Year: 2018

Park Ki-Young – Nella Fantasia

6:01 pm

An evening pause: The music is by Enrico Morricone from the film The Mission (1986). There it is entitled Gabriel’s Oboe, a musical piece I have posted previously here as an evening pause. Here it is sung to lyrics written by Chiara Ferraù, celebrating the joys that freedom brings. “I dream of souls that are always free,/Like the clouds that fly.”

Hat tip Jim Mallamace, who notes that this song is written by an Italian and sung by a Korean about the American aspiration of freedom. Seems to me that this illustrates two aspects of that American aspiration, one of which is freedom, the second of which is that freedom is something all people from all cultures aspire to.

1 comment

This week in bigoted academia

3:20 pm

Since October of last year I have been posting weekly reports listing the variety and frequency of intolerant actions by college administrators, facility, and students on American campus. This week, I want to highlight the bigotry that now runs rampant on these campuses, all centered on the bad idea to create entire departments and fields of study focused expressly on race, ethnicity, or gender, rather than ideas.

The last story highlights how the hate and bigotry against whites has gotten so bad at colleges that minority students and teachers are now frequently faking hate crimes against themselves in order to prove how evil whites are.

As I said above, the problem here is the focus on race, ethnicity, and gender rather than ideas. Any one from any race, ethnic group, or sex, can come up with a great idea. In fact, it is irrelevant what their race, ethnicity, or sex is. What matters is the idea. Unfortunately, colleges have become obsessed not with ideas but with race and gender diversity, and so the teachers teach students to see everything in that light, and that light only. It is bigotry and hate, at its worst. And it is poisoning the American intellectual community, preventing it from doing what we need it to do, to think deeply, thoughtfully, and maturely, and to do it without hate or rancor.

6 comments

Nigeria signs deal with China for two communications satellites

9:16 am

China has agreed to build for Nigeria two communications satellites, with the $550 million fee paid entirely for Nigeria through an arrangement with China’s EXIM Bank.

The China EXIM Bank and a Chinese firm, the China Great Walls, have agreed to pay the entire $550m to procure two new satellites for the Nigerian Communications Satellite Limited. The Minister of Communications, Adebayo Shittu, disclosed this in an interview with State House Correspondents on Wednesday shortly after a meeting he had with President Muhammadu Buhari at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

Shittu explained that the initial arrangement was that Nigeria would provide 15 per cent counterpart funding for the two satellites, while the bank and the firm would provide the balance. He said Nigeria, however, decided to renegotiate the deal when it became obvious that the country could not afford the counterpart funding. The minister explained, “Because we could not afford this 15 per cent, we have renegotiated with the China EXIM Bank and the China Great Walls, who are the manufacturers, and they have happily agreed to pay the entire $550m to procure two new satellites.

Essentially, this is foreign aid from China to Nigeria, and follows a pattern China has used recently in providing space-related foreign aid in other circumstances.

2 comments

Justice Dept to provide House Russian probe documents

9:25 pm

This could get very interesting: The Department of Justice has reached an agreement with the House to provide a variety of long requested documents connected with the department’s investigation on whether the Russians interfered with the 2016 election.

The deal was reached after FBI Director Chris Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made a surprise visit to House Speaker Paul Ryan It was announced by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, who had sought the information and threatened more drastic action if his panel continued to be denied access to the information. “After speaking to Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein this evening, I believe the House Intelligence Committee has reached an agreement with the Department of Justice that will provide the committee with access to all the documents and witnesses we have requested,” Nunes said in a statement. “The committee looks forward to receiving access to the documents over the coming days.”

Nunes has in recent months lashed out against the DOJ over its failure to respond to requests for the documents, suggesting the department was doing so deliberately. “At this point it seems the DOJ and FBI need to be investigating themselves,” Nunes wrote in a letter to Rosenstein last week.

What puzzles me is how long the Trump administration allowed the Trump Justice department to stonewall House investigators. Trump is legally in charge. The people at Justice work for him. Either Trump was involved with the Russians somehow and was stonewalling to protect himself, or he allowed Obama appointees to run things there for way too long. This agreement suggests the latter, assuming it is what the article says it is.

Either way, should House investigators get the documents they want, it could very well blow apart the Mueller investigation, based on everything I have read recently. There really does not appear to be anything of substance in the “Russian” scandal, except what appears to be a conspiracy in Justice by those who opposed Trump, a legally elected president, to harm him enough to get him overthrown.

And that could be the biggest scandal we have seen in Washington ever, even worse than Watergate.

9 comments

A faint seasonal fluctuation of methane on Mars?

8:23 pm

The uncertainty of science: Data from Curiosity during its two Martian years on Mars have revealed a faint but distinct seasonal fluctuation in the amount of methane in the local atmosphere, a fluctuation that scientists do not have a good explanation for.

Since landing in 2012, Curiosity has on 30 occasions opened a few valves to the martian night and taken a sniff of the thin, frigid air. In a small, mirrored chamber, it shines a laser through the air sample and measures the absorption at specific wavelengths that indicate methane. At the meeting, Webster reported vanishingly small background levels of the gas: 0.4 parts per billion (ppb), compared with Earth’s 1800 ppb.

Where that whiff comes from is the heart of the mystery. Microbes (including those that live in the guts of cows and sheep) are responsible for most of Earth’s methane, and Mars’s could conceivably come from microbes as well—either contemporary microbes or ancient ones, if the methane they produced was trapped underground. But methane can also be made in ways that have nothing to do with biology. Hydrothermal reactions with olivine-rich rocks underground can generate it, as can reactions driven by ultraviolet (UV) light striking the carbon-containing meteoroids and dust that constantly rain down on the planet from space.

Now, add to the methane puzzle the seasonal variation Curiosity has detected, with levels cycling between about 0.3 ppb and 0.7 ppb over more than two martian years. Some seasonality is expected in an atmosphere that is mostly carbon dioxide (CO2), says François Forget, who models the climate of Mars at the Laboratory of Dynamical Meteorology in Paris. In the southern winter, some of that CO2 freezes out onto the large southern polar cap, making the overall atmosphere thinner. That boosts the concentration of any residual methane, which doesn’t freeze, and by the end of northern summer this methane-enriched air makes its way north to Curiosity’s location, Forget says. Seasonal variations in dust storms and levels of UV light could also affect the abundance of methane, if interplanetary dust is its primary source.

But, Webster said at the meeting, the seasonal signal is some three times larger than those mechanisms could explain. Maybe the methane—whatever its source—is absorbed and released from pores in surface rocks at rates that depend on temperature, he said. Another explanation, “one that no one talks about but is in the back of everyone’s mind,” is biological activity, says Mike Mumma, a planetary scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “You’d expect life to be seasonal.”

They have a lot of theories, from asteroids to alien life, but none really explains this adequately.

1 comment

Was the solar system formed inside a giant bubble?

10:28 am

Don’t bet the house on this! Astronomers have come up with a new theory for the formation of the solar system, that it was formed inside a giant bubble inside a Wolf-Rayet star, in order to explain the known ratios of certain isotopes here.

The new theory for how the solar system formed starts with an extremely massive star known as a Wolf-Rayet star. Of all the stars in the universe, these stars burn the hottest. Because they are so hot, they also have exceptionally strong stellar winds.

As a Wolf-Rayet star sheds its outer layers – a normal end-of-life process for a giant star – its strong stellar winds plow through its loosely held cloak of material, forming densely shelled bubbles. According to the study, the solar system could have formed inside of one of these bubbles.

While this theory would explain a number of mysteries about the ratios of aluminum-26 and iron-60 in our solar system, which correspond closer to those in a Wolf-Rayet star than the galaxy itself, it is quite far-fetched. More hard data is necessary, including real evidence of such things actually happening in such stars, before it can be taken very seriously.

7 comments

New data from Tabby’s Star suggests that dust, not alien megastructures, is the cause of its dimming

8:39 am

New observations of Tabby’s Star now suggests that it is dust, not alien megastructures, that has caused the star’s erratic fluctuations in dimming over the past century.

“Dust is most likely the reason why the star’s light appears to dim and brighten. The new data shows that different colors of light are being blocked at different intensities. Therefore, whatever is passing between us and the star is not opaque, as would be expected from a planet or alien megastructure,” said [LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy Assistant Professor Tabetha Boyajian].

Though the data appears strong, it still leaves astronomers a bit baffled about how dust could cause the particular dimming they have seen.

3 comments

A short dose of ultraviolet light might save North America’s bats

8:24 am

Researchers have found that the fungus that has been decimating bat populations in the eastern United States for the past decade is easily killed by a short dose of ultraviolet light.

Upon being compared to six non-pathogenic Pseudogymnoascus species, it was found that P. destructans lacks a key enzyme that allows it to repair DNA damage caused by ultraviolet light. When samples of the fungus were exposed to a low dose of UV-C light from a handheld source, the survival rate was only about 15 percent – this dropped to less than 1 percent when the dose was moderate. In both cases, the duration of exposure was a matter of no more than a few seconds.

Next comes a control group experiment. If this proves true, than it might be possible to safely sterilize both bat populations and caves of the fungus. To work, however, the task will likely require repeated yearly visits to bat hibernation sites to kill the fungus before it causes the bats to wake up in the winter. Such visits have their own problems, and would be difficult to pay for. However, I am sure the caving community across the U.S. would be glad to volunteer for this effort, and could handle it.

36 comments

China aiming for more than 40 launches in 2018

8:18 am

The new colonial movement: As part of China’s continuing effort to establish itself as a major space power the country plans to launch more than 40 times in 2018, more than doubling its previous average yearly launch rate.

The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), announced at a conference on January 2 that its 2018 work model includes 35 launches, underlining the return to flight of the heavy-lift Long March 5 rocket, the Chang’e-4 lunar far side mission and launches of Beidou navigation satellites as the major activities.

In addition CASIC, a defense contractor, missile maker and sister company of CASC, will carry out a number of missions through its subsidiary EXPACE, including launching four Kuaizhou-1A rockets within one week and the maiden flight of the larger Kuaizhou-11.

Landspace Technology, a Beijing-based private aerospace company, is also expected to debut its LandSpace-1 solid propellant rocket this year.

The existence of even one private rocket company in China surprises me.

1 comment

Two for a Penny – The Grapes of Wrath

6:01 pm

An evening pause: To help start out a new year, a scene from the 1940 John Ford classic, The Grapes of Wrath, based on John Steinbeck’s novel. While the movie tended to make government a saintly hero, which bothered me from the first time I saw it, it also captured the heart and generosity of the American spirit, as certainly existed in the previous century. Even if you are poor and desperate, if you insist on paying your fair share and don’t ask for a hand out, Americans immediately rally around you, in a quiet unassuming way, without wishing credit or accolades.

Hat tip Wayne DeVette.

Note that I am in need of suggestions for evening pauses. If you have made suggestions before, you know where to send them. If you haven’t and want to, leave a comment here and I will email you. Don’t include the link to the pause, however, as I want to schedule it, and that will blow the punchline.

6 comments
1 … 152 153 154 155