August 4, 2021 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
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Category: Behind The Black
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers – Lonesome Polecat
An evening pause: This song, from the 1954 MGM classic musical, was one of the first evening pauses I posted back in 2010. As Diane and I recently rewatched the musical, I think it time to repost it. As I said then,
This haunting song from the movie Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is notable not only because of the beauty of the music and dancing, but because the entire number is shot as one take, no cuts. Everyone, from the actors with their axes to the crew moving the camera on its dolly and crane, had to be right on cue for everything to work.
Having spent almost twenty years in the movie business, I can promise you that this is not easy.
The 2010 evening pause uses the original voice of red-haired Matt Mattox, which was dubbed for the movie.
White blobs on Mars
Click for full image.
Time for another “What the heck?” image. The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on May 18, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what appears to be a series of white circular features aligned with a ridge line.
Are these eroded craters? Maybe, but their alignment with those ridges suggests otherwise. If you look at the full image, you will see further parallel ridges to the north and south, also with similar circular blobs lined along them. Furthermore, the flat surrounding terrain, part of the northern lowland plains north of the resurgences from Valles Marineris, has a scattering of very normal looking craters, with distinct rims and even some glacial material within. As this is at 44 degrees north latitude, the presence of glacial material inside craters is not surprising.
Thus, the white blobs are likely not craters, but some form of eruptive material from below, coming up along those ridges which are probably faultlines. The whiteness suggests that material is water ice, but this of course is unconfirmed.
The question is of course, why? What would cause water ice to erupt along these faultlines? And why are such features not seen elsewhere? Faults and underground ice are common on Mars. Yet, I don’t remember seeing features such as this in any other Martian images.
Today’s blacklisted American: Cybersecurity experts want people fired for expressing unpopular opinions on line
Mao’s cultural revolution in 1966, what the leftists
at Respect in Security want for America and the world.
Persecution is now cool! A new project being developed by leftist cybersecurity experts calls for corporations to use their software to identify and fire individuals that their software identifies as having expressed what they define as “offensive” speech online.
Cancel Culture and Big Tech are a match made in hell, as cybersecurity experts call to target the livelihood of internet users who get too edgy online. “The initiative, called Respect in Security, was launched on Tuesday by two cybersecurity experts. According to the founders, several companies have already signed up,” Reclaim The Net reported. “For a lot of people, it’s a no man’s land,” founder Lisa Forte and Red Goat Cyber Security employee told the BBC. “It can feel like the platforms do nothing, the police don’t do a lot, lawyers are expensive and the publicity legal action generates can be negative.”
The BBC reported that co-founder and Trend Micro Vice President Rik Ferguson said “many companies had anti-bullying policies but they tended to focus on internal behaviour.” In what may be a reference to his Respect in Security program, he wrote a few weeks ago: “Inside my ‘Projects’ email folder resides a subfolder called ‘Kill Trolls’ and it is now only a couple of weeks away from becoming a real thing (sadly not with that name).”
Free speech advocates concerned about Ferguson and Forte’s work may have good reason to be. Forte explained her clear fix for people saying offensive statements via the internet: “The best solution we have, if the culprit is identifiable, is to approach their employer.” [emphasis mine]
It is bad enough that the big social media companies — Google, Facebook, Twitter — are routinely banning conservatives for expressing opinions or even facts they don’t like. Now the storm troopers above want to extend the blacklisting to get those same people fired for daring to speak their mind publicly. From another story:
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Ingenuity’s 11th flight scheduled for tonight
Click for interactive map.
The next flight of Ingenuity on Mars is now scheduled for this evening, and will be a much simpler flight than the helicopter’s previous trip.
The map to the right shows the route in blue. The flight is mainly a transfer flight, intended to keep the copter ahead of the rover as they leapfrog from point to point in Jezero Crater. It will actually be the first flight by Ingenuity that does not push its engineering in any major way.
This map, the most up-to-date available, is at this moment about five sols out of date. Perseverance is likely slightly south and to the west of the location shown.
The present plan is for Perseverance to travel to the northwest along the dark ridgeline that Ingenuity will land next to. The rover will then retreat, returning more or less to its landing area and then north to circle around the largest crater on the map and then to head west to the base of the delta to the area labeled “Three Forks”, which is their entrance to the delta’s geology.
Gil Levin passes away
Gil Levin, a instrument project scientist for one of the science experiments on the Mars Viking landers in the 1970s, has passed away at 97.
Levin deserves special mention because he believed for years that his experiment, called “labeled release,” had possibly found evidence of life.
Dr. Levin’s experiment employed a nine-foot arm to scoop Martian soil into a container, where it was treated with a solution containing radioactive carbon nutrients. Monitors detected the release of radioactive gas, which Dr. Levin interpreted as evidence of metabolism.
“Gil, that’s life,” Straat said when they saw the results.
The findings held true for both Viking 1 and Viking 2, which took samples from different regions of the planet. Other experiments aboard the Viking, however, used different methods to conclude that Martian soil did not contain carbon, an element found in all living things.
Dr. Levin stood by his findings, but top NASA scientists disagreed, saying that the response he observed was the result of inorganic chemical responses, not biological processes. “Soon thereafter,” Dr. Levin told the Johns Hopkins University School of Engineering Magazine last year, “I gave a talk at the National Academy of Sciences saying we detected life, and there was an uproar. Attendees shouted invectives at me. They were ready to throw shrimp at me from the shrimp bowl. One former adviser said, ‘You’ve disgraced yourself, and you’ve disgraced science.’”
I met Levin once and interviewed him several times. With amazing grace and cheerfulness he always emphasized that his results needed to be confirmed, and there was certainly room for skepticism, but to reject them outright was not how the scientific method worked.
Levin however was never awarded another NASA project, essentially blackballed because of his 1970s claims, even though later research hinted at the possibility that he may have been right.
R.I.P. Gil Levin. Though the overall data we have gotten from Mars in the half century since still favors a non-life explanation for his experiment, the uncertainty remains quite large. He could have been right.
More important than his uncertain result, however, was his dedication to the proper scientific method, where you let the data speak for itself and never dismiss any possibility if that is what the data shows you.
Lemon Pipers – Green Tambourine
An evening pause: From yesterday’s cutting edge graphics we go to the early days of television color special effects, taped in 1968. Hardly as convincing, but with a sense of light-hearted fun that is quite infectious.
I also wonder how much drugs were involved with the writing, recording, playing and televising of this song.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
I am still in need for evening pause suggestions. If you’ve suggested before you know the routine. If you haven’t and want submit something, say so in a comment and I will forward you the guidelines. Don’t reveal your suggestion in the comment, or I won’t be able to use it.
Superheavy prototype #4 rolls to orbital launchpad
Click for live stream.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX today rolled its 4th Superheavy prototype from its assembly building in Boca Chica, Texas, moving it to the orbital launchpad in preparation for having the 20th Starship prototype stacked on top and assembled for the rocket’s first orbital test flight.
The first image to the right is a screen capture taken from a short movie posted in an Elon Musk tweet. It shows the base of this Superheavy, with its 29 Raptor engines. The engines appear surrounded by the support structure that holds the stage to the truck mover.
The second image to the right is a screen capture from Labpadre’s live stream Saphire camera, captured shortly before this post was published. Superheavy is 230 feet tall. Starship is 165 feet tall. Combined that equals just under 400 feet, which is still about 30 feet taller than the Saturn-5.
Yet, Superheavy is easily dwarfed by the launch tower behind it, and when they stack Starship on top the combined rocket will still be only three quarters as tall as the tower. They are using that tower not only for launches, but for stacking of Starship as well as a capture devise for when later Superheavies return to Earth. Instead of having landing legs, Superheavy will eventually lower itself into position next to the tower and hover there so that the tower can grab it.
All this means the tower needs to be taller than the combined rocket. I would also expect that a second tower will be necessary eventually for that landing grab.
Before they stack Starship #20 on top they will likely do pressure and tank tests of Superheavy, and maybe a few dress rehearsal countdowns leading to short static fire tests.
It still appears to me that we are looking for an orbital test flight sometime in late September, early October.
Chinese pseudo-private rocket fails during launch
A launch attempt by the pseudo-private Chinese company iSpace failed today, the second failure in a row for this company following a success.
A Hyperbola 1 rocket lifted off from the Jiuquan launch base at 3:39 a.m. EDT (0739 GMT; 3:39 p.m. Beijing time), China’s government-run Xinhua news agency said. Xinhua, which described the launch as a “flight test,” said the rocket exhibited “abnormal performance” after liftoff. Officials did not immediately specify when during the flight the rocket failed.
The news agency said a satellite carried by the rocket “did not enter orbit as scheduled.” Chinese officials did not identify the payload lost on the mission.
This is the second launch failure in a row, following the first successful orbital launch in July 2019.
The rocket is made of four solid-fueled stages, which means it most certainly is using military tecnology and is being closely supervised by the Chinese government. ISpace is one of about four such pseudo-private Chines companies. In each case, China is allowing private Chinese capital to finance the development of these rockets, for use both by the Chinese government as well as sale to customers (but only with the government’s approval and control).
Today’s blacklisted American: 65,000 Americans censored by social media
The Bill of Rights cancelled by
Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
The new dark age of silencing According to the legal team for former president Donald Trump, almost 65,000 people have submitted examples of censorship by the social media companies Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and the lawyers have amended Trump’s the lawsuit to add those individuals to it.
According to the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), Trump’s July 7 lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter, and Google is adding ”additional censorship experiences” from some of the nearly 65,000 people who submitted them to the institute. ”Late last night, Amended Complaints were filed in the Big Tech lawsuits against Facebook, Inc., Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter, Inc., Jack Dorsey, Google LLC, and Sundar Pichai,” AFPI said in a July 28 statement.
“Since the initial filing on July 7, 2021, nearly 65,000 American people have submitted their stories of censorship through America First Policy Institute’s (AFPI) Constitutional Litigation Partnership (CLP) at TakeOnBigTech.com,” AFPI added.
Curiosity’s wheels: a good news update
Click here and here for the original images.
For the past few weeks Curiosity has been traveling across some of the roughest terrain it has seen on Mars, since landing in Gale Crater in August 2012. The rover is now roving among the high cliffs and foothills at the very base of Mt Sharp, with the ground covered with rocks, boulders, plates of bedrock, and all sorts of protrusions.
On August 1st the rover team used its cameras to do another survey of the rover’s wheels to see how they fared during that journey. The two images to the right compare the same area on the same wheel after the most recent 16 sols of travel. This is the same wheel I have focused on since 2017. Overall, the damage in the most recent picture seems almost identical to the previous picture. In fact, if you compare today’s image with the annotated version of the 2017 photo, found here, you can see how little things have changed since then.
From this one wheel it appears that the wheels are continuing to hold up quite well. The Curiosity team of course needs to review all the images of all the wheels, but based on this one comparison, it looks like their long term strategies for mitigating damage to the wheels is working, even in the rough terrain the rover is presently traversing.
The annual July fund-raising campaign: Thank you!
This post will remain at the top of the page for the next few days. Scroll down for news updates and commentaries.
My July fund-raising campaign for 2021 has now ended. Thank you all for your donations and subscriptions. While this year’s campaign was not as spectacular as last year’s, it was the second best July campaign since I began this website. My gratitude cannot be expressed adequately.
As already mentioned, a handful of people have donated enough for a free ebook, but have not responded to my requests for which book they wish and in what format. I can’t give you this gift if you don’t tell me what you want. Will those individuals please email me the book and the format (epup or pdf) they desire?
I once again must express my gratitude to everyone for their support. No one is obliged to pay anything to read my website. That so many people are willing to give freely warms my heart, and gives me hope that I am not the only person left who believes in fearless exploration and freedom.