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

Speaker Johnson
Pinging you on January 6 Tapes

Just a friendly reminder Speaker Johnson. You’re doing some good things–or at least trying in the case of the budget–but this is the most important thing out there still hanging. One initial block released with the promise of more…and?

We have American patriots being held without bail and without trial, and the tapes almost certainly contain exculpatory evidence. (And if they don’t, and we’re all just yelling in an echo chamber over here, we need to know that too. And there’s only one way to know.)

Either we have a weaponized, corrupt government or we have a lot of internet charlatans. Let’s expose whatever it is. (I’m betting it’s the corrupt weaponized government, but if I am wrong, I’d like to see proof.)

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.

Small Government?

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

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

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

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

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

Political Science In Summation

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

His Truth?

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

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

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

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

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

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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.)

(Paper) Spot Prices

Kitco “Ask” prices. Last week:

Gold $2,578.70
Silver $30.80
Platinum $1,004.00
Palladium $1,092.00
Rhodium $5,100.00
FRNSI* 123.745-
Gold:Silver 83.724+

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

Gold $2,622.40
Silver $31.24
Platinum $986.00
Palladium $1090.00
Rhodium $5,075.00
FRNSI* 125.859-
Gold:Silver 83.944-

Gold has now busted $2600. Silver is going up but not quite enough to keep up with gold (it’s worth slightly less in terms of gold than it was last week). Palladium jumped up then back down this last week, ending virtually unchanged. But platinum is sliding. Rhodium is essentially stable.

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

Piling On

Just an Observation

The latest flerfer complaint is that the Final Experiment (the trip to Antarctica to observe the 24 hour sun) won’t count because it’s not an experiment but rather an observation. WTF? Anyhow, in this video, among many things of interest such as the fact that other people will be taking sun pictures that day in order to test the effect of variables (which would make it an experiment!), it’s shown what a bunch of lying hypocrite charlatans they are for trying to make this argument:

And this one from a year ago where Dave McKeegan tells of plotting the positions of celestial bodies over the Earth’s surface…then translating that to the pizzaworld model.

Antarctica

Oh, and spring (for Antarctica; it will be fall for Northern Hemisphere folks) starts at 06:43 Mountain Time on the 22nd (Sunday). This is the moment when the sun, which appears to travel along the zodiac line (even though we are orbiting it), appears to cross the celestial equator, northbound. [The celestial equator is just our own equatorial plane, projected out to infinity in the sky. The zodiac is the plane of the Earth’s orbit about the sun, projected out to infinity in the sky.] That should be the nominal instant when more than half of the sun becomes visible at Amundsen-Scott station at the south pole. (However, refraction makes the sun appear higher in the sky than it otherwise would, when it’s near the horizon, so sunrise will be somewhat earlier than this for them–and has probably already happened.)

So wish the 40 or so people who have spent the last six months wintering over there in either twilight or complete darkness a good “morning”!

Oh, wait…this doesn’t exist, does it? It’s all CGI!

In which case let’s get our money’s worth out of all that CGI, since we paid for it with our tax money. Here are a couple of videos which are tours of the station. First, upstairs.

Downstairs:

And there’s a part three (out of 2?) for the bits buried under the ice (such as vehicle maintenance, the generators, the logistics area, and so on); largely stuff that can get cold.

Incidentally there are three generators, that rotate, one is generally undergoing maintenance, one is a backup, the other is the active one. If all three crap out, there’s another generator that might manage to keep one part of the the station above freezing, but were this sort of failure to happen during winter over, they’re basically dead. It’d be easier to get people off the ISS then out of Amundsen Scott during winter.

And here’s one for the Ice Cube neutrino observatory (you’ll recall discussions of the neutrino in my Sun article a couple of weeks ago as well as during the physics series, part 20):

Anyhow, I hope you all enjoyed all that expensive taxpayer-funded CGI.

The 800 lb Gorilla

Jupiter, as photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2017. A true-color image.

The single most important fact about Jupiter is that it is BIG. How big? Well let’s compare it to Earth and the Moon:

By size it’s 11 times the width of Earth; by mass it’s 318 Earths. That’s over 2 1/2 times the mass of all other planets, asteroids, comets, etc., put together. Or to think of it another way, you can characterize the solar system as consisting of the Sun, Jupiter, and miscellaneous debris. (And even with that Jupiter is barely 1/1000 the mass of the Sun.) To put it in absolute terms, Jupiter is roughly 88,000 miles across; and even the Great Red Spot–which is storm in the atmosphere–would swallow the Earth.

Ironically, if Jupiter were somehow even more massive, it probably wouldn’t be much larger. The gas would simply compress more to make up for it. The maximum diameter might be a bit more than what we see, but not much. If it were 75 times more massive, it would actually be compressed enough to start fusing hydrogen…and it might actually be the size of Saturn; considerably smaller than its actual diameter.

Jupiter has four major moons, three of them larger than our Moon, plus another 91 smaller moons, generally too small to be forced into a spherical shape. Those four big moons are at least as interesting as Jupiter itself and will be covered in a different article.

Jupiter orbits at about 5.2 AU from the Sun (and I’m not going to explain AUs yet again). That makes its “year”–the time to make one orbit about the Sun–11.86 Earth years. It has almost no axial tilt, so it doesn’t have seasons to speak of.

This is significant: It’s beyond the “snow line.” This means that a lot of things that would normally be vapor inside the line–like water–are solid outside. Hydrogen and helium, the major constituents of the matter that formed the solar system, are considerably cooler and easier for planets to hang on to; and Jupiter did just that; that’s fundamentally why it is so big.

Jupiter rotates on its axis in 9 hours, 55 minutes, and 30 seconds. That’s considerably less time than it takes Earth to do so (23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds…with respect to the stars). Combine that with the fact that it is 11 times wider, and it turns out that an object on the Jovian equator experiences 65 times the centrifugal (well…it’s actually centripetal) force as an object on Earth’s equator. Why does that matter? It makes Jupiter look distinctly oblate (squashed); the difference between the diameter through the poles and between the equator is actually noticeable.

Jupiter is made almost entirely of gas and (deep down, under insane amounts of pressure somewhere between 500 and 4,000 atmospheres) liquid metallic hydrogen. Yes, under extreme pressure hydrogen behaves like a metal, complete with metallic bonds. And deep inside is a rock and ice core, that all by itself is larger than Earth. The following diagram is a cutaway of Jupiter. The pressures down there could be as high as 40,000 atmospheres, and the temperature is likely around 20,000K (versus 165K (-163 F) near the visible “surface.”

Unsurprisingly the atmosphere is mostly hydrogen (roughly 3/4), helium (a bit less than 1/4), plus a bunch of simple molecules like water (H₂O), methane (CH₄), ammonia (NH₃), hydrogen sulfide (H₂S), and even phosphine (PH₃)…basically simple molecules made up of very common elements.

What we see is an “upper” cloud deck, but as it happens the light bands (called “zones”) are at a considerably higher altitude than the dark bands (called “belts”). The upper clouds made largely of ammonia ice are at a pressure of 0.6 – 0.9 Earth atmospheres, the lower visible clouds contain sulfur compounds as well as water ice and can be anywhere from 1-7 Earth atmospheres.

All of this implies that the atmosphere just above these clouds is already fairly thick, while being clear enough for us to see through.

That liquid metallic hydrogen has a significant consequence–Jupiter has a ridiculously huge magnetosphere. Since it captures charged particles, just like our Van Allen belts do here on Earth, that makes the entire Jovian system, including the Moons, very hazardous from a radiation standpoint. We can’t realistically send manned missions to Jupiter’s moons because of this, with the possible exception of the outermost of the large moons. It’s shaped something like a tadpole, with the head facing the Sun and the tail pointing away from the Sun. I haven’t been able to nail down the diameter of the magnetosphere, but it extends some 7 million kilometers towards the Sun, and the tail nearly reaches Saturn’s orbit. More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere_of_Jupiter

Like the Sun, Jupiter exhibits differential rotation, with belts and zones rotating at different speeds and vortices (including spots) showing up a lot on the boundaries. Here is a GIF made from a timelapse of Jupiter rotating as seen from Voyager I in the 1980s. The pictures are all taken at times when the Great Red Spot in the same orientation with respect to to the spacecraft, so you can see other features, which rotate at different speeds, change position with respect to the Great Red Spot.

Herding Cats

Jupiter’s great mass means that it often deflects smaller bodies in the solar system like comets and asteroids. Many comets have an orbital period that suggests that an encounter with Jupiter put the comet into that orbit in the first place. And Jupiter has even taken a bullet or two, most recently in 1995. The comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was discovered having already broken into pieces thanks to tidal forces (yes, tidal forces show up again!) from Jupiter; it then was realized that Shoemaker Levy was going to impact Jupiter! What a spectacle! (And how good it was for us that it was Jupiter taking the brunt of that, not Earth!)

It wasn’t just a spectacle; the comet left “holes” in Jupiter’s atmosphere that allowed deeper material to come up to the surface where we could analyze the light with spectroscopes and learn more about Jupiter’s interior.

Jupiter is generally credited with reducing the amount of stuff that rains down on Earth from elsewhere in the Solar System.

History

Jupiter has been known since ancient times; it is generally the third brightest object in the night sky after the Moon and Venus. Since it is so bright and moves through the sky at a fairly stately pace, it got associated with the king of the gods, Zeus or in Latin, Jupiter.

It’s one of the ancient seven planets, each of which was associated with a metal, and each of which ended up associated with a day of the week. These are: Sun, gold, Sunday; Moon, silver, Monday; Mercury, mercury, Wednesday; Venus, copper, Friday; Mars, iron, Tuesday; Jupiter, tin, Thursday; and Saturn, lead, Saturday. And yes, the Sun and Moon were considered planets back then because they moved against the celestial sphere; the recent kerfuffle with Pluto is not the first time we’ve reclassified things. Many of our days of the week are named after Norse gods, but if you go to languages like Spanish, French or Italian, you’ll see the connections between days of the week and our planetary names (which, like those languages, are legacies of the Romans) more readily.

It’s a lucky coincidence that Jupiter turned out to be the king, not of the gods, but rather of the planets once we learned a lot more about it. This began mere months after we first turned telescopes to the sky; In 1610 Galileo noted four tiny “stars” near Jupiter, and could see the pattern change nightly, even over just a few hours. These turned out to be the four big moons of Jupiter (larger or comparable to our own moon).

The four big moons are to this day known as the Galilean moons, and you can spot them with binoculars. I said I’d cover them another time but there are a couple of points I want to make. First, when Galileo discovered them and realized they were orbiting Jupiter, that killed the centuries-old presumption that everything in the universe revolved around the Earth. (And if that wasn’t enough the phases of Venus put the final nail in the coffin, as they showed Venus revolved around the Sun.)

And our view of the universe was never the same again. That dinky telescope of Galileo’s (which is on display at a museum in Florence) is arguably one of the two most important telescopes in history for this reason. (The other being the 100 inch Hooker telescope that Hubble used.)

Second was their use in navigation. Galileo realized almost immediately that the moons’ motions were very regular; such that one could work up a time table and be able to tell absolute time with some accuracy here on Earth, provided you could see Jupiter and point a small telescope at it. Why was that a big deal? Because if you’re sailing a ship, the only way you can determine your longitude is by knowing what time it is in an absolute sense, or at least compared to some other location. For instance, if it’s noon in Greenwich, it’s about 7 AM in Washington DC….or perhaps some other spot in the middle of the ocean directly south of Washington DC. If you know both items of information; that the sun says it’s 7AM but it’s noon in Greenwich, England right now, you can figure out you are at 75 degrees west longitude. The problem was, they had no way of knowing what time it was in London at that same instant. We didn’t have anything like an accurate clock we could just set to London time (and never adjust it) to compare the local time to. But, we could look at Jupiter; if the moons were in the position for 3AM, you knew, regardless what time it was where you were at, that it was 3AM where the time tables were made. So you have a means of determining longitude.

But there was a fly in the ointment; it turns out that after painstakingly computing the table, it wouldn’t work well after a few months; the moons might get to their predicted position a bit early or a bit late. It turns out that the problem wasn’t with the computations, it was with the fact that sometimes Earth is a bit further from Jupiter, sometimes a bit closer, and so we were being thrown off by the light speed delay changing from one position to the other (light can take about 17 minutes to cross Earth’s orbit from one end to the other, and that’s about how much our distance to Jupiter varies). 17 minutes corresponds to about four degrees of longitude which in turn is 240 nautical miles if you’re near the equator. That’s a significant error!

We’ve also discovered that Jupiter has a very tenuous ring, a far cry from Saturn’s ring system, but there nonetheless.

Spacecraft

Jupiter is visited often by our spacecraft, not only for its own sake but because it’s a good waypoint for other missions; it’s often used for a gravity assist. The New Horizons probe to Pluto used a gravity assist from Jupiter to shorten its flight time by about five years (it could have got there without the assist, which in itself is remarkable).

The first probes were Pioneer 10 and 11 in 1973 and 1974. It was the Pioneer spacecraft that discovered Jupiter’s magnetosphere. (Pioneer 11 went on to Saturn). In 1979 Voyager 1 and 2 paid a visit, these spacecraft both went on to Saturn and one of them went on to Hugh Janus and Neptune.

Ulysses, which was a mission to study the sun, flew by Jupiter in 1992 and again in 2004. Why send a solar probe away from the sun to Jupiter? Because we wanted to put the probe in a highly inclined orbit so we could see the Sun’s north and south poles for the first time. The easiest way to do that was to send Ulysses past Jupiter’s north pole and let Jupiter bend the orbit into the new plane, some 80 degrees off from the main plane of the solar system. (Jupiter will bend your trajectory no matter what, but if we approach Jupiter so as to pass the pole, the trajectory will be bent outside of the plane of the planets’ orbits.) If we hadn’t done that we’d have needed a gigantic delta-V to cancel out Earth’s motion around the sun (which the spacecraft would “inherit”), then more to put the spacecraft into its new orbit around the sun. Ulysses took these opportunities to study Jupiter’s magnetosphere.

Cassini flew by in 2000, on its way to Saturn.

Flybys are great, but an orbiter is better. We sent the Galileo orbiter to Jupiter, with it arriving in 1995 and sending back data, including from close encounters with the four Galilean moons, until 2003. Galileo was well timed–when comet Shoemaker-Levy impacted Jupiter Galileo was approaching the system and took some amazing pictures of the aftermath of the event (the impacts were unfortunately on the far side). Galileo came with an atmospheric probe, too, that was dropped into Jupiter’s atmosphere on a suicide mission to return data for as long as it could withstand the rapidly-increasing pressure. In 2016, Juno, a European spacecraft, arrived at Jupiter, establishing itself in a highly elliptical and inclined orbit which means that once every orbit it gets very close to the clouds, and it passes over the poles, which otherwise we’d never see. Juno is still active.

Life?

Jupiter is sometimes cited as a possible location for life. In this case, since it’s essentially atmosphere down to depths where the pressure is crushing, the life forms are generally imagined as creatures with huge bladders filled with atmospheric gas…basically living hot air balloons. This idea got kicked around a lot, including by science fiction writers (like Arthur C. Clarke; a much more recent story told of Jovians’ reactions to Shoemaker-Levy 9).

All of this is complete speculation, of course, and I think as we’ve learned more about the rest of the solar system, we’ve come up with better candidates. But in the end we probably don’t know enough to even intelligently decide which scenario is most likely.