“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
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.
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.
Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.
Busy Week
Between 2000 Mules and the SCOTUS leak, things have been hectic out there. The latter item is “real” to the establishment (i.e., the Left), and they’re melting down. 2000 Mules, on the other hand, isn’t “real” to them.
I’m sure you’ve noticed now that no revelation gets any sort of traction in Washington DC, traction that causes someone in authority to actually act, until it gets into the Yellow Stream Media. (And these days, only information they want to act on, gets there.) 2000 Mules will probably never do so; and if not, it won’t show up on the DC radar and nothing will come of it. The claim that the election was stolen will continue to be dismissed by anyone who has any power to do something about it.
This is not the same as them not knowing about the election being stolen. They do know. It’s just that while the YSM isn’t hollering and screaming about it, they can ignore it. And they do. The YSM still continues to act as agenda billboard, and the Left controls the YSM. So this week we deal with abortion, not the stolen election. Last week it was Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Spot Prices
All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend).
Precious metals continue their downward slide. This is partially due to manipulation, but the fact of the matter is that investors will put their money where it will make a return. With interest rates going up, they actually like dollars, because dollars earn more interest. Gold, to them, is a way to not lose money most of the time.
JWST Update
JWST instrument commissioning proceeds apace.
NASA made a blog post explaining one of the more practical aspects of the James Web Space Telescope. Where can it point?
It must perpetually present the heat shield towards the sun, or it’s toast. Literally. Well, “toast” is a relative term; getting up to room temperature would be bad for the optics and sensors.
James Web Space Telescope. Mirror in gold, sunshield in gray “below” it.
So it seems like JWST can only look at half of the sky, basically the same half someone on Earth would see at midnight, with the sun on the other side of the big heat shield we call Planet Earth. And it doesn’t rotate like we do here, which lets us see almost all of the sky between just-after-sunset and just-before-sunrise, with the thin band in between only up when the sun is up and thus washed out. So even though we can see most of the sky on any given night, JWST can only see half of the sky (albeit 24/7, there being no daytime for it), right? [Note: I am ignoring the effect–on the Earth observer–of latitude, which permanently hides part of the sky from him or her, but on the other hand allows other parts of the sky to be seen any time at night.]
Yes, and no. JWST in orbit about the sun, once a year (since it sits at Earth/Sun L2), so six months from now, it can see the other half of the sky, just like our midnight astronomer here on Earth.
But it’s a bit more restricted than that. The JWST mirror cannot be moved. It’s not on any kind of a swivel. It cannot swivel either left-right or up-down in the picture above.
To aim the telescope, the entire spacecraft has to be rotated, with gyros. In the picture above it can be rotated 360 degrees about a “vertical” axis, keeping the sunshade where it is but turning it (and the antenna) like a record on a record player. (This is the yaw direction of rotation.)
It can also tip, just a bit, up and down, “nodding” basically, this is called the pitch direction. It has about a 50 degree travel in the pitch direction, as shown in the following two diagrams.
When JWST’s sun shield is face on to the sun, that shield is getting the maximum amount of solar radiation, and thus this is called the “hot” attitude. When the telescope is pointed halfway towards being pointed directly away from the sun, the sun shield is presented to the sun at a 45 degree angle and thus collects 70.7% percent as much energy as in the “hot” attitude (i.e., the sine of 135 degrees). We don’t dare tip the spacecraft any more than that lest the actual telescope (and sensors) be exposed directly to the sun (and thereby become “toast”).
The practical effect is that the patch of sky directly opposite of the sun cannot be looked at by JWST; that part lies outside the telescope’s “field of regard.” However if you actually want to look at something there, you can wait three months and get it when that patch of sky is at a 90 degree angle to the sun because JWST has moved 90 degrees around the sun.
Over the course of one year, JWST has access to the entire sky.
As to the current commissioning activity, at least part of it is “astrometric calibration.” In other words, if we tell the telescope to point at such-and-such pitch and yaw, what does each sensor actually see? There might be a tiny bit of error from what we would expect, no instrument is exact straight from the fabrication. We’ll be able to specify an exact right ascension and declination (the analogues to longitude and latitude in the sky) and know exactly how to rotate the spacecraft to look at that point.
There’s a lot more to it than that, but I’m going to let NASA explain it:
Do you remember the moon rocket that was undergoing a “wet dress rehearsal”?
Well, it has gone through several of them, and the test was a success. They found problems they now know they need to correct.
Yes, I called it a success, even though the spacecraft would have likely malfunctioned if it had launched. Because that’s the purpose of testing: to find such problems. We found them. A test isn’t a failure just because it found something wrong; it’s a failure if it fails to find problems that do exist.
If you remember the attention given to something called Biosphere 2 about 25 years ago, that’s another example. Biosphere 2 was an attempt to build a large, perfectly sealed greenhouse and see if people could live in it indefinitely, growing their own food and being sustained as part of a balanced system (plants to absorb the CO2 they exhaled and generate O2 for them to breathe).
The idea is if we are ever to start living in space or on other planets, we need to know how to do this, at least long enough to “terraform” other planets (make them more earthlike and establish an earthlike biosphere on them so we can live there as if we were native to the place). A long manned space mission probably won’t be able to bring several years’ worth of food along; we’ll have to grow it…inside a tin can that had better not leak. The only resource “out there” is sunlight (and that’s the one thing that could get in and out of Biosphere 2 once the doors were sealed).
It was a test of our ability to make a closed system.
And the test “failed.” The concrete in the structure continued to absorb oxygen even after we thought it was done curing.
But it wasn’t a failure; we learned a lot from it. Sure on one level our first attempt at building a closed system “failed” because it couldn’t sustain people for two years, but no one actually expected it to work perfectly; the point of the exercise was to discover what we don’t know. And for that, it worked beautifully.
Biosphere 2 is still standing; you can take tours of it. It’s being used for botanical research because it’s the most isolated environment on earth (even with people traipsing about on tours).
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 !!!
I see from video of your “conversation” with MTG that someone posted yesterday, that you are still a pugnacious, lying, puddle of bearded dragon shit.
How you can look at yourself in a mirror is beyond me, unless your conscience has been replaced by a dedication to Leftist goals. It certainly isn’t dedicated to real adversarial journalism. Much less any kind of journalism.
I will give you this. You have better hair than Brian Stelter. But then, so did Telly Savalas. And Yul Brynner.
RINOs an Endangered Species? If Only!
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 Tuesday’s 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?
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. (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.)
Mozart
Light this time around. The Turkish March, K331.
The string quartet, consisting of two violins, a viola and a cello, is a sort of economy orchestra. In the days when all music was live, if someone wanted to host a gathering and wanted music, they had to actually pay people to perform it. Except for the most fabulously wealthy hosts, that meant you weren’t going to be hearing symphonies and concertos! The string quartet was a good compromise (and you could even arrange a symphony for it). Each of the four instruments played different parts, so the music could be plenty complex.
Joseph Haydn around 1750 invented the “string quartet” as a compositional form (as opposed to an ensemble) with four movements, and wrote over sixty of them.
Mozart wrote 23 string quartets; this one, #17 “The Hunt,” K. 458 is probably the most famous of the bunch. Quartets 14-19 were dedicated to Joseph Haydn and composed between 1782 and 1785 (i.e., just after we won the Battle of Yorktown and bracketing the time we signed the Treaty of Paris with the United Kingdom).
This video is of The Hunt, in full. Movements are at the following time cues:
Mozart, in his dedication, admitted to taking “a long and laborious endeavor” with these quartets. Usually, he was able to compose in his head, with seemingly little effort. Putting it on paper was actually “copying it out” once completed, not part of the actual creative process.
To my dear friend Haydn,
A father who had resolved to send his children out into the great world took it to be his duty to confide them to the protection and guidance of a very celebrated Man, especially when the latter by good fortune was at the same time his best Friend. Here they are then, O great Man and dearest Friend, these six children of mine. They are, it is true, the fruit of a long and laborious endeavor, yet the hope inspired in me by several Friends that it may be at least partly compensated encourages me, and I flatter myself that this offspring will serve to afford me solace one day. You, yourself, dearest friend, told me of your satisfaction with them during your last Visit to this Capital. It is this indulgence above all which urges me to commend them to you and encourages me to hope that they will not seem to you altogether unworthy of your favour. May it therefore please you to receive them kindly and to be their Father, Guide and Friend! From this moment I resign to you all my rights in them, begging you however to look indulgently upon the defects which the partiality of a Father’s eye may have concealed from me, and in spite of them to continue in your generous Friendship for him who so greatly values it, in expectation of which I am, with all of my Heart, my dearest Friend, your most Sincere Friend,
W. A. Mozart
Upon hearing the quartets performed, Haydn said this to Mozart’s father, Leopold Mozart:
Before God, and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste, and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition.
Mozart lived from 1756 to 1791 and it is probably the greatest tragedy of orchestral music that he died so young. Imagine what he could have done in the next twenty years. (OK, honestly no one can imagine it, or they’d be Mozart.) Beethoven got his start shortly after Mozart’s untimely death; what influence would they have had on each other? Beethoven was famous for breaking the rules of the Classical era; would Mozart have been sympathetic? Possibly; a lot of his later works were quite “edgy” by the standards of the day.
Everything down, with the sole exception of platinum.
James Webb Space Telescope Update
The mirror is done. Instruments are at proper temperature.
People who have spent half a lifetime working on it now get to move on to their next endeavor, and hopefully will succeed at it as well.
All of the instrument packages now get a crisp image. The mirror is better than they expected!
They will now proceed to commission those packages. That’s expected to take about two months.
The picture above shows the results of aiming the JWST at a part of the Large Magellanic Cloud. This is a small galaxy that is a satellite of our own Milky Way, and is readily visible at night in the southern hemisphere (as is the Small Magellanic Cloud), provided, of course, you’re not in a big city. It’s a good target because, as seen from here there are a lot of stars crammed together in one part of the sky and they’re all at pretty much the same distance from us.
(This is how we discovered that Cepheid variables had an intrinsic brightness proportional to their period of variability–an astronomer looked at a bunch of them in the LMC and SMC and noticed their apparent brightness was proportional to their period of variability; since all were at the same distance, the apparent brightness was directly related to the intrinsic brightness with no possible confusion due to differing distances.)
When Supernova 1987-A blew up in (wait for it) 1987, it was in the LMC.
I’ve never seen the LMC and SMC, though I did look for them when I was a good deal further south than I am now. Alas, the lighting situation was terrible.
Anyhow, the process of commissioning the instruments is expected to take a couple of months, and involves setting operating parameters and the like (the blog doesn’t have a lot of detail, so I didn’t boil it down for you; they did).
To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!
Remember Hong Kong!!!
If anyone ends up in the cell right next to him, 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 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 !!!
Or rather, “Hey Chinese Communist Party and your entire array of servitors, ass-wipers, and fellators!”
You’re not even worth my time this week. When you decide to act like civilized people, maybe I’ll give you a lesson or two in how non-barbarians behave.
Hey BiteMe! (Or, Whoever Has Their Hand Rammed Up That Putrefying Meat Puppet’s Ass)
[Language warning]
You and yours have caused a lot of injury. Literal injury with your war on people who don’t want to take an untested vaccine. When people die in an emergency room because a hospital won’t admit them because they haven’t had their clot shot, that’s a crime.
I’m going to address here the insult on top of the injury, because I am among the insulted. I still have my health but apparently you want me to live under the 8th Street Bridge (which actually isn’t on 8th Street, but whatever, that’s what the I-25 overpass over Cimarron is called), so maybe if you have your way that won’t be true for long. Dreadful time of year to become homeless.
No, you’re just trying to make me unemployed, because I won’t take your fucking shots.
Well, that threat is NOT going to work. I. Won’t. Take. Your. Fucking. Shots.
And it looks like enough people agree, that you’re having to back down, you worthless asswipe.
You’re LOSING.
You LOSER.
You Chinese-bought ratfucking traitor.
I would love to see you die an agonizing, humiliating death. (This isn’t a threat, because I am not threatening to cause that death. I am just announcing my intention to party if it happens.) It would be just recompense for the way you’re killing America…and millions of Americans.
His Fraudulency
Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.
One can hope that all is not as it seems.
I’d love to feast on that crow.
(I’d like to add, I find it entirely plausible, even likely, that His Fraudulency is also His Figureheadedness. (Apparently that wasn’t a word; it got a red underline. Well it is now.) Where I differ with the hopium addicts is on the subject of who is really in charge. It ain’t anyone we like.)
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
Everything down except palladium (and it went down on Friday). Silver down a LOT in percentage terms. So I guess the market manipulators (if they aren’t tinfoil hat imaginings, but that’s yet another metal) are at work.
Expect continued inflation and for shortages to not just continue but get worse.
James Webb Space Telescope Update
JWST is still in the last mirror-alignment iteration.
The NASA website is talking about temperature right now. MIRI is keeping chill at 6 or 7 kelvins, but not everything is at final temperature. The mirror, especially, is not quite at its final temperature. The primary mirror segments’ (the segments are the individual hexagonal parts of the big mirror) temperatures vary from 34.3 to 54.5 kelvins, and the secondary mirror (which is at the end of the tripod-like structure; it reflects light back towards the instruments) is at 29.4 kelvins. The primary and secondary mirrors are made out of beryllium, which just takes a long time to cool off. Things are close enough, though, to work on commissioning the instruments, and for that the telescope is oriented to look at the ecliptic poles (i.e., perpendicular to Earth’s orbital plane, or roughly parallel to the sun’s axis of rotation), and in that orientation JWST heats up the most. Which is still not much but at those temperatures any amount of heating could be significant. But the system is working well, and the spacecraft can continue cooling off even in this orientation.
Orthodox Easter
Yesterday was Good Friday. Tomorrow is Easter.
If you’re thinking I’m out of my skull, well, you’re probably right but not on account of this; you see, I am talking about (Eastern) Orthodox holidays.
Easter is supposed to be the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox (the “paschal moon”, which is why it moves all over the place from year to year, but actually computing that date is a challenge.
Today, of course, we could determine the exact instant of the equinox (start of spring), the exact instant of the full moon, and then go to the next Sunday. But because not every place on Earth is at the same date, that could be problematic. Imagine that first full moon being on Sunday at 11:43 PM ET; that day should be Easter, right? But in Europe and certainly in Jerusalem, that’s Monday, and so Easter should be the next Sunday, not this Sunday.
But in ancient and medieval times, the Church just deemed spring to start on March 21, and counted from there using an algorithm that approximates the phase of the moon. But even March 21 being the first day of spring is a bit slippery, historically, because we began to switch calendars in 1564. Currently, it’s very likely that March 21 will actually be the first day of spring, but before the change spring might start on March 10–but the algorithm said to start with whatever day was called March 21, not the actual day of the equinox.
The algorithm is still being used today, with the “new,” more correct March 21.
Trying to follow the thread of this made my head hurt, but apparently, because (Eastern) Orthodoxy didn’t change calendars when the (Roman) Catholic church did, nor even when the protestant churches did, they don’t agree with the western churches, and usually end up celebrating Easter (and every other thing tied to the date of Easter) a week later.
Now whether they are late (rather than later), or the West jumps the gun and celebrates early, is a fight I don’t have a dog in. But the difference is an interesting historical artifact of how both our knowledge of astronomy and our calendars have developed over the centuries.
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 !!!
The Chinese Should Think Before Wiping Us Out As Sometimes They Need Us To Solve Their Problems For Them
Okay you knuckledragging ChiComs trying to take us down…here’s a history lesson for you.
For millennia, you had to suffer from this:
Yep. Steppe Nomads. They laid waste to your country, burned, raped and pillaged (but not in that order–they’re smarter than you are) for century after century.
You know who figured out how to take them on and win? The Russians.
Not you, the Russians. And it took them less than two centuries. And Oh By The Way they were among the most backward cultures in Europe at the time.
You couldn’t invent an alphabet, you couldn’t take care of barbarians on horseback, and you think you can take this board down?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! We’re laughing at you, you knuckledragging dehumanized communists…worshipers of a mass-murderer who killed sixty million people!
I mean, you still think Communism is a good idea even after having lived through it!
By my reckoning that makes you orders of magnitude more stupid than AOC, and that takes serious effort.
His Fraudulency
Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, 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.
“No Chemicals”
A detailed analysis of the contents of His Fraudulency’s skull was performed.
Absolutely no chemicals found!
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.
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).
James Webb Space Telescope Update
MIRI (the Midrange InfraRed Instrument) is now at 6K and the final iteration of mirror alignment is in progress. Once this is done, it’s time to work on commissioning the instruments…and I have no idea what that entails, to be honest. My vague notions of what that meant were all taken care of as part of the mirror alignment process.
The NASA blog put out another article on what JWST is expected to do. It’s expected to learn more about extrasolar planets that we have already detected; in particular it will be able to analyze their atmospheres.
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.
In fact, they closed 3PM on Thursday; the market weenies get Good Friday off and apparently that’s true even in Asia.
Gold is definitely on another upward climb. It was a couple of bucks higher on Wednesday, but that downtick doesn’t cover the fact that it’s distinctly in the upper 19s now. (1975? I remember that year…) The price of platinum can’t get any rounder than it is right now (even rounder than rhodium’s was last week). Palladium and rhodium are the two losers this week, albeit not by very much. But they are the two metals whose price is most dependent on industry.
T4 Combinatorics
If you’re wondering what “Combinatorics” is (and let’s face it, you probably weren’t wondering until you read that title, if even then), it’s the branch of mathematics that has to do with counting things; including counting the number of possible combinations of things. It’s not “hard” to do, but the concepts are a bit abstract sometimes.
If you’ve ever seen those statements about how many different configurations some puzzle (like a Rubik’s Cube) can have (and only one of them is right!), those were computed with combinatorics. (No one went and looked for them all.)
Ancient Indian physician Sushruta in the 6th century BCE asserted that given six tastes, there are sixty three possible combinations total where they are taken one at a time, two at a time, three at a time, and so forth. The ancient Greeks looked into this sort of thing too. During the Middle Ages, more progress was made, but not in Europe. Again in India more general formulas were found.
The specific problem here is precisely the number of combinations of different objects can occur. As it turns out, that’s also the same number as possible sequences of coin tosses.
Going back to Sushutra’s example, if you flip a coin six times, there are 64 possible outcomes. It could come out tails all six times. It could come out tails the first five times, then heads the last time. It could come out tails the first four times, then heads the fifth time, then tails the last time. And so on. If I were to tabulate all 64 of them with 0s (for tails) and 1s (for heads) it would look like someone counting in base 2 or binary.
000000 000001 000010 000011
…and so on.
There’s another method of stepping through all of the possibilities, and that’s to use a sequence where exactly one of the six things changes each time. That’s a bit trickier, but you can get some cool patterns out of it (like the bottom half of the list being a mirror image of the top half…except for the first digit which is 1 instead of 0).
But something may be bothering you….Sushutra said there were 63 combinations; I have just been yapping about there being 64. The discrepancy is because Sushutra didn’t count the case where none of his 6 samples were being tasted.
So far, perhaps not a surprise. The number of possibilities is 2n, where n is the number of times you toss the coin (or the number of flavors you’re sampling). And this works when the different tries are independent of each other. In the case of the coins, one toss has no effect on any of the others. In the case of the flavors, there are no rules like, for example, that flavor E is forbidden if you are using flavor B.
Slightly more interesting is the question, out of these six possibilities, how many of them have exactly three flavors. Or how many possible sequences of six coin tosses have exactly three heads in them?
Well, it turns out there’s a formula for this. And it involves, interestingly enough, combining formulas for another couple of possible problems.
Let’s say you have six scrabble tiles, A, B, C, D, E, F. How many possible words are there?
You could exhaustively list them all out, but that’s tedious. Instead let’s try thinking about it.
There are six possible choices for the first letter. Once you pick the first letter, though, there are five possible choices for the second letter; so each of the six first possible letter possibilities has five possible second letters. So that’s 6 x 5 = 30 possibilities for the first two letters. You can proceed similarly, 4 possibilities for the third letter, 3 for the fourth, 2 for the fifth, and 1 for the sixth. So we’re looking at 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 720 possible combinations. (It’s a good thing we decided not to try to list them all!)
This is a common enough thing that we call this the factorial and denote it with an exclamation point, in this case, 6! = 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 720.
I don’t believe it’s possible to form a good word of English out of those six letters, with all of those six letters and no others (but correct me if I’m wrong!); the best I can come up with is FACED. Or DECAF. I guess if you’re sore at the Federal Elections Commission you could say BADFEC.
But this is a game of Scrabble, and so you might settle for using some of the tiles. For example, how many candidate four letter words are there?
You can follow the same reasoning as above. Six possibilities for the first letter, five possibilities (for each of the six) for the second letter (30). Four possibilities (for each of the thirty) for the third letter (120). For each of those, three possible fourth letters (360). But now we STOP, because we don’t pick a fifth, or sixth letter. The math is: 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 = 360. So it’s like 6! only not taken all the way down to 1. In fact, it’s like 6! divided by 2!. Look: (6x5x4x3x2x1)/(2×1); the twos and ones cancel and we’re left with 6x5x4x3. Note that 2 is 6 – 4, i.e., it’s the total number of titles minus the number of tiles actually chosen.
So there’s a general formula here. You have n objects, you want to choose m of them. The number of possibilities is n!/(n-m)!
One thing that needs to be stressed, though! This formula is for use when you care about the order of the selection. In other words, if you grabbed the letters A, C, E, F, it matters to you whether you grabbed them as F, A, C, E or C, A, F, E or FCEA.
When dealing with Sushruta’s flavors, the first, third, fifth and sixth flavors (combined) taste the same no matter what order you’re adding them. It’s as if you didn’t care what order ACEF was written in.
So how do you adjust your answer to the question of how many possible ways to select four of the six letters if you don’t care about the order?
Well, imagine that you had actually written down all of the possible combinations (all 360 of them). Some number of these would have the letters A, C, E, and F in them. In fact, all possible orders of those letters would appear in the list exactly once. How many possible orderings of A,C,E,F are there? We already know this: 4 x 3 x 2 x 1.
And this is true for any possible grouping of four letters. There will be nine other anagrams of those four letters in the list.
So to get the answer, we start with our 360…and divide by 4! which is to say, 24, and get 15. This is the factorial of the number of objects we are choosing (m).
So, remember we got the 360 with n!/(n–m)!; this new number involves dividing again by m!.
So our number of combinations for an unordered choice of m objects out of a group of n objects is n!/[(n–m)!m!]. My combinatorics teacher called it “n-choose-m” or he’d substitute actual numbers.
We could, for example, figure out how many possible groups of ten letters we could pull out of the alphabet. With 26 letters, we have 26!/(16! x 10!).
So punch that into your calculator.
Well, don’t. 26! is probably too big for your calculator.
But you can probably get clever before you punch the numbers in.
Write those factorials out. It turns out you can do a lot of cancelling! You can skip 10×9…x1 on top, and just divide by 16x15x14…on the bottom. Better yet, you can skip the 16x15x…x1 on top and only divide by 10! on the bottom.
26 x 25 x 24 x 23 x 22 x 21 x 20 x 19 x 18 x 17 / 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1.
Right off the bat, you can cancel the 20 up top with the 10 and 2 on the bottom, and the 18 up top with the 6 and 3 on the bottom:
26 x 25 x 24 x 23 x 22 x 21 x 19 x 17 / 9 x 8 x 7 x 5 x 4 x 1
Do a bit more cancelling–get rid of the 5, 7, and 4 by dividing them into the 25, 21, and 24 respectively:
26 x 5 x 6 x 23 x 22 x 3 x 19 x 17 / 9 x 8
You have three even numbers on top. Divide them all by 2 and get rid of the 8 on the bottom:
13 x 5 x 3 x 23 x 11 x 3 x 19 x 17 / 9
And you now have two threes, so you can get rid of the 9 and those 3s
13 x 5 x 23 x 11 x 19 x 17
Well, now, we don’t have to do any dividing! In fact, you should NEVER have to do any dividing after you cancel. Why? We’re counting numbers of combinations, and that has to be a whole number. You won’t get a fraction. So if it looks like you’re about to get a fraction, you messed up somewhere–you didn’t do a cancellation you could have, or you made a simple arithmetic error.
So now go to the calculator, and it turns out there are 5,311,735 possible sets of ten letters you could pull out of 26 letters of the alphabet.
Yikes, that’s a lot!
You can get to some really big numbers this way with bigger “pots” of choices; in fact you can easily get to numbers that are larger than the numbers of quarks in the universe without too much trouble.
In fact, consider the number of possible bridge hands, which is 52!/(39!13!). If you think you’ve played enough bridge to repeat a hand…you’re probably wrong! Because there are 635,013,559,600 of them. That’s still more than the US Debt…though ask me again next week.
(And the game would still be different unless the other three players also each got the same hand as before. This could be computed with our n-choose-m formula, too, applied successively (it’ll be that number, times 39-choose-13, times 26-choose-13, times 26-choose-26) to see how many possible bridge deals there are.)
There’s another clever method to compute m-choose-n. It’s very visually oriented, but it does involve computing all of the smaller problems first.
Start with 1.
Then below it, staggered, write 1 1.
So you see:
1 1 1
You repeat this, over and over again. Each number is the sum of the two above it (and “blank” is zero). So you get:
1 1 1 1 2 1 1 3 3 1 1 4 6 4 1 1 5 10 10 5 1
And so on. What good is this exercise (which is called “Pascal’s Triangle”)?
It turns out that if you go to row n, the mth element is n-choose-m. But you have to start counting from zero. That last row is row 4 (not 4). And if you want 4-choose-2 you have to go to the third element on that row, which is 6. This is logical, because the actual first element is always a 1, and that’s how many ways you can pick zero items out of the group of 4. Or 17, or whatever. The last number is choosing all of the elements, and of course there’s only one way to do that (if you don’t care about the order).
Another neat thing about this triangle is if you sum up everything in the row, you get the total number of possible selections in that row, for example, with 4 items, the total is 16…which is 24.
Pascal’s triangle has a whole host of interesting properties, actually.
Once you see this triangle, it’s pretty clear that the biggest single n-choose-m value is when m is half the size of n. (Or if n is odd, when m is either just above or just below half of n.)
So that, if you toss a coin a hundred times, the most likely outcome is 50 heads and 50 tails, (In fact that is possible about 1×1029 different ways!) though a 49/51 split is almost as common (~9.89 x 1028 different ways), and a 48/52 split wouldn’t be all that surprising either (~9.32×1028 different ways). But 100 heads (or tails) in a row? Ridiculously unlikely! Even a 75/25 split can “only” occur 2.42 x 1023 ways, which sounds like a lot…but is 2 42/100 millionths as common as a 50/50 split. And therefore. 0.00000242 times as likely as a 50/50 split if you try the experiment.
Conversely an exact 50/50 split might be the most likely result, but it’s less likely than a 49/51 and 51/49 split put together, much less if you add all the other near/even splits. There are 2100 possible sequences, that’s 1.267×1030 possibilities. So there’s roughly 1 chance in 12 2/3 you’d get an exact 50/50 split.
The takeaway from this is that an exact “middle” result becomes less and less likely the more things are involved…but a result near the middle becomes overwhelmingly likely the more things are involved.
But what, you might ask, does this have to do with heat and temperature and thermodynamics?
This sort of example does not really have much to do with it, but the general concepts behind combinatorics do have a lot to do with it, as it turns out. Next time…
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 !!!
SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom
You knuckle-dragging barbarians are still trying to muck with this site, so I’ll just repeat what I said last time.
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…
Loop it if you like; I will wait.
Richly deserved.
Justice Must Be Done
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
Gold is moving around within a fairly tight range lately.
James Webb Space Telescope Update
A lot of material has been written by the JWST team. The mirrors are lined up and focused, but they need to be focused for all five of the sensors behind the mirror before they can do the next iteration of fine-tuning. But that has only been done for four of them. What’s the issue? The issue is that the Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) has been blind until very recently.
The other four instruments have gotten down to their desired operating temperatures of 34 to 39 kelvins. (And I discussed kelvins last week. Very convenient timing!) But they all work in either long wavelength visible light (oranges and reds) or “near infrared.” “Near” because it’s right next to visible wavelengths, just a bit longer than our eyes can see. But objects at room temperature actually glow at some of these frequencies, so in order to keep the sensor itself from glowing in the very light it’s trying to see, we keep them cooled off.
But the longer the wavelength (and lower the frequency) we want to see, the colder we have to make the instrument. Mid Infrared is longer than near infrared, so we have to cool MIRI down to about 7 kelvins or less. From MIRIs point of view the rest of the spacecraft, at -390 to -399 F, is scorching hot!
This is done with cryogenic cooling, using helium. Apparently at least some of the power on board the spacecraft runs what is essentially a refrigerator, and we’ve been running that and allowing MIRI to slowly, slowly cool down to -450 F. We don’t want to cool it off too fast lest frost form on the sensor (which would FUBAR it).
From what I can see MIRI is actually at this temperature now, so the mirror adjusting fun can resume.
What use is MIRI? It’s expected to be able to look at stars–and their accompanying planets–as they form. For instance, we’ve all seen “the Pillars of Creation” as imaged by Hubble, which is actually a part of the Eagle nebula.
The Pillars of Creation. This isn’t the original picture; they had Hubble go back and take another picture after they upgraded its cameras.
As presented the pillars run vertically, but the “Eagle Nebula” name was given to it based on the appearance of that area seen rotated 90 degrees clockwise. Or, here is a picture of the entire nebula, rotated only about 45 degrees. The dark area in the center is shaped a bit like an eagle, you can see the wings to the left, the body in the center, and the talons to the right…and of course, blown up, it’s “The Pillars of Creation.”
The Eagle Nebula
The Pillars of Creation picture is actually in false color, with green used to show hydrogen, etc., the picture of the eagle nebula is more like what it would look to us if we were close enough to it for it to be bright enough for us to see color.
But here’s what the Pillars look like in infrared:
The Pillars of Creation in infrared
Of course the colors here are ALL false; an infrared image in true color would look black.
But notice you can see a lot more stars.
Infrared can cut through dust clouds, including the dust clouds that condense to form stars and planets. So MIRI is expected to help us greatly in our quest to study “solar systems” that are forming Out There. This is all described in this blog post, from which I ripped off these pictures.
Fuck Joe Biden
Biden, 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.)
Incidentally, I’m writing this on Friday. This morning I saw a full-sized pickup truck in the oncoming left turn lane with a forest of flags in the bed. Once he turned and drove left-to-right in front of me, I could see two American flags near the cab, and SIX “Let’s Go Brandon” flags near the tailgate. That was unusual; usually there’s a mix of FJB (only not abbreviated) and “Trump Won” and “Trump 2024” flags when someone does this.
I haven’t seen such a display in a few weeks, by the way. Even the guy at the office complex where I work with the FJB flag on his pickup seems to have removed it (or doesn’t work there any more–trucks all look alike to me from the back, and all crossovers look like cockroaches).
T3 Heat Engines
In the early 1800s, steam engines were the cutting edge tech. We didn’t talk of them changing the world, because before that time, really the world didn’t change much over a person’s lifetime. People in the late 1700s pretty much lived as they had hundreds of years earlier. In fact, living conditions in Europe at the time (for everyone except the nobility and a very small wealthy merchant class) were described as “Third World Europe.” Except that unlike the third world today, we had no concept of sanitation, vaccination (real vaccination, not this current crap), the germ theory of disease, etc., so we had high infant mortality rates and all the rest of the stuff that today’s Third World is getting away from.
The steam engine, and the prosperity it would bring to Europe, would ultimately change that, and usher in an era where we are actually used to seeing rapid technological change generating wealth that even the not-so-rich and not-so-connected could accumulate.
If you recall my first Thermo post, I talked about turning work (energy doing something macroscopic like moving objects around) into heat, and how heat and work were both forms of energy.
A steam engine is one of a large class of devices called heat engines, that turn heat back into work.
A common misconception is that James Watt “invented” the steam engine. No, he didn’t. Actually the first known thing that was something sort of like a steam engine was put together by Hero of Alexandria (10-70 CE), and it’s either called Hero’s Engine or the Aeolipile (from Greek αιολουπυλη). It looks something like this:
The Aeolipile
A cauldron of boiling water is kept under pressure, steam can only get out by going into an object free to move around a pivot (like a bird on a spit over a fire). The steam can only escape by going through the bent arms; it generates a thrust that causes the doohickey to spin.
So Hero was actually able to get heat to do work–some fifteen or so centuries before we had our scientific concept of “work.”
The next step was to actually put something like this to work. It took a while. In 1698 Thomas Savery invented a pump for water that worked by steam power. Steam was allowed to cool and condense , which created a near vacuum which could be used to suck water upwards against gravity. Then more steam could be used to push that water.
So the first commercial application for steam power was to pump water.
Small copies of this device were reasonably efficient, larger ones were not. And lift height was severely limited (since it was a vacuum pump). And the power wasn’t continuous.
In 1712 Thomas Newcomen came up with a steam engine that could deliver continuous power and it used a cylinder, but was still very inefficient because parts of the engine itself (not just the steam) ended up being heated and cooled, heated and cooled, over and over again…which took time. These things could pump water out of mines…slowly. Still, it was better than paying some grunt to do it.
What Watt did was vastly improve the Newcomen engine. And now it could be used not just to pump water, but to pull trains, and power steamships, and even (very primitive) automobiles. And also to power factory equipment, which up until then had been almost entirely reliant on water power or (worse) animal power.
A good steam engine could supply LOADS of power.
And of course this was something scientists investigated. And what they learned could be used to make steam engines even more efficient, delivering more work for the same amount of fuel, which could be either wood, or coal that was pulled out of some of the mines the steam engine had been invented to pump water out of.
One “model” of an engine that could turn heat into work was the Carnot Engine, basically an idealized model, a thought experiment.
What’s needed is a piston with gas in it, a huge mass at high temperature (called the hot reservoir) that we can attach to the piston, and another huge mass at cold temperature (the cold reservoir) which we can attach to the piston as well. It runs through four phases, then from the fourth phase, it returns to the first phase.
Phase one starts with the piston pushed in all the way. There’s a tiny space inside filled with hot gas, under pressure. The gas is at exactly the same temperature as the hot reservoir.
Now you could let the gas under pressure expand, and push on the piston and use that to do work. But as the gas expands, it will lose pressure and the temperature will drop. Instead, what we want to do is let the gas absorb heat from the hot reservoir, so that it stays at the same temperature as it expands. Ideally the temperature is exactly the same but in practical terms this is unachievable (unless you are willing to take literally forever for it to happen).
Phase 2 is to allow the gas to continue to expand and push the piston, but now you let the gas cool off…until it reaches the temperature of the cold reservoir.
Phase 3 is to compress the gas, and keep it at the same temperature as the cold reservoir. Compressing the gas would normally raise its pressure and temperature, but we let the increased heat bleed into the cold reservoir. Do this infinitely slowly, and the gas in the cylinder stays at the cold reservoir temperature.
Phase 4, finally, is to continue compressing the gas, but let it heat up…all the way up to the temperature of the hot reservoir. We’re now back to having compressed gas at the temperature of the hot reservoir.
So what has happened here? We’ve extracted a net amount of work from the system…more came out letting the gas expand and cool than we had to put into it recompressing the gas. Also, some heat energy has been taken from the hot reservoir and put into the cold reservoir.
In reality, this would result in the hot reservoir cooling off just a tiny bit, and the cool reservoir heating up just a tiny bit, but this ideal model assumes these reservoirs are of infinite size.
So what’s going on here? Heat has moved, and some (notice: some, not all) of that heat got turned into work. The rest simply moved from hot to cold and did no work for us at all. And since heat moves from hot to cold naturally, not the other way, that heat energy we didn’t use is gone for good.
As it turns out this “Carnot Cycle” is the most efficient possible way, even in principle, to turn the heat differential between a hot and cold body into work. And it gets more efficient the greater the difference between the two. (And this is true even for engines that are steam turbines with no piston at all, or where the working fluid changes from a gas to a liquid…they can’t beat the Carnot engine.)
The maximum theoretical efficiency is 1-TC/TH. Note that those temperatures need to be measured against absolute zero (so kelvins and Rankines work). You’ll note that if TC and TH are far apart, that fraction gets smaller, and the efficiency climbs, if you can make that fraction 0, your efficiency is 1 (i.e., 100 percent). As a practical matter, though, we don’t have a cold reservoir at 0 K, so we can’t reach 100 percent efficiency even in principle. And whatever this number is…our current power plants don’t even achieve that.
But this is why power plants (coal, nuclear, natural gas, even geothermal) run so hot; it’s to raise the temperature of the working gas as high as possible. And this is why geothermal usually sucks as a power source. You have to drill way, way, way down to get to rocks hot enough to be worth the effort. Of course in some places, like Iceland the hot stuff is closer to the surface. Yellowstone has, if anything, even more potential than Iceland does for geothermal power.
And of course with nuclear and fossil fuels, we control the temperature difference and you can bet we run them as hot as we can.
Since a Carnot engine is as efficient as you can get, a lot of engine design since the mid 1820s has been to try to get as close to a Carnot engine as possible. (That was, for example, the initial idea behind the Diesel engine; eventually Diesel had to start making design compromises.)
In every power plant we build (other than geothermal) the heat reservoir is not only not infinite in size, but it’s actually rather small. It would cool off rapidly as the engine cycles, and the heat is transferred out. To keep it hot, we have to burn fuel. So we’re basically burning fuel to create heat to maintain the temperature of the hot reservoir so we can then turn the heat into work.
With geothermal, the reservoir is huge, perhaps even yuge, but still finite; using geothermal does suck heat energy out of the earth and dump it somewhere colder. It’s just that there’s so much of it we’ll never notice.
A typical coal fired plant uses the work extracted from burning the coal (and keeping the hot reservoir hot) to turn a generator. And the efficiency is roughly 30 percent. 30 percent of the energy in the coal becomes electricity. In fact the engineers and designers are overjoyed when they get that number.
But that does mean the other 70 percent is wasted as waste heat…and it can’t be any other way.
Waste heat is inevitable, and it can’t be recovered. Not without reversing the process. We can push heat energy from the cold to hot reservoir by supplying work. If it’s a Carnot engine, we can run the process in reverse, put the work we got out back in, and move all the heat back where it came from. For any real engine, it will take more work to move less heat than we lost creating the work in the first place. In other words, a Carnot engine is a reversible process. But no real heat engine is reversible this way. But if you try, you will move some heat from cold, back to hot.
This is the idea behind a heat pump.
In reality, there are always losses, and (again) there’s no such thing as a Carnot engine. So if, say, you ran your (real) heat engine and got 100 joules of work out of it, and 200 joules of heat ended up in the cold reservoir, you’d probably need to put 150 joules into it to move those 200 joules back to the hot reservoir. Where would you get the extra 50 joules from? Maybe from another engine, which has its own losses and its own inefficiencies, and even more energy flows from its hot reservoir to its cold reservoir.
In fact, there’s no way to completely reverse heat flow from hot to cold. Any attempt actually moves even more heat from hot to cold in the process. Which might be worth it, if you want to cool the inside of your refrigerator. You suck some heat energy out…at the cost of more heat energy being permanently lost somewhere else.
But on net, heat flows one way, one way only: From hot to cold. Even a theoretically perfectly reversible process like a Carnot engine just holds the total flow to zero. Never negative.
This is what was originally behind the concept of entropy. It denotes that fact that as processes go forward, temperatures even out, they get more and more evened out as time goes on, never the other way around.
(If you think you know of a case, like the inside of your refrigerator, recognize that that’s at the cost of more heat flow in the other direction somewhere else. This is why you can’t cool your house by opening the refrigerator door and leaving it open–it dumps the heat through the coils in back…more heat than it sucks out of the inside. Your air conditioner, on the other hand, does work…by dumping the heat (again, more than it removed from your living space) outside your house and making the outside warmer than it was before.)
Entropy is, conceptually, a measure of how much heat energy is irretrievably lost, and it increases. (It can even be quantified and measured…but that’s WAY beyond the scope of this post.) Entropy never shows a net decrease.
(Entropy is also second only to quantum mechanics as a source of pop philosophizing with a scientific/geeky bent to it. More on this in future posts, because the concept of entropy would eventually be greatly extended beyond mere “waste heat” type considerations.)
So what happens at some distant day when all of the energy in the universe has become waste heat and is irretrievably lost? Well, it’s game over.
Thinking in the long term, the big picture is the entire universe is running down. It will ultimately be one big thing of uniform temperature…and though there will be a lot of heat energy out there, none of it will be usable, not just for industry, but for life itself.
The concept of entropy, and the accompanying realization that the universe as a whole must run down, was the dawn of the science of thermodynamics. The true “dismal science.” Economics is sometimes called the dismal science, but it doesn’t hold a candle to thermodynamics when it comes to “dismal.”
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 !!!
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.
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.
Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.
Mozart
Sedate. The adagio (2nd movement) from his clarinet concerto.
And a bit…less sedate. Last movement of his Symphony #41 which is the last one he wrote.
(Don’t be fooled by the fact that there’s a Symphony #42, or 43, or…well up to #55 at least…as I explained last time the numbering isn’t really chronological. To the best of my knowledge he’s got at least 51 symphonies under his belt (though some are disputed), so if we were ever to renumber them, this one would be #51. But we never will renumber them; that would cause confusion for centuries.)
By the way, that sucker ends in a five part fugue. Not easy to write!
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Spot Prices
All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend).
Everything down except for rhodium. Gold seems relatively solidly in the lower half of the 1900s, with the recent spike being history. Platinum, meanwhile, is going back on sale.
JWST Update
Apparently the James Webb Space Telescope imaging team has done such a good job with the initial mirror alignment that most of the instruments are properly focused.
The one exception to this is the MIRI (Mid InfraRed Instrument). Actually, it might be too. But this is the instrument that rounds out the bottom end of the JWST “visible spectrum” (quite a bit lower frequency than yours and mine, even with night vision goggles). In order to operate properly it needs to be cooled by liquid helium (!) which means a temperature of 4 K, or about 7 degrees Fahrenheit above absolute zero, or roughly -453F. There’s a special cryogenic cooling system for this instrument.
(On the temperature of warmth, relative to Hitlary Klinton’s personality, we’re talking about 14 degrees higher. And yes, I know that puts her at -10K which should be physically impossible…)
The other instruments are happy with a relatively balmy 33-44K (-400F to -387F) or so.
So MIRI is slowly being cooled. They didn’t bother doing anything with it before, so (ironically) it’s the toastiest-warmest instrument right now at 53K (-364F), but it is dropping fairly rapidly.
Where Is Webb? NASA/Webb If you click on the temperature plots button you can see what’s going on. And you can read the official statement from NASA here if I wasn’t clear enough:
(Of course sometimes I can write an entire post unpacking their release for non-geeks. But this one seems OK.)
Other Space News
We’ve got a double feature this week. Triple, if you count the JWST news.
First off, the Hubble Space Telescope ain’t dead yet! (Nor should it be so long as we have the will and resources to keep it going…it and JWST will complement each other nicely.) It has spotted a star–a big one, obviously–12.9 billion light years away. It has been named Earendel (the star, not the telescope), an obvious Tolkien reference. Well, it sounds like a name he’d make up; apparently you have to be nerdy enough to have read the Silmarillion to “get” it. The character became a star (literally).
Earendel…brought to us by gravitational lensing.
So what’s the big deal? Well, if the star is that far away…then that light has been travelling for 12.9 billion years just to get to us. Which means the star itself was around only about 800 million years after the Big Bang. (It’s long, long, gone now–it probably blew up over 12.8 billion years ago. Big stars live hard and die young, burning fuel almost as profligately as Al Bore flying to a Global Warming summit.)
One of the goals of the JWST is to be able to see the very first stars that formed; we think those will generally be big honkin’ things that formed about the same time galaxies began to form. And since they will not contain anything other than the original hydrogen and helium that formed when the universe was a few minutes old. Among other things, for reasons I’m quite unclear on, stars made from pure “primordial” hydrogen and helium can likely be much larger than stars today can be. (We won’t know for sure until we can see them.)
Earendel is not one of these first stars, but it probably only had a couple of generations of predecessors. It’s certainly closer than we’ve come before. To do any better, we’ll need the (wait for it…) James Webb Space Telescope.
Meanwhile, if I understand correctly, the only reason we saw this star at all is it happens to lie in a place that’s gravitationally lensed; in other words, the curvature of space between us and Earendel is acting like a magnifying glass.
The other bit of space news is more on the “practical” side.
This is the most powerful rocket ever built. Even beating out the Saturn V which put Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and ten others on the moon over fifty years ago.
This rocket will be capable of putting 27 metric tons (spelled “tonnes”) of stuff in “Trans Lunar Injection” (in other words, to send 27 tonnes to the moon). Future versions will send over 46 metric tons Moonward. (The Saturn V did 43.5 tonnes at its best.)
This rocket will develop 8,800,000 lbf of thrust (39,000 kN) of thrust (versus Saturn V 7,891,000 lbf (35,100 kN)). The later versions will develop 9.2 million lbf of thrust. (lbf = “pounds force”, in other words a pound regarded as a unit of force, not a unit of mass…the English system is a hot mess when it comes to weight, force, and mass.)
The center stack (tan/brown) consists of liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen stages, similar to the shuttle. In fact it’s almost as if they simply stuck shuttle engines on the bottom of a shuttle external tank. (It’s more complicated than that, though.) The two boosters (HA!!! I can use that word for once without it being about f***ing slab jabs) are like the solid rocket boosters from the shuttle, only longer (an additional segment added); and they won’t be recovered after use.
Yes. It’s a moon rocket. An actual moon rocket, and is sitting on the launch pad. It’s either being fueled or IS fueled, today, and there’s a countdown in progress for a launch.
But that launch will be cancelled mere seconds before ignition.
This is a “wet dress rehearsal,” and it’s “wet” because that’s NASA/space travel slang for “with full fuel tanks.” Yes, they’re going to fuel it up, not launch it, drain the fuel, then take it back to the tall building where they assemble rockets (creatively named the Vehicle Assembly Building) and look it over to see if there are any problems. Because if there are problems caused by just filling the gas tank, you’d better address them before you launch the sucker for real!
Sometime in the future, there will be a real launch of an unmanned capsule. (Best guess, June.) Eventually…sometime around 2026…we go back to the moon. I’m going to repeat that, because the wokester Left is going to hang so much PC/CRT baggage on it that we risk losing sight of what’s important here while we vomit our lunches:
WE GO BACK TO THE MOON.
T2 Temperature
We talked about heat, as a form of energy last time around. Our discussion relied on the concept of temperature, which we’re all pretty comfortable with. It is, after all, part-and-parcel of any discussion of the weather, which nearly everyone likes to talk about and even plan their lives around.
But temperature is not heat. If it were, two objects at the same temperature would contain the same amount of heat.
“Wait, Steve,” you might say, “Of course a big boulder will contain more heat than a pebble, even at the same temperature, because it’s bigger!”
OK, not a bad thought. But as it turns out, two different substances, of the same mass, at the same temperature, will still contain different amounts of heat. In fact we can even hang a number on every substance, defining how much heat must be added to it to raise the temperature one degree (once we correct for the mass of the thing); that’s the specific heat. Water’s is unusually high, much higher than iron’s. (How we figured that out was largely covered last time.)
A very mundane observation comes into play here: If you put a hot object next to a cold one, or better yet, dunk one into a pool of the other, like hot iron into cold water, the iron cools off, and the water heats up. The process continues until everything is the same temperature. Then we’ve reached a state called “thermodynamic equilibrium” where heat is no longer flowing from the iron to the water. So temperature has to do with thermodynamic equilibrium.
Another clue came when chemists/physicists (pick either one: depending on where you draw the line between the two) investigated the behavior of gases in the 1600s through the early 1800s.
For instance, they found out that you could compress a gas, say to half its original volume, and it would both heat up and increase in pressure. You could then wait for the heat to dissipate (i.e., for thermodynamic equilibrium) and note the pressure was exactly twice as high as it was before the compression. (This is Boyle’s Law, from 1662.)
If you kept the gas at a constant pressure, heating it up would make it expand, cooling it would make it contract (this is Charles’s Law, from the 1780s).
And from 1800-1802, Gay-Lussac’s Law: Heating the gas while holding the volume constant would also increase the pressure. Cooling it would decrease the pressure.
But in order to go further with this, we need to be able to measure temperature. Here in the United States, we still use the Fahrenheit scale. It’s named after Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686-1736), who developed a 100 degree scale, with 0 being the temperature of a particular kind of freezing brine, and 100 being tied to human body temperature. He did note that pure water froze at 32 on his scale. Of course hot water would bust the upper bound of this; by the 20th century the scale had been defined by setting the temperature of boiling water 180 degrees above freezing point, or 212 °F. (I must add here that this is the boiling point at sea level; it turns out to depend on air pressure.)
Of course when the metric system came along and defined a scale called centigrade (since renamed to Celsius after Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius (1701-1744) who had had a similar idea in 1742), the tie to water became even stronger with 0 set to the temperature of ice water, and 100 set to the boiling point. (That hundredth of the difference is where the name “centigrade” came from, from Latin for “hundred steps.”) You can measure temperature on this scale, or talk about the difference between two different temperatures.
Now that last sentence is kind of odd; I seem to be pointing out the obvious there.
But there is a difference between Celsius being used to measure temperature, and (say) the meter used to measure length. For length, no matter what you do, you’re not going to find an object of negative length. But you can, apparently, measure the temperature of something and come up with a negative number. And because the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales have different starting points, an object can have a positive temperature in Fahrenheit and a negative one in Celsius.
Not at all like length, or mass, where it’s pretty easy to agree on where to set zero and the only thing you have to worry about is the size of the unit. Two different systems (English and Metric) both agree on what zero length means; it’s just the size of a foot versus a meter that’s at issue. You can compare the size of a Fahrenheit degree with a Celsius degree (and find that it’s 5/9ths the size of the other), but that’s not all you need.
Imagine measuring the distance from Washington D.C. to New York City, with a zero point in Baltimore. You’d have to travel a few dozen miles from DC to even get up to zero distance. Now that’s weird, even post general relativity. And honestly, it’d be a pain to plan trips, make maps or do anything like that if we had to deal with such a mess…especially if, when doing it in metric, the zero point was in Philadelphia instead!
But that’s the way the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales work. The zero point isn’t at anything that might be considered a real zero, because you can get below that point. (That’s why you have to multiply by 5/9ths and then subtract 32…or was it subtracting 32 then multiplying by 5/9ths…or adding and multiplying by 9/5ths…or whatevertheheck. [OK, I’m clowning here. To get from Fahrenheit to Celsius, you subtract 32…to get a number that is zero when water freezes; it’s the number of Fahrenheit degrees above freezing. Now your number has the same starting point as Celsius, and you can multiply by 5/9ths to account for Celsius having “bigger” degrees. Invert the process to go the other way: multiply °C by 9/5ths, then add 32.])
So now lets return to our gas laws. Gay-Lussac’s law says heating a gas increases its pressure (keeping the volume constant). And Charles’s law says heating a gas makes it expand (keeping the pressure constant). In both cases, how much?
It’s not a neat proportion like Boyle’s law, where you can halve the volume and double the pressure (holding temperature constant). Heating a gas from 20 to 40 °F doesn’t double its volume (if pressure is constant), or its pressure (if volume is constant). And it doesn’t work going from 20-40 °C either (in fact it works a bit worse).
Aaah, but remember, temperature measurement is goofy! Zero seems to be picked at some unnatural point. Boyle’s law works as a proportion because neither quantity is temperature. The other two don’t work as a proportion.
Actually, as it happens, if you measure temperature relative to -273.15 °C or -459.67 °F, instead of the scales’ zero points, it does work. Doubling the temperature measured from this point does indeed double the volume (or the pressure).
But working in reverse, if you were to cool your gas to -273.15 °C, then you’re at zero on the adjusted scale, and the volume of your gas should be zero. And so should its pressure.
It can’t shrink any more than that, and it can’t exert less pressure than that. So have we found an absolute lowest temperature?
It turns out we have. And so the modern metric unit…the real one, not the one people outside of the US see in their weather reports, which is still Celsius, is the kelvin, named after William Thomson (1824-1907). [Not a typo. Yes, “kelvin” and “Thomson” are distinctly different words, but he was named first Baron Kelvin by Queen Victoria in 1892 and used that name henceforth. In fact, he was the first scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords.]
Kelvin has the same degree size as Celsius. And it starts at absolute zero. So we don’t even bother with the word “degrees.” We don’t say “50 degrees kelvin” (unless by mistake), we just say “50 kelvins” or “50K.” And we skip the cute little circle: °. Water melts at 273.15 K, and boils a hundred kelvins higher, 373.15 K. And physicists think in kelvins. And so, especially, do astrophysicists, who will always quote the temperature of an astronomical body in kelvins. (If it’s something hot, they’ll just double that to give the science “journalists” Fahrenheit…it’s fairly close, and let’s face it, you and I don’t really know what 10,000F means other than “damned hot.”)
There is a similar scale using the Fahrenheit degree. It’s called the Rankine scale, symbolized with °R or °Ra. (And we’re back to the little circle.) It was proposed by Macquorne Rankin, using similar logic with the kelvin scale. But this is something you can safely forget about, as even English and American scientists and engineers stick with kelvins and no one but a scientist or an engineer cares about absolute zero.
As for the gases? Well, no they don’t shrink to zero size at 0K. Because long before then they liquefy or solidify, because the molecules of which they are made have a size greater than zero. Helium, it turns out, remains a gas all the way down to a bit over 4K. So the gas laws are an idealization, they work pretty well when the gases aren’t close to condensing or freezing.
The three laws I’ve mentioned so far can be combined into one rule. In fact, even better than that. If you work with moles of gas (i.e., accounting for the differences in molecular weight), you can bring in Avogadro’s law, which states that one mole of gas, at standard temperature (25 C) and pressure (one atmosphere) occupies 22.4 liters. So you can, if your name is name is Benoit Paul Emile Clapeyron and it’s 1834, tie all these other laws to that (double the temperature and leave pressure constant and that mole occupies 44.8 liters; leave the volume constant and the pressure doubles to 2 atmospheres, etc.) and write:
PV = nRT
Where P is pressure, V is volume, T is temperature, n is the number of moles…and R is the fudge-factor constant. Without it, the law becomes a bunch of “is proportional to” statements, much messier to deal with and harder to nail down.
I once had to pressure-test gas piping, in winter. I’d pump a bunch of air into the line, measure the pressure and seal it off. Then come back a day later and hope the pressure had stayed the same.
But this was winter, in Colorado, and the temperature can change a LOT, day to day. Which would mean the pressure would change even without a leak. It could go up (which would confuse the ignorant and make him suspect a prankster was pumping more air into the system), or down (which would make him think he’d messed up the pipe work). But I knew better. Volume, of course was constant, so was simply dealing with Gay Lussac’s law. I’d convert the temperature to the absolute scale (for this I did use Rankines since I was starting with Fahrenheit), and see if the pressure I had initially measured dropped or rose to what it should be. (And of course, there really were a number of leaks…and it didn’t help that the pressure gauge was one of them!) But at least once I got a new pressure gauge and fixed my work, I knew it was good and didn’t get thrown off by the 30 degree temperature one day dropping to -10 the next day (which is enough to reduce the pressure almost seven percent all by itself).
Well, there are two possible directions to go from here…and I’ll take them both. See you next time.
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 !!!
When I was a kid, I got nicknamed “Bald Eagle” because I actually was getting notably thin “up there.” Of course today “Bald Eagle” might be a cool nickname, but in junior high school, it definitely was not a cool thing.
Fast forward to today, and now here I am over twenty years older than you are, and even in spite of that poor start, I have better hair than you do.
And I am not a piss-guzzling, shit-gobbling communist “journalist” (what a sick joke) either.
On both accounts you must absolutely hate looking into the mirror.
And Oh By The Way probably more people read my posts than watch you bloviate on air. And yes, I know your ratings dropped again. One would think there’s be a limit to that…you can’t drop below zero, can you?
RINOs an Endangered Species? If Only!
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 Tuesday’s 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?
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. (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.)
Mozart
Mozart wrote two distinct pieces called “Symphonia Concertante), both in E flat major.
The more famous of the two (at least, judging from youtube hits) is K 364. Three movements, Allegro Maestso to start, 2nd movement (Andante) at 13:06, 3rd movement (Presto) at 23:47.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBTVWI6-eCc
But I think I like this one better, to be honest. KV 297b, also in three movements: Allegro at the start, Adagio at 13:53 and Andantino con Variazione at 22:37. This one has considerably more in the way of woodwinds to add color.
PGMs going down and the “traditional” precious metals going up indicates to me that we are expecting inflation and a recession. Or it will tell me that if the pattern holds for more than a few weeks (so far, one week and counting). Why? Because the platinum group metals are valuable primarily for their industrial uses, so they will tend to go down if industry expects to be in trouble, while gold and silver tend to be places people go when they’re worried–perhaps because industry is expected to be in trouble. Or perhaps because they think the dollar will suddenly approach its intrinsic value.
On the other hand, inflation tends to show up as rising stock and gold prices. A company’s nominal value goes up due to inflation, just like gold’s value will.
This market bears watching in light of recent world events, and recent couldn’t-be-worse-if-they-tried-which-makes-sense-because-they’re-probably-trying economic policies.
James Webb Space Telescope Update
Multi-instrument alignment continues. There are no less than five instruments inside the telescope, behind the mirror, and the mirrors have to be able to focus light accurately on all five instruments’ sensors.
One of the instruments is MIRI (Mid InfraRed Instrument) and it requires temperatures even colder than the telescope is getting just from being shielded from the sun. This is because it’s sensitive to longer wavelengths of infrared, wavelengths given off as black body radiation from even things quite a bit colder than the other instruments. It actually gets cryogenically cooled even more with liquid helium. But right now it is actually the warmest instrument of the five, at 94 K (-291 F). It needs to get down to 7 K (-447 F), which is still about 18 degrees K warmer than Hitlary Clinton’s personality.
T1: Heat
Finally, I have found some time to work on a “science” post. I’m going to cover a topic I skipped over the first time around through the physics series, because initially my main goal was eventually to talk about neutrinos. And every once in a while I regretted it. So if there’s a logical place for this in the old sequence, it’s somewhere in between a pair of the single-digit posts. But there’s more than one part to this, so I wouldn’t go renumbering things just yet! For now I’m going to treat these as a separate series, with numbers T1, T2 and so on. (T for “Thermal.”)
The issue of heat is important in physics, and chemistry, and biology. I’ve talked about “black body radiation” being dependent on temperature before.
(To refresh memories: The hotter something is the brighter it glows, and the higher the wavelengths it glows at; if if gets hot enough it glows in visible light, if it gets even hotter, it glows in ultraviolet light or (really, really hot) x rays or even gamma rays. Many stars visible in the night sky glow in primarily blue wavelengths, these are basically the hottest objects we have everyday (well, everynight) experience with, at 10,000 K or even higher. Fortunately they’re quite far away so they don’t barbecue us.)
But I never really talked that much about heat as such, just this one side effect that’s very important to astronomy since it can tell us a lot about a star.
If you remember all the way back to Newtonian dynamics (parts 1, 2, 3, and 5), it describes a view of the way the world works which at first seems totally at odds with the way things actually work.
Newton’s first law of motion is: A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, unless acted upon by a force.
But we see moving objects come to a halt all the time with no obvious “push” being given to them.
Even billiard balls stop eventually, and those are the inevitable example given for working with momentum. Or air hockey pucks. Or cars on ice. (I have occasionally found myself in a pickup game of two-ton-puck road hockey. Not fun. The only way to win is not to play at all.)
Outer space is actually the only place this seems to be true; objects in orbit will stay that way forever, at least when you can ignore third-body influences. (Which, even when dealing with the planets of our solar system orbiting the sun, you really can’t, not in the long term.)
This is probably why it took us so long to get to the point where Newton could do his thing. For one thing we had to figure out how, in fact, the planets moved, so that Newton could explain that with universal gravitation (thank you Johannes Kepler for the setup). And Galileo had to do all of his experiments with kinetics. Before this the theory was objects would be given an initial impeteus, which would then bleed away. Then, they might want to return “home.” Smoke’s home was Up There; a cannonball’s home was Down Here (and most things were like that). Fire a cannonball, and you give it an impetus. It travels in a straight line as the impetus bleeds away, finally halts, then drops straight down. That was the theory anyway. (Actual artillerymen knew this was bullshit, though, even before Galileo showed that cannonballs moved in parabolas. And then Newton showed that no, they were really moving suborbitally, in very small sections of a very eccentric ellipse–effectively indistinguishable at the ranges cannonballs could be fired in the 1600s. By the way, high school and college freshman physics teaches the parabola, not the ellipse.)
But in fact Newtonian dynamics works very well. The problem is, in order to teach it effectively, you have to pretend, at first, that friction doesn’t exist, because friction, though covered quite well in Newtonian dynamics, makes the story problems more complicated. Only after you master frictionless behavior do they throw friction at you and expect you to account for it as well.
Friction is a force from the air, or the ground, or something touching the object in question, and is both proportional to the speed of the object, and opposite in direction.
OK, I’d better unpack that with an example. Imagine you’re pushing a heavy box across the floor. And you’re able to shove the sucker at 1 MPH. It requires a certain continuous force to keep the box moving at a mile per hour. It would require twice as much force to move it at two miles per hour, half as much to move it at half a mile per hour. Since the box is not speeding up, the net force on it must be zero (by Newton’s second law of motion, good old F = ma). But you’re applying a force. But it’s countered–precisely–by the friction between the box and the floor, which is in the exact opposite direction. Now if you double how hard you’re pushing on the box, it speeds up, but eventually settles in on moving twice as fast as it was before, without moving, so your push and the friction are again in balance. So the force from friction is proportional to how fast the box is moving. Hopefully you can go back and reread the previous paragraph and it will make more sense to you.
OK, so Newtonian dynamics can, with added difficulty, account for friction. It’s a variable force working “against” us pushing that box across the floor. (And to save effort, we get a dolly, which reduces the friction. Our salvador is dolly.)
But we’re not done yet. Remember how momentum is supposed to be conserved? When the box quits moving because we stopped pushing, where does that momentum go? Well, let’s suppose we are pushing the box eastward, so our applied force is eastward. The force of friction on the box is westward, then. But that force of friction must also be acting on the floor, which is attached (ultimately) to the Earth, and the friction force acting on the floor must be pointed eastward (because of Newton’s third law, the one about every action bringing about an equal but opposite reaction). So the earth is getting pushed on by the friction. But it’s roughly a godzillion times more massive so you can’t see the effect. The effect (as invisible as it is) disappears when the box stops moving, because at that point the friction force on the box, and therefore on the floor-attached-to-the-earth, is zero.
And one more thing…the one that’s actually where I’m going with this (took my sweet time about it, didn’t I?). Isn’t energy conserved?
The box, while moving, has kinetic energy. Then it stops. This doesn’t seem like much of a problem, though, does it? After all we routinely swap kinetic and potential energy, pretty much any time gravitation comes into play, and orbiting bodies do this all the time unless they’re in perfectly circular orbits.
Indeed. We are free to swap potential for kinetic energy. But we are pushing the box across a level floor and it still comes to a stop when we quit pushing! The very definition of “level” is a surface where the potential energy is the same no matter where you are standing on it* so the kinetic energy cannot be getting turned into potential energy.
(*[skip this if you don’t want your mind blown] Incidentally, you can get some very weird shapes that are “level.” A non-rotating planet would have a spherical surface, all at the same potential but level, a rotating planet will have that surface be an oblate spheroid (i.e., one a bit squashed looking), with the equator being the maximum bulge, but then you have the moon and sun pulling on the earth which raises tides and makes the “level” surface a bit more complicated (and ever-changing). That level surface nevertheless looks flat to us, because it’s so doggone big.
You could conceivably have a double planet orbiting so closely that the two planets would each form a teardrop shape, with the points of the teardrops each pointing at the opposing planet. If they were close enough together they might even touch. And that would be “level” ground to the people on those planets, though the force of gravity would be zero where the teardrops touch.)
If energy is conserved, and at everyday scales it most certainly is, the kinetic energy of the box must be going somewhere, and it is: it becomes heat energy.
Not only that, but since you were pushing the box against an opposing force (before you quit and let it stop) across some distance, you were doing work, and that too is a form of energy, and it too all became heat energy.
I’m not quite sure when heat was recognized as a form of energy, as opposed to the older theory that it was a fluid named calor that flowed from one object to another (sort of a reverse-phlogiston; or rather phlogistion was a reverse of calor). Antoine Lavoisier, who late in the 1700s dismantled phlogiston theory and came up with a largely correct but incomplete list of elements, actually considered calor (as well as light) an element.
Chemists were able to determine that different substances required different amounts of heat energy to change their temperatures. The amount of heat energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water one degree Celsius (or one Kelvin) was defined as the calorie (note a small c). A thousand calories was a kilocalorie, enough energy to raise the temperature of a kilogram of water one degree C or one K. But sometimes a kilocalorie is written as “Calorie” with a capital C. (It is this Calorie-with-a-big-C that you contend with when you are dieting.)
A substance like iron, on the other hand, could heat up a degree per gram with a lot less energy than a calorie. In fact, it only takes 0.107 calories to do this.
How do you determine this? In principle, you can drop a one gram lump of iron at, say, 20C into a gram of water at 21C, then wait for the heat to transfer. Once everything is at a uniform temperature, you can measure the temperature, and notice that the water barely cooled down at all, but the iron nearly reached 21C. So the water dropped a little bit in temperature but the iron heated up quite a bit. If the energy is constant, the iron heated up a lot more (with the same amount of energy) than the water cooled off (by giving up that energy); thus iron takes less energy to heat up than water. Obviously, you can alter the mass of the water or the iron, or the temperature difference, and things change in proportion; you can do the math and figure that iron’s heat capacity is 0.107 calories per gram, per degree K, if water’s is 1 calorie per gram, per degree K (which it is, by definition).
Water’s heat capacity happens to be one of the highest. Iron’s is more typical.
It turns out that experiment is difficult to run precisely because, of course, the heat leaks out of the container of water while you’re trying to do it. Still, you can try to control this by putting the water in a thermos…a very good thermos, or something better than that. (These sorts of painstaking efforts to eliminate outside effects are why science is harder to do than it is to write about…or read about, no matter how badly I write these posts.)
On to James Prescott Joule, 1818-1889, who came up with the first definitive way to relate heat energy to mechanical energy. Calories were convenient for chemists working with water and other substances, but just how big is a calorie compared to other forms of energy?
In the metric system, we’ve built up our units of force, and so on, from meters, kilograms and seconds (MKS, also known as the international system or SI (its French initials)); there’s also an older system that worked off centimeters, grams, and seconds (CGS). Thus the Newton, the unit of force, is one kilogram-meter-per-second-squared (kg•m/s2 or, preferred by pedants, kg•m•s-2). Work is a force applied by a distance, so the natural units for this ought to be Newtons times meters, N•m, or substituting in, kg•m2•s-2. And indeed that’s what energy’s metric unit is. (It even has a convenient name, but I’ll hold off on telling you what it is for now.)
So can we somehow equate the calorie with this natural metric unit of energy? How many metric units of energy does it take to make up a calorie?
Joule was able to do a known amount of mechanical work on water and measure its temperature change, thus he could determine how much mechanical work it would take to raise the temperature of a gram of water one degree C, and so he knew how many natural metric units were equivalent to a calorie. In fact, he ran multiple different experiments, including some using electricity to heat the water, and (the most direct), the weight of an object hung from a pulley to turn blades in the water to stir it and thereby heat it up. He always got close to the same answer, working in English units (foot pounds of energy).
Over the years we’ve refined his work and have a very precise answer (and we express it in metric.) And the answer is: 4.184 natural metric units equals one (small c) calorie.
And because of Joule’s work on this and related topics, we gave that natural metric unit of energy the name joule, symbol J.
We have also named the metric unit of power, which is to say, the rate at which energy is delivered, the watt, yes the same “watt” you see on light bulbs and microwave ovens. (It’s a metric unit as are volts and amperes and ohms…which, if you’re anti-metric, ought to chap your hindquarters.) One watt is one joule per second, or one joule is the energy delivered by one watt, for one second. A kilowatt-hour (which you might be more familiar with since electric companies like to use them to bill you) is one kilowatt (a thousand watts), delivered for an hour, which is 3600 seconds, so a kilowatt-hour is 1000 x 3600 = 3,600,000 watt-seconds or joules. (Of course, it could also be 500 watts, delivered for two hours…or 2000 watts delivered for half an hour…anything that will multiply out to 3,600,000 watt-seconds.)
Returning to heat, 4.184 joules equals one calorie, but this isn’t the usual number you’ll see. Remember, a calorie is the amount of heat necessary to raise the temperature of one gram of liquid water 1 kelvin (or one degree C), but today, almost everyone works in MKS (meters, kilograms, seconds, newtons, joules, watts), not CGS (centimeters, grams, seconds, dynes, ergs…), so kilograms of water are preferred over grams and you’ll generally see that 4,184 joules equals one kilocalorie (abbreviated kcal preferentially, because “big C” versus “little C” gets confusing especially when talking). Or better yet, 4.184 kJ (kilojoules) = 1 kilocalorie.
(But note, the kilocalorie is still just called a “calorie” when we’re talking about food; the author of your book on the new fad kumquat diet may bother to capitalize it…and may not.)
Chemists still use kcals and calories, because it’s convenient for them, but offically, they are neither base units (kilograms, meters, seconds, kelvins, amperes), derived units (newtons, watts, joules, coulombs), nor even the list of non-SI units mentioned in the SI (like the astronomical unit, electron volt, or minute (of time or arc, take your pick).
I’ve talked a lot about temperature, as if we knew what it means. And everyone thinks we do because we measure it all the time, for weather and cooking and refrigeration. But our everyday understanding is very incomplete. (It’s certainly not the same thing as “heat” because different amounts of heat energy change temperatures by different amounts depending on the materials being heated.)
Physicists, of course, looked into this as well and gained a deeper understanding. And with that cliffhanger, I’ll stop here. Next time we move onwards.
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!!!
If anyone ends up in the cell right next to him, 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 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 !!!
Or rather, “Hey Chinese Communist Party and your entire array of servitors, ass-wipers, and fellators!”
You’re not even worth my time this week. When you decide to act like civilized people, maybe I’ll give you a lesson or two in how non-barbarians behave.
Hey BiteMe! (Or, Whoever Has Their Hand Rammed Up That Putrefying Meat Puppet’s Ass)
[Language warning]
You and yours have caused a lot of injury. Literal injury with your war on people who don’t want to take an untested vaccine. When people die in an emergency room because a hospital won’t admit them because they haven’t had their clot shot, that’s a crime.
I’m going to address here the insult on top of the injury, because I am among the insulted. I still have my health but apparently you want me to live under the 8th Street Bridge (which actually isn’t on 8th Street, but whatever, that’s what the I-25 overpass over Cimarron is called), so maybe if you have your way that won’t be true for long. Dreadful time of year to become homeless.
No, you’re just trying to make me unemployed, because I won’t take your fucking shots.
Well, that threat is NOT going to work. I. Won’t. Take. Your. Fucking. Shots.
And it looks like enough people agree, that you’re having to back down, you worthless asswipe.
You’re LOSING.
You LOSER.
You Chinese-bought ratfucking traitor.
I would love to see you die an agonizing, humiliating death. (This isn’t a threat, because I am not threatening to cause that death. I am just announcing my intention to party if it happens.) It would be just recompense for the way you’re killing America…and millions of Americans.
His Fraudulency
Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.
One can hope that all is not as it seems.
I’d love to feast on that crow.
(I’d like to add, I find it entirely plausible, even likely, that His Fraudulency is also His Figureheadedness. (Apparently that wasn’t a word; it got a red underline. Well it is now.) Where I differ with the hopium addicts is on the subject of who is really in charge. It ain’t anyone we like.)
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Platinum is at exactly the same price it was five weeks ago. When I copied the post…it already said $1,033.00 there.)
Everything except rhodium went down over the past week; actually it was a good deal lower on Wednesday, and higher on Thursday, than it is today. Which implies to me these metals are settling into a new trading range with (for example) gold trading at a bit over $1900 typically.
Which is still a good deal higher than where it was before, having trouble staying over $1800.00, though it’s not dancing around the $2000 dollar mark like it was a week and a half ago.
Expect continued inflation and for shortages to not just continue but get worse.
James Webb Space Telescope Update
This week the James Webb Space Telescope reached another milestone in getting the eighteen separate primary mirror segments to work as one. They were able to image a star and dozens of distant galaxies behind the star. (I posted about this on Thursday.) Now the challenge is getting that focus to be true for all of the different science instruments on the spacecraft, not just the one they’ve been using.
Apparently the optics are meeting or exceeding all expectations. Once the mirror alignment is fully complete and the instruments are all calibrated, the interesting stuff begins. Images from this thing should be vastly better than Hubble…but it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison since Hubble and JWST look at different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. JWST can’t even see green, blue, violet and ultraviolet light, though it can see very deeply into the infrared–which Hubble can’t do.
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 !!!
The Chinese Should Think Before Wiping Us Out As Sometimes They Need Us To Solve Their Problems For Them
Okay you knuckledragging ChiComs trying to take us down…here’s a history lesson for you.
For millennia, you had to suffer from this:
Yep. Steppe Nomads. They laid waste to your country, burned, raped and pillaged (but not in that order–they’re smarter than you are) for century after century.
You know who figured out how to take them on and win? The Russians.
Not you, the Russians. And it took them less than two centuries. And Oh By The Way they were among the most backward cultures in Europe at the time.
You couldn’t invent an alphabet, you couldn’t take care of barbarians on horseback, and you think you can take this board down?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! We’re laughing at you, you knuckledragging dehumanized communists…worshipers of a mass-murderer who killed sixty million people!
I mean, you still think Communism is a good idea even after having lived through it!
By my reckoning that makes you orders of magnitude more stupid than AOC, and that takes serious effort.
His Fraudulency
Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, 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.
“No Chemicals”
A detailed analysis of the contents of His Fraudulency’s skull was performed.
Absolutely no chemicals found!
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.
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).
James Webb Space Telescope Update
Nothing much reported this week. Mirror alignment continues, and the blog posted an article on how JWST will use spectroscopy to study distant galaxies: https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/03/10/webb-will-use-spectroscopy-to-study-composition-of-distant-galaxies/
Of course, those distant galaxies are also younger galaxies because we are seeing them by light that left them billions of years ago. One of the goals of JWST is to be able to see far enough away/far enough back in time, to see galaxies actually forming for the first time.
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.
After last week’s hundred dollar gain, gold and silver continued their climb this week, hitting $2000 on Monday…all with a backdrop of rumors that Russia is about to go onto a gold standard.
Back on February 5, gold was at $1809.40, silver at $22.60, platinum $1033, palladium $2378, and rhodium, $17,800. How things have changed! If you bought and held way back when…this is what you’ve been holding for.
Gold then spiked all the way up to $2050, but then was shoved back down to roughly 2000 on Thursday, before closing at 1992.1 Friday. Other precious metals had similar behavior.
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 !!!
SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom
You knuckle-dragging barbarians are still trying to muck with this site, so I’ll just repeat what I said last time.
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…
Loop it if you like; I will wait.
Richly deserved.
Justice Must Be Done
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
If You Absolutely HATE Your Car
Watch this.
And be glad you aren’t in East Germany. Which, OBTW was the garden spot of the Warsaw Pact.
On the other hand, if you lived in the Soviet Union, you could get a luxury vehicle:
Over here in the 21st Century, in the first world, we have our First World problems, like electric vehicles with a bit TOO much get up and go:
Gold moved up again, as of Thursday night it was around $1,940 again. And instead of being forced down again on Friday…well, it’s getting close to the milestone $2K.
I’m not sure, but palladium might now be at an all-time high. It has been going up faster than gold has been, that’s for sure. It has gone up about 25% just in the last week.
James Webb Space Telescope Update
Coarse phasing, described last week, continues.
Meanwhile the Near InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument is being checked out, as described here: https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/03/03/checking-out-the-mechanisms-in-webbs-nirspec-instrument/
Not a whole lot more to say unless they post something new on Friday.
Fuck Joe Biden
Biden, 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.)
Incidentally, I’m writing this on Friday. This morning I saw a full-sized pickup truck in the oncoming left turn lane with a forest of flags in the bed. Once he turned and drove left-to-right in front of me, I could see two American flags near the cab, and SIX “Let’s Go Brandon” flags near the tailgate. That was unusual; usually there’s a mix of FJB (only not abbreviated) and “Trump Won” and “Trump 2024” flags when someone does this.
I haven’t seen such a display in a few weeks, by the way. Even the guy at the office complex where I work with the FJB flag on his pickup seems to have removed it (or doesn’t work there any more–trucks all look alike to me from the back, and all crossovers look like cockroaches).
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 !!!
