The Great Barrington Declaration

Great Barrington Declaration - As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.

QOTD, 07/20/2019

I always knew I'd see the first man walking on the moon. I never thought I'd see the last.

Dr. Jerry Pournelle, scientist, author, raconteur

(Yes, I'm late posting this, thought I'd scheduled it and screwed that up...)

Oh, dear

Warning: Science and math, presented with a rather heavy Ukrainian accent. Mind you, she does a good job of making some pretty esoteric science understandable to the layperson, but some might be intimidated by the very concepts. (One might be tempted to turn on closed captioning, due to her accent. It might help, but I think they used a speech-to-text app, and it gets thrown off by homophones which aren't valid, due to... her accent.)

So that's an hour and a half of in-depth discussion of solar activity, including helioseismicity, sun spots, the corona, poloidal and toroidal magnetic fields...

... the gist of which is that Dr. Zharkova says that not only is the current (imminent, actually) sun spot cycle (25) going to be even lighter than the previous one (24, just ended), but she says that we are headed into a 30+ year Grand Minimum. (A sun spot cycle is usually about 11 years long, by the way.)

Can you say "Maunder"?

No solar activity means amateur radio continues to have poor propagation on the High Frequency bands, but, like the old George Carlin routine, it also means a mini-ice age, so I wouldn't sweat the propagation. As KB6NU points out in the blog post where I learned of this presentation, satellites are a workable alternative. (Yes, hams can and do use satellites. Yes they have their own issues.)

But, hey, at least that rig will be generating some heat...

...assuming there's power.


1. Solar minimum - Wikipedia. Political correctness leads Wikipedia to deny any correlation between solar minima and terrestrial climate.
2. I took a look at the effects of the Maunder Minimum in Quickie Book Review, The Global Crisis.
3. Homepage | NOAA / NWS Space Weather Prediction Center

"Darmok"

In my previous post, LOL of the Day, I shared a meme which, quite frankly, I knew a lot of people wouldn't get.

And that's OK. I even know some Star Trek fans who had forgotten the episode "Darmok".

Now, that particular episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation happens to be my favorite for several reasons.

A quick synopsis, for anyone not familiar with the episode:

• The Enterprise is dispatched to meet an alien race. 
• Picard is beamed off the ship as the aliens cast a "scattering field" which prevents Enterprises transporter from beaming Picard back up.
• Picard discovers that the intent of the alien captain is that he and Picard cooperate to fight a creature.
• Slowly, Picard realizes that the reason that the Federation has never been able to communicate with this alien race is that they only speak in allegory and metaphor; likewise, they find straightforward speech baffling.
• The alien captain dies, but Picard is now able to communicate with the aliens, so Everything's Fine.

How many Standard Star Trek Tropes did you spot in that executive summary of a synopsis?  (More at Darmok - Wikipedia and Star Trek One Trek Mind: Deciphering "Darmok".)

One of the reasons I like this episode is that it is one of the few examples of science fiction in media where there was an honest attempt to live up to SF's nickname "The Literature of Ideas." While any literature can be described as starting from the question "What if...?" -- "What if the teenage children of two feuding families of Verona fell in love and secretly married?" -- in Speculative Fiction the "What if?" gets to be (one might argue should be) more out of the ordinary.

In this case, "What if we met a race/culture that only communicated in metaphor and allegory?"

This is cool.

Mind you, it is also absurd, because, as is pointed out in the article "Deciphering 'Darmok'" I linked above,

Yet there's one annoying thing about “Darmok.” If the Tamarians only speak in these metaphors, how did they ever learn the words that later came to be used in the phrases? How did they know that walls fell around Shaka if they need a phrase to symbolize the word “wall?”

They had words for stuff, but they couldn't just use a word? They couldn't say "Here", meaning "take this", they had to say "Temba, his arms open"? How did they learn what "arm" or "arms" or "open" were? Or "his"?

Not to mention, how does a race that only speaks in metaphor develop the science and math needed to become a space-faring race?

My assumption has always been that there were certain ceremonial occasions on which it is an unbreachable imperative that one speak in these metaphors, not unlike a Vulcan's dedication to logic. We know Vulcans are actually susceptible to emotion and illogic, and that they must fight to maintain their control, so perhaps this alien outreach mission would be regarded as a failure if they didn't play by their own internal rules. ("Deciphering 'Darmok'" posits a race that is partially telepathic.)

Another thing I liked about the episode is that they routinely broke every other magic double-talk generator device on the show, but this is the only episode I remember where Universal Translator failed.

Given Roddenberry's known utopian vision for the future -- routinely ignored on the show, when it was convenient, but don't dare suggest to him that he was full of shit! -- he probably had some Chomskian notion of a "language organ"...

I did not know that.

SO, reading this article -- MRE Shelf Life and Stockpiling MREs - AllOutdoor.com, I wound up at this page: USDA -- Food Product Dating.

Where I learned that the "pull dates" on food items have nothing to do with food safety or health. (With one exception, see emphasis added below):

Does Federal Law Require Dating?
Except for infant formula, product dating is not required by Federal regulations.

For meat, poultry, and egg products under the jurisdiction of the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), dates may be voluntarily applied provided they are labeled in a manner that is truthful and not misleading and in compliance with FSIS regulations. To comply, a calendar date must express both the month and day of the month. In the case of shelf-stable and frozen products, the year must also be displayed. Additionally, immediately adjacent to the date must be a phrase explaining the meaning of that date such as "Best if Used By."

Are Dates for Food Safety or Quality?
Manufacturers provide dating to help consumers and retailers decide when food is of best quality. Except for infant formula, dates are not an indicator of the product’s safety and are not required by Federal law.

What Date-Labeling Phrases are Used? There are no uniform or universally accepted descriptions used on food labels for open dating in the United States. As a result, there are a wide variety of phrases used on labels to describe quality dates.

Examples of commonly used phrases:

• A "Best if Used By/Before" indicates when a product will be of best flavor or quality. It is not a purchase or safety date.
• A "Sell-By" date tells the store how long to display the product for sale for inventory management. It is not a safety date.
• A "Use-By" date is the last date recommended for the use of the product while at peak quality. It is not a safety date except for when used on infant formula as described below.

Although experience says that the bread mix you found in the back of the pantry from 5 years ago may no longer have fully (or any) active leavening...

So the other evening at the emergency communication team meeting we were talking about "Go Bags" and Bug Out Bags. I took my Go Kit -- which is to say, my bag for CERT or ARES/RACES work, not my "Get Out Of Town" bag.

I also took my car kit in, to show a couple of thing in it. Now, my car kit is mostly a cheap packable rain suit, such as you find at a big box store, hat and gloves, reflective vest... It also has a package of Datrex Lifeboat rations. (Might have been another brand.)

And it was pointed out to me that "These are almost expired."

The packaging is intact, these are safe to eat.

"But they're almost expired!"

s*i*g*h

"Mount Paektu is tall!"

In Korea, when two people say the same thing at the same time they say "Paektusan nop'ida!", Mount Paektu is tall!" Not sure why, but then, why do we say "Jinx!" or proclaim that the other guy owes you a coke?

Anyway. Mount Paektu is in north Korea, and is the tallest mountain on the peninsula. Kim Il Sung was allegedly born there, which makes it sacred to north Koreans, despite commies supposedly being atheists. (Then, there is that whole dynastic dictatorship thing...)

And despite being hundreds of miles from the nearest joint between two tectonic plates, with no apparent reason for there to be a volcano there, NatGeo now tells us that Sacred Volcano in North Korea May Be Waiting to Blow.

Apparently there is a "mushy mixture of liquid, gas, crystals, and rock" under what I always heard was a extinct volcano.

Because, you know, just what north Korea needs is a volcano going off in the backyard...

WOO-HOO!

SpaceX launches Falcon 9 rocket, lands booster back on land

Pull!

NASA wants to learn more about asteroids by shooting them with space shotguns | Blastr

Interesting article

Ancient shoulders show signs of humanity’s ape-like past - The Washington Post

A new study puts the burden of humanity's evolution on our shoulders. Like, literally on our shoulders. By examining the shoulder blades of two early human Australopithecus species, researchers believe they've found further evidence that humans and apes shared an ape-like ancestor.

A new study puts the burden of humanity's evolution on our shoulders. Like, literally on our shoulders. By examining the shoulder blades of two early human Australopithecus species, researchers believe they've found further evidence that humans and apes shared an ape-like ancestor.

 And now it seems that our ancestors backtracked somewhere along the way,  devolving, if you will, returning to some monkey-like physical characteristics.

The Art of the Headline

The Rumford Meteor takes on Anti-GMO types:
Woman Taking Paxil, Zoloft, Lexapro, Fluoxetine, Wellbutrin, Estrogen, Progestin, Himalayan Crystal Salt, Silver Water, and Medical Marijuana Wants to Know Exactly What's in Her Tomatoes - The Rumford Meteor

QOTD, 3/16/15

Seen on Michael Z. Williamson's Facebook page:

Time travel is a 4-Edged Sword
Bill Dunbar

METEOROLOGICAL ARMAGEDDON!!!1!

Well, not quite, but it's not lookin' good.

Also, this is where I piss off just about everyone east of the Mississippi, if not the Rockies...

Because, while they're lookin' a lot like Fimbulwinter, here in Pugetopolis the temperatures have been in the upper 50s and lower 60s, and the sky is blue, the sun is shinin'.

Yesterday a colleague was staring glumly at  "snow cams" of local ski resorts, which looked more like August than February.

Pacific Northwest Snowpack Near Lowest Levels on Record - weather.com (Video may auto-load.)

So, here's the concern, quoted from Weather.com:

Though an atmosopheric river of moisture soaked the Northwest and Northern California for several days at the start of February, significant snow was confined to the highest elevations due to mild temperatures. Therefore, the stormy weather pattern provided little help to the overall snowpack.

The snowpack is measured by how much water it would contain if it was melted down. In the West, the amount of water in the snowpack is more important than the depth since it helps replenish rivers, lakes and reservoirs when the spring melt arrives. Obervation stations known by the acronym SNOTEL are used to monitor the snowpack.

Emphasis added.

In the Oregon Cascades, the snow water content of the snowpack was less than 20 percent of average as of Feb. 9.
...
In Washington, snow water content ranged from 18 percent of average in the state's southern Cascade Mountains to 56 percent of average in the far northern part of the Cascades on Feb. 9. The Paradise SNOTEL (elevation 5,130 feet) on the southern slopes of Mount Rainier had its third lowest snow water content for Feb. 1 in records dating to 1981.

In the worst shape was the Olympic Mountains of northwest Washington, where snow water content was just seven percent of average.

Now, I know everyone's vision of Washington is that it rains nonstop. Players of Trivial Pursuit may be aware that New York City actually gets more rainfall annually than Seattle; while it does rain frequently here, it usually drizzles.

What we count on for our water supply supply is snow in the mountains. No snow, no municipal water supply.

New England can keep the damned sportsball trophy, just give us back our snow.

Down With The Cro-Magnon Collective!

So, Bill linked to this article, in which a boffin is explaining the discovery that genes linked to advanced intelligence, things like advanced mathematics and the like, originated with Neanderthal Man, and "modern humans" didn't pick them up until inter-breeding with their heretofore-assumed-to-be-less developed predecessors.  What Cro-Magnon man brought to the party was social skills.

I will say that the writer, despite working for Nature magazine and presumably having some grasp of science and the scientific principle, is honest and straight-forward about being unable, or unwilling, to face the implications.  "I don't know how you'll survive when our genes are gone."

Maybe now all those people whingeing about being introverts will start bragging instead. 

I'm gonna get me a new t-shirt.  On the front it will say "Neanderthal and proud!"

On the back it'll say "Don't crowd me, Cro-Mag!"

UPDATE:  For those who never read the comments, I should point out that this turns out to have been a piece of fiction. It reads like one, but I ass-you-me'd that Nature magazine wouldn't publish fiction, at least, not on purpose...

Oh, goody!

Been waiting for this my whole life!

Now’s your chance to watch scientists dissect a 770-pound squid - The Washington Post

Had to double check to be sure it wasn't the Rumford Meteor...

QOTD, One Giant leap Edition

I always knew I'd see the first man on the moon.  I never dreamed I'd see the last.
Jerry Pournelle

Ow!

Got to work feeling "meh".

Shortly afteward, my knee started hurting.

No, scratch that, my knee started HURTING!!!!

I left, came home, swallowed some ibuprofen

In the morning I may go see the doc LPN. 

I see that, according to WeatherSpark, the "glass" measured 29.98 inches of mercury about the time I woke up this morning, it was down to 29.96" about the time I got to work, and has fallen to, and since I got home been hovering around, 29.92".  And, yeah, it's been drizzling for the last couple of hours.  So I wouldn't be able to mow the lawn tomorrow even if I was up to it, and wanted to.

s*i*g*h

Snake Oil is the Best Lube!

As seen on Pistol Forums, "discussing" the latest alleged "last bullet you'll ever need":

"Developed by the Department of Extreme Research Projects!"

Geek Humor

Seen on Facebook:

Even further winnage from Bruce Israel in comments::

I wonder if Shrodinger's cat could get out of the box by using Heisenberg and absolutely measuring his speed, resulting in him not knowing exactly where he was, and could therefore be outside the box?

Heckuva view

Heckuva porch...

Time lapse video from the International Space Station.
That's Comet Lovejoy near the end.

I highly endorse embiggenating this to fill your biggest, best hi def screen.

Lookee what I got!

Vacuum packed for freshness!

Special packaging, no doubt, to protect the contents during re-entry...

Order your own copy here, and read all the adventures at I Work On A Starship.

My sincere apologies, Bobbi, I have no excuse for taking so long to order my copy.