DShomshak

Let us hope that Jamarria and his fellow students also learned some lessons that Snyder and his ilk did not intend, that will come to regret teaching.
 
Dean Shomshak

AP NewsBreak: US Army quietly discharging immigrant recruits

That reminds me of how Daniel Patrick Moynihan defined the difference between liberalism and conservatism. Conservatives, he said, believe that culture sets the limits of politics. Liberals believe that politics can change culture.
 
I see evidence for both. Optimally, they act as contraries to each curb the excesses of the other: Conservatives to remind liberals that humans are not infinitely malleable, and liberals to point out injustices in the status quo and insist that they can be corrected. At worst they become negations: Conservatives become reactionary apologists for privilege and injustice, while liberals try to burn down the social order because it's social order.
 
One irony is that -- at least according to one conservative political strategist I heard on All Things Considered -- many American conservatives believe they're losing the culture war or have already lost. So now they are trying to get their way through raw political dominance. Blocking Merrick Garland, a judge everyone said had no political ideology, from the Supreme Court was emblematic: An admission that the conservative agenda does *not* emerge naturally from just following the Constitution.
 
Dean Shomshak

That reminds me of how Daniel Patrick Moynihan defined the difference between liberalism and conservatism. Conservatives, he said, believe that culture sets the limits of politics. Liberals believe that politics can change culture.
 
I see evidence for both. Optimally, they act as contraries to each curb the excesses of the other: Conservatives to remind liberals that humans are not infinitely malleable, and liberals to point out injustices in the status quo and insist that they can be corrected. At worst they become negations: Conservatives become reactionary apologists for privilege and injustice, while liberals try to burn down the social order because it's social order.
 
One irony is that -- at least according to one conservative political strategist I heard on All Things Considered -- many American conservatives believe they're losing the culture war or have already lost. So now they are trying to get their way through raw political dominance. Blocking Merrick Garland, a judge everyone said had no political ideology, from the Supreme Court was emblematic: An admission that the conservative agenda does *not* emerge naturally from just following the Constitution.
 
Dean Shomshak

Fairly strong circumstantial evidence published in Nature this week that 'Oumuamua was a cometary object, in that its trajectory shows some nongravitational accelerations which are consistent with the kind of outgassing that happens to comets in a perihelion passage.  In effect, the ices inside the body heat up due to solar radiation, sublime, and the gas release acts like a very weak and poorly directed rocket.  This result comes from fitting an orbit to the entirety of its measured trajectory, and looking for systematic deviance in the observed motion.
 
Not a surprise, considering what was measured during its pass: the colors and reflectance spectrum were close to that of inactive comets and similar asteroids in the Solar System.
 
Other thing in the latest Nature is an analysis of some meteorites of martian origin; the upshot is that the crust of Mars seems to have become stable as much as a hundred million years before Earth's did, within 20 million years of the formation of the Solar System.  That also is not a surprise, though it's a really short time for an astronomical process.

RDU Neil: Your theory is pretty much what a sociologist found and described in his book called, IIRC, Caste and Class in a Southern Town.. This was in, like, the 1920s? (Super-slow internet connection makes it hard to look things up and check the details, sorry. I expect Wikipedia could give you the summary.)
 
Dean Shomshak

As part of its coverage of the Trump detention policy, All Things Considered consulted immigration law experts who confirmed that the regime's claim to be just following the law as written is, well, a lie. But we all knew that.
 
One of them, in pointing out that illegal border crossing is only a misdemeanor, specifically compared it to a parking infraction. So the regime is locking people up for the equivalent of double parking.
 
Why such fear and hatred? Jeff Sessions gave it away in one of his speeches. He explained that Zero Tolerance was necessary because the USA "Is not an idea... It is a nation-state." As I argued months ago, no it isn't. The American population does not meet the definition of a "nation." Not unless you reject a large fraction of the citizenry as not really American. So it seems pretty clear that Sessions' objection to border-crossers is not that they break the law, it's that they are brown and speak Spanish. But we all knew that, too.
 
This regime has gone from deplorable to disgusting, and is well on its way to depraved.
 
Dean Shomshak

As part of its coverage of the Trump detention policy, All Things Considered consulted immigration law experts who confirmed that the regime's claim to be just following the law as written is, well, a lie. But we all knew that.
 
One of them, in pointing out that illegal border crossing is only a misdemeanor, specifically compared it to a parking infraction. So the regime is locking people up for the equivalent of double parking.
 
Why such fear and hatred? Jeff Sessions gave it away in one of his speeches. He explained that Zero Tolerance was necessary because the USA "Is not an idea... It is a nation-state." As I argued months ago, no it isn't. The American population does not meet the definition of a "nation." Not unless you reject a large fraction of the citizenry as not really American. So it seems pretty clear that Sessions' objection to border-crossers is not that they break the law, it's that they are brown and speak Spanish. But we all knew that, too.
 
This regime has gone from deplorable to disgusting, and is well on its way to depraved.
 
Dean Shomshak

As part of its coverage of the Trump detention policy, All Things Considered consulted immigration law experts who confirmed that the regime's claim to be just following the law as written is, well, a lie. But we all knew that.
 
One of them, in pointing out that illegal border crossing is only a misdemeanor, specifically compared it to a parking infraction. So the regime is locking people up for the equivalent of double parking.
 
Why such fear and hatred? Jeff Sessions gave it away in one of his speeches. He explained that Zero Tolerance was necessary because the USA "Is not an idea... It is a nation-state." As I argued months ago, no it isn't. The American population does not meet the definition of a "nation." Not unless you reject a large fraction of the citizenry as not really American. So it seems pretty clear that Sessions' objection to border-crossers is not that they break the law, it's that they are brown and speak Spanish. But we all knew that, too.
 
This regime has gone from deplorable to disgusting, and is well on its way to depraved.
 
Dean Shomshak

As part of its coverage of the Trump detention policy, All Things Considered consulted immigration law experts who confirmed that the regime's claim to be just following the law as written is, well, a lie. But we all knew that.
 
One of them, in pointing out that illegal border crossing is only a misdemeanor, specifically compared it to a parking infraction. So the regime is locking people up for the equivalent of double parking.
 
Why such fear and hatred? Jeff Sessions gave it away in one of his speeches. He explained that Zero Tolerance was necessary because the USA "Is not an idea... It is a nation-state." As I argued months ago, no it isn't. The American population does not meet the definition of a "nation." Not unless you reject a large fraction of the citizenry as not really American. So it seems pretty clear that Sessions' objection to border-crossers is not that they break the law, it's that they are brown and speak Spanish. But we all knew that, too.
 
This regime has gone from deplorable to disgusting, and is well on its way to depraved.
 
Dean Shomshak

As part of its coverage of the Trump detention policy, All Things Considered consulted immigration law experts who confirmed that the regime's claim to be just following the law as written is, well, a lie. But we all knew that.
 
One of them, in pointing out that illegal border crossing is only a misdemeanor, specifically compared it to a parking infraction. So the regime is locking people up for the equivalent of double parking.
 
Why such fear and hatred? Jeff Sessions gave it away in one of his speeches. He explained that Zero Tolerance was necessary because the USA "Is not an idea... It is a nation-state." As I argued months ago, no it isn't. The American population does not meet the definition of a "nation." Not unless you reject a large fraction of the citizenry as not really American. So it seems pretty clear that Sessions' objection to border-crossers is not that they break the law, it's that they are brown and speak Spanish. But we all knew that, too.
 
This regime has gone from deplorable to disgusting, and is well on its way to depraved.
 
Dean Shomshak

As part of its coverage of the Trump detention policy, All Things Considered consulted immigration law experts who confirmed that the regime's claim to be just following the law as written is, well, a lie. But we all knew that.
 
One of them, in pointing out that illegal border crossing is only a misdemeanor, specifically compared it to a parking infraction. So the regime is locking people up for the equivalent of double parking.
 
Why such fear and hatred? Jeff Sessions gave it away in one of his speeches. He explained that Zero Tolerance was necessary because the USA "Is not an idea... It is a nation-state." As I argued months ago, no it isn't. The American population does not meet the definition of a "nation." Not unless you reject a large fraction of the citizenry as not really American. So it seems pretty clear that Sessions' objection to border-crossers is not that they break the law, it's that they are brown and speak Spanish. But we all knew that, too.
 
This regime has gone from deplorable to disgusting, and is well on its way to depraved.
 
Dean Shomshak

As part of its coverage of the Trump detention policy, All Things Considered consulted immigration law experts who confirmed that the regime's claim to be just following the law as written is, well, a lie. But we all knew that.
 
One of them, in pointing out that illegal border crossing is only a misdemeanor, specifically compared it to a parking infraction. So the regime is locking people up for the equivalent of double parking.
 
Why such fear and hatred? Jeff Sessions gave it away in one of his speeches. He explained that Zero Tolerance was necessary because the USA "Is not an idea... It is a nation-state." As I argued months ago, no it isn't. The American population does not meet the definition of a "nation." Not unless you reject a large fraction of the citizenry as not really American. So it seems pretty clear that Sessions' objection to border-crossers is not that they break the law, it's that they are brown and speak Spanish. But we all knew that, too.
 
This regime has gone from deplorable to disgusting, and is well on its way to depraved.
 
Dean Shomshak

An interesting article on why opioid addiction is such a much bigger issue in America than anywhere else...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41701718
 
But my favorite quote (of the various reasons why)...
 
Some Americans, says Professor Keith Humphreys from Stanford University, believe that life is "fixable".
"I'm 51," he says. "If I go to an American doctor and say 'Hey - I ran the marathon I used to run when I was 30, now I'm all sore, fix me', my doctor will probably try to fix me.
"If you do that in France the doctor would say 'It's life, have a glass of wine - what do you want from me?'"
In 2016, a study compared how Japanese and American doctors prescribed opioids. It found that Japanese doctors treated acute pain with opioids in 47% of cases - compared to 97% in the US.
"There is obviously a willingness, and a habit, of giving opioid pain relief that is not shared elsewhere," says Professor Feinberg.
"Other countries deal with pain in much healthier ways."

As part of its coverage of the Trump detention policy, All Things Considered consulted immigration law experts who confirmed that the regime's claim to be just following the law as written is, well, a lie. But we all knew that.
 
One of them, in pointing out that illegal border crossing is only a misdemeanor, specifically compared it to a parking infraction. So the regime is locking people up for the equivalent of double parking.
 
Why such fear and hatred? Jeff Sessions gave it away in one of his speeches. He explained that Zero Tolerance was necessary because the USA "Is not an idea... It is a nation-state." As I argued months ago, no it isn't. The American population does not meet the definition of a "nation." Not unless you reject a large fraction of the citizenry as not really American. So it seems pretty clear that Sessions' objection to border-crossers is not that they break the law, it's that they are brown and speak Spanish. But we all knew that, too.
 
This regime has gone from deplorable to disgusting, and is well on its way to depraved.
 
Dean Shomshak

Just heard on All Things Considered that numerous religious groups are in fact objecting. That the US Conference of Catholic Bishops speaks in favor of refugees is perhaps not surprising, but even the Southern Baptists are objecting to Jeff Sessions quoting scripture to justify his policy. A fellow who was actually one of Trump's Evangelical advisors called it "grotesque." We can only hope that in backing Trump for the sake of appointing anti-abortion judges, they sold their souls to the Devil.
 
Dean Shomshak

Just heard on All Things Considered that numerous religious groups are in fact objecting. That the US Conference of Catholic Bishops speaks in favor of refugees is perhaps not surprising, but even the Southern Baptists are objecting to Jeff Sessions quoting scripture to justify his policy. A fellow who was actually one of Trump's Evangelical advisors called it "grotesque." We can only hope that in backing Trump for the sake of appointing anti-abortion judges, they sold their souls to the Devil.
 
Dean Shomshak

Just heard on All Things Considered that numerous religious groups are in fact objecting. That the US Conference of Catholic Bishops speaks in favor of refugees is perhaps not surprising, but even the Southern Baptists are objecting to Jeff Sessions quoting scripture to justify his policy. A fellow who was actually one of Trump's Evangelical advisors called it "grotesque." We can only hope that in backing Trump for the sake of appointing anti-abortion judges, they sold their souls to the Devil.
 
Dean Shomshak

Other people seem to have the technobabble well in hand, but in case you want something more descriptive, I'll add a few.
 
Monopole Crystals. A monopole is a flaw in space-time. Its most distinctive feature is that it has a magnetic field with only a north or south pole, which is otherwise impossible. Call ing it a subatomic particle is shifty nomenclature because it's a lot more massive than any atom could be. The crystal is to hold the particle in place so you can do things with it. Also because proper comic-book super-science must include crystals.
 
Bose-Einstein Concensate Vortex. Cool a gas of atoms to near Absolute Zero and the atoms "smear out" and interpenetrate because of Quantum Mechanics weirdness. Fun fact: A Bose-Einstein Condensate slows the passage of light a lot. Set the quantum gas spinning, and a beam of light can be trapped inside -- its speed reduced to ZERO. Since the speed of light is intimately tied to Space and Time, a comic-book scientist should be able to do things with it.
 
Muonic Matter. The muon particle is identical to the electron, except a lot more massive. If you could replace some of the electrons in atoms with muons, their orbits would be much tighter, resulting in smaller atoms, denser materials, and -- so it is predicted by those who predict such things -- vastly increased magnetic properties. Muonic Iron would be just the thing to build a Hyper-Magnetic Generator.
 
Strange Matter is even better for technobabble. The atomic nuclei of ordinary atoms are made of protons and neutrons, which in turn are made of "up" and "down" quarks. But there are other sorts of quarks! The next pair are called Strong and Charm. Atoms that include particles made from these quarks are Strange Matter or Charmed Matter. In addition to being very dense their properties would be, well, strange. (Or charming?) Make up anything you want, here. Like, there might be completely new forces never before seen.
 
Just don't forget to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow. Whenever the Third Doctor had a techno-problem, this solved it. (Because the actor Jon Pertwee put his foot down and said he was only going to learn one technobabble phrase, and good for him.)
 
Dean Shomshak

Other people seem to have the technobabble well in hand, but in case you want something more descriptive, I'll add a few.
 
Monopole Crystals. A monopole is a flaw in space-time. Its most distinctive feature is that it has a magnetic field with only a north or south pole, which is otherwise impossible. Call ing it a subatomic particle is shifty nomenclature because it's a lot more massive than any atom could be. The crystal is to hold the particle in place so you can do things with it. Also because proper comic-book super-science must include crystals.
 
Bose-Einstein Concensate Vortex. Cool a gas of atoms to near Absolute Zero and the atoms "smear out" and interpenetrate because of Quantum Mechanics weirdness. Fun fact: A Bose-Einstein Condensate slows the passage of light a lot. Set the quantum gas spinning, and a beam of light can be trapped inside -- its speed reduced to ZERO. Since the speed of light is intimately tied to Space and Time, a comic-book scientist should be able to do things with it.
 
Muonic Matter. The muon particle is identical to the electron, except a lot more massive. If you could replace some of the electrons in atoms with muons, their orbits would be much tighter, resulting in smaller atoms, denser materials, and -- so it is predicted by those who predict such things -- vastly increased magnetic properties. Muonic Iron would be just the thing to build a Hyper-Magnetic Generator.
 
Strange Matter is even better for technobabble. The atomic nuclei of ordinary atoms are made of protons and neutrons, which in turn are made of "up" and "down" quarks. But there are other sorts of quarks! The next pair are called Strong and Charm. Atoms that include particles made from these quarks are Strange Matter or Charmed Matter. In addition to being very dense their properties would be, well, strange. (Or charming?) Make up anything you want, here. Like, there might be completely new forces never before seen.
 
Just don't forget to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow. Whenever the Third Doctor had a techno-problem, this solved it. (Because the actor Jon Pertwee put his foot down and said he was only going to learn one technobabble phrase, and good for him.)
 
Dean Shomshak

Other people seem to have the technobabble well in hand, but in case you want something more descriptive, I'll add a few.
 
Monopole Crystals. A monopole is a flaw in space-time. Its most distinctive feature is that it has a magnetic field with only a north or south pole, which is otherwise impossible. Call ing it a subatomic particle is shifty nomenclature because it's a lot more massive than any atom could be. The crystal is to hold the particle in place so you can do things with it. Also because proper comic-book super-science must include crystals.
 
Bose-Einstein Concensate Vortex. Cool a gas of atoms to near Absolute Zero and the atoms "smear out" and interpenetrate because of Quantum Mechanics weirdness. Fun fact: A Bose-Einstein Condensate slows the passage of light a lot. Set the quantum gas spinning, and a beam of light can be trapped inside -- its speed reduced to ZERO. Since the speed of light is intimately tied to Space and Time, a comic-book scientist should be able to do things with it.
 
Muonic Matter. The muon particle is identical to the electron, except a lot more massive. If you could replace some of the electrons in atoms with muons, their orbits would be much tighter, resulting in smaller atoms, denser materials, and -- so it is predicted by those who predict such things -- vastly increased magnetic properties. Muonic Iron would be just the thing to build a Hyper-Magnetic Generator.
 
Strange Matter is even better for technobabble. The atomic nuclei of ordinary atoms are made of protons and neutrons, which in turn are made of "up" and "down" quarks. But there are other sorts of quarks! The next pair are called Strong and Charm. Atoms that include particles made from these quarks are Strange Matter or Charmed Matter. In addition to being very dense their properties would be, well, strange. (Or charming?) Make up anything you want, here. Like, there might be completely new forces never before seen.
 
Just don't forget to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow. Whenever the Third Doctor had a techno-problem, this solved it. (Because the actor Jon Pertwee put his foot down and said he was only going to learn one technobabble phrase, and good for him.)
 
Dean Shomshak

“That's the way it was. Privilege, which just means 'private law.' Two types of people laugh at the law; those that break it and those that make it.”

― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

The May 19, 2018 issue of the Economist has an article about how astronomers are using the GAIA dataset to try solving a fairly significant puzzle in astrophysics: the rate at which the universe expands. Astronomers have two ways to measure this... and the measurements do not match. One method works directly from the Cosmic Microwave Background. The other uses a "ladder" of inferences:
-- Nearby stars can have their distance measured by parallax.
-- Within that range are bright, pulsating stars called Cepheid variables. Conveniently, a Cepheid's period correlates rather precisely with its absolute brightness. So, Cepheids can be used to find the distance to nearby galaxies. (Near in a cosmic sense, anyway.)
-- In those galaxies, astronomers see supernovae; and because they know the distance to the galaxies, they can tell that a certain kind of supernova always has a certain brightness. So, by watching for these supernovae, astronomers can measure the distance to galaxies out hundreds of millions of light-years.
-- And by measuring how fast those galaxies recede at a given distance, they infer the rate at which the universe expands.
 
The two methods do not give the same result. They differ by about 6 kilometers per second per megaparsec. (IIRC. I don't have the article in front of me.)
 
Oops.
 
Many astronomers hoped the problem was in the long chain of inference from parallax to Cepheids to supernovae. Every measurement has a margin of error, after all, and the errors at one link in the chain will increase the errors of later stages. It was hoped that GAIA, by supplying more accurate measurements to more stars than were ever measured before, would adjust the brightness scale for Cepheids -- and this correction would adjust the distances to galaxies and make the measurements of cosmic expansion match.
 
Nope. They still don't match.
 
From this, astronomers conclude that something is going on they do not understand, and it's probably pretty important. More research needed.
 
Dean Shomshak

Yeah, the unambiguous detection of neutrinos from 1987A dismissed a lot of questions with a single stroke.  Theory had predicted that core collapse supernovae should release a big neutrino burst, and the total energy in the neutrinos dwarfed the release in electromagnetic radiation (~99% of the energy comes out in neutrinos); the number of neutrinos detected was spang on this prediction, within the measurement uncertainties.  When I heard of the detection, that was literally the first question I asked: what the implied energy release in neutrinos was.  It was the key number: with that, you could tell if you basically understood supernovae or not.  And the number said: yes, you do have the basic understanding correct.
 
Last fall's gravity-waves-plus-electromagnetics detection of the merging neutron star event, and plausible interpretation of the ejecta as freshly synthesized r-process material, likewise settled a number of questions at a single stroke.
 
These stunning results, qualitatively different from any previous observations, drastically reduce the number of viable alternatives to known physics, because any new exotic theory not only has to explain whatever problem the theory was constructed to solve, but it has to work so that the rest of the observations are obeyed as well.  

The content is in the 8 June 2018 issue of Science (likely to be behind a subscriber wall).
 
Two papers here.  The one getting all the press is the result of mass spectrometer measurements of the stuff released from Martian surface samples when the stuff is heated.  This kind of thing was done with the Viking landers back in 1976, but the unsuspected presence of powerful oxidizing substances (perchlorates) in the Martian soil, generated over time by the solar ultraviolet (Mars's atmosphere does not block UV), made it more likely that those early results were due to the perchlorates reacting with stuff in the analysis chamber.  There's no way to remove the perchlorates from the soil, but by structuring your measurement process correctly you can sidestep them (cause them to be released from the soil, chew up other stuff which is what we really want to know about now, and eventually all the perchlorates are used up).  In effect, that's what they did with the mass spectrometer measurements: only measure things that are released after all the perchlorate damage is done.
 
Once you do that, you get solid detections of hydrocarbons (both aliphatics, chain-shaped molecules, like butane; and aromatics, ring-shaped molecules, the prototype of which is benzene), and things called thiophenes, which are compounds of carbon, hydrogen, and sulfur.  All of these are generated in the experiment by cooking the soil sample causing more complex organics to break down, and the breakdown products are released as gas and measured in the mass spectrometer.  You don't have a direct handle on what complex organics are in the soil; you just know they're there because only complex organics will release the other things when cooked.  It would take a rather more sophisticated instrument (something much larger than what's in the Curiosity rover now) to perform measurements of what those original organics are.
 
The second paper isn't getting as much press, but it also is interesting in the astrobiology front.  Using a laser spectrometers aboard  several instruments there have been measurements of methane content in the Martian atmosphere since 2004,  well before the Curiosity rover landed (Hiroshima Day 2012).  The detection of methane was announced early on, but it wasn't clear what it meant.  On Earth, methane is released from both currently-living biological sources (e.g., the bacteria in the guts of ruminants that turn cellulose into something that can be digested) and geological sources (some of which, at least, are from no-longer-living biological sources, but not all the sources are known).
 
The "other paper" in today's Science is a series of methane measurements from Curiosity, extending back over five Earth years (Aug 2012 - May 2017 included in the analysis), about 2 2/3 Mars years.  The methane content measured varies seasonally -- highest levels in norther summer, bottoms out in winter/spring.  Seasonal variation like that is easiest to explain via biological activity, not geological.