Category: TIL (Today I Learned)

The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution is a five-volume collection compiled by Jonathan Elliot in the mid-19th century.

The people are not to be disarmed of their weapons. They are left in full possession of them.
— Zachariah Johnson, 3 Elliot, Debates at 646

The Quantum Gun Fallacy

Those who suggest (or insist) that correlations prove that gun possession guarantees gun-related harm are essentially arguing a version of Schrödinger’s cat — where every person is simultaneously a shooter, a victim, and a bystander… and your neighbor’s dusty rifle, locked in a closet, is somehow shooting up a school, protecting someone, and doing absolutely nothing, all at the same time — until a policy advocate opens the box and decides which outcome they prefer.

Fanonism:
By  on 

A term for the anti-colonial liberationist critique formulated by the Martiniquan psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961). 

Fanon’s work in Algeria led him to become actively involved in the Algerian liberation movement and to publish a number of foundational works on racism and colonialism. These include Black Skin, White Masks(1952, translated 1968), a study of the psychology of racism and colonial domination. Just before his death he published The Wretched of the Earth (1961), a broader study of how anti-colonial sentiment might address the task of decolonization.

In these texts Fanon brought together the insights he derived from his clinical study of the effects of colonial domination on the psyche of the colonized and his Marxist derived analysis of social and economic control.

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More than one, in fact

Unknown Species of Bacteria Discovered in China’s Space Station.

Swabs from China’s Tiangong space station reveal traces of a bacterium unseen on Earth, with characteristics that may help it function under stressful environmental conditions hundreds of kilometers above the planet’s surface.

Naming their discovery after the station, researchers from the Shenzhou Space Biotechnology Group and the Beijing Institute of Spacecraft System Engineering say the study of Niallia tiangongensis and similar species could be “essential” in protecting astronaut health and spacecraft functionality over long missions.

The swabs were taken from a cabin on board the space station in May 2023 by the Shenzhou-15 crew as part of one of two surveys by the China Space Station Habitation Area Microbiome Programme.

Follow-up studies have traced the growth of microbes that inhabit the space station environment, revealing a microbiome that differs in both composition and function from the one found on the International Space Station.
The new species appears to be a close cousin to a known strain called Niallia circulans – a rod-shaped, soil-dwelling bacterium that just a few years ago was reallocated to a new genus classification, having previously been regarded as a pathogenic form of Bacillus.

Like species of Bacillus, N. circulans and its space-faring relatives pack their essential chemistry into hardy spores to survive times of great stress. It’s not clear whether N. tiangongensis evolved on the station or arrived in spore form with at least a few of its distinguishing features in place.

According to the recently published analysis on its genes and functions, the new species has a unique ability to break down gelatin as a source of nitrogen and carbon, a knack that comes in handy when it needs to construct a protective coat of biofilm to bunker beneath when conditions get a little rough.

On the other hand, it seems to have lost the ability to utilize other energy-packed substances its cousins happily chow down on.

Not only does this reveal Niallia can be a diverse bunch of microorganisms, it demonstrates how readily some varieties of bacterium can make themselves right at home in our orbiting habitats.

There’s also not a great deal we can do about it. An examination of the ‘clean rooms’ NASA used to prepare the Mars Phoenix mission revealed dozens of microbe strains belonging to 26 novel species.

A recent study of these novel bacteria found their amazing ability to survive conditions we would assume to make the environment sterile came down to genes linked to DNA repair and resistance to levels of substances other microbes would find toxic.

Knowing thy enemy is clearly a significant step towards dealing with them. If we can’t prevent their existence or their ability to adapt, it is vital we can predict how microbes will adjust to living in space.

It’s yet to be determined whether Niallia tiangongensis poses any threat to the health of Tiangong’s astronauts, but given its cousin’s ability to cause sepsis in immunocompromised patients and its newfound ability to break down gelatin, the potential for health problems from this and other space microbes is a serious issue.

With eyes on launching missions to the Moon and beyond, it’s never been more important to know how the tiny passengers sharing our space may be suited to a life far from home.

Someone explain to me why the U.S. was sending money to the cartel in the first place.

And I for one, would really like the math and engineering to work!

30 years after warp drives were proposed, we still can’t make the math work.

In 1994, Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre decided to figure out if the “warp drive” from his favorite science fiction shows was possible. Amazingly, he found a way to make it feasible, but it’s still unclear if it could ever actually work.

Although it’s impossible to travel faster than light, the restriction applies only to local measurements. It’s possible to manipulate space-time in such a way that superluminal motion is achievable. For example, the expansion of the universe drives apart galaxies faster than the speed of light, but because every galaxy is at rest in its local patch of space, it’s all good.

In the meantime, we can only skirt around the edges, poking at various aspects of the warp drive and seeing what might happen to the quantum fields in that highly strange gravitational environment. This process of poking around has led to some interesting — and sometimes contradictory — insights about the nature of warp drives in the three decades since Alcubierre’s original discovery.

For example, one set of calculations suggests that quantum fields at the edge of the warp bubble that sort of straddle the boundary between the inside bits and the outside essentially blow up to infinity as soon as you turn the thing on, which would be … bad.

But other calculations say that applies only in limited cases and that if you ramp up the warp engine slowly enough, you’ll be fine.

Yet more calculations sidestep all of this and just look at how much negative energy you actually need to construct your warp drive. And the answer is, for a single macroscopic bubble — say, 30 feet (100 meters) across — you would need 10 times more negative energy than all of the positive energy contained in the entire universe, which isn’t very promising.

However, still other calculations show that this immense amount applies only to the traditional warp bubble as defined by Alcubierre. It might be possible to reshape the bubble so there’s a tiny “neck” in the front that’s doing the work of compressing space and then it balloons out to an envelope to contain the warp bubble. This minimizes any quantum weirdness so that you need only about a star’s worth of negative energy to shape the drive.

But even more calculations show that even if you get ahold of some negative energy or negative mass, as soon as you start moving, you’re going to run into problems — namely, that the negative mass will immediately start flowing out of the edge of the bubble (which is bad) at a speed faster than light (which is really bad). What ends up happening is that the exotic matter constructing the warp bubble can’t keep pace with the bubble itself, so it just tears itself apart.

So, although warp drive seems implausible, the final verdict is uncertain. But it’s still a fun thought experiment that allows us to explore some interesting and surprising connections between general relativity and quantum mechanics. And, of course, it makes our sci-fi shows more fun to watch — we don’t have to wait millions of years for our favorite spaceship crew to reach their destination.

Aging Members of Congress Refuse to Disclose Details of Their Top Secret Hospital
The Office of the Attending Physician gives politicians nearly unlimited medical care for about $54 a month.

After a presidential election that saw an 82-year-old commander in chief unable to complete sentences in a debate or instill confidence in the public that he could carry out his duties, elected leaders in Congress are faring no better.

In the past two months alone,
82-year-old Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX) was discovered to be living in an assisted-living facility with a dementia ward in her final months in office;
74-year-old Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) won a high-profile leadership position on the House Oversight Committee after revealing he is battling highly terminal esophageal cancer;
82-year-old Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) fell twice on Capitol Hill just months after blacking out during a press conference;
84-year-old former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) fell and broke her hip in Luxembourg;
and 76-year-old Rep. John Larson (D-CT) appeared to suffer a stroke on the House floor. (Larson’s staff has said it was a bad reaction to a new medication.)

What has eluded attention is the highly secretive hospital, housed on Capitol Hill and funded by taxpayers, that provides both emergency and primary care to an aging political class, which some have come to describe as a gerontocracy. It also runs classified programs known only to some members of Congress.

In 2023, Congress designated $4.2 million to the Office of the Attending Physician (OAP), a Navy-staffed hospital with multiple branches spread across Capitol Hill. The current attending physician, Dr. Brian Monahan, who serves as a rear admiral in the Navy, oversees a staff of dozens of Navy doctors, nurses, and technicians whose primary responsibility is providing care to members of Congress and the Supreme Court.

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