“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
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
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).
OK – this will take a while to explain, but I’ll try to be brief.
I wanted to do a Hanukkah post – especially because Hanukkah 2024 has the unusual aspect of starting on Christmas (Western Christmas, that is) this year. Yes – Hanukkah runs from sundown on December 25, 2024 until sundown on January 2, 2025.
Now, you may have noticed that I spelled Hanukkah “wrong” in the title. Well, the holiday turns out to have 24 different “wrong” spellings! I simply picked the one that celebrated “X” the most!
Since the time for this debate is nearing: The right way to spell Hanukkah is to change the spelling of Channuka each time that you mention Xanukah. Khannike is a delightful holiday (get it?) when one eats fried foods and remembers miracles. Mark your calendar, Janice is coming!
I wanted to do two posts – an extra Xanukah post, and a post about the Grok AI now being free. And then I needed to do the Christmas post, but thankfully Aubergine did that, so I only had to do those two posts. And THEN I got the idea to combine them!
As to the point about the Grok AI, I was seeing ads on X for Grok now being free. Like this one.
A few days ago, I decided to try it. I clicked on the ad when I saw it, and it took me right to Grok. So I asked Grok a question.
What follows is the answer that was returned in under 15 seconds.
15 web pages
The image you’re referring to likely depicts a black hole, specifically showcasing the visual phenomenon known as the “photon ring.” Here’s an explanation of why this object appears differently from most ringed planets:
Shape and Appearance: Unlike planetary rings which are composed of particles orbiting a planet in a relatively flat plane, the shape in your image is due to the unique gravitational effects of a black hole.
Photon Ring: The bright ring you see is not a physical structure but an optical effect. It’s caused by photons (light particles) that orbit the black hole multiple times due to extreme gravitational lensing before escaping towards the observer. This results in a ring-like structure that appears around the black hole’s shadow. The light from the accretion disk or material around the black hole bends in the intense gravity, creating this luminous ring. The thickness and brightness of this ring can vary based on the black hole’s mass, spin, and the viewing angle.
Black Hole’s Shadow: Inside this photon ring is the black hole’s shadow, which is essentially the silhouette of the event horizon—the point beyond which no light or matter can escape. This shadow appears dark because any light or matter that crosses the event horizon cannot be seen from outside. The size of the shadow is roughly twice the size of the event horizon, making it larger than what you might expect just by looking at the black hole itself.
Difference from Planetary Rings: Planetary rings are made of ice, dust, and rock particles that orbit the planet due to its gravity but remain within a certain band due to stable orbits. A black hole’s photon ring, however, is an effect of spacetime curvature, where light paths are significantly altered around the black hole, creating an illusion of a ring. This is not due to physical material distribution but how light travels in the extreme gravity of a black hole.
Scientific Significance: The imaging and study of such phenomena help in understanding general relativity, black hole physics, and the behavior of matter and light in extreme gravitational fields. The first direct image of a black hole, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope, was of M87’s black hole and showed this very ring, confirming theoretical predictions about how black holes should appear.
This visual representation is a testament to the bizarre effects predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, where gravity can bend light to such an extent that we observe phenomena like the photon ring.
photon ring theory
gravitational lensing
OK – that was cool. So I decided to ask it another question that’s relevant today, and would take me a while to search.
Grok – please explain why Hanukkah normally happens before Christmas (December 25), but it happening after Christmas this year.
25 web pages
10 posts
Hanukkah normally occurs before Christmas because it follows the Hebrew calendar, which is lunisolar. Here’s how it works:
Hebrew Calendar: Hanukkah begins on the 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev. The Hebrew calendar is based on both lunar and solar cycles, with months starting with the new moon. Because lunar months are about 29.5 days long, there are roughly 12 lunar months in a solar year, but this cycle is shorter than the solar year, causing a drift. To realign the calendar with the solar year, an extra month (a second Adar) is added approximately every three years in a 19-year cycle. This adjustment ensures that holidays like Hanukkah maintain their seasonal timing.
Gregorian Calendar: In contrast, the Gregorian calendar, which is solar-based, has a fixed date for Christmas on December 25. Since the Hebrew and Gregorian calendars do not align perfectly, the date of Hanukkah on the Gregorian calendar varies from year to year, typically falling between late November and late December.
This year, in 2024, Hanukkah starts at sundown on December 25 and continues until January 2, 2025, due to the specific alignment of the lunar and solar calendars. It’s a rare occurrence for Hanukkah to begin on or after Christmas Day:
Rare Coincidence: The last time Hanukkah started on Christmas Day was in 2005, and it won’t happen again until 2035. This is because the Hebrew calendar’s leap year system occasionally pushes Hanukkah later into December, sometimes even into January, but rarely this close to or after Christmas.
Leap Year Influence: The Jewish calendar’s leap year, where an extra month is inserted, can shift Hanukkah’s timing on the Gregorian calendar. In a year like 2024, the leap year effect has resulted in Hanukkah starting later than usual, thus coinciding with or following Christmas.
In summary, the variable nature of the Hebrew calendar’s lunisolar system causes Hanukkah’s date to shift relative to the fixed solar-based Gregorian calendar, leading to this rare occurrence where Hanukkah begins after Christmas.
Hebrew calendar leap years
Other lunisolar calendars
WELL – that was excellent. Grok really gives nice answers – and FAST.
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:
xerophobous
adjective
unable to survive drought
intolerant of dry conditions
Shown in a picture
Used in a sentence
Xerophobous plants which require wet soil or even standing water, such as some species of the Japanese iris, are sometimes described as water-loving, but are perhaps better described as water-needful.
MUSIC!
Enjoy some real piano music!
The tank-top is the perfect touch!
THE STUFF
While we’re here, some kudos to Musk for inspiring us all.
Video from a different vantage point shows Starship Booster never came even close to hitting the tower.
As far as I can tell, this was as perfect of a Mechazilla catch as SpaceX could have hoped for. pic.twitter.com/TagzygAQgG
This is a fun piece of an interview with aging scientist Roger Penrose, a highly respected astrophysicist and theoretician. Don’t sweat it if you don’t understand the details. Soak up the controversy, still rumbling a century after the 1920s, when general relativity and quantum mechanics were just arriving.
This is, and was, what science was supposed to be like. Great minds feuding and governments staying the F out of the arguments.
HINT – “collapse of the wavefunction” means that “the tumbling dice of many possibilities settle down to something specific.” Penrose is saying that the idea our minds do this is bullshit. He believes that something in physics makes the dice settle on a value, but he doesn’t guess as to what it might be.
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
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?
A special thread from which to get ready for, and then watch, the “super blood wolf moon”.
Before leaving, I wanted to provide some information about the “super blood wolf moon” which will appear in my absence, on the night of January 20/21. I also wanted to leave a special parting message for everybody. And finally, I wanted to leave some potentially missing crumbs for the white hats.
Rather than doing three posts, I tried to do a SINGLE POST. Well, that didn’t work out so well. The “a few tips for the white hats” part turned into a MASSIVE reveal.
Eventually, the latter just became the focus of things, and it was all wrong. Therefore, I excised that part as a separate post. Which you may or may not have seen, when you see this.
So – let’s concentrate on the SUPER BLOOD WOLF MOON.
A “super blood wolf moon” will appear across the U.S. Sunday night. What does that mean? https://t.co/O2VTnjum2w
Latest SDO image of our local Star shows Earth Facing Coronal Hole on the way… the timing coincides with the arrival of the “Wolf Blood Super Moon” in the next two days.. there should be a Geomagnetic Influence taking place at the same time of the Gravitation Pull of the Moon.. pic.twitter.com/G1rBnMVeS6
The bottom line – there is a LUNAR ECLIPSE that is coincidental with a bunch of stuff, and that stuff has heightened the usual human interest in any eclipse to extraordinary levels.
Now – a few thoughts about that interest.
There is certainly a lot of interesting stuff attached to this eclipse. I think one of the greatest points demonstrated by this event is the MASSIVE MINDSHARE which this celestial event holds over people – the way both ANNIVERSARIES of things and ASTRONOMICAL EVENTS have PSYCHOLOGICAL POWER over people.
This is significant. Note that these events are important in both RELIGION and SCIENCE, to say nothing of HISTORY per se. Is it any wonder that both ASTROLOGY and ASTRONOMY developed?
The PERIODICITY of things is REAL. Some is hard and fast, some is loose and statistical, much is personal and circumstantial. Coincidence is a thing which sometimes is meaningful, sometimes not. I love the famous Ian Fleming quote:
“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action”
Ian Fleming
HA!
Let me add to that.
“Ten times means you’re behind enemy lines.”
Where “scientific suspicion” leaves off and the left’s useful dismissive tool of “confirmation bias” begins is not clear. In my opinion they overlap strongly, and one has to be careful that “intuition leading to revelation” is not dismissed too early. In fact, I tend to believe that “confirmation bias” is now the left’s strongest tool for creation of useful idiots.
“Nothing to see here. It’s just coincidence.”
Still, we must be PATIENT. Correlation is not causation. The search for causation is what takes things from astrology to astronomy. It can even take astronomy from planet Vulcan to general relativity.
The search for causation can also take things from happenstance and coincidence to enemy action. Causation is sometimes something we have to wait long and hard to find.
