What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

January 6 Tapes?

Where are the tapes? Anyone, Anyone? Bueller? Johnson??

Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.

Evading Reality

Many things the Left believes are simply not true. Right now the focus is on the size and scope of our government, and the many many billions of dollars the government has been spending on no-one-knew-what. None of that money is going to a key role of government. Which, after all, has the sole purpose of protecting rights.

And if you, Leftist Lurker, want to dismiss this as dead white cis-male logic…well, you can call it what you want, but then please just go fuck off. No one here buys that bullshit–logic is logic and facts are facts regardless of skin color–and if you gave it a moment’s rational thought, you wouldn’t either. Of course your worthless education never included being able to actually reason–or detect problems with false reasoning–so I don’t imagine you’ll actually wake up as opposed to being woke.

As Ayn Rand would sometimes point out: Yes, you are free to evade reality. What you cannot do is evade the consequences of evading reality. Or to put it concretely: You can ignore the Mack truck bearing down on you as you play in the middle of the street, you won’t be able to ignore the consequences of ignoring the Mack truck.

And Ayn Rand also pointed out that existence (i.e., the sum total of everything that exists) precedes consciousness–our consciousnesses are a part of existence, not outside of it–therefore reality cannot be a “social construct” as so many of you fucked-up-in-the-head people seem to think.

So much for Leftist douchebag lurkers. For the rest of you, the regular readers and those lurkers who understand such things, well here we go for another week of WINNING against the Deep State.

I confess that the novelty has not worn off.

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.

Yes, we won this time around. Not only did we win, we got to KEEP that win instead of having it stolen from us.

But no one should imagine that that’s the end of electoral fraud. Much work needs to be done to ensure it doesn’t just happen again next time around. And incidentally to rescue those states currently in the grips of self-perpetuating fraud, where the people who stole the last election, make sure it’s easier to steal the next one.

This issue, though it’s not front-and-center right now, is not going away, and if we ignore it, we’ll pay the price. See the article above about the consequences of evading reality.

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 $2,861.10
Silver $31.89
Platinum $984.00
Palladium $990.00
Rhodium $5,025.00
FRNSI* 137.406-
Gold:Silver 89.718-

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $2,883.10
Silver $32.22
Platinum $984.00
Palladium $992.00
Rhodium $4,975.00
FRNSI* 138.470-
Gold:Silver 89.482-

Gold went up nicely this week and closed in the 2920s Thursday. And then it got beaten with the ugly stick on Friday, dropping 45.60. Although silver took a hit on Friday, also, it wasn’t as bad so this week we see the gold:silver ratio dropping just a bit. Still it’s nowhere near the 83-ish range it was in not so long ago.

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

The Final Experiment Fallout

The fallout continues.

Jeran is now a glober. To those who have been following this for years (and no, I am not one of them), it’s simply stunning; they could never have imagined it. Austin Witsit has been trying to figure out how he got “fooled” which means he is looking for excuses to remain a flat Earther. It’s an interesting study in psychology. They both saw the same things. One had an epiphany, the other is burrowing deeper into the bullshit that the sights ought to have blasted away.

But of late something else has caught my attention. A South African who goes by the name “Flatzoid” is running hard to be the most obliviously stupid person on the face of the Earth. And yes he has quite a bit of competition from a lot of people on the Left, but from what I see he is up to the challenge.

[Take for instance the fact that he is South African, yet hasn’t noticed that the sun doesn’t rise and set where it should (i.e., to the northeast and northwest) if flat Earth were correct. He once even attempted to measure its sunrise position, and did so on video so people could see he was using a method guaranteed to introduce error. Sure enough he got an answer a few degrees off, loudly trumpeted that the globe earth couldn’t make the prediction…and ignored the fact it was many times further off any conceivable flat earth prediction. Not that they actually make predictions that aren’t just copying off of Globe Earth’s paper during the test.]

It’s referred to as the “upper left” award by the globe defenders; this is an allusion to the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is commonly depicted on a graph like this:

The “upper left” is the peak of stupid but confident, or even arrogant. In this case Flatzoid has accused people far more knowledgeable than he is of being incompetent, and has said so to them in online meetings and debates.

In the case I’m thinking of his target is an Aussie engineer (with almost the same education background that I have), who goes online by “Critical Think” (which makes it very hard to find his channel).

This video is a reaction by an engineer, to the debate between Fkatzoid and Critical Think.

(Warning: You are about to see the worst case of Dunning-Kruger ever. Fkatzoid has no comprehension of the experiment, no actual conception of what it means to control variables, no conception of measurement error, and is so smugly confident he knows more than Critical Think that it can be infuriating at times.)

Flatzoid was on the list to be invited to The Final Experiment, but complained (as his excuse not to go) that he never received an invite. Will Duffy told him (in a livestream) that that was because his email did not appear on his youtube channel page. Flatzoid hastily went to add it so he could claim it had been there all along, but fatfingered his name and it showed as fkatzoid@<whatever the provider was>, so now he’s often called fkatzoid by Globe defenders.

Critical Think was not only invited, but actually did go on the Final Experiment. And he did something very interesting. He brought a very accurate electronic scale with him, along with its test weights. He has been taking those things to various places (like Malaysia), himself lives in (IIRC) Brisbane Australia, and had it with him in Chile–Santiago and Puntas Arenas. And of course Union Glacier camp in Antarctica.

What was he hoping to prove? He was hoping to validate the WGS-84 model of the Earth’s shape. Earth is a very slightly oblate spheroid (not enough so to look “squashed” in pictures–in fact proportionately speaking it easily meets the specs for cue balls) on account of its rotation. This has two effects on the gravity: 1. At the poles you are closer to the center of the Earth than you are at the equator, so you should feel very slightly stronger gravity. 2. The centrifugal effect of the rotating earth should reduce the net gravity on the equator, because the centrifugal effect partly counteracts the pull of the Earth’s mass. #2 is by far the larger of these two effects.

How does one check this? By measuring the force of gravity in different places using the same masses.

You can do this with a scale…but it has to be the right kind of scale. And you have to know how to use it.

And in order for this to make sense, you must understand the distinction between weight and mass. Which Flatzoid clearly does not.

Mass is the amount of “stuff” in an object, and it manifests as a resistance to forces applied to it. You can feel this by trying to push on objects. (Don’t try to lift them for this part.) To wipe out the effect of friction, pick the object up, hold it in your hand, then move your hand toward or away from you. If the object is massive enough you’ll definitely feel it “resisting” the force you’re applying.

This resistance is the same everywhere. Here on Earth. Anywhere on earth. In outer space. You’d feel it even in orbit on the ISS. The Moon. Mars. Jupiter (if there were a surface to stand on). And so on. The same.

Weight on the other hand is the force exerted on the object. The weight of something is actually the force with which it is being pulled, by the Earth.

This is why you can weigh differently on (say) the Earth and the Moon, even without a trip to the bathroom on the way from one to the other, in other words, even though your mass stays the same. The force exerted by gravity is different, and weight is the force.

The distinction usually doesn’t matter for us “groundhogs” here on Earth. Hence there’s a tendency even for STEM people working their STEM jobs to conflate the two. Pounds are actually a unit of force, but it’s not hard to find references to something called “pounds mass” in, say, rocketry, where a lot of the industry stuck with the US Customary System until fairly recently–it’s the mass that on the surface of the earth weighs one pound. (Oh and by the way our customary system is not the “imperial” system as I’ve heard many people call it lately: if you don’t believe that note the difference in volume measurements. A US gallon is smaller than an Imperial one.) So it’s quite correct to say that 100 lb (when she is on Earth) woman weighs 16.5 lbs on the Moon.

The kilogram, the SI unit, is actually a unit of mass. But people are happy to talk about things weighing a kilogram, really meaning (whether they realize it or not): weighing as much as a kilogram does on Earth. (The SI unit of force is the Newton, and to be truly correct, a kilogram of mass weighs 9.8 Newtons. But absolutely no one makes a scale reading in Newtons, though pressure measurements (“pounds per square inch” to us) and torque do reference Newtons.)

Let’s not forget we’re eventually getting back to Fkatzoid vs. Critical Think.

There are two ways to measure “weight” (one of them actually measures mass). 1) A balance beam scale. This is the conceptually simplest variant:

This works by comparing the force exerted by gravity on whatever it is you want to weigh, against the force exerted on known weights. If the two pans are in balance (as indicated by the long vertical bar pointing up from the pivot point), the two forces are equal, and therefore the two weights are equal. For this kind of scale, though, there’s a bonus: You also know the two masses are equal. It can actually be used to measure mass. It would work if you took it to the Moon; the mass of your object would be the same as the mass of the known weights in the other pan, and you will get the same reading.

There are more complex versions of this, including ones with sliding weights where the known weight is moved closer or farther, to balance things like having people of two different weights on a seesaw. The lighter one has to move further out.

If you remember those scales at your doctor’s office with the sliding weights, that’s this kind of scale; it’s set up so that you “hang” from a place very close to the pivot, while the sliding weights are further away; they therefore exert more leverage and a balance can be struck without actually putting something as heavy as you are on the balance beam.

The second kind of scale essentially measures the compression or stretching of a spring (or some other device sensitive to force) caused by gravity pulling on whatever it is you’re weighing.

Springs (et. all.) do their thing in response to a force, so these scales measure force. Take a 1 kilogram mass and a scale like this (that reads off in kg though it should technically read off in Newtons) to the moon and it will read 165.4 grams, not 1000 grams. That’s because it’s really measuring a force then, under the assumption it’s being used in Earth’s gravity, converting to read in kilograms. (If you are ever in such a situation, don’t be fooled into thinking the mass has changed.)

Your bathroom scale, the scale you use to measure ingredients in the kitchen, the scale at the deli and the scale at the post office are all this type (unless you’re like me and bought a used medical scale). If you reload you may have a balance beam scale of some type for the powder.

OK, so now to Critical Think’s experiment. He has a scale…of the second type, and it came with a kilogram mass.

Normally, you’d set up the scale, turn it on, make sure it zeros…and then you calibrate it. How? you put the kilogram mass on it, and push a button, which tells it that the force it is detecting right now is from local gravity acting on a one kilogram mass. It’s then smart enough to know what to do if it feels twice that force: it will tell you that what you’ve put on the scale has a mass of two kilograms. Likewise for any other mass: read out in proportion to that force which it has been taught means there’s a mass of one kilogram.

Why the need to calibrate the scale? Because if you don’t, it will be thrown off by the slight differences in the Earth’s gravitational field. Mountaintops, latitude, depressions like Death Valley or the Dead Sea, etc. will all change the force ever so slightly, and by calibrating the scale, you get it to correct for that.

What if you move the scale to another location, and don’t calibrate it? Your mass readings will be off by a bit, because the force you measure isn’t the same. It’s a small amount, a few hundredths of a gram per kilogram, but nonetheless measurable by Critical Think’s scale.

So this is what he did: He calibrated the scale at home. So in his house, the weights read 1000 g. He then takes the scale and weights somewhere else, and repeats the measurement without calibrating the scale. So the 1 kilogram mass now weighs a bit more or a bit less, and the difference is actually due to the difference in gravity.

On returning home, you weight your kilogram mass again to make sure the scale actually did hold its initial calibration. If the scale doesn’t read 1000 g again, something actually fell out of adjustment in the scale.

Critical Think’s data (multiple weighings of the known mass at each site), by the time you do the stats work that every scientist must do with their data, confirms the WGS-84 ellipsoid combined with the rotation of the Earth.

But it’s key: for this to work, you must not calibrate the scale at the other locations. Otherwise all you’ve done is show that the scale will report 1000g every time you calibrate it.

This is totally, completely beyond Fkatzoid’s comprehension. He insists that because Critical Think did not calibrate the scale at each location, the entire experiment is worthless–oblivious to the fact that the point of the experiment was to use the same calibration in different areas.

Furthermore Fkatzoid has no conception of measurement error. Critical Think took multiple readings at each location, and averaged them. This is standard operating procedure when taking data, because of measurement error. However, when this came out in the conversation, that the multiple readings had all been slightly different from each other, Fkatzoid triumphantly declared all of the data worthless, because it wasn’t “repeatable.”

And finally, Fkatzoid insists that temperature and humidity are factors that must be taken into account. Why? Because. Because what? Because. It turns out that Critical Think actually checked these beforehand, by varying the temperature and humidity at home and seeing what effect they had on the scale (by again, calibrating once then measuring under different temperatures and pressures–and noting that they had no significant effect, so he could from that point forward ignore them so long as he stayed within the operating temperature range of the scale. This point, too, is completely lost on Fkatzoid.

He’s trying to argue about basic science with an experienced engineer. Not that experienced engineers are automatically right by any means, nor are they necessarily geniuses. But engineering is where the scientific rubber meets the road in a way that’s visible to everyone. All branches of engineering must study and understand physics at a bare minimum (many branches have to go into other disciplines like chemistry as well), and they must apply it to solve real-world problems.

If the physics they understand doesn’t have a close relationship to reality, their solutions can’t work. And sometimes they “don’t work” badly enough to kill people. The Romans knew this. Their engineers would have to stand under the arches they designed, as the blocking for construction was removed. If the engineer had messed up…he died. Better him than someone who had trusted him.

There are certainly plenty of examples of engineering failures in history. (Engineers get to learn about them!) But even those who fail when pushing the envelope understand the basics.

Fkatzoid never had to learn any science past the third grade level (complete with all of the oversimplifications made to get the basic concept across) and it shows here. I don’t think I’ve every seen someone more obliviously but arrogantly ignorant than Fkatzoid.

And in the wake of the Final Experiment, he’s one of the leaders of the Flat Earth movement.

No Geology This Time

I will try to write something up this weekend, for next weekend.