Category: Points of Information

Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.

Google routinely hands your smart phone data to the police

9:48 pm

Reason 4,326,987 to never use a Google smart phone: Google handed the police the GPS data for every single smart phone that was in the vicinity of a robbery, resulting in an innocent bike rider becoming the primary suspect in a burglary.

The [man’s] lawyer, Caleb Kenyon, dug around and learned that the notice had been prompted by a “geofence warrant,” a police surveillance tool that casts a virtual dragnet over crime scenes, sweeping up Google location data — drawn from users’ GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular connections — from everyone nearby.

The warrants, which have increased dramatically in the past two years, can help police find potential suspects when they have no leads. They also scoop up data from people who have nothing to do with the crime, often without their knowing ─ which Google itself has described as “a significant incursion on privacy.”

What happens is Google gives the data to the police, with no names attached. If the police see something they think worthwhile, they then ask for the identity of the person in question. Google then warns that person, giving them seven days to defend themselves before handing the police their name.

This type of search stinks to high heaven. If Google really considered this “a significant incursion on privacy” they wouldn’t cooperate with the police. Thus, they are lying if when they say that. Google likes prying into your private affairs, and using that data for its own benefit. In fact, based on Google’s track record, I’m surprised they didn’t demand a payment from this man to prevent the release of his name to the police.

Google, like Facebook and Microsoft, is a corrupt and dishonest company. No one should be doing business with them, and if you are, you should be finding ways to switch to the competition as quickly as possible. This is why I haven’t used Google or Bing to do any web searches in about a decade, using Startpage and DuckDuckGo instead. This is why I abandoned Microsoft Windows fourteen years ago, switching to Linux.

In fact, I think this story calls for a repost of the links to the series of articles reader James Stephens wrote for Behind the Black back in 2016 for getting and installing Linux. If you want to try out Linux, all you really need is a spare laptop or desktop, one or two years old, that you aren’t using any more, and to then follow James’ step-by-step instructions below. I’ve done it now three times. The two laptops I use were bought for $20 and $35 each. I wiped Windows 7 from both and installed my favorite flavor of Linux. And they work as well if not better than any Windows machine.

Find an old laptop you aren’t using any longer and put Linux on it. And stop using Google. It is pure poison.

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California Tesla factory reopens, defying local officials

2:23 pm

Go get ’em! As he promised, Elon Musk has reopened his California Tesla factory, defying the demands of local officials who wanted it to remain closed until June.

Not only did he institute some stringent employee rules in connection with the Wuhan flu, he also as promised had Tesla initiate a lawsuit against those local officials.

Tesla filed a lawsuit against Alameda County on Saturday after the Fremont plant was shuttered amid the statewide lockdown on March 23. The suit claims that county officials ignored Gov Gavin Newsom’s allowances for ’16 crucial infrastructure industries,’ including transportation, to continue operating.

Personally I think the company’s stringent new health rules are ridiculous, but Musk has to play this “feel-good” game while fighting to survive against this government power-grab.

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House FISA court reauthorization reaches Senate

1:39 pm

You gotta have your KGB: A House-passed FISA court reauthorization bill, which makes some superficial claims at reining in the abuses of that court by FBI and Justice officials in the past four years, has now reached the Senate.

Overall this new law is junk, and accomplishes nothing. Though it does increase penalties for misuse, and allows for outside review in more situations, the secret court will continue, available to authorize the illegal surveillance of American businesses and individuals, for political reasons.

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Bennu’s equatorial craters

10:05 am

Bennu's craters
Click for full image.

The OSIRIS-REx science team today released a neat image of Bennu, highlighting the string of impact craters along the rubble-pile asteroid’s equatorial ridge. The image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows that image. From the release:

Bennu’s darkest boulder, Gargoyle Saxum , is visible on the equator, near the left limb. On the asteroid’s southern hemisphere, Bennu’s largest boulder, Benben Saxum , casts a long shadow over the surface. The field of view is 0.4 miles (0.7 km). For reference, the largest crater in the center of the image is 257 ft (78 m) wide, which is almost the size of a football field.

The photo was taken from a distance of six miles on April 28. The craters illustrate well the rubble pile/sandbox nature of this asteroid. They all look like what you’d expect if the impact was able to easily drive itself deep into the a pile of sand and loose rocks. The resulting crater thus has a very indistinct rim and a sloping floor down to a central point.

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The salty liquid water on Mars

9:49 am

Map of seasonal salty liquid water on Mars
Click for full unannotated image.

The map above, reduced and annotated by me, comes from a new science paper that has attempted to model where on Mars we might find liquid very salty water, based on the planet’s known temperature and make-up. From the press release:

The team of researchers used laboratory measurements of Mars-relevant salts along with Martian climate information from both planetary models and spacecraft measurements. They developed a model to predict where, when, and for how long brines are stable on the surface and shallow subsurface of Mars. They found that brine formation from some salts can lead to liquid water over 40% of the Martian surface but only seasonally, during 2% of the Martian year.

“In our work, we show that the highest temperature a stable brine will experience on Mars is -48°C (-55° F). This is well below the lowest temperature we know life can tolerate,” says Dr. Rivera-Valentín. “For many years we have worried about contaminating Mars with terrestrial life as we have sent spacecraft to explore its surface. These new results reduce some of the risk of exploring Mars,” noted Dr. Alejandro Soto at the Southwest Research Institute and co-author of the study. [emphasis mine]

I have added a red rectangle to the map, showing the candidate landing zone for SpaceX’s Starship. This paper illustrates again that this choice is a good one. We know from other research that there is a lot of ice very close to the surface here. This research indicates that for a little less than one percent of each year, some of that ice will turn to liquid brine.

Whether it will be easier to process the ice or the brine into drinkable water remains unknown. This location however will give future colonists that option.

That this model also suggests that there is little risk of contaminating Mars accidently with terrestrial life is really not a surprise. All the research of Mars for decades has found that it is inhospitable to terrestrial life. This data however is further confirmation, and tells us once again that worrying about contaminating the planet is a irrelevancy. For scientific reasons some precautions should be taken, but to spend a lot of time and money sterilizing the spacecraft we send there will be a fool’s errand. For humans to settle Mars will require a very very high level of engineering and adaptation, something we humans are very naturally good at, but something that shouldn’t be burdened with unnecessary tasks or restrictions.

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Long March 5B’s core stage might hit the ground in uncontrolled reentry

10:28 pm

China does it again! The core first stage of China’s first Long March 5B launch is expected to fall back to Earth sometime tomorrow or the next day in an uncontrolled reentry, and it appears that it is large enough for its denser sections to reach the ground.

The core stage is more massive than other notable satellites that have plunged unguided back into Earth’s atmosphere in the last decade, such as China’s Tiangong 1 space lab, Russia’s failed Phobos-Grunt Mars probe, and NASA’s UARS atmospheric research satellite. It’s about one-quarter the mass of NASA’s Skylab space station, which made headlines when it fell to Earth over Australia in 1979.

…The Long March 5B rocket body is mostly comprised of hollow propellant tanks, and much of the rocket’s structure is expected to burn up during re-entry. But some pieces, such as denser parts of the rocket’s two main engines, could survive the fall to Earth and hit the ground. [emphasis mine]

It is very hard at this moment to predict where the stage will come down, which could be as far north as New York and as far south as Wellington, New Zealand.

China is a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty, which states as follows:

Each State Party to the Treaty that launches or procures the launching of an object into outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, and each State Party from whose territory or facility an object is launched, is internationally liable for damage to another State Party to the Treaty or to its natural or juridical persons by such object or its component parts on the Earth, in air or in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies. [emphasi mine]

Does China care? Apparently not. This is the second uncontrolled reentry of a large Chinese object in less than two years, since their first space station module, Tiangong-1, came crashing down in 2018. They might have had an excuse with Tiangong-1, since they lost control of it. With this core stage there are no excuses, assuming they have not made plans to bring it down in a controlled manner. We will find out in the next 48 hours.

Nonetheless, this should give us warning about their intentions in space. Though the treaty also forbids any nation from claiming territory, and they will certainly object to the Trump administration’s attempts recently to get around that restriction, I guarantee they will take possession completely of any territory they grab on the Moon or on any asteroids. It does really appear that they really don’t care about international treaties, except when it is to their benefit.

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Musk: Tesla leaving California due to government-imposed shut down

2:00 pm

Good: Elon Musk yesterday announced in a furious tweet yesterday that he has had enough of the government-imposed shut down in California due to the Wuhan flu panic, and will be shifting Tesla operations from that state.

“Frankly, this is the final straw,” Musk tweeted. “Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately. If we even retain Fremont manufacturing activity at all, it will be dependen (sic) on how Tesla is treated in the future. Tesla is the last carmaker left in CA.”

He is also suing Alameda County, since its order to stay closed contradicted the okay he had gotten from fascist governor Gavin Newsom. How these actions here will effect SpaceX is not yet clear. Last I heard that company was going to put its factory to build Starship in the port of Los Angeles. Maybe not now.

I expect more businesses that can will be shifting their operations from the dictatorial Democratically-controlled blue states to places that are more friendly to freedom and free enterprise.

A bit of history: This flight from leftist states mirrors what happened in East Germany during the 1950s during the Cold War. The Soviets, direct ancestors to today’s Democratic Party, were insistent on imposing communism in East Germany, which quickly resulted in poverty and an inability of anyone to make a living. In response people and businesses fled in great numbers, making East Germany the only country in Europe to be losing population.

To solve this, Khrushchev decided in 1961 to build the Berlin Wall and make everyone in East Germany a prisoner. I will not be surprised if the leftist states, such as California, Oregon, Washington, New Jersey, and New York, soon consider the same solution. Nor would I be surprised if soon these very states find large portions seceding from them to also escape this tyranny.

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The epidemic model that panicked the world was junk

12:17 pm

A software engineer has done a careful fact-based analysis of the code that runs the computer model of now disgraced and fired Neil Ferguson of Imperial College in London — the computer model that had predicted millions would die in mere weeks from COVID-19 and thus triggered the worldwide panic over it — and found that it is buggy, unreliable, produces different results with the same data, and often does so for completely irrelevant factors (such as simply running it on different computers).

Hat tip Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings.

The conclusion from this software engineer:

All papers based on this code should be retracted immediately. Imperial’s modelling efforts should be reset with a new team that isn’t under Professor Ferguson, and which has a commitment to replicable results with published code from day one.

On a personal level, I’d go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded. This sort of work is best done by the insurance sector. Insurers employ modellers and data scientists, but also employ managers whose job is to decide whether a model is accurate enough for real world usage and professional software engineers to ensure model software is properly tested, understandable and so on. Academic efforts don’t have these people, and the results speak for themselves.

The second paragraph applies equally to all computer modeling in the climate field, which has been repeatedly found to have similar problems.

Science should be based on data, from the field, not models predicting that data. Models have a minor use as a guide, but it is beyond dangerous to depend on them in any manner at all. Had our politicians relied on the available data when COVID-19 first started to spread, instead of these fake models, they would not have panicked, and would have instead done what they should have, focused on protecting the elderly and the sick, the only part of the population under serious threat.

Similarly, had the public and the press ignored these bad models and focused on that same data, they too would not have been frozen in fear, and would have demanded a more rational approach to the epidemic.

I know I have been repeating myself on this subject, but it must be driven home. The modelers are unreliable. The modelers are often driven by political agendas, not the facts. The modelers must not be relied upon for any long term policy.

Repeat this mantra to yourself, over and over again. It should sound a warning in your brain every time you read another article predicting doomsday from something, from global warming, from sea level rise, from the ozone hole, from some disease, from any crises these frauds want to latch onto.

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Evidence suggests Ryugu was once closer to Sun

11:38 am

The uncertainty of science: Spectral data collected of the surface of Ryugu by Japan’s Hayabusa-2 probe suggests that the asteroid once spent a period of time much closer to the Sun.

The combined data show an oddly striated world. Ryugu’s equator and poles are tinged blue and are brighter compared with its darker, reddish mid-latitudes. These color differences wouldn’t be obvious to the human eye, although the brightness changes might be.

…As Tomokatsu Morota (University of Tokyo) and colleagues write in the May 8th Science, Ryugu’s boulders likely start bluish. Then a combination of solar wind exposure, meteoroid impacts, and solar heating reddens them. This redder stuff migrates to the asteroid’s mid-latitudes over time, because topographically those are the lowest on Ryugu’s surface. That movement leaves the higher equator and polar regions relatively bluer and brighter.

Based on this data, the scientists posit that Ryugu was closer to the Sun from 800,000 to 8 million years ago, and that the evidence also suggests that the asteroid is only at most 17 million years old.

To put it mildly, there are great uncertainties to these conclusions.

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“A naked abuse of authority.”

9:41 am

The quote that makes up my headline comes from Congressman Devin Nunes (R-California). It was said in response to the new information that has come out about how partisan and corrupt FBI agents, hostile to Trump and his administration, falsified the interview report of Trump’s then National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in order to get him either “prosecuted or fired” (their words). The full quote:

“The FBI set up General Flynn — that is clear as day,” Rep. Devin Nunes, ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, tells RealClearInvestigations. “There is FBI leadership ordering the case kept open when agents wanted to close it for lack of evidence, the discussion of getting Flynn to lie or trying to get him fired, the ambush interview, the withholding of exculpatory evidence, and many other acts of blatant malfeasance. None of this is standard procedure. It’s a naked abuse of authority.”

Nunes might be a politician and a Republican (with the expected partisan agendas), but everything he says here is accurate and true (as has been the case for Nunes throughout this sorry affair). The article outlines in excruciating detail the fraud and manipulation that FBI officials Peter Srtzok, Lisa Page, and Andrew McCabe went through to rewrite the report of Flynn’s FBI interview, in order to create the false impression that he had lied during that interview, and thus frame him.

Revealing this criminal activity and abuse of power by these FBI officials is good, but as long as they avoid indictments and punishment, we accomplish nothing. These people have to face juries, and go to prison. If they don’t, then nothing will change in Washington, and in fact we in the future can expect more such abuses, coming from both parties.

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Chinese manned test capsule returns to Earth

9:03 am

The new colonial movement: China’s first unmanned test flight of its new manned capsule, still unnamed, ended today with that capsule’s safe return to Earth.

Before re-entry into the atmosphere, the capsule executed a skip maneuver employing aerodynamic lift in the high upper atmosphere. The technique is used to extend the re-entry time for vehicles returning to Earth from the Moon to avoid having to shed a large amount of velocity in a short time causing very high rates of peak heating. The skip reentry was used by Apollo Command Module returning from the Moon, as well as the Soviet Zond Probes and the Chinese Chang’e 5-T1.

Following atmospheric reentry, and at a determined altitude, two deceleration parachutes were opened, stabilizing the vehicle. Then, the three main parachutes were deployed, slowing the flight speed of descent. According to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), moments before touching down the heat shield was discarded and six airbags were deployed and inflated to help it land softly.

More here from China’s propaganda press, which included this detail:

Different from the three-capsule structure of Shenzhou spaceships currently in use, the new spacecraft comprises a return capsule, which is the command center and the living place for astronauts, and a service capsule, which provides power and energy, according to the CAST.

In other words, the Shenzhou copied the Soyuz design, while this new spacecraft copied the American design used in all our manned capsules.

I have embedded below the fold a short video released by China’s state-run press, showing the reentry. That capsule sure looks a lot like an Apollo capsule. It also looks surprisingly scorched.
» Read more

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Study: 50% of all small businesses to vanish due to Wuhan lock downs

10:08 pm

The Great Wuhan Depression: According to a new survey, it is predicted that 50% of all small businesses will vanish in the next six months due to losses incurred because of the government-imposed Wuhan flu shut downs.

The study also predicts that another 12% will go bankrupt in the next month. That’s 62% of all small businesses, gone in a flash, leaving their owners and all of their employees jobless. And though it is only implied at the link, the loss of those businesses will ripple outward, causing more businesses to fail. The consequences will be horrifying.

“Before the pandemic, food policy experts say, roughly one out of every eight or nine Americans struggled to stay fed. Now as many as one out of every four are projected to join the ranks of the hungry, said Giridhar Mallya, senior policy officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for public health,” the AP reported Tuesday.

And that’s just in the states. On a global level, the United Nations has predicted that hundreds of thousands of children may die before year’s end specifically because of the economic realities being engendered by the current crisis. “Economic hardship experienced by families as a result of the global economic downturn could result in hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths in 2020, reversing the last 2 to 3 years of progress in reducing infant mortality within a single year,” a U.N. report published last month reads. “And this alarming figure does not even take into account services disrupted due to the crisis – it only reflects the current relationship between economies and mortality, so is likely an under-estimate of the impact.” [emphasis mine]

As I have written repeatedly, when you find yourself in this kind of crisis, you need to rationally and calmly do a cost-benefit analysis, figuring out the best solution that will do the least harm, to the most people. In this case a likely smart move would have been to look at the early data, now confirmed, that showed the the disease was only a serious threat to the old and sick, and that to the young and healthy the Wuhan flu was no threat at all. A wise plan then would have focused on protecting the elderly and the sick, while letting the rest of the population not at risk live their lives normally, get infected, and develop antibodies to the disease so that the epidemic would peter out quickly — as has been done with every flu-type epidemic for more than a century.

That would have been a rational approach, reasonable and likely very successful. It would not have prevented all deaths from COVID-19, but then no plan could. What it would have done is minimize the damage as much as possible.

Instead, our politicians, in their never-ending partisan battles, depended not on the data but on faulty computer models, which have been routinely found to be inaccurate and unable to predict anything. Those models, vastly wrong, said that millions would get sick and hundreds of thousands would die, and this would all happen in a matter of weeks. The politicians panicked, and destroyed the economy, even as they enforced policies that actually exposed the elderly and the sick directly to the disease, causing many more to die than was necessary.

The consequences of this madness in the coming years will be hard to measure. We can hope that the economy might recover. We can hope that our government will back off and reinstate its respect for the law, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and its citizens.

We can hope. I have no idea however if this is a vain hope. I am not optimistic.

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A relaxed crater on Mars

12:40 pm

A relaxed crater on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, shows what the science team for the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) call a “Relaxed Crater.” This particular image was taken in July 2014. A more recent photo was taken in March 2020 to create a stereo pair, but because this older image shows more of the crater I decided to highlight it.

The crater is considered relaxed because it is very shallow and appears as if, after impact, some process caused the interior to in-fill with material even as the rim became less pronounced and degraded (as explained in this paper [pdf]). The process could have involved either molten magma or melted ice. As this crater is located in the northern highlands to the southwest of Erebus Mountains, in a region that research has consistently suggested has a great deal of ice just below the surface, the latter seems likely. This assumption is further reinforced in that the crater is also located in the mid-latitudes where scientists have found a lot of craters they think are filled with buried glaciers. This certainly seems the case here.
» Read more

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Pennsylvania: 79 average age of COVID-19 deaths; 67% in nursing homes

11:02 am

What was obvious two months ago has now been confirmed again in Pennsylvania: The average age of those who died from the Wuhan flu was 79, and 67% of the deaths occurred in nursing homes.

Moreover, almost all of those who died also had some underlying other chronic illness.

In other words, the early data that said the disease is really only a threat to the elderly and the ill has been confirmed, again, and that shutting down the whole society and destroying the economy made no sense. If you an ordinary healthy person COVID-19 is not a threat to you. In any way at all.

Meanwhile, what about that worry that the disease’s arrival would overwhelm the healthcare system? Well, this same Pennsylvania report found that, as of yesterday, of the 37,000 hospital beds in the state, only 2,572 were in use, meaning that 93% of the beds were empty.

In other words, we cancelled all other medical procedures, actually causing some people to die because they could not get treatment, and ended up with so much spare hospital capacity that hospitals are going bankrupt because they have no patients.

But don’t worry. Our politicians are godlike and know best. Kneel before them and obey their commands, without question. You will be saved.

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NASA considering consolidating two Gateway launches into one

9:16 am

Capitalism in space: NASA’s Artemis program is now considering using a single launch to place two different Gateway modules into space, rather than two separate launches.

Originally, NASA wanted to launch the PPE and HALO modules – together representing the absolute bare minimum needed to build a functional Gateway – on separate commercial rockets in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Now, according to NASA associate administrator Doug Loverro, the space agency has made the decision to launch both modules simultaneously on the same commercial rocket.

This decision was made in large part because it makes sense from a technical simplicity and overall efficiency standpoint but also because several commercial launch vehicles – either currently operational or soon to be – are set to debut extremely large payload fairings. As a combined payload, the Gateway PPE and HALO modules would be too big for just about any existing launch vehicle, while the tiny handful it might fit in lack the performance needed to send such a heavy payload to the Moon.

Falcon Heavy apparently has the performance needed, as NASA used the rocket and a new stretched fairing developed by SpaceX for military customers as a baseline to determine whether PPE and HALO could launch together. Given that NASA could have technically used any of the vehicles expected to have large payload fairings for that analysis, the explicit use and mention of Falcon Heavy rather strongly suggests that the SpaceX rocket is a front runner for the new combined launch contract. This isn’t exactly surprising, given that the massive rocket has already completed three successful launches and will attempt at least another four missions between now and 2023.

Note the rocket that is not mentioned: SLS.

My regular readers know my consistent opposition to Gateway. That opposition was based on its initial design, depending for launch and operations entirely on NASA’s SLS rocket, and requiring it to be built before we landed on the Moon. Based on the SLS program’s track record, I believed Gateway would become, like SLS, nothing more than a pork barrel project accomplishing nothing but funneling government payroll to congressional districts while failing to launch any missions into space.

If NASA however is shifting gears, and aiming to allow private enterprise to build, launch, and operate Gateway, for considerably less cost and time, than Gateway might actually be of some value, mostly because there is actually a chance it might really be built, within a few short years.

I remain skeptical however. I still have questions about this lunar station’s utility, at this time. We might be spending a lot of money for a space station that won’t get us anywhere. Or maybe if NASA rethinks it properly it could provide us the real opportunity to test construction of an interplanetary spaceship, in lunar orbit.

We will have to see how this plays out. This story does appear encouraging however.

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China: All well for manned test capsule

9:00 am

The new colonial movement: A sparse report in China’s propaganda state-run press today states that the test manned capsule launched by its Long March 5B rocket on May 5 is functioning normally in orbit.

So far, the new spaceship, developed by the China Academy of Space Technology under the CASC, has unfolded its solar panels and positioned them toward the sun, deployed its relay antenna and established a relay communication link, as well as conducted autonomous orbit control four times.

It is now in a stable flight attitude in a highly elliptical orbit, with the power supply, measurements and control links normal, said the CASC.

They intend to raise its orbit three times before returning to Earth on May 8th. This higher orbit is likely intended to increase the speed in which the spacecraft reenters the atmosphere, thus facilitating one of the mission’s goals, testing the system’s heat shield. It is likely that this higher orbit will also allow them to test reentry procedures for returning the capsule from beyond Earth orbit.

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NY mayor forbids protests

2:34 pm

The Democratic and fascist mayor of New York City, Bill De Blasio, has now declared the city a first amendment-free zone, where protests will no longer be allowed.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea stated outright this week that people are not permitted to gather for protests in public due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The city leaders pointed to the need to maintain social distancing in order to prevent greater spread of COVID-19, stating that this takes precedence over people’s rights to exercise their First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly.

Can I point out once again the big lie being spread by these fascist thugs? The original reason we were told to “social distance” was merely a very temporary measure to slow the spread of the Wuhan flu so that the healthcare system would not be overwhelmed. We’ve achieved that, handily, with much room to spare (while bankrupting ourselves in the process).

Now they are instead claiming its to “prevent the greater spread of COVID-19”. That is a lie. Social distancing is not going to stop the disease from spreading. It never will.

De Blasio’s goal is not your safety. His goal is power, more for him and less for you. You have been warned.

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Arctic ozone hole closes

10:13 am

The uncertainty of science: The largest ozone hole ever detected over the north pole has now closed.

After looming above the Arctic for nearly a month, the single largest ozone hole ever detected over the North Pole has finally closed, researchers from the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) reported. “The unprecedented 2020 Northern Hemisphere ozone hole has come to an end,” CAMS researchers tweeted on April 23.

The hole in the ozone layer — a portion of Earth’s atmosphere that shields the planet from ultraviolet radiation — first opened over the Arctic in late March when unusual wind conditions trapped frigid air over the North Pole for several weeks in a row. Those winds, known as a polar vortex, created a circular cage of cold air that led to the formation of high-altitude clouds in the region. The clouds mixed with man-made pollutants like chlorine and bromine, eating away at the surrounding ozone gas until a massive hole roughly three times the size of Greenland opened in the atmosphere, according to a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA). [emphasis mine]

Note that the north pole hole occurred because of unusually frigid and cold conditions, something I thought we were never going to see again because of global warming.

The last paragraph of the article at the link reveals a lot of ignorance by its writer, Brandon Specktor, where he discusses the south pole ozone hole. First, he says it “has existed for roughly four decades.” Wrong. The south pole ozone hole was first detected in the 1950s, and has likely existed every winter for eons.

Next, he wonders if it is “starting to close.” Wrong. That ozone hole opens every winter and closes every summer, like clockwork. When winter arrives and the south pole is in darkness, oxygen molecules are no longer being ionized by sunlight and thus there is a drop in the production of ozone, producing the hole. When sunlight begins hitting the upper atmosphere in the spring it starts ionizing oxygen molecules again to produce ozone, and the hole goes away.

Then he notes that scientists hope the hole will “heal” and forever disappear by 2050. Wrong. The data says instead that the south pole ozone hole is a natural phenomenon that occurs every winter. It is not a wound against the earth.

Finally, he claims that the south pole ozone hole exists almost entirely because of us evil humans, first because of global warming and second because until 1987 we put ozone-depleting pollutants into the atmosphere. Wrong. As I said, the ozone hole is almost entirely a natural phenomenon, caused each winter because sunlight is no longer hitting the upper atmosphere above Antarctica and thus oxygen molecules are no longer being ionized into ozone. Those pollutants might have made it slightly larger in the late 20th century, but then, that theory has a problem, as most of those pollutants were released in the northern hemisphere, where they would have little or no interaction with the atmosphere of the southern hemisphere. (The atmospheres of the two hemispheres are largely independent.) Yet it was only in the south that we have generally seen an ozone hole

I predict, very confidently, that come 2050 climate scientists will discover, “unexpectedly”, that the south pole ozone hole has not “closed” or “healed”, but continues to reappear, each winter. And they will have by then discovered that depending on circumstances, a north pole ozone hole also appears during some colder winters, which despite their repeatedly failed predictions of global warming will likely continue to happen.

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UAE’s Mars probe arrives in Japan for launch in July

9:31 am

The new colonial movement: The United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Mars orbiter, dubbed Hope, has arrived at its launch site in Japan in preparation for its July launch on a Mitsubishi H-2A rocket.

Previously I had thought the probe had been built in the UAE with help from engineers from India, but that was not the case. Instead, the probe was mostly built by Americans, in America.

Carrying three science instruments, the Hope mission will measure conditions in the Martian atmosphere from a unique semi-synchronous orbit high above the Red Planet. The mission is the first from the Arab world to travel to another planet.

About the size of Mini Cooper, the spacecraft was assembled at LASP’s facilities in Colorado [Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics], with the help of Emirati engineers and scientists. The probe was delivered to Dubai in February for additional testing, and then was supposed to be transported to Japan in early May.

But the coronavirus pandemic forced officials to shuffle the schedule, and mission managers decided to send the probe to Japan early. [emphasis mine]

In other words, this probe might be financed by the UAE, and it might have UAE engineers and scientists involved, but essentially the UAE paid LASP to build it for them.

I am not criticizing the UAE for this effort, but to call it an Arab mission is somewhat dishonest. This is a joint American-UAE probe. If it results in producing qualified engineers in the UAE capability of building their own future planetary probe, fine. They are not doing it now, however.

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Successful static fire Raptor engine test on 4th Starship prototype

9:19 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX yesterday successfully completed the first static fire Raptor engine test on its fourth Starship prototype, laying the foundation for a planned 150-meter vertical hop later this month.

The test lasted about three seconds.

I want to make a quick comparison between SpaceX’s approach for developing Starship, and NASA’s development of SLS. The differences are stark.

First, SpaceX began cutting metal a little over one year ago, and is already testing a full scale prototype, fully fueled, with its planned flight engine.

SLS began development officially around 2011. It uses the engines from the Space Shuttle, so those are already flight proven. However, even after almost a decade of development NASA as yet to do a single static fire test with those engines actually installed on an SLS rocket, either a prototype or the real thing.

Second, in the past year SpaceX has been aggressively testing the fueling of Starship, using a series of prototypes. With this fourth iteration they have apparently gotten the fueling process and the tanks to work effectively. Further tests of course will increase their confidence in the system’s reliability.

SLS, even after almost a decade of development, has yet to do any similar tank tests. Instead, NASA has done separate individual tests of the rocket’s tanks, but never with everything fully assembled. The agency, and its lead contractor Boeing, hope to finally do their first full scale SLS tank test and static fire test sometime later this year. As they have never filled the tanks in this manner before, they have admitted that problems could arise, including the possibility that the tanks could leak.

Note the big difference. SpaceX has done this testing very early in development. NASA is doing it very late in development. Which to you seems the better approach?

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China has problem with test “cargo return capsule”

9:01 am

According to China’s propaganda state-run news, an “inflatable cargo return capsule ” launched on yesterday’s Long March 5B rocket “operated abnormally” during its return to Earth.

That’s all they tell us. The description suggests this is not the test manned capsule launched by the Long March 5B, but the text is vague enough that it could be, since that unmanned capsule was supposedly going to return to Earth in one or two days.

At the moment I have not seen any other updates on the status of that manned capsule. If the problem was with it, this issue could delay their manned space station program, scheduled to go into full operation by 2022.

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The closest black hole: 1,000 light years away?

8:48 am

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers now think they have detected evidence of a stellar-mass black hole only a thousand light years away and orbiting a star system that is visible to the naked eye.

Thomas Rivinius, an astronomer with the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and his colleagues studied the unusual star system HR 6819 in this way using a 2.2-meter telescope in Chile, operated by ESO and the Max Planck Society. They thought it was a binary system, but there was an extra wobble in the periodic light shifts of one of the stars that indicated something else was asserting its presence. It turned out to be a triple system, with one star in a fast 40-day orbit with an unseen companion and another star on a more distant, slow-moving trajectory, they write today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. The invisible companion’s mass was large enough—four times the mass of the Sun—that, if it was a star, “we would have seen it,” Rivinius says.

Though there are a lot of uncertainties, this discovery is reasonable, and expected. In the coming years astronomers will surely find more such stellar-mass black holes, with some even closer to Earth.

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Blue Origin to deliver first BE-4 engines to ULA this summer

8:42 am

Capitalism in space: Development of Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine, to be used in both its New Glenn rocket as well as ULA’s new Vulcan rocket, appears to be finally reaching its conclusion with the planned delivery this summer of two operational engines to ULA.

The bulk of the article at the link is mostly a summary of stuff that had already been revealed about the development of the New Glenn rocket. The only new piece of information that I could glean was this engine delivery date. It is significant, however, because no rocket company can ever really design its rocket before it has finished building the rocket’s engines. With the BE-4 now complete, I would expect the development of both New Glenn and Vulcan to proceed with great speed.

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Trump administration drafting new space agreement to supersede Outer Space Treaty

2:49 pm

The new colonial movement: According to this Reuters article, the Trump administration is presently drafting a new space agreement, which they have dubbed the “Artemis Accords,” that would allow private property ownership in space and thus supersede Outer Space Treaty’s restrictions on sovereignty.

The Artemis Accords, named after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s new Artemis moon program, propose “safety zones” that would surround future moon bases to prevent damage or interference from rival countries or companies operating in close proximity.

The pact also aims to provide a framework under international law for companies to own the resources they mine, the sources said.

In the coming weeks, U.S. officials plan to formally negotiate the accords with space partners such as Canada, Japan, and European countries, as well as the United Arab Emirates, opening talks with countries the Trump administration sees as having “like-minded” interests in lunar mining.

They at the moment are not including Russia or China in the discussions, since those countries have little interest in promoting private enterprise and ownership in space.

Back in 2017 I proposed in an op-ed for The Federalist that Trump do almost exactly this:

Trump should propose a new Outer Space Treaty, superseding the old, that would let nations plant their flags in space. This new treaty should establish the rules by which individual nations can claim territory and establish their law and sovereignty on other worlds or asteroids.

The American homesteading acts of the 1800s could work as a good guide. Under those laws, if an American citizen staked a claim and maintained and developed it for five years, that claim and an accompanying amount of acreage would then become theirs.

In space, Trump could propose that in order for a nation to make a territorial claim, a nation or its citizens must establish a facility. If they occupy and use it for a minimum of five years, that nation can claim it, plus a reasonable amount of territory around it, and place it under that nation’s sovereignty.

Now consider this quote from the Reuters article:

The safety zones – whose size would vary depending on the operation – would allow for coordination between space actors without technically claiming territory as sovereign, he said. “The idea is if you are going to be coming near someone’s operations, and they’ve declared safety zones around it, then you need to reach out to them in advance, consult and figure out how you can do that safely for everyone.”

In other words, the safety zones would essentially be the claimed property of the colonizers, a completely reasonable position.

It is hard to say at this moment whether the Trump administration will succeed in this tactic, of side-stepping a renegotiation of the Outer Space Treaty by working out a new agreement with other interested players. Canada for example has expressed reservations about the Trump administration’s recent public announcement encouraging private ownership of resources in space.

Regardless, that the administration now appears to be addressing the limitations of the Outer Space Treaty is very heartening news. Let us hope they can make it happen.

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The eroding edge of Mars’ largest volcanic ash field

1:45 pm

Eroding yardangs at the edge of Mars' largest volcanic ash field
Click for full image.

Cool image time! In the regions between the biggest volcanoes on Mars is the Medusae Fossae Formation, a immense deposit of volcanic ash that extends across as much surface area as the nation of India. As planetary scientist Kevin Lewis of Johns Hopkins University explained to me previously,

In general, much of the [formation] seems to be in net erosion now, retaining very few craters on the surface. …One hypothesis is that this long term erosion, since it’s so enormous, is the primary source of the dust we see covering the much of the planet’s surface.

The image above, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on January 25, 2020. It shows one very small area at the very edge of the Medusae ash deposit, in a region where that deposit is clearly being eroding away by the prevailing southeast-to-northwest winds. The mesas of this ash that remain are called yardangs, their ash more tightly pressed together so that it resists erosion a bit longer than the surrounding material.

In the context map below the location of these yardangs is indicated by the white cross, right on the edge of the Medusae ash field.
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California building “army” to track those infected with COVID-19

10:40 am

They’re coming for you next: The California government is now building an “army of tracers” to track those infected with COVID-19 and restrict their future movements.

Gov. Gavin Newsom addressed the concern about inadequate contact tracing on [April 22], announcing plans to train 10,000 people to help local health departments. “The good news is we believe we have the capacity to build an army of tracers,” Newsom said, although he did not say when they’d be ready to deploy.

More on that “army” and its goals here.

“As people move more, we increase the risk for people to get sick,” Sonia Angell, California Department of Public Health director and State Health Officer, said in a live stream. “If people get sick, we want to identify those individuals very early, and then make sure that all of their contacts are also identified.”

…The new contact-tracing platform the state announced today will sync up with California’s existing digital disease surveillance platform, and contact tracers can use it to check in on people’s symptoms through texts, chat, emails, and phone automation, according to Angell. Angell emphasized that the database will focus on health information and will be kept confidential. [emphasis mine]

If you believe the last two words of that quote, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.

The second link admits that for this whole plan to work, under present privacy laws “people must be willing to cooperate.” I can tell you this: If I am tested for the Wuhan flu, the very last people I will tell my results to will be these fascist thugs. They aren’t really interested in stopping the virus, which is impossible for them to do. No, what they want is to build up a database of people whom they will then have the right to oppress, by law.

And if you don’t believe me, I still have that bridge in Brooklyn for sale. Make you a good deal, too!

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A failed star with cloud bands like Jupiter’s

9:32 am

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers think they have detected cloud bands similar to Jupiter’s on a brown dwarf about 6.5 light years away.

A team of astronomers has discovered that the closest known brown dwarf, Luhman 16A, shows signs of cloud bands similar to those seen on Jupiter and Saturn. This is the first time scientists have used the technique of polarimetry to determine the properties of atmospheric clouds outside of the solar system, or exoclouds.

Brown dwarfs are objects heavier than planets but lighter than stars, and typically have 13 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter. Luhman 16A is part of a binary system containing a second brown dwarf, Luhman 16B. At a distance of 6.5 light-years, it’s the third closest system to our Sun after Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s Star. Both brown dwarfs weigh about 30 times as much as Jupiter.

Despite the fact that Luhman 16A and 16B have similar masses and temperatures (about 1,900° F or 1,000° C), and presumably formed at the same time, they show markedly different weather. Luhman 16B shows no sign of stationary cloud bands, instead exhibiting evidence of more irregular, patchy clouds. Luhman 16B therefore has noticeable brightness variations as a result of its cloudy features, unlike Luhman 16A.

This conclusion is based on studying the polarized light coming from both brown dwarfs. For Luhman 16A, the result suggested bands. For Luhman 16B, the result suggested patchy, irregular clouds like on Earth.

The emphasis should be on the words “suggested” and “uncertainty.” This is good science, but the data is very sparse. We will need to actually see at these objects to really determine their weather.

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