“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
Yes, it’s great that one of the most rancid cunts in US politics is destined to leave office on January 3rd of next year, having been primaried out…by a great big (but not big enough) margin.
But just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled), 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 wheelhouses 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!
SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom
I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”
Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.
Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?
Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:
OK, with that rant out of my system…
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).
Gold continues to drop…and the standard story is that it’s because the dollar looks attractive to the big financial weenies because the interest rate is climbing. And it’s trending up against the euro. Personally I think both are circling the drain, so something else is in play…conspiracy theories about big buyers forcing the price down are certainly not out of order.
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
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 !!!
TL;DR – Watch this sucker while ignoring the myopic neo-Bolshevik “refugee” propaganda, but instead keeping in mind the current COVID/WEF insanity, to get a grip on the incipient climate-excused holocaust of the depopulationists, which is the fault of SOCIALISM, same as the soon-to-be-dwarfed “Holocaust” of the 1930s and 1940s.
OK – just a bit more detail…..
Don’t watch the Ken Burns Holocaust special for any of the slanted, leftist, socialist messaging stapled onto the historical facts in a DNC-approved and ADL-edited way.
Watch this PBS special while subversively keeping in mind the new socialist, depopulationist, eco-nuttery holocaust which now exceeds 6 million COVID dead and will soon DWARF the old “Holocaust” of so much hypocritical and self-centered angst.
Calmly stroke Suspicious Cat, as the Holocaust is falsely linked to rejection of current “asylum seekers” in a face-palmingly stereotypical and Trump-hating way.
Watch this PBS special while “rebelliously” remembering that RIGHT NOW we are in a DESIGNED CRASH of the world economy, which will kill BILLIONS of innocent people if not stopped – and which is largely driven with the eager participation of globalist and socialist “Jazis” – who are no less evil than the Nazis of old – self-righteous in their “ESG/DEI” zeal, with their vain self-assurance that they and they alone know the answers which must be forced upon the world.
Watch this special remembering Andrew Cuomo, Anthony Fauci, Ralph Baric, Joe Biden, WEF, Klaus Schwab, Pfizer, CCP and Albert Bourla, and keeping close in mind, the NEW holocaust which has already killed over 6 million worldwide by the virus ALONE, and is already creating even-more-massive excesses in mortality in every country, in unacknowledged proportion to acceptance of the “vaccines”.
Watch this PBS propaganda special while remembering how the US and China co-created biological “gain of function” which literally DWARFS the mere chemical nastiness of a bug spray, “Zyklon B”, itself more comparable to Fauci’s murderous remdesivir, or the midazolam they apparently used for “COVID euthanasia” in the UK.
Watch this special while remembering the millions who died around the world from both virus and vaccines, including tens of thousands of Israelis, as secular Jewish leaders condemned their own and didn’t lift a finger, other than to censor Zev Zelenko, and to suppress their own report on the dangers of the vaccines they INVESTED IN.
Watch this special in strict analogy of the THEN unbelievability of the “final solution”, to the NOW unbelievability of “depopulation”.
Realize that the problem isn’t antisemitism or “refugee acceptance” – it’s SOCIALISM.
SOCIALISM KILLS – no matter which brand.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) were joined by Democratic lawmakers from both the House and Senate on February 7, 2019, to introduce Green New Deal legislation.
Oh, hell. I said enough already. Do I really need to explain this?
If so, I’ll do it in the comments.
But the bottom line is that this special has a lot of great facts, which – if you are prepared to see them in the context of current events – are quite convincing that we ARE in the late beginning of yet another socialist holocaust.
Yes, it’s great that one of the most rancid cunts in US politics is destined to leave office on January 3rd of next year, having been primaried out…by a great big (but not big enough) margin.
But just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled), 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 wheelhouses 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!
SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom
I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”
Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.
Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?
Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:
OK, with that rant out of my system…
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).
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
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 !!!
Why the Communist Chinese Behavior of DOJ and FBI Makes Proof of Life Necessary to Prevent Secret Indictment and Arrest of Trump and Associates
We are entering a dangerous phase, patriots. The DOJ and FBI are becoming desperate liars. Each day, they act MORE and MORE COWARDLY, like their Chinese and North Korean counterparts, who “disappear” people in the interest of “national security” without the slightest apology.
Think it can’t happen here? Think they might not “secretly” arrest Trump, to “prevent violence”?
Let’s walk through this.
Here is one side of that equation. (H/T phoenix)
TUCKER: You can feel it. Trump can feel it. He asked for calm. This could get very bad, very fast for our country pic.twitter.com/Frgfk7mzQG
As you will see from the conversation link above, not everybody was ready to believe that Trump even SAID this. I’m a bit ambivalent about it myself, and have theorized both ways.
I tend to believe he DID say it, but I see an extreme need to be skeptical going forward.
Scott467 did some meticulous digging, and cannot find actual proof that Trump said it, such as a video. And given that Red State was once an anti-Trump oasis, and Fox News literally ASSISTED in the electoral coup against Trump, why should we believe them? I agree. It’s time to be skeptical.
And NOW THIS.
Melania steps out and goes to Trump Tower. As discussed HERE. (H/T Bfly)
We got into bit of discussion about the mask. Take a look.
I mean, take a look.
I mean, really take a look.
Now you all know that I’m a massive skeptic of “doubles” allegations, because in most cases, they’re just disinformation. That disinformation is not only used to make our side look silly – it also protects the REAL cases of stunt doubles, by a kind of “seeded disbelief”.
The fact remains, doubles ARE a real trick, used by all sides. Retired military and DEA operator Jeffrey Prather, who spotted the current use of operators against the American people in recent years, including January Sixth, even talked about the use of doubles in America, on Americans, as the recent “PIT” meeting.
VIDEO: (You’ll have to listen to the whole wonderful thing – I don’t remember where he talked about the doubles.)
Prather mentions MASKS as being part of the “doubles” scam. He also talks about “doubles” being used as part of discreditation, blackmail, and false evidence. Hopefully somebody can get the exact transcription.
I still remember the time that Kamala Harris, that dopey Indian-Jamaican valley girl who can screw up anything, had a political stunt double “screw up” a simple glad-handing job in Palm Beach, thanks to the brilliant provocateur Laura Loomer, who knew that “Real Kamala” was somewhere else as that very moment, and sent the double running for her vehicle.
FAKE KAMALA GOT LOOMERED! – Laura Loomer Catches Kamala Harris BODY DOUBLE at Palm Beach Polling Place! (VIDEO -PHOTOS)
SO – doubles ARE a real thing, but they can be desperately hard to catch.
You have to admit – this lady looks a LOT like Kamala Harris.
Take a look at Melania again. Are you POSITIVE it’s Melania?
Even if it IS Melania, we are going to have to think hard about KAPO’S next move.
We KNOW that this LAWFARE REGIME will literally SANCTION its own illegal and unconstitutional acts against us. Just like every dirty trick they used against Trump – all of which I believe were “globally sanctioned” by horrifying and ANATHEMA secret treaties.
Remember – it’s how they SLEEP AT NIGHT. They tell themselves that everything they do is “legal”.
SO – let’s consider this scenario.
Let’s assume that KAPO – Merrick Garland – acting under the orders of Stalinist ASSHOLE Barack Obama, via the grubby lips of professional LIAR Susan Rice, needs to INDICT or even ARREST Donald Trump.
This may even be a SECRET indictment, under SECRET LAW.
Our pathetic and evil government has clearly been caught with their pants down, SECRETLY but “not so secretly” injecting children with poison to fight “climate change” – or so they tell themselves.
Why would they not secretly arrest Trump?
Would it not be better “for national security” to order some kind of hoax-protected secret arrest “in the interest of public safety”?
Would it not be better FOR THEM to seed disinformation that “all is well”?
Maybe even on social media?
Think about how COWARDLY these asshole DODGE and FIB communists actually are.
SPIT
These people are NOTHING like the old FBI and DOJ.
How do we know this? Because they’re not the same people carrying the guns.
I don’t know about you all, but I don’t trust this government. AT ALL.
Prepare for them to take down our rightful and true President in the most underhanded ways possible. Nothing is beneath them.
Remember what they did to us on January Sixth – how they STOLE our peaceful protest right out from under us.
Because they don’t want us to protest. They want us to give up. They want to “normalize” the removal of Trump.
I will try to keep this brief – although that is hard, because I’m fighting against people’s “feelings” instead of facts.
When the other side LIES all the time, it creates a “feeling” that they’re lying about everything.
Yes, they ARE lying about everything – but the lies are often very sophisticated, being composed of a matrix of solid and hard-won truths, held together by crafty lies.
If you’re going to FIGHT BACK, then I say FIGHT BACK SMART.
Buckle up.
INTRO
There has been a very successful strain of disinformation used to make our side seem very unconvincing to normies (to put it mildly).
That strain is the “there is no virus” deception.
Many times we tolerate this, because we don’t want to discourage our “fellow skeptics”, but it is critical that we refute nonsense on our own side.
In the past I’ve devoted occasional comments to putting down disinformation to the tune of “there is no virus” and “the virus was never isolated”, but after this last time, meaning yesterday, I’ve decided to just GUT this beast right on the dissection table, under the glaring lights of its own post, so that the “debunking” has its own URL, suitable for posting in response to well-meaning people on our side, who think “no virus” is a tenable position.
NO. It is not tenable. You are being BAITED into nonsense, so that you are no longer effective. You are being baited into becoming a “FEELZ” person, like reliable Democrats.
The “there is no virus” position is basically the “new flat earth” of biology. You’ll see why momentarily.
An Example of “There Is No Virus / Isolation”
I want to thank Canadian Guest for bringing an example of this disinformation to the board for my consideration. Bringing some FRESH RATS to this SCIENCE HAWK is always appreciated.
This is why I don’t restrict the bringing of “propaganda” and potential disinformation here. We’re adults. We can DEAL with it – and often very usefully. I get more truth out of Russian “propaganda” than out of most MSM “explainers”. Funny how that works.
WE will be the judge of truth – NOT “them”.
Here is the video. Watch if you want – particularly after reading this.
There are some tells OTHER than what I’m going to talk about, that this is an interesting construction designed to derail critics of the vaccines. Tell me what you think “smells” like targeted disinformation in the comments.
Did CIA or FIB make this? Did Chinese intelligence? Who are these people?
Koch’s Postulates
One of the centerpieces of “disproving” that viruses exist, is to engage in passive-aggressive science using what are called “Koch’s postulates”.
Koch’s postulates were a brilliant set of standards from the beginning of microbiology, designed to help prove that an illness was actually caused by a microbe, rather than a bodily dysfunction of some kind.
The microorganism must be found in abundance in all organisms suffering from the disease, but should not be found in healthy organisms.
The microorganism must be isolated from a diseased organism and grown in pure culture.
The cultured microorganism should cause disease when introduced into a healthy organism.
The microorganism must be reisolated from the inoculated, diseased experimental host and identified as being identical to the original specific causative agent.
Wikipedia has an excellent and quick presentation about Koch’s postulates AND the problems therein.
You would be very smart to notice something on the LAST slide.
“It is sometimes impossible to satisfy all of Koch’s postulates.”
One of the ways in which this happens, is that “pure culture” (stated in the second postulate) varies between a laboratory vacuum and a jungle floor. If you’re a “purist”, nothing will pass the postulates. If you’re laissez-faire about things, everything will pass. If you’re SMART about things, and demand a SMARTLY PURE culture, you will get great results, and Koch’s postulates will continue to work for even crazy things like viruses, prions, etc.
What’s up with viruses?
The problem is that viruses are not microbes in the same sense as bacteria, protozoans, and similar microorganisms which are well-handled by Koch’s original postulates, where “pure cultures” were “biologically sterile, but molecularly fertile” mixtures.
Viruses are, quite literally, molecular parasites. The transmission of viruses is both more demanding and less demanding on the nature of a “pure medium”, than is transmission of bacteria. Viruses transmit in a different way.
Viruses need almost nothing to survive in, but they need CELLS to reproduce in. Viruses do not grow in simple chemical brews. They need CELLS. Cells not only contain a lot of stuff of “their own” – they also contain a lot of viruses, AND the encoding for these and other viruses.
If you demand a “cell-free medium” for growth of a virus, you have basically sabotaged science “under the color of science”.
See how that works?
The history of Koch’s postulates, and the upgrading of Koch’s original postulates to take care of things like viruses, prions, etc., is discussed in THIS article:
SO – you will almost always see some kind of reference to Koch’s postulates, in “there is no virus” disinformation. Koch’s postulates are the perfect “medium” for passive-aggressive anti-science.
BUT WAIT! There’s MOAR!
“BUT MUH NON-ISOLATION!”
The next, and actually essential part of the disinformation, is the allegation that the virus behind COVID-19 was never isolated.
HOGWASH!
BULLSHIT!
LIES!
It was not only isolated early and often – it is ROUTINELY isolated, all over the world, in order that genetic studies OF THE VIRUS can be done.
Think of all the hundreds of thousands of scientists who gather “clout” in molecular biology by analyzing the RNA of a single virus, and thereby look for small changes in that RNA – meaning a few nitrogenous bases among hundreds of thousands. How do they “isolate” the RNA of the virus from samples taken from people? How do they NOT get a bunch of human nasal RNA, plus the RNA of all our OTHER embedded viruses, AND nasal bacteria, mixed up in the sample, screwing up the results?
It’s simple. They GROW THE VIRUS in a NONINFECTED cellular medium that LOVES the virus. They filter and separate the budding and “transmitting” virus from the cells. And then they check the RNA of the filtered virus.
WHICH LOOKS LIKE THIS!
“Pictures or it didn’t happen.”
You can even see the damn spikes! Of course, they didn’t really need to do this – the RNA is the real convincer – the FINGERPRINT – but a picture is helpful for the doubters.
Sure sounds like “isolation” to me!
One of the best ways to demonstrate this to you, is to simply READ YOU THE PAPER where the pictures came from – back in the early days of COVID-19.
This paper was “e-published” back in March of 2020, when “Wuhan Coronavirus” had just been renamed to “SARS-CoV-2” because of China and Democrats (more on that later). The paper was actually received in February, around the time I was recovering from the original Wuhan strain of COVID-19, or something immediately descended from it.
This is from a Japanese group located in Tokyo. This is not by any means the earliest research on SARS-CoV-2 virus. It’s an IMPROVEMENT paper. These guys are saying “Hey! It’s easier to isolate this damn virus using OUR new method!”
Here is a text version of the paper, emphasizing the abstract.
Enhanced isolation of SARS-CoV-2 by TMPRSS2-expressing cells
A novel betacoronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which caused a large respiratory outbreak in Wuhan, China in December 2019, is currently spreading across many countries globally. Here, we show that a TMPRSS2-expressing VeroE6 cell line is highly susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection, making it useful for isolating and propagating SARS-CoV-2. Our results reveal that, in common with SARS- and Middle East respiratory syndrome-CoV, SARS-CoV-2 infection is enhanced by TMPRSS2.
As a bit of an aside, you will note that the editor is a Chinese researcher at an American university. The CCP has no problem pushing on the “social” buttons of American science, AND IT DOES. There was no way that the name “Wuhan coronavirus” was going to last. Think about it. This is subtle, but it’s the way things are now.
There are some nice graphics in the paper, too, including pictures of the virus.
(A) Expression of TMPRSS2 in total cellular RNA (0.2 µg) of indicated cells was compared with that in human lung RNA (catalog no. 636524; Clontech) by quantitative real-time PCR. ND, not detectable. (B) SARS-CoV-2–infected VeroE6/TMPRSS2 cells. Cell rounding (black arrows) and syncytium formation (white arrows) (C). Electron micrograph showing isolated virus particles with negative staining. (Scale bar, 200 nm.) (D) Viral RNA multiplication in various cells at 48 h postinoculation with the viral specimen, as determined by real-time RT-PCR using E and N primer/probe sets (9). Cq, quantitation cycle. (E) Real-time RT-PCR amplification plot using the E primer/probe set, corresponding to the data in C. RFU, relative fluorescence units. (F) Comparison of cell susceptibility to the isolated virus, detected with a patient’s serum and Alexa 488-conjugated goat anti-human IgG. Nuclei were stained with DAPI.
It is EXTREMELY helpful to simply READ what the authors say, in recounting what they did.
I’ve put in BOLD what they DID.
Seven clinical specimens (throat swabs or sputum) obtained from seven SARS-CoV-2 infection cases were inoculated into VeroE6/TMPRSS2 cells, which were monitored daily for cytopathic effect (CPE). These clinical specimens were deidentified prior to use, and this study was approved by the ethics committee of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Japan (approval no. 1091). Informed consent was obtained from all participants, from which the subjects were obtained, or their legally acceptable representatives for sample donation. In five cases among the seven, clear CPE with detachment/floating (black arrows, Fig. 1B) and syncytium formation (white arrows, Fig. 1B) developed at 2 or 3 d postinfection (p.i.) (Table 1).The virus titers in culture supernatants of the five cases at 3 d p.i. were 4.6 × 106 to 6.8 × 107 median tissue culture infectious dose (TCID50) per mL (Table 1).Typical coronavirus particles were detected by electron microscopy (Fig. 1C).Next-generation sequencing (NGS) of case Wk-521 detected the nearly full-length genome sequence from SARS-CoV-2 with >99.9% homology (1, 2) (GISAID database ID EPI_ISL_408667). Unexpectedly, the NGS data showed contaminated mycoplasma sequences (Mycoplasma hyorhinis and Mycoplasma arginini) from VeroE6/TMPRSS2 cells. CPE in VeroE6 cells persistently infected with SARS-CoV was enhanced by infection with Mycoplasma fermentans (8), but whether a similar situation exists for SARS-CoV-2–related CPE in this cell line is unclear.
The viral RNA copies in the clinical specimens used for virus isolation were estimated by real-time RT-PCR (9, 10). As expected, viral RNA copies in the clinical specimens in which CPE developed within 2 d p.i. were greater than those in the other specimens (Table 1).
VeroE6/TMPRSS2 cells are superior to other cell lines tested in this study for SARS-CoV-2 isolation. Consistent with previous reports (2, 4), the amount of SARS-CoV-2 RNAs in the culture supernatants of Vero, Calu-3, and A549 cells 48 h p.i. was low and was measurably higher when VeroE6 cells were used. However, the viral RNA copies in the VeroE6/TMPRSS2 cell culture supernatants were >100 times greater than those from VeroE6 cells (Fig. 1 D and E). Data for SARS-CoV show that TMPRSS2 enhances its entry efficiency (5, 11). VeroE6 and VeroE6/TMPRSS2 cells were infected with 10-fold serially diluted SARS-CoV-2 samples, and the infected cells were visualized by indirect immunofluorescent assays (Fig. 1E). The results showed that VeroE6/TMPRSS2 displayed ∼10-fold greater number of SARS-CoV-2–infected cells than the parental VeroE6 cells. These data suggest that, in common with SARS-CoV, TMPRSS2 may also play an important role in SARS-CoV-2 cell entry.
Pay special attention to THIS PART which is not highlighted above, but which shows the level of ATTENTION that was paid to the results.
Unexpectedly, the NGS data showed contaminated mycoplasma sequences (Mycoplasma hyorhinis and Mycoplasma arginini) from VeroE6/TMPRSS2 cells. CPE in VeroE6 cells persistently infected with SARS-CoV was enhanced by infection with Mycoplasma fermentans (8), but whether a similar situation exists for SARS-CoV-2–related CPE in this cell line is unclear.
See what I was talking about with a “pure medium”? These mycoplama are very common contaminants of cell cultures. Note that these scientists are not HIDING the presence of contaminants in their “pure” medium. On the contrary, they’re saying they spotted the contamination, and are accounting for it.
The bottom line is that these people know exactly what they are doing, dealing with the tricky nature of Koch’s postulates under the realities of working with viruses – some of the hardest biology that can be done.
And THAT brings me to a personal observation.
On Difficult Technology
Science is a game that everybody CAN play, and I would go so far as to say it’s a game that everybody SHOULD play. You should be teaching your kids science and art, in exactly the way you should teach them football, baseball, and ice skating.
And just like with PROFESSIONAL SPORTS, in which people who you respect make errors that you call out, it helps to RESPECT the pros of science – EVEN AS YOU POINT OUT THEIR ERRORS, WHICH YOU SHOULD.
We don’t believe professional athletes are “always right” – why should you believe the same things about scientists?
Back in my laboratory days, I had a couple of “lucky insights” connected by a lot of hard work, and they demonstrate how science gets past obstacles, including in particular other scientists.
Dissatisfied with my seemingly unexciting assigned research project, I was in the perfect mood when a colleague of mine drew something very interesting on the blackboard with a big chalk “X” through it.
“Why doesn’t this work?” was my question.
My colleague gave a reason that didn’t seem right to me, and then stated that he was abandoning that project. I asked if he minded if I tried it. He didn’t mind – he had already gotten a new assignment from our boss.
I picked up the gauntlet, and got things to work the very first time. The big chalk “X” was wrong. My insight was correct.
Happy that the abandoned research project was back in play, our boss allowed me to take it over and pursue it.
Pushing the idea through on a small scale, I actually got the entire project to work – but not to the satisfaction of skeptics. We didn’t have “clincher” proof. We needed to scale up to get that level of proof.
Scaling it up, however, failed. It took a lot of very interesting science to understand the whole process, and scale it up to the level that was necessary to convince the skeptics.
The problem was, not ALL of the skeptics were convinced. One skeptic, at the last minute, needed proof that would require even MORE scaling up.
The problem THERE is that NOT EVERYBODY could do the work.
When others could not duplicate my results, I was forced to do the even bigger scale-up myself, AND to do it under intense scrutiny, to figure out why *I* could do it and others could not.
The result was obvious proof that I had gotten it to work. The skeptic’s harassment had led to a magnificent NEW proof that neither we nor the skeptic had fully predicted. We had exceeded the level of proof that the skeptic demanded.
HOWEVER, this left open a subject that nobody really wanted to talk about.
Why weren’t others able to duplicate my results?
The sad fact is, science is filled with people who do not practice the habits necessary for success. They are not PERSISTENT when they need to be. They are not INSIGHTFUL in trying to get around problems. Even more importantly, they are not HOPEFUL that they CAN get around problems. This failure to have hope in overcoming obstacles is a HUGE problem in science. But likewise, many are not sufficiently DUBIOUS in trying to spot thousands of small potential problems, and doing what is necessary to prevent them. We have to be SKEPTICAL, too.
Even when we’re skeptical, sometimes we’re not skeptical enough. An excellent example is provided by the tragic death of Karen Wetterhahn, who died of dimethylmercury poisoning, when a few droplets of dimethylmercury splashed on and penetrated one of the thin latex gloves she was wearing. This was the level of protection recommended at the time, but it was not enough.
Karen had protected her coworkers by doing the work herself, instead of exposing THEM to the danger. She did the work “to code”, but it was still not enough. Part of her legacy is the habit of scientists in later years to use two or even three layers of gloves, when handling dangerously toxic and reactive substances. Many will use “one more than recommended” of just about any safety measure.
We have to LEARN and RETAIN thousands and thousands of such habits just to do some of the simplest scientific operations, like weighing out a substance properly.
The boss who I mentioned above loved to say “All the easy stuff has been done.” It’s SO true, even though it’s obviously an exaggeration. That is why there are amazing recent discoveries – every once in a while – of things that COULD have been discovered many years prior, and which were simply missed or overlooked. But for the most part, it’s true. Almost all of the easy and obvious stuff has been done.
So what is my point?
The point is, science is HARD – and yet you are allowed to criticize it – AND YOU SHOULD.
The trick is, criticizing it and BEING RIGHT. And you do NOT have to be an “expert”, or even a scientist, to be right.
But you may have to be persistent, insightful, hopeful, and skeptical.
SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom
I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”
Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.
Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?
Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:
OK, with that rant out of my system…
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).
There’s no question–the traditional precious metals (gold and silver) are getting hammered. The PGMs aren’t getting hit as badly; in fact rhodium is up!
JWST Update (Last One for a While?)
The James Webb Space Telescope has been commissioned. It has returned its first operational pictures. I posted them on Tuesday.
The science mission now begins. This will run, hopefully, for years. They plan on getting ten years out of the telescope. But NASA either fails spectacularly coming out of the gate, or ends up running missions for far longer than expected (the Voyager probes are closing in on fifty years). Since the first didn’t happen…well, we can look forward to all sorts of interesting stuff!
What do we expect? Well, we hope to look further back in time, to the formation of the very first stars–those are expected to be different from anything around today because they formed from almost pure hydrogen and helium; no recycled “burned” fusion products as every star today is made from. The idea is these will probably have been gigantic stars and maybe we’ll learn something about those supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies.
I’m going to go way out in front of my skis here and ask if perhaps those supermassive black holes are remnants of first stars, and the galaxies formed around them rather than them forming after the galaxies did. (Hopefully my faceplant will be entertaining. Any real astrophysicist reading this is probably rolling on the floor laughing at some elementary idiocy in what I just said.)
Another thing JWST hopes to do is look at exoplanets. We know of hundreds of them indirectly; now we finally have a tool that might be able to see something directly.
Of course, it stands ready to investigate the next unscheduled “kaboom.” If there’s a supernova nearby you can bet JWST will be on it. SN 1987A (which wasn’t exactly nearby but you could see it with the naked eye so it wasn’t that far away either) happened before Hubble. Generally about 10 or 20 percent of the time on the telescope is not allocated ahead of time just in case something crops up. With Hubble the scientist who administered it got to assign that time to whatever he wanted (with the understanding that if something big happens unexpectedly, he’ll drop what he’s doing and use his time on that). Of course the truly unexpected is…well, unexpected, so we can’t know what will come of it.
But the larger point is, we actually do not know what JWST will discover; we have a list of what it will investigate. If we did know what it would discover, we wouldn’t need it! We have questions we can use JWST on, but no answers. When we have answers…they will lead to questions we couldn’t even think to ask today. That’s real science. (Quite unlike the crap that goes on in medical research.)
Meanwhile, I am going to have to find something else to write about, at least until some results come in. A scientist granted time on JWST generally has some set period of time where s/he has exclusive access to the data, so they can write their paper and publish. Then it’s opened up to everyone.
So I don’t expect to see news reports about what “JWST has found” for at least a little while.
You Read It Here First
Slate (okay, I’ll pause while you vomit…OK, better now?) has an article about false-color images from JWST:
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
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 !!!
SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom
I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”
Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.
Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?
Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:
OK, with that rant out of my system…
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).
All over the map here. Gold up, silver is exactly where it was (though I am sure it moved around a bit over the week), all of the PGMs down. That says to me the industrial users are demanding less, and gold is serving as a safe haven.
But that interpretation is worth exactly what you just paid for it.
JWST Update
JWST instrument commissioning proceeds apace.
This morning, I saw they had two of the seventeen instrument modes checked off. It’s now 3PM mountain time…and they have four!
That tells me they’re working a bunch of them (maybe even all of them) at the same time.
The JWST blog is busy, too. As some here noted, they’ve already dealt with a micrometeor strike. They expected these and designed with that in mind. (Though if a meteor isn’t so “micro-” there could be problems. However, the bigger they are the less likely they are.)
Also they’ve posted about the near infrared imager and slitless spectrometer (NIRISS), one of the four instruments on JWST (there’s a fifth, but it’s used to keep track of the JWST itself). They can do spectroscopy on one object, or everything in the field of view at once, interfermetry (getting increased resolution at the cost of some light), and just plain old imaging to back up and/or supplement NIRCam.
If I were to try to overstate how important spectroscopy is to astronomy, I’d fail. It’s thanks to spectroscopy that we can tell radial velocity (how fast a star is moving towards or away from us), how fast something is rotating, what it is made of, and (with a lot of sophisticated processing) the mass and period of many exoplanets and even what the atmosphere of an exoplanet might contain (provided in the latter case we are in the exoplanet’s orbital plane), all without leaving the comfort of our home planetary system (and let’s face it, we still haven’t much choice there). The overwhelming majority of what we know about “out there” is thanks to spectroscopy. And it was key in discovering at least a dozen chemical elements, including one that was discovered in the sun before it was discovered here (I’ve told that story–hint/reminder, it’s the chemical element named after the sun).
You may have wondered how they’re going to decide who gets to use JWST. After all there are more astronomers than there are James Webb Space Telescopes. And, it turns out, it’s a bureaucratic process.
I know that some of the available (24/7 minus takedowns for maintenance, usually adjusting mirror secoment alignments) time is held in reserve, at the discretion of the manager of the JWST. That’s quite a privilege, but other than his personal research, he’ll be expected to use it to study things that go kaboom or comets, especially comets about to hit things. In other words, if a supernova were to go off near by (a totally unanticipatable event), it gets priority over the guy who wants an image of NGC-1234…and that guy would probably even agree with the decision; we haven’t had a really gonzo supernova since before Galileo’s telescope. (The fact that the one back in 1987 was visible even though it was a hundred thousand light years away tells you something about how bright a star like Betelgeuse would be if it went kaboom! since Betelgeuse is a couple of hundred times closer. Yes, it would be visible in daylight.)
When we conservatives decline to volunteer as a dish in the progressive buffet, the leftists have no choice but to feed upon each other. We will see more of it as conservatives wake up and smell the kombucha – leftists only win when they can bully and intimidate, and if we choose not to let them do that to us, then it’s not as if they will give up their go-to move. No, they will turn on each other, and we will gobble up the Orville Redenbacher as they fight to the death for our amusement.
And we are amused.
Donald Trump was the first guy to push back, really push back, but it was not simply his pugnacious nature and cunning ability with mean tweets that made him important. It was his moral position. At some level, for some reason, so many establishment Republicans had approached these bad faith actors as legitimate critics who were at best misguided and who might actually have a germ of a point within their critiques. Trump, however – having been among them for decades and understanding exactly who they are – read them correctly. He considered them garbage.
It was not so much that Trump fought back, it was that he made it clear that the leftists are scum. And because he did not credit them with any moral stature, their slings and arrows bounced off his armor. Of course, Ron DeSantis has taken the same tack with them, refusing to credit them with any kind of merit. And that deprives them of their most powerful weapon – their victims’ complicity.
The thing about words is that they can only hurt you if you let them. At one point, “racist” and “sexist” and all the other lies might have stung. Now, we consider them a punchline and an outright slander. We laugh at them.
Kurt Schlichter on TownHall
This is precisely what Ayn Rand called “the sanction of the victim.” It comes about when, deep down, you cede moral authority to your oppressors. Rand would, in particular, highlight the effects of an altruistic world view in this connection, i.e., where your worth is measured by how much self sacrifice you are willing to do. If you can be guilt-tripped for not being willing to give up something you value, to help out a bum on the street, they’ve got you.
This sort of thing is, I believe, why many RINOs cave regularly. They believe that the Left has a bunch of impractical ideals, and they think of themselves as practical people who have to rein those impractical people in. But the problem is, they think of the left’s ideals as ideals that can’t be achieved practically–which means they say to themselves, “Well it’s nice in theory.” So they can be pressured to help try. After all, it would be nice if real communism could work, so why not get as close to it as is practical?
But in doing this they cede the moral high ground to the Left. Which is why RINOs are inveterate invertebrates.
Rand, of course, thought altruism (which she considered sacrificing something of greater value for something of lesser value, about which more below) was a crock, so she was immune to that.
But even those immune to altruistic appeals might not be immune to accusations of “sexism” or “racism” and modern Leftism isn’t so much about Marxism of the “workers own the means of production” as it is about race and sex inequality “built in” to the culture. (Though the former is supposed to be a means to correct the latter…or maybe the latter is the excuse to implement the former…ah, well, who cares which one it is?) So they pull guilt trips that can only work if you cede them the high ground. If you do that, you will feel you deserve what they do to you.
That’s a major philosophical thread underlying the entire novel Atlas Shrugged.
(By the way in her non-fiction writing Ayn Rand was explicit that she was not talking about “sacrificing” to put your kids through college or things like that–you are trading a lesser value (that fancy car you couldn’t buy) for something of greater value (your children’s futures. She would not consider that an actual sacrifice but rather a high price paid for something of great value. A sacrifice is giving up something more valuable to you, in exchange for something less valuable. With that in mind, Ayn Rand opposed sacrifices in life, often gotten from people through guilt trips.)
And now, thanks in part to the Left going over the top with accusations of “racism” and in part to Trump showing them to be paper tigers, the Left is losing their power…and they’re losing their shit over that.
Quarters
The subject of the new quarters came up a couple of days ago, and I thought I’d bring in a historical perspective.
It’s hard to imagine today, but in the early days quarters weren’t that popular a denomination. Since, back then, the mint made coins to order by anyone who brought silver or gold in, that meant if people didn’t specifically ask for it, they didn’t make it. And most people bringing in a bunch of silver would want it done as dollars or half dollars.
But, nevertheless they did make a few thousand of them in 1796.
Note there’s no denomination on the coin. You were expected to know what it was by its size. And the other silver coins had the same design themes on them.
They made a few more quarters in the 1800s (i.e., 180x, not the 19th century) with a different eagle (and now, the denomination is given as 25 C though it looks like an afterthought):
And then in 1807 or so they changed designs completely.
Collectors refer to the prior designs as “Draped Bust/Small Eagle” and “Draped Bust/Large Eagle” and this design is the “Capped Bust” because Liberty is wearing a cap. This ran until mid 1838, though the recently-founded New Orleans mint adopted it a couple years later. Again, all silver denominations basically used the same theme, the coins looked like each other except for size and the written denomination (half dimes, dimes, quarters, and halves–there were no capped bust dollars at all). [Yes, half dimes…silver coins half the size of a dime. The nickel we know and love didn’t exist until 1866.]
Again, there’d be multi-year gaps where no one ordered quarters from the mint.
Next was the “Liberty Seated” series which ran until 1891, i.e., it lasted longer than the mint had been in existence when it was adopted. Again, all of the silver coins basically looked the same. We had silver dollars again. But the half-dime and dime were a little different, instead of an eagle they had a wreath on the reverse. So we finally started to see a breaking up of the monolithic one-design-for-all-denominations rule.
There was one major change to this in 1866 for the quarter, half dollar and dollar, because “In God We Trust” was added, on a ribbon over the eagle’s head and wings.
A multimillionaire might decide it would be fun to get one of each date and mintmark, in uncirculated condition…that’s the typical collecting type, albeit with a budget the typical collector doesn’t have (most collectors don’t even delve into Liberty Seated and earlier coinage at all; if you collect by type–one of each design type rather than one of each year and mint mark–you have a considerable advantage; you need six or eight coins instead of over a hundred).
That multimillionaire will never succeed if he undertakes that quest. Many dates, especially from the San Francisco mint, are unknown in uncirculated condition; i.e., absent someone opening a box in an old attic somewhere and making a discovery, there aren’t any. Period. Again, quarters were not that popular, and the mint didn’t make many. (And the Civil War was not good for specie coinage on top of that.)
The mint got bored with the Liberty Seated coinage and decided to replace it starting in 1892. We were now down to four silver denominations, the dime, quarter, and half dollar, plus two distinct types of silver dollars. The silver dollars had their own designs, now, but the dime, quarter and half dollar still had liberty seated on the obverse and an eagle (or wreath) on the reverse. Anyhow, the replacement quarter was…
And collectors are almost unanimous in finding this design to be incredibly blah. (What’s with Liberty’s neck?) This design had one big advantage though, and that is that it struck up well, with all the detail, and as it wore down, it was still readily recognizable. That was the criteria Charles Barber was working from, and he succeeded.
Why am I showing you all of this? Because people were talking about the artistry and symbolism of the new quarters. So the design has been my focus so far.
In the 1900s…as in 190x, not 19xx..none other than President Theodore Roosevelt decided our coins were artistically atrocious. Not just silver but also the coppers, nickels, and gold pieces. (Probably the only then-current design liked a lot today is the Indian head cent.) So he embarked on a crusade to change the designs. There was, at the time, a law against changing the designs more than once every twenty five years, but the then-current gold designs had been around since 1839 or 1849 depending on the denomination, so those could be done right now. Roosevelt brought well-known sculptors famous for their work into the project, and this was in the days before modern “art.” (You can look those up: Indian head quarter eagle, half eagle, eagle, and St. Gaudens double eagle, I want to focus on quarters).
But the effort to change our coinage actually did outlive Teddy Roosevelt. In 1916, under Woodrow Never-to-be-Sufficiently-Damned Wilson, the silver was addressed (and again, there was no dollar being produced at all). And this time the designs were completely different for each denomination.
So I present you the “Standing Liberty Quarter.”
Only a few were made at the tail end of 1916 and command a huge premium today, but more were made in 1917 and then there was a design change.
The shield looks different, the eagle is higher up, the stars on the reverse are rearranged…and yeah, Liberty is now overdressed.
[The modern “old wives’ tale” is that there was a huge hue and cry over the bare breast and that’s why they changed the design, but in fact little evidence of such can be found in contemporary newspapers. And John Ashcroft wasn’t even alive then.]
These coins are much, much more artistic than the Barber series, but the mint hated them. The design was nearly impossible to strike up. Oftentimes detail in Liberty’s head was just not there, and so today, if you’re shopping for one of these, an “FH” or “Full Head” designation can bring a premium. But even on “Full Head” coins, many of the rivets on the shield (and the US shield on the shield) can be soft or nonexistent.
It was difficult to mint these well in the sorts of quantities the mint was now being called upon to produce. (The “Mercury” dime and walking liberty half dollar also introduced in 1916 had similar issues…also worth looking up.)
Charles Barber was stung that his design had been dropped after 24 years (with a little creative interpretation of the exact text of the 25 year rule), and considered these designs failures–and by his criteria, as a man charged with producing designs that would strike up and wear well, he was actually right.
Washington’s 200th birthday was fast approaching, and Congress passed a bill to put Washington on the quarter in 1932. The last standing liberty quarter was made in 1930 (none dated 1931).
So now, who gets to sculpt George Washington?
The Commission on Fine Arts had hired Laura Gardin Fraser to sculpt a commemorative medal, and they suggested the same bust be used on the quarter. But instead Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon chose the James Flanagan portrayal, which in turn was based on a sculpted bust by Jean-Antoine Houdon made in 1786–i.e., a sculpture made using Washington himself as a model.
A plaster copy of Houdon’s bust of Washington
So the Flanagan portrayal should be very, very close to an actual image of Washington. (It can be hard to nail down a good image of someone who lived before photography.) Anyhow, here it is:
This of course is what we’re used to. But please note, there is actual detail in Washington’s hair. By the 1960s and 1970s the master hub from which the dies are made had worn smooth from repeated use and Washington’s hair began to look like a skullcap.
A touched up version of this began to be used sometime in the 1990s, but they overdid it and it looked like Washington’s hair was made of spaghetti.
Honestly, from 1994 they couldn’t find a coin that wasn’t heavily dinged up around George’s mouth?
It only got worse in 1999. The image was shrunk slightly to make room for legends brought from the reverse for the state quarters series.
And the spaghetti looks even worse. For that matter so do the dings on the coin.
And the spaghetti hair looks even worse. (BTW, here he faces away from “In God We Trust.” This is nothing new; it has been like that since 1999.)
Still, it looks very much like before. Flanagan might not have liked what was done to his portrait, but at least it was recognizable as an attempt at his portrait.
The state quarters series, and the subsequent national seashore series ended, finally in 2021, early in the year, and the mint reverted to the 1990s full-size, spaghetti hair portrait, for just that one year (with IGWT on the left again below Washington’s chin).
On the reverse is this image of Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. (I couldn’t find a decent sharp image of the obverse of this coin; the focus was on the new reverse.)
But this was just a gap filler. We’re on to a new program for quarters, one recognizing women…and OBTW it’s quota time. One White, one “Native American,” one Black, one Asian, one Hispanic. (And we get to do this for three more years after this one. Oh joy. Oh rupture.)
(The feminazis must be downright orgasmic over the Amerind honoree, Wilma Mankiller.)
And it being women…well, it has been alleged that Mellon made his decision for the Flanagan portrait over the Fraser portrait on purely sexist grounds, and so, where better than on quarters designed to honor women should one rectify such an injustice? So Fraser’s portrait, used once on a $5 gold commemorative in 1999 (shown below), got brought back.
Well, Mellon’s choice might have been due to sexism, or it might have been that he thought this was butt ugly by comparison. Judging from the commentary here earlier this week, I’ll go with butt ugly.
On the other hand, a “Fine Arts Commission” did recommend this over the Flanagan design. So I’ll allow that perhaps sincere people could differ over which one is better.
Perhaps. 🙂
Now I’m going to come to Fraser’s defense, a bit. She and her husband, James Earle Fraser, were “real” sculptors too, just as St. Gaudens, Bela Lyon Pratt, Adolph Weinman, Victor D. Brenner, and Hermon Atkins MacNeil were (these people had all done coin designs in the early 20th century). In fact James Fraser did the Indian Head (or “Buffalo”) nickel. Laura did one of the two sides of the Oregon Trail Memorial half dollar (struck intermittently between 1926 and 1939):
She and her husband both liked to use American Indian subjects in their sculpture, and I realized earlier this week that might be why Washington looks very “Indian” in her portrayal.
(By the way the other side of that coin was done by James:)
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
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 !!!
SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom
I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”
Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.
Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?
Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:
OK, with that rant out of my system…
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.
Busy Week
Between 2000 Mules and the SCOTUS leak, things have been hectic out there. The latter item is “real” to the establishment (i.e., the Left), and they’re melting down. 2000 Mules, on the other hand, isn’t “real” to them.
I’m sure you’ve noticed now that no revelation gets any sort of traction in Washington DC, traction that causes someone in authority to actually act, until it gets into the Yellow Stream Media. (And these days, only information they want to act on, gets there.) 2000 Mules will probably never do so; and if not, it won’t show up on the DC radar and nothing will come of it. The claim that the election was stolen will continue to be dismissed by anyone who has any power to do something about it.
This is not the same as them not knowing about the election being stolen. They do know. It’s just that while the YSM isn’t hollering and screaming about it, they can ignore it. And they do. The YSM still continues to act as agenda billboard, and the Left controls the YSM. So this week we deal with abortion, not the stolen election. Last week it was Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.
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).
Precious metals continue their downward slide. This is partially due to manipulation, but the fact of the matter is that investors will put their money where it will make a return. With interest rates going up, they actually like dollars, because dollars earn more interest. Gold, to them, is a way to not lose money most of the time.
JWST Update
JWST instrument commissioning proceeds apace.
NASA made a blog post explaining one of the more practical aspects of the James Web Space Telescope. Where can it point?
It must perpetually present the heat shield towards the sun, or it’s toast. Literally. Well, “toast” is a relative term; getting up to room temperature would be bad for the optics and sensors.
James Web Space Telescope. Mirror in gold, sunshield in gray “below” it.
So it seems like JWST can only look at half of the sky, basically the same half someone on Earth would see at midnight, with the sun on the other side of the big heat shield we call Planet Earth. And it doesn’t rotate like we do here, which lets us see almost all of the sky between just-after-sunset and just-before-sunrise, with the thin band in between only up when the sun is up and thus washed out. So even though we can see most of the sky on any given night, JWST can only see half of the sky (albeit 24/7, there being no daytime for it), right? [Note: I am ignoring the effect–on the Earth observer–of latitude, which permanently hides part of the sky from him or her, but on the other hand allows other parts of the sky to be seen any time at night.]
Yes, and no. JWST in orbit about the sun, once a year (since it sits at Earth/Sun L2), so six months from now, it can see the other half of the sky, just like our midnight astronomer here on Earth.
But it’s a bit more restricted than that. The JWST mirror cannot be moved. It’s not on any kind of a swivel. It cannot swivel either left-right or up-down in the picture above.
To aim the telescope, the entire spacecraft has to be rotated, with gyros. In the picture above it can be rotated 360 degrees about a “vertical” axis, keeping the sunshade where it is but turning it (and the antenna) like a record on a record player. (This is the yaw direction of rotation.)
It can also tip, just a bit, up and down, “nodding” basically, this is called the pitch direction. It has about a 50 degree travel in the pitch direction, as shown in the following two diagrams.
When JWST’s sun shield is face on to the sun, that shield is getting the maximum amount of solar radiation, and thus this is called the “hot” attitude. When the telescope is pointed halfway towards being pointed directly away from the sun, the sun shield is presented to the sun at a 45 degree angle and thus collects 70.7% percent as much energy as in the “hot” attitude (i.e., the sine of 135 degrees). We don’t dare tip the spacecraft any more than that lest the actual telescope (and sensors) be exposed directly to the sun (and thereby become “toast”).
The practical effect is that the patch of sky directly opposite of the sun cannot be looked at by JWST; that part lies outside the telescope’s “field of regard.” However if you actually want to look at something there, you can wait three months and get it when that patch of sky is at a 90 degree angle to the sun because JWST has moved 90 degrees around the sun.
Over the course of one year, JWST has access to the entire sky.
As to the current commissioning activity, at least part of it is “astrometric calibration.” In other words, if we tell the telescope to point at such-and-such pitch and yaw, what does each sensor actually see? There might be a tiny bit of error from what we would expect, no instrument is exact straight from the fabrication. We’ll be able to specify an exact right ascension and declination (the analogues to longitude and latitude in the sky) and know exactly how to rotate the spacecraft to look at that point.
There’s a lot more to it than that, but I’m going to let NASA explain it:
Do you remember the moon rocket that was undergoing a “wet dress rehearsal”?
Well, it has gone through several of them, and the test was a success. They found problems they now know they need to correct.
Yes, I called it a success, even though the spacecraft would have likely malfunctioned if it had launched. Because that’s the purpose of testing: to find such problems. We found them. A test isn’t a failure just because it found something wrong; it’s a failure if it fails to find problems that do exist.
If you remember the attention given to something called Biosphere 2 about 25 years ago, that’s another example. Biosphere 2 was an attempt to build a large, perfectly sealed greenhouse and see if people could live in it indefinitely, growing their own food and being sustained as part of a balanced system (plants to absorb the CO2 they exhaled and generate O2 for them to breathe).
The idea is if we are ever to start living in space or on other planets, we need to know how to do this, at least long enough to “terraform” other planets (make them more earthlike and establish an earthlike biosphere on them so we can live there as if we were native to the place). A long manned space mission probably won’t be able to bring several years’ worth of food along; we’ll have to grow it…inside a tin can that had better not leak. The only resource “out there” is sunlight (and that’s the one thing that could get in and out of Biosphere 2 once the doors were sealed).
It was a test of our ability to make a closed system.
And the test “failed.” The concrete in the structure continued to absorb oxygen even after we thought it was done curing.
But it wasn’t a failure; we learned a lot from it. Sure on one level our first attempt at building a closed system “failed” because it couldn’t sustain people for two years, but no one actually expected it to work perfectly; the point of the exercise was to discover what we don’t know. And for that, it worked beautifully.
Biosphere 2 is still standing; you can take tours of it. It’s being used for botanical research because it’s the most isolated environment on earth (even with people traipsing about on tours).
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
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 !!!
While America trips over itself, thanks to our WOKE FAIL MEDIA, demented Joe Biden, secret President Obama, and the DNCIA-mediated evils of the WEFFEN SS featuring KlauSS SSchwab, one more BRICS nation stays on track with REAL NEWS by casting SIDE-EYE on Ukraine.
Huge hat tip to barkerjim for bringing this, and to Kalbo for raising it to my attention.
This is NOT a hit piece on Zelensky. What makes this real journalism so damning is that it simply presents the facts, and the facts point squarely at the reality of modern politics, that “leaders” are created to be media-savvy influencers, NOT actual thinkers or strategists.
Some people (like TRUMP) are actual strategists, and can be trained in media savvy (“The Apprentice”), but others are clearly being created to give the illusion of being what they are not.
We all know that Zelensky was a “comedian” elected to office, but once you see the predictive programming, the whole thing is just FACE-PALM obvious.
So I just want everybody to watch this.
The lady doing the presentation is Palki Sharma Upadhyay, who narrates the WION (World In One News) documentaries.
Kalbo noted that this is the same presenter who we saw in coverage of Pfizer’s abusive vaccine deals. Remember – ALL of Pfizer’s clinical trials are now handled by their CHINESE OPERATION. If you want to consider Pfizer’s shot to be a bioweapon used against the American military – well – you’re not too far off the simple reality of a CHINESE COMPANY pushing a debilitating drug on American soldiers.
Yeah. Think about that. I’m sorry, but I’m not taking any drugs from Pfizer Wuhan, shilling for the CCP and the Chinese PLA.
Just askin’. I think it’s becoming obvious now. Thanks to INDIA – which gets historic Chinese duplicity – for making me see the connection between Pfizer the company, which is fast becoming a CHINESE-based multinational, and what Pfizer is doing globally. You see, I remember hearing from the VERY FIRST PFIZER WHISTLEBLOWER – who the …
Kinda figures India would spot things we would not. Ya know? They live in China’s neighborhood.
When you’re done with these two stories, keep your eyes open for any other documentaries by this lady.
Here’s one which is useful for red-pilling your friends and neighbors about something ELSE we were quite ahead of the curve on, on this site.
SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom
I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”
Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.
Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?
Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:
OK, with that rant out of my system…
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.
Mozart
Sedate. The adagio (2nd movement) from his clarinet concerto.
And a bit…less sedate. Last movement of his Symphony #41 which is the last one he wrote.
(Don’t be fooled by the fact that there’s a Symphony #42, or 43, or…well up to #55 at least…as I explained last time the numbering isn’t really chronological. To the best of my knowledge he’s got at least 51 symphonies under his belt (though some are disputed), so if we were ever to renumber them, this one would be #51. But we never will renumber them; that would cause confusion for centuries.)
By the way, that sucker ends in a five part fugue. Not easy to write!
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).
Everything down except for rhodium. Gold seems relatively solidly in the lower half of the 1900s, with the recent spike being history. Platinum, meanwhile, is going back on sale.
JWST Update
Apparently the James Webb Space Telescope imaging team has done such a good job with the initial mirror alignment that most of the instruments are properly focused.
The one exception to this is the MIRI (Mid InfraRed Instrument). Actually, it might be too. But this is the instrument that rounds out the bottom end of the JWST “visible spectrum” (quite a bit lower frequency than yours and mine, even with night vision goggles). In order to operate properly it needs to be cooled by liquid helium (!) which means a temperature of 4 K, or about 7 degrees Fahrenheit above absolute zero, or roughly -453F. There’s a special cryogenic cooling system for this instrument.
(On the temperature of warmth, relative to Hitlary Klinton’s personality, we’re talking about 14 degrees higher. And yes, I know that puts her at -10K which should be physically impossible…)
The other instruments are happy with a relatively balmy 33-44K (-400F to -387F) or so.
So MIRI is slowly being cooled. They didn’t bother doing anything with it before, so (ironically) it’s the toastiest-warmest instrument right now at 53K (-364F), but it is dropping fairly rapidly.
Where Is Webb? NASA/Webb If you click on the temperature plots button you can see what’s going on. And you can read the official statement from NASA here if I wasn’t clear enough:
(Of course sometimes I can write an entire post unpacking their release for non-geeks. But this one seems OK.)
Other Space News
We’ve got a double feature this week. Triple, if you count the JWST news.
First off, the Hubble Space Telescope ain’t dead yet! (Nor should it be so long as we have the will and resources to keep it going…it and JWST will complement each other nicely.) It has spotted a star–a big one, obviously–12.9 billion light years away. It has been named Earendel (the star, not the telescope), an obvious Tolkien reference. Well, it sounds like a name he’d make up; apparently you have to be nerdy enough to have read the Silmarillion to “get” it. The character became a star (literally).
Earendel…brought to us by gravitational lensing.
So what’s the big deal? Well, if the star is that far away…then that light has been travelling for 12.9 billion years just to get to us. Which means the star itself was around only about 800 million years after the Big Bang. (It’s long, long, gone now–it probably blew up over 12.8 billion years ago. Big stars live hard and die young, burning fuel almost as profligately as Al Bore flying to a Global Warming summit.)
One of the goals of the JWST is to be able to see the very first stars that formed; we think those will generally be big honkin’ things that formed about the same time galaxies began to form. And since they will not contain anything other than the original hydrogen and helium that formed when the universe was a few minutes old. Among other things, for reasons I’m quite unclear on, stars made from pure “primordial” hydrogen and helium can likely be much larger than stars today can be. (We won’t know for sure until we can see them.)
Earendel is not one of these first stars, but it probably only had a couple of generations of predecessors. It’s certainly closer than we’ve come before. To do any better, we’ll need the (wait for it…) James Webb Space Telescope.
Meanwhile, if I understand correctly, the only reason we saw this star at all is it happens to lie in a place that’s gravitationally lensed; in other words, the curvature of space between us and Earendel is acting like a magnifying glass.
The other bit of space news is more on the “practical” side.
This is the most powerful rocket ever built. Even beating out the Saturn V which put Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and ten others on the moon over fifty years ago.
This rocket will be capable of putting 27 metric tons (spelled “tonnes”) of stuff in “Trans Lunar Injection” (in other words, to send 27 tonnes to the moon). Future versions will send over 46 metric tons Moonward. (The Saturn V did 43.5 tonnes at its best.)
This rocket will develop 8,800,000 lbf of thrust (39,000 kN) of thrust (versus Saturn V 7,891,000 lbf (35,100 kN)). The later versions will develop 9.2 million lbf of thrust. (lbf = “pounds force”, in other words a pound regarded as a unit of force, not a unit of mass…the English system is a hot mess when it comes to weight, force, and mass.)
The center stack (tan/brown) consists of liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen stages, similar to the shuttle. In fact it’s almost as if they simply stuck shuttle engines on the bottom of a shuttle external tank. (It’s more complicated than that, though.) The two boosters (HA!!! I can use that word for once without it being about f***ing slab jabs) are like the solid rocket boosters from the shuttle, only longer (an additional segment added); and they won’t be recovered after use.
Yes. It’s a moon rocket. An actual moon rocket, and is sitting on the launch pad. It’s either being fueled or IS fueled, today, and there’s a countdown in progress for a launch.
But that launch will be cancelled mere seconds before ignition.
This is a “wet dress rehearsal,” and it’s “wet” because that’s NASA/space travel slang for “with full fuel tanks.” Yes, they’re going to fuel it up, not launch it, drain the fuel, then take it back to the tall building where they assemble rockets (creatively named the Vehicle Assembly Building) and look it over to see if there are any problems. Because if there are problems caused by just filling the gas tank, you’d better address them before you launch the sucker for real!
Sometime in the future, there will be a real launch of an unmanned capsule. (Best guess, June.) Eventually…sometime around 2026…we go back to the moon. I’m going to repeat that, because the wokester Left is going to hang so much PC/CRT baggage on it that we risk losing sight of what’s important here while we vomit our lunches:
WE GO BACK TO THE MOON.
T2 Temperature
We talked about heat, as a form of energy last time around. Our discussion relied on the concept of temperature, which we’re all pretty comfortable with. It is, after all, part-and-parcel of any discussion of the weather, which nearly everyone likes to talk about and even plan their lives around.
But temperature is not heat. If it were, two objects at the same temperature would contain the same amount of heat.
“Wait, Steve,” you might say, “Of course a big boulder will contain more heat than a pebble, even at the same temperature, because it’s bigger!”
OK, not a bad thought. But as it turns out, two different substances, of the same mass, at the same temperature, will still contain different amounts of heat. In fact we can even hang a number on every substance, defining how much heat must be added to it to raise the temperature one degree (once we correct for the mass of the thing); that’s the specific heat. Water’s is unusually high, much higher than iron’s. (How we figured that out was largely covered last time.)
A very mundane observation comes into play here: If you put a hot object next to a cold one, or better yet, dunk one into a pool of the other, like hot iron into cold water, the iron cools off, and the water heats up. The process continues until everything is the same temperature. Then we’ve reached a state called “thermodynamic equilibrium” where heat is no longer flowing from the iron to the water. So temperature has to do with thermodynamic equilibrium.
Another clue came when chemists/physicists (pick either one: depending on where you draw the line between the two) investigated the behavior of gases in the 1600s through the early 1800s.
For instance, they found out that you could compress a gas, say to half its original volume, and it would both heat up and increase in pressure. You could then wait for the heat to dissipate (i.e., for thermodynamic equilibrium) and note the pressure was exactly twice as high as it was before the compression. (This is Boyle’s Law, from 1662.)
If you kept the gas at a constant pressure, heating it up would make it expand, cooling it would make it contract (this is Charles’s Law, from the 1780s).
And from 1800-1802, Gay-Lussac’s Law: Heating the gas while holding the volume constant would also increase the pressure. Cooling it would decrease the pressure.
But in order to go further with this, we need to be able to measure temperature. Here in the United States, we still use the Fahrenheit scale. It’s named after Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686-1736), who developed a 100 degree scale, with 0 being the temperature of a particular kind of freezing brine, and 100 being tied to human body temperature. He did note that pure water froze at 32 on his scale. Of course hot water would bust the upper bound of this; by the 20th century the scale had been defined by setting the temperature of boiling water 180 degrees above freezing point, or 212 °F. (I must add here that this is the boiling point at sea level; it turns out to depend on air pressure.)
Of course when the metric system came along and defined a scale called centigrade (since renamed to Celsius after Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius (1701-1744) who had had a similar idea in 1742), the tie to water became even stronger with 0 set to the temperature of ice water, and 100 set to the boiling point. (That hundredth of the difference is where the name “centigrade” came from, from Latin for “hundred steps.”) You can measure temperature on this scale, or talk about the difference between two different temperatures.
Now that last sentence is kind of odd; I seem to be pointing out the obvious there.
But there is a difference between Celsius being used to measure temperature, and (say) the meter used to measure length. For length, no matter what you do, you’re not going to find an object of negative length. But you can, apparently, measure the temperature of something and come up with a negative number. And because the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales have different starting points, an object can have a positive temperature in Fahrenheit and a negative one in Celsius.
Not at all like length, or mass, where it’s pretty easy to agree on where to set zero and the only thing you have to worry about is the size of the unit. Two different systems (English and Metric) both agree on what zero length means; it’s just the size of a foot versus a meter that’s at issue. You can compare the size of a Fahrenheit degree with a Celsius degree (and find that it’s 5/9ths the size of the other), but that’s not all you need.
Imagine measuring the distance from Washington D.C. to New York City, with a zero point in Baltimore. You’d have to travel a few dozen miles from DC to even get up to zero distance. Now that’s weird, even post general relativity. And honestly, it’d be a pain to plan trips, make maps or do anything like that if we had to deal with such a mess…especially if, when doing it in metric, the zero point was in Philadelphia instead!
But that’s the way the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales work. The zero point isn’t at anything that might be considered a real zero, because you can get below that point. (That’s why you have to multiply by 5/9ths and then subtract 32…or was it subtracting 32 then multiplying by 5/9ths…or adding and multiplying by 9/5ths…or whatevertheheck. [OK, I’m clowning here. To get from Fahrenheit to Celsius, you subtract 32…to get a number that is zero when water freezes; it’s the number of Fahrenheit degrees above freezing. Now your number has the same starting point as Celsius, and you can multiply by 5/9ths to account for Celsius having “bigger” degrees. Invert the process to go the other way: multiply °C by 9/5ths, then add 32.])
So now lets return to our gas laws. Gay-Lussac’s law says heating a gas increases its pressure (keeping the volume constant). And Charles’s law says heating a gas makes it expand (keeping the pressure constant). In both cases, how much?
It’s not a neat proportion like Boyle’s law, where you can halve the volume and double the pressure (holding temperature constant). Heating a gas from 20 to 40 °F doesn’t double its volume (if pressure is constant), or its pressure (if volume is constant). And it doesn’t work going from 20-40 °C either (in fact it works a bit worse).
Aaah, but remember, temperature measurement is goofy! Zero seems to be picked at some unnatural point. Boyle’s law works as a proportion because neither quantity is temperature. The other two don’t work as a proportion.
Actually, as it happens, if you measure temperature relative to -273.15 °C or -459.67 °F, instead of the scales’ zero points, it does work. Doubling the temperature measured from this point does indeed double the volume (or the pressure).
But working in reverse, if you were to cool your gas to -273.15 °C, then you’re at zero on the adjusted scale, and the volume of your gas should be zero. And so should its pressure.
It can’t shrink any more than that, and it can’t exert less pressure than that. So have we found an absolute lowest temperature?
It turns out we have. And so the modern metric unit…the real one, not the one people outside of the US see in their weather reports, which is still Celsius, is the kelvin, named after William Thomson (1824-1907). [Not a typo. Yes, “kelvin” and “Thomson” are distinctly different words, but he was named first Baron Kelvin by Queen Victoria in 1892 and used that name henceforth. In fact, he was the first scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords.]
Kelvin has the same degree size as Celsius. And it starts at absolute zero. So we don’t even bother with the word “degrees.” We don’t say “50 degrees kelvin” (unless by mistake), we just say “50 kelvins” or “50K.” And we skip the cute little circle: °. Water melts at 273.15 K, and boils a hundred kelvins higher, 373.15 K. And physicists think in kelvins. And so, especially, do astrophysicists, who will always quote the temperature of an astronomical body in kelvins. (If it’s something hot, they’ll just double that to give the science “journalists” Fahrenheit…it’s fairly close, and let’s face it, you and I don’t really know what 10,000F means other than “damned hot.”)
There is a similar scale using the Fahrenheit degree. It’s called the Rankine scale, symbolized with °R or °Ra. (And we’re back to the little circle.) It was proposed by Macquorne Rankin, using similar logic with the kelvin scale. But this is something you can safely forget about, as even English and American scientists and engineers stick with kelvins and no one but a scientist or an engineer cares about absolute zero.
As for the gases? Well, no they don’t shrink to zero size at 0K. Because long before then they liquefy or solidify, because the molecules of which they are made have a size greater than zero. Helium, it turns out, remains a gas all the way down to a bit over 4K. So the gas laws are an idealization, they work pretty well when the gases aren’t close to condensing or freezing.
The three laws I’ve mentioned so far can be combined into one rule. In fact, even better than that. If you work with moles of gas (i.e., accounting for the differences in molecular weight), you can bring in Avogadro’s law, which states that one mole of gas, at standard temperature (25 C) and pressure (one atmosphere) occupies 22.4 liters. So you can, if your name is name is Benoit Paul Emile Clapeyron and it’s 1834, tie all these other laws to that (double the temperature and leave pressure constant and that mole occupies 44.8 liters; leave the volume constant and the pressure doubles to 2 atmospheres, etc.) and write:
PV = nRT
Where P is pressure, V is volume, T is temperature, n is the number of moles…and R is the fudge-factor constant. Without it, the law becomes a bunch of “is proportional to” statements, much messier to deal with and harder to nail down.
I once had to pressure-test gas piping, in winter. I’d pump a bunch of air into the line, measure the pressure and seal it off. Then come back a day later and hope the pressure had stayed the same.
But this was winter, in Colorado, and the temperature can change a LOT, day to day. Which would mean the pressure would change even without a leak. It could go up (which would confuse the ignorant and make him suspect a prankster was pumping more air into the system), or down (which would make him think he’d messed up the pipe work). But I knew better. Volume, of course was constant, so was simply dealing with Gay Lussac’s law. I’d convert the temperature to the absolute scale (for this I did use Rankines since I was starting with Fahrenheit), and see if the pressure I had initially measured dropped or rose to what it should be. (And of course, there really were a number of leaks…and it didn’t help that the pressure gauge was one of them!) But at least once I got a new pressure gauge and fixed my work, I knew it was good and didn’t get thrown off by the 30 degree temperature one day dropping to -10 the next day (which is enough to reduce the pressure almost seven percent all by itself).
Well, there are two possible directions to go from here…and I’ll take them both. See you next time.
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
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 !!!
