It’s another of those busy summer weeks where I am away and my writing and reading time (which is just as, if not more, important) is dependent on spotty WiFi and finding a hidden corner away from the Gilmore clan.
I’m also missing my customary naps which leaves me irritable, ennervated, and unfocused.
And so sucky blogging returns. Truthfully I haven’t been able to find much of interest during my cursory scans and what I have I don’t have time to give the treatment it deserves. Still, the purpose of these pieces (outside their entertainment value of which I’m sure you’re getting enough at my expense) is to alert you to stories and sources to which you might otherwise not be exposed.
Therefore it is more important than ever that you click the links. I will not be able to summarize, merely to sum up-
Buttercup is marry Humperdinck in little less than half an hour. So all we have to do is get in, break up the wedding, steal the princess, make our escape… after I kill Count Rugen.
Obligatories
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
I would never make fun of LaEscapee or blame PhilJD. And I am highly organized.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Sometimes the Science section scares me and I have a hard time coming to grips with issues that are more immediately and politically important like Climate Change and the Environment, instead favoring those that are more esoteric and intellectual.
This is one of those weeks where the news in general has been uniformly depressingly bad and the only place we seem to be making any progress at all is on the silly issue of whether the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia represents racism and should be removed from government sponsorship.
Of course it does.
But it is just another in the littany of Social Issues the Plutocrat thieves and their NeoLib minions use to divide and distract us from the fact they are robbing us blind and destroying the Environment, the Economy, and Peace and Freedom in the process.
I like to think as a writer I’m a positive and cheerful person (and what you think doesn’t really matter to me, I write for myself) so I make an effort to select good news and there is just not as much of it as I had hoped today.
So instead of pointing out how Genetically Modified Organisms are likely to create a world full of health problems and unintended consequences (add ‘Space Germs’ to your reading list), and the pettyness of Scientists (see ‘Jellyfish Gene’ and ‘Sexism in Science’); or talking about the destruction of our environment for marginal monetary gain and the determination of our government to strip us of our last scrap of privacy, freedom, and dignity; I have chosen instead today to focus on just how lucky we are.
Some physicists consider it a puzzle that certain constants they have discovered have the particular values they do because they seem random and arbitrary. Those who argue this way are fond of pointing out that should any of the values vary the Universe as we know it wouldn’t exist.
There are 3 main camps of thought on this issue. The first is called ‘Weak Anthropomorphism’ and basically contends the Universe is a fluke and we should all just be happy it is the way it is. The second is called ‘Strong Anthropomorphism’ which says the Universe responds to observation like the Quantum State of Schrodinger’s cat.
The third, and this is the one to which I subscribe, says simply that if the values were different the Universe would be different. Everyone pretty much accepts now the idea that the Universe will keep expanding until all the energy in the system is equal and after that nothing much will happen. It’s called the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
It was fashionable for a time to think this would not occur, that a limit would be reached where the energy expanding the Universe would be overcome by Gravity and it would collapse on itself in another Big Bang. Indeed for quite a while the existence of a Big Bang was denied entirely and a Steady State Universe was proposed where everything was always the same.
What changed?
Well, as we checked out the values of specific items predicted by each of the discarded theories we found out they weren’t that, they were something else.
But if they were that then that’s the kind of Universe it would be.
Now those who subscribe to the first two camps (and indeed physicists who insist this is a very important question) tend to dismiss this attitude as a mere multiverse cop out, but it’s much more subtle than that.
In complex equations there are often more than one right answer and their very nature frequently depends on the results of the previous ones.
Our mathematical structure is fundamentally arbitrary and derives it’s validity from internal consistency and practical use. That means it’s not impossible to imagine a different mathematical structure.
Rejecting the possibility that this was nothing more than a lucky accident, physicists have been looking for some underlying principle – a compelling explanation for why everything could only have unfolded in this particular way.
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But physics isn’t played that way: If a number called alpha, which governs the strength of electromagnetism, were infinitesimally larger or smaller, stars could not have formed, leaving a lifeless void.
Alpha’s value seems no more predictable than digits randomly spit out by a lottery machine: 0.0072973525698.
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Other values, like the mass of the Higgs, or the strength of the force that binds together the cores of atoms, appear to be just as finely tuned. Bump the dials just barely, and nothing like our universe could exist.
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Finally there are followers of a middle path, who seek to prove that the universe is not accidental but inevitable, with its set of defining numbers as constrained and mutually consistent as the solution to a Sudoku puzzle.
That was the goal of string theory when it rose to prominence three decades ago. The mathematics, with its extra dimensions and pretzel geometries, was so mesmerizing that the theory seemed almost certain to be true – a tightly woven description, when ultimately deciphered, of a universe just like our own.
Instead, string theory spiraled off in another direction, predicting a whole multitude of other universes, each with a different physics and each unobservable except for our own. Maybe some of the other universes have spawned different kinds of conscious beings, made from something other than atoms and just as puzzled (in some unfathomable equivalent of puzzlement) as we are.
What fundamentaly drives this issue is our collossal, egotistical, anthropomorphism that insisted for centuries that the world is flat and the Sun revolves around us.
Plenty of multiverse skeptics remain open to some version of string theory, one that doesn’t require redefining what counts as real. Maybe, lurking still hidden in the thicket, is a magic equation, showing that this universe is, after all, the only one that can be.
See? It’s the same attitude that faced Copernicus. What doesn’t change is people and their self centered ignorance.
Science Oriented Video
The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Start of the Berlin blockade during the early Cold War; Boxing champ Jack Dempsey born; Comedian and actor Jackie Gleason of ‘The Honeymooners’ fame dies.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
Without too much in preliminaries, the British Coalition’s position at Waterloo was very strong. The rolling farmland provided plenty of opportunities for protection from direct fire in the line of sight, which is what the French had, while Coalition indirect fire (Howitzers and Mortars) was relatively unimpeded despite the fact they had fewer Artillery pieces overall.
The Coalition was in fortified defensive positions awaiting relief from the Prussians who despite their defeat at Ligny the previous day were well enough organized to field a force about half the size of the entire French army by the late evening.
For his part Napoleon had been able to interpose his army between the divided forces as he had often in the past and planned to use his interior lines of communication to defeat his enemies piecemeal. It almost worked.
Napoleon did beat Blucher handily but was unable to inflict the level of disorganization necessary to cause his retreat. Still, he turned his army to face Wellington and the Coalition. The forces were evenly matched which is a disadvantage for the attacker that can only be overcome by producing uncertainty and command paralysis in the defender and exploiting the weak points that develop.
Unfortunately for Napoleon, Wellington was a General not much given to introspection and he himself was not at the top of his game. Suffering from dehydration and cramps he had to retire from the field during a critical point in the battle and turn over direction of his army to Marshal Ney, his cavalry commander and a person of dubious loyalty and appallingly bad judgement.
Ney promptly mistook a normal rotation to reorganize damaged units as a general retreat and sent his calvalry charging in where they were predictably (and not to the credit of the same genius mentality in World Wars 1 & 2) slaughtered.
After recovering a bit personally Napoleon was left without many reserves except his Imperial Guard who had never suffered defeat in battle though that was mostly due to the fact they’d seldom been committed before the outcome was decided. After their assault was beaten back like Pickett’s Charge and Blucher’s units came up in relief the fight was over and the fate of Europe decided.
Kind of. I won’t dwell today on how the playing fields of Eaton led to the Poppies of Flanders and the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau because I want to talk about music.
Never get involved in a land war in Asia
You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! Inconceivable!
This famous, and public domain, infograph illustrates what happened to Napoleon in Russia in 1812 where he took the most powerful army in the history of the world to that point and basically pissed it away. Not that capturing Moscow would have mattered much to the Romanovs who ruled from St. Petersburg anyway. You may ask why the U.S. Army has 9 support troops for every Infantryman. This is why. Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics.
The Russians counted it a great victory though it was entirely inevitable, and it is a touchstone of patriotism (for Russians). The most iconic (we get to irony later) expression of it in the West is The Year 1812.
It only took 6 weeks to write which is kind of unsurprising given that it’s an aggregation of national anthems and folk tunes that perfectly encapsulates the Romantic Nationalist vision. Among oddities it is in fact scored for carillons and cannons which gives modern orchestrators some problems reproducing, it’s ironic given the current social climate in Russia that it was written by one of the most clearly homosexual composers, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who personally conducted it at the dedication of Carnegie Hall.
It’s hard to imagine that history is so recent and accessible, that the things you read about in dry dusty old books happened to real people.
My Grandfather knew War of Southern Rebellion veterans who served in the Michigan Brigade (Custer was an idiot). Tchaikovsky knew people who had served in the First Great Patriotic War (not that they called it that). I have watched conductors who studied under Tchaikovsky, lots of them.
Many things we think of as contemporary have roots in the past, but in comparison to deep time, the 4.5 Billion year history of the Earth or the 14 Billion year history of the Universe, they are bare blips. How far have we evolved?
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed; Father’s Day first celebrated in the U.S.; The event behind ‘Juneteenth’; Author Salman Rushdie born; NBA draft pick Len Bias dies; Entertainer Paula Adbul born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
I believe that summer is our time, a time for the people, and that no politician should be allowed to speak to us during the summer. They can start talking again after Labor Day.
So the concept was this, we’d orbit a satellite around a comet (which is kind of a fun feat of astro navigation, like hitting a bullet with a bullet) and in addition to visual observations we’ll send down a lander to take actual surface samples.
And that went horribly, horribly wrong, though in kind of a predictable way.
You see micro-gravity is tricky to work with because thinks have a tendency not to stick where you put them (it being micro and all) and it’s really easy to achieve escape velocity so when you jump up you never come back down.
Anyway the EU fires off Philae which has this kind of harpoon thingee that’s supposed to hold it down but it doesn’t work and we kind of lose track of it.
Oops.
Now it’s kind of obvious that it didn’t simply bounce off because then we would be able to see it (deduction!) and we do get some signals that it’s running out of power so it’s in a shadow somewhere (space is a very bright place if you have a line of sight to a nearby star like, oh, Sol for instance) but all that kind of peters out and we don’t have any pictures from the orbiter (Rosetta) of it lying around.
Fortunately it’s got this power on reset routine and as it gets closer to the sun it wakes up.
Surprise!
As near as we can tell at the moment after the harpoon failed it bounced around for a while and ended up stuck in a crack where the solar power wouldn’t work. But micro-gravity and it’s all fine and ready to do some hay making while the sun shines.
Not that Rosetta didn’t answer some big questions already. The reason we’re interested in these dirty snowballs at all is we imagine them time capsules of some 4.5 billion years ago when the planets were forming. What we’ve discovered (thanks in part to Philae and Rosetta) is that the solar system was a whole lot more nebulous (as in less dense) than we thought and that planetary orbits not as stable as we were taught.
Does basic research like this have any practical benefit? Well, if you don’t count the technical skills that went into building the machines it does somewhat justify our “exceptionalism” because we survive in a unique and fragile moment that is destined for doom. Does it mean we’re unique? God’s special favored creation? Space big. Really, really big. And time is looong. Diamonds are considered valuable because of the monopolistic marketing practices of the DeBeers cartel, in fact you can make them out of peanut butter (though there are other forms of carbon that work better).
“The key here is to maximise the communication with Philae,” Elsa Montagnon, Rosetta’s deputy flight director told the briefing. She explained that if the orbiter got too close it would shut down because of dust thrown up in the comet’s wake. She likened the mission to driving through a snow storm.
The Philae probe made contact with agency for the first time in seven months on Saturday, and has sent back hundreds of packages of valuable data. It had been silent since a partially botched landing last November.
If more contact can be established the probe will able to send back more data than if it had landed in the spot it was meant to, scientists said.
Montagnon confirmed that there was contact for 85 seconds on Saturday night. The comet then made one revolution in which there was no contact, but then a further three 10-second bursts were received on Sunday evening, she said.
Jean-Pierre Bibring, the lead scientist on the project, told the briefing that the mission had already been a success because it had been so unexpected and challenged existing paradigms. He said the mission could now “go beyond expectations”, if longer periods of contact were made with the probe.
He said the probe’s reawakening showed it survived temperatures of minus 150 degrees. He acknowledged that the probe would probably have overheated if it had not landed under the shadow of an area of the comet identified by the scientists as the “Perihelion cliff”. He said: “Although we are in shadow we survived and that is really amazingly fantastic.”
Bibring said that the material already gathered from the lander is “amazingly exciting” because it gives detail of the material that modelled the solar system.
The fact that Philae set down on a target just 2.5 miles in diameter — let alone that it hit its intended landing site, and worked for days after the fact — is an incredible feat.
But it soon became obvious that the harpoons meant to anchor Philae into the ice hadn’t deployed properly, so that initial touchdown at the intended site had been followed by several bounces and a precarious landing at the edge of a shady crater. It was obvious that Philae wouldn’t get enough sunlight to keep operating, and certainly not enough to power communications with Earth.
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Until recently, we weren’t even sure where the lander had landed. Scientists knew it was a shady area, probably the edge of a crater. But without more data from Philae, they were left searching for the lander in photos taken by its orbiter.
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Now that we know that Philae survived its hibernation, we can actually consider its bumpy landing a fortunate mistake. Philae’s intended landing site would have given it enough sunlight to power its operations for months, it’s true. But the lander probably would have been dead by now, growing too hot as its host comet approached an August rendezvous with the sun.
Space agencies are interested in comets because of the secrets they might hold about the early days of the universe — and more immediately, the early days of our solar system. We’re fairly certain that comets are remnants of the early solar system and that their frozen cores contain the molecules that were present 4.6 billion years ago. By unlocking those time capsules, scientists could get a better read on what activity led up to the formation of our planet.
“It’s a look at the basic building blocks of our solar system, the ancient materials from which life emerged,” Kathrin Altwegg of the University of Bern in Switzerland, who works on the Rosetta orbiter, told The Post in November. “It’s like doing archaeology, but instead of going back 1,000 years, we can go back 4.6 billion.”
In its accidentally shady spot, Philae will get to make observations on the comet as the sun heats it up, which is the most volatile time in its life cycle. Things are melting, gasses are off-gassing and new clues about the way comets form and evolve are being revealed. With Philae back on the case, there’s no telling what we could learn.
Science Oriented Video
The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
The Watergate scandal begins to unfold; The Battle of Bunker Hill during the American Revolution; O.J. Simpson arrested in the slayings of his ex-wife Nicole and Ronald Goldman; Singer Kate Smith dies.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.
Unless he cooked an extra-juicy steak, how does Snowden “have blood on his hands” if there is “no evidence of anyone being harmed?” As one observer put it last night in describing the government instructions these Sunday Times journalists appear to have obeyed: “There’s no evidence anyone’s been harmed but we’d like the phrase ‘blood on his hands’ somewhere in the piece.”
The whole article does literally nothing other than quote anonymous British officials. It gives voice to banal but inflammatory accusations that are made about every whistleblower from Daniel Ellsberg to Chelsea Manning. It offers zero evidence or confirmation for any of its claims. The “journalists” who wrote it neither questioned any of the official assertions nor even quoted anyone who denies them. It’s pure stenography of the worst kind: some government officials whispered these inflammatory claims in our ears and told us to print them, but not reveal who they are, and we’re obeying. Breaking!
The first clue of the pope’s interest in the environment came when he chose his name in honor of St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th century friar who dedicated himself to the poor and is considered the patron saint of animals and the environment. Francis had shown interest from his days in Argentina, when he was Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires.
There, he played a major role in convening different leaders to seek solutions for Argentina’s social ills. Francesca Ambrogetti, who co-wrote a biography of Francis, said he pushed for scientists at the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina to investigate the impact of environmental issues on humanity. As far back as September 2004, Cardinal Bergoglio cited the “destruction of the environment” as contributing to inequality and the need for social reforms. At a 2007 meeting of Latin American bishops in Aparecida, Brazil, he oversaw the drafting of a broad mission statement that included an emphasis on the environment.
Pablo Canziani, an atmospheric physicist who researches climate change, said Francis, who had once trained as a chemist, became very interested in the links between environmental destruction and social ills, including a dispute over paper pulp mills on the border with Uruguay, which Argentina claimed were polluting local drinking water.
It’s another of those busy summer weeks where I am away and my writing and reading time (which is just as, if not more, important) is dependent on spotty WiFi and finding a hidden corner away from the Gilmore clan.
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