2023·02·11 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

EDIT: 22:54 MT. Well let’s just say the top item didn’t age well…except perhaps for the deserved insults to Speaker Dungsmear.

I can only hope McCarthy keeps his promises.

Giving Our “Love” To the RINOs and the Dipshits Going After O’Keefe

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

(Well this is the perfect time for this to come up in the rotation!)

According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.

Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.

I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.

But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.

The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the so-called populists stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.

Given the results of our most recent elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.

I well remember 1989-1990 in my state when the RINO establishment started preaching the message that a conservative simply couldn’t win in Colorado. Never mind the fact that Reagan had won the state TWICE (in 1984 bringing in a veto-proof state house and senate with him) and GHWB had won after (falsely!) assuring everyone that a vote for him was a vote for Reagan’s third term.

This is how the RINOs function. They push, push, push the line that only a “moderate” can get elected. Stomp them when they pull that shit. Tell everyone in ear shot that that’s exactly what the Left wants you to think, and oh-by-the-way-Mister-RINO if you’re in this party selling the same message as the Left…well, whythefuckexactly are you in this party, you lying piece of rancid weasel shit?

In Defense of Ranked Choice Voting

One of the biggest obstacles to direly-needed change is RINOs, and one of the weapons in their arsenal is the “Wasted Vote” argument.

Periodically a third party has arisen, trying to hold RINOs to account by putting pressure on them from outside of the party, since doing so from the inside has historically done very little good. But, even if you find a third party candidate who perfectly reflects your views, you’re likely to vote for the RINO anyway. Why? Because if you don’t, the Democrat might win, and that would be even worse. So if you vote for that third party (that few will vote for), you’re throwing your vote away and increasing the likelihood of the Democrat winning. (It’s half as much a gain for the Democrat, as actually voting for the Democrat would be. Not as much, but half as much. Because although you denied the R your vote, you did not flip your vote to the Democrat.)

The Republican Party Establishment knows you don’t love them. But they know you hate the Democrats worse, and they use that to continue to herd you into supporting them. With gritted teeth you cast your vote, but your vote counts the same whether you cast it enthusiastically. And the other alternative, pissing on the voting apparatus to express your actual feelings, is probably a felony.

But what if you could vote for that third party without increasing the chances of the Dem walking away with the prize?

This is what ranked choice voting, or instant runoff voting, can do provided it is properly implemented. (And this includes the votes, and only genuine votes, being counted honestly, of course. However, I’m going to compare it to what we have today, and pretend that is honestly done too. RCV can’t work if it’s not honestly administered, just like our current system isn’t working because it isn’t honestly administered.)

The idea behind RCV is to vote by expressing your order of preference. You could vote for the Patriot Party, then for the RINO Party as your second choice (and ignore the Democrat, the Green, the Overt Socialist Schmuckmonkey Party, etc).

It’s just like the famous “Prisoner’s Dilemma” where your fear of other peoples’ actions prevents you from doing the optimal thing–and vice-versa. As long as Job Lowe is afraid to vote Patriot because he’s afraid you’ll vote RINO, you’ll have to vote RINO because you fear that Job Lowe will, because he fears you will.

So on the whole I like RCV. It gives you a no-risk way to vote against the RINO scum, and in favor of someone who deserves your vote.

The problem is, as done here in the US, it comes packaged with a “jungle primary.” A bunch of candidates get to put their name out there, and the top four (or so) candidates get onto the “main” ballot. This gives party establishments their way around the threat of a good third party bumping them off. Because they know that few people bother with primaries, and third parties don’t have the resources to run in a primary…so they throw two or three establishment hacks into the primary and they will probably beat the third party. The result is the RINOs end up with two of the four slots in the general election, and the Dems get the other two. Now there’s suddenly no third party candidate on the ballot at all.

If we were to combine RCV with the present system where each party could nominate exactly one candidate to appear on the November ballot, or at the very least, ensure minor parties could get onto the ballot with at least one candidate regardless of the primary, we would be getting somewhere, but the establishment is smarter than we like to give them credit for. They will support the jungle primary + RCV “solution” rather than the more appropriate one-candidate-per-party + RCV solution.

It’s not RCV that is the problem, it’s the primary structure grafted onto it.

Justice

It says “Justice” on the picture.

And I’m sure someone will post the standard joke about what the fish thinks about the situation.

But what is it?

Here’s a take, from a different context: It’s about how you do justice, not the justice that must be done to our massively corrupt government and media. You must properly identify the nature of a person, before you can do him justice.

Ayn Rand, On Justice (speaking through her character John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged):

Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

Ayn Rand identified seven virtues, chief among them rationality. The other six, including justice, she considered subsidiary because they are essentially different aspects and applications of rationality.

—Ayn Rand Lexicon (aynrandlexicon.com)

Justice Must Be Done.

Trump, it is supposed, had some documents.

Biden and company stole the country.

I’m sure enough of this that I put my money where my mouth is.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system. (This doesn’t necessarily include deposing Joe and Hoe and putting Trump where he belongs, but it would certainly be a lot easier to fix our broken electoral system with the right people in charge.)

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is pointless 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 in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

This will necessarily be piecemeal, state by state, which is why I am encouraged by those states working to change their laws to alleviate the fraud both via computer and via bogus voters. If enough states do that we might end up with a working majority in Congress and that would be something Trump never really had.

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

Last week:

Gold $1,865.30
Silver $22.41
Platinum $983.00
Palladium $1,703.00
Rhodium $12,500.00

This week, 3 PM MT on Friday, markets closed for the weekend

Gold $1,866.50
Silver $22.08
Platinum $956.00
Palladium $1,614.00
Rhodium $12,950.00

Little significant change…the biggest being palladium which is dropping. Since that gets used in catalytic converters this might be a sign car manufacturing is declining.

Escape

Thus far I’ve been monologuing almost entirely about the typical two body problem, a small satellite orbiting a massive primary, and below escape velocity. The orbits end up being ellipses (or possibly a perfect circle, if the satellite is traveling at the circular velocity, in a “horizontal” direction, at exactly the right distance from the primary.

Ellipses have eccentricities of 0 through 0.9999… (keep writing 9s forever), with zero being a circular orbit (considered a special case of the ellipse). That ellipse with an eccentricity of just below 1 is extremely narrow compared to its length.

I brought up the concept of escape velocity last time, too. That represents a spacecraft traveling in an orbit with an eccentricity of exactly 1.

Such an orbit is a parabola. And I’d better step back and talk just a little bit about conic sections.

Conic sections are the shapes you get when you slice a cone. And here is the paradigmatic diagram:

Slicing perpendicular to the centerline of the cone, you get a circle…you see the one in red, and because they cut the cone off at the bottom of the diagram (technically, it should extend to infinity), there’s another (unlabeled) circle there too.

Slicing at a shallow angle gives you some sort of an ellipse.

But notice the blue (purple) shape. You get that from slicing the cone at exactly the angle of the cone itself. The center line of that purple shape is parallel to the side of the cone to the left.

That is a parabola, and you can also get a parabola by graphing something like y=x². You can multiply the x² by some number, the y by some number, or add a constant to either side. You can even add x (or some multiple) to either side. It makes no difference, you get a parabola. Multiplying will change the size of the parabola, but it will not change the shape. (It’s always possible to rotate and zoom in/out on a parabola and make it identical to another parabola.)

If you cut at an even steeper angle, you get a hyperbola, just like shown in the diagram.

Ahem. No, that’s not quite true. I said the cone is supposed to extend to infinity earlier, and that’s true in both directions.

Here’s the correct diagram:

Notice the cone is now what we’d think of as a double cone (but technically, that’s what a cone is). Number 3 is the parabola. Because that plane is parallel to the top half of the cone, it never will cut through the top half of the cone. But in diagram 4 the cut is vertical, and the plane does cut through both halves of the cone. (It will also do so for any slant higher than the one shown in diagram 3.) That two-piece shape is called a hyperbola, and…well, we’ll get to it, I promise. (Evil laugh.)

If you imagine the cones and the plane extending to infinity, you’ll realize that neither the parabola or hyperbola are actually closed curves; they don’t loop back on themselves.

And if something is moving at escape velocity, it never comes back. So it makes sense that the parabola is the escape trajectory.

(Provided that the smaller body is moving precisely at escape velocity. If it’s moving faster, it’s in a hyperbolic orbit.)

OK, so where is the primary? In an ellipse it sits at one focus; where does it sit in a parabola?

Another way to define a parabola is shown below.

Draw a line like the one on the left, called the directrix. Pick a point not on the directrix, like the one near the c=a in the diagram, where the bottom of the red line is. This is the focus.

The parabola is the curve, such that every single point on the curve, is the same distance from the focus as it is from the directrix.

(This is similar, sort of, to the ellipse, where you can pick two foci, and every point on the ellipse is the same total distance to the two foci. It’s just that here one of the foci is replaced by the directrix.)

Notice that the distance from the focus to the “base” of the parabola is a, and the distance from the base to the directrix is also a.

It’s a just like the semi-major axis of the ellipse was a, and in orbital mechanics this a means exactly the same thing; it’s the size of the orbit. If a is big the parabola is big and therefore not as sharply curved; that represents the trajectory not being bent as much because the spacecraft never gets really close to the primary.

Does this actually correspond to anything in the real world?

Almost.

About a light year away from the Sun, we believe there are vast numbers of small, icy “snowballs” in orbit about the Sun; that grouping is called the Oort cloud. That’s far, far away (260,000 AU, or 260,000 or so times as far from the sun as Earth is), so things aren’t moving too fast out there.

That’s far enough away that every once in a while another star will pass close enough to perturb these bodies, and some of them might be brought to a dead halt in its orbit. It starts to drop toward the sun.

It is so far away, that the orbit is almost exactly a parabola. If it’s dropping almost directly into the sun, it will be a nice tight parabola with the nearest point inside the orbit of Mercury (so a which is the minimum distance to the sun could equal 0.3 AUs or less); if it still has some “sideways” motion the snowball won’t get too close to the sun; it will be a very open parabola, very large in size, a might be about 5 if it gets only as close as Jupiter; it might be much higher than that.

If it is that far away it’s extremely hard to detect. But if it gets close to the sun, the ices in the snowball will heat up, and boil off, and the snowball will grow a tail. It will be a comet.

Most comets come from the Oort cloud, and effectively, we’ll only see the comet once, because it’s just under escape velocity. Sure, it will be back…millions of years from now! The recent “green” comet has a smaller (but still not small) elliptical orbit; it’s expected to come back in 50,000 years. Most famously, though Halley’s comet has an eccentricity of 0.96658; a is 17.737 AUs, and its closest distance to the sun is 0.59278 AUs, so it gets closer to the sun than Venus (roughly 0.7 AUs), but not closer than Mercury (roughly 0.4 AU).

Halley’s comet probably started out as a visitor from the Oort cloud, but it passed too close to one of the outer planets and its orbit was bent into a (still fairly large) ellipse.

How fast does an Oort cloud comet travel? Well, that’s simple: Figure out how far it is from the Sun and then calculate escape velocity at that distance.

Circular orbital velocity at some distance r, (i.e., how fast an object in a circular orbit must be traveling) is:

$v = \sqrt{ GM\! \over{r}} = \sqrt{\mu\over{r}}$

while escape velocity at that same distance is:

$v\geq {\sqrt {\frac {2GM}{r}}}.$

Notice that the difference is a 2 under the radical so the escape velocity is sqrt(2) times the circular velocity. sqrt(2) is roughly 1.414. Speed the earth up in its orbit 41.5 percent and we’re going away and never coming back. (It’s cold out there!)

So let’s see what happens if an Oort cloud comet hits Earth. Earth moves around the sun at 29.78 kilometers every second (yowza!); the comet must be moving at 1.414 times this speed or roughly 42 kilometers per second.

Now this could be a head on collision, if the comet’s a is 1 AU just like ours is, and it happens to be closest to the sun where Earth is and is traveling the other direction. Which makes a 72 kilometer per second head-on collision. Or it could be traveling in the same direction as earth, in which case the difference is “only” 12 kilometers per second.

Either way that impact would hurt. But far more likely is the comet heading almost directly into the sun, and therefore cutting across Earth’s orbit at almost a right angle. By the time you get done playing with vectors, that works out to very roughly 51 kilometers per second collision speed.

That’s damned fast. We don’t want to be hit by a comet; asteroids are bad enough.

But I would like to send a lot of Uniparty hacks on an escape trajectory out of here, someday. I might even be generous and seal the spacecraft so it holds air…for a while.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

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 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 !!!

2023·02·04 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

News Flash

Today, it is still the case that Joe Biden didn’t Win.

I realize that to some readers, this might be a shock; surely at some point things must change and Biden will have actually won.

But the past cannot actually be changed.

It will always and forever be the case that Joe Biden didn’t win.

And if you, Leftist Lurker, want to dismiss it 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: I continue to carry the banner once also carried by Wheatie. His Fraudulency didn’t win.

Let’s Go, Brandon!!

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:

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

Spot Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $1,928.50
Silver $23.69
Platinum $1,021.00
Palladium $1,696.00
Rhodium $12,550.00

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $1,865.30
Silver $22.41
Platinum $983.00
Palladium $1,703.00
Rhodium $12,500.00

WOW. Major drops in everything just today. Gold was around 1950 on Wednesday, dropped a bit Thursday and went down almost 50 bucks today. Silver went down $1.14 today..

More Stupid Orbit Tricks (Orbital Mechanics Part 3)

Well, this is a bit embarrassing. This is one subject that I actually have some formal background in, albeit from over thirty years ago, and I flubbed something in the first column.

[Math note: Take the velocity vector for the satellite. Normalize it, so its length is 1. Take the cross product of it and the z axis unit vector. Take the magnitude of that product. You now have the sine of the inclination angle. For those of you who didn’t understand that, be assured that it’s dead damn easy and you don’t have to watch the satellite in orbit to figure out its inclination, so long as your velocity measurement is accurate.]
Me being slightly stupid two weeks ago

You can certainly do this. It works as described. But it’s vastly better to take the dot product of the normalized vector with the z axis unit vector, and treat that as the cosine of the inclination angle. Why? Two reasons. First, the cosine could be anything from 1 down to -1, and those correspond to angles of 0-180 degrees, the exact range of angles an inclination can be. Second…to take that dot product, just grab the z component of the normalized velocity vector; no need to actually do the dot product, (v_x, v_y, v_z) (0, 0, 1) is a no-brainer.

OK with that out of the way, we can pick up where we left off last week. I gave you the formula for the period of an elliptical orbit of a certain semi-major axis (a), and used the special case of a circular orbit where a is the radius of the circle, to figure out the radius of a geostationary orbit. Here’s the formula once again:

$T=2\pi\sqrt{a^3\over{\mu}}$

(Last week, the one I found had GM where this one has μ; they’re the same thing, the gravitational parameter of the object being orbited, which is the mass of that object multiplied by the gravitational constant.)

It’s really easy to get from here to the speed the object is traveling at in its orbit. The orbit will have a total length of 2πa. (The circumference is 2π times the radius.) Divide that length by the period. Both of the 2πs cancel, and you’re left with a / sqrt of a³/μ, but that’s just the square root of μ/a.

$v = \sqrt{ GM\! \over{r}} = \sqrt{\mu\over{r}}$

Yes, this one has r instead of a. (This is what I get for copying and pasting formula graphics from Wikipoo; it’s not being consistent about using μ instead of GM, and the point I am about to make is obscured by using r instead of a.)

So does this mean that if you’re at a certain distance from the center of the object, a, and you’re traveling at speed v, you’re in a circular orbit?

Not necessarily. You’ll notice I said “speed” not “velocity.”

It is true that if you are at that distance, and traveling at that speed, your orbit will have a semi-major axis of a, but it won’t necessarily be a circular orbit; it could be an ellipse. The direction you are moving in at that distance matters. Draw a line from you to the center of the primary. That line defines “down” (even though you don’t feel weight while in orbit). Perpendicular to “down” you are moving “horizontally.” See the following very fancy (and stolen) diagram, where v is always in a horizontal direction:

If that is the direction you’re moving, and you are at the proper speed, you will be in a circular orbit. Otherwise, if you’re at the proper speed but not moving “horizontally” you are in an elliptical orbit whose semi major axis happens to match your distance from the primary. The more eccentric the orbit it, the farther away you will get from the primary at apoapsis…but the closer you will be at periapsis.

And this is where clean theory departs from actual practice. The theory pretends the entire mass of the primary is located at a point at one focus of the ellipse (or the center of the circular orbit). The fact of the matter is, the primary has a size, a radius, and if periapsis is less than that number, your time in orbit ends when you smack into the surface of the primary.

If you are in an elliptical orbit, then of course your speed at apoapsis is less than the speed we just computed, and your speed at periapsis is greater than that speed–unless it’s zero because you smacked into the surface of the primary. This formula is only good when your distance from the center of the primary is the same as the semi-major axis of your orbit. (Always true in a circular orbit, true at exactly two points of an elliptical orbit.)

Remember this diagram? It’s baaaaaack. The red orbit is circular. the red object’s speed never changes. The other orbits have the same semi-major axis, and as you’ll recall all of the objects orbit in the same amount of time. But here, the point is that when one of the objects (green, blue gold, and magent) crosses the red circular orbit, its distance is equal to its semi-major axis, and it is moving at the appropriate speed for a circular orbit (i.e., the same speed as the red object), just not in the right *direction*.

Surely there’s a better formula useful in other circumstances!

Stop calling me Shirley, and yes, there is. It’s called the vis viva equation:

$v=\sqrt{\mu\left({2\over{r}}-{1\over{a}}\right)}$

a is your semi major axis, and r is the distance from the center of the primary. Notice that you do not need to know the orbit’s eccentricity. More importantly, notice r and a don’t have to be the same.

(Also notice that if they are the same, things cancel and you get the circular orbit formula above. And notice also that if r is more than 2 times a, you get a negative sign under the radical. But that makes sense, it’s physically impossible no matter how eccentric an elliptical orbit gets, for you to be more than 2a away from the center of the primary, because the orbit itself is 2a in length, measured the long way.)

And now we have the background needed for today’s stupid orbit tricks.

Escape Velocity

If you set the semi-major axis a to infinity in the vis viva equation, you’re now thinking, basically, about an ellipse with apoapsis at infinity, which is to say, you’re not ever going to get to it, so you’re never coming back. Plugging that in to vis viva, the 1/a term becomes zero, and so escape velocity (at any given distance r from the primary) is:

$v\geq {\sqrt {\frac {2GM}{r}}}.$

(And now we’re back to GM.) You don’t have to be in orbit for this to work. So at the surface of the earth, 6,378 km from the center, escape velocity is roughly 11 km/s.

(And again, now reality crowds into theory. In reality there is more than just the earth and your spacecraft, there’s also the sun. You’ll get away from earth, but not from the sun…so you won’t travel infinitely far from the earth. To get away from the sun, you need 42 km/s (yes, even 150 million kilometers away from the sun). The earth’s orbital velocity of 26 km/s can help you with that, if you launch in the right direction; just add 16 km/s to get to 42 km/sec. This is how New Horizons was launched to–and past–Pluto.)

Note that the formula has a “greater than or equal to” sign; any velocity greater than this is also good for escaping, with some left over of course.

Changing Orbits

How do you change from one orbit to another?

If you’re in orbit you need some source of thrust, and the most common and obvious one is a rocket.

But here is the key thing…if you want to change from one orbit to another, you apply thrust where the two orbits–the one you’re in and the one you want to be in–cross each other. Because what you change with thrust is not position (not at the time you thrust, but of course later on your position will be different than it otherwise would be), but rather velocity. So the position before you thrust will be the same as your position after the thrust, but your velocity will differ.

Let’s go back to the eccentricity diagram.

Let’s say you’re in the red orbit and want to go into the green orbit. What you do is wait until you’re at one of the two points where the two orbits intersect–let’s pick the bottom one for this example, fire up your rocket, and change your velocity so that you’re now travelling on the green ellipse instead of the red circle.

But–and this is key–I said velocity not speed. The speed remains the same (remember, from above, that when those other orbits cross the red orbit, they’re at the same radius r and the orbits all have the same semi-major axis, a, so they have the same speed, just in different directions.

Velocity is defined both by speed and a direction of motion. In this case, you need to change the direction without changing the speed. This is a job for vectors! Just eyeballing it, at the bottom of the diagram where the red and green orbits intersect, you’ll want to point your rocket almost directly at the thing you’re orbiting, and thrust for a bit. That will result in your velocity shifting a bit downwards on the diagram, and you’ll be moving on the green ellipse instead of the red circle.

Remember what I said about being able to change velocity but not position, with thrust?

There was an egregious misunderstanding of this in a certain Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, Deja Q (from the third season). A certain planet was facing disaster, because its moon, formerly in a nice tidy circular orbit, was starting to drop inwards. With every orbit, the periapsis was getting closer and closer to the planet; eventually it’d hit the planet.

The Enterprise was going to try to pull the moon back into its proper orbit with the tractor beam.

But the Hollywood effects people were utterly ignorant of what I was just telling you. If you want to move the moon from that elliptical orbit back into its circular orbit, what do you do? You go to where the two orbits touch, at 3 o’clock in the diagram…and give it a good shove there. (You will want to speed it up at that moment; same direction, but make it go faster.)

Instead they depicted the enterprise waiting until the moon was at periapsis (9 oclock on that elliptical orbit) then pushing from there. Luckily they didn’t succeed, otherwise that moon would have ended up in a different orbit than what they wanted, quite possibly a very eccentric ellipse that would collide with the planet…oops!

Now a real starship crew would know this (unless they slept through orbital mechanics at Starfleet Academy), but Hollywood writers and producers? Nope. And either their “technical consultant” didn’t know Jacques Schiff about orbital mechanics (which, let’s face it, is an arcane specialty for people on Earth, though if we ever migrate into space in a big way, people up there will have to know it), or the Hollywood weenies decided not to listen to him.

(And let’s leave aside the fact that there’s simply no reason for a moon to suddenly have a shrinking orbit like this, in the first place! The only way it could happen, in reality, is if someone applied a small thrust to it at 3 o’clock, every time it was there, to slow it down and get the other side of the orbit to drop. I can’t think of a natural process that would do that. Once, yes, but every single time it’s at the same spot in its orbit?)

So there you go, an orbit change…and even an application (and you get to laugh at Hollywood too).

Hohmann Transfers

But what if the two orbits don’t touch? The short and glib answer is, then you use a transfer orbit; pick one that touches both orbits.

Hohmann transfers get used a lot by NASA for interplanetery probes. The orbits of Earth and (say) Mars are in very nearly the same plane, so you just pick an ellipse that touches both orbits, sort of like the way that wayward moon’s new orbit was touching the old one at 3 o’clock.

But it gets used for satellites too.

Imagine we have a satellite in a very low, circular orbit, say, 222 km above the earth’s surface or 6600 km from the center of the earth. And we want to put it into a geostationary orbit, which is at 42,164 km from the center of the earth.

We need a transfer orbit.

Like this one:

Our two circular orbits are connected by an elliptical orbit. (And yes my low special effects budget is in play here….the diagram is again stolen from Wikipedia, and it’s for the sun and two planets, clearly. Just imagine that’s Earth at the center instead of the sun.)

When you change an object from one orbit to another, its position doesn’t change, its speed does change. So what has to happen is the satellite, when it reaches 6 o’clock in orbit 1, has to change its speed to be appropriate for that elliptical orbit, at its closest distance, so now it’s in orbit 2. Then it will have to change speed again when it gets to 12 o’clock in orbit 2, to put itself in orbit 3. Needless to say, there’s a rocket attached to the satellite for doing this.

We know a for orbits 1 and 3, but we don’t know it for orbit 2. But look at it. The semi major axis of 2 is half of the long distance across the ellipse, and it should be pretty obvious that the long distance the sum of a for orbits 1 and 3. Because the top end of ellipse 2 is at the same distance as a for orbit 3, and the bottom end is at the same distance as a for orbit 1. Add them together to get the total distance, and divide by 2. A for the transfer orbit is 24,382 km.

Orbital velocity at 6600 km comes from $v = \sqrt{ GM\! \over{r}} = \sqrt{\mu\over{r}}$ . Using μ=3.986 x 10⁵ we get v = 7.771 km/second.

Orbital velocity at 42,164 km comes from the same formula and is 3.075 km/sec.

So now we need to use vis viva twice, once for r=6600 km in an a=24,382 km orbit, and another for r=42,164km in a 24,382 km orbit (the same orbit, two different distances). At 6600km, to be in that orbit, the spacecraft must be moving at 10.22 km/second (not that much below escape velocity!) and at 42,164 km it will be moving at 1.600 km/sec (it’s 1.59968 but I am rounding everything to four significant figures).

So at the point where orbits 1 and 2 touch, the spacecraft is moving at 7.771 km/second and has to speed up to 10,22 km.sec, which is a change of 2.448 km/second.

And at the point where orbits 2 and 3 touch, the spacecraft will arrive moving at 1.600 km/sec but needs to speed up to 3.075 km/sec to go into the circular geostationary orbit, which is a change of 1.475 km/sec.

As I said this is done with a rocket attached to the spacecraft. This rocket must be able to change the velocity of the spacecraft 2.448+1.475 = 3.923 km/second.

With that, and the mass of the satellite and of the rocket with empty fuel tanks, and the characteristics of the rocket fuel, you can use the “rocket equation” to compute exactly how much fuel that booster needs to do the two “burns” it has to do, in order to move the satellite to geostationary earth orbit (GEO).

The rocket equation sounds like a good thing to talk about in a future Saturday daily, assuming anyone in my audience still has eyeballs that haven’t turned into glass.

But in the meantime, you at least have some notion of how to send the GOPe to its most appropriate next convention site.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”

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 !!!

2023·01·28 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

Language Warning

In the next piece I had to discuss a particular topic. Unfortunately, I couldn’t discuss it without naming it. Therefore I apologize in advance for having to do so, and apologize to anyone offended by the sight of the name.

RINO McDaniel

As you no doubt know, RINO McDaniel got re-elected to RNC Chair Friday. I hope no one has already managed in the intervening time to suppress that memory; if so I apologize for the PTSD trigger.

RINO McDaniel isn’t the problem.

Let me be crystal clear on this, RINO McDaniel is a lower-than-whale-shit, piss guzzling ratfucking shit eating traitorous rancid syphillitic cunt. Her worth as a human being is substantially less than zero, any oxygen sucked into her lungs is wasted, and it would be, no matter what job she had.

I fear I haven’t been clear enough, but that will have to suffice.

But she is not the problem…or rather, she would not be a problem were it not for others. She’d still be as I have described, but we wouldn’t know who she is and would not care, because she could do no damage. She’d just be anonymous human refuse.

No, the real problem is the fact that a majority of the 168 top GOP people voted for her. And now that has happened five times so they cannot claim they didn’t know what she was.

In spite of the fact that under her “leadership” the party has deliberately sabotaged the will of its base, has deliberately refused to challenge blatant election fraud, had gone out of its way to ensure certain candidates do not get nominated, has diverted donor money to namby-pamby candidates who have all the electoral appeal of a puddle of dog vomit…and in general has done nothing whatsoever to help fix the problems that plague America.

However that last is to be expected; I cannot expect anyone who IS the problem to help FIX the problem.

RINO McDaniel would be powerless without an entire party leadership of the same mind as her. They want this dismal performance; they want to ignore the party base.

If she were to drop dead this instant, it would solve nothing as someone just like her would be elected by those same pustulous people.

According to Charlie Kirk, about 55 people voted against her, 10-12 wanted something different but were too chickenshit to do the right thing, and roughly 100 people voted for her enthusiastically, and even had the unmitigated gall to complain to Kirk about US. Fuck ’em. Rusty 12 gauge bore brushes would be too good for these arrogant pricks and cunts.

Every single one of those hundred is just as bad as she is. In other words, they are all worse than I described at the beginning of this piece. And no doubt those people in turn have people who supported them to be state party chairs and whateveritis they call the other two people from each state and territory who were voting.

It’s time to face up to the fact that the Republican party is effectively owned by the shit-eating RINOs. We’ve got more work to do, a lot more work, to make the GOP an instrument for the restoration of the United States of America. And that’s in addition to cleaning up our elections.

There’s no point in cleaning up elections just to elect ratfucking RINOs.

OK, hopefully now you will have some inkling of my true attitude towards RINOs. Sorry that words were inadequate to give you the full picture.

The Real Fascist is His Fraudulency Joe Biden*

*Or whoever has his hand rammed up that meat puppet’s ass.

Brandon (which I will use as a term for whoever is the power behind the Porcelain Throne) has thrown down the gauntlet…but in a way where most of America will never see it. The networks didn’t carry his tirade. CNN air brushed it (or whatever you call editing the red background) for its five viewers (who aren’t trapped in airports).

Luckily for me I live in Colorado, and therefore, despite my best efforts, I probably didn’t vote for Donald Trump.

Of course, for this purpose who I actually did try to vote for will be essential, and they undoubtedly know.

Come and get us, asswipes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h6ZZ28QtX4

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.

Small Government?

Many times conservatives (real and fake) speak of “small government” being the goal.

This sounds good, and mostly is good, but it misses the essential point. The important thing here isn’t the size, but rather the purpose, of government. We could have a cheap, small tyranny. After all our government spends most of its revenue on payments to individuals and foreign aid, neither of which is part of the tyrannical apparatus trying to keep us locked down and censored. What parts of the government would be necessary for a tyranny? It’d be a lot smaller than what we have now. We could shrink the government and nevertheless find it more tyrannical than it is today.

No, what we want is a limited government, limited not in size, but rather in scope. Limited, that is, in what it’s allowed to do. Under current circumstances, such a government would also be much smaller, but that’s a side effect. If we were in a World War II sort of war, an existential fight against nasty dictatorships on the brink of world conquest, that would be very expensive and would require a gargantuan government, but that would be what the government should be doing. That would be a large, but still limited government, since it’d be working to protect our rights.

World War II would have been the wrong time to squawk about “small government,” but it wasn’t (and never is) a bad time to demand limited government. Today would be a better time to ask for a small government–at least the job it should be doing is small today–but it misses the essential point; we want government to not do certain things. Many of those things we don’t want it doing are expensive but many of them are quite eminently doable by a smaller government than the one we have today. Small, but still exceeding proper limits.

So be careful what you ask for. You might get it and find you asked for the wrong thing.

Political Science In Summation

It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).

A Few Things We Cannot Blame on His Fraudulency

I am pretty sure Joe Biden had nothing whatsoever to do with the 30 Years War that ran from 1618-1648 and probably killed about a third of the people then living in what is now Germany.

Nor did he cause the collapse of either Roman empire (Western, 476 CE, Eastern 1453 CE). Nor the ignominious failure of most of the Crusades. Nor the collapse of Bronze Age civilization around 1200 BCE (including the collapse of the Minoans and the blowup of Santorini).

However, my utter lack of ability to imagine how he could possibly be responsible for these things is not a valid argument against them, so I await correction if appropriate.

His Truth?

Again we saw an instance of “It might be true for Billy, but it’s not true for Bob” logic this week.

I hear this often, and it’s usually harmless. As when it’s describing differing circumstances, not different facts. “Housing is unaffordable” can be true for one person, but not for another who makes ten times as much.

But sometimes the speaker means it literally. Something like 2+2=4 is asserted to be true for Billy but not for Bob. (And when it’s literal, it’s usually Bob saying it.) And in that sense, it’s nonsense, dangerous nonsense. There is ONE reality, and it exists independent of our desires and our perceptions. It would go on existing if we weren’t here. We exist in it. It does not exist in our heads. It’s not a personal construct, and it isn’t a social construct. If there were no society, reality would continue to be what it is, it wouldn’t vanish…which it would have to do, if it were a social construct.

Now what can change from person to person is the perception of reality. We see that all the time. And people will, of course, act on those perceptions. They will vote for Trump (or try to) if their perception is close to mine, and vote against Trump (and certainly succeed at doing so) if their perception is distant from mine (and therefore, if I do say so, wrong). I have heard people say “perception is reality” and usually, that’s what they’re trying to say–your perception of reality is, as far as you know, an accurate representation of reality, or you’d change it.

But I really wish they’d say it differently. And sometimes, to get back to Billy and Bob, the person who says they have different truths is really saying they have different perceptions of reality–different worldviews. I can’t argue with the latter. But I sure wish they’d say it better. That way I’d know that someone who blabbers about two different truths is delusional and not worth my time, at least not until he passes kindergarten-level metaphysics on his umpteenth attempt.

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:

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

(Paper) Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $1,927.30
Silver $24.01
Platinum $1,052.00
Palladium $1,800.00
Rhodium $13,000.00

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $1,928.50
Silver $23.69
Platinum $1,021.00
Palladium $1,696.00
Rhodium $12,550.00

Gold apparently was higher earlier in the week (roughly $1950), but has now receded. Still, it’s holding its current gains, and that’s a good sign for gold. Not so good for the US Federal Reserve Note (the “Fern” from its initials FRN, or “Federon” the entirely appropriate name of the monopoly money in the SolarQuest board game).

Orbital Elements (Part 2)

Before we continue, let’s back up just a bit.

Let’s look at the elliptical orbit again.

This rather cheesy (but it’s free!) graphic from Wikipedia shows 1) the farthest approach of a satellite to the planet (3), and also the nearest approach (2). (Never mind that the diagram is clumsily drawn so that it looks like the closest approach is somewhere else on the ellipse–I see that mistake a LOT and the planet should be drawn a bit further to the right.)

The farthest point is generically the apoapsis. When it’s Earth being orbited, it can be called apogee, when it’s the sun it’s aphelion. (Some other bodies have special names for it too.) Similarly the near point is periapsis (or perigee or perihelion…). The line connecting the two, along the long axis of the ellipse, is the line of apsides.

We’re going to need those concepts in a little bit.

OK, going back now to the satellite in the inclined orbit, there is a point when the satellite passes from south of the equator to north of the equator, this is the ascending node. And similarly, moving from north to south, the descending node.

Just giving the inclination, though, doesn’t uniquely specify the plane of the orbit. Let’s say a satellite passes through its ascending node at precisely midnight ET on January 28th. But, at that moment, it could be over Ecuador. Or Brazil. Or Equatorial Guinea. Or Kenya. Or Indonesia. Or any point in between.

So our next orbital element is called the longitude of the ascending node, Ω. (Capital omega.) Except we don’t measure the longitude on Earth’s surface…because that reference moves; Earth rotates. Instead, we measure it off a place called the “first point of Aries.” It’s basically the direction the sun is in as seen from Earth, at the moment spring begins in the northern hemisphere (or another way to put that, it’s the place where the ecliptic and the celestial equator intersect). This doesn’t move (much).

The following diagram shows an object in orbit around the sun (so it refers to perihelion, not periapsis).

Earlier when I was talking about earth centered inertial coordinates, I said the Z axis was the earth’s axis of rotation, and sort of blew off talking about the X and Y axes except to say they were in the plane of the equator. Now I can say that the line from Earth to the first point of Aries is the X axis.

So between i and Ω, we define the plane of the orbit of the satellite. a defines the size of the orbit and e the shape of the orbit.

We’ve still got two to go, and the diagram shows the first of the two, the angle labeled w (which should be ω, lower case omega). That’s the angle between the ascending node and periapsis, and is called the argument of periapsis. Without that, the periapsis could be over the southern hemisphere instead of the northern hemisphere; that’s two quite different situations.

The last parameter defines where the satellite is in its orbit at some particular time. This is done in multiple different ways. Perhaps it’s an angle, the true anomaly, with an implicit given time (the epoch). For example the epoch could be midnight, January 1, 2001, and the true anomaly would be where the satellite was in its orbit (measured from periapsis) at that time (or, if the satellite wasn’t yet in that orbit, you can back-calculate where it would have been).

It is also possible to simply give the x, y and z positions of a satellite, and also its velocity vector…at some epoch time…and one can convert back and forth between the two. Note that this method also involves six numbers. But the way I described in detail is the way that gives you a feel for what the orbit looks like; the x, y, z, and velocity vector won’t do that for you right off the bat.

Stupid Orbit Tricks

If anyone remembers David Letterman’s Stupid Pet Tricks, well this is my homage to that. I’m going to do a few of these, likely continuing next week.

Trick #1: Geostationary Orbits.

The Earth rotates in 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds. What, not 24 hours? The 24 hours you’re thinking of is with respect to the sun. But Earth orbits the sun in about 365 days…in other words, it travels almost one degree in its orbit about the sun every day. That means, as seen from Earth, the sun appears to move almost a degree in the sky every day, and if you want to define a day as the time between (say) high noon one day and high noon the next, Earth must rotate almost 361 degrees in one day to re-center the sun. We defined that time as 24 hours, so the actual 360 degree rotation in the inertial reference frame takes a bit less time.

Earlier I stated that the period of an orbit (the time the satellite takes to go around it once) depends only on the size of the orbit a. Implicitly it also depends on the mass of the body it’s orbiting, too. Here’s the formula:

T = 2 π sqrt( a³ / μ )

μ is the gravitational parameter, Newton’s gravitational constant multiplied by the mass of the primary (G x M). In metric units (kilometers and seconds) it’s 3.986 x 10⁵ for the Earth and 1.327 x 10¹¹ for the sun.

That formula gives you the period for a given semi-major axis a. If we do a bit of algebra, we can reverse it, and get the semi-major axis of an orbit with a specific period:

So with T equal to 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds…that’s 86,164 seconds. Shove that number through that formula and get: 42,164 kilometers or 26,205 miles. That number is from the center of Earth.

So any orbit with this semi-major axis will result in a satellite that goes around Earth in the same amount of time that it takes Earth to spin on its axis. So if it’s over Mar A Lago at 11:32 AM on one day, it will be over Mar A Lago at the same time the next day, and the day after that. That is a geosynchronous orbit.

Note, though that if the orbit is inclined (and one passing over anything not on the equator is inclined) or is elliptical, it will not stay over Mar A Lago 24/7. Inclination, of course means that the satellite will move over a range of latitudes from +i to -i every orbit. If the orbit is elliptical, it will move at different speeds over the course of the orbit, so instead of keeping pace with the rotating earth, it will move ahead of, or behind, some point on the earth’s surface depending on whether it’s moving faster or slower (respectively).

Therefore, a geosynchronous orbit like this is not terribly useful. But make it circular, so it moves across the sky at a constant speed as seen from Earth, and then make sure the orbit has an inclination of 0 degrees, so it’s always over the equator, and you have a satellite that, as seen from the surface of the earth which is rotating, appears to be stationary in the sky. That is a geostationary orbit, and it’s a special case of the geosynchronous orbit. It’s a circular orbit, so it has a radius, and that radius is of course equal to a of 42.164 km.

This is extremely useful because you can just point an antenna at that spot in the sky and the satellite is always there. So it’s great for propaganda TV or forms of meanignful communication. As such, positions in that circle are valuable real estate, and they’re specified in degrees longitude (i.e., the longitude the satellite appears to hover over). (Specifying a position like that only works for geostationary orbits.)

Trick #2: Molniya Orbits

But there’s a problem with this…one that’s not a big deal for us in the Lower 48 but is a big deal in Russia and Alaska. When you get to about 80 degrees north, that satellite will be on the horizon; anywhere above 70 degrees north and it’s less than ten degrees above the horizon, and your signal has to push its way through a lot of atmosphere. Clearly geostationary communications satellites don’t work well near the north pole (or south pole for that matter).

The Russians came up with a fairly effective workaround. It’s not as elegant as geostationary, but it can be made to work. It’s called the Molniya orbit. It’s a Russian inwention, so the original spelling is Молния. (In English it is usually mispronounced “mole-NYE-uh” but the Russian pronunciation is “mole-KNEE-yuh”.)

As you can see from the diagram, it’s a very elliptical orbit, at a high inclination, 63.4 degrees. Also the argument of periapsis (perigee) is 270 degrees; the periapsis is 3/4 of the way around from the ascending node (which is over Africa in the diagram); 3/4 of a circle is 270 degrees.
It’s a 12 hour orbit, not a 24 hour orbit, so twice every day it’s at apogee, the point marked 6 in the diagram (six hours since perigee). The satellite is moving so slowly near apogee that it almost tracks with the earth. So it can actually be used as a communication satellite any time between 2 and 10 hours after perigee. Of course on the next orbit, North America, not Russia, will be under it, so there needs to be another satellite with the opposite longitude of the ascending node to be over Russia then. And to be sure, there’s still a four hour gap (out of every twelve) in coverage while the satellite is too close to perigee. So the Russians likely have several of these satellites to ensure continuous coverage.

Incidentally, the inclination of this orbit must be at 63.4 degrees. It might look as if it could be adjusted a bit, but there are reasons (having to do with the fact that Earth is not a perfect sphere) that the orbit has to be at this inclination; any other inclination and the line of apsides will precess and the apogee won’t be in the right place for very long, in other words, ω will change. Eventually perigee will be over Russia and then it’s useless as a communications satellite because it will zip across the sky very quickly. (Accounting for “perturbations” due to other bodies or irregularities in the Earth is considerably more advanced stuff than I’ve gone into here. I’ve been pretending perturbations don’t exist to get the basic concepts out.)

Any of these orbits (geosynchronous, geostationary, Molniya) would be good places to send worse-than-useless RINO party officials to, provided they don’t collide with anything useful up there such as actual satellites. But of course it would be expensive to put them there. On the other hand, nothing need be spent on pressure suits, so some cost could be saved.

There are a lot more stupid orbit tricks, but the next ones I want to cover involve a little more background, so until next time…

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

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 !!!

2023·01·21 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

Joining The Herd Of Lemmings

I’ve had cause to consider a few things. Maybe we’re going about it the wrong way, and we need to ditch Trump

Yeah, NO

Trump all the way! Why? Because being hated by the people who hate him is a sign of impeccable character, that’s why.

The haters can go fuck themselves with rusty twelve gauge bore brushes. I’d prefer ten gauge but that’s kind of scarce, so…I’m willing to compromise.

The RINO’s Dilemma

The RINOs who who have burrowed in and taken over most GOP organizations, from the state down to local organizations, have quite a dilemma on their hands, and most of them have their heads too far up their asses to realize it.

OK, I’m not talking about the liberal in a Republican area, who knows they’re in the wrong party, but is there because it’s the only game in their town; they hope to capture a nomination someday, at which point they’re guaranteed to be elected…otherwise, they never will be. These people are a hazard in any heavily conservative area.

No, I’m talking about the guys who are a little bit conservative and want to do some good by going into politics, and they’re in a closely matched area, closely enough that they can join the party they are most aligned with and still have a chance. They think the Democrats…particularly the ones who end up running for office…are nuts.

They don’t think much better of the Deplorable types, either. A bunch of bumpkins whose hearts are in the right place, mostly…OK a bit extreme. But they think Deplorables can’t understand that first you have to get elected, then work within the system to change things…a slow process. They genuinely want many of the things Deplorables want…just not as much. The government is spending too much. Or they need to spend money on highways instead of welfare for illegal immigrants. But they want to work within the system to get these things done.

Or maybe they think things are pretty close to ideal right now, and they want to nail it in place.

The problem is, that means they don’t stand for anything in particular. And it shows. They’re about as unappetizing to the electorate as a puddle of dog vomit. The folks in the middle, who they think they are appealing to because they themselves are not extreme, would honestly prefer a clear-spoken radical to someone who qualifies everything they say to the point where they sound like they don’t believe anything at all.

The problem these “Mild RINOs” have, is they just can’t see that. And the reason they just can’t see that, is their entire sense of self-worth is tied up in not seeing that. In their minds, they’ve worked tirelessly for their party, to keep those crazy Democrats out…only to have to constantly fight with a small number of crazy Republicans–who are only liabilities if they end up as candidates. They’ve fought the good fight, and if they can just find the right candidate, someone with some charisma, they might stop the crazies…without being too beholden to the OTHER crazies. In the meantime it’s not working. What’s a responsible guy in politics to do?

They simply cannot understand that the Republicans can’t succeed as the party of nothing in particular. Not really in the past, and certainly not today when people are starting to realize that no matter what they do in the voting booth, the country is still about to fly off a precipice. If they did see it, they’d suddenly have two choices: Go away and let the GOP succeed, or stay and fight. But “go away” isn’t really an option, because what’s the point of having a party now owned by the crazies, win?

Well, they have a dilemma…and WE, therefore have a problem. And we would have that problem even IF they realized that they had a problem…that they were the problem.

No one ever thinks they are the bad guy. Even Epstein probably thought he was the good guy. Right up to the moment where he didn’t kill himself.

So if you ever wonder why these unappetizing dufuses cling on even when their fingernails are being left behind…that’s why. They don’t understand no one wants them, and can’t imagine that no one should want them. And oftentimes their greatest pride is in all the hard work they’ve done for the party. They’re not going to give that up; it’d be psychological suicide.

If you’ve worked with these people, there’s a good chance you like them and consider some of them your friends. But even if so…we’re going to have to give them a good, hard shove. Because America is more important than those milquetoasts’ egos.

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:

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

Spot (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $1,921,60
Silver $24.38
Platinum $1,073.00
Palladium $1,863.00
Rhodium $13,000.00

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $1,927.30
Silver $24.01
Platinum $1,052.00
Palladium $1,800.00
Rhodium $13,000.00

Mixed movement this week. Gold up a tad, rhodium flat, everything else down. If I were one of those guys paid by the YSM to write the rationale for why the stock market went up or down that day, I’d say something like “Precious metals consolidated their gains this week.” And collect my paycheck. Why do I have to code for a living when that clown never learned to code?

Fuck Joe Bdn

Due to complaints about foul language, I’ve censored the most objectionable word in the title of this section.

B*d*n, you don’t even get ONE scoop of ice cream today.

(Please post this somewhere permanent, as it will continue to be true; the SOB will never deserve a scoop.)

Orbital Elements (Part I?)

Valerie asked me to explain what I was talking about when I talked about Starlink having to be in an inclined orbit, so here’s my attempt.

It turns out there are six numbers that can, taken together, uniquely and completely describe an orbit. Actually, there are many such sets of numbers, but the most popular ones are symbolized by the letters a, e, i, ω, Ω, and t.

But first we’ve got to make some simplifying assumptions. We are talking about two bodies (primary and satellite), and both can be treated as point masses.

As it turns out Newton showed that a spherical body (or whatever size) could be treated as a point mass, provided you’re outside the sphere and it’s radially symmetric. And what that last bit means is that if you start at the surface and drill down, you see the same things at the same depths, no matter where you start from. Earth turns out to have a solid iron core, surrounded by molten iron, surrounded by mantle rocks, surrounded by the crust; since these layers are pretty much the same thickness everywhere, Earth is spherically symmetric.

Well, almost. It does have an equatorial bulge, and the crust is of slightly varying thickness depending on whether you’re on land or out in the middle of the ocean, and the ocean itself doesn’t cover things completely. But it’s close enough for a first approximation.

You can, from an orbital mechanics standpoint, treat the Earth as if its entire mass were at a point at the center of the Earth.

One more assumption is that there is no atmosphere to cause drag.

Under these circumstances, orbits are governed completely by the force the primary (usually Earth) exerts on the satellite. That force “points” directly towards the primary’s center of mass. And in fact you can simply even further. The force on the satellite is proportional to the satellite’s mass; if you want, you can divide through by the mass, and just talk about the acceleration the satellite will experience as a result of gravity–that will be the same whether we’re talking about a baseball, or the International Space Station…or the Moon.

So we have two objects, pulling on each other, out in space. If they are moving slowly enough with respect to each other, one of them will travel in an ellipse around the other; it’s “in orbit” about the other object. (And technically the other object is also in orbit around the first one at the same time…but if one object is huge, like a planet, and the other is an artificial satellite, it is dang close to being “satellite in orbit around planet and not the other way around.”)

If the satellite is moving fast enough, though, it’s not going to go around and around the big object, though; it will escape, and not come back. This too is technically considered an orbit, but that doesn’t fit people’s mental image of an orbit, so I won’t insist on that here.

So, we have some object “in orbit” around the Earth. But that mere statement doesn’t tell you anything about where it will be, when it will be there, or how fast it will be moving, or in which direction.

That’s what you need those six numbers for. They encapsulate all of those things, and given those six numbers, you can (with a lot of computation), figure out where the satellite is, how fast it’s moving at that time, and in what direction. And you can pick any time, too; the computation is good for a thousand years from now, or last week. (Again, with those simplifying assumptions.)

OK, so what are they? Well depending on how much time I have to write this, I can cover two or three of them.

The first and most important is a. This is the size of the orbit. A non-escape orbit will be an ellipse of some kind (or possibly a perfect circle, but that’s actually just thought of as a special case of an ellipse). a is the semi-major axis of the ellipse…halfway across the ellipse the long way. If the ellipse is actually a circle, there’s no long way, or you can think of it as every diameter being the long way, and the semimajor axis becomes the radius of the circle.

[Johannes Kepler, around 1600, showed that all planets orbited the sun in ellipses (close to being circles). But that was simply showing that they do it. Newton was able to prove that an attractive force that fell off proportionately to the square of the distance would result in elliptical orbits, at least for things not escaping; thus he could describe the cause of all of those elliptical orbits and eventually show it was the same force that makes an apple fall to Earth or which makes the Moon orbit Earth.]

Now here’s the key thing–the amount of time it takes to make one orbit around some planet (called the “period”) depends only on the value of a. If the orbit is a perfect circle, it takes that amount of time. If the orbit is a narrow ellipse with the same semi major axis…it takes that same amount of time.

These orbits all have the same semi-major axis (the distance the long way across the ellipse is the same, but the shape of the orbit is different. You can see, though that each object takes the same amount of time to orbit the primary…note that every time things are to the left of the primary, they’re in exactly the same configuration. This also illustrates that in an elliptical orbit things move faster they closer they are to the primary.

So, that’s one down: We have the size of the orbit. How about its shape? That is e, the eccentricity. There are multiple different definitions of this number, all with the same result. For our purposes, measure the distance from the center of the ellipse to one focus. Divide that by the semi-major axis. For a circle, the distance to the focus is zero (since both foci are at the center), so your eccentricity will be zero. For a really long, skinny ellipse the focus will be nearly at the end of the ellips and the eccentricity will be almost, but not quite, 1. You can get as close as you like to 1 without actually reaching it; just keep drawing skinnier and skinnier ellipses.

But everything I’ve shown you is two dimensional. What about three dimensions? Couldn’t an orbit be perpendicular to the ones in the last figure I showed, into and out of your computer screen?

Absolutely!!! And the next three numbers will describe the orientation of the orbit, in 3D.

But to describe the orientation with numbers, you must have a coordinate system and then you’ll want to do math. I can relieve you of the math (since I just want you to have a picture of what’s going on) but we’re going to need that coordinate system.

The first thing about that system is that it’s much, much more convenient if it’s inertial…in other words the coordinate system can’t move. That seems kind of trivial and something you shouldn’t have to mention, but that’s not true: we use a coordinate system every day that does move, and that’s latitude and longitude. Sure, 105 West longitude runs through Colorado, and will continue to do so–so it’s stationary, right? No. Colorado moves…because the Earth rotates.

So to best do orbital mechanics, you need a three-D coordinate system, that does not rotate with the Earth. You’d also find it easier if the system were a square grid, which latitude and longitude aren’t (even with altitude thrown in for a third dimension). The most commonly used such system is one called “Earth Centered Inertial (ECI).” In Earth Centered Inertial, every location in space is described by three numbers, x, y, and z. I won’t go too much into x and y (yet), but the Z axis, along which z is measured, is Earth’s axis of rotation. It goes through the north and south poles, and the center of the earth. If some object is on Earth’s axis, it will have a z value, but x and y will both be zero.

But that also means Earth’s equator has a z value of zero, just like Earth’s center does. So the xy plane represents the plane of Earth’s equator.

As described, the Z axis is the earth’s axis of rotation, and the X and Y axes are in the plane of the equator.

So what’s the first thing you can do with an orbit, now that we’re thinking in 3D? Up to now you’ve probably been imagining these orbits as being in the earth’s equatorial plane (if you’ve thought about it at all).

The first thing we can do is tilt the thing so it is no longer in the earth’s equatorial plane. So you can imagine measuring the angle between the plane of the orbit and the plane of the earth’s equator. But that’s not what we do, actually; it’s mathematically simpler to draw a line perpendicular to the plane of the orbit, and measure the angle it makes with the earth’s axis, i.e. the z axis. In the diagram below, h with the hat on it is perpendicular to the orbital plane (green disc) and forms an 11 degree angle with the north pole (k).

[Math note: Take the velocity vector for the satellite. Normalize it, so its length is 1. Take the cross product of it and the z axis unit vector. Take the magnitude of that product. You now have the sine of the inclination angle. For those of you who didn’t understand that, be assured that it’s dead damn easy and you don’t have to watch the satellite in orbit to figure out its inclination, so long as your velocity measurement is accurate.]

Or here’s another one, though it’s showing the angle between two planes definition:

Note that you can go all the way up to a 180 degree inclination, in which case you’ve flipped the orbit over as if it were a flapjack. The difference is, if the satellite were going counterclockwise around the planet before you flipped it, it’s now going clockwise. (Counterclockwise, as seen from over the north pole, is the “normal” direction, the one the moon and planets follow, and is also called prograde. Clockwise is retrograde.)

Note that a satellite will go over the north and south poles only if the inclination is 90 degrees. It will go over every possible latitude. This is called a “polar orbit” and it is the only orbit that can go over every spot on earth. (The orbit has to be of such a period that it doesn’t just hit the same spot at the same time every day, or you’ll repeat the same thing over and over again.)

If it’s only at a 60 degree inclination, it will only go as high (or low) as 60 degrees north (or south) latitude. But you can also get this with a 120 degree inclination! Because the plane of the orbit will at that point be at a 60 degree “slant” just like a 60 degree inclined orbit, but the satellite will be going “backwards” in its orbit.

For a satellite at over a 90 degree inclination, you can figure out the maximum latitude it will go over by subtracting its inclination from 180 degrees, so working that example, (180-120) = 60 degrees.

But you can actually work that backwards. If you’re launching from Cape Canaveral into orbit, what orbits can you get to, directly, without having to maneuver “up there”? (Such a maneuver is a “plane change” and is very expensive in fuel.) Well, ones that pass over Cape Canaveral of course. Cape Canaveral is at 28.5 degrees north latitude, so Cape Canaveral can only launch directly into orbits inclined at least that much. An orbit with a 20 degree tilt, for example, simply will never pass over Cape Canaveral. Cape Canaveral can launch into a polar orbit by aiming the rocket to the north or south, or into a 60 degree orbit by aiming northeast, a 28.5 degree orbit by launching straight east, but it can’t go less than that, because no 20 degree orbit can ever have Cape Canaveral in its orbital plane.

At least some of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites have to be launched into a very highly inclined orbit, or they will never pass over the Arctic. Since Musk wants his starlink to be useful anywhere on earth, he has to have at least some of his satellites be in polar (or very nearly polar) orbits.

Well, with any luck I’ve achieved my goal of confusing Valerie quite thoroughly. And I haven’t even gotten to the other three numbers yet. Maybe some other time.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

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 !!!

2023·01·14 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

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.

Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.

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:

(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 $1,866.70
Silver $23.92
Platinum $1,100.00
Palladium $1,889.00
Rhodium $13,250.00

So here it is, Friday, 3PM MT after markets closed and we see:

Gold $1,921,60
Silver $24.38
Platinum $1,073.00
Palladium $1,863.00
Rhodium $13,000.00

Gold is going somewhere–we’re not at record levels (~$2070), but at the rate things are going it won’t be long, unless of course it reverses course (let’s face it: “they” will do their darndest to make that happen). Silver is too, though not as much. The others…not very much at all. This looks like the prime “pusher” is people worried about the economy. They will tend to pick gold over silver…and the other metals won’t share in that.

My gut feel is that it will end up dropping again, hard. If I am wrong and the dollar is going to collapse to the point where you can pay off your house with a silver dime because silver is at a million toilet-paper bucks an ounce…well, so be it.

If inflation gets THAT bad, expect your credit card companies to amend their agreements so as to index your balance to inflation. And certainly any other new loan. But old car and house loans cannot be amended!

How Far Are the Stars?

Thanks to Hollywood, it’s easy to imagine that since we’ve gone to the Moon (and yes, we have gone to the Moon), the planets are just one step away–one we inexplicably didn’t just take right after Apollo–and the stars one more step after that.

The moon’s orbit’s semi-major axis (which is one half of the length of the elliptical orbit, measured across the longest part; this serves as a good average distance) is 384,399 kilometers. But you should subtract the earth’s radius from that, as well as the moon’s, as it’s center-to-center. Let’s call it, very roughly, 375,000 kilometers.

Compare that to the distance between the earth and the sun, one “astronomical unit” of 149,597,870.7 kilometers. It’s 398.9 times as far…call it four hundred times. And these are the sorts of distances we’d have to travel to get to Mars. Sure it gets closer to us than 150 million kilometers, but we would not be traveling that shortest distance; we’d be using a “Hohmann Transfer” or something very similar to that (because it would take a lot less delta-V to do that; i.e, a lot less fuel), and that would easily be over 300 million kilometers.

Traveling 400-800 times as far is not a “small step.”

Compare Columbus traveling 3000 miles or so (one way) to the sorts of things people did before him, where they hugged the coastline but often traveled thousands of miles. Comparatively speaking, that’s a much smaller jump than going to Mars, having gone to the Moon, would be.

This is in large part why we’ve been doing everything with robot probes. It takes them as long as it would take astronauts, but they don’t have to bring along food and life support for months or years of travel…so that makes it possible to do it with smaller rockets…smaller meaning rockets smaller than a mountain.

Neptune, the outermost planet, is at about 30 AUs distance; that’s a 15-fold jump over a trip to Mars. Significant, especially when you consider the time it would take, but not that big a jump from getting to Mars. If we can start sending people to Mars, it won’t be that much harder to go other places (assuming there’s something there at the other end that’s not instantly lethal…and let’s face it Jupiter’s moons are mostly close enough to Jupiter’s radiation belts that astronauts would be broiled alive without a lot of heavy shielding…and that word “heavy” is a deal breaker). But, nonetheless, the planets are at similar distances to each other…compared to the jump it will be to go from moon travel to planetary travel.

What about the stars?

Proxima Centuari is the nearest star. And it is 268,000 AUs away. In other words it’s basically ten thousand times as far as Neptune.

We could have Southwest Spaceways running daily (except when their computers go tango uniform) trips to Neptune for tourists…and we’d be nowhere near ready for star travel. For a number of reasons, the main one of which would be having to go a thousand times as fast just to get there in a lifetime. But that’s just a consequence of the YUGE jump in distance.

That day we first set out for the stars, will represent a “giant leap for mankind” bigger than everything before it, put together.

Calculus Made Easy (No Joke)

This is a conceptual introduction to calculus; the meat of it starts about three minutes in–assuming, of course, that it posts at all! There’s no actual math drudgery involved for the conceptual part (though he does start flinging it at you around 12 minutes or so), though you do need to understand graphs. You should come out of it with an understanding of what integration and differentiation are, even if you don’t actually know how to do them.

If it buggers up here’s the link: h ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuOxDh3egN0 (remove the space).

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 !!!

2023·01·07 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

EDIT: 22:54 MT. Well let’s just say the top item didn’t age well…except perhaps for the deserved insults to Speaker Dungsmear.

I can only hope McCarthy keeps his promises.

Giving Our “Love” To A Certain RINO POS

Sundance of Banhammer Central, addressing Kevin “Dungsmear” McCarthy:

(See, this is how you do it, Sundance. Don’t drone on for ten thousand words, half of which are selected [and many of those misused] solely for their two-dollar value.)

More seriously, have you ever seen a more blatant example of how the Republican Party simply does not care about what its voters want? (Except of course to figure out what positions they need to mindlessly parrot when doing town halls and campaigning.)

Most of the base loathes McCarthy, and all but twenty of the Republicans in the House of Representatives insist on voting for him for Speaker of the House, again and again, exemplifying the definition of insanity.

For those twenty standing their ground, you are heroes. For the rest…you’re RINO scum (or you’re acting like it so if, deep down, you aren’t I can’t tell and neither can any other actual American, so quit acting before we decide to terminate your careers). Lauren Boebert is not my representative…on paper. That honor is dishonorably discharged by Ken Buck. In spirit, however, Lauren IS my representative.

[Note: Now there are six holdouts. Five of whom say NO WAY to McCarthy. The others, I hope, got some very good concessions that will neuter the RINO to some extent. And of course two hours before this posts, they will try again, so (other than my note to Sundance) this may all be moot by the time it posts.]

[11:45 PM ET: Dungsmear lost again, but the House remains in session. Apparently Gaetz is being pressured to switch from “present” to “Dungsmear.” Ongoing…]

Now the most likely outcome is that McCarthy does indeed pick up that gavel, after having made a deal. Hopefully one that renders him powerless to interfere with a MAGA agenda.

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

(Well this is the perfect time for this to come up in the rotation!)

But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.

Given the results of our most recent elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.

In Defense of Ranked Choice Voting

One of the biggest obstacles to direly-needed change is RINOs, and one of the weapons in their arsenal is the “Wasted Vote” argument.

The Republican Party Establishment knows you don’t love them. But they know you hate the Democrats worse, and they use that to continue to herd you into supporting them. With gritted teeth but your vote counts the same whether you cast it enthusiastically, or only because it’s probably a felony to piss on the voting apparatus.

But what if you could vote for that third party without increasing the changes of the Dem walking away with the prize?

The idea behind RCV is to vote by expressing your order of preference. You could vote for the Patriot Party, then for the Rino Party as your second choice (and ignore the Democrat, the Green, the Overt Socialist Party, etc.)

What does this do? It nullifies the wasted vote argument. Your vote will be counted for the Patriot party, first, then instead of it being “wasted” when the Patriot Party loses, it ends up going to the RINO. Actually, it’s just barely possible that the Patriot Party would actually beat the RINO, if people weren’t all individually afraid to vote for it. (It’s just like the famous “Prisoner’s Dilemma” where your fear of other peoples’ actions prevents you from doing the optimal thing. As long as Job Lowe is afraid to vote Patriot because he’s afraid you’ll vote RINO, you’ll have to vote RINO because Job Lowe will.)

So on the whole I like RCV. It gives you a no-risk way to vote against the RINO scum, and in favor of someone who deserves your vote.

It’s not RCV, it’s the primary structure grafted onto it.

Justice

It says “Justice” on the picture.

And I’m sure someone will post the standard joke about what the fish thinks about the situation.

But what is it?

Ayn Rand, On Justice (speaking through her character John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged):

Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

—Ayn Rand Lexicon (aynrandlexicon.com)

Justice Must Be Done.

Trump, it is supposed, had some documents.

Biden and company stole the country.

I’m sure enough of this that I put my money where my mouth is.

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:

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

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $1,825.50
Silver $24.08
Platinum $1,079.00
Palladium $1,869.00
Rhodium $12,900.00

This week, 3 PM MT on Friday, markets closed for the weekend

Gold $1,866.70
Silver $23.92
Platinum $1,100.00
Palladium $1,889.00
Rhodium $13,250.00

Everything other than silver is UP. Gold might actually exceed palladium soon at this rate. (I still remember when gold was $300-400 and palladium was $80 or so. Then palladium spiked overnight to $120 when cold fusion was announced by Pons and Fleischman.)

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

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 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 !!!

2022·12·31 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

Some Cause for Celebration

Sunday is the New Year.

The new congress starts on January 3.

Lynn Cheney, that rhinoceros cunt, will be out of office on that day.

So there’s that at least.

News Flash

Today, it is still the case that Joe Biden didn’t Win.

I realize that to some readers, this might be a shock; surely at some point things must change and Biden will have actually won.

But the past cannot actually be changed.

It will always and forever be the case that Joe Biden didn’t win.

Let’s Go, Brandon!!

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]

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.

His Fraudulency

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

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:

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

Spot Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $1,799.50
Silver $23.82
Platinum $1,033.00
Palladium $1,832.00
Rhodium $12,750.00

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $1,825.50
Silver $24.08
Platinum $1,079.00
Palladium $1,869.00
Rhodium $12,900.00

The classic precious metals (gold and silver) moving up as one would expect in inflationary times. It looks like gold is forcing its way upward now though beware of “pump and dump.”

PGMs are showing upward movement too, enough that palladium’s lead over gold has actually grown (from $32.50 to $47 per troy ounce).

The New Year

It’s actually surprising that through the last couple of thousand years of the Julian, and then the Gregorian calendars, one key factor has changed a lot, while others haven’t changed much or at all.

Our calendar goes back to the Romans, and was a hot mess until Julius Caesar reformed it in 45 BCE. Years were only vaguely aligned with the seasons, and priests would occasionally insert extra months as a sort of “leap month” measure. However that was very politicized. If they liked someone who was in office, they were liable to insert a month even when it wasn’t called for.

[And let’s not go into how the days were counted within a month, which makes me wonder how Romans could both keep track of it and remember to breathe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar if you really want to know.]

46 BCE was the “Year of Confusion” as Julius Caesar decreed three extra months (!) to bring things back in synchrony; but 45 BCE, the first year of the actual reform, is recognizably our calendar.

Going back a bit, well before Caesar’s day, the year had ten months and then some indefinite time for winter, two months (January and February) were eventually added to cover winter. (This is why Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November and December all had “number” names that are now two off from where we think they ought to be. And oh, yeah, Quintilis was renamed July and Sextilis August, after Julius and Augustus Caesar. Later emperors attempted to rename the other months, but in all cases their successors eventually undid the change.)

[What about March, April, May and June? Their names derive from Mars, Aphrodite (Apru), Maia (one of the Pleiades and the mother of Hermes), and Juno.]

What hasn’t changed at all? The week. We haven’t ever, once, broken that seven day pattern; it’s actually the one major feature we didn’t get from the Romans, but rather from Judea. (The Romans had a nine-day cycle, an eight day week followed by a day of religious festivals and markets. This of course is long gone.) Constantine brought the week into the Roman calendar by making Sunday (any Sunday) a holiday.

The months haven’t changed since Augustus Caesar. Julius, after fixing the lengths of the months, had decreed a leap year every four years; this was misunderstood and applied every three years. Augustus corrected that mistake by skipping a few leap years and clarifying, “every four years,” and fixed the lengths of the months in their current form.

The minor change since then has been the matter of leap years. As stated the Julian rule was that every fourth year be a leap year; over the centuries, however, the calendar date accumulated “extra” days such that the 21st of March started falling later and later in the year, relative to the spring equinox, and so the new rule instituted by Pope Gregory in 1582 was that three of those dates in every 400 years would be dropped. This resulted in an average 97 leap years every four hundred years. The Reformation had already happened, so large parts of Northern Europe didn’t adopt this change until the 1700s (England, and hence the future United States, in particular waited until 1752); and of course the Eastern Orthodox countries waited even longer than that. Russia, for instance, did not switch until 1918. Even today many Orthodox congregations continue to use the Julian calendar. (By the rules of that church, they can stay as they are, but once they decide to change, they must stick with it.)

This change has almost no impact on our daily lives. We today here at QTree can simply pretend the Julian rule is in place, because the last “skipped” leap year was 1900 and the next one won’t be until 2100. None of us were alive back then, few reading this will be alive in 2100. [Now watch this article get resurrected and be read by billions sometime around 2096, just so they can laugh at that previous sentence. “Gee, that SteveInCO was such a short-sighted dingbat…” Honestly, guys, I’ve written better, go dredge some of those up instead.]

That’s the minor change I alluded to. (And yes, technically it affects the length of some months.)

The major thing that has changed, often and quirkily, in the last two thousand years, is the day the year starts. Yes, without changing the names of the dates, New Years day gets shifted around the year, falling on different dates.

You saw a hint of this already. The Roman calendar started with March and ended with what would eventually become February…at least for some period of time. Once January was instituted, it started then…Janus was the god of beginnings.

At various times, and in various places since the Romans, people have celebrated the new year on March 1, March 25, September 1st, and December 25th…and some started on Easter, which could literally be any date from late March to late April. England, in fact, used March 25 until 1752, when they switched to the Gregorian calendar.

This is hard to imagine today. But imagine that the day after March 24, 2022 was March 25, 2023. (What a pain in the butt for software! And imagine what full-year wall calendars would look like.)

George Washington, born in February, would, if birth certificates had been a thing, have had his marked February 11, 1731. Thanks to these two changes that happened in 1752, that same day would be denoted February 22, 1732.

Well, technically we’re not supposed to retroactively renumber dates just because we adjusted the calendar. And we’re also not supposed to go back to before a calendar was instituted and give dates in the “proleptic” calendar either, but we do it often. (Washington himself celebrated his birthday on February 22 after the change.) In England and the United States, sometimes a date will be labeled “O.S.” (“Old Style”) to indicate it’s the Julian calendar (and March 25 year start) in use; and (less commonly) N.S. for the Gregorian Calendar; this is done in the Wikipedia article on George Washington. And we certainly regard his birth year as having been 1732, even though on the date of his birth everyone was writing 1731 on their checks. (The Washington Quarter, for instance, originally commemorated his 200th birthday…in 1932.)

Many Eastern Orthodox countries used 1 September as the start of the year–and of course that would have been by the Julian calendar. Russia switched their New Year’s date in 1700 (but they retained the Julian calendar). September 1 would actually make a very limited amount of sense. I remember as a kid watching some commentary on the news suggesting we move New Year’s day to September 1, since a lot of things we do on an annual basis (school years, the NFL season, etc) start then. However, even if this were still true (school, at least where I live, and the NFL start earlier now), it wouldn’t be worth the bother, honestly. Imagine how it would bork up our statistics having one eight month year in there in that sequence of 12 month years. (The US government fiscal year used to start in July…then we had one 15 month fiscal year as we transitioned to having it start in October, and people complaining about federal spending have been having to explain that one ever since. And even with that change those jackasses couldn’t get a budget passed in time, and have now given up on even that.)

If we were starting from scratch, I’d personally push for either the winter solstice or the spring equinox to start the year…and the appropriate month would start on that same date as well. (No split months, thank you!) The 25th of December or March are close to these times but not right on, and I’ve never figured out for sure why there’s a four or five day difference between those historical New Year’s Days and the astronomical events. But we’re not starting from scratch; we have the calendar we have and January 1 works as well as any day.

Besides, the New Year hangovers subside just in time to celebrate Lynn Cheney’s celluloid-covered ass getting booted out of Congress. Buh-bye…Bitch.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”

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 !!!

2022·12·24 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

The Real Fascist is His Fraudulency Joe Biden*

*Or whoever has his hand rammed up that meat puppet’s ass.

Luckily for me I live in Colorado, and therefore, despite my best efforts, I probably didn’t vote for Donald Trump.

Of course, for this purpose who I actually did try to vote for will be essential, and they undoubtedly know.

Come and get us, asswipes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h6ZZ28QtX4

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.

Small Government?

Many times conservatives (real and fake) speak of “small government” being the goal.

So be careful what you ask for. You might get it and find you asked for the wrong thing.

Political Science In Summation

A Few Things We Cannot Blame on His Fraudulency

I am pretty sure Joe Biden had nothing whatsoever to do with the 30 Years War that ran from 1618-1648 and probably killed about a third of the people then living in what is now Germany.

However, my utter lack of ability to imagine how he could possibly be responsible for these things is not a valid argument against them, so I await correction if appropriate.

His Truth?

Again we saw an instance of “It might be true for Billy, but it’s not true for Bob” logic this week.

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:

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

(Paper) Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $1,794.00
Silver $23.31
Platinum $999.00
Palladium $1,780.00
Rhodium $12,800.00

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $1,799.50
Silver $23.82
Platinum $1,033.00
Palladium $1,832.00
Rhodium $12,750.00

Gold was well over $1800 earlier this week, and looked to be solidifying its position there, so of course it had to be shoved back down. (Uppity PMs!) It might at some point in the very near future, become more valuable than palladium. (Which still seems absurdly overpriced to me; I can remember when it was less than midway between silver and gold.)

Qubes OS In Some More Detail

A few months ago I mentioned Qubes OS. (https://www.qubes-os.org/. The intro page covers a lot of what I’m saying in someone else’s much more carefully crafted words; I could probably do as well if I wanted to spend weeks writing instead of two days: https://www.qubes-os.org/intro/ .)

Qubes bills itself as a “Reasonably Secure Operating System.” Yes, that doesn’t sound super duper confident, but security, be it physical or in cyberspace, is inherently imperfect. Your adversary…be it some shitbag who wants your credit card number or to hit you with a ransomware attack, some other shitbag in a fancy building with a cute logo that wants to saturate you with inane “targeted” advertising so he needs to know how many squares of toilet paper you use, or a Deep State actor who’s unhappy because you understand what kinds of shitbags are running this country (I guess “shitbag” is the common denominator) gets a say in how good your security is–by doing his best to make sure it’s not good enough.

What Qubes helps you do is to implement some fairly basic principles of security, that most computers are absolutely miserable at doing. (So miserable, one would think it was deliberately bad in some cases…I am looking at YOU, Micro$haft.)

The main benefit to Qubes is compartmentalization. If you want to both a) do online banking (which means you have a glowing red target painted on your hindquarters) and b) go to some of the, shall we say, dodgier areas of the internet (and no, that’s not necessarily porn sites), then what you’re begging for is to have some guy who’s giving you that stuff for “free” decide he wants payment with your bank account, and he will try to collect without your knowledge or consent. Even sites that aren’t trying to be dodgy might have ads on them that mask a hacker trying to get into your system. And sometimes they do that by tricking you into clicking on a link. Yes, we can be our own worst enemy.

What’s the best way to ensure the scumbag doesn’t get your online banking password? Or your credit card number? By not having it be on that computer in the first place! That way he can’t rape you online and you can’t accidentally help him rape you online.

Cthulhu has often mentioned that he has multiple different physical computers, each having a specific purpose. (I have visions of a house cluttered with little Raspberry Pis everywhere; sit on the couch and the cushion is lumpy because there’s a computer under the cushions, right next to the 68 cents in change he lost two weeks ago.)

You can go that far, but then there will be times you do have to move data from one machine to another and that’s a solid pain the ass. I know this because I was doing something similar.

Compartmentalizing with Virtual Machines

The second best (and sometimes arguably better anyway) method to go is with virtual machines. That’s a setup where there are two (or more) software systems on the same physical computer that are both like “brains in a vat”. Each one sees itself as a computer; they’re really two or more different programs running on the same computer. Of course there’s a system running on the box that really is in control, and it’s providing little “bubbles” for the virtual machines to live in. So you can have one virtual machine that you use, say, to visit here, and a totally different one to use to do online banking. Each is unaware of the other’s existence. And–most importantly–many of these virtual machines can be running at the same time. (It’s expensive; you need a fairly powerful processor and lots of RAM memory to do it.)

What you can’t do, however is keep the “controlling” system from knowing what’s going on. It’s the controller, it has to know something about the other machines just to do its job.

Qubes uses virtual machines for everything, and I mean everything.

There are at least two ways to “do” virtual machines.

One is to install a virtual machine application on an otherwise normal system, called the “host” system. The host actually has direct contact with your hardware–keyboard, mouse, monitors, network connections, usb thumb drives, sound card…et-nearly-endless-cetera. The virtual machine app runs inside that operating system, and it creates and manages the virtual machines, letting you start them and stop them, and arranging for limited communications between them. It also lets those machines “talk” to your computer hardware, though it may do some sleight of hand in there…for example, you open a window with Virtual Machine A in it, and the controller tricks Virtual Machine A into thinking that window is your entire video driver. If that window is 1200×800 pixels, Virtual Machine A thinks you have one 1200×800 pixel monitor. Another window has Virtual Machine B in it, and that system thinks that other window is the monitor. This is the method used by Oracle VirtualBox, and that is the software I used to use.

The problem with this is you still have a regular machine that can be readily hacked because it’s directly connected to the internet, and the virtual machine app depends on it. In other words, the controlling system, a big bloated OS with lots of ways to be attacked, is directly exposed, and once a hacker has it, it’s game over.

The other method of doing virtual machines is to run the virtual machine controller directly on your hardware. And since it does nothing but fire up virtual machines and connect hardware to different machines, it’s a bit harder to attack. Also it can be expressly designed to manage your hardware without actually connecting to it (and giving hackers a possible doorway into it). It’s the difference between plugging something else in, versus sticking your own fingers into the electrical socket.

Qubes chose the latter method, using something called the Xen Hypervisor. When your system boots, it boots directly into Xen Hypervisor, not Micro$haft Windows, not Linux, not MacOS, not Android.

Xen Hypervisors starts up a special virtual machine called dom0 (domain zero). This will be the controller. But the controller doesn’t necessarily have primary access to your hardware. It does not get access to your network cards, for instance, so it is isolated from the hackers. It also usually doesn’t get access to your USB ports but an exception is made if you have a USB keyboard or mouse. (Some older machines still have the special PS-1 plug for those.) Having USB be separated is a good thing, because USB is used for a lot of sneaky attacks like the thumbdrive “accidentally” dropped in a parking lot that is full of malware for the first careless geek who says, “Hmm, I wonder what’s on this?” (Cthulhu explained below that the USB protocol allows a device to ‘set your system up’ without asking permission, and that’s why USB is so noxious from a security standpoint.)

Dom0 is used to start and stop other virtual machines, and is also used as an intermediary for those situations where one VM must talk to another.

(And those situations do arise. Another aspect of the way Qubes does things is that NO such communication happens without your specific approval. Want to move a file? You can do it, but you will be prompted to select which VM it’s going to and press OK. If that prompt ever shows up out of the blue (and not because you wanted it to), then alarm bells should ring in your skull and you should definitely hit cancel, not OK. This popup will show up if you’re using GUI menus to copy the file, or if you do it from the command line. (Command line versions of commands usually don’t show on the GUI so hackers love them.) A similar process happens with copy-and-paste, which, between VMs, is a four step process, not a two step one.)

In addition to dom0 you have a VM whose sole job it is to manage your network; that one is called sys-net. It is given direct access to your network card(s). And another one which implements a firewall, sys-firewall. Your system connects sys-firewall to sys-net, then it connects whatever VM(s) you use to talk to the internet, to sys-firewall. The actual firewall rules are on that last VM, so you can create one for online banking that only lets you connect to the bank website, and another one that’s more wide open for surfing the web.

And yes, you as the user are free to create as many VMs as you want. When you first install Qubes it comes with VMs named “Work,” “Personal” and “Vault.” This gives you a way to keep your job separate from your personal stuff, right off the bat. But let’s say you have five or six clients–you can create a separate VM for each of them! No risk of sending the wrong thing to the wrong client. Or maybe you’re writing software and have two totally different projects in different languages going on…split them up!

Vault is “special” because it has no network connections at all. It’s a place to store passwords. Those get VM-to-VM copied and pasted into the VM that’s on the network. So a hacker who’s gotten control of that VM can only get that password; they don’t get your list of passwords (which is not only not on that VM, but is kept in an encrypted database anyway).

You can also choose what runs on the virtual machines. Dom0 will run Fedora Linux (no choice there), but your VMs can run Debian Linux (similar to Ubuntu), Windows 7, 10, or 11. Or something called whonix, which is set up to let you browse the web anonymously, through VPNs that can literally pop up all over the world. It’s really hard for black hats to trace. There are other third-party supported versions of Linux out there, too; even though they are third party the Qubes site has links to them.

[And yes, you can safely run Windows 7…provided you never hook it up to the internet. And you don’t have to. (But this does mean you can’t use it for surfing the internet.) There’s even a third party Windows XP setup out there. And you can safely run Windows 10 and 11…safely in a different sense, in that you can keep them from phoning home and telling Asshole Gates what you are doing, by never connecting them to the network.]

At this level there’s one other feature; you can color-code your VMs. They will open up in windows with different colored frames as another visual cue that they are different VMs. However, there are exactly eight colors, and it’s easy to end up with more than eight VMs (I have a couple of dozen). Generally dom0 and the system VMs and templates (I’ll explain “template” in a moment) are black, with user-type qubes (the ones you actually do things on) being red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple or gray. Different people have different color codings.

OK, so keeping things separated from one another helps in case you do get hacked, but what does it do to help keep you from getting hacked in the first place?

To be honest, not much more than any other system. In fact, they assume you will get hacked. But it can help you remove the hack quickly, which is nearly as good. Consider, someone sends you an infected attachment in e-mail. If you open your attachments in a different VM, then when you open that infected attachment, you can simply throw away the VM it infected. In fact, you should do this whether or not you think the attachment might be infected, just in case. Since you were never planning to use that VM for anything else ever again anyway, you’ve lost nothing by throwing it away…except an infected system.

Digging deeper into Virtual Machines.

I mentioned “templates” before, and now I’m going to explain that. Qubes does VMs a bit differently from most systems.

Have you ever wondered, in exasperation, why the heck the part of your computer that contains the operating system can’t just be made read only so viruses can’t infect it? Well, you can get close to that with Qubes. It has a way of separating the operating system and applications areas from your personal files.

There are two main types of VMs in Qubes…TemplateVMs and AppVms. (That last name is not the best name they could have come up with; it can be a bit misleading as you’ll see soon.)

A TemplateVM is for installing software on. Installing only. You do that the standard way for Linux with apt or dnf commands. To do this, you have to log in to that VM, but you don’t do anything on the Template. The template in other words is a “clean” install of your applications onto a clean install of the operating system. Yes, there’s a “home” area for user accounts and you just used it while you were installing stuff, but you didn’t change anything there…and if you did it won’t matter anyway. NEVER connect a TemplateVM to sys-firewall or sys-net, even if you’re putting a browser on it. (The installation process follows some other route I frankly don’t understand, to get the software off the internet to install it–probably one with lots of intermediaries.)

When you create an AppVM, you must base it on a TemplateVM. (Interestingly, later on you can change it, but that can sort of pull the rug out from under you.) So let’s say you created a template with Brave Browser on it, :brave-template.” You can create an AppVM and name it “theqtree” and base it on brave-template.

When you start theqtree, you have a virtual machine with Brave installed on it. (But before you do that, connect it to sys-firewall.) You can save bookmarks, download files, set up Brave how you like it, and that will all be remembered from one startup of theqtree to another. BUT if you visit a web page that tries to install malware in the system area, that malware will not be there the next time you start theqtree. (That is not immunity from malware installed in your user area, though.)

How does that work? Well when you start theqtree, you get your user area, like it was when you shut theqtree down last time. But for a program area, you get a copy of the one from the template. And this copy does not get saved when you shut theqtree down. So something that gets installed there, or even changes to a system configuration file, will go away when you shut theqtree down. But the files you downloaded (to your Downloads folder) are in your user area, so they are not lost. Your bookmarks and so on are also there. And likely, it will even remember your open tabs. (It’s easy to forget this and make a deliberate change to the system/apps area, and lose the change when you shut down.)

So that’s one quick way to recover from a virus…shut it down and restart it. If the virus is in the system area, it’s gone.

It’s possible to base multiple AppVMs on one template, so you can create a different AppVM, using the same Brave template. So you can keep your online banking and your conspiracy theories separate!

BUT if something gets into your user area instead of your system area, you’re stuck with it, until you throw away the AppVM.

(By the way, the VMs I mentioned before, sys-net, sys-firewall, work, vault, personal…are all AppVMs. As distributed, they are all based on the same template, which will either be a vanilla install of debian or fedora linux, with a lot of different apps preinstalled. That means that firefox, which is installed by default, exists in your vault VM, uselessly since from there it can’t connect to the internet; sys-net, conversely, has no need for keepass (a password manager), but every VM has it. There are ways to fix this, but they’re for more advanced users.)

I think we’re finally ready for a picture…I’d have showed it earlier, but too much of it was unexplained before now.

A notional/typical Qubes install. USB devices connected via sys-usb. sys-net and sys-firewall on the right. Templates shown at top. GuiVM is something they’re testing to separate your monitors from dom0–I’m not using it yet. And the color scheme they use indicates “levels of trust” which is to say how much do you trust a VM not to be infected? AdminVM is dom0, and is trusted the most.

Disposable Virtual Machines

Now there’s another level of complication that can help with ANY malware infection, even one in your user area. Notice that in the diagram above that AppVM 3 is labeled “disposable VM.” What does that mean?

A disposable VM is one that self-destructs as soon as you close it. It’s based on a template, too, but the template is an AppVM, not a templateVM. (This causes a lot of confusion.) Basically the disposable makes copies of the AppVM’s user area, and the system area of the template VM the AppVM is based off of, and those disappear when it shuts down, just like the system area of the AppVM closes when you shut down the AppVM.

A disposable is really handy for looking at attachments sent with an E-mail, too. If it’s some dodgy thing Pgroup sent you, and it infects your disposable, so what? The infection is sterilized the instant you close the window on the disposable.

The advantage to having the disposable be based on an AppVM is that you can (for example) get Brave set up just the way you like it in an AppVM, but not actually visit any sites. Then set up the AppVM to act as a disposable template, and whenever you go to a site you don’t trust, use a disposable. When the disposable opens, you have a fresh copy of Brave (but set up how you like it); you go to that dodgy site pgroup.com, then close the browser window and POOF!!! that machine no longer exists.

There are two slightly different flavors of disposables, named disposables and ones that aren’t named. A named disposable has to be explicitly shut down, the other ones will get a random number name like disp37 or disp7734, and they tend to pop up when you’re looking at an email attachment or the like. That attachment will open in say LibreOffice (which can read Micro$haft Word files), but when you close the LibreOffice window, the VM shuts down. But if you were to open a named disposable, such as LibreOffice-Disposable, you have to remember to shut it down afterwards. (I came up with a trick to avoid that, by the way.) Otherwise, they’re the same: they both go POOF when they shut down–it’s just that one of them makes sure you don’t forget to shut it down. I make heavy use of both kinds.

So why did I decide to write this now? Well, I have actually customized the hell out of my install and it’s finally looking like I want it to–which as it turns out is not a whole lot like that diagram (there’s a lot of stuff I’m doing which I didn’t even mention). So this is by way of celebrating that.

A Case Study: The Great Notifier Kerfuffle

But also because I was reminded about all of this when, last week, we had that big kerfuffle over the way Wordpus broke the notifier. And I found myself really appreciating Qubes when Wolf and I were trying to debug my broken notifier.

I have a template that has nothing but an absolutely bone-stock Firefox ESR install on it. I didn’t have any AppVMs based on it, it was what I call an “intermediate” template. Because I often create templates by cloning other templates, then adding more stuff to the clone. In this case I cloned the bone-stock firefox and, then on the new template, I customized the heck out of FIrefox. (Firefox has ways to customize it in the installation/system area, which is how companies with 60,000 employees can set up FIrefox the same annoying way for all of their employees and even block them from customizing it themselves–they have a customized Firefox installation package with all of the options preset they way they want to inflict on you. I actually set up Firefox that way, myself, so the customizations are actually in my cloned template, not in my user area. Most software does not work that way.)

I was using an AppVM based on the customized template, to browse QTree that day. Why an AppVM? So it would keep the cookies that tell wordpress and QTree that I am logged in. Yes, I risk getting infected and keeping the infection, but when QTree logs me out anyway like it does every few days–I just destroy the AppVM and make a new one. That’s the same sanitizing effect as closing a disposable. All of my settings are actually on the template because of that funky way Firefox works, so all I have to do is open the new AppVM (which automatically goes to Qtree on its one open tab), log in, and I’m back where I started.

But when my notifier went south, I thought maybe some of my customizations were causing the problem. So, rather than try to undo them, I just created an AppVM based off the bone-stock firefox template. (That takes about 30 seconds. I could have made that into a disposable template, but when debugging it’s sometimes handy not having settings disappear.) I could now visit QTree with an absolutely clean install of Firefox–so clean it opens up the welcome to Firefox tab and the stupid privacy tab–and no worries about my having done something in Firefox to cause the problem. “Try this, Steve.” “No change.” “How about this?” [after blowing away the appvm and creating a new one–like a brand spanking new computer] “No change here either.” It was as if I was reinstalling Firefox, over and over. But I could keep doing it every two or three minutes, all night.

Later on when we figured out all I had to do was log into Wordpus instead of QTree, I could go back to my customized Firefox and try it there, to be sure that that wasn’t the only issue. (AND logic–one of my custom settings could have been hurting me AND I was logging in the wrong way.) I could do this, without having to recreate my settings–by going back to using that VM. I then went back and created a fresh AppVM on that template and made sure it would work that way. So once that worked, I knew the solution would work on a fresh copy of my customized Firefox. At that point, I could consider the problem solved, and I knew the ONLY thing that was wrong before was the login. I didn’t have to change anything else.

Now imagine having to undo all the things Wolf and I tried but didn’t work! Then having to manually reset all of those settings to go back to my “personal” Firefox! No need, when I was working in Qubes, because “delete VM” was doing it for me.

Some caveats and cautions

Although you can create Windows VMs on Qubes, you will have to learn some Linux to use it (if you don’t already know it). At the very basic level, it’s not much to learn. (It has a GUI so you don’t need to learn how to copy files on the command line, or rename them or move them. In fact you can actually use a totally different gui if you don’t like the one it has. The default is called xfce, which is the one that Xubuntu uses so I was very used to it.) If you want to do some more advanced things, though, you’ll have to learn more Linux. I did do some very advanced things, and I know a lot more about Linux than I used to. (Although I wasn’t a complete noob before, I still don’t consider myself any kind of expert even now.)

And if you can’t, no matter how hard you try, keep straight in your head the difference between a TemplateVM and an AppVM, and how you have to make an AppVM into a disposable template to make disposable templates…you’re going to have a tough time of it. (Everyone is going to forget once or twice while learning, of course–that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about chronically “not getting it.” Or just being the scatterbrained type.)

Another issue is that Qubes OS can be very fussy about the computer it runs on. I wouldn’t do anything you can’t undo installing it…just in case it won’t install and you have to go back to what you had before. (I.e., don’t blow away what’s on the hard drive in your computer installing Qubes…install to a fresh hard drive or SSD, or at least one that’s got crap on it you don’t care about.) Installation for me was a nightmare–QubesOS literally could not interact with my hard drives, including the one I wanted to install it on–but I finally got it to a state where it was running off a thumbdrive and I was able to decide, “Yes I want to do this…so now I have to buy another computer it will work on.”

Whatever machine you decide to use should have a fast CPU on it and at least 32 Gb of RAM in it, and 64 Gb would be much better. And a 256 Gb SSD would be good too (SSDs are faster than regular hard drives), especially if you can get one of those mvne types that plugs directly into your motherboard. I’ve seen people struggle successfully with smaller machines, but if you can possibly afford an appropriate box (or already have one) then you’ll be happier.

(Cthulhu, I have no idea how well it works on Raspberry Pi machines.)

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

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 !!!

2022·12·17 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

Joining The Herd Of Lemmings

I’ve had cause to consider a few things. Maybe we’re going about it the wrong way, and we need to ditch Trump

Yeah, NO

Trump all the way! Why? Because being hated by the people who hate him is a sign of impeccable character, that’s why.

The haters can go fuck themselves with rusty twelve gauge bore brushes. I’d prefer ten gauge but that’s kind of scarce, so…I’m willing to compromise.

The RINO’s Dilemma

Or maybe they think things are pretty close to ideal right now, and they want to nail it in place.

Well, they have a dilemma…and WE, therefore have a problem. And we would have that problem even IF they realized that they had a problem…that they were the problem.

No one ever thinks they are the bad guy. Even Epstein probably thought he was the good guy. Right up to the moment where he didn’t kill himself.

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:

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

Spot (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $1,798.90
Silver $23.56
Platinum $1,034.00
Palladium $2,026.00
Rhodium $13,350.00

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $1,794.00
Silver $23.31
Platinum $999.00
Palladium $1,780.00
Rhodium $12,800.00

Gold and silver are stable. The platinum group metals, though, are taking a beating. I don’t think I’ve seen rhodium this low in a long, long time, and palladium is actually less than gold!

I take that as a sign the economy is circling the drain…those PGMs are industrial metals in the main, platinum a bit less so, but then it also took less of a beating than the other two.

Fuck Joe Bdn

Due to complaints about foul language, I’ve censored the most objectionable word in the title of this section.

B*d*n, you don’t even get ONE scoop of ice cream today.

(Please post this somewhere permanent, as it will continue to be true; the SOB will never deserve a scoop.)

Fusion

There has been a fair amount of attention paid to the recent breakthrough in nuclear fusion. So it’s time for a bit of a review about nuclear fusion.

But there are some preliminaries…rather basic ones from a physicist’s point of view, not so from the point of view of many others.

Power vs. Energy

First off, the difference between power and energy. The physicist defines energy as the capacity to do work…and then defines work as motion against an opposing force. (Note: this is quite a bit different from the daily life definition; for example if you simply carry a 94 pound bag of cement across a level field, to a physicist you’re not doing work–okay, lifting the bag is work, but setting it down again cancels that out. To your muscles, you sure as heck are doing work.)

Energy is measured in joules in the SI (“metric system”); and lifting an apple a meter is about a joule of work. So is lifting two apples half a meter apiece. It’s work because you’re moving the apples upward against the force caused by the pull of gravity.

Power is not the same thing as energy. It’s actually how fast you expend energy. If you lift that apple one meter in one second, then pick up another apple and lift it up before two seconds (total) have elapsed, then pick up a third apple in the third second and so on, you’re using a joule of energy every second…and a joule of energy every second is a watt. Yes, that’s the same “watt” as you use for light bulbs; a 100W light bulb uses a hundred joules ever second. Watts are not actually a measure of brightness, but we’re used to a hundred watt bulb putting out a certain amount of light, so we tend to think of it that way. So much so that the compact fluorescent “spiral” bulbs and LEDs are marketed in watt-equivalents…they tell you that this particular bulb here puts out the same amount of light as a 100 watt bulb. (I get the impression that in Europe this is considerably overstated, but it seems closer to true here in the US.) The CF or LED bulb itself, however, uses a lot less than 100 watts of actual energy to produce that light, largely because an incandescent bulb literally generates more (waste) heat than light. (Note, if you look closer at the package you’ll probably also see “lumens” listed; that’s actually the measure of how much light the thing puts out. IIRC 1600 lumens is what an incandescent 100W bulb puts out, so that’s another way to compare.)

Another measure of power is the horsepower, which is not a metric unit. Now we tend to think of horsepower as being something mechanical like power tools and car engines, and then we think of watts as representing something electrical, but the fact is the two things measure the same actual thing: the rate of usage of energy. So you can convert between them: one horsepower equals 746 watts. (If you think about it this makes sense: your power drill generates a certain amount of horsepower…by using electrical energy at a certain rate. So they must be equivalent at a fundamental level.)

OK with that high school physics class level stuff reviewed, we’re ready to move on.

The Actors and Acts

The story of fusion has two main actors. They are the proton and the neutron. They are the two things you will find in an atomic nucleus. Supporting actors are the electron and neutrino, but you can (for the most part) ignore them in this context.

Protons and neutrons are about the same mass…the neutron is just a little bit more massive. But they are small. It takes roughly 600 sextillion protons (or neutrons) to weigh just one gram. (600 sextillion = 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.) In terms of actual size, protons and neutrons are 0.84 femtometers in radius–1.68 femtometers across, and that’s 0.000 000 000 000 001 680 meters. Tiny little buggers!

Protons and neutrons in an atomic nucleus. Of course, this is just a very notional drawing…neutrons are not colored blue and protons in reality are not colored red. (They’re far too small to even be seen in visible light.) In reality they tend to blend into each other following the laws of quantum chromodynamics–which, fortunately is not our topic for today!

Everything these actors do is according to one of four fundamental forces. The one you’re most familiar with as a force is gravity. The next one is electromagnetism, which manifests itself most plainly as magnets sticking to iron or steel, static electric “zaps” and your sheets sticking together after a run through the dryer. But it also is tied with light…and chemistry. Basically, in your daily life everything that happens that isn’t because of gravity is because of electromagnetism. Well, until you dig down to the nuclear level, which we are actually going to do today. The remaining two forces then come into play and are imaginatively named the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. The strong nuclear force is the main player for fusion, but the other three all have a role.

The strong nuclear force is directly manifested between quarks…what are quarks? That proton and neutron are themselves made of quarks, and the strong force keeps the quarks glued together. Without it, no protons, no neutrons…nothing we know today could possibly exist. There’s also a residual side-effect of the strong force, which holds protons and neutrons to each other.

The weak force is the only one that can turn one type of quark into another; we see it as radioactive decay. At the level we’re interested in today, because it can change one type of quark to another, and protons and neutrons are made up of quarks, it can turn protons into neutrons, and neutrons into protons. That’s going to be important.

Comparing these: Gravity is extremely weak. A nuclear physicist simply never cares about it, because compared to the others its effect is very small. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be important to us today; it plays a critical role in fusion that happens in nature. Gravity may be weak, but it is always an attractive force and its range is infinite. It weakens with distance but never drops to zero. Because of this it’s sort of like the tortoise that raced the hare–it wins in the end.

Electromagnetism for our purposes today can be thought of as electrical charges, those come in two types…opposite each other, and one kind was labeled “positive” and the other “negative” because there’s a pretty good analogy between electrical charge and positive and negative numbers. It’s much stronger than gravity…think about how an itty bitty magnet can pull on a nail harder than the great, big Earth…but because there are equal amounts of positive and negative charges out there, they tend to cancel each other out at distances…so even though in theory the force goes out forever just like gravity does, it’s effectively self-canceling at distances.

The Strong nuclear force is the strongest of the bunch…it had better be. But it is very, very short range…it’s good for about one femtometer, which is slightly greater than the radius of a proton or neutron, so it can bind one proton or neutron to the next, but fades to zero after that. It’s generally attractive, but it works like velcro. A proton or neutron has to be practically in physical contact with a neutron or another proton before the force takes effect.

The weak nuclear force is a bit weaker than electromagnetism and its range is much less than the size of a proton or neutron; about 1/1000th of the range of the strong force. What it does therefore happens entirely inside these particles, but as I said before, it’s critical nonetheless.

In our normal every day lives, protons, neutrons and electrons form atoms. The atom has a very tiny nucleus, where protons and neutrons “live”, and are surrounded by electrons essentially orbiting the nucleus. The protons have a positive electric charge, one “unit” each (the unit is a small number of coulombs, and I’m not going to define the coulomb…just think of it as +1 electric charge). The electrons have a negative charge, -1. So the electrons will be attracted to the protons, and vice versa, and will want to stick together. Those electrons will interact with the electrons of other atoms…that’s chemistry. And that’s why electromagnetism is behind chemistry.

But the protons in the nucleus (if it has more than one in it) should be repelling each other. In fact they do. Even though +1 unit is a very, very small amount of electrical charge, the protons are so close together that you could actually feel the force pushing them apart. The reason they stick together is the strong nuclear force.

Focusing on Nucleons

Protons and neutrons both seem to have the same size and mass…very close but not quite the same. The neutron is slightly heavier. In fact, since both of them live in nuclei and are so similar, they are sometimes lumped together and called “nucleons.” They are both subject to the strong nuclear force. The key difference is the proton has that +1 electric charge. The neutron has no net charge at all. (The quarks inside a neutron do, but you have to get really close to the neutron to see any effect from them.)

It’s the number of protons in a nucleus that determines which element it is a nucleus of. If it has six protons, it’s a carbon nucleus. The number of neutrons doesn’t matter for this at all. But add a proton, and you have nitrogen (7). If one of the neutrons ups and changes to a proton, it’s now nitrogen. And this does happen to carbon-14.

Wait! I just said carbon was 6, but then I talked about carbon-14. Well, I said the number of neutrons doesn’t matter for that, but it does matter for other things, Carbon-14 has six protons and eight neutrons in its nucleus, for a total number of nucleons of 14. These differing nucleon counts, that are nevertheless the same element because the proton count is the same, are called isotopes. Carbon-14 happens to be unstable; the weak nuclear force will eventually change one of the quarks in one of the neutrons, making that neutron into a proton, and now you have nitrogen 14.

Isotopes usually don’t make much difference to chemists (usually), but they’re overwhelmingly important in nuclear physics.

For nuclear fusion, specifically, we’re concerned with five different isotopes of nuclei.

The basic hydrogen nucleus is dead simple…it’s just one proton, no neutrons. Hydrogen-1. When you consider it as a complete atom (including the electron), nuclear physicists call this “protium” to distinguish it from…

The heavy hydrogen nucleus, which has the one mandatory proton, but also contains a neutron. Because there’s two nucleons in this thing, it got a special name, from deutero (two), and it’s a deuteron. When thought of as a whole atom (including electrons), it’s deuterium.

That’s actually pretty tidy: proton is to protium as deuteron is to deuterium.

Usually two different isotopes of the same element are almost identical chemically. Any slight difference is due to the different weights, a heavier isotope will react a bit more slugglishly than a lighter one. In the case of hydrogen, though, the weight difference is double and that has a noticeable effect on chemistry, so chemists actually do have to care about this difference. It can even effect water made from those atoms. If you’ve ever heard of heavy water, that’s just water made from deuterium instead of protium.

Of all the hydrogen out there, 156 atoms of every million are actually deuterium, not protium. So in every day life you can just ignore deuterium. But in fusion, the distinction is a big deal.

Both protium and deuterium are stable–they don’t decay radioactively into something else. But that’s not true of our next isotope, tritium, which is a hydrogen isotope with two neutrons. (And true to our scheme, the nucleus is sometimes called a triton.) On average after about 12 years, one of those neutrons will flip to a proton (just like with carbon-14) and you get:

A helium atom, with two protons (by definition of helium) and one neutron. This is helium 3 and on earth it is extremely rare. (It is less rare in stars.) There’s no “special” name for helium-3; you have to call it helium-3. It’s stable.

And the last of our five isotopes is helium-4, two protons, two neutrons. Almost all helium on earth is helium-4, and it came from the radioactive decay of very large nuclei. But in the stars, the story is very different. Helium 4 is not only stable, it’s extremely stable. So much so that every hydrogen nucleus out there aspires to become part of a helium-4 nucleus.

However, if you’re disappointed at the lack of pictures of helium-3 and helium-4 nuclei, well, I’ll make that up to you below.

Finally: Nuclear Fusion

So now, finally, I can tell you what nuclear fusion is. Nuclear fusion is the process of combining two atomic nuclei together to make a larger atomic nucleus; when the nuclei are small (for nuclei) doing this releases energy. A lot of energy. That’s generic, it could describe any two nuclei becoming some third nucleus.

But what almost everyone means, specifically, when they say “nuclear fusion” is the process of combining four hydrogen-1 nuclei into one helium-4 nucleus.

In our universe this is a very common process. It powers most stars, including our sun. Some stars have run out of hydrogen and are fusing helium into heavier things. We’re going to ignore that and focus on the stars still burning hydrogen; astronomers call those “main sequence” stars and stars spend most of their lifetimes as “main sequence” stars. Our sun has been a main sequence star for about four and a half billion years, and it will probably remain a main sequence star for another five billion years.

What does it take to fuse nuclei? It isn’t easy. Remember that protons repel each other quite strongly electrically, unless you’re within strong nuclear force range. I compared the strong nuclear force to velcro. Well the electrical part of the repulsion is called the “coulomb barrier” and it’s like trying to force two magnets together when it’s both north or south poles and the magnets are repelling each other. So think: very strong magnets, with velcro on them. If you can manage to force them together, they’ll stick. If you can manage to force them together.

This applies to any nuclei, but here we’re interested in the simple case, two bare protons that some guy is trying to get to stick together. The best strategy is to fire one at high speed towards the other. The repulsion, hopefully, won’t be able to slow the incoming proton enough and it will get close enough for the strong nuclear “velcro” to engage.

And how do you do that, wholesale? You heat hydrogen gas up. A lot. Temperature, after all, is just the average kinetic energy of the atoms in a substance; the higher the temperature, the faster the atoms are moving. At only a few thousand degrees, the electrons are bumped off the atoms, and they become bare nuclei–in the case of protium, they’re just bare protons. This is actually considered a fourth phase of matter. We have solid, liquid, gas, and this: plasma. Now you just have to make it so hot, they slam into each other in spite of the huge electrical force pushing them apart. We’re talking millions of degrees here.

Natural Fusion in Stars

This is how a star functions. A star spends its whole life fighting the force of gravity. It’s a big ball of gas, and gravity is trying to compress it under its own weight. Gas is compressible, so gravity can do this. Up to a point. As the gas compresses, its temperature goes up, as the temperature goes up the pressure increases, so the star reaches a point where the heat on the inside balances the gravity on the outside and its size stabilizes.

That won’t work for long, of course, because the star will eventually cool off and the pressure drops, so gravity can begin to shrink it again. Without any new energy inside the star, it will just keep collapsing.

But fusion actually provides that energy. If a star starts “burning” its hydrogen by fusing it to helium, the energy released can balance the energy lost from the star trying to cool off, and it’s stable.

A star doesn’t have to fuse a lot of hydrogen all at once–fusion supplies a lot of energy. So even a little bit of fusion is enough to keep the sun from collapsing…and it can nurse its fuel supply and not run out for billions of years. A larger star, on the other hand has more gravity trying to crush it, and needs more fusion to counteract it. But there’s a built-in control valve: The more pressure and temperature, the more fusion. So the large star just gets hotter on the inside until the amount of fusion going on counterbalances gravity. It ends up having to rip through its fuel a lot faster than a small star, but it does do so as long as it can. In the meantime it’s a negative feedback system, so it’s stable. If something were to cause the star to generate excess heat in the core, it would just expand a bit until things were back in balance again, similarly if the star were to shrink for some unknown reason: the extra heat generated would make it expand again.

Very stable, and it’s a good thing because we are utterly dependent on it being stable. (Our sun varies some, but it doesn’t go way out of bounds.)

The interior of a star consists of about 75 percent hydrogen…protium, not deuterium, and 25 percent helium-4 by weight. (That’s what the universe originally consisted of. Everything else has been made since the universe begin, and is just a trace.) And the electrons have been stripped off these atoms and will have very little effect on what’s going on. So the interior of a star is bare protons and bare helium-4 nuclei, for the most part.

Fusion inside a star usually follows the route I’m about to describe, which is called the proton-proton chain. 1) Two protons get fused together. 2) The resulting two proton combo, called a diproton, is extremely unstable, and will just fall apart again–unless one of those protons happens to turn into a neutron at that exact time. The result is a deuteron. 3) Another proton gets added to the deuteron to make helium 3. 4) two helium 3 nuclei get smashed together. The result is helium-4, and two extra protons, that can then go off and try to repeat the process.

And a lot of energy is generated. In fact, for every helium-4 nucleus made, 26.73 million electron volts of energy are generated. What the heck is an electron volt? It’s a unit of energy, sized to be convenient to nuclear physicists. (This is not a rabbit hole we want to dive down; I covered it in my physics series.) Converting it to joules, we get 0.0000000000042768 joules.

Now that sounds like a millionth of a mouse fart. But remember, there are 600 sextillion protons in one gram of hydrogen gas. That’s enough to make 150 sextillion helium 4 atoms, so if we were to fuse all of the hydrogen in a gram of hydrogen, we’d have 641 billion joules of energy come out.

One kilowatt hour from your electric company is a thousand watts for one hour, or 3,600 seconds; power times time = energy so that’s 3,600,000 joules. So this one gram of hydrogen has produced 178,200 kilowatt hours of energy…that’s many many years of your electrical usage…again, from one gram of hydrogen! Which is less than half a cubic foot of the stuff. Or, it’s the amount of hydrogen in nine grams of water, which is roughly two teaspoons.

Two teaspoons of water, producing 178,200 kilowatthours of energy! Do you begin to understand why we are trying so hard to do this?

The Fly in the Ointment

There is a big problem though. That first reaction, getting two protons to get together into a deuteron…is almost impossible even at the center of the sun. Almost impossible. Even bouncing around at that temperature, and under that pressure, on average a proton will have to wait nine billion years for it to happen. Why is this so slow? Because it relies on the weak nuclear force to happen…that proton must turn into a neutron at exactly the right time, otherwise, effectively you just get protons bounding off each other, since the diproton falls apart immediately. And the weak force isn’t just weak, it’s slow.

The good news is once we do that the other steps are quick, because they only require the strong force…but we still have to get that first step out of the way.

(The other good news is that because it’s so slow, our sun lasts a long time rather than ripping through the fuel like it was gasoline-soaked pine needles dropped on a roaring fire.)

If we were to recreate the core of the sun in a fusion reactor, and put a bunch of hydrogen-1 in, it would take a long, long, long time to burn that hydrogen, and so our power output would be minimal. We’d get halfway through in 9 billion years, which means for every gram of hydrogen, we’d get 89,100 kilowatthours out…over the span of 9 billion years. Doing the math the power coming out of that plant is 314 femtowatts per gram of fuel. Or 0.000000000000314 watts.

OK, so that’s useless.

In bigger stars the temperatures and pressures are higher, so it won’t take as long under those circumstances. And maybe we could duplicate those conditions, and burn the hydrogen faster, but honestly even duplicating stars that burn fuel a thousand times faster than the sun, we’re getting nowhere. 314 picowatts/gram is still useless.

(You, sitting there reading this digesting your bacon breakfast, generate more power just maintaining your body temperature, than does an equivalent-mass part of the sun’s core. Yes, the sun’s core is hotter, but that’s pre-existing heat energy. In terms of new energy bacon works better than the sun’s core, per unit mass. But the sun’s core is so much bigger that it can power everything on Earth and the other planets with one billionth of the output and throw away the rest, sending it radiating out into the universe.) [edit: inserted this paragraph]

No, what we need to do is skip that first step entirely. In our reactors here on earth we need to start with deuterium. And helium 3. And even tritium. Then we will get most (but not all) of the energy out, but it’s well worth it, because we get it quickly enough–i.e., with high enough power–to be useful. [edit: rephrased this paragraph for clarity…as if any of this were clear.]

Our hydrogen bombs actually do this, rather than trying to fuse protium. And so do our fusion experiments. The good news is the step we skipped over only produces about 3 million (out of the 27 million) electron volts, so we will get nearly as much energy out starting from deuterium as we would have by starting with protium.

We also throw tritium into the mix, which means this is a slightly different sequence than the sun uses, because the last step in the sun is combining two helium-3s to make a helium-4 and two protons. But helium-3 is rare, and tritium actually requires a lower temperature to “ignite,” so we combine tritons and deuterons in ways that just don’t happen much inside the sun. But the end result is the same: helium-4 and energy.

But this is still hard to do. And that’s why we’ve been building big-ass labs with big-ass reactors trying to do it.

How We’re Doing It

There are two major approaches we’re following to try to get fusion to work. The first is the “Tokamak.” The idea is to ionize the deuterium and tritium, and put it inside a magnetic bottle so we can heat it up. (Nothing made of matter can be made into a container that will survive these temperatures.) We had problems with magnetic bottles leaking out the ends, so we started making them donut shaped, so they’d have no ends to leak out of. And so the tokamak–an acronym formed from the Russian for “Toroidal chamber with magnetic coils”–was born. (тороидальная камера с магнитными катушками: tokamak) [an alternate reading is “toroidal chamber with axial magnetic field: тороидальная камера с аксиальным магнитным полем.] (Luckily, t, o, k, a, and m look the same in Russian as they do in English.)

This is essentially the same idea as is being used by ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) in southern France. It is expected to be finished by 2025 and will be ten times the size of any previous tokamak…and who cares because we are accomplishing what it was intended to accomplish already using the other major method.

Inertial confinement is to put a small amount of deuterium and tritium gas in a certain place and instead of trying to restrain it with magnetic fields, simply heat it up so suddenly it doesn’t have a chance to escape before reaching ignition temperatures. This is what the National Ignition Facility in California does. It uses small hollow pellets called hohlraums filled with fusion fuel, a few milligrams apiece, and blasts them with super powerful lasers. The energy is delivered so suddenly the gas heats up before it has a chance to dissipate. Even the shell of the pellet participates by collapsing inward under the pressure from the lasers, increasing the pressure.

The goal of both methods is to get out of the fusion reaction more energy than it took to cause the reaction. If we can do that, we’re generating energy. Otherwise, we’re consuming it.

This latest report concerns the fact that, for the first time ever, more energy came out of the fusion than was delivered to the fuel by the lasers. 3.15 megajoules came out, with 2.05 megajoules going in, roughly a 50 percent gain. Up until now it has always been a loss; the best was only a 30 percent loss. (3.6 megajoules = 1 kilowatthour.) We’ve achieved what’s known as scientific breakeven.

The problem is those lasers are horrifically inefficient; it takes about 400 megajoules to produce those beams for one firing of the system. So if you look at the whole system, we’re using 400 MJ to generate 3 MJ…and that’s not a good deal. We’re still nowhere near overall breakeven. We need better lasers, or perhaps more energy coming out of the pellet.

So maybe ITER still has a chance.

We’ve got a long way to go, but at least, for the first time we’ve got the second half doing its job, producing energy. Without that, it doesn’t matter if the lasers don’t waste a single billionth of a joule, the system will never produce power. Now half of it does.

So it’s still going to be a while before you can run your house or car off of Mr. Fusion.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

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 !!!

2022·12·10 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

Another Twitter Censorship Drop.

I must admit it’s having more of an effect than I expected. The Left is having to squirm really hard to pretend it’s not there, meaning it’s penetrating their MSM armor…somewhat.

We got another dump Friday night, and this time more directly to do with the 2020 election, instead of some very-well-connected shit-for-brains’s laptop.

May the Left go apeshit and stroke out. They deserve worse, so I guess I’ve practiced charity/mercy just this once.

A Caution

Running good candidates is only HALF of the battle!

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

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:

https://youtu.be/WjM26GWWoGk?t=21

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.

Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!

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.

Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.

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:

(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 $1,798.30
Silver $23.19
Platinum $1,023.00
Palladium $1,974.00
Rhodium $14,100.00

So here it is, Friday, 3PM MT after markets closed and we see:

Gold $1,798.90
Silver $23.56
Platinum $1,034.00
Palladium $2,026.00
Rhodium $13,350.00

It looks like gold didn’t move, to speak of! Actually it dropped and (unusual for a Friday) came back up. It’s trying to bust through $1800 but hasn’t done so. In a normal (non-manipulated) market, you would expect it to either bust through and then just keep going, or turn around and go the other way. In this distinctly not non-manipulated market, who knows?

Artemis I Coming Home

The unmanned Artemis I mission is on its way back, after three weeks in space. In the days of the Space Shuttle going just to orbit (instead of to the ISS) that was a fairly long mission. But this time it not only went to the moon it went significantly farther. It even took a picture of the (round) Earth behind an (also round) Moon, the sort of view you would expect if you were arriving from interplanetary space.

This is the furthest any spacecraft designed to carry people in it has ever gone from Earth. And, presuming that the manned flight slated for 2024 follows the same path, those four people will set a record for furthest distance from Mother Earth, ever. And even before they are more than a thousand miles above the surface they will have been further than anyone has been in half a century.

Apollo only took roughly three days to go to the moon (each way); Artemis was about as fast, actually, but took some side trips once it got there. (It would actually be harder to go to the Moon more slowly…orbital mechanics can be surprising sometimes.) But the fact that the missions are slated to take three or more weeks is an indication we have deep space exploration in mind now…as in other planets, as in Mars. (Which sucks, but much less than anywhere else other than Earth.)

The Orion module has a solar array, there are cameras mounted on it so it’s possible to see the spacecraft from the outside. No need for NASA animations like they did for Apollo, and if something like Apollo 13 should happen [I certainly hope NOT], they’ll be able to actually look at the outside of the spacecraft to see what happened. In the actual Apollo 13, the astronauts couldn’t see the damage until they separated from the service module to start re-entry.

Which brings me to today’s topic.

I have to explain something up front, and that is: how a rocket works. It’s not rocket science (seriously; I tell people that rocket science isn’t rocket science, at least it sure ain’t compared to particle physics). In essence a rocket moves because of Newton’s third law…every action comes with an equal but opposite reaction. If you push something away from you in the direction opposite of the one you want to go, you react by going the direction you want to go. A rocket functions by adding a bunch of energy to a bunch of mass and letting that mass go out one end…the rocket goes the other way. The rocket changes speed; and that’s the goal…the change in speed is called delta V, delta V costs reaction mass, and the heavier you are at the time, the more reaction mass it costs.

With nothing to grab onto in space–like, say, tires on pavement, that’s pretty much the only way to get moving (with the exception of a solar sail). You can’t push on something outside your spacecraft, so you have to push on something you brought with you. But that means you must carry a bunch of mass with you for the sole purpose of throwing it away en route! (It is called “reaction mass” for that reason.) And that mass requires even more mass to get moving. The engineering trick is to find the fuel (as it turns out liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen are the best readily available) that will generate the most impulse (change in momentum) for the least amount of weight. (Heating it up by burning it and letting it blast out the back end under high pressure is basically how we do it.) And to design your rocket to be as light as possible and as efficient as possible. That is hard, and we seem to be doing it as about as well as can be done; there’s little room for improvement without an (likely as yet unimagined) radically different way.

We’ve done halting experiments with using a nuclear reactor to heat the reaction mass hotter than burning it would; that would help but few people relish the thought of setting up an almost-explosion under a nuclear reactor and sending that reactor up into the air.

Anyway, in a nutshell, and without supplying numbers, that is the “30,000 foot” “granular” view of what rocket science is trying to overcome.

Apollo was just barely possible. The biggest rocket we could build could barely do the job. Think of it in terms of how many times you have to change velocity, each of which requires reaction mass. And you need to think of it back-to-front. You have to change velocity to safely land on Earth (rather than go splat! and leave a very Moon-like crater), after traveling through space at, basically escape velocity because you just did a ballistic orbit from somewhere far away. That takes reaction mass–a lot of it because the delta-V is something like 25,000 miles per hour. (Except we found a way to avoid that…but I am getting ahead of myself.) That fuel has weight, just like the capsule and astronauts do; in fact it would weigh many times as much as the astronauts and capsule. But in order to get to Earth from the Moon, they have to leave Lunar orbit and get to escape velocity. So you need enough fuel to push the astronauts, and that fuel being brought along for landing, through a second-to-last delta V. That’s much more fuel than you would need if it was just the astronauts and spacecraft you needed to push. And then, you have to get off the Moon in order to be in lunar orbit. More fuel, and it’s like compound interest, all the way back through landing on the moon, entering lunar orbit, leaving earth orbit, and getting to Earth orbit…such that it would require a truly gigantic amount of fuel for the initial boost off of Earth, because most of what you’d be lifting was…fuel. The rocket would be as big as a mountain. And that is not that much of an exaggeration; it might not be any exaggeration at all.

We couldn’t do that then. And we can’t do that now.

No I am not claiming we never went. I am claiming we did a lot of creative engineering, instead of just building a massive one-piece rocket. We set things up in such a way as to save fuel. We didn’t, for example, land the whole spacecraft on the moon, just a very tiny, fragile part of it, and we only sent two of the three astronauts down. We also threw away empty fuel tanks (i.e., rocket stages) on the way (a trick we need to do just to get to Earth orbit, unfortunately), so at least we weren’t coming back to earth with a gigantic (read massive) spacecraft that was mostly empty fuel tanks, then trying to land it gently. We were coming back with the bare minimum mass. And of course one other thing, perhaps the most essential, which I’ll get to very shortly.

Even with all those savings, it’s insane. Artemis weighed 5,750,000 pounds at launch. What’s coming back to us in Sunday weighs 18,200 lbs, less than 1/300th as much. That’s 99.7% overhead or 0.3% payload. And they did their best to make sure as much of that was fuel as possible. If you want to double the weight of that capsule, you don’t just add another 18,200 pounds to Artemis’s liftoff weight…no, you make Artemis 11,500,000 pounds. Every pound sent to the moon and then back to Earth requires 300 pounds of rocket plus fuel. (I expect they make sure the astronauts don’t eat too much the night before launch.)

You are, I hope, beginning to understand why space travel costs so damned much.

I promised to tell you about one more savings, and I saved it because it’s going to cover the rest of this post: The most critical and scariest thing we did was to come up with a way to make the final delta-V–the one that would make the rocket as big as a mountain–without expending any fuel at all! That was a yuge savings, because that gets compounded through all of the phases of the mission, not just the first two or three of them. And that alone might just have reduced Apollo to one 1/4 the size it would have been, otherwise–changing 25,000 miles an hour into zero miles an hour takes a lot of fuel there at the end.

I refer, of course, to slamming into the Earth’s atmosphere at escape velocity and letting air resistance slow the capsule down for us. No fuel burned.

The trick was (and is) to do so in a way that didn’t result in spacecraft+astronauts burned instead. Slamming into the atmosphere at 32 times the sea-level speed of sound will heat things considerably; five thousand degrees Fahrenheit is quite toasty. (And incidentally, this is one of the major reasons hypersonic travel in the atmosphere is a challenge.)

It’s called aerobraking, when it isn’t called “bring me my brown pants.”

Because the rocket equation (which implies all that compounding) was well known since WWII if not earlier, we knew we’d have to do this if we were to go to the moon, and tests had been done well before Apollo 11. The first thought was to make the spacecraft extremely streamlined, but that turned out to be a bad idea. So instead a nearly flat face with as much air resistance as possible would be presented to the atmosphere smacking into the vessel at 25000 miles per hour. (And I thought the wind here was bad.) But it had to be a material that wouldn’t just burn away, so that took a lot of materials engineering. In the case of the Space Shuttle the heat-resistant tiles did the job (though the Space Shuttle didn’t come back at nearly as high a speed).

But that wasn’t the only issue. We had to hit the atmosphere at an almost perfectly precise angle. Too steep, and the spacecraft would burn up anyway. Too shallow and the spacecraft would actually skip off the atmosphere like skipping rocks off a pond. (Before you object that the air–certainly not the thin upper atmosphere–isn’t as substantial as the water, try hitting it at 25,000 miles per hour and report back.)

Skipping off the atmosphere would not be instantly fatal, but the spacecraft would now be moving away from Earth at escape velocity and there’s be absolutely no way to rescue the astronauts and (remember, no fuel) no way for them to turn around and come back.

As the spacecraft is approaching Earth, which presents a circular cross section to it, it has to aim near the edge of that cross section…somewhere in a ring about 22 miles thick (but thousands of miles cross). Outside the ring…skip. Inside…slag.

The movie Apollo 13 had one clip in it from an actual newscast at the time, where a blowtorch was aimed at a model of the capsule as the “news”reader talked about what had to happen. I tried to find that clip and failed, but it was an understatement of the peril they had to go through.

So you gotta hit the right angle. And you have to hit the right part of the arc of the ring, too, or you end up landing in Antarctica or Siberia instead of near the Navy ships sent to retrieve you.

Your arrival time at the ring (hopefully not ‘of fire’) is dictated by one thing: the time you left lunar orbit. Because once you’ve done that, you’re basically a bullet, only much bigger and much faster. (Yes, you can make tiny course corrections…but those are basically windage and elevation, not arrival time at target. And you need windage and elevation, because that’s how you make sure you’re going to hit that ring.) So where the astronauts came down was dictated days in advance and they didn’t have much in the way of choices, which is why they came down at the corner of No and Where out in the Pacific. It was a matter of which way the Earth was facing when they hit that ring, which, again, depended on when they left lunar orbit.

And yet, we did this nine times for Apollo 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17. (As well as for Apollo 7 and 9, but only from Earth orbit.) Nary a hitch. The Columbia disaster was a failure of the Shuttle tile system and is similar, but Apollo had a perfect record handling a tougher problem.

In the last fifty years almost nothing has changed. We still have to play meteor to get back to Earth. We’ve gotten better at building spacecraft, but we didn’t use the mass savings on fuel to brake at the return; we just made the spacecraft bigger. Artemis is supposed to hold at least four astronauts, not just three. And it has to do the same trick the Apollo astronauts had to do.

We have a couple of advantages they didn’t have though, and they all boil down to better computing. The computers on Apollo were extremely primitive by today’s standards; you have thousands of times more computing power in your phone. More computing power means finer control over those tiny midcourse corrections, which means more control over how you come back.

The other one, which also comes back to computing power, is that Artemis actually will, deliberately, skip off the atmosphere…but very late in the process, after it has slowed down to merely a nice suborbital velocity. It’ll do this by tumbling in just the right way at just the right time. Once it’s back up in space it can cool off a bit, but then it will come back at a slower speed (typical of mere low-earth-orbit craft) and there will be a lot of control over where it comes down. In fact, they’re going to splash down just off of San Diego. This reduces the maximum g-force during reentry from 6.8 g to about 4 g. (And I’ve actually been on amusement park rides at 4 g.)

This is, as far as I know, a first time trying this, so keep your fingers crossed on Sunday.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

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 !!!

Giving Our “Love” To the RINOs and the Dipshits Going After O’Keefe

RINOs an Endangered Species? If Only!

In Defense of Ranked Choice Voting

Justice

Justice Must Be Done.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

Spot Prices

Escape

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

China is in the White House

Joe Biden is Asshoe

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

News Flash

Hey China!

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

His Fraudulency

Justice Must Be Done.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

Spot Prices.

More Stupid Orbit Tricks (Orbital Mechanics Part 3)

Escape Velocity

Changing Orbits

Hohmann Transfers

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

China is in the White House

Joe Biden is Asshoe

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

Language Warning

RINO McDaniel

The Real Fascist is His Fraudulency Joe Biden*

Justice Must Be Done.

Small Government?

Political Science In Summation

A Few Things We Cannot Blame on His Fraudulency

His Truth?

Lawyer Appeasement Section

(Paper) Spot Prices

Orbital Elements (Part 2)

Stupid Orbit Tricks

Trick #1: Geostationary Orbits.

Trick #2: Molniya Orbits

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

China is in the White House

Joe Biden is Asshoe

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

Joining The Herd Of Lemmings

The RINO’s Dilemma

Justice Must Be Done

Lawyer Appeasement Section

Spot (i.e., paper) Prices

Fuck Joe B*d*n

Orbital Elements (Part I?)

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

China is in the White House

Joe Biden is Asshoe

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

A Caution

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit

Justice Must Be Done.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

Spot Prices

How Far Are the Stars?

Calculus Made Easy (No Joke)

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

China is in the White House

Joe Biden is Asshoe

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

Giving Our “Love” To A Certain RINO POS

RINOs an Endangered Species? If Only!

In Defense of Ranked Choice Voting

Justice

Justice Must Be Done.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

Spot Prices

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

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

Fuck Joe Bdn

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

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

Fuck Joe Bdn