January 7, 2019 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
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Year: 2020
Survivor – Eye of the Tiger
An evening pause: Performed live 1985 in Japan. Stay with it. They just don’t want this performance to end.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
Money finally allocated to replace signs at Glacier that say glaciers to vanish by 2020
Having gotten the budget to do so, the National Park Service is finally proceeding with removing the absurd signs at Glacier National Park that claim the glaciers would be gone by either 2020 or 2030.
They had announced the decision to fix these silly signs back in June, but didn’t yet have the budget until now.
When I visited the park with Diane in 2017, I reported on these ridiculous signs, which provided a great illustration of the routinely bad predictions of the global warming advocacy crowd. Not only were the predictions absurd and certain to be wrong, the park couldn’t make up its mind, posting signs that either predicted 2020 or 2030 as the moment when all the glaciers would be gone.
The new signs are still pretty bad, stating “When they [the glaciers] will completely disappear depends on how and when we act. One thing is consistent: the glaciers in the park are shrinking.”
This is poppy-cock. How we act is almost certainly not a factor in whether the glaciers shrink or grow, and to say this proves once again how the park service is pushing human-caused global warming, a hypothesis that remains unproven and has in fact failed in every prediction it has made.
Moreover, it is not certain that “the glaciers in the park are shrinking.” Research from 2010 to 2014 indicated that the shrinkage had ceased. I have not seen an update since, but the fact that no measurable shrinkage occurred so recently suggests that nothing is “consistent” or certain here.
China releases data and images from Yutu-2 and Chang’e-3
Click for full image.
The new colonial movement: To celebrate the completion of a year on the lunar surface, China has released the bulk of the data and images produced by the lander Chang’e-3 and the rover Yutu-2.
The link includes a nice gallery of images. I especially like the image to the right, cropped to post here. It shows Yutu-2 moving away from Chang’e-3 early in the mission. It also shows how truly colorless the Moon is. The rover proves this is a color image, but if it wasn’t in the shot you’d have no way of knowing.
And then there is that pitch black sky. I wonder what’s behind it.
India releases Vikram failure report
India’s space agency ISRO has released its investigation report on the failure of its lunar lander Vikram on September 7, 2019 to soft land on the Moon.
The Chandrayaan-2’s Vikram lander ended up spinning over 410 degrees, deviating from a calibrated spin of 55 degrees, and making a hard landing on the moon, according to ISRO scientists. The anomaly, which occurred during the second of four phases of the landing process, was reflected in the computer systems in the mission control room, but ISRO scientists could not intervene to correct it as the lander was on autonomous mode, using data already fed into its system before the start of the powered descent.
According to the report, they are using what was learned to incorporate changes in Chandrayaan-3, their next attempt at putting a lander and rover on the Moon, presently scheduled to launch 14 to 16 months from now. That launch date, about six months later than previous reports, also seems more realistic. Initially the agency was saying it planned to launch Chandrayaan-3 in less than a year from project inception, by November 2020, a schedule that seemed rushed and ripe for mistakes.
Webb telescope remains on schedule for March 2021 launch
Good news: According to NASA and Northrop Grumman officials, the James Webb Space Telescope remains on schedule for its March 2021 launch by an Ariane 5 rocket.
This might be the first update on Webb in years where no new delays were announced. Instead, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, which will manage the telescope, is preparing to release in two weeks its first call for research proposals.
Proposals will be due May 1, with the institute making selections later in the summer. …[I]nstitute officials said they expect to receive 1,000 to 1,600 proposals, seeking some fraction of the 6,000 hours of observing time that will be available in that initial round of observations. About 300 proposals will be selected for Cycle 1, which will begin once spacecraft commissioning is complete about six months after launch.
Let us all pray that all goes well during launch and spacecraft deployment.
SpaceX crew Dragon launch abort test delayed another week
NASA and SpaceX have delayed the launch abort test flight of the company’s crew Dragon capsule one week, to January 18, in order to allow “additional time for spacecraft processing.”
SpaceX has made it clear for the past month that their hardware is ready to go and that they could have launched by the end of December. That makes me suspect that the processing delay relates to NASA’s bureaucracy and paperwork requirements.
Investigation forces retraction of 800+ Russian science papers
An investigation by Russia’s Academy of Sciences has forced the retraction of more than 800 Russian science papers, many for plagiarism.
The RAS commission’s preliminary report documenting the problems and journals’ responses to them is “a bombshell,” says Gerson Sher, a former staffer at the U.S. National Science Foundation and the author of a recent book on U.S.-Russia science cooperation. The report, released yesterday, “will reinforce the suspicions and fears of many—that their country is not going down the right path in science and that it’s damaging its own reputation,” says Sher, who applauds RAS for commissioning the investigation.
Russia’s roughly 6000 academic journals, the vast majority published in Russian, are popular among the country’s academics. A 2019 study found that Russian authors publish far more in domestic journals than, for instance, their counterparts in Poland, Germany, or Indonesia. But standards are often low. In March 2018, for instance, Dissernet, a network aimed at cleaning up the Russian literature, identified more than 4000 cases of plagiarism and questionable authorship among 150,000 papers in about 1500 journals.
And Russian authors frequently republish their own work, says Yury Chekhovich, CEO of Antiplagiat, a plagiarism detection company. In September 2019, after sifting through 4.3 million Russian-language studies, Antiplagiat found that more than 70,000 were published at least twice; a few were published as many as 17 times. Chekhovich believes most instances are due to self-plagiarism. Meanwhile, the website 123mi.u claims to have brokered authorships for more than 10,000 researchers by selling slots on manuscripts written by others that were already accepted by journals.
In many ways this report reflects the overall corruption that appears to permeate the upper echelons of Russian culture. Rather than do real science and report it to the world, Russian scientists publish in Russian in ways that get them in-house promotions but do little to advance science.
That this investigation was conducted by the Russian Academy of Sciences however is a positive sign. It indicates a desire to clean things up.
On the radio
I’m doing the last two hours of Coast to Coast with George Noory tonight, starting at midnight, Pacific time. Listen in if you’re a night person.
George Harrison tribute – While My Guitar Gently Weeps
An evening pause: Performed live in 2004 by Prince, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and others.
Hat tip Cotour.
Dragon returns to Earth with mice and cookies baked in space
After several months docked to ISS SpaceX’s cargo Dragon returned to Earth today, bringing back forty mice send up in December for research and some cookies that were baked in space.
Researchers want to inspect the handful of chocolate chip cookies baked by astronauts in a special Zero G oven just in time for Christmas. The oven launched to the space station in November, so astronauts could pop in pre-made cookie dough provided by DoubleTree. A spokesman for the hotel chain said five cookies were baked up there, one at a time. The company plans to share details of this first-of-its-kind experiment in the coming weeks. “We made space cookies and milk for Santa this year,” NASA astronaut Christina Koch tweeted late last month from the space station, posing with one of the individually wrapped cookies.
Scientists also are getting back 40 mice that flew up in early December, including eight genetically engineered to have twice the normal muscle mass. Some of the non-mighty mice bulked up in orbit for the muscle study; others will pack it on once they’re back in the lab.
At the moment the only way to get experiments like this back from ISS is with cargo Dragon. Hopefully that will change when Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser mini-shuttle finally flies in the next few years.
Arsonists the cause of most of Australia’s bushfires
It ain’t climate change: Police in Australia have arrested almost two hundred arsonists, suspected of the causing the bulk of the bushfires that have been sweeping the country.
Thus the cause is not global warming, an absurd claim that has been made repeatedly over the past few months by various climate scientists who in their spare time make their livings as either actors or activists. As noted in the article at the link:
Melbourne University Professor Janet Stanley, quoted in the Australian, said that the arsonists were typically young males aged 12 to 24 or older men in their 60s – generally from an unsettled background. She said, “They are often kids not succeeding in school, or they have left school early and are unemployed. The boundaries between accidentally and purposefully are unclear because many arsonists don’t plan on causing the catastrophe that occurs. Often there is not an intention to cause chaos and the penalties for accidentally lighting a fire are far less than purposefully lighting a fire.”
What is especially sad is that these actors and celebrities expect us to take them seriously, when it is very clear they haven’t faintest idea what they are talking about. Worse, news outlets seem to think their ignorant opinions are worth reporting, as if they carry real weight in the discussion.
Think about it. Why should any adult give any credence to the opinions of a teen-age girl about the science of climate when she is intentionally not attending school and therefore is intentionally not getting educated? No adult should. That so many do, including many politicians (who also known nothing about the subject), speaks volumes about the decay and childishness of our culture today.