By the way;
HappyDay
Category: Science
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.
The first entity to establish a Mars colony will be the universe’s first trillionaire.
Lately, we’ve had a lot of puddlefish whining about how “we” shouldn’t go to Mars. Some of them actually think they get a vote, based on economic illiteracy and the delusion that SpaceX is somehow part of the US federal government. [Closed caption for the hard-of-thinking: it isn’t.]
But others just think they are giving good investment advice… SpaceX investors can do what they want, but Mars is a frozen wasteland full of nothing but near-vacuum and rocks.
So why would anyone want to go there?
Elon Musk likes to answer this question by pointing out that it’s not a good idea to store all humanity’s eggs in one basket. He’s right, but this kind of argument isn’t comprehensible to everyone, nor is it the full picture.
So now it’s the SF writer’s turn.
And therefore I present to you…
An Economic Roadmap for the Future of Humanity.
Researchers at Duke University release new study on gun violence
RALEIGH, N.C. (WTVD) — Duke University’s recent study on gun violence showed that not even restrictive gun laws are having a significant impact among gun deaths among children.
Since 2020, guns have ranked as the leading cause of death among people between the ages of one to 18.
The study identified 36 firearm laws including expansive background checks, mandatory waiting periods, safe storage provisions and laws that limit access for people at risk of harming themselves or others.
Surprisingly, there were no notable distinctions between states with and without firearm laws when it comes to firearm deaths among children.
There were also no significant reductions in suicide death rates in states with laws setting minimum ages for possession or purchase of firearms.
February 29, 2024
What Is a Leap Year?
The Short Answer:
It takes approximately 365.25 days for Earth to orbit the Sun — a solar year. We usually round the days in a calendar year to 365. To make up for the missing partial day, we add one day to our calendar approximately every four years. That is a leap year.
In an ordinary year, if you were to count all the days in a calendar from January to December, you’d count 365 days. But approximately every four years, February has 29 days instead of 28. So, there are 366 days in the year. This is called a leap year.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Why do we have leap years?
A year is the amount of time it takes a planet to orbit its star one time. A day is the amount of time it takes a planet to finish one rotation on its axis.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Because of that, most years, we round the days in a year down to 365. However, that leftover piece of a day doesn’t disappear. To make sure we count that extra part of a day, we add one day to the calendar approximately every four years. Here’s a table to show how it works:
| Year | Days in Year | Leap Year? |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 365 | No |
| 2018 | 365 | No |
| 2019 | 365 | No |
| 2020 | 366 | Yes |
Because we’ve subtracted approximately 6 hours — or ¼ of a day — from 2017, 2018 and 2019, we have to make up that time in 2020. That’s why we have leap day!
Are leap years really that important?
Leap years are important so that our calendar year matches the solar year — the amount of time it takes for Earth to make a trip around the Sun. Subtracting 5 hours, 46 minutes and 48 seconds off of a year maybe doesn’t seem like a big deal. But, if you keep subtracting almost 6 hours every year for many years, things can really get messed up.
For example, say that July is a warm, summer month where you live. If we never had leap years, all those missing hours would add up into days, weeks and even months. Eventually, in a few hundred years, July would actually take place in the cold winter months!
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The Likely Lab Leak and the Covid Cassandra.
I thought I was done with writing about Covid-19. But Covid-19 isn’t done with me—or with any of us.
I’m writing this precisely four years after Chinese health officials first announced the emergence of a mysterious new form of pneumonia in the city of Wuhan. “No obvious human-to-human transmission has been observed,” the officials added in that December 30, 2019, release. (Already, the Chinese were lying.) Today, Covid cases are ticking up for the umpteenth time. And documents keep coming to light that expose how American officials and scientists similarly suppressed unsettling facts about the pandemic’s origins.
While the death rate from each new wave of Covid keeps dropping, the disturbing revelations about our public health leaders keep getting worse. In December 2023, a new disclosure revealed how leading U.S. virus experts lobbied to conduct dangerous gain-of-function research at the substandard Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory. The latest leak provides yet more evidence that the pandemic likely emerged from a lab experiment gone awry, and that U.S. scientists actively covered up their possible role in that world-historical catastrophe.
After both the 1986 Challenger explosion and the 9/11 attacks, bipartisan commissions were convened to investigate the disasters. Covid has killed more than a million Americans and has cost our economy at least $14 trillion. And yet we see no great urgency to investigate the pandemic’s murky origins or prevent a recurrence. Republicans in Congress continue to hold productive hearings. But, according to the New York Times, the Biden administration is “privately resisting” pressure to create a 9/11-style commission on the pandemic. The press has largely moved on. And the public health officials most deeply involved in the debacle—including Anthony Fauci and his National Institutes of Health (NIH) colleague Francis Collins—continue to tap-dance around the truth, even after leaving their posts.
Note The New Madrid Fault, right smack on the Mississippi
New map shows where damaging earthquakes are most likely to occur in US.
Nearly 75% of the U.S. could experience damaging earthquake shaking, according to a recent U.S. Geological Survey-led team of more than 50 scientists and engineers.
This was one of several key findings from the latest USGS National Seismic Hazard Model (NSHM). The model was used to create a color-coded map that pinpoints where damaging earthquakes are most likely to occur based on insights from seismic studies, historical geologic data, and the latest data-collection technologies.
The research is published in the journal Earthquake Spectra.
Updated information on Mass Public Shootings from 1998 through October 2023
Between January 1st, 1998, and October 25th, 2023, 52.5% of attacks used solely handguns, and 16.8% used only rifles of any type—thirty-five percent of attacks used solely rifles or rifles in conjunction with another type of gun. Given the debate over pistol-stabilizing braces, the Excel file we provide lists the guns used in each attack, and two of the attacks used AR-15-type handguns with a pistol-stabilizing brace.
When astronauts become farmers: Harvesting food on the moon and Mars.
With renewed interest in sending people back to the moon and on to Mars, thanks to NASA’s Artemis missions, thoughts have naturally turned to how to feed astronauts traveling to those deep space destinations. Simply shipping food to future lunar bases and Mars colonies would be impractically expensive.
Astronauts will, on top of everything else, have to become farmers.
Of course, since neither the moon nor Mars has a proper atmosphere, running surface water, moderate temperatures or even proper soil, farming on those two celestial bodies will be more difficult than on Earth. Fortunately, a lot of smart, imaginative people are working on the problem.
NASA has been studying how to grow plants in space on the International Space Station for years. The idea is to supplement astronauts’ diets with fresh fruits and vegetables grown in microgravity using artificial lighting. Future space stations and long-duration space missions will carry gardens with them.
I’m sure The Matrix wasn’t meant to be a ‘How To’ guide
This video envisioning EctoLife, the world’s first concept of artificial womb facility.
[📹 Hashem Al-Ghaili]pic.twitter.com/qJcltcMpsk
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 19, 2023
A New Report Throws Cold Water on Man-Made Global Warming Pseudoscience
“To what extent are temperature levels changing due to greenhouse gas emissions?” may prove to be the most important scientific paper in the last 10 years.
Statistics Norway just published a bomb-shell of a paper that offers a real analysis of global temperatures. The English translation of the paper is available HERE, and is well worth looking at for anyone interested in the facts behind global temperature trends.
Climate Discussion Nexus offers an introduction to why this paper is so important:
Well, this is awkward. Statistics Norway, aka Statistisk sentralbyrå or “the national statistical institute of Norway and the main producer of official statistics”, has just published a paper “To what extent are temperature levels changing due to greenhouse gas emissions?”
The awkward part isn’t trying to grasp the subtleties of Norwegian since it’s also available in English. It’s that the Abstract bluntly declares that “standard climate models are rejected by time series data on global temperatures” while the conclusions state “the results imply that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be sufficiently strong to cause systematic changes in the pattern of the temperature fluctuations.”
But the really awkward part is that a paper from a government agency dares to address openly so many questions the alarmist establishment has spent decades declaring taboo, from the historical record on climate to the existence of massive uncertainty among scientists on it.
What the Norwegians did was conduct statistical analyses of observed and reconstructed temperature series and test whether the recent fluctuation in temperatures differs systematically from previous temperature cycles potentially due to the emission of greenhouse gases. For example, the researchers gathered all the data from various sources, including those related to the four previous glacial and inter-glacial periods, and did a statistical analysis to see how more recent Global Climate Models (GCMs) compare.
In the global climate models (GCMs) most of the warming that has taken place since 1950 is attributed to human activity. Historically, however, there have been large climatic variations. Temperature reconstructions indicate that there is a ‘warming’ trend that seems to have been going on for as long as approximately 400 years. Prior to the last 250 years or so, such a trend could only be due to natural causes.
The length of the observed time series is consequently of crucial importance for analyzing empirically the pattern of temperature fluctuations and to have any hope of distinguishing natural variations in temperatures from man-made ones. Fortunately, many observed temperature series are significantly longer than 100 years and in addition, as mentioned above, there are reconstructed temperature series that are much longer.
I was recently discussing the fact that Earth is warming from its last glaciation period. The Norwegian statisticians’ comprehensive temperature review takes the long view into account by looking at the last 420,000 years.
Judge Benitez destroys the 2.2 rounds per DGU lie once and for all
Over two years ago, I read through some court filings in Duncan v. Bonta, the lawsuit against California’s “large capacity” magazine ban. I was left scratching my head at a claim from the State of California in support of their magazine ban, that the average Defensive Gun Use (DGU) incident involves discharging only 2.2 rounds. The more I looked into it, the more obvious it became that this was unsubstantiated.
Since then, Duncan v. Bonta made a trip to the Supreme Court, got GVR’d after NYSRPA v. Bruen, and sent back down the judicial hierarchy to the US District Court for the Southern District of California. The district court published its decision last Friday, in which Judge Roger Benitez completely took apart the 2.2 rounds per DGU canard (PDF pages 26-33):
C. The Invention of the 2.2 Shot Average
…the State’s statistic is suspect. California relies entirely on the opinion of its statistician for the hypothesis that defenders fire an average of only 2.2 shots in cases of confrontation.
Where does the 2.2 shot average originate? There is no national or state government data report on shots fired in self-defense events. There is no public government database. One would expect to see investigatory police reports as the most likely source to accurately capture data on shots fired or number of shell casings found, although not every use of a gun in self-defense is reported to the police. As between the two sides, while in the better position to collect and produce such reports, the State’s Attorney General has not provided a single police report to the Court or to his own expert.
Without investigatory reports, the State’s expert turns to anecdotal statements, often from bystanders, reported in news media, and selectively studied. She indicates she conducted two studies. Based on these two studies of newspaper stories, she opines that it is statistically rare for a person to fire more than 10 rounds in self-defense and that only 2.2 shots are fired on average. Unfortunately, her opinion lacks classic indicia of reliability and her two studies cannot be reproduced and are not peer-reviewed.
“Reliability and validity are two aspects of accuracy in measurement. In statistics, reliability refers to reproducibility of results.” Her studies cannot be tested because she has not disclosed her data. Her studies have not been replicated. In fact, the formula used to select 200 news stories for the Factiva study is incomprehensible. […]
For one study, Allen says she conducted a search of stories published in the NRA Institute for Legislative Action magazine (known as the Armed Citizen Database) between 2011 and 2017. There is no explanation for the choice to use 2011 for the beginning. After all, the collection of news stories goes back to 1958. Elsewhere in her declaration she studies mass shooting events but for that chooses a much longer time period reaching back to 1982. Likewise, there is no explanation for not updating the study after 2017.
[…] details are completely absent. Allen does not list the 736 stories. Nor does she reveal how she assigned the number of shots fired in self-defense when the news accounts use phrases like “the intruder was shot” but no number of shots was reported, or “there was an exchange of gunfire,” or “multiple rounds were fired.” She includes in her 2.2 average of defensive shots fired, incidents where no shots were fired. […] She does not reveal the imputed number substitute value that she used where the exact number of shots fired was not specified, so her result cannot be reproduced. […] For example, this Court randomly selected two pages from Allen’s mass shooting table: pages 10 and 14. From looking at these two pages (assuming that the sources for the reports were accurate and unbiased) the Court is able to make statistical observations, including the observation that the number of shots fired were unknown 69.04% of the time.
The foundation of the claim was not real data but “anecdata,” which don’t cover nearly as many incidents as actual police reports do. (Not every incident is reported, so even police data is incomplete.)
Second, the sampled news reports were randomly selected. It isn’t clear if there were any process safeguards to prevent cherry picking, and there is no transparency about the included incidents.
Third, the selected timeframes look arbitrary.
Fourth, as Judge Benitez points out, including zero-shot incidents will obviously bring the average down, so it’s questionable.
The most devastating critique is that the expert assigned an arbitrary number of shots fired when news stories didn’t include that crucial detail.
The Court is aware of its obligation to act as a gatekeeper to keep out junk science where it does not meet the reliability standard of Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. […] while questionable expert testimony was admitted, it has now been weighed in light of all of the evidence.
Using interest-balancing, the en banc 9th Circuit shamelessly rubber-stamped California’s infringement using this pathetic junk science. It’s gratifying to see interest-balancing tossed into the garbage alongside this junk science under the new Bruen standard.
Okay, so when do we start sending mining missions?
In A First, NASA Returns Asteroid Samples to Earth.
A capsule containing precious samples from an asteroid landed safely on Earth on Sunday, the culmination of a roughly 4-billion-mile journey over the past seven years.
The asteroid samples were collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which flew by Earth early Sunday morning and jettisoned the capsule over a designated landing zone in the Utah desert. The unofficial touchdown time was 8:52 a.m. MT, 3 minutes ahead of the predicted landing time.
The dramatic event — which the NASA livestream narrator described as “opening a time capsule to our ancient solar system” — marked a major milestone for the United States: The collected rocks and soil were NASA’s first samples brought back to Earth from an asteroid. Experts have said the bounty could help scientists unlock secrets about the solar system and how it came to be, including how life emerged on this planet.
Bruce Betts, chief scientist at The Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization that conducts research, advocacy and outreach to promote space exploration, congratulated the NASA team on what he called an “impressive and very complicated mission,” adding that the asteroid samples are the start of a thrilling new chapter in space history.
“It’s exciting because this mission launched in 2016 and so there’s a feeling of, ‘Wow, this day has finally come,’” he said. “But scientifically, it’s exciting because this is an amazing opportunity to study a very complex story that goes way back to the dawn of the solar system.”
Earth’s atmosphere can clean itself, breakthrough study finds.
Scientists have made a groundbreaking discovery that could change the way we think about air pollution. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have found that a strong electric field between airborne water droplets and surrounding air can create a molecule called hydroxide (OH) by a previously unknown mechanism.
This molecule is crucial in helping to clear the air of pollutants, including greenhouse gases and other chemicals.
The discovery is outlined in a new paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which suggests that the traditional thinking around the formation of OH in the atmosphere is incomplete. Until now, it was thought that sunlight was the primary driver of OH formation, but this new research shows that OH can be created spontaneously by the special conditions on the surface of water droplets.
The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.
— Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet
Careful scientists know to acknowledge uncertainty in the findings and conclusions of their papers. But in one leading journal, the frequency of hedging words such as “might” and “probably” has fallen by about 40% over the past 2 decades, a study finds.
If this trend holds across the scientific literature, it suggests a worrisome rise of unreliable, exaggerated claims, some observers say. Hedging and avoiding overconfidence “are vital to communicating what one’s data can actually say and what it merely implies,” says Melissa Wheeler, a social psychologist at the Swinburne University of Technology who was not involved in the study. “If academic writing becomes more about the rhetoric … it will become more difficult for readers to decipher what is groundbreaking and truly novel.”
The new analysis, one of the largest of its kind, examined more than 2600 research articles published from 1997 to 2021 in Science, which the team chose because it publishes articles from multiple disciplines. (Science’s news team is independent from the editorial side.) The team searched the papers for about 50 terms such as “could,” “appear to,” “approximately,” and “seem.” The frequency of these hedging words dropped from 115.8 instances per 10,000 words in 1997 to 67.42 per 10,000 words in 2021.
Study Shows Gun Laws Don’t Matter, Race Does
33 people were shot over the weekend in Chicago. Urban gangland violence like that is what real “mass shootings” look like and finally a Journal of the American Medical Association paper addressed the problem by shifting the blame to something it calls “structural racism”.
The JAMA paper, which was quickly picked up by CNN as “Structural Racism may Contribute to Mass Shootings” and by Bloomberg as “Mass Shootings Disproportionately Victimize Black Americans”, acknowledged what conservatives have been saying about gun violence.
“There was no discernible association noted in this study between gun laws and MSEs [mass shootings] with other studies showing similar findings,” it noted.
The issue wasn’t gun laws, it was race. “The study found that in areas with higher black populations, mass shootings are likelier to occur compared to communities with higher white populations,” CNN reported. “The findings disrupt the nation’s image of mass shootings, which has been shaped by tragedies like the Las Vegas festival shooting and Sandy Hook in which most of the victims were not black,” Bloomberg added.
Faced with an immovable statistical object and the unstoppable force of equity, the JAMA paper blames the whole thing on structural racism. The study correlates urban areas and neighborhoods with high concentrations of single-parent households” to mass shootings. It then demonstrates that “structural racism” must be at fault because of “the percentage of the population that is black.” Black people in the study are interchangeable with racism.
Such is the state of woke medical science which tries to fix racism with more racism. The study never comes up with any plausible explanation of how structural racism causes people to shoot each other. At one point it claims that “racial residential segregation practices are predictive of various types of shootings” in a country where segregation had been abolished since 1964.
The study’s definition of segregation is so senseless that it lists majority black cities like Detroit, a 77% black city, as being 73% segregated, and Baltimore, a 62% black city, as being 64% segregated. A city with a strong black majority and black leaders is racially segregated and its people are suffering from “structural racism”. That’s why there are so many mass shootings.
But if segregation is the issue then why does Atlanta, which had actual segregation, have only 18 mass shootings, while Chicago has 141? Southern cities show up as less segregated and less violent in the paper’s data. A history of segregation is clearly not the issue. This isn’t about the past, whether it’s the historical revisionism of the 1619 Project, or any other.
If segregation were the issue, crime would have been far higher during segregation than after it.
This gets verified and replicated and away we go to the races…
The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor
For the first time in the world, we succeeded in synthesizing the room-temperature superconductor (Tc≥400 K, 127∘C) working at ambient pressure with a modified lead-apatite (LK-99) structure. The superconductivity of LK-99 is proved with the Critical temperature (Tc), Zero-resistivity, Critical current (Ic), Critical magnetic field (Hc), and the Meissner effect.
The superconductivity of LK-99 originates from minute structural distortion by a slight volume shrinkage (0.48 %), not by external factors such as temperature and pressure. The shrinkage is caused by Cu2+ substitution of Pb2+(2) ions in the insulating network of Pb(2)-phosphate and it generates the stress.
It concurrently transfers to Pb(1) of the cylindrical column resulting in distortion of the cylindrical column interface, which creates superconducting quantum wells (SQWs) in the interface. The heat capacity results indicated that the new model is suitable for explaining the superconductivity of LK-99.
The unique structure of LK-99 that allows the minute distorted structure to be maintained in the interfaces is the most important factor that LK-99 maintains and exhibits superconductivity at room temperatures and ambient pressure.
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What’s up in space |
EARTH-DIRECTED CME (UPDATED): A magnetic filament in the sun’s southern hemisphere erupted on July 11th (movie #1) and hurled a CME toward Earth (movie #2). According to a NASA model, most of the CME will sail south of our planet, but not all. The northern flank will likely strike our planet’s magnetic field during the late hours of July 14th possibly causing a G1-class geomagnetic storm. Aurora alerts: SMS Text
A HYPERACTIVE SUNSPOT: New sunspot AR3372 is seething with activity. In the last 24 hours alone it has produced eight M-class solar flares (graph) To the extreme ultraviolet telescopes onboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, it looks like the northeastern limb of the sun is on fire:
The rat-a-tat-tat of solar flares from AR3372 is causing a rolling series of shortwave radio blackouts around all longitudes of our planet. Ham radio operators, mariners and aviators may have noticed loss of signal below 30 MHz on multiple occasions since July 11th. In addition, episodes of sudden ionization in the atmosphere are doppler-shifting the frequency of time-standard radio stations such as Canada’s CHU and America’s WWV (data).
If current trends continue, we should expect more strong M-class flares during the next 24 hours with a chance of X-flares as well. This sunspot will become even more geoeffective in the days ahead as it continues to turn toward Earth. Solar flare alerts: SMS Text
Bu bu bu bu but all those scientists can’t be wrong!
Regarding Consensus Science
I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.
― Michael Crichton