A Caution
Just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. (Or we might not. The record is mixed even though there is more MAGA than there used to be.) But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled–I suspect it’s RINO), don’t get replaced.
State party chairs, vice chairs, secretaries and so on, and the same at county levels, have huge influence on who ultimately gets nominated, and if these party wheelhorses are RINOs, they will work tirelessly to put their own pukey people on the ballot. In fact I’d not be surprised if some of our “MAGA” candidates are in fact, RINO plants, encouraged to run by the RINO party leadership when they realized that Lyn Cheney (and her ilk) were hopelessly compromised as effective candidates. The best way for them to deal with the opposition, of course, is to run it themselves.
Running good candidates is only HALF of the battle!
SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom
I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”
Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.
Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?
Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?
中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!
And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:
OK, with that rant out of my system…
Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit
…we can move on to the next one.
Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.
Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.
Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!
It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.
In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.
Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.
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.
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
All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend).
Last Week:
Gold $1,990.30
Silver $22.70
Platinum $985.00
Palladium $1,495.00
Rhodium $10,000.00
So here it is, Friday, 3PM MT after markets closed and we see:
Gold $1,978.30
Silver $23.31
Platinum $993.00
Palladium $1,507.00
Rhodium $9,300.00
After dropping substantially earlier this week, gold reversed course by Thursday and spent most of Friday getting close to $2,000 but not over, then dropping down again. It ended up net down -15.20 for the day, which means it was over 1990 at close yesterday. I can’t see it going down much, honestly; the dollar is circulating the drain, and to keep it from going down the drain they would have to crater the economy. Because our “betters” play stupid games with the currency…we all win stupid prizes.
Galilean Relativity
Well, let’s give this a go, on short notice.
I like to write a first draft of science posts a couple of days beforehand. I’ll then come back in a couple of days and see a much better way of organizing it, or perhaps a more useful analogy, or other things like that.
I don’t have that luxury today; it’s 8PM mountain time already. So here’s hoping I’m organized from the get-go, because I am going to give it a go.
I’ve been planning to cover “gravitational slingshots” (the click-baity name) or “gravity assists” since much of what NASA has been doing is utterly dependent on them. That’s going to be a big topic, but I realized I can at least lay some groundwork tonight.
Consider a typical two body problem: some small satellite or even a space probe, and a big honkin’ planet.
I’ve been talking as if the probe orbits a point at the center of the planet. Technically that’s not true. The two bodies both orbit the “barycenter.” That’s basically the center of gravity of the system. Imagine the planet and the satellite on a seesaw, at whatever their “current” distance is. A million miles? five thousand? Ten billion? Whatever.
The barycenter is the point at which you’d want to put the fulcrum of the seesaw.
Now when it’s Earth and, say, a GPS satellite, that point turns out to be so close to the center of the earth that it’s likely immeasurable, because the earth is about 1.5 septillion times more massive than the satellite (6×1024 kilograms versus 4 kilograms; a one with 24 zeros after it is a septillion). And the GPS satellite orbit is about 20,000 km in radius (it’s a circular orbit so we can speak of a radius here).
So the “balance point” between Earth and the satellite is 1/1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th of the way in from one of the ends. Which works out to 13 and a third femtometers. Recall that a femtometer is roughly the size of a proton or neutron; much much much smaller than an atom, and you’ll see the difference between the barycenter and the center of the earth Just. Doesn’t. Matter.
It can matter, though when the two bodies are closer to each other in mass. The sun-Jupiter barycenter is significantly far from the center of the sun (the mass ratio is almost exactly a thousand to one, the sun is almost half a million miles in radius, Jupiter’s orbit is a bit over half a billion miles in radius). In fact the barycenter is actually outside of the sun. Earth and Moon are closer together in mass, but much closer together, so the Earth/Moon barycenter is still a thousand miles or so down below the surface. Pluto and Charon are more nearly the same mass…they’d be a double planet if they were planets. The barycenter of that system is out in space.
When New Horizons was still far out from Pluto it took the pictures that were assembled into the GIF above of Pluto and Charon. The white x marks the barycenter.
OK, so now that I’ve set the record straight and planet and satellite both orbit a barycenter, I’ll now pose a question that is going to sound like it comes completely out of left field.
What if the barycenter is moving?
Take a space probe doing a flyby of a planet. It’s an escape orbit…it’s flying by never to return, so we are talking about a hyperbola. Under the circumstances the barycenter is effectively at the center of the planet.
So what if the planet is moving? They do move you know.
It turns out that this makes absolutely not a shred of difference. The spacecraft will move along a neat hyperbola as seen from the planet, no matter how fast the planet is moving.
The deep reason for this is that one level, it’s meaningless to talk about a planet or a star moving.
Einstein didn’t quite invent the concept of relativity; rather he refined it. Galileo truly originated it, to cover cases where (for instance) you’re in a moving railroad car tossing a ball in the air, and you have no way to tell the railroad car is moving. In fact, you could claim the railroad car is stationary, and the world is moving. As long as the train isn’t accelerating, you will feel like you aren’t moving.
It turns out that all of the mathematics of speed, velocity, and so on, is exactly equivalent no matter whether you regard the train car as stationary and the earth moving, or vice versa. The signs (plus or minus) on all the numbers are different, but the moving objects behave the same way either way. Galileo realized that there’s no absolute motion, only relative motion. The train is moving? Relative to what? The earth? Or the passengers on the train? Or the bug flying into the locomotive’s windshield?
It’s even more true out in space. Who’s moving, and who’s stationary. Is anything stationary?
You pick a frame of reference and go from there. Since they’re all equivalent, pick a convenient one. And it turns out in the case of the spacecraft flying by a planet, the convenient frame of reference is the center of the planet (I mean the barycenter of the planet/spacecraft system…here let me find my atom-sized measuring stick to correct it). In that frame of reference, draw a hyperbola, that’s what the spacecraft does.
Even though the planet is moving in orbit around the sun. Well, from the planet’s point of view the sun is going in circles around the planet.
[I remember in a college class discussing the sun as seen from Earth; the professor described the sun’s apparent path through the sky as if it were in a one year orbit around the earth. He gave us orbital elements just like I discussed a few weeks ago. And it worked, because…Galileo. We could compute where the sun would appear on any particular day. Of course some satellite in a 150,000,000 kilometer orbit around Earth is not going to complete that orbit in a year…not even in a thousand years. So we had to pretend the sun was closer than it is. The reason why is that in analyzing an orbit we need the combined gravitational parameters of the planet and the satellite…but again the satellite’s contribution is twenty or so digits past where you round off, so we don’t bother adding them together. Similarly, with the sun-earth system, the gravitational parameter that matters is the sun’s, not the earth’s; our gravitational parameter is a rounding error. So we can either put the sun closer to the earth for this analysis…or use the sun’s gravitational parameter in place of our own. The prof went with putting the sun closer.]
OK, we’re halfway to understanding the “slingshot.” I can’t say “see you next week” with a perfectly straight face, so I’ll settle for “see you next time.”
[PS: So what did Einstein add? He added that the rules change when the relative velocity between two objects gets close to the speed of light, and later on he incorporated accelerations into the mix–Galileo specifically excluded them.]
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 !!!