“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
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).
And indeed, it’s Monday…again.
But we WILL get through it!
…and we will have fun doing it, too!
The Rules
Boilerplate, more or less, but worth reading again and again, if only for the minor changes, and to stay out of moderation.
The bottom line is Free Speech. Theories and ideas you don’t agree with must be WELCOME here, and you must be part of that welcoming. But you do NOT need to be part of any agreement.
Bottom line – respect other people’s FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS.
Our only additional requirement is that you do so NICELY. Or at least try to make some effort in that direction.
SO….. [ENGAGE BOILERPLATE…..]
We must endeavor to persevere to love our frenemies – even here.
Those who cannot deal with this easy requirement will be forced to jump the hoops of moderation, so that specific comments impugning other posters and violating the minimal rules can be sorted out and tossed in the trash.
In Wheatie’s words, “We’re on the same side here so let’s not engage in friendly fire.”
That includes the life skill of just ignoring certain other posters.
We do have a site – The U Tree – where civility is not a requirement. Interestingly, people don’t really go there much. Nevertheless, if you find yourself in an “argument” that can’t really stay civil, please feel free to “take it to the U Tree”. The U Tree is also a good place to report any technical difficulties, if you’re unable to report them here. Please post your comment there on one of Wolf’s posts, or in reply to one of Wolf’s comments, to make sure he sees it (though it may take a few hours).
We also have a backup site, called The Q Tree as well, which is really The Q Tree 579486807. You might call it “Second Tree”. The URL for that site is https://theqtree579486807.wordpress.com/. If this site (theqtree.com) ever goes down, please reassemble at the Second Tree.
If the Second Tree goes down, please go to The U Tree, or to our Gab Group, which is located at https://gab.com/groups/4178.
We also have some “old rules” and important guidelines, outlined here, in a very early post, on our first New Year’s Day, in 2019. The main point is not to make violent threats against people, which then have to be taken seriously by law enforcement, and which can be used as a PRETEXT by enemies of this site.
In the words of Wheatie, “Let’s not give the odious Internet Censors a reason to shut down this precious haven that Wolf has created for us.”
A Moment of Prayer
Our policy on extreme religious freedom on this site is discussed HERE. Please feel free to pray and praise God anytime and anywhere.
Thus, please pray for our real President, the one who actually won the election.
You may also pray for our nation, our world, and even our enemies.
Call To Battle
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 DayYear Week:
trochiferous
adjective
bearing a wheel or wheel-like organ.
Used in a sentence:
“Perhaps the most obviously trochiferous insect of all is the wheel bug.”
Used in a picture:
Appearing in a video:
NOTE: Please do not watch this if you are creeped out by insect bites and stings.
SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom
You knuckle-dragging barbarians are still trying to muck with this site, so I’ll just repeat what I said last time.
Up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”
Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.
Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?
Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:
OK, with that rant out of my system…
Loop it if you like; I will wait.
Richly deserved.
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.
Precious metals continue to drop because the dollar is strong. It’s strong not because it’s actually worth a damn, but because foreign investors in the currencies markets put their money where they’ll earn high interest.
In other words the dollar climbs when the Fed hits the brakes and raises interest rates–an act which results in a recession. (That’s aside from whether the Fed “needed” to do it or not, which in turn is aside from whether the damned Fed should even exist in the first place.)
James Webb Space Telescope Update
NASA is now starting to talk more and more about the commissioning of the instrument; i.e., the sensors that will do something with the light that JWST collections. They’re going to track things on this graphic; the hexagons become bolded gold when that particular aspect of calibration is done.
There are 17 different modes that need to be calibrated, and they are described at length here:
And they’re still raving about how much better the optics are than they actually expected.
In other words this is about the only damned thing that the government has done right during His Fraudulency’s administration, so hopefully he won’t notice and decide he has to f*ck it up in order to have a perfect record.
In the meantime, we have a nice before/after image of a particular patch of stars. (The name of the image file indicates it’s of the Large Magellanic Cloud, still.)
The image on the left is from the old Spitzer Space telescope (which was also designed to look at infrared; its lifetime was strictly limited by the amount of cryo-coolant it had on board but it was very valuable while it lasted). That was taken at 8000 nanometer wavelength (that equals 8.0 micrometers).
The image on the right is from JWST, using the super-cold (6 or 7 K) MIRI instrument, at 7700 nanometers.
As you can see it’s much, much sharper!
This light is of a wavelength about ten times the very deepest red we can see with our unaided eyes, and it requires MIRI (the super cold sensor running at 6-7 K) to photograph.
Instead of being blurred blobs, the brighter stars in the LMC are actual points, with diffraction spikes. Dimmer stars are actually visible instead of just looking like background noise.
If you remember when JWST took a picture of the star that was being used as a reference when aligning the mirror segments, that star had really obvious spikes on it. They were at 12, 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 o’clock with two shorter spikes at 3 and 9 o’clock. You see the same thing here. The first six I listed are caused by the seams between the mirrors, the left and right pair are caused by the “arms” that hold the secondary mirror in front of the main one.
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!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
China is in the White House
Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.
Joe Biden is Asshoe
China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.
But of course the much more important thing to realize:
Joe Biden Didn’t Win
乔*拜登没赢 !!! Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!! Joe Biden didn’t win !!!
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).
And indeed, it’s Monday…again.
But we WILL get through it!
…and we will have fun doing it, too!
The Rules
Boilerplate, more or less, but worth reading again and again, if only for the minor changes, and to stay out of moderation.
The bottom line is Free Speech. Theories and ideas you don’t agree with must be WELCOME here, and you must be part of that welcoming. But you do NOT need to be part of any agreement.
Bottom line – respect other people’s FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS.
Our only additional requirement is that you do so NICELY. Or at least try to make some effort in that direction.
SO….. [ENGAGE BOILERPLATE…..]
We must endeavor to persevere to love our frenemies – even here.
Those who cannot deal with this easy requirement will be forced to jump the hoops of moderation, so that specific comments impugning other posters and violating the minimal rules can be sorted out and tossed in the trash.
In Wheatie’s words, “We’re on the same side here so let’s not engage in friendly fire.”
That includes the life skill of just ignoring certain other posters.
We do have a site – The U Tree – where civility is not a requirement. Interestingly, people don’t really go there much. Nevertheless, if you find yourself in an “argument” that can’t really stay civil, please feel free to “take it to the U Tree”. The U Tree is also a good place to report any technical difficulties, if you’re unable to report them here. Please post your comment there on one of Wolf’s posts, or in reply to one of Wolf’s comments, to make sure he sees it (though it may take a few hours).
We also have a backup site, called The Q Tree as well, which is really The Q Tree 579486807. You might call it “Second Tree”. The URL for that site is https://theqtree579486807.wordpress.com/. If this site (theqtree.com) ever goes down, please reassemble at the Second Tree.
If the Second Tree goes down, please go to The U Tree, or to our Gab Group, which is located at https://gab.com/groups/4178.
We also have some “old rules” and important guidelines, outlined here, in a very early post, on our first New Year’s Day, in 2019. The main point is not to make violent threats against people, which then have to be taken seriously by law enforcement, and which can be used as a PRETEXT by enemies of this site.
In the words of Wheatie, “Let’s not give the odious Internet Censors a reason to shut down this precious haven that Wolf has created for us.”
A Moment of Prayer
Our policy on extreme religious freedom on this site is discussed HERE. Please feel free to pray and praise God anytime and anywhere.
Thus, please pray for our real President, the one who actually won the election.
You may also pray for our nation, our world, and even our enemies.
Call To Battle
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 Day Year:
placeholder
noun
something which holds the place of another, such as this default post which “holds the place” of what would be an interesting and varied weekly Monday post.
verb
to do something to Eric Holder, as in “Please placeholder under arrest.”
SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom
I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”
Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.
Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?
Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:
OK, with that rant out of my system…
Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit
…we can move on to the next one.
Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.
Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.
Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!
It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.
In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.
Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.
Busy Week
Between 2000 Mules and the SCOTUS leak, things have been hectic out there. The latter item is “real” to the establishment (i.e., the Left), and they’re melting down. 2000 Mules, on the other hand, isn’t “real” to them.
I’m sure you’ve noticed now that no revelation gets any sort of traction in Washington DC, traction that causes someone in authority to actually act, until it gets into the Yellow Stream Media. (And these days, only information they want to act on, gets there.) 2000 Mules will probably never do so; and if not, it won’t show up on the DC radar and nothing will come of it. The claim that the election was stolen will continue to be dismissed by anyone who has any power to do something about it.
This is not the same as them not knowing about the election being stolen. They do know. It’s just that while the YSM isn’t hollering and screaming about it, they can ignore it. And they do. The YSM still continues to act as agenda billboard, and the Left controls the YSM. So this week we deal with abortion, not the stolen election. Last week it was Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Spot Prices
All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend).
Precious metals continue their downward slide. This is partially due to manipulation, but the fact of the matter is that investors will put their money where it will make a return. With interest rates going up, they actually like dollars, because dollars earn more interest. Gold, to them, is a way to not lose money most of the time.
JWST Update
JWST instrument commissioning proceeds apace.
NASA made a blog post explaining one of the more practical aspects of the James Web Space Telescope. Where can it point?
It must perpetually present the heat shield towards the sun, or it’s toast. Literally. Well, “toast” is a relative term; getting up to room temperature would be bad for the optics and sensors.
James Web Space Telescope. Mirror in gold, sunshield in gray “below” it.
So it seems like JWST can only look at half of the sky, basically the same half someone on Earth would see at midnight, with the sun on the other side of the big heat shield we call Planet Earth. And it doesn’t rotate like we do here, which lets us see almost all of the sky between just-after-sunset and just-before-sunrise, with the thin band in between only up when the sun is up and thus washed out. So even though we can see most of the sky on any given night, JWST can only see half of the sky (albeit 24/7, there being no daytime for it), right? [Note: I am ignoring the effect–on the Earth observer–of latitude, which permanently hides part of the sky from him or her, but on the other hand allows other parts of the sky to be seen any time at night.]
Yes, and no. JWST in orbit about the sun, once a year (since it sits at Earth/Sun L2), so six months from now, it can see the other half of the sky, just like our midnight astronomer here on Earth.
But it’s a bit more restricted than that. The JWST mirror cannot be moved. It’s not on any kind of a swivel. It cannot swivel either left-right or up-down in the picture above.
To aim the telescope, the entire spacecraft has to be rotated, with gyros. In the picture above it can be rotated 360 degrees about a “vertical” axis, keeping the sunshade where it is but turning it (and the antenna) like a record on a record player. (This is the yaw direction of rotation.)
It can also tip, just a bit, up and down, “nodding” basically, this is called the pitch direction. It has about a 50 degree travel in the pitch direction, as shown in the following two diagrams.
When JWST’s sun shield is face on to the sun, that shield is getting the maximum amount of solar radiation, and thus this is called the “hot” attitude. When the telescope is pointed halfway towards being pointed directly away from the sun, the sun shield is presented to the sun at a 45 degree angle and thus collects 70.7% percent as much energy as in the “hot” attitude (i.e., the sine of 135 degrees). We don’t dare tip the spacecraft any more than that lest the actual telescope (and sensors) be exposed directly to the sun (and thereby become “toast”).
The practical effect is that the patch of sky directly opposite of the sun cannot be looked at by JWST; that part lies outside the telescope’s “field of regard.” However if you actually want to look at something there, you can wait three months and get it when that patch of sky is at a 90 degree angle to the sun because JWST has moved 90 degrees around the sun.
Over the course of one year, JWST has access to the entire sky.
As to the current commissioning activity, at least part of it is “astrometric calibration.” In other words, if we tell the telescope to point at such-and-such pitch and yaw, what does each sensor actually see? There might be a tiny bit of error from what we would expect, no instrument is exact straight from the fabrication. We’ll be able to specify an exact right ascension and declination (the analogues to longitude and latitude in the sky) and know exactly how to rotate the spacecraft to look at that point.
There’s a lot more to it than that, but I’m going to let NASA explain it:
Do you remember the moon rocket that was undergoing a “wet dress rehearsal”?
Well, it has gone through several of them, and the test was a success. They found problems they now know they need to correct.
Yes, I called it a success, even though the spacecraft would have likely malfunctioned if it had launched. Because that’s the purpose of testing: to find such problems. We found them. A test isn’t a failure just because it found something wrong; it’s a failure if it fails to find problems that do exist.
If you remember the attention given to something called Biosphere 2 about 25 years ago, that’s another example. Biosphere 2 was an attempt to build a large, perfectly sealed greenhouse and see if people could live in it indefinitely, growing their own food and being sustained as part of a balanced system (plants to absorb the CO2 they exhaled and generate O2 for them to breathe).
The idea is if we are ever to start living in space or on other planets, we need to know how to do this, at least long enough to “terraform” other planets (make them more earthlike and establish an earthlike biosphere on them so we can live there as if we were native to the place). A long manned space mission probably won’t be able to bring several years’ worth of food along; we’ll have to grow it…inside a tin can that had better not leak. The only resource “out there” is sunlight (and that’s the one thing that could get in and out of Biosphere 2 once the doors were sealed).
It was a test of our ability to make a closed system.
And the test “failed.” The concrete in the structure continued to absorb oxygen even after we thought it was done curing.
But it wasn’t a failure; we learned a lot from it. Sure on one level our first attempt at building a closed system “failed” because it couldn’t sustain people for two years, but no one actually expected it to work perfectly; the point of the exercise was to discover what we don’t know. And for that, it worked beautifully.
Biosphere 2 is still standing; you can take tours of it. It’s being used for botanical research because it’s the most isolated environment on earth (even with people traipsing about on tours).
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
China is in the White House
Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.
Joe Biden is Asshoe
China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.
But of course the much more important thing to realize:
Joe Biden Didn’t Win
乔*拜登没赢 !!! Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!! Joe Biden didn’t win !!!
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).
And indeed, it’s Monday…again.
But we WILL get through it!
…and we will have fun doing it, too!
The Rules
Boilerplate, more or less, but worth reading again and again, if only for the minor changes, and to stay out of moderation.
The bottom line is Free Speech. Theories and ideas you don’t agree with must be WELCOME here, and you must be part of that welcoming. But you do NOT need to be part of any agreement.
Bottom line – respect other people’s FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS.
Our only additional requirement is that you do so NICELY. Or at least try to make some effort in that direction.
SO….. [ENGAGE BOILERPLATE…..]
We must endeavor to persevere to love our frenemies – even here.
Those who cannot deal with this easy requirement will be forced to jump the hoops of moderation, so that specific comments impugning other posters and violating the minimal rules can be sorted out and tossed in the trash.
In Wheatie’s words, “We’re on the same side here so let’s not engage in friendly fire.”
That includes the life skill of just ignoring certain other posters.
We do have a site – The U Tree – where civility is not a requirement. Interestingly, people don’t really go there much. Nevertheless, if you find yourself in an “argument” that can’t really stay civil, please feel free to “take it to the U Tree”. The U Tree is also a good place to report any technical difficulties, if you’re unable to report them here. Please post your comment there on one of Wolf’s posts, or in reply to one of Wolf’s comments, to make sure he sees it (though it may take a few hours).
We also have a backup site, called The Q Tree as well, which is really The Q Tree 579486807. You might call it “Second Tree”. The URL for that site is https://theqtree579486807.wordpress.com/. If this site (theqtree.com) ever goes down, please reassemble at the Second Tree.
If the Second Tree goes down, please go to The U Tree, or to our Gab Group, which is located at https://gab.com/groups/4178.
We also have some “old rules” and important guidelines, outlined here, in a very early post, on our first New Year’s Day, in 2019. The main point is not to make violent threats against people, which then have to be taken seriously by law enforcement, and which can be used as a PRETEXT by enemies of this site.
In the words of Wheatie, “Let’s not give the odious Internet Censors a reason to shut down this precious haven that Wolf has created for us.”
A Moment of Prayer
Our policy on extreme religious freedom on this site is discussed HERE. Please feel free to pray and praise God anytime and anywhere.
Thus, please pray for our real President, the one who actually won the election.
You may also pray for our nation, our world, and even our enemies.
Call To Battle
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 Day Week:
aeroponics
noun
the process of growing plants in an air or mist environment without the use of soil or an aggregate medium.
adjective: aeroponic
Used in a sentence:
Aeroponics systems [sic] can reduce water usage by 98 percent, fertilizer usage by 60 percent, and pesticide usage by 100 percent, all while maximizing crop yields.
Used in another sentence:
Aeroponics may also involve managing CO2 levels in the air within the system, which in turn affects the rate of photosynthesis within the plants.
I see from video of your “conversation” with MTG that someone posted yesterday, 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
Light this time around. The Turkish March, K331.
The string quartet, consisting of two violins, a viola and a cello, is a sort of economy orchestra. In the days when all music was live, if someone wanted to host a gathering and wanted music, they had to actually pay people to perform it. Except for the most fabulously wealthy hosts, that meant you weren’t going to be hearing symphonies and concertos! The string quartet was a good compromise (and you could even arrange a symphony for it). Each of the four instruments played different parts, so the music could be plenty complex.
Joseph Haydn around 1750 invented the “string quartet” as a compositional form (as opposed to an ensemble) with four movements, and wrote over sixty of them.
Mozart wrote 23 string quartets; this one, #17 “The Hunt,” K. 458 is probably the most famous of the bunch. Quartets 14-19 were dedicated to Joseph Haydn and composed between 1782 and 1785 (i.e., just after we won the Battle of Yorktown and bracketing the time we signed the Treaty of Paris with the United Kingdom).
This video is of The Hunt, in full. Movements are at the following time cues:
Mozart, in his dedication, admitted to taking “a long and laborious endeavor” with these quartets. Usually, he was able to compose in his head, with seemingly little effort. Putting it on paper was actually “copying it out” once completed, not part of the actual creative process.
To my dear friend Haydn,
A father who had resolved to send his children out into the great world took it to be his duty to confide them to the protection and guidance of a very celebrated Man, especially when the latter by good fortune was at the same time his best Friend. Here they are then, O great Man and dearest Friend, these six children of mine. They are, it is true, the fruit of a long and laborious endeavor, yet the hope inspired in me by several Friends that it may be at least partly compensated encourages me, and I flatter myself that this offspring will serve to afford me solace one day. You, yourself, dearest friend, told me of your satisfaction with them during your last Visit to this Capital. It is this indulgence above all which urges me to commend them to you and encourages me to hope that they will not seem to you altogether unworthy of your favour. May it therefore please you to receive them kindly and to be their Father, Guide and Friend! From this moment I resign to you all my rights in them, begging you however to look indulgently upon the defects which the partiality of a Father’s eye may have concealed from me, and in spite of them to continue in your generous Friendship for him who so greatly values it, in expectation of which I am, with all of my Heart, my dearest Friend, your most Sincere Friend,
W. A. Mozart
Upon hearing the quartets performed, Haydn said this to Mozart’s father, Leopold Mozart:
Before God, and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste, and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition.
Mozart lived from 1756 to 1791 and it is probably the greatest tragedy of orchestral music that he died so young. Imagine what he could have done in the next twenty years. (OK, honestly no one can imagine it, or they’d be Mozart.) Beethoven got his start shortly after Mozart’s untimely death; what influence would they have had on each other? Beethoven was famous for breaking the rules of the Classical era; would Mozart have been sympathetic? Possibly; a lot of his later works were quite “edgy” by the standards of the day.
Everything down, with the sole exception of platinum.
James Webb Space Telescope Update
The mirror is done. Instruments are at proper temperature.
People who have spent half a lifetime working on it now get to move on to their next endeavor, and hopefully will succeed at it as well.
All of the instrument packages now get a crisp image. The mirror is better than they expected!
They will now proceed to commission those packages. That’s expected to take about two months.
The picture above shows the results of aiming the JWST at a part of the Large Magellanic Cloud. This is a small galaxy that is a satellite of our own Milky Way, and is readily visible at night in the southern hemisphere (as is the Small Magellanic Cloud), provided, of course, you’re not in a big city. It’s a good target because, as seen from here there are a lot of stars crammed together in one part of the sky and they’re all at pretty much the same distance from us.
(This is how we discovered that Cepheid variables had an intrinsic brightness proportional to their period of variability–an astronomer looked at a bunch of them in the LMC and SMC and noticed their apparent brightness was proportional to their period of variability; since all were at the same distance, the apparent brightness was directly related to the intrinsic brightness with no possible confusion due to differing distances.)
When Supernova 1987-A blew up in (wait for it) 1987, it was in the LMC.
I’ve never seen the LMC and SMC, though I did look for them when I was a good deal further south than I am now. Alas, the lighting situation was terrible.
Anyhow, the process of commissioning the instruments is expected to take a couple of months, and involves setting operating parameters and the like (the blog doesn’t have a lot of detail, so I didn’t boil it down for you; they did).
To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!
Remember Hong Kong!!!
If anyone ends up in the cell right next to him, tell him I said “hi.”
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
China is in the White House
Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for 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 !!!
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).
And indeed, it’s Monday…again.
But we WILL get through it!
…and we will have fun doing it, too!
The Rules
Boilerplate, more or less, but worth reading again and again, if only for the minor changes, and to stay out of moderation.
The bottom line is Free Speech. Theories and ideas you don’t agree with must be WELCOME here, and you must be part of that welcoming. But you do NOT need to be part of any agreement.
Bottom line – respect other people’s FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS.
Our only additional requirement is that you do so NICELY. Or at least try to make some effort in that direction.
SO….. [ENGAGE BOILERPLATE…..]
We must endeavor to persevere to love our frenemies – even here.
Those who cannot deal with this easy requirement will be forced to jump the hoops of moderation, so that specific comments impugning other posters and violating the minimal rules can be sorted out and tossed in the trash.
In Wheatie’s words, “We’re on the same side here so let’s not engage in friendly fire.”
That includes the life skill of just ignoring certain other posters.
We do have a site – The U Tree – where civility is not a requirement. Interestingly, people don’t really go there much. Nevertheless, if you find yourself in an “argument” that can’t really stay civil, please feel free to “take it to the U Tree”. The U Tree is also a good place to report any technical difficulties, if you’re unable to report them here. Please post your comment there on one of Wolf’s posts, or in reply to one of Wolf’s comments, to make sure he sees it (though it may take a few hours).
We also have a backup site, called The Q Tree as well, which is really The Q Tree 579486807. You might call it “Second Tree”. The URL for that site is https://theqtree579486807.wordpress.com/. If this site (theqtree.com) ever goes down, please reassemble at the Second Tree.
If the Second Tree goes down, please go to The U Tree, or to our Gab Group, which is located at https://gab.com/groups/4178.
We also have some “old rules” and important guidelines, outlined here, in a very early post, on our first New Year’s Day, in 2019. The main point is not to make violent threats against people, which then have to be taken seriously by law enforcement, and which can be used as a PRETEXT by enemies of this site.
In the words of Wheatie, “Let’s not give the odious Internet Censors a reason to shut down this precious haven that Wolf has created for us.”
A Moment of Prayer
Our policy on extreme religious freedom on this site is discussed HERE. Please feel free to pray and praise God anytime and anywhere.
Thus, please pray for our real President, the one who actually won the election.
You may also pray for our nation, our world, and even our enemies.
Call To Battle
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 Day Week:
holdplacer
noun
somebody who places a hold on a process, such as a credit card transaction, mail delivery, etc., not to be confused with placeholder.
the wrestler who places another wrestler in a hold.
Used in a sentence:
“Sir, I am sorry, but I will have to forward your call to the person who can place this payment on hold. We are a call center and do not have the holdplacer capabilities.”
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.
Everything down except palladium (and it went down on Friday). Silver down a LOT in percentage terms. So I guess the market manipulators (if they aren’t tinfoil hat imaginings, but that’s yet another metal) are at work.
Expect continued inflation and for shortages to not just continue but get worse.
James Webb Space Telescope Update
JWST is still in the last mirror-alignment iteration.
The NASA website is talking about temperature right now. MIRI is keeping chill at 6 or 7 kelvins, but not everything is at final temperature. The mirror, especially, is not quite at its final temperature. The primary mirror segments’ (the segments are the individual hexagonal parts of the big mirror) temperatures vary from 34.3 to 54.5 kelvins, and the secondary mirror (which is at the end of the tripod-like structure; it reflects light back towards the instruments) is at 29.4 kelvins. The primary and secondary mirrors are made out of beryllium, which just takes a long time to cool off. Things are close enough, though, to work on commissioning the instruments, and for that the telescope is oriented to look at the ecliptic poles (i.e., perpendicular to Earth’s orbital plane, or roughly parallel to the sun’s axis of rotation), and in that orientation JWST heats up the most. Which is still not much but at those temperatures any amount of heating could be significant. But the system is working well, and the spacecraft can continue cooling off even in this orientation.
Orthodox Easter
Yesterday was Good Friday. Tomorrow is Easter.
If you’re thinking I’m out of my skull, well, you’re probably right but not on account of this; you see, I am talking about (Eastern) Orthodox holidays.
Easter is supposed to be the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox (the “paschal moon”, which is why it moves all over the place from year to year, but actually computing that date is a challenge.
Today, of course, we could determine the exact instant of the equinox (start of spring), the exact instant of the full moon, and then go to the next Sunday. But because not every place on Earth is at the same date, that could be problematic. Imagine that first full moon being on Sunday at 11:43 PM ET; that day should be Easter, right? But in Europe and certainly in Jerusalem, that’s Monday, and so Easter should be the next Sunday, not this Sunday.
But in ancient and medieval times, the Church just deemed spring to start on March 21, and counted from there using an algorithm that approximates the phase of the moon. But even March 21 being the first day of spring is a bit slippery, historically, because we began to switch calendars in 1564. Currently, it’s very likely that March 21 will actually be the first day of spring, but before the change spring might start on March 10–but the algorithm said to start with whatever day was called March 21, not the actual day of the equinox.
The algorithm is still being used today, with the “new,” more correct March 21.
Trying to follow the thread of this made my head hurt, but apparently, because (Eastern) Orthodoxy didn’t change calendars when the (Roman) Catholic church did, nor even when the protestant churches did, they don’t agree with the western churches, and usually end up celebrating Easter (and every other thing tied to the date of Easter) a week later.
Now whether they are late (rather than later), or the West jumps the gun and celebrates early, is a fight I don’t have a dog in. But the difference is an interesting historical artifact of how both our knowledge of astronomy and our calendars have developed over the centuries.
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
China is in the White House
Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.
Joe Biden is Asshoe
China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.
But of course the much more important thing to realize:
Joe Biden Didn’t Win
乔*拜登没赢 !!! Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!! Joe Biden didn’t win !!!
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).
And indeed, it’s Monday…again.
But we WILL get through it!
…and we will have fun doing it, too!
The Rules
Boilerplate, more or less, but worth reading again and again, if only for the minor changes, and to stay out of moderation.
The bottom line is Free Speech. Theories and ideas you don’t agree with must be WELCOME here, and you must be part of that welcoming. But you do NOT need to be part of any agreement.
Bottom line – respect other people’s FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS.
Our only additional requirement is that you do so NICELY. Or at least try to make some effort in that direction.
SO….. [ENGAGE BOILERPLATE…..]
We must endeavor to persevere to love our frenemies – even here.
Those who cannot deal with this easy requirement will be forced to jump the hoops of moderation, so that specific comments impugning other posters and violating the minimal rules can be sorted out and tossed in the trash.
In Wheatie’s words, “We’re on the same side here so let’s not engage in friendly fire.”
That includes the life skill of just ignoring certain other posters.
We do have a site – The U Tree – where civility is not a requirement. Interestingly, people don’t really go there much. Nevertheless, if you find yourself in an “argument” that can’t really stay civil, please feel free to “take it to the U Tree”. The U Tree is also a good place to report any technical difficulties, if you’re unable to report them here. Please post your comment there on one of Wolf’s posts, or in reply to one of Wolf’s comments, to make sure he sees it (though it may take a few hours).
We also have a backup site, called The Q Tree as well, which is really The Q Tree 579486807. You might call it “Second Tree”. The URL for that site is https://theqtree579486807.wordpress.com/. If this site (theqtree.com) ever goes down, please reassemble at the Second Tree.
If the Second Tree goes down, please go to The U Tree, or to our Gab Group, which is located at https://gab.com/groups/4178.
We also have some “old rules” and important guidelines, outlined here, in a very early post, on our first New Year’s Day, in 2019. The main point is not to make violent threats against people, which then have to be taken seriously by law enforcement, and which can be used as a PRETEXT by enemies of this site.
In the words of Wheatie, “Let’s not give the odious Internet Censors a reason to shut down this precious haven that Wolf has created for us.”
A Moment of Prayer
Our policy on extreme religious freedom on this site is discussed HERE. Please feel free to pray and praise God anytime and anywhere.
Thus, please pray for our real President, the one who actually won the election.
You may also pray for our nation, our world, and even our enemies.
Call To Battle
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 Day Year:
loxodrome
noun
line on the globe equally oblique to all meridians
an imaginary line on the surface of a sphere that crosses all meridians at the same angle, known also as a rhumb line
a curve on a surface of revolution that cuts all the meridians at a constant angle αα. If αα is an acute or obtuse angle, then a loxodrome performs infinitely many windings about the pole, getting closer and closer to it.
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.
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
MIRI (the Midrange InfraRed Instrument) is now at 6K and the final iteration of mirror alignment is in progress. Once this is done, it’s time to work on commissioning the instruments…and I have no idea what that entails, to be honest. My vague notions of what that meant were all taken care of as part of the mirror alignment process.
The NASA blog put out another article on what JWST is expected to do. It’s expected to learn more about extrasolar planets that we have already detected; in particular it will be able to analyze their atmospheres.
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.
In fact, they closed 3PM on Thursday; the market weenies get Good Friday off and apparently that’s true even in Asia.
Gold is definitely on another upward climb. It was a couple of bucks higher on Wednesday, but that downtick doesn’t cover the fact that it’s distinctly in the upper 19s now. (1975? I remember that year…) The price of platinum can’t get any rounder than it is right now (even rounder than rhodium’s was last week). Palladium and rhodium are the two losers this week, albeit not by very much. But they are the two metals whose price is most dependent on industry.
T4 Combinatorics
If you’re wondering what “Combinatorics” is (and let’s face it, you probably weren’t wondering until you read that title, if even then), it’s the branch of mathematics that has to do with counting things; including counting the number of possible combinations of things. It’s not “hard” to do, but the concepts are a bit abstract sometimes.
If you’ve ever seen those statements about how many different configurations some puzzle (like a Rubik’s Cube) can have (and only one of them is right!), those were computed with combinatorics. (No one went and looked for them all.)
Ancient Indian physician Sushruta in the 6th century BCE asserted that given six tastes, there are sixty three possible combinations total where they are taken one at a time, two at a time, three at a time, and so forth. The ancient Greeks looked into this sort of thing too. During the Middle Ages, more progress was made, but not in Europe. Again in India more general formulas were found.
The specific problem here is precisely the number of combinations of different objects can occur. As it turns out, that’s also the same number as possible sequences of coin tosses.
Going back to Sushutra’s example, if you flip a coin six times, there are 64 possible outcomes. It could come out tails all six times. It could come out tails the first five times, then heads the last time. It could come out tails the first four times, then heads the fifth time, then tails the last time. And so on. If I were to tabulate all 64 of them with 0s (for tails) and 1s (for heads) it would look like someone counting in base 2 or binary.
000000 000001 000010 000011
…and so on.
There’s another method of stepping through all of the possibilities, and that’s to use a sequence where exactly one of the six things changes each time. That’s a bit trickier, but you can get some cool patterns out of it (like the bottom half of the list being a mirror image of the top half…except for the first digit which is 1 instead of 0).
But something may be bothering you….Sushutra said there were 63 combinations; I have just been yapping about there being 64. The discrepancy is because Sushutra didn’t count the case where none of his 6 samples were being tasted.
So far, perhaps not a surprise. The number of possibilities is 2n, where n is the number of times you toss the coin (or the number of flavors you’re sampling). And this works when the different tries are independent of each other. In the case of the coins, one toss has no effect on any of the others. In the case of the flavors, there are no rules like, for example, that flavor E is forbidden if you are using flavor B.
Slightly more interesting is the question, out of these six possibilities, how many of them have exactly three flavors. Or how many possible sequences of six coin tosses have exactly three heads in them?
Well, it turns out there’s a formula for this. And it involves, interestingly enough, combining formulas for another couple of possible problems.
Let’s say you have six scrabble tiles, A, B, C, D, E, F. How many possible words are there?
You could exhaustively list them all out, but that’s tedious. Instead let’s try thinking about it.
There are six possible choices for the first letter. Once you pick the first letter, though, there are five possible choices for the second letter; so each of the six first possible letter possibilities has five possible second letters. So that’s 6 x 5 = 30 possibilities for the first two letters. You can proceed similarly, 4 possibilities for the third letter, 3 for the fourth, 2 for the fifth, and 1 for the sixth. So we’re looking at 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 720 possible combinations. (It’s a good thing we decided not to try to list them all!)
This is a common enough thing that we call this the factorial and denote it with an exclamation point, in this case, 6! = 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 720.
I don’t believe it’s possible to form a good word of English out of those six letters, with all of those six letters and no others (but correct me if I’m wrong!); the best I can come up with is FACED. Or DECAF. I guess if you’re sore at the Federal Elections Commission you could say BADFEC.
But this is a game of Scrabble, and so you might settle for using some of the tiles. For example, how many candidate four letter words are there?
You can follow the same reasoning as above. Six possibilities for the first letter, five possibilities (for each of the six) for the second letter (30). Four possibilities (for each of the thirty) for the third letter (120). For each of those, three possible fourth letters (360). But now we STOP, because we don’t pick a fifth, or sixth letter. The math is: 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 = 360. So it’s like 6! only not taken all the way down to 1. In fact, it’s like 6! divided by 2!. Look: (6x5x4x3x2x1)/(2×1); the twos and ones cancel and we’re left with 6x5x4x3. Note that 2 is 6 – 4, i.e., it’s the total number of titles minus the number of tiles actually chosen.
So there’s a general formula here. You have n objects, you want to choose m of them. The number of possibilities is n!/(n-m)!
One thing that needs to be stressed, though! This formula is for use when you care about the order of the selection. In other words, if you grabbed the letters A, C, E, F, it matters to you whether you grabbed them as F, A, C, E or C, A, F, E or FCEA.
When dealing with Sushruta’s flavors, the first, third, fifth and sixth flavors (combined) taste the same no matter what order you’re adding them. It’s as if you didn’t care what order ACEF was written in.
So how do you adjust your answer to the question of how many possible ways to select four of the six letters if you don’t care about the order?
Well, imagine that you had actually written down all of the possible combinations (all 360 of them). Some number of these would have the letters A, C, E, and F in them. In fact, all possible orders of those letters would appear in the list exactly once. How many possible orderings of A,C,E,F are there? We already know this: 4 x 3 x 2 x 1.
And this is true for any possible grouping of four letters. There will be nine other anagrams of those four letters in the list.
So to get the answer, we start with our 360…and divide by 4! which is to say, 24, and get 15. This is the factorial of the number of objects we are choosing (m).
So, remember we got the 360 with n!/(n–m)!; this new number involves dividing again by m!.
So our number of combinations for an unordered choice of m objects out of a group of n objects is n!/[(n–m)!m!]. My combinatorics teacher called it “n-choose-m” or he’d substitute actual numbers.
We could, for example, figure out how many possible groups of ten letters we could pull out of the alphabet. With 26 letters, we have 26!/(16! x 10!).
So punch that into your calculator.
Well, don’t. 26! is probably too big for your calculator.
But you can probably get clever before you punch the numbers in.
Write those factorials out. It turns out you can do a lot of cancelling! You can skip 10×9…x1 on top, and just divide by 16x15x14…on the bottom. Better yet, you can skip the 16x15x…x1 on top and only divide by 10! on the bottom.
26 x 25 x 24 x 23 x 22 x 21 x 20 x 19 x 18 x 17 / 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1.
Right off the bat, you can cancel the 20 up top with the 10 and 2 on the bottom, and the 18 up top with the 6 and 3 on the bottom:
26 x 25 x 24 x 23 x 22 x 21 x 19 x 17 / 9 x 8 x 7 x 5 x 4 x 1
Do a bit more cancelling–get rid of the 5, 7, and 4 by dividing them into the 25, 21, and 24 respectively:
26 x 5 x 6 x 23 x 22 x 3 x 19 x 17 / 9 x 8
You have three even numbers on top. Divide them all by 2 and get rid of the 8 on the bottom:
13 x 5 x 3 x 23 x 11 x 3 x 19 x 17 / 9
And you now have two threes, so you can get rid of the 9 and those 3s
13 x 5 x 23 x 11 x 19 x 17
Well, now, we don’t have to do any dividing! In fact, you should NEVER have to do any dividing after you cancel. Why? We’re counting numbers of combinations, and that has to be a whole number. You won’t get a fraction. So if it looks like you’re about to get a fraction, you messed up somewhere–you didn’t do a cancellation you could have, or you made a simple arithmetic error.
So now go to the calculator, and it turns out there are 5,311,735 possible sets of ten letters you could pull out of 26 letters of the alphabet.
Yikes, that’s a lot!
You can get to some really big numbers this way with bigger “pots” of choices; in fact you can easily get to numbers that are larger than the numbers of quarks in the universe without too much trouble.
In fact, consider the number of possible bridge hands, which is 52!/(39!13!). If you think you’ve played enough bridge to repeat a hand…you’re probably wrong! Because there are 635,013,559,600 of them. That’s still more than the US Debt…though ask me again next week.
(And the game would still be different unless the other three players also each got the same hand as before. This could be computed with our n-choose-m formula, too, applied successively (it’ll be that number, times 39-choose-13, times 26-choose-13, times 26-choose-26) to see how many possible bridge deals there are.)
There’s another clever method to compute m-choose-n. It’s very visually oriented, but it does involve computing all of the smaller problems first.
Start with 1.
Then below it, staggered, write 1 1.
So you see:
1 1 1
You repeat this, over and over again. Each number is the sum of the two above it (and “blank” is zero). So you get:
1 1 1 1 2 1 1 3 3 1 1 4 6 4 1 1 5 10 10 5 1
And so on. What good is this exercise (which is called “Pascal’s Triangle”)?
It turns out that if you go to row n, the mth element is n-choose-m. But you have to start counting from zero. That last row is row 4 (not 4). And if you want 4-choose-2 you have to go to the third element on that row, which is 6. This is logical, because the actual first element is always a 1, and that’s how many ways you can pick zero items out of the group of 4. Or 17, or whatever. The last number is choosing all of the elements, and of course there’s only one way to do that (if you don’t care about the order).
Another neat thing about this triangle is if you sum up everything in the row, you get the total number of possible selections in that row, for example, with 4 items, the total is 16…which is 24.
Pascal’s triangle has a whole host of interesting properties, actually.
Once you see this triangle, it’s pretty clear that the biggest single n-choose-m value is when m is half the size of n. (Or if n is odd, when m is either just above or just below half of n.)
So that, if you toss a coin a hundred times, the most likely outcome is 50 heads and 50 tails, (In fact that is possible about 1×1029 different ways!) though a 49/51 split is almost as common (~9.89 x 1028 different ways), and a 48/52 split wouldn’t be all that surprising either (~9.32×1028 different ways). But 100 heads (or tails) in a row? Ridiculously unlikely! Even a 75/25 split can “only” occur 2.42 x 1023 ways, which sounds like a lot…but is 2 42/100 millionths as common as a 50/50 split. And therefore. 0.00000242 times as likely as a 50/50 split if you try the experiment.
Conversely an exact 50/50 split might be the most likely result, but it’s less likely than a 49/51 and 51/49 split put together, much less if you add all the other near/even splits. There are 2100 possible sequences, that’s 1.267×1030 possibilities. So there’s roughly 1 chance in 12 2/3 you’d get an exact 50/50 split.
The takeaway from this is that an exact “middle” result becomes less and less likely the more things are involved…but a result near the middle becomes overwhelmingly likely the more things are involved.
But what, you might ask, does this have to do with heat and temperature and thermodynamics?
This sort of example does not really have much to do with it, but the general concepts behind combinatorics do have a lot to do with it, as it turns out. Next time…
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
China is in the White House
Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.
Joe Biden is Asshoe
China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.
But of course the much more important thing to realize:
Joe Biden Didn’t Win
乔*拜登没赢 !!! Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!! Joe Biden didn’t win !!!
