“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
hauberk
noun
long chain-mail coat
long mail shirt
long tunic made of chain mail
coat of mail; especially, the long coat of mail of the European Middle Ages, as contrasted with the habergeon, which is shorter and sometimes sleeveless
Used in a sentence
By the 10th century, the hauberk was common among well-armored warriors, often paired with a helmet.
Shown in a picture
Featured in a video, but not by name
MUSIC!
Listen to some traditional folk music while watching a woke-looking modern Renaissance festival type gal make decorative chain mail!
THE STUFF
So what if space was actually a bit like chain mail? Sabine talks about it!
So have we really found the point where math turns into physics?
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
Do We Still Need the Kang (Mis)Quote?
I’m still using the quote about winning the battles but losing the war. It seems like this doesn’t make sense right now given that we seem to be going from triumph to triumph.
On the contrary. This is the exception that proves the rule. The quote isn’t just a lament, it’s to point out why we can never seem to win.
You see, the RINOs cannot interfere and that is why, just for once, we are actually winning. And that is just one more piece of evidence (for the willfully blind) as to what I have been saying with that quote.
It stays.
Speaker Johnson Pinging you on January 6 Tapes
Just a friendly reminder Speaker Johnson. You’re doing some good things–or at least trying in the case of the budget–but this is the most important thing out there still hanging. One initial block released with the promise of more…and?
We have American patriots being held without bail and without trial, and the tapes almost certainly contain exculpatory evidence. (And if they don’t, and we’re all just yelling in an echo chamber over here, we need to know that too. And there’s only one way to know.)
Either we have a weaponized, corrupt government or we have a lot of internet charlatans. Let’s expose whatever it is. (I’m betting it’s the corrupt weaponized government, but if I am wrong, I’d like to see proof.)
Justice Must Be Done.
The 2020 election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Yes this is still true in spite of 2024. Fraud must be rooted out of our system and that hasn’t changed just because the fraud wasn’t enough to stop Trump winning a second term. Fraud WILL be ramped up as soon as we stop paying attention.
Otherwise, everything ends again in 2028. Or perhaps earlier if Trump is saddled with a Left/RINO congress in 2026, via fraud.
Small Government?
Many times conservatives (real and fake) speak of “small government” being the goal.
This sounds good, and mostly is good, but it misses the essential point. The important thing here isn’t the size, but rather the purpose, of government. We could have a cheap, small tyranny. After all our government spends most of its revenue on payments to individuals and foreign aid, neither of which is part of the tyrannical apparatus trying to keep us locked down and censored. What parts of the government would be necessary for a tyranny? It’d be a lot smaller than what we have now. We could shrink the government and nevertheless find it more tyrannical than it is today.
No, what we want is a limited government, limited not in size, but rather in scope. Limited, that is, in what it’s allowed to do. Under current circumstances, such a government would also be much smaller, but that’s a side effect. If we were in a World War II sort of war, an existential fight against nasty dictatorships on the brink of world conquest, that would be very expensive and would require a gargantuan government, but that would be what the government should be doing. That would be a large, but still limited government, since it’d be working to protect our rights.
World War II would have been the wrong time to squawk about “small government,” but it wasn’t (and never is) a bad time to demand limited government. Today would be a better time to ask for a small government–at least the job it should be doing is small today–but it misses the essential point; we want government to not do certain things. Many of those things we don’t want it doing are expensive but many of them are quite eminently doable by a smaller government than the one we have today. Small, but still exceeding proper limits.
So be careful what you ask for. You might get it and find you asked for the wrong thing.
Political Science In Summation
It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).
His Truth?
Again we saw an instance of “It might be true for Billy, but it’s not true for Bob” logic this week.
I hear this often, and it’s usually harmless. As when it’s describing differing circumstances, not different facts. “Housing is unaffordable” can be true for one person, but not for another who makes ten times as much.
But sometimes the speaker means it literally. Something like 2+2=4 is asserted to be true for Billy but not for Bob. (And when it’s literal, it’s usually Bob saying it.) And in that sense, it’s nonsense, dangerous nonsense. There is ONE reality, and it exists independent of our desires and our perceptions. It would go on existing if we weren’t here. We exist in it. It does not exist in our heads. It’s not a personal construct, and it isn’t a social construct. If there were no society, reality would continue to be what it is, it wouldn’t vanish…which it would have to do, if it were a social construct.
Now what can change from person to person is the perception of reality. We see that all the time. And people will, of course, act on those perceptions. They will vote for Trump (or try to) if their perception is close to mine, and vote against Trump (and certainly succeed at doing so) if their perception is distant from mine (and therefore, if I do say so, wrong). I have heard people say “perception is reality” and usually, that’s what they’re trying to say–your perception of reality is, as far as you know, an accurate representation of reality, or you’d change it.
But I really wish they’d say it differently. And sometimes, to get back to Billy and Bob, the person who says they have different truths is really saying they have different perceptions of reality–different worldviews. I can’t argue with the latter. But I sure wish they’d say it better. That way I’d know that someone who blabbers about two different truths is delusional and not worth my time, at least not until he passes kindergarten-level metaphysics on his umpteenth attempt.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the Q Tree Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Political correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
Gold blooped up over the 3000 dollar mark briefly Friday, but retreated a bit and closed at the level shown above (it actually closed a bit higher than that on Thursday). So of course the FRNSI is at an all-time weekly high. Silver did very well this last week; long overdue; gold is now worth over an ounce less silver than last week. Platinum shows some signs of life. Maybe it is only mostly dead.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
The Ides of March
Yes, our calendar is a direct descendant of the Roman calendar, particularly after Julius Caesar’s reforms.
That doesn’t mean we’d have any idea WTF we were looking at when looking at a Roman Calendar. They didn’t lay out months in tidy little rectangles like we do, with days numbered from 1-31. (Or 30, or 28 or fairly rarely 29.)
Nope they did something totally wacky, at least from our point of view.
The Kalends was the first day of the month. The Nones was the ninth day before the Ides. The Ides were, in turn the 15th day of full months (months of 31 days), or the 13th day of hollow months (months of 30 days) [Before Julius and Augustus Caesar, February had 30 days.] After some reforms months could have four different lengths and even the 31 day months were handled two different ways.
Counting through the days of the month, the 1st was “on the Kalends”. the 2nd was “the day after the Kalends” OR it could be called (in March, May, July and October–MMJO) the “Sixth day before the Nones” and for every other month the “Fourth day before the Nones”. Then count down each subsequent day until on the 7th (MMJO) or 5th (all others), was “On the Nones.” But beware because the “Third day before the Nones” was followed by “the day before the Nones” (there was no “second day before the Nones). The next day (8th or 6th) was “The day after the Nones.” OR that day could be called the 8th day before the Ides. Then the 7th, 6th, 5th, 4th, 3rd days before the Nones…and then skipping over “the second day before the Ides” to “the day before the Ides.” Then the Ides…which was on the 15th (MMJO) or 13th (all other months).
Then it gets tricky. For MMJO, the day after the Ides (the 16th) could be called “The day after the ides” or “the 17th day before the Kalends” Note, though that (for example) March 16 was called “the 14th day before the Kalends of April.” So April was being named…even though it was really still March! For January, August, and December, the “day after the Ides” (the 14th) was also “the 19th day before the Kalends”. For April, June, September, and November (all 30 days at the time), the “Day after the Ides” (the 14th) was “the 18th day before the Kalends”. For February (28 or 29 days) the “Day after the Ides” (the 14th) was either the 16th or 17th day before the Kalends of March”.
You would then count down to the second-to-last-day of the month and that would be the 3rd day of the Kalends, and the last day would be “the day before the kalends.”
Of course they did this in Latin, not English, so for example, they’d say “ante diem tertium decimum Kalendas” (the 13th day before the Kalends) and write it down as “a.d. XIII Kal.” since who wants to write all that out?
The day after Kalends, Nones, or Ides were considered “black” days and unlucky. (Though they were off one day for Julius Caesar.)
[Note before the Julian reforms, there were no thirty day months; there were MMJO (31 days), February (28 days) and everything else (29 days) and they followed the rules for MMJO, 28 day Februaries, and the 29 day February, respectively). When the caesars made January, August and December into 31 day months, they actually left the Ides in the same place relative to the Kalends (i.e., on what we call the 13th of the month) rather than moving the Ides to the 15th, to avoid messing up festival days.]
Somehow, they were able to use this insanely complex system and still have enough brainpower left to conquer the entire Mediterranean world.
And NO I don’t have this memorized, I had to look it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar. Otherwise I’d not have the brainpower left to butcher the topic of geology.
A Deeper Dive on Isotopes
Last time I described the atomic nucleus as it came to be known during the early 20th century, and I discussed radioactivity. I touched on isotopes a bit; time for a deeper dive.
As chemists worked to measure atomic weights for all known elements (painstaking and unglamorous work; the ones doing this are the unsung heroes of chemistry) it became apparent that most elements had atomic weights that were almost an integer multiple of the element with the lightest atomic weight: hydrogen (for example, taking hydrogen as 1 (not the currently used value!), helium comes in at 3.971, very close to 4. But there were a few oddballs, too, elements with a not-very-close multiple, like (and now I’ll use the current values, with hydrogen at 1.008, not 1.000) boron (10.81), neon (20.18), chlorine (35.45). Just eyeballing the list it looks like about a quarter of all elements are “off” like this.
It wasn’t until people started ionizing elements and sending the ions through a magnetic field to see how much their trajectories bent that we started to understand this. This was first done by J. J. Thomson (who had discovered the electron, and loved to play with magnets and charged particles) in 1912 with neon gas. Neon is atomic number 10, ten protons, and as I mentioned its atomic weight is 20.18. Thomson discovered that neon is actually mixture of two different things, one with an atomic weight of 20, another with an atomic weight of 22. The signal was weaker for 22, so he figured it neon was mostly the atomic-weight-twenty stuff.
These were both undeniably neon; there was no way to separate them chemically because they both behaved the same (which is to say, being totally unwilling to engage in chemical reactions; neon is a noble gas). They just weighed different. Thomson however had been brought up believing that atomic weight was an inherent property of an element, so he thought of it as two separate gases. We don’t think this any more. They’re both neon. And we now know there’s a very small amount of neon atoms with a mass of 21.
As more and more of these experiments happened, it became clear; if an element’s atomic weight was far off from an integer, it was a mix of these “isotopes.” Aston (who formulated the “whole number rule” for isotopic masses) showed in 1920 that chlorine’s 35.45 atomic weight was due to being a mixture of atoms with mass 35 and mass 37 units.
When talking about just the nucleus of an atom, we often use the term nuclide instead of isotope (which is the whole atom). It’s not a hard and fast rule but chemists will tend to use “isotope” and nuclear physicists including those researching fusion will be a bit more likely to say “nuclide.”
Again, the chemical behavior is nearly identical. In principle a heavier isotope should be slightly slower to react than an lighter one, but the practical difference is nil except in one case. Thus when it matters (and it usually doesn’t), chemists and physicists will write something like neon-20 or neon-22. When they can do so they will follow the formal convention: 20Ne or 22Ne. I am able to do that here (writing the post) but not in comments; but it’s such a pain to do so (wordpiss), that I will stick with writing either neon-20 or Ne-20.
And by the way, for our purposes here, it does matter. Quite a lot.
The one exception regarding chemical differences is the case of hydrogen, which usually has mass number of 1, but some few atoms have a mass number of 2. If you concentrate the mass-2 stuff, and use it to make water, you have heavy water, which even though it’s technically hydrogen monoxide just like tap water is, will kill you. (It also melts at 4 degrees Celsius so it’s possible to put a heavy water ice cube in a glass of water at 1 degree Celsius and it won’t melt. It will sink to the bottom, too, which is even weirder.) In fact for hydrogen and hydrogen alone, there are “special” names for the heavier isotopes; hydrogen-2 is called deuterium and (in this context) hydrogen-1 is called protium. There is also hydrogen-3, which is radioactive and is called tritium.
Once the neutron was discovered by James Chadwick in 1932, we got some clarity as to what was going on. Neutrons, it turns out are very slightly more massive than protons, We now know that neon-20, neon-21 and neon-22 all contain ten protons (neon has ten protons, by definition), but they contain 10, 11, and 12 neutrons, respectively, the total of the two numbers 10+10, 10+11, 10+12 gives you the mass number.
So what happens when you do this sort of analysis on other elements as found in nature? Fluorine (#9) has one isotope, F-19. Tin (#50) has no less than ten isotopes: Sn-112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, and 124. The natural proportion for each of these ranges from 0.34 percent to 33 percent.
It is possible to create isotopes in the lab. So long as the number of neutrons isn’t too high or low, you’ll get a nucleus that hangs together for a while, perhaps even permanently. Otherwise the excess neutrons will “drip” off (fail to stick even momentarily) or if there are too few neutrons, a proton will “drip” off.
Between these bounds, the isotope will be intensely radioactive, less intensely radioactive, even less intensely radioactive, dang near stable, or actually stable. (Those are not “official” terms by the way.) And if you include all those made-in-a-lab-and-very-unstable isotopes the isotope counts go way up. Tritium is one of them for instance, and tin actually has isotopes ranging from 99 through 140.
Why do we need to make those highly radioactive isotopes in a lab? Because if there were any on earth originally, they have long since decayed away and none are left.
[If you poke around on wikipedia you may see references to something being “observationally stable.” That means an isotope that they believe on theoretical grounds is almost stable but it’s so close to stable they haven’t caught it decaying yet. In other words “we think this ought to be very very mildly radioactive–so mild we haven’t detected it yet so maybe it’s really stable after all.” Three of the ten tin isotopes I mentioned are “observationally stable”]
Because we are able to produce almost-arbitrary nuclides in the lab, we have pretty complete tables of nuclides–both a table with columns and a bunch of numbers in them, like you see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_tin, or nice graphical ones like this:
Going across the bottom, you have the number of neutrons, going up you have the number of protons, as shown in this excerpt from the very lower left corner. Note that the same isotope number for different elements lie on a diagonal. (They also threw in a bare neutron, mass number 1, element zero.)
The colors indicate how the isotopes decay; black is a stable isotope. Blue is a β+ (positron) decay (or capturing an electron), orange is losing a proton (technically it’s “dripping” the proton), deep purple is dripping a neutron, yellow is alpha decay (note that 8Be alpha decays–and what’s left over is a helium nucleus, which is itself an alpha particle; so really it just splits in two). Green (visible at the other end of the chart) is spontaneous fission where a nucleus splits into two or more large pieces. Finally the pink or light purple squares like 3H are β– (ordinary beta decay).
If you paid attention last time, you should be able to figure out what the isotope will turn into. For example 10Be undergoes beta decay, so it goes up one in charge (it now has 5 protons) but stays the same mass. It becomes boron-10, which is stable.
This chart also indicates half life. And I will more than likely be pasting in other pieces of it in future posts.
OK, so we have this list of all possible isotopes (and ones that arguably shouldn’t be considered isotopes because they “drip” when you try to create them). What do we see when we look “out there” on Earth? This is, after all, supposedly a series on geology, right?
The isotopes we see fall into three broad categories.
Stable isotopes. Every single stable isotope is found on Earth. Every last one.
Long lived isotopes. Isotopes over a certain half-life (which I will discuss below) will be found on Earth too. Again, every last one. (And by the way some of those half lives exceed present day estimates of the age of the earth by millions or even billions of times. And “observationally stable” isotopes, if they turn out to be radioactive, will have even longer half lives.)
Short lived isotopes. Some of the known short-lived isotopes can be found in nature. Here’s the thing though. In all of these cases, we can identify a natural process that is creating those isotopes, even at the present moment. For example, carbon-14 with a half life of about 5,760 years is being produced in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays impacting nitrogen-14 nuclei. Uranium-234 has a half life of 245,500 years, and is created by uranium-238 decay (U-238 becomes thorium-234 due to an alpha decay, then Th-234 becomes protactinium-234 via beta decay, then Pa-234 becomes U-234 after another beta decay). All of those intermediate products, of course, we also detect in nature (and they have very short half lives of days or hours) so they fall into this category too. But, very important: We do not have any short lived isotopes we cannot account for this way.
This actually paints a picture: We have a situation where we have primordial isotopes–ones that apparently were always here on Earth, and the others, that weren’t. Since anything that could be a primordial nuclide based on being stable or having a long half life, is here, there’s no reason to suppose that some other nuclide that is now not found in nature wasn’t actually once here–only to have decayed completely away. Which means the Earth would have to be old enough for them to be gone by now.
OK, so what’s the dividing line between short lived and long lived isotopes? Somewhere between 100 and 700 million years.
Uranium-236 is listed twice (I just noticed). The 234,200,000 figure should not be there, so I crossed it out.
We cannot find plutonium-244 in nature. We’ve tried, some claim to have found it, but it’s inconclusive. Likewise with samarium-146. But we have no trouble finding uranium-235…and were even able to send Hiroshima, Japan a care package of the stuff on August 6 of 1945, the first nuclear bomb to be detonated in anger.
As it happens, samarium-146, if any were present on our Earth 4.5 billion years ago, would have gone through over 40 half lives, which is to say less than a trillionth of it would be left today. Uranium-235 (which we know was here) has gone through six half lives, so over one percent of it is still left.
In other words, this situation is consistent with Earth being 4.5 billion or so years old, as dated by other methods. If there were significant amounts of Pu-244 or Sm-146 around, the Earth would have to be considerably younger than this (though it could still be in the billions of years) for that to make sense.
All told, there are 251 stable nuclides, and 35 long-lived primordial nuclides.
As it happens many of the primordial nuclides can be of use in radiometric dating. We’ll dive into that next time. It’s now 10:16 PM here and I’m sure people are getting antsy.
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
wallflower
noun, adjective
a color which is yellowish red
an attribute of being colored yellowish red
a light purple color marketed by Sherwin-Williams
a genus of flowering plants, Erysimum, in the family Brassicaceae (mustards)
a shy, unassuming person
Used in a sentence
Whether wallflower is yellow-to-red or purple seems to depend upon the circumstances.
Shown in a picture
Shown in a different picture
But wait! Some wallflowers show the other wallflower!
MUSIC!
Wallflowers. Just can’t get away from them!
But wait! There’s moar!
THE STUFF
So what do you think about going to Mars? I can tell you, the crowd at Trump’s inauguration was incredibly enthusiastic. I was cheering BIG TIME. But let’s look at it more critically – both sides of the question. We’ve learned from Trump – always cover the downside. Listen to the critics, and think about what they say.
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
OK, this is interesting – a mixture of Jefferson Airplane, epic music, and Matrix visuals.
Which led me to another…..
Which led me back to the original. Which seems very strange now.
THE STUFF
Why is AI being used to create fake stories about Elon Musk?
I find this sort of fake story to be much more annoying that AI country music.
OK – let’s wash that away with some reality – the study of “perfect” numbers! (I may have played this topic before, but whatever – let’s play it again!)
Six is a pretty cool number – but 28? And 496? And (2^82,589,933 – 1)?
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
yoni
noun
symbol representing female genitals
a stylized representation of a vulva worshiped as a symbol of a goddess, in particular the Hindu goddess Shakti.
the symbol under which Shakti, or the personification of the female power in nature, is worshiped
The female sexual organs, or a symbol of them, especially as an object of veneration within certain types of Hinduism, Buddhism, and other cultures
concept applicable to female vaginal treatments, exercises, massages, and other focuses
As I have said, I don’t back down on ANY word that comes next in my list of “needful words” that don’t get enough usage. HOWEVER…..
Used in a sentence
I’m not going to show all the things I’ve read regarding yoni. I encourage interested readers to explore on their own. And as for pictures…..
Used in a picture
No. Just no. And the good pictures include symbolic representation of the male counterpart, too. Yikes. Interesting, but…..
MUSIC!
LOL! OK – I am simply not going to promote “yoni” music – this is classified as “women’s health” in my world, and even the less “anatomically technical” music videos are likely to be a bit too pagan and new-age for this site.
On the other hand, being only a bit new-age and globalist (“world music”), Greek instrumental and electronic artist Yanni is somebody my father enjoyed during his sunset years, and Yanni’s music brings back good memories of my mother and father enjoying their retirement, so here you go. Twenty of Yanni’s greatest hits.
https://youtu.be/MKaDLtMkn5I
THE STUFF
Flying insects the size of a hawk or an eagle?
OK – this video is actually some interesting science wrapped in click-bait advertising and bad AI narration. The critters aren’t all THAT bad – although they seem pretty nasty by today’s standards.
Bottom line – kinda happy all these bugs got smaller.
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
voile
noun
a soft, fine, sheer fabric
a light, plain-weave, sheer fabric of cotton, rayon, silk, or wool used especially for making dresses and curtains
a light, translucent cotton fabric used for making curtains and dresses
a light, semitransparent fabric
Used in a sentence
Like many lightweight fabrics, voile cloth is ideal for spring and summer outfits.
More about voile
The term comes from the French word meaning ‘veil’. When made of 100% cotton or cotton and linen blended together, it allows the air to pass through, providing comfort even on the most scorching day. Due to its fine texture, voile fabric can also be used to line garments.
What are the key features of high quality voile?
Plain, tight weave
Silky soft finish
Light drape
No stretch
Slightly transparent (lining is optional)
Crisp and sometimes wiry
Stiff but flexible
Voile fabric is versatile, which means it is great both for apparel and home décor. You’ll often find voile in craft projects such as pillowcases, cushions, doilies, doll’s dresses and more. This gauzy material is also one of the favourites when it comes to creating lightweight curtains. It filters the sunlight and floods any room with natural light.
Shown in a picture
Discussed in a video
MUSIC!
A search on “voile” brought back “Voilà” – so enjoy this song, even though you likely have seen this performance before.
THE STUFF
Dating methods.
The basics. Including limitations.
No, we’re not talking about Brylcream and hot cars – chocolates and roses – BMOC / “wingman” – websites, matchmakers, singles groups – or any of the other methods of “dating success”! Although YES, those do work!
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
These gals still rock! More HEART – from less than a year ago.
THE STUFF
Many may find the following discussion of thyroid treatment boring, but endocrine pharmacology is still a bit of a mystery to science. I found this “laid-back” conversation between two health hippie MAHA types to be really enjoyable, as they go down many rabbit holes.
This lady is a pharmacist who worked as a case consultant figuring out why people were having medical conflicts and side-effects. Her insights into polypharmacy (people taking too many drugs) are quite interesting.
The guy is a veteran of every medical fad on earth – so what he has distilled his health approach down to is also fascinating. Enjoy!
So if you sat through all of that, and still have confidence in alternative medicine, then you are SOLID as an explorer of difficult terrain, and my hat is off to you!
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
First Things First
Today sees two memorial services for “Sam”: Susan P Sampson (Deplorable Patriot) at 10 AM CST (at St. Roch Roman Catholic Church in St. Louis) and Sam, PAVACA’s brother at 2PM EST (Peeples Valley Baptist Church in Cartersville, Georgia).
RIP
We carry on the fight, in memory of the fallen.
Do We Still Need the Kang (Mis)Quote?
I’m still using the quote about winning the battles but losing the war. It seems like this doesn’t make sense right now given that we seem to be going from triumph to triumph.
On the contrary. This is the exception that proves the rule. The quote isn’t just a lament, it’s to point out why we can never seem to win.
You see, the RINOs cannot interfere and that is why, just for once, we are actually winning. And that is just one more piece of evidence (for the willfully blind) as to what I have been saying with that quote.
It stays.
Speaker Johnson Pinging you on January 6 Tapes
Just a friendly reminder Speaker Johnson. You’re doing some good things–or at least trying in the case of the budget–but this is the most important thing out there still hanging. One initial block released with the promise of more…and?
We have American patriots being held without bail and without trial, and the tapes almost certainly contain exculpatory evidence. (And if they don’t, and we’re all just yelling in an echo chamber over here, we need to know that too. And there’s only one way to know.)
Either we have a weaponized, corrupt government or we have a lot of internet charlatans. Let’s expose whatever it is. (I’m betting it’s the corrupt weaponized government, but if I am wrong, I’d like to see proof.)
Justice Must Be Done.
The 2020 election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Yes this is still true in spite of 2024. Fraud must be rooted out of our system and that hasn’t changed just because the fraud wasn’t enough to stop Trump winning a second term. Fraud WILL be ramped up as soon as we stop paying attention.
Otherwise, everything ends again in 2028. Or perhaps earlier if Trump is saddled with a Left/RINO congress in 2026, via fraud.
Small Government?
Many times conservatives (real and fake) speak of “small government” being the goal.
This sounds good, and mostly is good, but it misses the essential point. The important thing here isn’t the size, but rather the purpose, of government. We could have a cheap, small tyranny. After all our government spends most of its revenue on payments to individuals and foreign aid, neither of which is part of the tyrannical apparatus trying to keep us locked down and censored. What parts of the government would be necessary for a tyranny? It’d be a lot smaller than what we have now. We could shrink the government and nevertheless find it more tyrannical than it is today.
No, what we want is a limited government, limited not in size, but rather in scope. Limited, that is, in what it’s allowed to do. Under current circumstances, such a government would also be much smaller, but that’s a side effect. If we were in a World War II sort of war, an existential fight against nasty dictatorships on the brink of world conquest, that would be very expensive and would require a gargantuan government, but that would be what the government should be doing. That would be a large, but still limited government, since it’d be working to protect our rights.
World War II would have been the wrong time to squawk about “small government,” but it wasn’t (and never is) a bad time to demand limited government. Today would be a better time to ask for a small government–at least the job it should be doing is small today–but it misses the essential point; we want government to not do certain things. Many of those things we don’t want it doing are expensive but many of them are quite eminently doable by a smaller government than the one we have today. Small, but still exceeding proper limits.
So be careful what you ask for. You might get it and find you asked for the wrong thing.
Political Science In Summation
It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).
His Truth?
Again we saw an instance of “It might be true for Billy, but it’s not true for Bob” logic this week.
I hear this often, and it’s usually harmless. As when it’s describing differing circumstances, not different facts. “Housing is unaffordable” can be true for one person, but not for another who makes ten times as much.
But sometimes the speaker means it literally. Something like 2+2=4 is asserted to be true for Billy but not for Bob. (And when it’s literal, it’s usually Bob saying it.) And in that sense, it’s nonsense, dangerous nonsense. There is ONE reality, and it exists independent of our desires and our perceptions. It would go on existing if we weren’t here. We exist in it. It does not exist in our heads. It’s not a personal construct, and it isn’t a social construct. If there were no society, reality would continue to be what it is, it wouldn’t vanish…which it would have to do, if it were a social construct.
Now what can change from person to person is the perception of reality. We see that all the time. And people will, of course, act on those perceptions. They will vote for Trump (or try to) if their perception is close to mine, and vote against Trump (and certainly succeed at doing so) if their perception is distant from mine (and therefore, if I do say so, wrong). I have heard people say “perception is reality” and usually, that’s what they’re trying to say–your perception of reality is, as far as you know, an accurate representation of reality, or you’d change it.
But I really wish they’d say it differently. And sometimes, to get back to Billy and Bob, the person who says they have different truths is really saying they have different perceptions of reality–different worldviews. I can’t argue with the latter. But I sure wish they’d say it better. That way I’d know that someone who blabbers about two different truths is delusional and not worth my time, at least not until he passes kindergarten-level metaphysics on his umpteenth attempt.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
Gold got into the 2870s range Wednesday, dropped then recovered some on Friday. Silver, of course succeeds in going down even on days when gold went up–down 40+cents on, Friday: a day when gold went up.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
A Bit More Geology
I’ve talked about stratigraphy quite a lot in this series so far, and plan to move on to very different aspects of geology for a while…but I’m going to start by a review or summing up or practical application.
Here’s a diagram Valerie brought to the comments last week, as referenced by a YEC site which then went on to disparage it.
This is a cross section of the Grand Canyon, which is everybody’s favorite illustration of stratigraphy in action.
On the right are the attributions to different systems (periods) including the “Precambrian” which isn’t really a period (it’s the bucket they put the first three entire eons into sometimes). If you remember the names from last time (and I would be surprised if you did), there’s some missing names here.
Digression on how I remember them:
I’ve heard names like Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, etc., enough to recognize them; but I could never remember the order they appear. I could remember Cambrian being the first Paleozoic period and the Permian being the last one, but Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous (here divvied up into Mississippian and Pennsylvanian, as is often done in America), I could never remember. Until I looked at the initials: COS is of course the Colorado Springs airport code and living near there that’s easy for me to remember: Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian. I could force myself to remember the Carboniferous is right before the Permian, which leaves (by elimination) the Devonian as the fourth period right after the Silurian.
I have no difficulty with the Mesozoic because I grew up with a dinosaur nut as a kid; I got exposed to this a lot. Triassic (lame), Jurassic (cool dinosuars), Creataceous (really cool dinosaurs).
The Cenozoic is both easier and harder. Easier because Paleogene obviously comes before Neogene (Paleo = old, Neo = new), so you can list off Paleogene and Neogene (and then just remember Quaternary–note not Quarternary), but harder because this one usually gets subdivided all the way down to epochs, one level further, even in children’s books! I didn’t talk about that at all last time except mentioning that in passing, but those all have names ending in -cene and I can’t ever remember them. (I’ll write them out here just for grins: Paleocene, Eocene and Oligocene (subdivisions of the Paleogene) and Miocene and Pliocene in the Neogene. The Quaternary gets broken down into the Pleistocene and Holocene–the Holocene is everything since the last ice age. Seven of these epochs and they rhyme and I can’t remember their ordering for nuthin.
Anyhow returning to the diagram, the entire Ordovician and Silurian, plus who knows how much late Cambrian and early Devonian, is completely missing from the sequence shown. And nothing after the Permian. In fact for all we know from looking at the diagram the last part of the Permian is missing too. What gives?
I’ve talked a lot about rock layers being laid down, and you might have got the impression this happens all the time everywhere, but that’s not true. In many cases nothing gets laid down for millions of years (imagine, for instance, a desert, or mountains, or the land under an icecap or glacier). And in many cases, something already laid down gets removed by erosion. Here what we see is a nice thick Cambrian layer followed immediately by a thin Devonian layer.
For all we know, there may have once been more Cambrian rock here, then some amount of Ordovician rock, then some Silurian rock…and then deposition stopped, and a bunch of stuff got eroded away until resuming near the end of the Devonian.
Or maybe none of that ever got laid down; deposition stopped right where we see it, then resumed late in the Devonian. We can’t tell–not from this diagram at least–we just know those layers aren’t there now.
(If you dig deeper you can learn a bit more. The Muav Limestone is the top Cambrian layer shown, and you can look that up in Wikipedia (and then chase down the sources if you really want to be thorough). In addition to describing the limestone as fine-grained and gray, it goes on to describe the extent of the formation. It turns out the Muav Limestone was laid down in the mid-to-late Cambrian, not at the very end (dates are given), and extends into Utah, Nevada and California…and it is of different thicknesses in different areas. In most places what lies on top of it is Mississippian rock, but in some areas (like the Grand Canyon) where it’s a bit thinner there’s Devonian rock there. Now you can reconstruct a bit what happened: The Muav was laid down. Then parts of it were eroded and there was a Devonian deposit, which probably got planed off by erosion but it lived on in places where the Muav was lower and it filled in deeper areas.
[When I think about the sheer amount of field work it takes to map these things, I am staggered. Geologists basically have to go everywhere to do this to this level of detail.]
The dividing line is labeled as a “disconformity.” It turns out that a disconformity is a specific type of unconformity. And an unconformity is any sort of gap in the stratigraphic sequence, which indicates a gap in deposition of sediment.
I can’t say it better than Wikipoo does so I’ll just quote it: “The rocks above an unconformity are younger than the rocks beneath (unless the sequence has been overturned). An unconformity represents time during which no sediments were preserved in a region or were subsequently eroded before the next deposition. The local record for that time interval is missing and geologists must use other clues to discover that part of the geologic history of that area. The interval of geologic time not represented is called a hiatus. It is a kind of relative dating.”
It’s called a “disconformity” when the unconformity is between parallel layers of sedimentary rock…as is the case here.
It is called a “nonconformity” when the upper layer is sedimentary and what is below is igneous or metamorphic rock, presumably partially eroded away before the sediments were deposited.
Also showing up in that diagram is an “angular unconformity” where the rocks below the unconformity are angled. There are parallel layers there but the layers are at a steep tilt. This usually happens because after the layers were deposited there was a mountain building episode that tilted the landscape. Then part was eroded away and the overlying sediment was deposited.
And of course at the very top, nothing above the Kaibab limestone, which (I went and looked) is early-to-mid Permian, so the late Permian either was never deposited here, or was and has been eroded away. But one shouldn’t judge such things from one location. Before we start looking elsewhere though, I’m going to paste in a different diagram of the Grand Canyon layers, one from the National Park Service:
Some occasional bluffs appear on top of the Kaibab that are of the “Moenkopi” formation.
But let’s look further afield, and if we do so we’ll be rewarded. Because the Kaibab is under many additional layers in Zion National Park. That nails it down; the Kaibab was once under a lot more rock than it is today. Here are the layers that appear above it in Zion:
The Dakota formation spreads all over the Intermountain Western United States and further, it is seen in Kansas as well as the Dakotas. (And I can guess what I am going to find when I go look: YUP, it’s Cretaceous; the last period/system of the Mesozoic. (And the Dakota formation is mid-Cretaceous at that, not late Cretaceous). That’s because there was an “inland sea” called the Western Interior Seaway in the Western United States until then, and I’ve known about that since childhood. Yes, a shallow arm of the ocean where there are now highlands and even mountains.)
From Ellis County, Kansas (which is Western Kansas on or near I-70) we have this imprint fossil of a leaf; the rock contains significant iron. Apparently when this leaf got buried, the area was boggy sand near deciduous (leafy) trees. Other nearby areas have fossilized mollusc shells so there was also a beach near here at one point in time.
(You may have noticed a lot of those Zion Park formation names are quite redolent of the Southwest: Kaibab, Moenkopi, Chinle, Moenave, Keyenta, and Navajo. All were discovered on the Colorado Plateau, largely by watching the rock layers fly by as Wile E. Coyote fell thousands of feet whilst trying to get away from the anvil that was his traveling companion. Really, really, he should never have looked down.)
So what forces erode rocks? Or (by the way) the soil before it becomes a rock?
Many different things. But number one is:
Erosion by Water
And there are many ways for water to do this. Rainfall and surface runoff are what I (sometimes) see where I live, far away from the World Sump known as the ocean, so I’ll cover that one first.
The mere act of a raindrop hitting the ground can sometimes eject particles of soil. But much more dramatic erosion results from runoff; it can go downslope as sheet erosion, form rills, or even create gullies. Rills and gullies are qualitatively the same, but a rill is small enough that you can (if you are farming the land) fill it in just through normal tilling the soil.
Continuous water flow occurs in rivers and streams. Given time they can wear down rocks; rocks in the bed of a stream eventually become smoothed down into pebbles. Streams can not be fed by rainfall but also snow melt and springs.
Entire mountain ranges can, and will, be removed by these processes though it takes millions of years. Streams will first cut narrow, v-shaped canyons; as time progresses and the mountains erode away the channels will get more of a U profile, and eventually the stream ends up moving slowly through a broad river valley. Or one can often see such a progression following a stream downhill today. (Geologists even talk of “young” streams (the ones cutting narrow valleys) versus “mature” streams, with more rounded beds, and then finally “old age”, which are more like:
A stream in a wide flood plain, moving slowly, will eventually start to meander (look at a map of the lower Mississippi to see this in action today). The stream can cut across the meanders especially during a flood, and leave behind oxbow lakes as seen in this picture of the Nowitna River in Alaska.
Water flowing in a stream will pick up more “stuff” the faster it is flowing; when it’s a flash flood it can remove boulders. Slower moving streams will pick sand up off their beds and move it downstream. Fine Silt can stay suspended even along slow-moving nearly-flat rivers.
Of course it’s easiest for streams to pick up loose material like sand than to actually grind down rock, but the latter does happen…assisted some by the loose stuff the stream is carrying. (It is a mistake to compare a gully cut through soil to a canyon cut through rock and assume they are both being cut at the same rate.)
Where does it all go? Downstream of course, and the sediment carried off can be deposited a couple of different ways.
One is the “alluvial fan” where water can emerge from a narrow canyon into a larger valley. The water will spread out and slow down; These are plainly visible in the Basin and Range province of Nevada and California; here is an overhead picture of one in Death Valley:
And from ground level, also in Death Valley (but I don’t know if it’s the same one):
Alluvial fans can be many square kilometers in size and tend to have gentle slopes up to where the stream emerges from its canyon (and nothing says the stream has to run full time; it certainly doesn’t do so here). The deposited stuff tends to be coarser nearer the source, which makes sense: as the water exiting the canyon fans out, it slows down, as it slows down the bigger stuff will be deposited first, closest to where the water exited the canyon.
Alluvial fans have even been seen on Mars, an indication that water used to flow there. They also appear on Titan, but this isn’t due to water flow but rather liquid methane and ethane. As you might expect given the examples I’ve shown, these tend to show up in mountainous, arid places, though by no means must the place be as arid as Death Valley. Buried alluvial fans underlie Denver, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles and often contain groundwater. They also underlie the Ganges valley in India, being fed from the Himalayas. And of course ancient fans often end up becoming sedimentary rock and end up in the geologic column.
River deltas are another obvious destination. The Mississippi delta deposit is tens of thousands of feet thick; it’s so heavy it pushes the bedrock down into the Earth. But in less extreme cases, smaller streams dump sediment into ponds, swamps and oceans…and these could eventually end up becoming rocks in the geologic column.
Below is the mouth of the Amazon river, in Brazil. This river is titanic; it may not be the longest in the world (the other possibility being the Nile) but no other river can hold a candle to it in terms of volume–in fact its total discharge is greater than the next seven rivers on that list, combined. It is mostly in Brazil, but even way upstream where it enters Brazil, it’s carrying more water than any other river on Earth.
But most relevantly here, notice the water is tan–that’s silt, being washed out into the ocean to settle as sediment and eventually show up in a geologic column. (What the geologist who studies it (if any) will look like is another question entirely.)
Those white things on the picture are clouds, which should give you an idea of the sheer scale of the picture.
Streams can empty out into a bog or swamp, too…to say nothing of lakes and endorheic basins. That last sounds truly awful, but that’s any inland basin with no outlet to the ocean. Probably the most famous example of such a thing to Americans is the Great Salt lake, but there are many others in North America, and Eurasia has vast endorheic basins. The map below shows endorheic basins in dark gray (as well as divides separating flows between various oceans).
These tend to be in desert regions; with more water erosion will eventually cut a channel or lower the rims of the basins. This can often happen from outside of the basin, as streams flowing away from it slowly wear down the ridges separating the basin from the outside.
Endorheic lakes have no outflow, so what happens to the water in them? Evaporation. The lake will grow until the evaporation on the surface cancels out the water flowing into the lake. Of course, the rivers flowing into the lake don’t have a constant flow, meaning that the lake can–and does–vary in size. This can be an issue with the Great Salt Lake, which has often flooded during El Nino seasons which tend to dump a lot of rain in the Western US. But when the levels are low there is a lot of evaporite, mostly salt, left behind. This happens at many such lakes including the Dead Sea between Israel and Jordan, and there are many dry lake beds in the Basin and Range Province centered on Nevada but including parts of Utah, California, and Oregon. (Why is this area called the basin and range province? It has mountain ranges…and it’s an endorheic basin.)
I feel as if I haven’t covered this adequately, but I’m simply out of time.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces – but not for long!
Daily outrage and epic phuckery still abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win – even after we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
ombrophobia
noun
fear of rain
not to be confused with ombrophobe, which can mean either a person who suffers from ombrophobia, or a plant or other organism with a low tolerance for rain. Ombrophobe is similar to xerophile, but not identical.
Used in a sentence
Ombrophobia often originates from a traumatic experience involving rain.
Shown in a picture – OK – not really shown, but yeah
As the name of a video by a Burmese hip-hop artist, OASIX
MUSIC!
As opposed to AI country, here’s some actual US rock!
OK – let’s go back even further…..
Now forward in time again – 1978…..
THE STUFF
I’ll be blunt. The mathematics of WGTTs is messing up Newtonian physics, and the usual suspect troublemakers, Einstein and Schroedinger, are laughing!
Darren Beattie broke more important J6 stories than almost anybody. He and Julie Kelly grabbed the J6 narrative out of the hands of the left, and beat the Biden administration into defeat with it.
