Tag Archives: science

Quick News Break – February 23, 2011

Good morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by for a read.  I wasn’t going to make another post for today, but I thought I’d better in case some of you haven’t been visiting spaceweather.com to keep current on news events.

As you can see, Old Sol has a few magnetic field issues he’s trying to work through.  Astrophysicists and Mayan priests are trying their best to walk him through the tough spots and get him back on track.

You’ve also probably been having nagging questions about what else is going on in the solar system.  Nothing to get excited about though.  Uranus and Saturn are standing off opposite one another with their seasonal spin axis configurations and their ‘not fully understood’ offset magnetic fields whirling around firing something a bit strange at one another and Old Sol just found himself downrange.  No big deal.  It will pass.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably also been asking yourself what the Galilean moons are up to today.  As you can see, Europa and Ganymede are somewhat lined up down-orbit, Io’s sort of off to the side and Callisto’s way-to-hell-and-gone back the other side of Jupiter.

Other than that, there’s not much going on.  I hope this helps you through the day.

Old Jules

Today on Ask Old Jules: 

Mental Illness?

Old Jules, what is the most beautiful mental illness or mentally ill act there is?

 

Why Superstitions are a Bad Thing

Accidental Posting.  This is the post for tomorrow I was working on when I hit the wrong button.  It’s still the post for tomorrow.

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

I suppose there are a lot of good reasons to be tolerant of the superstitions people hold, but it’s not always easy to put up with it. 

For instance, a lot of people are so superstitious about this and that, they don’t help bring up Old Sol mornings.  That naturally puts a heavier load on the rest of us.  Not being sure someone else is going to cover it requires iron nerves if we decide to sleep in, or happen to croak during the night.

Last time I flew anywhere the airport security folks were so superstitious one of them wanted to physically touch what’s in my  medicine bag.  Can you imagine that?

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to remember when that was.  I don’t think I’ve been through airport security since sometime before 1998, but I think I must have been later than that by several years.  It’s only since people got superstitious about other people of Middle Eastern extraction, I think, that anyone’s gotten that submerged in his fantasies he’d do something quite that far off-the-wall.

But it shows up other places, maybe worse.  For instance, I’ve got this stuff made from red clover, bloodroot, galangal, and sheep sorrel I use on myself to get rid of skin cancers popping up from time to time because of my not protecting myself against a particular insecticide when I was a young man.  The easy way was to buy it because making it is a considerable chore.  

But a few years ago the FDA got all uppidy and superstitious about it.  Went out and attacked the bejesus out of all the websites where a person can buy it, ran them off.  Even the name is verboten.

Then a few days ago Gale was telling me about some stuff his dermatologist was having him rub on his face to get rid of skin cancers.  That is one horrifying face old Gale’s putting on at the moment, same as you’d expect if he was using the same stuff I’m using, but doing it on his face.

It appears to me what Gale’s putting on his face is the exact same concoction the FDA was so superstitious about people using if they were buying it off the web, or making it themselves.    Maybe it was the fact every Native American tribe on the continent’s been making it and treating themselves with it for all manner of carcinomas since before Columbus.

That ought to be enough to make anyone makes a living off treating people for cancer, or selling pharmaceuticals to them for big bucks superstitious.  It goes against every superstition the medical and scientific communities hold dear.

I suppose a person just needs to be especially conscious and tolerant of scientific and medical superstitions, more than others.  After all, they’ve got an army of police and other people carrying around guns willing to use them if anyone violates their superstitions.

The Tale of the Dreamsheep Mother and the Y2K War Gods

Sometimes I think the whole reason people have those superstitions is just to give them an excuse.  An excuse to explain how their particular brand of enlightenment is the only one anyone has any business adopting as a superstition.

Because it’s the one they believe.

Old Jules

Sorry, Wrong Number.

I don’t get many phone calls here, so a few days ago when the phone rang and a male voice with an accent said something I didn’t understand about ‘technical support’ and ‘your computer’ I kept listening a moment.  But other than those two phrases I couldn’t cypher out a word he was saying.

Excuse me.  I can’t understand what you’re saying.  What do you want?”

Another long string of words including the two phrases, unintelligible.  My hearing isn’t all that it might be.  I can’t understand what store clerks or waiters are saying half the time when I’m in town, so I nod yes, or no, as the mood strikes me and take my chances.

But this guy had something to say that might be important, and he called to say it.  Seemed prudent to me to focus my iron will and patience on the job of knowing what it was.  I tried several possibilities.

After I’d interrupted him three or four times asking him to speak more clearly, more slowly, though, he said, “Never mind.”  Spang broke the connection.

I’m reasonably certain the man was in India.  I shot a couple of phrase of Gujarati at him I remembered from Peace Corps training and he shot some back at me I couldn’t understand any better than I understood his English.

Remembering it, I recalled a story I read a while back online:

A PACKED commuter train sped hundreds of kilometres across India in the wrong direction before passengers finally realised it was pulling into an unfamiliar station.

The train left the southern town of Tirupati on Wednesday for the eastern city of Bhubaneswar, where it was due to swing north to its eventual destination of Varanasi, a city in northeastern India, The Times of India reported today.

But bewildered passengers noticed something was amiss yesterday when it chugged into Warangal – a central Indian city on an entirely different route some 980km west of its intended stop at Bhubaneswar.

The express train had managed to cross three of India’s railway divisions and travel hundreds of miles without anyone noticing it had lost its way, The Times reported.

The mistake was believed to have arisen because it was given an incorrect destination code, compounded by the fact it was a special service and many of the staff were unfamiliar with the route.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/train-travels-980kms-in-wrong-direction/story-e6frf7jx-1226132739080

By hindsight, I don’t know whether the guy thought he was talking to someone in the US, Australia, or the UK.  I can’t for the life of me form an opinion about whether he knew something about my computer it was important I know, or wanted to tell some train pilot in New Zealand he was going backwards and another one was coming at him 90 miles an hour the other way.

This brave new world’s getting a bit complex for a 20th Century man.

Old Jules

 

Today on Ask Old Jules:   Old Jules, what scripture do you use most in helping you fight your demons?

UFO and Certainties About What Isn’t

Good morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by for a read.

We human beings love ourselves better for our certainties.  Most of us take particular satisfaction in sneering about the certainties of others when we’ve applied something we pretend is logic to prove theirs are invalid.  Pulls us up by the rhetorical bootstraps in a reality where being intelligent is considered a virtue almost as resounding as being ‘right’.

One of the areas of opinion that breaks down into sneers rapidly involves unidentified flying objects and whether creatures from somewhere else have visited this planet.  The ‘right’ side of the issue is they are fig-newtons of the imagination and declaring it to be so proves intelligence, level-headedness, education and superiority to those who believe otherwise.

The ‘wrong’, ‘stupid’, ‘irrational’, ‘illogical’ side is people who’ve experienced them.  Police, airline pilots, military pilots, lawyers, psychologists, physicians, and thousands of other people who might have been ‘right’ once, but were transported into the camp of ‘wrong’ by personal observation and experience.

A while back I posted about a visit I had with Kay’s aunt, Loretta. [An Afternoon with Aunt Loretta (Proctor)- Roswell, 1947] Loretta’s one of the folks still living who was close-enough to the Roswell UFO incident to have an opinion about it based on her own experiences and observations at the time.  I’ve got a lot of respect for the lady and value what she had to say, even though it’s just naturally ‘wrong’.

But I was backed into a corner of open-mindedness on the issue by a couple of experiences of my own.  One with a lot of other witnesses on California Avenue in Socorro, New Mexico.   The second was long-lasting and relatively close-up and personal.   Back during the Y2K time.

 

Pie Town’s located about 30 miles west of the Very Large Array [VLA] telescopes near Datil, New Mexico.  The village sits almost atop the Continental Divide, an isolated community in the middle of nowhere.

I was in the only telephone booth in Pie Town  around midnight. The town only has a couple-hundred people and there were no lights of any sort in town. Low overcast, 500 feet or less.

Whatever it was appeared above me below the overcast and stayed there while I told the person I was talking to on the phone what was happening.  It stayed maybe 10-15 minutes and gave me the willies badly enough, I got thinking I was the reason it was there.

I told the person I was talking to adios and went to the truck, took a .45 out from under the seat and racked in a round.  It moved a bit about then, not much but some, while I stood there pointing a pistol at it waiting in the dark. It moved a little more, seemed to descend — at least it got larger, and stopped again.

I decided to just get the hell out of there if I could. Cranked up the truck and drove about a quarter-mile and pulled off the highway to make sure it wasn’t following me. It sort of drifted or glided off to the north and vanished into the overcast.

The experience motivated me enough to try to find out whether objects of that particular description and configuration were common, because I’d never heard of one. I occasionally would research various UFO sighting archives on the web.

Years later I found that within a few days of my own sighting an object of almost identical description upset a lot of on-duty military personnel by behaving almost the same way at White Sands Missile Testing Range near Alamogordo, New Mexico, a couple of hundred miles SE from Pie Town. White Sands is an extremely high security area and they take it personally when something intrudes into the airspace over the place, more personally yet when it hangs around and isn’t scared.

There was [maybe still is] a squadron of F117s stationed at Alamogordo [Luftwaffe] at the time, and they scrambled. But the object removed itself before they arrived.

As for my own experience and the times involved — I’m having to best guess. The person I was describing it to on the telephone and I took a stab at it toward the end of our conversation before I decided to evacuate. But things seem longer and it mightn’t have been that long. Afterward, while I was standing there watching and pointing the .45 it’s anyone’s guess. Might have been as little as 5 minutes, seemed a lot longer.

Which is to say, I don’t know much about aliens and the things they fly around in, but I don’t put a lot of value on the speculations of people who know all about what they aren’t.   Even if they’re real smart and have a lot of school-housing.

Old Jules

 

Computer Saga Proposed Denouement

Good morning readers and thanks for coming by for a read.

Hopefully by the time you read this I’ll be strutting like a peacock, wearing my Texas Hatters Manny Gammidge High Roller tilted at a jaunty angle, certain I’m a smarty-pants extraordinaire.  At least that’s how I’m planning the final chapter of this monumental butt show.

But it’s 7:56 pm Monday evening, and I’m 43 % done on a 79 mb download of a modem driver.  Six hours 29 minutes from now the box says, I’ll know whether this is going to work.  Except I’ll be in bed six hours and 29 minutes from now, unless I pick that as one of the times I get up to pee.

But here’s the rundown on the plot thus far. 

Ed’s comment reminded me I had a weirdly shaped and sized hard drive I’d yanked out of an old Vista E Machine I bought new at WalMart a few years ago and it died after about six months and $150 spent in repair shops.

So I pulled open the Dell and voil’aismimo!  The drive looked more-or-less the same as the one from the E Machine, aside from some extra parts.  I worked an hour-or-so getting the extra parts off the Dell drive and onto the E Machine one, installed it, reassembled everything, clenched my teeth really hard and squeezed my eyes shut and I turned that commie pig on.

She booted spang up, showed me a screen I hadn’t seen since the E Machine died.  But, the fly in the ointment was that the modem still didn’t get recognized.  I ran through a flurry of downloading alleged drivers from sites all over the web, putting them on a CD, loading in the E Dell Machine and having them snubbed like clerks in camera stores used to snub a person brought in a Brownie Hawkeye for a roll of film.

Meanwhile Norton Symantic was slipping me mickeys behind the scenes, popping screens up at me threatening to keep me company if I kept downloading from non-regular free driver places.

Which I’ll keep short by saying, led me to Dell and my current act of genius downloading 79 mb on a dialup with 12/2 Romax wrapped in electrical tape between me and the power pole. 

So, tomorrow morning when you read this you’ll be seeing words of a man with a modem working on an E Dell Machine running Vista, is the way I want to end this chapter.  Wearing a 1972 vintage Manny Gammidge Texas Hatters High Roller.  A man commanding respect, admiration and quite possibly veneration.  A man you want to be like.  Same as before all this crap happened.

That’s the proposal for the chapter.  Assuming the editors don’t think that 79 mb download wasn’t a high enough price for our guy to pay to get a damned modem working.

I’m going to schedule this tonight before I go to bed to post at 6:00 am.   Just to make sure it goes to work before the editors finish breakfast.

Old Jules

6:46 am edit:  Seems prudent to get other things done before I unplug the modem here and plug it into the other machine to test the driver.  The world needs coffee before it begins the kind of foolishness this day might be destined to bring.  It isn’t that I’m reluctant to step boldly into the future.  It’s just a minor fit of hesitation on my part to contemplate the Odyssey Homer never had to deal with.  Putting a computer on my shoulder and walking inland until someone asks me what it is might be the next step, dragging the Toyota 4-Runner along behind until someone asks me what that is, too, seems a lousy day to anticipate.

12:23 pm edit:

Done Deal

Sunday Morning Newsiness January 22, 2012

Sometimes you can’t help being a little embarrassed for Old Sol, showing off just because he has a captive audience.

http://spaceweather.com/

But you have to admit, even the Chinese can’t do fireworks to compete.  Some things just can’t be pulled off with the combination of cheap labor and US politicians dancing for multi-national corporations and banks.

Old Sol’s got his own cheap labor, I’m guessing.

And if he does they’re not forever counting themselves up to calculate whether they could march four abreast into the sea without wearing thin on the patience of everyone else.

I’m in the doghouse with all the cats this morning, but especially with Hydrox.  The invadercat came in just at dark last night while I was feeding the can of cat food to the four belongers.  Sat there 20-30 feet off the porch just watching.

Irked the bejesus out of Hydrox, especially, because I was taking its picture and talking to it instead of running it the hell off.  This morning Hydrox is being standoffish and treating me with a disdain I rarely see in him.

But you’ve got to admit that looks like a pretty good cat, though I’m not going to let it stay around here.  I don’t need any more cats and it’s well enough groomed to argue it has a home somewhere, anyway.

Hydrox and the other can relax, once they’ve punished me a while for causing them a momentary doubt about feline population projections for 2012.

I’ve mentioned guineas a number of times here, but I suspect some of you folks might never have seen one.  They’re difficult to photograph because they’re constantly moving faster than you can realize until you try snapping a pic of them.

They look a bit like a cross between a turkey vulture and a pheasant.  Most biologists believe the species leaked over here from a parallel universe and they’ve never quite managed to get a grip on this reality.

The biologists might be correct, but my personal theory is that they escaped from a Larry Niven novel, one of the Tales of Known Space from the 1970s and 1980s.  Likely as not they were developed by the race that created the Bandersnatchi.

But what the hell do I know?

Old Jules

Clearing the fingertip pile

Good morning readers.  I’m grateful you came by.  Lots of important stuff bogging down my fingertips this morning and I doubt I’ll get it all in here.  But the sooner begun, the sooner left unfinished, I reckons.

First, Old Sol:   http://spaceweather.com/

I’m not going to insult you by offering an explanation for this.  Undoubtedly you know the explanation already.

Later this morning I’ve got an emergency meeting with the feline and poultry astrophysicists here to kick around whatever needs kicking around about it.

He took a cheap shot, not only at us, but at Mars.  But that ain’t the half of it.

“INCREASING SOLAR ACTIVITY CLEANS UP SAT-DEBRIS: Earth’s atmosphere has been puffing up in response to increasing levels of UV radiation from sunspots. This is good news for satellite operators, because a puffed up atmosphere helps clean up low-Earth orbit. “The number of cataloged debris in Earth orbit actually decreased during 2011,” reports Nick Johnson in NASA’s Orbital Debris Quarterly newsletter. “[The figure below] illustrates how the rate of debris reentries from the Fengyun-1C anti-satellite test of January 2007 increased during the past year.”  http://spaceweather.com/

 So, we’ve got two issues here.  First, Old Sol’s got the planet Earth [that’s US] all puffed up, which is to say, even though he might be too convoluted and subtle to come out in the open and say it, Earth has it figured out.  If Earth’s puffed up about it, we can be assured we should be puffed up about it too.

Secondly, he’s screwing around with our space debris, shamelessly knocking it out of orbit.  Which really has the people who put it up there in a ring-tailed tizzy.  Humanity spent a lot of money and effort getting that stuff up there.  Then, in one year, Old Sol takes it upon himself to knock-it-the-hell out of the sky.

This puts a serious burr under my saddle and it should put one under yours, as well.  Just who the hell does he think he is, anyway?  We’re not talking committee decision here.  We’re talking unilateral usurpation of the Rights of Man to stick garbage in orbit and keep it the hell there as long as it suits our fancy.

But this has gotten longish.  I’m going to have to get into the other fingertip pile stuff in another post.  Maybe later today, maybe not.

Old Jules

Shiva’s Headband – Old Sol’s Magnificent Coronal Hole

http://spaceweather.com/

I mentioned the other day how Shiva the Cow Cat dropped the ball while we were praying up Old Sol.  I’m not going to say with certainty Shiva’s responsible for this, but if she is, I’m going to give her a special scratch behind the ears as a reward.

CORONAL HOLE: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is monitoring a dark gash in the sun’s atmosphere–a coronal hole. It’s the dark vertical feature in this extreme UV image taken on Jan. 13th:

Coronal holes are places where the sun’s magnetic field opens up and allows the solar wind to escape. This yawning hole is about 120,000 km wide and more than a million km long. Solar wind flowing from its UV-dark abyss will reach Earth on Jan. 16th or 17th, possibly sparking auroras for high-latitude sky watchers.”

Mayan calendar enthusiasts, on the other hand, choose to ignore the coincidence of Shiva’s lapse and attribute the hole to the obvious sinister consequences of the rock calendar having runned spang out of numbers.

Meanwhile, astrophysicists, unaware of Shiva’s blink, speculate it’s the work of Proxima Centauri, a hot tempered red dwarf cholla who hangs out in the same honkytonks  as Old Sol, and who has a long history with a switch-blade.

I’m leaning to Shiva doing it, but what the hell do I know?

Old Jules

  

The Price of Solitude

Good morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by this morning.

I’m having to re-boot my brain, trying to get a fix on this reality I live in this morning.  Spent the night busybusybusy in a sequencial dream I used to have, one of two, the first forty years of my life.  The guy I was in the dream had gotten a lot older these three decades I hadn’t been him, and so had the two others who showed up whom I’ve never known outside the dream.  But one of them turned over a D9 bulldozer, which slid down a slope about 30 feet and fell off a cliff.  I tried to warn him, but he ran down the slope, couldn’t stop, and went off the cliff too.

The guy I am in the dream spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get down that slope for a look, just to satisfy himself whether the obvious was true without going over himself.

Busybusybusy.  It wasn’t exactly old home week, but it never was.  From childhood until the age of 40 I knew those people in that dream but I never cared for them.  I thought they’d passed out of my life. 

I’ve been three weeks without seeing another human being, now I count it up.  Good things usually begin to happen in the mind after three days without seeing anyone, but a few spinoffs do eventually begin to happen triggering the awareness it’s time to have a few hours of human company.

Had an exciting day yesterday, for those of you interested, running some of the tests I mentioned a while back.  Most of the day spent running calculations for the barycentric centers of the solar system and earth at particular moments over the past 15-20 years, comparing it to concurrent events of a particular description.  It’s going to take a lot more work, but it’s looking fairly promising.

Maybe it was all that excitement caused the dream to start up again.  But at least one of those folks probably won’t be coming back into the dream.  I never cared much for him anyway.

Old Jules

Sweatsocks, Milo Maize and Microwaves

Morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by for a read.

Some of you are too young to remember why microwave ovens and electricity were invented.  It’s a fact worth knowing.

The pioneers, when they invented this country, lived mostly in dugouts.  Dugout canoes in the summer, dugout houses in the winter.  Those winters tended to get them cold on their backsides and necks.  So they started growing wheat, milo maize, rice, to try heating up and putting in some warm container to throw around their necks to try to keep warm.

They tried all manner of containers, those cold natured ancestors of ours.  Tried skinning rabbits and sewing up grain inside the hides, but it didn’t take any time at all before the only benefit they were getting from it was the smell of burning hair.  So they invented sweat socks to put it in.

But they needed a way to heat it up without burning it, so they invented microwave ovens.  Trouble was, the microwaves sat there for generations full of sweatsox waiting for electricity to be invented.

Then along came Nicoli Tesla Edison with the solution.

So nowadays all you have to do is plug that mama in, that microwave, shove in a sweat sock full of grain, run it about five minutes, and you have a thingamabob you can drape around your neck when it’s cold, or stiff, or for when the old shoulder’s reminding you of a motorcycle that wrapped itself around a tree 40 years ago, and you can toss in another one for putting at the foot of your blankets to give the cats a place to get hacked off when you throw them off it and go to bed.

Got two of them in that microwave right this very moment.

Thankee universe for nicola tesla edison and joseph h. microwave and their yankee ingenuity inventions.  And thankee universe for joseph cotton’s development of sweatsocks.  Also Horatio Milo, the developer of Milo Maize.

We lucky to have this universe to provide such blessings.

Old Jules