Change my title?

I’ve got to admit, I recently thought of changing my title to reflect a more current controversy. After all “Brandon” not winning has been beaten into the ground around here.

But recent revelations of slightly less recent events–I speak of the news about Wheatie–have cause me to harden my stance. Change the title? Hell NO!

Beaten into the ground? Yes…but it’s still 6,666 feet above sea level.

Keep beating, pounding, and pummeling!!!

Hey China!

Or rather, “Hey Chinese Communist Party and your entire array of servitors, ass-wipers, and fellators!”

You’re not even worth my time this week. When you decide to act like civilized people, maybe I’ll give you a lesson or two in how non-barbarians behave.

Hey BiteMe!
(Or, Whoever Has Their Hand Rammed Up That Putrefying Meat Puppet’s Ass)

[Language warning]

You and yours have caused a lot of injury. Literal injury with your war on people who don’t want to take an untested vaccine. When people die in an emergency room because a hospital won’t admit them because they haven’t had their clot shot, that’s a crime.

I’m going to address here the insult on top of the injury, because I am among the insulted. I still have my health but apparently you want me to live under the 8th Street Bridge (which actually isn’t on 8th Street, but whatever, that’s what the I-25 overpass over Cimarron is called), so maybe if you have your way that won’t be true for long. Dreadful time of year to become homeless.

No, you’re just trying to make me unemployed, because I won’t take your fucking shots.

Well, that threat is NOT going to work. I. Won’t. Take. Your. Fucking. Shots.

And it looks like enough people agree, that you’re having to back down, you worthless asswipe.

You’re LOSING.

You LOSER.

You Chinese-bought ratfucking traitor.

I would love to see you die an agonizing, humiliating death. (This isn’t a threat, because I am not threatening to cause that death. I am just announcing my intention to party if it happens.) It would be just recompense for the way you’re killing America…and millions of Americans.

His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

(I’d like to add, I find it entirely plausible, even likely, that His Fraudulency is also His Figureheadedness. (Apparently that wasn’t a word; it got a red underline. Well it is now.) Where I differ with the hopium addicts is on the subject of who is really in charge. It ain’t anyone we like.)

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $1,827.40
Silver $21.24
Platinum $918.00
Palladium $1,952.00
Rhodium $15,000.00

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $1,813.90
Silver $20.00
Platinum $901.00
Palladium $2,032.00
Rhodium $14,550.00

Silver is at an even $20.00. This isn’t too far off from the traditional price of gold, back when a piece of gold was money. An ounce of gold, back then, wasn’t worth $20.67, it was $20.67 even if the government hadn’t minted it into coins as a convenience. Back when government mostly did useful things.

Independence Day

This is the Second of July…not the Fourth of July. But an excellent argument can be made that this is Independence Day.

It was on July 2, 1776 that the Continental Congress voted for Independence. The document, of course, reads July 4, 1776, but that is the date that it was adopted as a statement of the reasons for Independence.

In fact the original resolution from the 2nd is quoted in the Declaration of Independence, at the end: That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are absolved of all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connection between them and the State of Great-Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, and do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.

Those words, passed by the Continental Congress on July 2, 1776, made us independent.

From that point forward, it was just a matter of making it stick.

James Webb Space Telescope Update

They’ve now crossed off all but one of the 17 instrument modes–the last one is the coronagraphy module on NIRCam (Near Infra Red Camera). This is an adaptation of an designed to study the sun’s corona–i.e., its atmosphere–by blocking out the sun itself with an opaque disk. Except that here the goal is to directly image extrasolar planets by blocking out their primary star–which is a billion times brighter. Without doing so it’s like trying to take a picture of a firefly next to a searchlight.

We’re still expecting a big media event in less than two weeks with the first “real” pictures from JWST, as opposed to ones taken to help align, adjust, and calibrate the optics and instrumentation. So far what we’ve seen is basically orange and black, and is probably technically accurate…JWST can’t see yellow through violet.

What I expect we will see is “false color” images. What does that mean?

So glad you asked…

Color (And False Color)

Our eyes function by focusing light onto a layer of light sensitive cells called the retina. The cells can be divided into “rods” (sensitive to dim light) and “cones” (sensitive to brighter light). The cones in turn are a bit more specialized; there are three (and in many people, four) types, each most sensitive to a different color, and they are called the blue, green and red cones (though the red cone is actually most sensitive to a yellowish color). When it’s dark, the cones basically can detect nothing, and the rods pick up the burden. Rods tend to be a bit more broadly sensitive, though they are weakest in red light. But since our brain receives only the one signal, it interprets what it gets as monochrome–black-and-white.

We can compare this to sound. Our ears have sensors for thousands of different pitches, but those sensors are in only two places, the right and left ear. So we get extreme clarity as to the pitch of the sound, and even the combination of pitches (chords), and somewhat lesser clarity as to its direction. The eyes are actually the opposite; we get excellent directional discrimination, and not-nearly-as-good pitch–er, color–discrimination.

The ears can, at least before age takes its toll, nominally pick up anything between 20 Hz (Hertz, named after Heinrich Hertz, who discovered radio waves) and 20,000 Hz. That’s a range of 19,980 Hz, but that’s not the correct way to think about the range. As it happens, you want to look at the ratio, not the absolute arithmetic difference (which will depend on the units you are using anyway). A sound of 440 Hz, combined with a sound of 880 Hz, will blend very nicely, and musicians will say the range is one octave (which comes from the Latin for eight, for complicated historical, music theory nerd reasons–perhaps some other time). That’s not necessarily a difference of 880-440=440 Hz, though, it’s a doubling. The difference between musical notes is always a ratio of their frequencies, not their arithmetic difference. Another pleasing combo is 440 an 660 Hz, this is a 3/2 ratio and is called a “perfect fifth” even though it has nothing to do with ¹/₅. (It’s not fifth (the fraction) but rather fifth (the one after fourth, or four after first). Again, music theory nerd stuff and a lot of historical legacy.) An octave difference represents a doubling or halving of frequency, depending on which direction you’re going.

The ratio between 20 and 20,000 Hz is ¹/₁₀₀₀, and that is almost exactly ten octaves. (Ten octaves would be ¹/₁₀₂₄, which is ½ x ½ x ½…nine multiplications, ten ½s) and sorry I didn’t mean to remind you of Liawatha.)

When dealing with light, though, we tend to think not in frequency but in wavelength. But you get from one to the other by dividing a constant (the speed of light) by the one you have, to get the one you want. But the end result is, you can still think in terms of octaves, except that with light it is a halving or doubling of wavelength.

How do we perceive different “pitches” of light? As colors. Every different frequency (or wavelength) is a different, pure color of light.

I’m going to paste this in directly from Wikipedia. It shows the wavelengths and frequencies of each of the seven recognized major colors of light.

(And of course the color blocks themselves didn’t come through, so I had to do a bit of rearranging.)

So light covers a range from 400 to 700 nm, and that is less than one octave.

A word about the names, red, orange, etc. We have inflicted on us in school the mnemonic “Roy G. Biv” as a way to remember the colors of the rainbow. (The rainbow, of course, is mixed (white) light, split up into all of the pure colors. Or you can do the same with a prism.) Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. I never really saw the point of this mnemonic, though. A mnemonic needs to be something familiar, and I never met the (undoubtedly fictitious) Biv family. I have seen plenty of rainbows, though, so I remember Mr. Biv by remembering the rainbow, not the other way around.

But regardless, what’s the deal with blue and indigo, and why does the table above show cyan and blue? The seven named colors go back to Isaac Newton (mid-late 1600s) at least; he was the first to scientifically investigate the spectrum/rainbow. We wonder today why a blue purple was a distinct enough color for Newton to call it out, but in fact what probably happened is that he used “blue” to refer to a color somewhat like the sky, and “indigo” to refer to the blue you get from indigo dye (i.e., similar to the blue in the Flag). And indeed if you look at a rainbow, you do see a wide “light blue” stripe between the green and Flag-blue stripes.

[Newton proved that the individual colors of a rainbow are pure. Once he extracted, say, a particular yellow shade from the spectrum, nothing he could do to it would change its color–except of course mixing it with some other light. He could shine it through colored glass, or use it to illuminate different colored objects. The most he could do to that light was reduce its intensity, he couldn’t change its color. White light, of course, changes color when it goes through colored glass (see any Gothic cathedral); it’s not pure. In fact it’s a mix of light of all colors.]

We think of that as “light blue” but many languages (Italian and Russian among them) think of it as a distinctly different, separate color, as different from blue as orange is from red to us.

So what’s in the table basically reflects the seven “original” colors of the rainbow, once you untangle the cyan/blue/indigo confusion.

But this is all packed into less than one octave.

It’s worse, though. We can only truly distinguish three colors independently, basically blue, green and yellow, because of the cones in our retinas. Fortunately, those cones have a fairly broad frequency response. You don’t have to exactly match the peak frequency of a yellow cone for it to register, which is a good thing because that yellow cone is the major cone that responds to red light, albeit weakly (the green cone responds very weakly). If its range were narrower, we couldn’t see red, no matter how infuriating Leftist douches became. And that’s why the “yellow” cone is actually called the “red” cone.

The graph above shows the response of each of the three types of cones according to the wavelength (across the bottom). Red runs from 635-700 nm, so you can see green barely responds at all to say, 650 nm light, and the red, even though it peaks at a yellow wavelength, responds more strongly.

Let’s say you’re looking at a pure, bluish-cyan light of 500 nm. Your retina will register green somewhat weakly, red even weaker, and blue even weaker than that. Your brain will put those together, and you see “cyan.”

But it’s possible, with light, to fool your brain with a mixture of totally different frequencies of light, to get almost the same effect as some pure wavelength. This is not possible with sound. A mixture of different pitches trying to simulate, say, a middle C, will sound like some sort of chord; it will be a very different sound, perhaps “dark” or perhaps not, depending. That’s because your ear has thousands of those humps in it, and they’re narrow, with less overlap. You will actually perceive the different pitches separately and put them together in your brain and get a different effect.

But, as I said, the eye can be fooled. Don’t believe me? I have evidence. You’re looking at it right effing now.

Your computer screen only emits three colors, a certain pure blue, a certain pure green, and a certain pure red. So if it wants to show you cyan, it has to mix blue and green somehow. In fact a 50-50 mix is what we call cyan.

But it will not look quite like a pure cyan extracted from a prism. Why? Because you set the intensity of the blue and green phosphors of the computer screen in the right ratio to duplicate the blue and green cones’ response to the original pure cyan…but the green phosphors will get a much stronger response from the red cones than the original cyan light did. So any cyan on a computer screen will look a bit washed out to us compared to a pure cyan out of a rainbow, which is what they call “saturated.” It will be pale. And this will be true of printed colors as well, though usually in any professional grade application there are more than three “true” colors in a print and it’s possible to more closely approximate what the eye sees from all three cone colors.

One last loose end before I move on: I mentioned that some people have a fourth type of cone. That doesn’t actually end up helping them, though, because their brain basically ignores it. If the brain actually processed it, however, they’d be able to see perhaps ten times as many colors as we do (ten million versus one million). And of course, color blindness (“daltonism” named after John Dalton of atomic theory fame) results from missing one or more of the “normal” three cone types. [But there is, apparently, one recorded but not confirmed case of someone who could use that fourth cone color.] The reason color blind people can sometimes see a slightly-off hue more distinctly than others is because they have a different set of frequency responses than everyone else, and so they’ll respond to pigment mixes differently. (This includes an ability to cut through camouflage sometimes, including spotting people in Ghillie suits that others cannot see.)

But what does this have to do with false color?

The sensors on JWST see a different range of wavelengths than we do. The wavelengths are quite a bit longer in some cases. JWST’s wavelengths top out at orange, include red…and go beyond red into the “infrared.” (And that is a reference to the fact that the frequency of infrared is lower than that of red–hence infra–even though scientists normally think in terms of wavelength…yes, a bit confusing.)

If you’ve noticed that three of JWST’s instruments have names beginning with NIR, while the fourth, the one kept at just a few degrees above absolute zero, has a name starting with MIR. These stand for “Near Infra Red” and “Mid Infra Red” respectively. Near? Near what? Near, as in close to, visible light. And Mid of course is the “middle” part of infrared.

Infrared runs from 700 nm (the boundary with red) clear up to 1,000,000 nm, which is more than ten octaves. However, JWST won’t go further than 27,000 nm. The NIRCam runs from 600-5000 nm (which means it can see some red and orange), the MIRI is the one that goes all the way to 27,000 nm.

So when JWST takes a picture and we print it, won’t it be mostly black,because it’s mostly in infrared “colors” we can’t see?

No, because we can, and will, change the colors we get back. This is downright common in astronomy, in fact. In the old, stone knives, bearskins, and glass emulsion photography plates days, we’d sometimes put a filter over the telescope to look at one wavelength of light–say one emitted by hydrogen–and get a black and white print that shows us where the hydrogen is.

It doesn’t even have to be a wavelength we can see…so long as the film responds to it and turns black where exposed. And we can take multiple pictures at multiple wavelengths and combine them, but then we want to print each in a different color. This is false color and it is how our eyes will make sense of ten octaves of color we mostly can’t see, even though we can see only one (different) octave of light.

This is done routinely. Just for instance:

This is the famous “Pillars of Creation” in the Eagle Nebula; so called because stars and planets are forming there, right now. The stars look pink, actually magenta. Now, have you ever seen a magenta star? Neither have I.

This picture is false color. It is not what you would see if you could take a star ship out there.

The green is used to show light of the frequencies emitted by hydrogen–and it’s not necessarily visible light. The red is for sulfur ions, and the blue is for oxygen ions–doubly ionized, in fact–with the same caveat about it not necessarily being visible at its original frequencies. This way the scientists studying it can directly see where the oxygen and sulfur are, since each of those constituents is color coded.

OK, that’s not obviously false color, because most of us aren’t familiar with the actual appearance of the Eagle Nebula. (I personally have seen it through a telescope, but it’s not bright even there, so my rods gave me a black-and-white image (and much smaller than this photo, too). It’s rare to see color with your eyes through a telescope unless you’re looking at planets. I once saw a hint of color in the Orion nebula…through a big scope that was gathering a lot of light.)

(Sometimes they will put together a picture that actually is true color, bringing out the colors we would see with our cones if only the object were bright enough to register on them.)

A more obvious case of false color is this:

This is a person, shown in infrared, with false colors. The yellow colors are the shorter wavelengths, blues and purples are longer wavelengths. These correlate directly with temperature as you can see in the scale on the right.

Since this is a familiar object, the false color is blatantly obvious.

[Incidentally, the normal convention with stuff like this is to show “hot” things as red and “cool” things as blue. But this reverses the actual wavelengths! It makes the shorter wavelengths red and the longer ones blue, when in reality blue has a shorter wavelength than red. But, we think of red as a hot color and blue as a cool one, so this reversal is inevitable. Blue light in fact is emitted by very hot objects, hot enough that we just don’t encounter them here on Earth. What, here, is at 30,000 K? Not much. But you can see blue-hot things though you will never feel the heat from them. Many of the stars in the night sky are blue hot.]

So when you see, soon, gorgeous color photography from JWST…remember, it’s not the real colors. Or rather, the colors are real, they’re just not the colors you’re being shown. It’s not your fault you can’t see down that far, down to colors we never had a need to name, without help.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!