Off to Israel

For the next week my posting might be lighter than usual. Today I am heading to Israel to visit family and do a bit of sightseeing. Whether I have sufficient access to the internet to keep up with events as well as continue to post will not be clear until I get there and get settled in.

In the meantime, I will also be celebrating my sixtieth birthday while in Israel. If you have been a regular reader of Behind the Black and would like to help me celebrate this milestone with a donation to the website, I would be most grateful. The tip jar is located at the bottom of the right column, just below the search box.

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Our government’s modern scientific method:
Proving others are wrong is not allowed!

An Interior Department official has been accused of trying to disband a fish research division specifically because its research is politically incorrect.

The research division, the Fisheries Resources Branch, had repeatedly found good evidence that the salmon of the Klamath River in the northwest were not suffering significantly from the presence of the dams on that river, contradicting the accepted wisdom that the dams had to be removed in order for these species to survive. The Interior official, Jason Phillips, along with the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), did not like these results, and decided that scientific work that “proved others wrong” was unacceptable and had to be squelched. From the actual complaint [pdf]:
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The Sun crashes

NOAA today released its newest monthly update of the Sun’s sunspot cycle and, as I do every month, I have posted the latest graph, with annotation, below the fold.

The sunspot numbers for December were not only startlingly low, they actually plunged to levels not seen since May 2011, at a time when the Sun is supposed to be approaching sunspot maximum and the number of sunspots is supposed to be increasing.
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The most interesting comment threads of December

Many of the posts here at Behind the Black are not much more than me providing my readers a link to what I consider to be an important story, what I categorize as a point of information. Ever so often, however, one of these posts will touch a nerve and generate a great deal of comments and discussion, most of which is generally well written and thoughtful.

In December two posts in particular resulted in a lot of debate. Because these comments were part of a point of information, however, they ended up being lost amid the many similar posts. I have decided to highlight both threads here on the front page because I think it worthwhile for others to read what was written.
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Sequestration and NASA

Here we go again. Yesterday an aerospace organization, Aerospace Industries Association, released a sixteen page report [pdf] claiming that NASA will lose 20,500 jobs and NOAA 2,500 if the federal government goes over the “fiscal cliff” and sequestration happens.

Immediately, a slew of news articles xeroxed this report to pound home this point, noting the job loses for the specific cities of each newspaper and how disaster awaits the country if sequestration is allowed to take place and we go over that blessed “fiscal cliff”:

The trouble is, this is all hogwash and bad journalism.
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The solar scientists change their prediction again

Today, with little fanfare, the solar scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center adjusted slightly downward their prediction for the upcoming solar maximum, from a sunspot number of 73 down to 72. This was the fourth month in a row that they have revised their prediction.

The Marshall scientists do not archive their predictions, which I suspect is a convenient way of preventing people from noticing how much they change them. I however like to archive these revisions. Below is a full list of their changes during the past two years:
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The press lets Curiosity get the better of them

The big news is out. Today the eagerly awaited press conference at the American Geophysical Society meeting in San Francisco on the recent results from the Mars rover Curiosity was finally held. The announced results had been hyped like crazy when rumors began to spread a few weeks ago that Curiosity had discovered something truly spectacular.

Well, here are some of the headlines heralding the results.
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Why state regulation is better than federal regulation

In response to my condemnation of the insane requirement by Obamacare that restaurants and take-out pizza delivery services publicly post on their menus the calorie count for every item, including a calorie count for each of the literally thousands of topping variations for pizzas, regular reader Patrick Ritchie asked me, “What level of super market labeling would you support?”

I replied, “I think the federal government has no business requiring any labeling at all. This is a state matter, pure and simple, both for practical and Constitutional reasons.”

He responded, “Which practical reasons? I’m genuinely curious. What makes a state regulation inherently better than a federal one?”

My response to this last question was quite long, and after reading it Patrick suggested I elevate the comment into a full headlined post. I have decided to do so. Here is what I wrote, edited slightly for clarity:
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The discovery of volcanoes on Io

discovery image

On March 8, 1979, as Voyager 1 was speeding away from Jupiter after its historic flyby of the gas giant three days earlier, it looked back at the planet and took some navigational images. Linda Morabito, one of the engineers in charge of using these navigational images to make sure the spacecraft was on its planned course, took one look at the image on the right, an overexposed image of the moon Io, and decided that it had captured something very unusual. On the limb of the moon was this strange shape that at first glance looked like another moon partly hidden behind Io. She and her fellow engineers immediately realized that this was not possible, and that the object was probably a plume coming up from the surface of Io. To their glee, they had taken the first image of an eruption of active volcano on another world!

Today, on the astro-ph preprint website, Morabito has published a minute-by-minute account of that discovery. It makes for fascinating reading, partly because the discovery was so exciting and unique, partly because it illustrated starkly the human nature of science research, and partly because of the amazing circumstances of that discovery. Only one week before, scientists has predicted active volcanism on Io in a paper published in the journal Science. To quote her abstract:
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Bankruptcy

It appears that Barack Obama has won another four years in office. Despite what many consider to be one of the weakest and most incompetent presidencies in history, the American people have decided to stick with this man. Even worse, the Democrats look like they will gain seats in the Senate, even though it was the Democratic majority in that Senate that has refused to pass a budget — as required by law — for the last three years. For that dereliction of duty, the American people have decided to reward them with more power.

Overall, it appears that the polls that favored Democrats in their sampling were actually capturing the tone of the country. The public wants big government and a restriction in freedom. 2010 was a fluke, not a trend. I was wrong.

We are stuck with Obamacare. We are stuck with trillion dollar deficits. We are stuck with bankruptcy. I have little hope now for the near future. It will probably take fifty years or more to fix the problems that the past four years and the next four years will create.

This is not even a conservative perspective. No policy can survive, even good leftwing policy, when the government is bankrupt. And with trillion dollar deficits the new normal, we are guaranteed that the government will go bankrupt. And it will take everything else down with it.

Even worse, this willingness of the American public and its intellectual class to ignore this reality, to make believe that trillion dollar deficits don’t matter, suggests an intellectual bankruptcy that is even more appalling. For you can’t fix a problem if you refuse to face it.

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The Sun takes a plunge

The latest monthly update the ongoing sunspot cycle of the Sun has been published today by NOAA. Once again, the trend suggests that the Sun’s ability to produce sunspots is fading, and fading fast.

I have posted this latest graph, covering the month of October, below the fold, with additional analysis.
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Kepler reveals our Sun might be more variable than we imagine

More exoplanet news: The problems of Kepler.

The article outlines the status — both good and bad — of Kepler in its hunt for Earthlike exoplanets.

I have already reported on Kepler’s failed reaction wheel. It no longer has a backup and needs every reaction wheel it has to keep it pointed in so precise a manner. Thus, the loss of one more wheel will shut the telescope down.

However, I had not been aware that the scientists now need more than twice as much time, eight years instead of three, to do their work, because they have discovered that sunlike stars are far more variable than expected. To quote the article,
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