Category: Points of Information

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

California wildfire threatens Wilson Observatory

10:03 am

One of the many wildfires raging across California has now come with 500 feet of the Mt. Wilson Observatory.

Officials at the observatory said all personnel had been evacuated as the fire was “knocking on our door.”

Firefighters battling the blaze had made slight headway in recent days in trying to control the flames that erupted September 6, but containment shrank from 6 percent to 3 percent Tuesday, according to the Angeles National Forest. “They are in a firefight right now, because it is so close,” LA County Fire Captain David Dantic told the Los Angeles Times, referring to crews positioned at Mt. Wilson.

He said the fire, located about 16 miles (25 kilometers) northeast of downtown Los Angeles, had grown to 40,000 acres (16,200 hectares). “It’s a bigger area now,” Dantic said. “Before, we had 6 percent containment when it was about 30,000 acres, but now the fire has gotten bigger. It’s a bigger footprint. That’s why the containment is down.”

KNX radio said the fire was also threatening broadcast towers in the area worth more than a billion dollars.

If destroyed I doubt seriously there would be money to rebuild Wilson, especially because its location near the bright lights of Los Angeles limits its astronomical value. Astronomers have shifted its use to other purposes that are not as badly affected by the light pollution, but once gone it will be hard to raise the cash to bring it back.

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Martian crater filled with lava

9:06 am

Lava filled Martian crater
Click for full image.

Cool image time! Unlike most of the recent images I’ve posted from Mars, today’s has nothing glacial about it. Instead, the photo to the right, cropped to post here, shows us a crater where lava broke through the southern rim to fill its interior.

The picture was taken on July 15, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The crater is located within what I call volcano country on Mars, just inside the Athabasca Valles lava field, what some scientists believe [pdf] is the youngest lava field on Mars, estimated have occurred less than 600 million years ago.

The overview map below provides context.

Overview map

The tiny white box south of Elysium Mons indicates the location of this crater. The dark blue areas indicate the extent of the Athabasca lava field. The Medusae Fossae Formation is the largest volcanic ash deposit on Mars.

The Athabasca lava field is about the size of Great Britain, and is thought to have been laid down in only a matter of a few weeks. When it spread it clearly reached this crater, the lava pushing through to fill it. If you look at the full image you can see that the north-trending lava flow even continued past the crater a considerable distance on both sides, the crater acting like a big rock in a stream, blocking the flow.

Since this happened more than half a billion years ago, a lot of erosion has occurred, mostly between the crater’s rim and the edge of the ponded but now solidified lava.

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Seven weeks after mask mandate, 40% of Ohio counties show an INCREASE in COVID-19

8:28 am

Seven weeks after the governor of Ohio imposed a mask mandate, it now appears that 40% of the state’s counties show an increase in coronavirus cases.

35 of 88 counties (40 percent) experienced a net increase in cases. … A total of 47 of 88 counties, or 53 percent, saw either a net increase or no more than a 20 percent reduction in cases. Fourteen of 88 counties saw a 50 percent to 70 percent reduction. Only five of 88 counties saw a 70 percent or more reduction.

This data confirms what has been seen in other states as well. Mask mandates have completely failed to stop the spread of COVID-19. While some places saw a reduction in cases, most did not. Worse, the data above as well as elsewhere suggests that the mask mandates might actually be contributing to the disease’s spread, mainly because almost no one in the general public uses them properly. Instead, everyone uses them over and over without washing, while touching them with unwashed hands continually. They thus act to collect pathogens, at exactly the place you breathe.

Masks are useless. They don’t do what too many foolish and ignorant politicians claim. Take them off. Throw them out. Claim you have legitimate medical reasons for not wearing them and stand firm. You will find that almost everyone will agree, and let you be. And the few control freaks that try to harass you can and should be ignored.

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Scientists declare solar minimum over, with next sunspot maximum coming

10:47 am

Scientists from the government agencies of NOAA and NASA today announced that the solar minimum of the past sunspot cycle occurred in December 2019, and that the ramp up to the next solar maximum has begun, which they predict will be as active as the last weak maximum.

The announcement and prediction was put forth by “the Solar Cycle 25 Prediction Panel, an international group of experts co-sponsored by NASA and NOAA.” While this group is made up of legitimate scientists studying the Sun, its press releases tend to be lobbying efforts for government programs, which nicely describes today’s release as well. The release not only touts the importance of their work, it links this work to the Trump administration’s Artemis program to get back to the Moon.

Note also that this announcement only makes official what has been obvious for months, as I have noted in my monthly sunspot updates. See for example this quote from my September 7th update:

What is clear is that the activity does herald the next maximum. As in the past few months, the sunspots in August all had polarities that assigned them to the new maximum. While it is not impossible for there to be a handful of sunspots in the next few months that belong to the last maximum, it now appears that the last cycle is pretty much over. We are entering the ramp up to the next maximum, presently predicted by a portion of the solar science community aligned with NOAA to be a weak one.

The only change is that it appears they are upping their prediction for the next maximum slightly. Before the prediction panel had said that the next maximum would be weaker than the past maximum. Now they it appears they are saying it will be the same.

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Empty Chinese apartment complex overrun with plants and mosquitoes

9:27 am

The coming dark age: A Chinese apartment complex, designed to be an “eco-paradise,” has instead become an empty jungle overrun with plants and mosquitoes.

An experimental green housing project in a Chinese megacity promised prospective residents life in a “vertical forest,” with manicured gardens on every balcony. All 826 apartments were sold out by April this year, according to the project’s estate agent, but instead of a modern eco-paradise, the towers look like the set of a desolate, post-apocalyptic film.

The problem? The mosquitoes love the plants too. Only a handful of families have moved into Chengdu’s Qiyi City Forest Garden because of an infestation, state media reported.

The pictures at the link are quite incredible. Imagine being surrounded by neighbors who allow their property to fall apart and you have a sense of what these buildings look like.

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College English Department to only accept students studying “Black Studies”

9:15 am

The coming dark age: The English Department at the University of Chicago will next year only accept new students who focus all their literature work on “Black Studies.”

The University of Chicago’s English Department declared it will only accept applicants interested in ‘working in and with Black studies’ for its 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle.

In a statement uploaded to the English department’s website in July, the faculty announced their commitment to the “struggle of Black and indigenous people, and all racialized and dispossessed people, against inequality and brutality. For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black studies. We understand Black studies to be a capacious intellectual project that spans a variety of methodological approaches, fields, geographical areas, languages and time periods.”

“…English as a subject, the department says, has provided ‘aesthetic rationalizations for colonization, exploitation, extraction and anti-Blackness.”

The statement goes on to deem the “collective responsibility” of the faculty to be “undoing persistent, recalcitrant anti-Blackness in our disciplines and in our institutions.”

Or to put it another way, the literature of western civilization can go to hell. All that matters now is race. And race comes first in order to groom that next generation of racists and bigots, now educated to hate whites.

I cannot imagine any parent or student wanting to attend such a program, unless their goal is is to learn how to become a Black-Power bigot aimed at oppressing all other races.

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Japan chooses Hayabusa-2’s next asteroid target

8:47 am

The new colonial movement: It appears that Japan has chosen the next asteroid that its probe Hayabusa-2 will visit in 2031, after it releases its samples to Earth in December from Ryugu.

Japan’s Hayabusa2 space explorer will aim to probe the asteroid “1998KY26” located between the orbits of Earth and Mars in 2031 after completing its current mission of collecting samples from another asteroid, the country’s science minister said Tuesday.

It is hoped Hayabusa2 will approach the ball-shaped asteroid, which has a diameter of around 30 meters and rotates about every 10 minutes, in July 2031, Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Minister Koichi Hagiuda said.

It will not obtain samples from this second asteroid, only observe it close up by camera.

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China launches rocket from ocean launch platform

8:41 am

The new colonial movement: China today successfully put nine Earth observation smallsats into orbit using its Long March 11 rocket, and it did it by launching from a floating launch platform.

I have embedded video of the launch below the fold. Notice that the rocket appears to ignite its first stage engines after it is flung upward from the platform, similar to the launch of an ICBM from a submarine. This is not surprising, as the Long March 11 solid fueled rocket is based on ICBM technology.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

23 China
15 SpaceX
9 Russia
4 ULA
4 Europe (Arianespace)

The U.S. still leads China 24 to 23 in the national rankings.

» Read more

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The frozen and changing mid-latitudes of Mars

12:51 pm

Glacial erosion on Mars
Click for full image.

Using “frozen” and “changing” to describe any single location might seem contradictory, but when it comes to the mid-latitudes of Mars, high resolution images keep telling us that both often apply, at the same time and at the same place.

The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, is a typical example. Taken on May 8, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), it shows what the scientists label as “mesas and ridges.” Drainage is to the south, and it sure looks like some sort of glacial flow is working its way downward within the canyons between those mesas.

Overall the terrain has the appearance of a frozen ice sheet, or at least terrain that has a shallow ice table close to the surface. It also looks like chaos terrain in its infancy, the erosion process not yet cutting down enough to make the mesas stand out fully.

The location of these mesas and ridges is shown in the context map below, which also shows that this location is at the same latitude as SpaceX’s Starship prime Martian landing site, and only about 400 to 500 miles to the east.
» Read more

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Next Starship test flight to go to 60,000 feet

9:15 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX has decided, after two successful 500 foot hops using its fifth and sixth Starship prototypes, to forego further hops with those prototypes and instead test fly prototype number eight to a height of 60,000 feet, about 11 miles.

Starship SN5 and SN6 were set to become a tag-team, flying 150-meter hops to refine the launch and landing techniques that SpaceX has pioneered with its Falcon 9 rocket. However, with SN5’s hop proving to be a success, followed by a notable improvement with SN6’s leap to 150 meters a few weeks later, it’s likely SpaceX is now confident of advancing to the next milestone.

The company has applied for an FCC license to do the flight anytime from Oct ’20 to April ’21, with October 11th being the first available date.

In the meantime the company plans a pressure tank test to failure of prototype #7, probably later this week.

In other related news at the second link, Boeing and Firefly have also applied for FCC licenses, the former for a Starliner demo mission from November ’20 to May ’21, the latter for its first launch of its smallsat Alpha rocket, also from November ’20 to May ’21.

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Tiny amount of rare chemical found on Venus; it is NOT a sign of life

8:53 am

The coming dark age: Scientists today announced that they had detected a tiny amount of the rare chemical phosphine in the upper atmosphere of Venus, and immediately jumped to the absurd conclusion that this was a sign of life.

The international team, which includes researchers from the UK, US and Japan, estimates that phosphine exists in Venus’s clouds at a small concentration, only about twenty molecules in every billion. Following their observations, they ran calculations to see whether these amounts could come from natural non-biological processes on the planet. Some ideas included sunlight, minerals blown upwards from the surface, volcanoes, or lightning, but none of these could make anywhere near enough of it. These non-biological sources were found to make at most one ten thousandth of the amount of phosphine that the telescopes saw.

To create the observed quantity of phosphine (which consists of hydrogen and phosphorus) on Venus, terrestrial organisms would only need to work at about 10% of their maximum productivity, according to the team. Earth bacteria are known to make phosphine: they take up phosphate from minerals or biological material, add hydrogen, and ultimately expel phosphine. Any organisms on Venus will probably be very different to their Earth cousins, but they too could be the source of phosphine in the atmosphere.

To leap from finding twenty molecules out of a billion of a single rare chemical to claiming this is a sign of life is absurd. And yet, this is what these scientists do, in the European Space Agency (ESA) press release at the link above, as well as this Royal Astronomical Society press release.

This discovery is not giving us “a hint of life on Venus.” All these scientists have done is detect a chemical whose formation in Venus’ very alien environment is a mystery. Yes, on Earth this chemical comes from life related activities, but to claim that the presence of biology must explain it on Venus is not science, but witchcraft and the stuff of fantasy. We know practically nothing about the full make-up of Venus’ atmosphere, its chemistry and environment, which makes it impossible to hint at any theories, no less life.

The worst part of this is that we can expect our brainless media to run with these claims, without the slightest effort of incredulity.

We live in a world of make believe and made-up science. Data is no longer important, only the leaps of fantasy we can jump to based on the slimmest of facts. It was this desire to push theories rather than knowledge that locked humanity into a dark age for centuries during the Middle Ages. It is doing it again, now, and the proof is all around you, people like zombies and sheep, wearing masks based not on any proven science but on pure emotions.

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