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 $2,720.80
Silver $33.78
Platinum $1,023.00
Palladium $1,106.00
Rhodium $5,100.00
FRNSI* 130.618-
Gold:Silver 80.545-

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

Gold $2,748.70
Silver $33.77
Platinum $1033.00
Palladium $1219.00
Rhodium $4,950.00
FRNSI* 131.968+
Gold:Silver 81.395-

Palladium went absolutely bananas Thursday and Friday rising 96 bucks the first day and 37 bucks the second. Platinum went up a whole eight bugs then down three. (Somebody, please go wake platinum the hell up.) Silver managed to drop one cent, while gold showed a modest increase. (As such, the gold:silver ratio has gone up.)

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

The Moon and Flat Earth

Let us examine what we should expect to see when observing the Moon, assuming the usual flat earth model is correct.

We’ll start with this standard diagram.

It’s difficult to tie down exact distances, because the Flat Earthers have yet to come up with a map (as opposed to a diagram) complete with a scale, but apparently the Moon is claimed to be about 3000 kilometers above the plane of the Earth. There’s no official notion what the diameter of the disc is, either, but one could say that the distance from the north pole (at the center of the disc) to the outer rim (corresponding to the globe earth south pole) is 20,000 km since that is very roughly the distance on the round earth (globers have no hesitation in publishing exact figures). Alternatively since the glober circumference of the earth along the equator is ~40,000 km, we could say that that is the distance that should be measured along the circle of the equator, which means (via dividing by 2 x pi) the distance from the center to the equator is 6366.2 km. From the pole to the equator is 1/4 of the total distance across the circle, so the diameter of the entire disk is 25,465 km. (Which is actually fairly close to the globe earth circumference when that is expressed in miles, by coincidence.)

The Moon varies in declination from 28.7 S to 28.7 N, or to translate that into non-astronomese, that’s as far north or south as it gets. The Sun, by contrast, stays between 23.44 degrees S and N. (In globe earth terms, that’s the Earth’s axial tilt.) Every flat earth model I’ve seen shows the Sun going around and around on a daily basis, following a circle that grows or shrinks according to the seasons, withing these bounds on the flat earth; likely also about 3000km above the Earth. I’m going to assume the Moon behaves similarly only within the 28.7 S to 28.7 N bounds.

Here is a picture of the Moon, when it is directly over the equator, in the Flat Earth model. (Screen shot taken off a youtube video.)

The Moon is regarded by most Flat Earthers as a sphere, with some minority thinking that it, too is some sort of disk. Whichever one it is, when you look at a full moon, you see something like this:

However, it may be tilted clockwise (near moonset) or counter-clockwise (at moonrise), in other words the orientation may be different. This is lunar north pole at the top so it should be close to what you see when the moon is directly south of you, which should happen at about midnight on a full moon, provided you’re north of the moon.

And therein lies the first problem.

What if you are south of the moon at that moment? Like, for instance, living in Australia or South Africa or South America?

If the flat earth is correct, you should see a good part of the other side of the moon (if it is a sphere), since you’ll be “behind” the moon compared to the guy to its north. Not exactly behind the moon, so there will be some overlap between what the two of you see. The person south of the moon, in other words, should see some features you cannot see, and vice versa.

On the other hand, if the Moon is a disk (apparently the minority opinion in the flat earth camp), then…well, there are two sub cases. If the moon is pasted to the firmament so that it faces “down” to the Earth, than only people directly under it will see the moon as a circle; anyone else will see it as elliptical. If (on the other hand) it happens to be face-on to the viewer in the northern hemisphere, anyone not on that line of sight should see it as elliptical, and if they’re far enough away, they may even be seeing the opposite face of the disk.

Yet we’ve never seen a photograph of the back side of the Moon taken from Earth’s surface, not even a partial one. Nor have we seen pictures with the Moon distorted into an elliptical shape because the photographers are not face-on to it. Yet effects like these must happen if the Moon is as close as is claimed.

Here’s another issue. If you’re inside the circle that the Moon traces every day, you will be closest to the moon when it is directly south of you; if you’re outside of that circle, you will be closest to the moon when it is directly north of you. If you are actually very close to the moon’s latitude, it should pass by almost directly overhead, and be nearest at that time. Closer to moonrise/moon set it should be much further away.

If it’s further away, it should look smaller. Yet tracking the moon across the sky shows no change in its apparent size, no matter where you are.

Interestingly, these same issues would arise on Globe Earth, if the Moon were this close to it. If you saw the moon looking like the picture I showed, someone far away would be able to see features that you can’t, on the other side of the Moon. So the mistake here is not with the shape of the Earth, but rather, with the notion that the Moon is nearby.

All of these issues resolve if the Moon is far away, compared to our baseline (40,000 km for Flat Earth, or 13,000 km for Globe Earth). If the Moon is far enough away, two people standing 40,000 km apart will see almost exactly the same features on a spherical Moon, with the differences being seen oblique near the edges of what we see, so those differences would be hard to even tell apart.

How far away? Aristarchus of Samos who lived from 310-230 BCE (approximately) was able to do a computation, and got a value of roughly 130,000 kilometers. Others, like Hipparchus and Ptolemy, got 425,000 and 376,000 kilometers, respectively.

If numbers like these are even remotely correct–and they must be at a bare minimum, because we do not see the effects we would see (regardless of the shape of the Earth) if the Moon were closer to Earth–then there’s now a new problem.

If the Moon is that far away, two different observers on a flat Earth should see it in almost exactly the same direction, both altitude and azimuth. [Altitude: the angle above the horizon, with 0 being on the horizon and 90 being overhead. Azimuth: the compass bearing of the object. Generally 0 is considered to be due north, 90 degrees is to the east, 180 to the south, 270 to the west, and 360 is also due north.] This is because it is so far away that shifting a few thousand kilometers should make little difference, like taking two steps sideways and noting that light pole at the other end of the parking lot only seems to shift a little compared to the buildings in the distance. A 40000 km shift (from one edge to the other) against a moon 300,000 km away should lead to an angular shift of about seven and a half degrees.

Yet at the same time. different people can see the Moon low in the east, and low in the west, a difference of almost 180 degrees! OK, that one can be explained on Flat Earth. If I’m in Colorado, west is the same direction as east would be in India (check the diagram). [Also true for globe earth, in three dimensions.] But what about when the Moon is overhead for me, and low to the horizon for someone else, at the same time? There’s no way to make that work, for a distant object, on a Flat Earth. And we’ve established that the Moon must be distant.

Well, there’s only one way to solve that problem. The ground itself that you are standing on, cannot be oriented in the same direction as the ground of that other observer. To try to visualize this, it’s easiest to deal with plumb bobs; the lay of the ground (if the ground is horizontal) is perpendicular to the plumb bob. So if “horizontal’ is the same thing in two different places, the plumb bobs will be perpendicular to the same thing and thus parallel to each other. This would be the case on Flat Earth. A line of sight to a distant moon would form nearly the same angle to both plumb bobs, instead of very different angles, which is what we actually observe.

Therefore horizontal in one place, is not oriented the same as horizontal in the other place. The Earth cannot be flat. (What shape it actually is can be determined by collecting information about the orientation of the moon from various locations, all at the same time.)

As a post script, the same reasoning works for the Sun as well…though you have to have the proper equipment to see sunspots, otherwise the Sun is just a featureless sphere and you cannot tell whether two people far apart are looking at two different sides of it or not.

Oilworld

I know of a world where it rains, there are mountains, hills, streams and rivers and lakes, all under a nice thick atmosphere–thick enough you could strap on wings and fly! Not the dessicated nearly-airless rocks of the inner solar system, the roasting dry hell that is Venus, the deep-frozen (or totally volcanic) Galilean moons, the bottomless atmospheres of the gas giants.

Comparatively speaking this is nearly paradise!

Perhaps I have a second calling for writing real estate ads. Because what I haven’t told you is that this place is a frigid 93 K (-290 F)…so cold that water is a rock, a hard one, never a liquid. Those mountains are largely made of ice. The streams and rivers and lakes? Liquid methane and ethane, in some ways a lot like gasoline, but gasoline would be frozen solid here. If one could feel this stuff it would probably feel oily, not wet. The atmosphere is almost pure nitrogen; even if it weren’t at that frigid temperature you’d pass out and die breathing it. And it’s so smoggy that you’d never see the shrunken sun, nor much of anything else in the night sky.

I speak, of course, of Saturn’s moon Titan, which orbits at 1,122,870 km. (Compare to the Earth-Moon distance of 384,399 km.) Despite being almost three times further, this is still close enough to Saturn that, if you could see Saturn through the smog it would be 11 1/2 times as wide as the moon. Titan is almost precisely in Saturn’s equatorial plane, however, so the rings would be almost perfectly edge on. The orbital period is 15.95 days. Here it is, seen from an Earth-based telescope, a dot to Saturn’s upper right.

To remind people of what I said in the Moon roundup, major moons (the ones that are round) come in three sizes, large (7 of them), medium (9 of them) and small (three of them), for a total of nineteen. There are also five non-rounded minor moons about the size of those small major moons, we can call these “big” small moons, well, big small moons, or maybe medium-small.

The seven large major moons are: our own Moon, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan and Triton. Titan happens to be the second largest of the Big Ones. It’s just a bit smaller than Ganymede, and it’s thus the 10th largest object in the solar system (including the Sun); it’s larger than Mercury. This is the only large major moon that Saturn has, so Jupiter has it beat. Or does it? Saturn has four of the medium major moons (out of nine total), and two of the three small ones, for a total of seven major moons. And for the cherry on top, two of the big five unrounded moons are also here. But we’ll cover the medium and small stuff later; today we focus on Titan, which is arguably the most interesting of the large (and major) moons.

Titan was thought to be larger than Ganymede until relatively recently; it turned out that astronomers were measuring the light-impenetrable atmosphere, and that was enough to make the difference and fool astronomers for decades. An understandable error; this is the only moon with a significant atmosphere; more so than ours in many ways.

And yes, there’s more than enough air pressure to allow stable liquids to form. (The only other world like that in our solar system is the one you’re sitting on.) The atmosphere is four times as dense as ours, yet the pressure is “only” 1.45 times our atmospheric pressure. The difference being largely due to Titan’s much lower surface gravity of 13.8 percent of Earths (our Moon’s gravity is higher, actually.)

After the Pioneer and Voyager missions, we realized that there could be liquids on Titan’s surface. The Hubble Space Telescope was able to add to the speculation by detecting more strong evidence.

So we decided that the next time we sent something to Saturn, we’d take a closer look at Titan.

A much closer look. As in, actually touching it.

The Cassini probe, named after one of the two scientists who first studied Saturn in depth, brought with it the Huygens lander…named after the other of those two scientists, the one who discovered Titan. From 2004-2017 Cassini was able, in its copious spare time while studying Saturn, to map Titan with its penetrating radar, and Huygens actually landed on Titan on January 14, 2005.

Radar is needed, because this is what Titan would look like to human Mark I eyeballs, in true color, no enhancements, no false color:

The color is good old smog.

With near infrared (“near” meaning it’s infrared at frequencies close to visible light), you see this:

This feature was actually first seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1994, though Cassini got a better look starting in 2003. The dark area is apparently a dune sea! (No, no Shai Hulud. Sorry, Coothie.)

So here is a map put together in 2016, with a lot of official names for features (open in a new tab for a much more legible rendering):

It looks like a bit of a patchwork quilt because Cassini could only do sharp imaging on those occasions where it was flying by Titan; it wasn’t dedicated to studying Titan, so many areas are just shaded polygons, or just very blurry. (In fact Cassini divided its time between studying Saturn itself and 20 different moons.)

As with any map like this, you won’t get a decent notion of the two poles, so here they are. In case you haven’t gotten my subtle hints that this isn’t very good real estate (never mind the billion mile one-way commute) you can scout out properties on the original images at over 3000 pixels width.

And now what you’ve been waiting for: Huygens’ descent to Titan’s surface. This just-under-five-minute movie is a time lapse, showing you the fish-eye image sent as the probe descended. Look to the sides, though, and you will see graphics reporting time, angles to the Sun and Cassini, which sensors are seeing what at any given time, altitude information, scale information…this thing is loaded; many of you will want to watch it a couple of times.

And in case you didn’t want to watch that, here’s the contrast-enhanced picture from the surface:

(Now go back and watch the movie.) Those rocks are almost certainly water ice.

Huygens is the only probe we’ve ever landed on a body that remains entirely in the outer solar system.

OK, so on to a bit more technical content. Here’s a cutaway of Titan, somewhat hypothetical, much like the one I found for three of the Galilean satellites a few weeks ago:

And yes…another liquid water ocean deep down! But we’re not completely certain that this is the correct model; note that the diagram specifies which model it is, which it wouldn’t have to do if we were certain of it.

The atmosphere is responsible for the fact we can have liquids on Titan; here’s a diagram of its layers:

Nearer the surface, we have this cross section, reminiscent of some notional cross sections we see for Earth:

On earth we have aquifers the top of which are the water table, and a lake is basically where the water table is above the surface. But here we have…an “alkanofer”?!? What the heck is that about?

(Dragging out the organic chemistry skis. Not a soapbox, skis. As in, getting out over my…) Alkanes are a class of molecule consisting of nothing but hydrogen and carbon. Every carbon uses all four of its bonds to connect to distinct atoms. The simplest alkane is methane, with one carbon, connected to four hydrogens, CH₄. The next one up is a pair of carbons, connected to each other by one bond (carbon can double or even triple bond, but those cases wouldn’t be alkanes). The other three bonds for each carbon is connected to a hydrogen, for a total of two carbons and six hydrogens, C₂H₆; this is ethane. You can add a third carbon to the chain, to get propane (C₃H₈), a fourth to get butane (C₄H₁₀)…but now there’s an additional complication. With four carbons, they could form a chain, or a T, with one carbon in the “middle” connected directly to three other carbons. Either configuration will connect to ten hydrogen atoms. The chain is butane, the T configuration is isobutane.

And if you allow rings of carbon atoms (technically molecules with rings aren’t called alkanes, but rather cycloalkanes), you can have up to six different variations, called isomers. Four of them are shown below. Though the ones with rings don’t connect to as many hydrogen atoms, in the lower left is cyclobutane and note there are only eight hydrogen atoms.

(And yes, propane has a ring form too, but the chain is the only possible three carbon alkane.)

You can go on, and the higher you go the more isomers are possible, and this number grows rapidly. Leaving out cyclo- type isomers, you have 2 isomers for 4 carbons, three isomers for 5 carbons, five for 6 carbons, nine for 7 carbons, 18 for 8 carbons, 35 and seventy five for 9 and 10 carbons, respectively…and when you get to 32 carbons, there are over 27 billion isomers…again, no rings.

One trend is that the longer the alkane, the higher its melting point. Hence we have butane which is a liquid on earth at 0 C, and at room temperature with just a little bit of pressure (like in cigarette lighters), pentane which is liquid up to 34 C, and so on. Gasoline is largely made up of alkanes and cycloalkanes with (roughly) eight or so carbon atoms in them.

At the low temperatures on Titan, only the smallest alkanes will be liquid, but that doesn’t mean bigger ones don’t exist as sand or other forms of solid matter. Imagine a world you could scrape frozen crude off the ground.

Titan should, perhaps, be thought of as “Oilworld.”

What would it be like to swim on Titan? Pretending that the cold and lack of oxygen wouldn’t kill you within seconds, these liquids aren’t very dense, so you’d sink to the bottom of the lake or pond. Your best strategy might be to leap out of the “water,” rather than try to swim.

Life?

For those speculating about life, Titan has some advantages. It certainly has plenty of carbon, and those alkanes make good feedstock for building more complex molecules (which is why, for instance there’s so much smog there). But that life would almost certainly have to exist in that subsurface ocean…and we’re not even sure that that ocean is there, yet. Anywhere else, it’s simply too cold.

On the other hand, its atmosphere resembles the atmosphere on Earth, back before cyanobacteria and plants started producing oxygen. It’s likely Titan would have something to teach us about pre-biotic chemistry.

Future Missions

In 2028 Dragonfly will launch, and in the mid 2030s it will arrive at Titan. It will be a flying drone, powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generator, i.e., the heat from a chunk of plutonium 238 (which literally glows red, it’s so hot from radioactivity). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator). This is the way we power most of our probes to the outer solar system, however Juno and Europa Clipper did (and will) use large solar arrays (they have to be large because sunlight is very weak out there). Other unfunded ideas were for a hot air balloon, a probe that would float on one of the lakes, and even a submarine drone!

Titan is going to get a lot of attention in the future, that’s for sure.