Change my title?

I’ve got to admit, I recently thought of changing my title to reflect a more current controversy. After all “Brandon” not winning has been beaten into the ground around here.

But recent revelations of slightly less recent events–I speak of the news about Wheatie–have cause me to harden my stance. Change the title? Hell NO!

Beaten into the ground? Yes…but it’s still 6,666 feet above sea level.

Keep beating, pounding, and pummeling!!!

Hey China!

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

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

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

[Language warning]

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

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

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

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

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

You’re LOSING.

You LOSER.

You Chinese-bought ratfucking traitor.

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

His Fraudulency

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

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

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

Justice Must Be Done.

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

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

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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

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

Spot Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

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

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $1,813.90
Silver $20.00
Platinum $901.00
Palladium $2,032.00
Rhodium $14,550.00

Silver is at an even $20.00. This isn’t too far off from the traditional price of gold, back when a piece of gold was money. An ounce of gold, back then, wasn’t worth $20.67, it was $20.67 even if the government hadn’t minted it into coins as a convenience. Back when government mostly did useful things.

Independence Day

This is the Second of July…not the Fourth of July. But an excellent argument can be made that this is Independence Day.

It was on July 2, 1776 that the Continental Congress voted for Independence. The document, of course, reads July 4, 1776, but that is the date that it was adopted as a statement of the reasons for Independence.

In fact the original resolution from the 2nd is quoted in the Declaration of Independence, at the end: That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are absolved of all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connection between them and the State of Great-Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, and do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.

Those words, passed by the Continental Congress on July 2, 1776, made us independent.

From that point forward, it was just a matter of making it stick.

James Webb Space Telescope Update

They’ve now crossed off all but one of the 17 instrument modes–the last one is the coronagraphy module on NIRCam (Near Infra Red Camera). This is an adaptation of an designed to study the sun’s corona–i.e., its atmosphere–by blocking out the sun itself with an opaque disk. Except that here the goal is to directly image extrasolar planets by blocking out their primary star–which is a billion times brighter. Without doing so it’s like trying to take a picture of a firefly next to a searchlight.

We’re still expecting a big media event in less than two weeks with the first “real” pictures from JWST, as opposed to ones taken to help align, adjust, and calibrate the optics and instrumentation. So far what we’ve seen is basically orange and black, and is probably technically accurate…JWST can’t see yellow through violet.

What I expect we will see is “false color” images. What does that mean?

So glad you asked…

Color (And False Color)

Our eyes function by focusing light onto a layer of light sensitive cells called the retina. The cells can be divided into “rods” (sensitive to dim light) and “cones” (sensitive to brighter light). The cones in turn are a bit more specialized; there are three (and in many people, four) types, each most sensitive to a different color, and they are called the blue, green and red cones (though the red cone is actually most sensitive to a yellowish color). When it’s dark, the cones basically can detect nothing, and the rods pick up the burden. Rods tend to be a bit more broadly sensitive, though they are weakest in red light. But since our brain receives only the one signal, it interprets what it gets as monochrome–black-and-white.

We can compare this to sound. Our ears have sensors for thousands of different pitches, but those sensors are in only two places, the right and left ear. So we get extreme clarity as to the pitch of the sound, and even the combination of pitches (chords), and somewhat lesser clarity as to its direction. The eyes are actually the opposite; we get excellent directional discrimination, and not-nearly-as-good pitch–er, color–discrimination.

The ears can, at least before age takes its toll, nominally pick up anything between 20 Hz (Hertz, named after Heinrich Hertz, who discovered radio waves) and 20,000 Hz. That’s a range of 19,980 Hz, but that’s not the correct way to think about the range. As it happens, you want to look at the ratio, not the absolute arithmetic difference (which will depend on the units you are using anyway). A sound of 440 Hz, combined with a sound of 880 Hz, will blend very nicely, and musicians will say the range is one octave (which comes from the Latin for eight, for complicated historical, music theory nerd reasons–perhaps some other time). That’s not necessarily a difference of 880-440=440 Hz, though, it’s a doubling. The difference between musical notes is always a ratio of their frequencies, not their arithmetic difference. Another pleasing combo is 440 an 660 Hz, this is a 3/2 ratio and is called a “perfect fifth” even though it has nothing to do with ¹/₅. (It’s not fifth (the fraction) but rather fifth (the one after fourth, or four after first). Again, music theory nerd stuff and a lot of historical legacy.) An octave difference represents a doubling or halving of frequency, depending on which direction you’re going.

The ratio between 20 and 20,000 Hz is ¹/₁₀₀₀, and that is almost exactly ten octaves. (Ten octaves would be ¹/₁₀₂₄, which is ½ x ½ x ½…nine multiplications, ten ½s) and sorry I didn’t mean to remind you of Liawatha.)

When dealing with light, though, we tend to think not in frequency but in wavelength. But you get from one to the other by dividing a constant (the speed of light) by the one you have, to get the one you want. But the end result is, you can still think in terms of octaves, except that with light it is a halving or doubling of wavelength.

How do we perceive different “pitches” of light? As colors. Every different frequency (or wavelength) is a different, pure color of light.

I’m going to paste this in directly from Wikipedia. It shows the wavelengths and frequencies of each of the seven recognized major colors of light.

(And of course the color blocks themselves didn’t come through, so I had to do a bit of rearranging.)

So light covers a range from 400 to 700 nm, and that is less than one octave.

A word about the names, red, orange, etc. We have inflicted on us in school the mnemonic “Roy G. Biv” as a way to remember the colors of the rainbow. (The rainbow, of course, is mixed (white) light, split up into all of the pure colors. Or you can do the same with a prism.) Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. I never really saw the point of this mnemonic, though. A mnemonic needs to be something familiar, and I never met the (undoubtedly fictitious) Biv family. I have seen plenty of rainbows, though, so I remember Mr. Biv by remembering the rainbow, not the other way around.

But regardless, what’s the deal with blue and indigo, and why does the table above show cyan and blue? The seven named colors go back to Isaac Newton (mid-late 1600s) at least; he was the first to scientifically investigate the spectrum/rainbow. We wonder today why a blue purple was a distinct enough color for Newton to call it out, but in fact what probably happened is that he used “blue” to refer to a color somewhat like the sky, and “indigo” to refer to the blue you get from indigo dye (i.e., similar to the blue in the Flag). And indeed if you look at a rainbow, you do see a wide “light blue” stripe between the green and Flag-blue stripes.

[Newton proved that the individual colors of a rainbow are pure. Once he extracted, say, a particular yellow shade from the spectrum, nothing he could do to it would change its color–except of course mixing it with some other light. He could shine it through colored glass, or use it to illuminate different colored objects. The most he could do to that light was reduce its intensity, he couldn’t change its color. White light, of course, changes color when it goes through colored glass (see any Gothic cathedral); it’s not pure. In fact it’s a mix of light of all colors.]

We think of that as “light blue” but many languages (Italian and Russian among them) think of it as a distinctly different, separate color, as different from blue as orange is from red to us.

So what’s in the table basically reflects the seven “original” colors of the rainbow, once you untangle the cyan/blue/indigo confusion.

But this is all packed into less than one octave.

It’s worse, though. We can only truly distinguish three colors independently, basically blue, green and yellow, because of the cones in our retinas. Fortunately, those cones have a fairly broad frequency response. You don’t have to exactly match the peak frequency of a yellow cone for it to register, which is a good thing because that yellow cone is the major cone that responds to red light, albeit weakly (the green cone responds very weakly). If its range were narrower, we couldn’t see red, no matter how infuriating Leftist douches became. And that’s why the “yellow” cone is actually called the “red” cone.

The graph above shows the response of each of the three types of cones according to the wavelength (across the bottom). Red runs from 635-700 nm, so you can see green barely responds at all to say, 650 nm light, and the red, even though it peaks at a yellow wavelength, responds more strongly.

Let’s say you’re looking at a pure, bluish-cyan light of 500 nm. Your retina will register green somewhat weakly, red even weaker, and blue even weaker than that. Your brain will put those together, and you see “cyan.”

But it’s possible, with light, to fool your brain with a mixture of totally different frequencies of light, to get almost the same effect as some pure wavelength. This is not possible with sound. A mixture of different pitches trying to simulate, say, a middle C, will sound like some sort of chord; it will be a very different sound, perhaps “dark” or perhaps not, depending. That’s because your ear has thousands of those humps in it, and they’re narrow, with less overlap. You will actually perceive the different pitches separately and put them together in your brain and get a different effect.

But, as I said, the eye can be fooled. Don’t believe me? I have evidence. You’re looking at it right effing now.

Your computer screen only emits three colors, a certain pure blue, a certain pure green, and a certain pure red. So if it wants to show you cyan, it has to mix blue and green somehow. In fact a 50-50 mix is what we call cyan.

But it will not look quite like a pure cyan extracted from a prism. Why? Because you set the intensity of the blue and green phosphors of the computer screen in the right ratio to duplicate the blue and green cones’ response to the original pure cyan…but the green phosphors will get a much stronger response from the red cones than the original cyan light did. So any cyan on a computer screen will look a bit washed out to us compared to a pure cyan out of a rainbow, which is what they call “saturated.” It will be pale. And this will be true of printed colors as well, though usually in any professional grade application there are more than three “true” colors in a print and it’s possible to more closely approximate what the eye sees from all three cone colors.

One last loose end before I move on: I mentioned that some people have a fourth type of cone. That doesn’t actually end up helping them, though, because their brain basically ignores it. If the brain actually processed it, however, they’d be able to see perhaps ten times as many colors as we do (ten million versus one million). And of course, color blindness (“daltonism” named after John Dalton of atomic theory fame) results from missing one or more of the “normal” three cone types. [But there is, apparently, one recorded but not confirmed case of someone who could use that fourth cone color.] The reason color blind people can sometimes see a slightly-off hue more distinctly than others is because they have a different set of frequency responses than everyone else, and so they’ll respond to pigment mixes differently. (This includes an ability to cut through camouflage sometimes, including spotting people in Ghillie suits that others cannot see.)

But what does this have to do with false color?

The sensors on JWST see a different range of wavelengths than we do. The wavelengths are quite a bit longer in some cases. JWST’s wavelengths top out at orange, include red…and go beyond red into the “infrared.” (And that is a reference to the fact that the frequency of infrared is lower than that of red–hence infra–even though scientists normally think in terms of wavelength…yes, a bit confusing.)

If you’ve noticed that three of JWST’s instruments have names beginning with NIR, while the fourth, the one kept at just a few degrees above absolute zero, has a name starting with MIR. These stand for “Near Infra Red” and “Mid Infra Red” respectively. Near? Near what? Near, as in close to, visible light. And Mid of course is the “middle” part of infrared.

Infrared runs from 700 nm (the boundary with red) clear up to 1,000,000 nm, which is more than ten octaves. However, JWST won’t go further than 27,000 nm. The NIRCam runs from 600-5000 nm (which means it can see some red and orange), the MIRI is the one that goes all the way to 27,000 nm.

So when JWST takes a picture and we print it, won’t it be mostly black,because it’s mostly in infrared “colors” we can’t see?

No, because we can, and will, change the colors we get back. This is downright common in astronomy, in fact. In the old, stone knives, bearskins, and glass emulsion photography plates days, we’d sometimes put a filter over the telescope to look at one wavelength of light–say one emitted by hydrogen–and get a black and white print that shows us where the hydrogen is.

It doesn’t even have to be a wavelength we can see…so long as the film responds to it and turns black where exposed. And we can take multiple pictures at multiple wavelengths and combine them, but then we want to print each in a different color. This is false color and it is how our eyes will make sense of ten octaves of color we mostly can’t see, even though we can see only one (different) octave of light.

This is done routinely. Just for instance:

This is the famous “Pillars of Creation” in the Eagle Nebula; so called because stars and planets are forming there, right now. The stars look pink, actually magenta. Now, have you ever seen a magenta star? Neither have I.

This picture is false color. It is not what you would see if you could take a star ship out there.

The green is used to show light of the frequencies emitted by hydrogen–and it’s not necessarily visible light. The red is for sulfur ions, and the blue is for oxygen ions–doubly ionized, in fact–with the same caveat about it not necessarily being visible at its original frequencies. This way the scientists studying it can directly see where the oxygen and sulfur are, since each of those constituents is color coded.

OK, that’s not obviously false color, because most of us aren’t familiar with the actual appearance of the Eagle Nebula. (I personally have seen it through a telescope, but it’s not bright even there, so my rods gave me a black-and-white image (and much smaller than this photo, too). It’s rare to see color with your eyes through a telescope unless you’re looking at planets. I once saw a hint of color in the Orion nebula…through a big scope that was gathering a lot of light.)

(Sometimes they will put together a picture that actually is true color, bringing out the colors we would see with our cones if only the object were bright enough to register on them.)

A more obvious case of false color is this:

This is a person, shown in infrared, with false colors. The yellow colors are the shorter wavelengths, blues and purples are longer wavelengths. These correlate directly with temperature as you can see in the scale on the right.

Since this is a familiar object, the false color is blatantly obvious.

[Incidentally, the normal convention with stuff like this is to show “hot” things as red and “cool” things as blue. But this reverses the actual wavelengths! It makes the shorter wavelengths red and the longer ones blue, when in reality blue has a shorter wavelength than red. But, we think of red as a hot color and blue as a cool one, so this reversal is inevitable. Blue light in fact is emitted by very hot objects, hot enough that we just don’t encounter them here on Earth. What, here, is at 30,000 K? Not much. But you can see blue-hot things though you will never feel the heat from them. Many of the stars in the night sky are blue hot.]

So when you see, soon, gorgeous color photography from JWST…remember, it’s not the real colors. Or rather, the colors are real, they’re just not the colors you’re being shown. It’s not your fault you can’t see down that far, down to colors we never had a need to name, without help.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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

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

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

For millennia, you had to suffer from this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His Fraudulency

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

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

“No Chemicals”

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

Absolutely no chemicals found!

Justice Must Be Done.

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

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

Roe v. Wade is Toast

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

Let’s see if that trend continues.

Small Government?

Many times conservatives (real and fake) speak of “small government” being the goal.

This sounds good, and mostly is good, but it misses the essential point. The important thing here isn’t the size, but rather the purpose, of government. We could have a cheap, small tyranny. After all our government spends most of its revenue on payments to individuals and foreign aid, neither of which is part of the tyrannical apparatus trying to keep us locked down and censored. What parts of the government would be necessary for a tyranny? It’d be a lot smaller than what we have now. We could shrink the government and nevertheless find it more tyrannical than it is today.

No, what we want is a limited government, limited not in size, but rather in scope. Limited, that is, in what it’s allowed to do. Under current circumstances, such a government would also be much smaller, but that’s a side effect. If we were in a World War II sort of war, an existential fight against nasty dictatorships on the brink of world conquest, that would be very expensive and would require a gargantuan government, but that would be what the government should be doing. That would be a large, but still limited government, since it’d be working to protect our rights.

World War II would have been the wrong time to squawk about “small government,” but it wasn’t (and never is) a bad time to demand limited government. Today would be a better time to ask for a small government–at least the job it should be doing is small today–but it misses the essential point; we want government to not do certain things. Many of those things we don’t want it doing are expensive but many of them are quite eminently doable by a smaller government than the one we have today. Small, but still exceeding proper limits.

So be careful what you ask for. You might get it and find you asked for the wrong thing.

Political Science In Summation

It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).

James Webb Space Telescope Update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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

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

(Paper) Spot Prices

Last week:

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

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

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

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

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

But first, a couple of go-backs.

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

Why doesn’t the air fall down?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then, you can tell that anyway. Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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

Message for Bill Barr

You’re dirt.

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

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

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

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

Your day will come, Traitor.

Justice Must Be Done

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

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

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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

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

Spot (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

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

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

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

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

Qubes OS

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

James Webb Space Telescope Update

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

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

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

From the link:

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

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

Fuck Joe Biden

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

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

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

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

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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

Yo, Jim Acosta!

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

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

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

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

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

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

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

But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.

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

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

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

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

Justice Must Be Done.

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

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

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

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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

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

Mozart

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spot Prices

Last week:

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

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

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

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

Qubes Update

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

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

James Webb Space Telescope Update

ONE out of the 19 instrument modes is commissioned:

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

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

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

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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