“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
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
ischiorrhogic
adjective
of an iambic line, having spondees in the second, fourth or sixth place
in ancient prosody, noting a variety of iambic trimeter which has not only a spondee or trochee for an iambus in the sixth or last place, as in the choliamb, but a spondee in the fifth place also
Wolf’s easy alternative explanation
A kind of irregularity in old Greek poetry, which jazzes things up, but too much so, in the opinions of some.
When the variation on the sixth foot of the trimeter coexists with a spondee in the fifth place, the verse becomes still more irregular, and can, in fact, hardly be considered an Iambic verse, but is rather a combination of an iambic diameter with a trochaic monometer. Such lines are called by the grammarians Ischiorrhogic (broken-backed) : they are very rarely used by Hipponax. LINK
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.
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.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
We’ve talked about theories of flat earth, and of gravity not existing. What about the other direction – not only gravity existing, but anti-gravity, too?
SO – the failure of “beautiful theories” led her to begin questioning them – and to wondering how beauty and math might be misleading the direction of physics.
Well – let’s couple that with journalism – how the cross-interests of journalism – the WOW – the NOW – the NO – the WHOA – and the WOO – how that might ALSO be misleading science.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
anticryptic
adjective
Best Definition
in biology, serving to conceal or fitted for concealing one organism to the disadvantage of another: as contrasted with procryptic, serving to hide an organism for its own welfare
Inferior and Less Clear or Complete Definitions
camouflaged
having protective resemblance to environment
of or pertaining to camouflage used by a predator to provide stealth, as opposed to camouflage used by prey to hide
of or relating to resemblance to surroundings that renders an animal less conspicuous to its prey
serving to conceal an animal from its prey
Shown in a picture
Unencrypted by magnification, so to speak
Crazy cat ladies – stay away, with your vegan cat food!
MUSIC!
I let this nice song hang out in a tab forever. Need some room!
Ah, Celtic Woman! Always a pleasure!
THE STUFF
Care for a piece of pi?
SO – what do we have here? A new way to calculate pi? That’s still pretty complicated?
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
January 6 Tapes Reminder
After the first release, we were supposed to get more, every week.
As far as I know it hasn’t happened.
Speaker Johnson, please follow through!
A Caution
Just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. (Or we might not. The record is mixed even though there is more MAGA than there used to be.) But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled–I suspect it’s RINO), don’t get replaced.
State party chairs, vice chairs, secretaries and so on, and the same at county levels, have huge influence on who ultimately gets nominated, and if these party wheelhorses are RINOs, they will work tirelessly to put their own pukey people on the ballot. In fact I’d not be surprised if some of our “MAGA” candidates are in fact, RINO plants, encouraged to run by the RINO party leadership when they realized that Lyn Cheney (and her ilk) were hopelessly compromised as effective candidates. The best way for them to deal with the opposition, of course, is to run it themselves.
Running good candidates is only HALF of the battle!
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.
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). (Note: most media quotes are for the bid…the price paid by the market makers, not the ask, which is what they will sell at. I figure the ask is more relevant to people like us who wish we could afford to buy these things. In the case of gold the difference is usually about a dollar, for the PGMs the spread is much wider.)
Gold see-sawed, getting closer to 2700, almost dipping below 2600 on Wednesday and Thursday but recovered nicely on Friday, even to the point of closing up for the week, barely. Silver, however, has definitely slipped, and you would need almost two more ounces of silver this week to buy an ounce of gold, than last week. Platinum a bit down, palladium might be starting another run.
*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.
Moon Roundup
Before 1610, there was one Moon, and it wasn’t a class of objects. Actually at one time the Moon and Sun (!) were lumped in with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn as planets. They were, after all, all objects that moved with respect to the background stars (that includes the Sun but it takes a little bit of extra work to show this since it’s rather difficult to see the stars and Sun at the same time). And planet derives from a Greek word for wanderer.
Note by the way that Earth was not considered a planet. Planets were things up there in the sky, not down here, and certainly not as “down here” as you can get, the dirt beneath your feet.
This was back in the old “Earth is the center of everything” days, but late in the 1500s some people started suggesting that perhaps it was the Sun at the center. (This was actually a revival of an ancient Greek idea.) Now this is difficult to settle with naked eye observations, but a telescope will show you that not everything goes around the Earth. Venus and Mercury exhibit phases that show they orbit the Sun. And Jupiter, of course, has those Galilean moons.
Galileo actually considered them planets at first, because, after all, they moved against the background stars, just like Jupiter did. He didn’t realize we needed a new category of thing, with the Moon being the first known member. And it took a while; for a couple of centuries the larger moons of the outer planets were called “satellite planets” instead of “moons” or just plain “satellites.”
So if you think Pluto being demoted from planet status was a kerfuffle, imagine what was going on then, when they still couldn’t figure out which buckets even existed that they could put things into (figuratively speaking of course).
Eventually anything that orbited the Sun was a planet, including Earth, and anything that orbited a planet was a satellite or moon, including “the” Moon. We know of no cases of a moon itself having a natural satellite of any significant size.
And yes, “satellite” used to be synonymous with “moon,” but then we started putting things in orbit, and we started talking about natural and artificial satellites. Some people still do so, but most people use “moon” (with a lower case M) for the natural case and just plain “satellite” for the artificial case.
[And yes, we’ve no idea how to classify Stacy Abram’s hindquarters. It’s a moon…sort of…and is of similar size to the major moons, but it’s not a heavenly body by any stretch of the imagination.]
Since those days, of course, we’ve found objects out there of all kinds of different sizes orbiting both planets and the Sun, so we had to sit down and reassess definitions again and Pluto got the boot from the “planet” clique. (And, IMHO, rightly so; the other alternative would have been to promote about half a dozen Kuiper belt objects.) There’s no minimum size, as yet, for moons, so technically any planet with a ring has countless moons: all the constituent rocks that make up the ring.
Anyhow, we’re not even halfway through the moons that are in our solar system. But I thought I’d do a quick roundup, to set up the Big Picture. Let’s start out with a picture from Wikipedia showing planets and large (or famous) moons, all to scale by size. Notably, Mercury and Mars look roughly the size of some of the bigger moons, and Pluto is outclassed by at least seven moons.
Let’s consider them in order of size. If you ignore the planets and Pluto, there seem to be seven “big ones,” and a bunch of medium sized ones.
The big ones are The Moon, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto (all orbiting Jupiter), Titan (Saturn), and Triton (Neptune). They are all 2500 km across or larger. There seems to be a big gap between Triton and any of the moons smaller than it, and when you look at masses, that is confirmed. Triton, the smallest of these seven, is more massive than all of the other moons put together. So you could actually make a list with eight entries, the eighth being “everything else that’s a moon, put together” and that would be the last item on the list.
That makes it seem like a nice, natural dividing line between “large” and “medium.”
The large moons verge on being planet sized, with Ganymede more voluminous than Mercury (though made of much lighter stuff). So much so that at least some astronomers call these seven the “satellite planets.” (I.e., things that would be planets, if only they weren’t orbiting a planet!) [As an aside I suspect we’ll be looking, again, at reclassifying things soon. And I would not be entirely unsympathetic.]
Now just eyeballing that diagram again, there are nine moons in the “medium” bracket (with S for Saturn, U for Uranus, and P for Pluto): Titania (U), Oberon (U), Rhea (S), Iapetus (S), Charon (P), Ariel (U), Umbriel (U), Dione (S), and Tethys (S). And again, it turns out that Tethys, the smallest of the nine, is bigger than all of the remaining “small” moons, put together. So, another natural dividing line, between medium and small. These medium moons are all 1000-2500 kilometers in diameter.
Up to here, moons seem to be named after mythical figures, however for some reason the moons of Uranus got named after Shakespearean characters.
So that’s sixteen medium and large size moons. Everything else is “small.”
But there’s another criterion we could use…and that’s “hydrostatic equilibrium” which when you dumb it down means “is it spherical”?
If you don’t dumb it down, there are nuances. For instance, if a moon is orbiting fairly close to a planet when it’s still largely molten, it’s going to take on an oblate shape, first because it’s rotating once per orbit, and second because the planet’s going to tend to make it egg shaped (tidal forces). If it then solidifies and its orbit gets larger, it’s technically not quite in hydrostatic equilibrium any more; because if it were liquid it would flow into a slightly different shape. Our own moon is actually an example. But in general, for classification purposes, this is a nuance that is ignored; the sucker is round or it isn’t.
[Edited to add:] A moon in hydrostatic equilibrium is considered to be a “major moon,” no matter how small it might be.
[Edited:] All of the large and medium moons are major moons. But as happens, three (maybe four) of the biggest “small” moons, those below 1000km across but greater than 250 km across, are round too and also qualify as major moons. There are two moons in the 500-1000 km range, and seven in the 250-500 km range. I’m going to call the 250-1000 km range the “medium small” range.
[Edited:] In the 500-1000 km range, we have Enceladus (S) barely making it at 504 km, and definitely a major moon. There is also Dysnomia, a satellite of the dwarf planet Eris, which is the “maybe” case. It’s 615 km across, apparently, but it’s very dark and we cannot get a read on its shape though its density appears to be low enough that we don’t expect its gravity will have crushed it into a sphere.
[Edited:] in the 250-500 km range we have Mimas (S), and Miranda (U), 400 and 470 km in diameter respectively, both major moons. And we also have five objects that are not major moons, and they are Hyperion (S), Proteus (N), Nereid (N), Vanth (satellite of dwarf planet Orcus) and Hi’iaka (satellite of dwarf planet Haumea). Proteus is actually bigger than Mimas, so there’s clearly not a hard line, above which a moon will be round (and therefore major). As I alluded to above, a low density can make a moon less massive, which can be enough that it does not “go round.”
[Edited:] So there’s your roundup. Expect to see talk of Large, Medium and Medium-small moons, as well as major moons and minor moons; “major” encompassing large and medium moons as well as three of the scores of small moons.
Saturn
History
Saturn, to the ancients, was a star-like object that took 29.5 years to make one trip around the ecliptic. Dimmer and slower than Jupiter, which was associated with the king of the gods, it got associated with the prior generation.
You see, in Greek and Roman mythology the Olympian gods were the third generation. The first was Uranus (Οὐρανός), the sky, and Gaia, the Earth. He was both her son and her husband. Their children were the titans, twelve of them: Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys, and Cronus. (You will see some of those names again…in fact if you read the previous section, you already have.) Cronus (or Kronos) was the father of Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hades, Hestia, Demeter and Chiron. These are all the Greek names. The one called Kronos was known to the Romans as Saturn.
In 1610 Galileo turned that telescope towards Saturn, and saw…well, a couple of lumps one on each side of Saturn that each looked like it might be a moon a third the size of Saturn. (Let’s face it, it wasn’t a very good telescope, even if it was one of the best in the world at the time.)
A couple of years later, he looked again, and the moons were gone. He predicted that they would be back later, and indeed they showed up. And got bigger to the point where Saturn seemed oval-shaped. Christiaan Huygens finally saw this as rings in 1655, publishing his results in 1659. Huygens spotted one moon, which he named Titan. Shortly thereafter (1675) Giovanni Domenico Cassini discovered a gap in the rings, and also four more moons, Iapetus, Rhea, Tethys and Dione–all named after titans. (Dione is either another daughter of Uranus and Gaia, or the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, depending on whose rendering of the mythology you’re reading.) In 1789 William Herschel (discoverer of Uranus) discovered two more moons, Mimas and Enceladus–these are two of the three “small” moons in our solar system that are nevertheless big enough to be round, from the previous section. Hyperion was discovered in 1848. It’s comparable to Mimas and Enceladus, but not round…far from it, as we’ll see.
Saturn ends up having seven major moons, one large, the other six medium. Add in Hyperion, and that’s eight. When I was a kid, the count was ten (with most books still saying nine). The missing two were Phoebe (1898) and..well..number ten, first spotted in 1966, was a bit confusing. It was first spotted on December 15, 1966. But then another astronomer spotted it again…but in a different place in the same orbit…on December 18, 1966. Here was a moon that appeared to be jumping around in its orbit, but it was there (well, maybe not) and it was number 10. Finally in 1978, a couple of astronomers realized what was really going on. There were two moons sharing the same orbit, Janus and Epimetheus, a situation which had been assumed to be unstable up until then. So elementary school Steve didn’t realize Saturn’s tenth moon was really the tenth and eleventh moons. Today’s count is (drumroll) one hundred and forty six, with the most recent discovery being in 2020. But I am going to save detailed discussion of the moons until next time.
Pioneer 11 flew by in 1979. Voyager 1 zipped by in 1980, and Voyager 2 followed it in 1981. What a nice little barrage, especially since the cameras on the Voyagers were so much better. After that nothing until 2004, when Cassini went into orbit around Saturn. It not only stayed there for 13 years (until we deliberately deorbited it into Saturn’s atmosphere, since it was about to die anyway), it even put a lander on Titan! The ONLY landing ever made beyond the asteroid belt.
The Planet Proper
Saturn itself orbits at an average distance of 1,434 million kilometers, nearly a billion and a half. That’s 9.58 AUs. It has an axial tilt of about 28 degrees, a bit more than Earth’s 23 degrees, so Saturn definitely has seasons, unlike Jupiter (whose axial tilt is about 2 degrees). This will turn out to be important when we finally quit fiddling around and talk about the rings.
Saturn has a magnetosphere, like Jupiter, Ganymede, and Earth. Unlike Jupiter and Earth, the Saturn “magnet” is aligned with the axis of rotation pretty well. This magnetosphere isn’t as strong as Jupiter’s, but still significant.
Measured across the equator, Saturn is as wide as 9 earths. Measured through the poles, on the other hand, it’s only 8 earths tall. That’s because it is spinning very rapidly, once in about 10 1/2 hours, and it’s fluid clear down to a solid core that’s about 16,000 km across. We were able to learn a LOT about Saturn’s interior just from monitoring its gravity’s effect on both the Cassini probe and the rings.
Saturn has a banded atmosphere much like Jupiter’s though not nearly as colorful. It doesn’t have a long-standing storm like the Great Red Spot, but from time to time white spots will appear. Great white spots tend to appear once every Saturnian year, during its northern hemisphere summer, the last one in 1990. Cassini got to see one form, stretch out along its band, and eventually dissipate, after the head of the thing caught up and passed its tail. And then in 2010, ten years early, we got another white spot.
Voyager 1 spotted something very peculiar around Saturn’s north pole. For some reason we don’t fully understand, the clouds there form a hexagon, which appears to rotate with the planet, in time with Saturn’s radio emissions.
The south pole, by contrast, shows something like a hurricane eyewall. (No word yet on whether this is where all the FEMA hurricane money goes.)
OK, with that out of the way…
The Rings
They have been called “Gravity’s Masterpiece.”
And that is an understatement.
Gravity created them, gravity maintains their structure, and gravity is slowly destroying them.
Galileo noticed change when looking at Saturn, but could not resolve the rings; his telescope was simply too small. That change is caused by Saturn’s seasons. When it’s northern hemisphere summer, the north surface of the rings is tilted toward the Sun, at autumn they are edge on, at northern winter, the south surface is tipped toward the Sun, and finally at northern spring, they are edge on again. And since, comparatively speaking, we’re quite close to the Sun, we see the same thing. Here is a twenty nine year time lapse:
The rings are thin. At the time the earth crosses through the plane of the rings, we can’t see anything, not even a thin line. It has been likened to looking at a sheet of paper edge on, but relatively speaking the sheet of paper is much too thick! The next “disapperance” is next year, right now it looks something like this:
The rings are skinny but definitely there.
The rings are themselves subdivided into seven sections, imaginitively named A, B, C, D, E, F, and G.
What we see through our telescopes are basically A, B, and C. This is typically what you’ll see…only it’s much smaller in the telescope field of view than this:
This picture (from Cassini) shows the rings from well above the plane, with Saturn itself casting a shadow on them.
Going form the outside in, there’s a medium-bright ring (A), a wide gap–the one noted by Cassini, a brighter ring (B), and a much fainter ring (C). There are other, smaller gaps as well. Where do they come from? The Cassini gap happens to be at that spot where, if something were orbiting there, it’d do so in a 2:1 resonance with Mimas. That causes enough instability to force objects into smaller or larger orbits. In other cases, small moons within the rings help clear things out.
That’s just the beginning of the crazy stuff that happens in the rings. Ripples one to two kilometers high raised by embedded moons, spokes on the B ring we can’t figure out (yet)…some scientists are spending their entire careers on this stuff!
To see the D through G rings readily, we must look at Saturn backlit…something we couldn’t do until we sent spacecraft there.
By the way, if you right click and open in new tab, between the two “gray” fuzzy rings (a narrow one and a broad one) at about 4 oclock…that dot there is Earth.
The rings appear to be made of chunks of ice, averaging about a foot across. And they’re pretty bright; they haven’t been covered with dark space dust. That leads most scientists to think that they aren’t that old…150 million years at the most. It’s possible that they weren’t there when the non-avian dinosaurs were killed 66 million years ago.
The most common thought is that a medium-sized moon got too close to Saturn somehow, perhaps thanks to perturbations from the other moons, and tidal forces (yes tidal forces again) did the rest.
Picture this: a spherical body maybe 200 kilometers across in orbit. It will orbit as if the entire mass of the moon were concentrated at the center. But a rock at the far side of the moon is 100 kilometers further away, and one at the near side is 100 kilometers closer. An object 100 km further out, in order to stay in orbit, wants to move slower than this moon is orbiting, yet that rock is being forced to move faster than that, since it’s stuck to the moon. If the moon were to suddenly disappear and leave the rock behind, it would actually go into a new, elliptical orbit, with the closest part where the rock was, sitting on the moon, and the furthest part, oh, some distance away. And so, this is what the rock “wants” to do. It actually feels a slight tug pulling at it, off the surface of the moon. If the moon is close enough to the planet, and its gravity weak enough, the rock will actually feel no net attraction to the moon, and drift off. As will its neighboring rocks. And similar things happen on the side of the moon closest to the planet, they want to go into smaller orbits and feel a net tug toward the planet and off the moon.
That’s how loose rocks might peel off, but moons are generally solid, aren’t they? Sure. But, if you think about that orbit where things on the far side will just barely want to drift away, but put the moon closer, then something deep underground at the far side would (if it weren’t buried) drift away. Now bury it again. Everything above it wants to drift away too. Those miles of stuff are effectively “hanging” wanting to fall off the moon. Enough of that, and even a solid rock will fracture. Rocks don’t do too well under tension, a fact which has had a profound effect on architecture here on Earth.
So, basically, we think a mostly-icy moon got too close and shattered. And the tidal forces have kept it from reforming. However some suggest that instead, two moons collided and this is the debris from the collision.
The rings are dying, though. The ice is slowly sublimating with help from cosmic rays, and that ice ends up in Saturn’s magnetic field and eventually forms auroras in its atmosphere. There are also other forces causing ring material to rain down onto Saturn’s equator (this was discovered by the Cassini spacecraft). The rings have 10-100 million years to live at the rate they are losing mass.
I’ll close this with another picture:
..or two, just to see the aurora…
..or three (you can see the hexagon in this one).
Obviously I could go on. But some of the coolest stuff is on the moons. So…until next time!
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
ultramontane
adjective
south of the Alps
supporting the Pope
of or relating to peoples or regions lying beyond the mountains, especially the Alps
supporting the authority of the papal court over national or diocesan authority
relating to or supporting the doctrine of papal supremacy
literally – “beyond the mountains”
Shown in a picture – sort of
All hail the Cthulhu plushie!
MUSIC!
Some interesting period music for a role-playing game related to the Lovecraft story…..
But if that’s not your bag, try this mountain music – supposedly the first ever film of Appalachian music – which was recorded on October 7, 1928 – and posted to the internet on October 7, 2021.
Here for your enjoyment on October 7, 2024.
Good stuff! And speaking of stuff…..
THE STUFF
Did you know that – in addition to the speed of light – there is a “55 mph truck speed” that protons have to deal with?
Steve prepared you for this video. Enjoy!
Hmmmmm…….
Just sayin’!
And remember…….
Until victory, have faith!
And trust the big plan, too!
And as always….
ENJOY THE SHOW
W
PS – Wishing the people of Israel peace and safety on this day of infamy.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
I obtained the word “montero” randomly, but when I searched on it for music, it came up with a song and album that was foisted on us by the satanists and communists in Hollywood and Nashville, via that horrifyingly creepy “Lil Nas X”. You may remember him.
I am not going to reproduce the blatantly homophilic, pedophilic, and anti-Christian content which is revealed in the Wiki article, but one quickly realizes that this “talent” was created to be pro-pedo (“Lil”), Madonna-style mocking and appropriating (“Nas” and “X”), and generally satanic, in a Travis Scott way.
The fact that “they” would send this guy into country music and even the Super Bowl shows the utter DISDAIN that Hollyweird and their satanic outpost in Nashville actually have for the “country” crowd.
Rather than listen to the toxic music, check out this very positive review of the album. Listen to all the details. The enemy’s moves just spill out one after the other!
The opening face-palm image on the video is rather precious in retrospect.
THE STUFF
This short (1-minute!!!) video is for Gail, and all of us who love the little goats.
The grazing goat problem – SOLVED!
I kinda like listening to this lady, despite the fact that there is also something very annoying about her.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
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.
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.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
chanticleer
noun
a rooster
a cock, so called from the clearness or loudness of his voice in crowing
a name for a rooster, used in medieval fables
Shown in art which is then shown in a picture
MUSIC!
Somewhere between Wheatie Music (TM) and Gregorian Chants, lies this stuff.
Nice. I like it!
THE STUFF
Ever wondered about black holes not just “bigger than a breadbox”, but sized somewhere between normal stellar-sized black holes, and the giant ones at the centers of galaxies?
