Author: Robert Zimmerman

NASA uses computer model to find exoplanets

11:26 am

Garbage in, garbage out: Using statistical computer modeling only, NASA today announced that they are certain that almost a third of Kepler’s candidate exoplanets are really exoplanets.

Analysis was performed on the Kepler space telescope’s July 2015 planet candidate catalog, which identified 4,302 potential planets. For 1,284 of the candidates, the probability of being a planet is greater than 99 percent – the minimum required to earn the status of “planet.” An additional 1,327 candidates are more likely than not to be actual planets, but they do not meet the 99 percent threshold and will require additional study. The remaining 707 are more likely to be some other astrophysical phenomena. This analysis also validated 984 candidates previously verified by other techniques.

This is actually a stupid announcement. They haven’t learned a damn thing from this statistical analysis, but are merely saying that because Kepler found a lot of candidates, a lot of those candidates must be real planets. Worse, NASA is also implying here that confirming some of these candidate exoplanets by hard observations is now really unnecessary, since they can do it statistically.

This smacks of the corruption that has ruined much of climate research, allowing a computer model to replace actual observations. Big mistake. But I also suspect this announcement occurred for the same reasons: NASA wishes to justify its work and its funding, and thus decided to make a big deal about this very minor statistical analysis in order to puff up the discoveries of Kepler, even though there is no reason to do so.

I expect a lot of mainstream news organizations to write big puff pieces extolling this announcement in the coming days, which will once again prove that almost no one in journalism today has the slightest ability to apply their own independent analysis to the press releases they receive.

8 comments

Harvard researchers discover that Obamacare isn’t working

9:50 am

Finding out what’s in it: A Harvard research study has found that the program in Obamacare designed to improve hospital care has had no effect, and essentially is not working.

Or, to put it another way, in exchange for increasing regulations and cost, we have gotten nothing in return.

Gee, I seem to remember a lot of unwashed, uneducated rubes from the backwaters of flyover country saying loudly that these programs in Obamacare would not work, back in 2010. Too bad these brilliant Harvard experts considered themselves too smart to pay any attention.

6 comments

Computer simulation models Sun’s magnetic field during grand minimum

9:11 am

The uncertainty of science: A computer simulation, run for six months on a supercomputer, suggests that during grand minimums in the Sun’s solar cycle, when there are no sunspots for decades, its magnetic field remains strong but descends into the star’s interior.

I think this statement by the leader of the science team is most informative:

‘The Sun as such is impossible to replicate on present-day computers – or those of the near future – due to its strong turbulence. And indeed we are not claiming that this modelling would really be the Sun. Instead, it is a 3D construction of various solar phenomena by means of which the star that runs our space climate can be better understood,’ Käpylä explains.

6 comments

More problems at Khrunichev

9:00 am

Construction of the second Angara rocket, built by the Russian organization Khrunichev, is behind schedule by at least three months.

[T]he reason for the lag is the delay with the supply of components, as well as the production setup in Omsk, the long period of checks and the lack of certain equipment for testing. In Moscow, the units will pass additional testing and the carrier rocket will be assembled, after which the launch vehicle will be transported to the Plesetsk cosmodrome (Arkhangelsk region) for the pre-launch preparation.

It is interesting to note the circuitous route the rocket’s parts must travel before launch. Kind of reminds me of the way Congress distributed SLS, and how ESA distributed Ariane 5, in order to spread the wealth and put pork in as many places as possible, regardless of how it increased production cost.

Meanwhile, the delay suggests again that Khrunichev’s quality control problems, seen repeatedly with launch failures of its Proton rocket, have not been solved with the new Angara rocket.

0 comments

Iran completes another ballistic missile test

3:45 pm

Does this make you feel safer? Iran has successfully completed another ballistic missile test with a rocket capable of reaching Israel and most of the Middle East.

And does the Obama administration response below ease your mind?

The rogue nation conducted the test in defiance of a United Nations resolution that calls on Iran to cease work on its ballistic missile program. “Iran has to abide by U.N. resolutions with regard to ballistic missiles tests, and if they have violated or not been consistent with those resolutions, that clearly would be a concern for us,” Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said.

37 comments

New analysis says it ain’t aliens at strange star

2:17 pm

The uncertainty of science: A new analysis of old star data has concluded that KIC 8462852, also known Tabby’s Star and subject to random fluctuations that no scientist can explain, has not dimmed by 20% in the past century.

This reduces the chances that the fluctuations are caused by the slow accumulating construction of a Dyson sphere by an alien civilization, as some have proposed, but it still does nothing to explain the star’s random changes in brightness.

6 comments

Judge rules White House showed “bad faith” in global-warming case

12:51 pm

A federal court has ruled that the Obama White House was stonewalling in its refusal to turn over global warming documents requested under the Freedom of Information law

In this most recent case, the Competitive Enterprise Institute was trying to force the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to release documents backing up Director John C. Holdren’s finding that global warming was making winters colder — a claim disputed by climate scientists. Mr. Holdren’s staffers first claimed they couldn’t find many documents, then tried to hide their release, saying they were all internal or were similar to what was already public.

But each of those claims turned out not to be true. “At some point, the government’s inconsistent representations about the scope and completeness of its searches must give way to the truth-seeking function of the adversarial process, including the tools available through discovery. This case has crossed that threshold,” the judge wrote.

The judge also ruled that they will now proceed with “discovery”, in which the courts will force the administration to release documents, under penalty of contempt.

The article also notes that this is the third time the courts have been forced to go this route with the Obama administration. For some reason, they seem to be stonewalling a lot of Freedom of Information requests. And that doesn’t even include the stonewalling the IRS did in the Lois Lerner IRS scandal.

8 comments

Facebook routinely suppressed conservative news

11:19 am

Even as Facebook claimed that its trending website, listing the stories that are supposedly the most popular, curators of that website have now admitted that they routinely suppressed conservative stories, just because they were conservative.

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.

Facebook can do what it wants, but it is important to note the dishonesty here. They claimed their trending site objectively listed stories according to their popularity on Facebook, but when conservative news became popular, Facebook managers then stepped in make sure no one knew that. In other words, the organization lied to its members.

Note also that this is only further evidence that the last thing anyone should do is rely on one source for their information. Get it from multiple sources, with multiple perspectives, so that you increase the chances that you will get it all.

11 comments

Sunspot activity crashes

10:19 am

The monthly NOAA update of the solar cycle was released yesterday, showing the Sun’s sunspot activity in April. It is annotated and posted below.

April 2016 Solar Cycle graph

The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The red curve is their revised May 2009 prediction.

After four months of steady decline matched exactly with the low prediction from 2007 (the lower green line curve), in April sunspot activity plummeted to the lowest level seen since January 2011.

This decline shouldn’t surprise anyone. The now ending solar maximum has been the weakest in a century and, as noted here, it is now more than a year since the last X-class solar flare, the most powerful kind, with this solar maximum seeing only 45 X-class events, compared to 126 during the previous solar maximum.

As I have noted repeatedly, the big question now is what will happen during the next solar cycle. Will we get another weak solar cycle or will the sun’s sunspot activity recover? Or will sunspots vanish and will the sun enter a grand minimum, with no sunspots for decades? At the moment no one knows, though some solar scientists favor the latter.

2 comments

Saturn’s moon Epimetheus

9:14 am

Epimetheus

Cool image time! The picture on the right was taken by Cassini on December 6, 2015, and shows the asteroid-like misshapen moon, too small (only 70 miles across) for gravity to force it into a sphere. Behind it, filling the frame, is gigantic Saturn.

If you look close, you can see one crater that appears elongated, as if the impact was only a glancing blow.

1 comment

Long March 7 heads to spaceport

9:01 am

The competition heats up: The first of China’s new generation of rockets, Long March 7, is now on its way to its spaceport for its first launch next month.

The first flight of the 53-metre-tall Long March 7 will take place in late June, according to CASC’s Yang Baohua, and will test the design and performance indicators. The 600 tonne, 3.35m diameter rocket will carry a scaled-down version of a new Chinese re-entry capsule for human spaceflight, chief designer of China’s human space program Zhou Jianping revealed in March.

The article provides some good detailed information about China’s new rockets, noting that this rocket has been designed to launch manned and cargo spacecraft into orbit, making it the equivalent of Russia’s Soyuz rocket. The more powerful Long March 5, set for launch later this year when it will put China’s next space station prototype into orbit, will be their equivalent of Russia’s Proton. In both cases, however, they will be better than Russia’s rockets, more advanced and upgraded with greater capabilities.

The article also makes note of China’s new Wenchang spaceport on the coast, which took six years to build.

0 comments

Mercury’s transit today

8:50 am

Here are a few links on today’s transit of the Sun by Mercury, which is going on right now.

I could give more, but this event is hardly as important as many new media are saying. It is interesting, and rare, and important in that it helps scientists get a better understanding of the uncertainties in their exoplanet research, but hardly important scientifically.

Consider this however: Mercury’s real orbit has it circle the sun every 88 days. If we could only detect it by the transits seen from Earth, we would only see it cross the Sun in 2006, 2016, 2019, and 2032. Figuring out its real orbit from that data would likely be impossible. Now, I realize that these seemingly random transits are partly determined by the Earth’s own orbit around the Sun, but they still illustrate that our use of transits to detect and characterize exoplanets has its limits. And in science one must always be aware of one’s limits.

4 comments

Trump calls for a minimum wage increase

9:51 pm

Researching the November Democratic primary: Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump on Sunday called for an increase in the minimum wage.

He did add that this is something the states should decide. However, with him pushing it he is helping to make it a political issue that will force an increase, something that has routinely damaged economies and hurt the poorest and lowest income members of society. He also added that he will negotiate with Democrats on his tax plan (which he now called “only a concept”) which will likely cause increased taxes on the wealthy.

As I’ve said, we now have a choice between a liberal Democrat and an avowed socialist/communist. Ain’t that just wonderful?

23 comments

Death threats to vegan restaurant owners for eating meat again

9:41 pm

Fascists: The owners of a chain of vegan restaurants in California are now faced with boycotts and death threats because, after 40 years of being vegetarians, they have started eating meat again.

Protesters outside of the Cafe Gratitude restaurant in Venice, Calif., over the weekend carried signs that read “It’s not food/It’s violence” and “No animal is grateful to die.” One poster depicted a cow hanging from a rope with the speech bubble “No gracias, madre!” A stick figure of Matthew held up a knife over a pool of blood and said, “I love you…”

The Engelharts told the Hollywood Reporter that they have been receiving death threats. “People have taken up the mob mentality,” Matthew said. “It saddens me that the choices we made in the privacy of our home would lead people to feel so betrayed that it’s elevated to threats on our lives.”

How dare they leave the reservation of liberal/leftwing beliefs and do something different? How dare they? Time to set up concentration camps for traitors like these!

3 comments

May 6, 2016 Zimmerman/Pratt podcast

9:13 pm

On Friday afternoon I spent 90 minutes with Robert Pratt on his radio show, Pratt on Texas. Unlike most radio hosts, Robert wanted to hear my thoughts not just on the state of the aerospace industry, but also on today’s politics. The conversation thus ranged beyond space during the last half hour. If anyone wants to hear this conversation, the podcast be found here.

Note: The podcast now works at this link.

8 comments

Why I use Linux

2:27 pm

Linux can be a pain sometimes, and it requires a bit more hands-on work by the user to make it function, but overall in the ten years since I abandoned Windows and switched to Linux (first with the Debian operating system and now with Kubuntu) I have found my work on my computer to be far more satisfying and successful. I can mostly get things done the way I like to do them, not as dictated by some software geek working at Microsoft’s headquarters.

Which is why this story interested me: “I thought my daughter clicked on ransomware – it was the damn Windows 10 installer.” It describes a number of stories where Windows 10 took control of a person’s computer and imposed an upgrade, against their will.

This story, among many others, only confirmed for me that my decision in 2006 was a wise one. I will never return to Windows, and if I was certain that computer projectors could read Linux laptops I’d switch the laptop to Linux as well.

It is just a shame however that so many people still stick with Windows, as it often makes doing their work difficult, if not impossible. When a product doesn’t work for you, you find another product. That’s how freedom and competition work.

17 comments
1 … 1,055 1,056 1,057 1,058 1,059 … 1,759