Jon Lord – Miles Away
An evening pause: Stick with it. The playing and music is superb.
Hat tip Danae.
Year: 2017
January 4, 2017 Zimmerman/Noory podcast
My long appearance on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory last week is now available, and I have embedded it below the fold. Hat tip Wayne DeVette.
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Berkeley professors demand silencing of dissent
Fascists: Merely because they disagree with Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, a group of more than 100 University of California-Berkeley professors have signed a letter demanding that he be banned from their campus so that he will be prevented from speaking there during a scheduled lecture on February 1.
More significantly, these so-called intellectual educators demonstrate that they have never once read or listened to a single word Yiannopoulos has written or said by their claim that he supports “white supremacy, transphobia, and misogyny”. My god, the guy is as openly homosexual as can be imagined. More importantly, his primary advocacy is for freedom and human rights. I guess these are ideas that modern academics can no longer support. Instead, they like to grind their boots into the faces of those they oppose.
Leftist organization organizes boycotts of many companies for Trump support
Fascists: Merely because someone in the company or the company itself expressed support for a Presidential candidate they do not like, the leftwing organization #GrabYourWallet is demanding a boycott of those companies.
The focus of the article is about the boycott of LL Bean, because one of its 50 co-owners donated to Trump, but this quote reveals the more fascist agenda of this organization:
“#GrabYourWallet” is officially boycotting 39 companies, including Kmart and Macy’s. It advises supporters to “consider” boycotting an additional 22 companies, but advises that another 10 Trump-linked companies (such as bookstores carrying Trump book) should not be boycotted because their association with him is incidental. (Regarding bookstores, #GrabYourWallet adds: “Note: this policy does not necessarily cover bookstores that may choose to feature Ivanka as an author in live events for her upcoming book release / tour. That activity will be evaluated at the time it takes place.”)
Under their rule of tolerance, it is unacceptable for anyone to dissent from their beliefs. If you do, you are evil, a racist, and must be crushed.
Note that the boycotts have nothing to do with the quality of the work of the specific businesses. They are advocating a boycott because of they disagree with the opinions of the companies or of individuals associated with these companies. This distinction is crucial.
Senate passes Obamacare partial repeal
In a party line vote last night, the Senate passed an Obamacare repeal bill that ends the law’s tax and financial components.
It must be emphasized that the failure to repeal the law’s regulations is entirely due to the unwillingness of any Democrats to cross party lines, end the filibuster, and allow a vote. The result: we are still stuck with some of the most egregious components of the law. In 2018 many of those same Democrats will be faced with difficult re-elections. It will be time to remove them.
I should add that, just like Obamacare itself, the manner in which this repeal is being written and approved actually appears to be unconstitutional. It is tax policy and it is originating in the Senate. The Constitution however clearly states “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.” (Article 1, Section 7) The same section also states that the Senate can propose, so I suppose this is how they get around this issue.
A centrifuge costing 20 cents based on a toy
Scientists at Stanford have developed a centrifuge costing 20 cents to make, based on a child’s toy, that can be used in the field to separate blood samples.
According to Stanford, Prakash and post-doctoral fellow Saad Bhamla came up with the “paperfuge” while looking at toys like tops and yo-yos for inspiration. Noticing how the disc of a whirligig spins when the cords on either side are pulled, they decided to make a slow motion video of one, only to discover that it rotated at 10,000 to 15,000 RPM.
The pair started developing prototypes using a blood capillary tube mounted on a paper disc, but they went beyond simple tinkering as they recruited three undergraduate engineering students from MIT and Stanford to create mathematical models of how the whirligig could change a pulling motion into a rotary motion. Looking at variables like disc size, string elasticity, and pulling force, they combined this with equations from the physics of supercoiling DNA to gain a better understanding of the whirligig’s mechanism.
The result was a centrifuge made of 20 cents of paper, twine, and plastic that could spin at 125,000 RPM, generate 3,000 G’s, and process samples in 1.5 minutes.
I have embedded a video explaining the paperfuge below the fold. I wonder if a variation of this on ISS could do low gravity experiments.
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January 11, 2017 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold. Strange astronomy and planetary geology was the focus tonight.
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SpaceX to land both Falcon Heavy first stages and Dragon at Cape Canaveral
An environmental report, prepared by SpaceX, describes in detail their plans to build landing facilities for their Dragon capsule as well as two more landing pads to facilitate the vertical landing of all three Falcon Heavy first stages at Launch Complex 13 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
It is not clear when this work will go forward, though I suspect it will not be too far in the future.
These Gears Really Work?
An evening pause: From the youtube page: Clayton Boyer demonstrates a variety of square, oval, pentagonal, organic and other unbelievably-shaped gears–and they really work!
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Russians complete investigation into Progress launch failure
According to Roskosmos, the accident led to the unplanned separation between the third stage of the launch vehicle and the spacecraft. Members of the commission established that the most probable cause of the accident had been the disintegration of the oxidizer tank of the third stage as a result of the failure of the 11D55 engine, following the fire and disintegration of its oxidizer pump, Roskosmos said. The fire in the pump and its disintegration could be triggered by a possible injection of the foreign particles into the pump’s cavity or by violations during the assembly of the 11D55 engine, such as a wrong clearance between the pump’s shaft and its attachment sleeve, floating rings and impellers, leading to a possible loss of balance and vibration of the rotor.
The fault, which has a production nature, manifested itself during the flight, Roskosmos said. The State Corporation promised to prepare a plan of immediate action at enterprises of the the rocket industry to ensure the safe launch of the Progress MS-05 spacecraft, Roskosmos announced. [emphasis mine]
It appears that though they have not definitely established what went wrong (due to a lack of telemetry), they have determined that all of the possible causes are related to quality control issues.
Launch industry trends, based on recent history
The worldwide competition to launch the most rockets each year, first noted by Doug Messier about the 2016 race that was won by a squeak by the U.S., and then augmented by my own post about the various predictions by different nations and companies about what they hope to achieve in 2017, got me to thinking. How do these numbers compare with the past? What are the launch trends? Who has been moving up and who has been moving down? And most important, what would a close look at the trends for the past two decades tell us about the future?
In order to answer these questions, I decided to compile a table of all worldwide launches since 1998.
This table reveals some very interesting trends and facts that I had not recognized previously.
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The raging storms of Jupiter’s south pole
Cool image time! Below the fold I have embedded an animation that was assembled from 30 Juno images taken during its third orbital close approach of Jupiter. It is at first a little hard to watch, which is why I have not made it visible on the main page, but it is worth watching because it gives a real sense of how powerful and violent the storms are in the polar regions of the gas giant planet. Keep your eye especially glued to the storms near the center of the image. In a very short time that it took Juno to zip past Jupiter, less than a day, these storms rotated about one third. Remember too that each storm would probably cover at least half of the Earth’s surface.
We desperately need a fleet of weather satellites orbiting Jupiter to give us a continuous view of these storms. The knowledge gained about atmospheric weather patterns would be priceless.