The Chinese Should Think Before Wiping Us Out As Sometimes They Need Us To Solve Their Problems For Them

Okay you knuckledragging ChiComs trying to take us down…here’s a history lesson for you.

For millennia, you had to suffer from this:

Yep. Steppe Nomads. They laid waste to your country, burned, raped and pillaged (but not in that order–they’re smarter than you are) for century after century.

You know who figured out how to take them on and win? The Russians.

Not you, the Russians. And it took them less than two centuries. And Oh By The Way they were among the most backward cultures in Europe at the time.

You couldn’t invent an alphabet, you couldn’t take care of barbarians on horseback, and you think you can take this board down?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! We’re laughing at you, you knuckledragging dehumanized communists…worshipers of a mass-murderer who killed sixty million people!

I mean, you still think Communism is a good idea even after having lived through it!

By my reckoning that makes you orders of magnitude more stupid than AOC, and that takes serious effort.

His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

“No Chemicals”

A detailed analysis of the contents of His Fraudulency’s skull was performed.

Absolutely no chemicals found!

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Roe v. Wade is Toast

Whatever you feel about abortion per se, however important it might be, the import of this decision extends far beyond it. For it is a re-affirmation of the basic principles of federalism, which have been severely eroded since…oh…well, you can draw that line anywhere you want in American history. FDR? Wilson? The other Roosevelt? Lincoln? For that matter, the Constitution itself centralized power that had previously been scattered, so maybe the trend has been on since 1787. But this was a major, blatantly visible step in the opposite direction. Abortion is now left to the states, and the opinion explains that that is the way it used to be.

Let’s see if that trend continues.

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).

James Webb Space Telescope Update

They’ve now checked off ten (no, twelve–they added two on Friday!) out of 17 (heh) instrument mode boxes on JWST. And four of these are all on one sensor, NIRISS, and that one sensor is done.

NASA has announced an event on the 12th of July, where they will be release the first “real” color images. (These will no doubt be “false color” since most of the light JWST sees, is light we cannot see because the frequency is too low–analogous to sound pitches only dogs can hear, because the pitch is too high. In fact the famous Pillars of Creation from Hubble is also false color.)

There will even be local gatherings you can go to, for example two in Denver suburbs, one in Boulder, and one in Pueblo (surprisingly, though, none in Colorado Springs, even though we have a space symposium here frequently).

NASA Invites Media, Public to View Webb Telescope’s First Images | NASA

We’ve already seen hints of what it can do, for instance imaging the LMC far more sharply than the old, short-lived infrared Spitzer Space Telescope could do.

This is where it gets interesting, but very slow-paced. We might not see news from JWST for months at a time but be assured scientists will be using it. And the headline will likely not even mention the telescope at all but instead describe what they discovered using the telescope.

So, I’ll have to hunt for something else Joe Biden hasn’t managed to fuck up (I can only conclude he’s unaware of JWST or he’d have fucked it up), to highlight here every week.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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

Last week:

Gold $1,840.80
Silver $21.74
Platinum $941.00
Palladium $1,896.00
Rhodium $13,850.00

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

Gold $1,827.40
Silver $21.24
Platinum $918.00
Palladium $1,952.00
Rhodium $15,000.00

Rhodium and palladium up, the other three–you know, that may actually be known to the man in the street–are all down.

T6 Entropy Understood, Or Why I Inflicted Combinatorics On You In Part 4

But first, a couple of go-backs.

One way people like to bring up the kinetic theory of gases is to ask a stupid-sounding question that isn’t really stupid.

Why doesn’t the air fall down?

That’s on the same level as “why is the nighttime sky dark” which isn’t as obvious as it seems.

Gases are individual atoms free to move about, and spaced far apart. So why don’t those atoms just fall to the ground and roll around like marbles on a floor? In the case of the air, why isn’t there just an 14.7 pounds of nitrogen and oxygen (and a few other things) lying around on every single square inch of Earth’s surface on average? (Up in the mountains this pile of small marbles would no doubt have rolled down hill and left the ground bare, which is why I used the word average.)

Well, something like that would resemble a liquid, not a gas, and that’s our clue. The question “why doesn’t the air fall down,” it turns out, is equivalent to asking why air is a gas.

As we saw last time a gas is full of widely spaced particles, moving around at random, slamming into each other and their surroundings; it’s all that kinetic energy being transferred in differing amounts with every collision that keeps the air from falling. If there’s less kinetic energy on average, the air molecules are, on average closer to each other because they’re not bumping into each other as hard.

The sorts of diagrams I showed last time (which was five weeks ago) with gas molecules ping ponging off each other (you know like this one:)

make the point fairly well. Imagine if the top wall of that box were free to slide downward; all of those dots hitting it would tend to push it up against gravity…that’s what pressure is, at a fundamental level.

But in the real world, with say pool balls on a pool table after a break, the little balls slow down and come to a stop eventually. And this is true; gases are part of the real world. But what this diagram doesn’t show you is that the edges of the box are also made of molecules, and though they aren’t moving freely, they’re vibrating in place, transferring energy back to the gas as often as the gas loses energy to the walls. At least it’s “as often” if the gas and the walls’ molecules all have roughly the same kinetic energy…which we learned last time is equivalent to saying “if they’re at the same temperature.”

Speaking of those billiard balls, you’ve no doubt at some time seen movies run backwards. You’ll see people walking backwards, eating backwards, and so on. And maybe you’ve seen a pool break backwards, with all the balls coming back together into that nice triangular array and “spitting out” the cue ball.

You can carefully analyze each collision you see in that backwards-pool-break, and see that they all follow Newton’s laws–all that stuff about elastic collisions–perfectly. (See Part 2 of the original physics series: https://www.theqtree.com/2021/05/08/2021%c2%b705%c2%b708-joe-biden-didnt-win-daily-thread/ )

Newton’s laws behave the same whether you’re looking at them in forward motion, or backwards motion.

If they didn’t, you’d be able to measure what’s going on in a clip and be able to tell whether the clip is running backwards or forwards, right?

But then, you can tell that anyway. Why?

With the billiard balls, you simply won’t ever see sixteen billiard balls moving around at random suddenly come together with 15 in a triangle and one–the only one that happens to be all white–shooting off to the other side of the table.

Even though it’s perfectly “legal” by physical law for them to do so.

It’s fifteen times more likely that they’d come together and one of the fifteen balls other than the cueball goes shooting to the other end of the table, and yet you’ll never see that happen, either.

You can tell which direction is “forward in time” versus “backward in time” just by watching what happens, even though both sequences follow the same physical laws.

This is actually pretty profound. And when you dig deeper, it turns out that the “forward” view shows entropy increasing, and the “backward” view shows it going down, and so what we see is that “wrong looking” backwards-playing tape is wrong-looking because it’s violating the second law of thermodynamics.

I’ll spend the rest of this expanding on that, trying to justify it. After all entropy is just this thing I tried, in vain, to explain satisfactorily when I was talking about hot gases (not necessarily emitted by politicians) a few essays ago.

Now I’m saying you can see it at the billiards table.

Imagine, if you will, a chamber like the one in the GIF above. But imagine there’s an adjacent, empty chamber to the right of the first chamber, the same size as the first. The gas should stay in the first chamber, yes? And the second chamber should remain empty.

Until, of course, you drill a little hole in the wall. Not too little, though…you want the gas molecules to be able to pass through.

The first molecule through the hole will travel left to right, of course, since all the molecules are on the left side of the wall. And if this is a real situation, many more will do the same because there are billions of billions (not billions and billions, Doctor Sagan; billions of billions) of molecules. And the odds are one of them will hit the opening in the wall before one of the few that have made it into the right hand chamber does so.

So the flow of these little gas molecules is left to right, predominantly, Eventually there’s about an equal amount on both sides, and the flow is two way.

But you will not ever see all of the molecules on the same side of the wall, or even 60 percent of them or even 51.1 percent of them on one side, once it has had a chance to even out…or as scientists say it, to reach equilibrium.

They’re all bouncing around effectively at random, but they’ll split 50/50 on both sides of that wall.

You don’t even need the wall. Let’s say it’s one big chamber. What are the odds, at any given moment, that the gas molecules will all be on the same side of the room?

Not quite zero…but so low that you can bet your life and the life of everyone else on Earth that it won’t happen ever even if the room lasts a trillion trillion years.

Because this situation is exactly like the situation of tossing a billion billion coins all at the same time and having them all come up heads. Or all come up tails. Each gas molecule has a 50 percent chance of being in the left side of the room rather than the right, each coin has a 50 percent chance of coming up heads, rather than tails.

And we saw two installments back how unlikely that is for just a hundred coins…much less 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them (and that would be a very small sample of gas; to get up to a gram of it you’d need over ten million times as much as even that ridiculous number).

[And no, the Federal Debt hasn’t gotten that high yet; it only has thirteen zeroes in it officially, fourteen unofficially. But not for lack of trying.]

Combinatorics can be used to count the different configurations of things like coins or molecules, and it’s very closely related to another branch of mathematics called probability. Combinatorics, however, doesn’t consider the possibility that some states might be more likely than others; it simply will tell you how many configurations there are of 48 heads and 52 tails.

Probability can tell you the likelihood of it being 48/52–that’s the number of configurations like that, divided by the number of all possible configurations. But it can do a lot more; it can even adjust for situations where the coins are all weighted, say to come up heads 60 percent of the time. But that doesn’t concern us here.

The point is that if things are reasonably random, the evenly spread out state is vastly more likely than the state with everything clustered together.

The single state where the billiard balls are in a triangle is MUCH less likely than the multitude of states where they’re scattered around the table, and that is because there are so many more such possible states. So if you see a scattered state become a “in a nice triangle” state just watching the billiards bounce around, you’ve either seen something inconceivably unlikely…or you’re watching a movie running backwards.

So as it turns out that there is a statistical way to think about entropy, and that is the tendency of a system full of random components to go to a state that’s basically equivalent to a lot of other states. (That’s my wretched phrasing, don’t use it on a thermodynamics exam.) With the coins, you’re going to see about 50 coins out of a hundred come up heads…and it doesn’t matter which fifty it is; the important thing is the proportion of heads to tails. 50-50 or 48-52 or something like that is vastly more likely than 100 to 0 or 0-100, and so that is what you see. Likewise with gas moving around a volume.

And this is why heat flows hot to cold. A hot item has a high kinetic energy per particle; put it in contact with a colder object and some of the high-energy particles of the hot item will transfer their energy to colder particles in the other object. Over time the kinetic energy will come to be average everywhere; the cold object has warmed up, the hot item has cooled off.

There’s a lot of pop-science and even some geeky corners pop culture regarding entropy. A picture of a child’s messy bedroom and a quip about entropy, for instance. Or calling it a progression from “order” to “disorder.” Well, that’s an evaluation, that 100-0 head/tails on a bunch of coins is “orderly” where half and half is not–by whose standards? I don’t call it a progression from order to disorder.

And of course entropy can be reversed, locally, but only by paying for it with more entropy elsewhere. The kid can clean his room, or you can painstakingly turn all the coins so they show heads. But these activities take energy and total entropy of you (or the kid) and the coins (or the clutter) still goes up, because you (or the kid) burned energy tidying up.

There’s a famous thought experiment called “Maxwell’s Demon.” And yes, it’s the James Clerk Maxwell I wrote about at length when talking about electromagnetism; he also did good work in thermodynamics–good but it pales by comparison with his EM work.

He said, imagine a device that sits near the opening between the two chambers in the example above. If a fast molecule approaches, it’s shunted (or bounced back) into the left chamber. A slow one is bounced back (or shunted) into the right hand chamber.

With this device, you’d eventually see the left chamber heat up (because it has all the high kinetic energy molecules) and the right one cool down.

This looks like a way to reverse entropy, and that device is usually called “Maxwell’s Demon.”

However, it turns out that the demon would require energy to function, and so it’d be just as much of an energy hog as an air conditioner. And it’s basically doing the same thing, except that the AC unit moves the energy out, not the particles with the energy.

This becomes plain when you treat the subject with mathematical rigor…which I don’t have time to do, so you guys all lucked out.

But now you hopefully understand the physical basis of this slippery thing called “entropy.”

It’s this sort of thought process that became known as “statistical mechanics” during the late 19th century, and Max Planck, when he began the quantum revolution, did a similar sort of thing and he, like many others, was deeply suspicious of it…but it worked. So he had to accept it.

And that brings this “T” miniseries to a close.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

Message for Bill Barr

You’re dirt.

Your job was to pursue justice impartially. Instead, you decided it was worth being partial just to get rid of the Orange Man with the Mean Tweets.

I imagine you sleep easy at night, though, because in your alleged mind, you saved America. The America you saved was the America that’s ruled by an elite and has to tolerate a dumptruck load of “deplorables”–you know the sort of people who just want to be left alone and not be forced to participate in some grand plan.

That just proves you’re a bloated bag of rancid, maggot-infested lard.

Since that has been true for quite some time, a large percentage of you must be maggot turds.

Your day will come, Traitor.

Justice Must Be Done

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

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

Spot (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $1,873.20
Silver $22.00
Platinum $982.00
Palladium $2,020.00
Rhodium $14,900.00

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

Gold $1,840.80
Silver $21.74
Platinum $941.00
Palladium $1,896.00
Rhodium $13,850.00

Everything is down since last week. The industrial PGMs are taking a beating. I’m reading articles showing that computer hardware (and related gadgets) are showing signs of crashing demand, which means of course you might be able to pick some stuff up on sale. If you can afford to after buying gas.

Qubes OS

It’s substantially working, but I’m doing some tinkering and ironing out glitches (many of which I probably caused with my tinkering). One is that I can no longer see Chinese characters, so my red and yellow Chinese flags below have a lot of rectangular outlines on them. That’s a matter of installing the right fonts. Unfortunately I’ve decommissioned the old machine so I have no idea what’s installed on it without setting it back up.

James Webb Space Telescope Update

We’re now up to 8 of 17 (Q) instrument modes being checked out. Just today the first MIRI mode got checked off. MIRI is the longer-wave infrared sensor, the one that has to be cooled to 6 or 7K.

When MIRI is tasked to do spectroscopy, it will of course reveal many chemical constituents of planets, nebulae, and so on:

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/06/16/webbs-mid-infrared-spectroscopy-will-reveal-molecules-elements/

From the link:

[The modes checked off this week are used for:] (5) NIRCam grism time series and (4) imaging time series, both used to study exoplanets and other time-variable sources; (12) NIRISS aperture masking interferometry mode, for direct detection of a faint object that is very close to a bright one; (11) NIRISS wide-field slitless spectroscopy, for studying distant galaxies; and (9) NIRSpec bright-object time series, for studying exoplanets.

So JWST is going to be looking at planets orbiting distant stars…but we knew that already!

Fuck Joe Biden

Biden, you don’t even get ONE scoop of ice cream today.

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

Incidentally, I’m writing this on Friday. This morning I saw a full-sized pickup truck in the oncoming left turn lane with a forest of flags in the bed. Once he turned and drove left-to-right in front of me, I could see two American flags near the cab, and SIX “Let’s Go Brandon” flags near the tailgate. That was unusual; usually there’s a mix of FJB (only not abbreviated) and “Trump Won” and “Trump 2024” flags when someone does this.

I haven’t seen such a display in a few weeks, by the way. Even the guy at the office complex where I work with the FJB flag on his pickup seems to have removed it (or doesn’t work there any more–trucks all look alike to me from the back, and all crossovers look like cockroaches).

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

Yo, Jim Acosta!

I see from video of your “conversation” with MTG that someone posted recently, that you are still a pugnacious, lying, puddle of bearded dragon shit.

How you can look at yourself in a mirror is beyond me, unless your conscience has been replaced by a dedication to Leftist goals. It certainly isn’t dedicated to real adversarial journalism. Much less any kind of journalism.

I will give you this. You have better hair than Brian Stelter. But then, so did Telly Savalas. And Yul Brynner.

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

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

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

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

But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.

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

Given the results of Tuesday’s elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.

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

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

Justice Must Be Done.

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

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is pointless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

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

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

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

Mozart

A few weeks ago I introduced you to the string quartet, two violins, a viola and a cello playing four distinct parts. It was an invention of Joseph Haydn, and Mozart wrote 23 of them (and probably wrote at least four of those in his sleep). If you ever hear of a piece of music called, say, a “clarinet quintet” or a “piano quintet” it’s not five clarinets or five pianos, it’s one clarinet (or piano) added to one of these string quartets.

(Often times four string players, perhaps four who work for some large city’s orchestra, will get together and form a named group, like the “Veronica Quartet.” They end up knowing each other very well, a simple raised eyebrow while playing speaks a thousand words. They end up with five frequent flier accounts if they get famous enough to be brought to other locations; one for each of the players, and one for the cello. It’s also possible to get confused between a musical work named a quartet, and a musical group named a quartet.)

There is also the straight “quintet,” much less common than the quartet, with a second viola; it could be called a “viola quintet” for consistency; it just isn’t.

I’m going to feature two quintets by Mozart here:

The quartet (group) is the Armida Quartet, and Sabine Meyer is the clarinetist.

It doesn’t say, but I think this is the fourth of Mozart’s six (viola) quintets (and unlike the symphonies they are numbered in chronological order).

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $1,855.10
Silver $22.22
Platinum $964.00
Palladium $2,172.00
Rhodium $16,250.00

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

Gold $1,852.30
Silver $22.00
Platinum $1022.00
Palladium $2,074.00
Rhodium $15,500.00

Not a whole ton of movement–until you look at the platinum group metals, with platinum appreciably up, the other two down. The latter two are strongly tied to industrial uses, so if they’re down maybe it means we’re heading into hard times (or people are afraid we are). I don’t know; I’ll never get a job writing the little partial sentences the news uses to explain why the market went up or down that day.

Qubes Update

After a lot of hardware struggles, I finally bought a new computer; it’s conceptually a lot like a Raspberry Pi on steroids, being in a very small package. I’m using it right now to write this post. Of course it’s using the same monitors as the other machine, which means I have to switch keyboards, make sure I don’t try to use the wrong mouse, and flip to different inputs on the monitors to go back and forth. I’m going to be doing a lot of configuration tweaking then eventually move all my “stuff” over and kiss the old Ubuntu behemoth goodbye.

Qubes is actually set up to be easy to install, with a default setup that will work for a lot of people. The difficulty comes in changing habits; you need to do different things in different “boxes.” Qubes makes that about as easy as possible to do, but you still have to train yourself to do it. It isn’t Micro$haft Windoze (though you can run a windows machine from inside it, a trick possible with other systems though I personally never managed it except on Qubes).

James Webb Space Telescope Update

ONE out of the 19 instrument modes is commissioned:

And now they’re discussing what is to be the subject of the first “real” pictures Webb is going to take: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/first-images-from-nasa-s-webb-space-telescope-coming-soon

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

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

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

Hey China!

Or rather, “Hey Chinese Communist Party and your entire array of servitors, ass-wipers, and fellators!”

You’re not even worth my time this week. When you decide to act like civilized people, maybe I’ll give you a lesson or two in how non-barbarians behave.

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

[Language warning]

You and yours have caused a lot of injury. Literal injury with your war on people who don’t want to take an untested vaccine. When people die in an emergency room because a hospital won’t admit them because they haven’t had their clot shot, that’s a crime.

I’m going to address here the insult on top of the injury, because I am among the insulted. I still have my health but apparently you want me to live under the 8th Street Bridge (which actually isn’t on 8th Street, but whatever, that’s what the I-25 overpass over Cimarron is called), so maybe if you have your way that won’t be true for long. Dreadful time of year to become homeless.

No, you’re just trying to make me unemployed, because I won’t take your fucking shots.

Well, that threat is NOT going to work. I. Won’t. Take. Your. Fucking. Shots.

And it looks like enough people agree, that you’re having to back down, you worthless asswipe.

You’re LOSING.

You LOSER.

You Chinese-bought ratfucking traitor.

I would love to see you die an agonizing, humiliating death. (This isn’t a threat, because I am not threatening to cause that death. I am just announcing my intention to party if it happens.) It would be just recompense for the way you’re killing America…and millions of Americans.

His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

(I’d like to add, I find it entirely plausible, even likely, that His Fraudulency is also His Figureheadedness. (Apparently that wasn’t a word; it got a red underline. Well it is now.) Where I differ with the hopium addicts is on the subject of who is really in charge. It ain’t anyone we like.)

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $1,847.70
Silver $21.88
Platinum $964.00
Palladium $2,039.00
Rhodium $16,150.00

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $1,855.10
Silver $22.22
Platinum $964.00
Palladium $2,172.00
Rhodium $16,250.00

Gold and silver up, most of the PGMs up but platinum itself is nailed in place at 964 bucks. (Still, inexplicably cheap compared to gold.)

And now for something completely different

I finally got a wild hair up my whatever and decided to investigate something I’ve known about for quite some time, Qubes OS.

The idea behind Qubes OS is that everything you do can run in a separate virtual machine. So if you want to go to a dodgy web site, perhaps one that sometimes puts malware on your system, you can open that website in a one-time virtual machine. It can go ahead and infect the daylights out of your system…and it won’t matter because it goes up in a cloud of smoke when you close the window. It’s sort of like sending all the woke people with the CRT mind virus off to their own island and letting them starve to death because they don’t know Jacques Schitt (brother of Adam) about doing anything you need to do to survive.

Qubes OS is in fact based on the premise that you WILL get attacked successfully; the idea is to only allow the hackers to get their mitts on one disposable “sandbox” that you can throw away.

Qubes OS is Linux based–fair warning. And I had a really hard time getting it to install, finally having to resort to installing it on a USB drive (not a thumb drive, but one of those little boxes you have to run a cable from, to a USB port). [This is not recommended, in fact they recommend using PS2 keyboards and mice instead of USB ones (including wireless). I didn’t even know anyone still sold those! But it was good enough for me to give it a test drive.] After struggling with that for three days, I’ve managed to do a lot in the last few hours.

You have direct control over which of the virtual machines can even see your internet connection, and/or your ethernet. In fact, the default setup includes something called the “vault.” It cannot communicate with ANYTHING without your direct intervention, so that’s a good place to keep, for example, your passwords.

In fact, I’m writing this post in a Qubes OS window running firefox. I’ll be working out Brave at some point. As well as a lot of other things.

Another fair warning–you will want 32 GB of RAM to start and a very powerful processor for this, and the fastest storage you can get (one of those M2 cards that plug directly into the motherboard would be about right). Running virtual machines consumes a lot of RAM and processing time. Opening a new window can take an annoyingly long amount of time when you’re used to something responsive.

In other words you might want a “Gaming” machine, but without the water-cooled graphics card that makes the lights dim when it shows monsters blowing up or whatever.

It’s supposedly possible to install Windows in one of the virtual machine “templates” and thereby be able to open up Micro$haft Turd or Micro$haft Exceed if you need to (though LibreOffice is usually a workable alternative to those); I have a number of eclectic apps that do not have Linux versions out there, so if I ever want to ditch my other old system, that’s something I will have to do.

It does come with Whonix, which by default uses Tor to communicate with the outside world.

Anyhow, this machine I am on isn’t bad…but it might be time to spring for a real powerhouse.

Now having said all that, probably the only person remotely interested here is Cthulhu, and he just uses a ton of Raspberry Pi machines anyway.

James Webb Space Telescope Update

Another of a series of articles on what they hope…OK maybe finally we can say “expect”…JWST to do. This one concerns the search for primimeval black holes.

Although we’re pretty confident there’s a mondo (4 million sun mass) black hole at the center of the galaxy (and one a thousand times more massive than that at the center of the M87 galaxy in the Virgo cluster), we do not know why galaxies seem to invariably have these black holes in them. Hopefully JWST will shed some light on that.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/05/26/webbs-quest-for-primeval-black-holes/

One question is whether these black holes existed before the galaxies did; that would likely mean galaxies need the black holes to form in the first place, sort of like raindrops condensing around dust particles. Well, we don’t have a time machine, but we CAN look backwards in time if we can just get a strong enough telescope that can see redshifted stuff from 13 billion light years away…which is what JWST is supposed to do for us.

Seeing 13 billion light years away is seeing 13 billion years into the past…because it takes the light that long to get to us; we only now would see what happened there 13 billion years ago. (Astronomers call this “look back time.” Yeah, no fancy Latin or Greek name; very few people learn that stuff in school any more.) On the other hand if we don’t see “bare” black holes back before there were galaxies, then they likely formed in the galaxies, after the galaxies formed; in other words rather than the black holes causing the galaxies, the galaxies caused the black holes.

Meanwhile the graphic showing the instrument commissioning still shows 19 instrument modes in progress.

https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

The Chinese Should Think Before Wiping Us Out As Sometimes They Need Us To Solve Their Problems For Them

Okay you knuckledragging ChiComs trying to take us down…here’s a history lesson for you.

For millennia, you had to suffer from this:

Yep. Steppe Nomads. They laid waste to your country, burned, raped and pillaged (but not in that order–they’re smarter than you are) for century after century.

You know who figured out how to take them on and win? The Russians.

Not you, the Russians. And it took them less than two centuries. And Oh By The Way they were among the most backward cultures in Europe at the time.

You couldn’t invent an alphabet, you couldn’t take care of barbarians on horseback, and you think you can take this board down?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! We’re laughing at you, you knuckledragging dehumanized communists…worshipers of a mass-murderer who killed sixty million people!

I mean, you still think Communism is a good idea even after having lived through it!

By my reckoning that makes you orders of magnitude more stupid than AOC, and that takes serious effort.

His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

“No Chemicals”

A detailed analysis of the contents of His Fraudulency’s skull was performed.

Absolutely no chemicals found!

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

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).

James Webb Space Telescope Update

None of the 19 boxes I showed last time have been checked, yet, but NASA has published another blog entry about what they plan to do with JWST once it is ready to do science, this time focusing on our own solar system.

Webb Nearly Set to Explore the Solar System – James Webb Space Telescope (nasa.gov)

The article makes the point that we haven’t sent a spacecraft to Uranus and Neptune since 1986 and 1989, respectively, and that was Voyager 2 (which, by the way, is still alive and kicking, and 129.9 AUs away from the Sun, the second furthest we’ve ever sent a probe [you are a mere 1 AU from the Sun]).

We’ve even managed to put orbiters around Jupiter (two of them), and Saturn (one) and even landed on a moon of Saturn, but we’ve not been back to the two ice giants. So we need to watch them from here. Hubble has taken pictures of Uranus and Neptune, and JWST will, also.

[As an aside, I still remember New Horizons’ 2015 flyby of Pluto. In my lifetime Pluto went from being a dot (marked with an arrow) among an array of other dots (which are stars) in a photograph, to being a world we had some very detailed images of, and almost all of that progression was in one week. (Hubble had gotten very blurry images in 2002-03.) Suddenly I was able to buy a six inch globe of Pluto, something flat-out (pun intended) undoable mere months earlier.

[If we can launch New Horizons, we can launch more probes to Uranus and Neptune, though they might not be orbiters. New Horizons was launched at solar escape velocity directly from Earth. (Its speed immediately after launch, relative to Earth, was over 36,000 miles per hour, a record that still stands, though other spacecraft like the Helios sun probe have gone much faster well after launch.) It didn’t need a gravity assist “slingshot” like the Voyager probes needed to get to Saturn and beyond, though we did use one off Jupiter to shorten the voyage by a few years. New Horizons was a very lightweight (884 lbs) probe compared to the Voyagers (1820 lbs), and that’s what made the difference–a lighter probe can be pushed to a higher velocity by the same rocket.]

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

Last week:

Gold $1,813.20
Silver $21.24
Platinum $951.00
Palladium $2,020.00
Rhodium $16,950.00

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

Gold $1,847.70
Silver $21.88
Platinum $964.00
Palladium $2,039.00
Rhodium $16,150.00

We’re seeing some recovery of gold, silver and platinum, but well below the levels that were starting to look normal before the Fed raised the rate.

Greatest Physicists and Greatest Scientists

Physics World (a British journal) did a poll back in 1999, presumably only quizzing actual physicists. They were asked to name the greatest physicists of all time. Here’s what they got:

1. Albert Einstein
2. Isaac Newton
3. James Clerk Maxwell
4. Niels Bohr
5. Werner Heisenberg
6. Galileo Galilei
7. Richard Feynman
8. Paul Dirac
9. Erwin Schrödinger
10. Ernest Rutherford

All of these have gotten mention here; I probably didn’t spend enough time on Heisenberg. (Or maybe I did. Can’t be sure.) I’m a little surprised to not see Michael Faraday on the list. It’s heavily tilted towards post-1894 people, which shouldn’t be too surprising; physicists’ heads are the quantum world constantly, and Einstein, Heisenberg, Dirac, Schrödinger, and Feynman had a lot to do with shaping that world, and Bohr and Rutherford investigated the atomic nucleus (which also depends on quantum concepts). That just leaves Newton, Maxwell, and Galilei (almost always referred to by his first name) as representing classical (“old”) physics.

There’s also a site named famousphysicists.org and they list twenty names:

• Albert Einstein (for Advancing the Theory of Relativity)
• Neils Bohr (for Contributions to quantym theory, nuclear reactions and nuclear fission
• Stephen Hawking (for Explaining black holes and advances on the General Theory of Relativity and quantum mechanics
• Isaac Newton (for explaining the theories of gravity and mechanics)
• Nikola Tesla (for creating the first alternating current system)
• Galileo Galilei (for providing a mathematical analysis of the relationship between astronomy and physics)
• Marie Curie (for discovering radioactive nature of thorium and the discovery of polonium and radium)
• (Lord) Kelvin (for advancement of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics; developing absolute thermometric scale
• Robert Hooke (for explaining Hooke’s Law of elasticity)
• Richard Feyman (for work on path integral formulation on quantum mechanics, particle physics, theory of quantum electrodynamics, and superfluidity)
• Michael Faraday (for discovering electromagnetic induction and for coming up with the idea for the first electrical transformer)
• Ernest Rutherford (for supporting the theory on the existence of an atomic nucleus)
• Marconi (for work on wireless telegraphy)
• Max Planck (for formulation of quantum theory)
• Allesandro Volta (for inventing the first electric battery)
• J. J. Thomson (for showing the existence of the electron)
• Erwin Schrodinger (for extensive advancements of quantum mechanics and the Schroedinger equation)
• James Clerk Maxwell (for work on the theory of electromagnetism and the kinetic theory of gases)
• Werner Heisenberg (for work on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle
• James Chadwick (for discovery of the neutron).

The only ones I missed completely during the physics series were Hooke (and I’ve noted I shouldn’t have skipped that particular topic, especially when later stuff turned out to depend on it somewhat), Marconi. and Tesla. Though Tesla, I noted, did have a unit of measurement named after him.

Discover Magazine came up with their own list of scientists (not specifically physicists) here: The 10 Greatest Scientists of All Time | Discover Magazine (Warning, this is one of those sites that gives a very limited number of free reads to non-subscribers…sort of a demi-paywall.) Their selection criteria seem just a bit…odd.

• Albert Einstein
• Marie Curie
• Isaac Newton
• Charles Darwin
• Nikola Tesla
• Galileo Galilei
• Ada Lovelace
• Pythagoras
• Carl Linnaeus
• Rosalind Franklin.

I definitely haven’t mentioned all of these, many are biologists and one is a geologist, and I haven’t talked about those fields (which are more closely tied to each other than many might imagine). Charles Darwin is famous enough, clearly (though many suffer from misconceptions as to what his theory addressed–it says nothing about the origin of life) and he definitely deserves a spot in the top ten. Ada Lovelace was in fact the first programmer, but the man who designed the machine she programmed is absent. Carl Linnaeus came up with a classification scheme for living things close to what we use today and is definitely a biologist of the first rank. Pythagoras is famous for his theorem about right triangles, and Franklin was part of the DNA sequencing team, denied her rightful share of the credit. All on this list are worthy of mention, but only a few of them should be in a Top Ten Scientists list. I suspect some PC or even wokester influence in the cases of Lovelace and Franklin. If Franklin should be on this list, so should her two teammates Watson and Crick. It could be worse, though; at least no one on this list was totally useless.

Readers of Discover Magazine sent in some other suggestions, including Isaac Asimov, Richard Feynman, Robert FitzRoy, Lucretius, Katherine McCormick, John Muir, Rolf O. Peterson, and Marie Tharp. Frankly the only one of these in the absolute top drawer is Feynman, though all of the others did worthwhile things. Asimov was a very good explainer of science (more so than me!). Marie Tharp discovered the mid-ocean terrain that was an important piece of the evidence for plate tectonics (without which, geology makes no sense). FitzRoy was the captain of the HMS Beagle (the ship on which Darwin voyaged) and made contributions to meteorology; Peterson has been running a predator/prey study on Isle Royale for decades.

T5 The Kinetic Theory of Gases or Why The Earth Leaks Hydrogen

The second list above contains the name “(Lord) Kelvin” and explains that he’s famous for his work on the kinetic theory of gases. The original article says a bit more, crediting him with enunciating the first two laws of thermodynamics. Which, for review, are:

1. If you put energy into (or take it out of) a system, the energy remaining in the system changes by that much. This is essentially the conservation of energy.
2. In a natural thermodynamic process, the sum of all entropies of the interacting items never decreases. As it turns out, this is equivalent to saying that heat never passes from a colder body to a warmer body.

Even in your refrigerator, the heat inside the refrigerator goes into the refrigerant; it’s piped away and compressed (to warm it up), the heat leaves the hot refrigerant, which is allowed to expand and cool…and sent back into the refrigerator. Energy–work–is used to alter the temperature of the refrigerant by mechanical means so it can suck heat out of the refrigerator then dump it outside the refrigerator; that work itself creates more heat.

But what’s really behind all of this? We’ve talked about heat, we’ve established that it’s a form of energy, but why does it always flow hot to cold? And what is it, really?

The kinetic theory of gases goes all the way back to Lucretius, who suggested that all objects consisted of a large number of moving particles, but Aristotelian theory was more widely accepted. In the 1700s some scientists revived the theory, but it ran into difficulty because it required perfectly elastic collisions. I’d better explain what that means, because it’s probably counter-intuitive. When you hear “elastic” you’re probably thinking of bouncing a rubber ball, which after all, is an elastic material, but to a physicist an elastic collision is one where the bodies do not deform and do not lose their kinetic energy in any way–whereas with rubber objects some of the energy goes into compressing and bending the rubber. Billiard balls are close to elastic in this sense.

William Thomson (1824-1907) was a key figure to elaborating and getting the kinetic theory of gases accepted. He was actually a very important figure in physics, and you may recall he had things to say with regard to the (then) mystery of where the Sun (and other stars) gets its energy. He was first knighted by Queen Victoria in 1866, becoming Sir William Thomson, then eventually ennobled and made Lord Kelvin in 1892, the first scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords. And he is more commonly known as Lord Kelvin today, and so the metric unit of temperature is named the kelvin, not the thomson.

In 1847 Thomson attended a conference at which James Prescott Joule argued against the then-dominant caloric theory of heat, which stated that heat was a fluid, named “caloric,” that repelled itself and thus would tend to flow to where it wasn’t (i.e., to colder objects). Joule was having little success, but Thomson became intrigued and eventually during the mid 1850s the two collaborated, mostly by mail, with Joule doing the experimental work and Thomson suggesting new experiments and working on the theory.

And they ended up arguing convincingly for the kinetic theory of gases.

This theory models a gas as a collection of very small particles, identical particles if the gas is pure, which are spaced much further apart than the diameter of the particles. And they’re all bouncing around, smacking into each other and their surroundings, sort of like in the GIF below (ignore the different colors for now).

It’s like the world’s biggest game of billiards–perfectly elastic. And it’s in three D, and there’s no friction at all. Air resistance? This is what the air is made of, how can these spheres be encountering air resistance? In other words, the space between these little particles (atoms or molecules) of gas is a vacuum.

If you watch that GIF for a while, you’ll see that some of the particles move quickly, some move slowly, and a particle’s speed can change. Part of the loop, just for instance, shows a red particle in the lower left that is nearly stationary until it gets smacked by another particle.

Just looking at that, there’s a fair amount of kinetic energy in all these particles. But it’s more than just the particles flying all over the place and smacking each other; the particles can vibrate and rotate as well, and all of this is kinetic energy in different guises.

It turns out the temperature of the gas is directly related to the average kinetic energy of the particles.

If you have, say, about six hundred sextillion particles of gas, you have a mole of the gas, in other words, if it’s hydrogen molecules, H₂ (molecular weight 2), it’s two grams of hydrogen, and so on; physicists and chemists like to work in moles because if two samples of two different things are of the same number of moles, they have the same number of molecules in them.

So if temperature is directly tied to the average kinetic energy of the particles, in other words energy per particle, then you can get to total energy by multiplying by the number of particles, and every mole has the same number of particles in it. So they like to write this law out in energy per mole.

So the kinetic energy in one mole of a gas is equal to a constant, R, times the temperature in kelvins, so E_k = ³/₂ RT. And if you have n moles of the gas, it becomes Ek = ³/₂ nRT.

R = 8.31446261815324 J/(K mol)

But scientists then like to divide this energy per mole, by the number of particles in a mole, to get the average kinetic energy of each molecule in the gas, and when they do that the constant becomes:

k = 1.380649×10⁻²³ J/K

And k is known as the Boltzmann constant.

So the average kinetic energy of a molecule in a sample of gas is simply this number, times the temperature of the gas, times ³/₂.

Kinetic energy in general is E_k = ¹/₂ mv², i.e, one half the mass of the object, times the square of its velocity.

So we have the average kinetic energy of a molecule of the gas expressed in two different ways, one the traditional formula for kinetic energy, the other in terms of temperature. So we can set these two things equal to each other, like this:

E_k = ¹/₂ mv² = ³/₂kT

If you do a bit of algebra, you can get the average velocity of a molecule of gas, at some temperature–skipping past energy.

v_average = sqrt( 3kT / m )

Notice…now that we’ve done it this way, it becomes clear that the lighter the molecule, the faster it must move at a given temperature (on average). A molecule of oxygen is sixteen times heavier than one of hydrogen; so at some temperature, the average hydrogen molecule must move four times as fast as the average oxygen molecule.

Those are averages. Can we say anything about the individual molecules? Well, there is a distribution known as Maxwell’s Distribution (named after the same James Clerk Maxwell who worked on electromagnetism; he also did work on this topic). With it you can determine, given an average kinetic energy (or velocity), what percentage of molecules are moving faster than some given velocity, or how many are moving slower. So perhaps the average molecule is moving at 100 meters per second, but you want to know what fraction of them are moving at more than 120 meters per second. The Maxwell Distribution will tell you. (It’s an ugly mess of a formula with derivatives in it…so I’ll spare you.)

This has a practical consequence, and explains something we take for granted.

You can imagine, perhaps, a temperature at which oxygen molecules (on average) travel slower than a planet’s escape velocity, so they tend to stick around, and hydrogen molecules, moving four times as fast, exceed the planet’s escape velocity and will escape the planet. Of course there are a couple of caveats. If the hydrogen is down close to the surface, it’s likely to bump into another molecule and perhaps lose its energy; it will certainly be deflected before it zooms off into outer space. So this applies to the upper reaches of the atmosphere, where the hydrogen has a straight shot to interplanetary space.

Also, the temperature doesn’t quite have to be high enough that the average velocity is over escape velocity. In fact, it can be quite a bit lower. This is an average velocity; some molecules move faster, some slower. What if the average is quite a bit lower than escape velocity, but one percent of the molecules are exceptionally fast and exceed escape velocity? Well, then over time that gas will slowly bleed away. Any hydrogen at high altitude will lose one percent of its number to outer space…and what’s left over, of course, will maintain the average and it will lose one percent to outer space. Repeat this a lot, and all the hydrogen in the upper atmosphere is gone, but then replenished by hydrogen from lower altitudes–but it bleeds away too. Eventually all of the hydrogen will be gone, even though it’s cool enough that at any given time, only one percent of the molecules are above escape velocity.

The earth is actually warm enough to bleed hydrogen like this. And in a fairly short amount of time, geologically speaking. This is why even though hydrogen is ridiculously common in our universe, much, much more common than oxygen, that we don’t have a world that consists of rock, water, and left-over hydrogen after all the oxygen forms rocks and water. That excess hydrogen, if it was ever here (it might not have ever stuck to the Earth in the first place during planetary formation), is long, long gone.

Helium is twice as heavy as hydrogen, and also very common…and it too bleeds away. When you open the valve on a cylinder of helium and it leaks out into the atmosphere, it rises, and eventually bleeds away into interplanetary space. Remember that the next time you get a party balloon. The helium in that balloon is gone forever once it leaks out. Helium is slowly generated by radioactive decay inside the earth, but once we pump out helium that has accumulated over billions of years and lose it, it’s gone. It’s the ultimate non-renewable resource…at least until we go mine it from gas giant planets, which is a ways away. This is why it’s so hard to get helium for balloons now–we’re saving it for MRI machines, where at least it’s continually recovered instead of leaked.

Even water (nine times as heavy as hydrogen) leaks from the earth, very slowly. GIve it enough time and the earth would become bone dry, as water evaporates, and some bleeds away. But something as heavy as oxygen and nitrogen has an average velocity low enough that, according to the Maxwell Distribution, virtually none of it gets fast enough to escape.

Jupiter, by contrast is colder and has a higher escape velocity, so it keeps its hydrogen. And helium. (Which is in large part why it is so massive.)

OK, I was hoping to get farther than this, and connect combinatorics and thermodynamics.

But alas, I have run out of time. It’s four minutes after 10 PM mountain, and I gotta publish this. I don’t even have time to edit for clarity (more than I have as I wrote it).

Hope it made some sense.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!