Salvatore Cezar Pais' nice little earner

Sandboxx points over to Salvatore Cezar Pais' ... body of work. Pais is working on a "High Energy Electromagnetic Field Generator". Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division is funding him.

NAWCAD believes that China is working this field so they've got Pais on it, here.

The field-generator can, Pais believes, create a "Pais Effect". This will (he says) allow decent-scale fusion reactions and can alter spacetime. Not for an FTL drive right now, but capable of a bomb an order of magnitude more than Teller's H bomb.

NAWCAD thinks they have the next Nicky Tesla. I think they have a huckster. I think if there was something (anything) here then a more modest-scaled verification of the "Pais Effect" could be farmed out to universities. Pais has been careful enough not to violate Emmy Noether - but still.

As for the money being (now) wasted, a more efficient use of it could be to send these Department Of Justice inspectors to a brothel in Panama. Might have some others left over to investigate Pais' embezzlement.

Explaining the anti-Republican fanatics

Trump lost. I have achieved sufficient distance from the yuuge #losing that I'm up for explaining how the man lost: he attracted more votes than he got in 2016, but not as many as the Not-Trump party gained. And, of course, the Left rigged the shebang; the Baghistan is not your blog to Count Every Vote as if were made by a living human voter. I am here to offer some possibilities as to why the Left felt the need to rig it.

At basis, the Trump coalition by 2020 had made itself odious. Jonah Goldberg explains the QAnon phenonemon and the Jewish space laser. Sure, that's part of it. Not really all of it; the Qtards hadn't really extended their infamy past Youtube comments and Crazy Days And Nights, until the Stop The Steal movement. And as Glenn Reynolds jumped in to point out, WHADDABOUT RUSSIAN COLLUSION. As of November 2020, conspiracy-theories were a wash.

I propose it was more about CoVID. Ace of Spades whined a few weeks ago that Biden had made CoVID his running mate. That's an emotive and slanderous comment fully worthy of its rage-infused utterer. But, also worthy of Ace, there's a truth behind his utterance. CoVID was a winner for Biden. For Whitmer too. The Democrats at least pretended to care. Ace preferred to social-distance himself in his own room and to post anti-LOCKDOWN memes for his horde of fellow shut-in "morons".

As with anti-racists, who attack (other) racists rather than simply avoiding being personally racist, most anti-lockdowners have found it easier to attack anyone explaining the science than to disobey the mandates. Although some have acted on the principles Ace has expounded. They got the attention they demanded.

The Republicans, including Ace, and also "circlingback" to the pious Ed Driscoll spotted exactly ONE HOUR before his link to Goldberg pandering to antimask, are the Plague Party - like it or not. They're the party of the Black Book Of Libertarianism, as of the time of posting with a 449649 butcher-bill.

Did anyone in the MAGA Right actually read Scott Adams' Win Bigly or was it just me? When one is faced with something disgusting and dangerous, in Adams' example a big steamy turd on the sidewalk - don't take its side. When one does, that one has associated xyrself with the disease - to all the world. For the rest of you let's pretend, like Steve Sailer, you're basically on the side of innocent life not getting curtailed before its time. To save 449649 lives - more precisely to delay 449649 deaths - what would you do?

At the least, you wouldn't let the deniers run your lives. Rigging the election or indeed outright manufacturing votes the night after the election isn't the Way Of Kahless, to use a Goldbergism. But it works.

Running the deniers off mainstream platforms also isn't Klingon. But again: it works.

You can call them "fascists" or "authoritarians" or whatever other nasty names you have borrowed from antifa. Those nasty names won't work.

Princeton's magnetic reconnection drive

Dr Fatima Ebrahimi, who's earned her honorific unlike some, proposes a rocket thruster. This one pushes out its propellant by magnetic recombination. That would be "An Alfvenic reconnecting plasmoid thruster" now doi 10.1017/S0022377820001476.

Ebrahimi works in the dead-end of fusion energy creation but, here, has found a spinoff. Note: despite that she came out of fusion research, her drive doesn't seem to be fusing its propellant itself. This is a better ion drive. Ebrahimi is a high-energy VASIMR, basically; for which, Ad Astra last January ran a prototype at 120 kW. So the Ebrahimi Drive is not to be confused with Princeton's Direct Fusion (also lagging on prototypes).

By magnetic recombination rather than steady magnetism, she promises higher thrust in addition to standard iondrive efficiency. This is great for pushing out of gravity-wells in a reasonable time. Right now the ion drives only work properly in deep space where you don't need high initial thrust, so may work mainly with I_SP pushing faster gradually.

Specifically Ebrahimi promises I_SP 2,000 to 50,000 s, power from 0.1 to 10 MW and thrust from 1 to 100 Newtons. Still, I think, a design for pushing small robotic probes, not for getting Schwarzenegger's ass to Mars.

And we still need the power, more so if we're talking about megawatts, which looks to me something between a big rig diesel lorry and a small nuclear submarine. Luckily, frontloading the thrust near high orbits will allow solar-power redirection and focusing.

IMPLEMENTATION 1/30: Stationkeeping, SVL2.

PROPELLANT 9/4: As with NTR, so VASIMR - I say "propellant", not "fuel". So why not ammonia? Answer: it's that "plasmoid" in the title. They're ions driven by magnetism, not (relatively) inert molecules driven by heat. Ebrahimi notes that the mass of the ion doesn't matter: she's looking at deuterium or helium, like Jupiter missions expect, but classically argon and krypton get used close to home. So far, over Venus for stationkeeping, this blog is assuming hydrogen on account it's a 584-day mission.

Porcius Cato done told you so

On topic of the Spanish adventure I must make an aside on Marcus Porcius Cato. I love this man.

Porky Pies, as I like to call him, was a Harry Flashman kinda guy you'd like to have a beer with - but only one beer, before he got to talking too much. He was a politician very VERY good at blustering his way through confrontations. He successfully cowed the locals into submission barely even needing to come to blows. Unfortunately he also bragged his way through the Senate.

Porky in this had followed the fine example of Cornelius Scipio before him. But, frankly, Scipio had dealt with wiser Senators, who saw that the bluster was done for the rubes and not for the realists. The newer generation was... different.

The Senate rewarded Porky first by starving him of resources. Fine, said Porky; "war should pay for itself". He (somehow) got away with this without raiding too many Spaniards (those who mattered, anyway). Then the Senate flat cashiered him. And then the Senate wondered how come the locals weren't treating Rome with due respect.

Winning, despite themselves

On deck in the LOCKDOWN List: Daniel Varga, The Roman Wars in Spain (and in Lusitania). This is a Pen & Sword imprint; military history.

Now: I like military history. I am happy a publisher is still working this field. I remain unsold on this publisher. They are AuthorHouse-bad in editing their content. I mean, seriously: what's with affectations like "Livius" for Livy. I get the impression that Varga is not an Anglophone which is why we have editors.

This aside, Varga starts his book as an up-to-AD-2015 summary of up-to-AD-1 events in this peninsula. He goes on to how Rome improved its tactics and logistics to fight there. He implies, meanwhile, that Rome might not have had to change everything, if her Senate had been smarter about how to run the place.

You know all that talk about "fourth generation war" and Plan David / Plan Goliath, making the rounds in the aftermath of the Iraq war pre-Surge/-Sahwa? Apparently the Romans weren't privy to much of that, and had to learn the hard way like Bush did. Rome up to the third century BC had engineered an army and a culture capable of grinding down a similar army. They used this army to good effect in eastern Spain to oust Carthage, to say nothing of rousting Carthage from Italy herself. Well, in Spain the Romans had become Carthage. Now they had to deal with the same tribes which Carthage had failed at. They made the same mistakes, and more.

It got particularly bad over there in the 150s BC when the Numantines rebelled and Fluvius Nobilior failed to breach their citadel. The Senate sent over Marcellus, who came to an agreement; but the Senate deemed that pact "disgraceful" and sent Licinius Lucullus and Suplicius Galba instead. These two idiots broke treaties Rome had signed, and even some treaties they'd signed themselves. They guaranteed that no Spaniard would trust a word they'd say afterward.

Varga leads his readers to understand that there was no reason Rome could not have come to a decent accord with the Hispanian peoples a century or more before she, in fact, did. He makes a good case. Maybe one day he'll get an editor worthy of helping him present that case.

One kraton of mead for Aphrodite

Brown University, alma mater of Curtis Yarvin, got things to say 'bout Mead Crater. When its meteor hit Venus, it hit a particularly thick part of the lithosphere. Its crater hasn't changed since.

This implies no tectonics since then... nor, really, recently before then. The crustal "lid" was "stagnant". doi 10.1038/s41550-020-01289-6.

As for "then", there the timing isn't constrained too well: 1000-300 Mya. Ever since Magellan there's been talk about a Great Reset Resurfacing - 500±200 Mya, on the tail end of Mead's date. Any resurfacing of course would have covered any craters so, the Mead impact postdates that.

That Venus' crust is this thick does help us, in that it keeps Maxwell Montes standing tall. Maybe even such as to support higher robust structures, above the worst of the heat.

Alphonse the Wise

Christopher Rose has an intriguing essay about Alfonso X's style of kingship. Rose proposes that Alfonso aimed to imitate the Islamicate form of rule. He patronised a translation effort of Arabic to Latin (much of which Arabic literature was Syriac and Greek in origin) at home, and abroad made a stab at North Africa.

Patron of the arts and humanities, conqueror of Mediterranean lands, benign overseer of all God's Religions. This sounds to Rose like Harun al-Rashid. And when you consider the 'Iqd al-Farid selling our own merchandise back to us, we can consider also the prime Umayyads in Qurtuba. Or Akbar the Great in India or, my word, Shah Yazdegird I.

If we must have a king, it certainly seems like Alfonso was sabio at it. Pity about his foreign megalomania and his oppression at home. Catholicism, it seems, has little room for a caliph.

SVL2 comes first

For those worried about collecting sufficient hydrogen to run a colony over Venus, perhaps they can borrow some of the cold water that Casey Handmer dumped on the whole project, last April. They could terraform the planet with that.

I have to admit, Handmer's not wrong... if we were concerned with the planet. Lately as you can see here I've been looking to SVL2.

As Landis-stan goes, at the poles, we might be able to stay in perma-daylight. And instead of helium - use hydrogen or syngas. There's not much of that over Venus but there's certainly more of it than helium, and it's not going to burn. So some of Handmer's cold water is tepid.

But overall yes, we will need (much) more mass to get to Venus' clouds and stay up there than to get to Mars' surface. And once on Mars, you got minerals to work with; which Venus' clouds don't got. Venus will need a space presence before daring a cloud presence.

Elsewhere on Handmer's blog, I find a post about airship tech. The Zeppeliners should rebuild what they build best: airbourne cruise ships. As in: our air. Maybe helium-buoyed, maybe even hydrogen with some flame-retardant gas. I cannot argue with this; I don't see why the whole time I've been alive our only airship experience was A Ride In The Goodyear Blimp. As in: there weren't many other blimps.

Anyway, if we could get this tech out of the early 1930s, we might be able to give Venus' clouds a shot.

Bronze Age standardised barter

... another word for "coinage". So posted last Wednesday and on Saraceni's aggregate yesterday.

2150 to 1700 BC marks Early Bronze in Europe. With the rise of metals, and especially when / where came a metal trade, the metals got commoditised. There arose an objective value in a "hundredweight" or a "talent" in silver or (perhaps especially) in tin.

So some cultures developed a standard. A city in Crete or in Sicily, maybe even in Cornwall, would carve a mould in rock or maybe bake one in ceramic. That mould would make standard shapes - ribs, perhaps. If you got your wares in that shape, you knew the volume of tin you were buying. Or in rings, for smaller values.

Later, over the 1700s (between Avellino and Kabri, much before Thera), cities evolved a new invention: the scale. Trying to sell your pewter blend as pure silver? Molecular-weight, sucka! With that, the ribs and rings got replaced by ingots (pieces of casting cakes), and by mystery-metal scrap where - I guess - the trader flat didn't know what was in his carriage and hoped to dump it at discount.

The sequel of course is when tin and copper weren't worth so much no more. New Lamps For Old.

TRAPPIST-1's strange coincidence

On topic of Laplacian systems, Eric Agol, ''et al.'' refined the TRAPPIST-1 system a bit. Here's the release.

These planets are much cooler than the other Laplacians noted so far, excepting Gliese 876 whose giants we cannot observe so directly. In fact the planets can be mapped to the Mercury-Mars line of insolation. Unlike GL 876's, TRAPPIST-1's worlds are rocky. Not, however, as rocky as is Earth. Or perhaps more rocky, more like Mars; we'll get to that.

The choices are: no core, a Mars-like small core, large core waterworld.

Since all these planets are about as dense as each other, for their structures the authors incline toward WWG1WGA. That was clearly not the case for the Laplacians in TOI-178 and, likely, not for GJ 876's either. But as the authors point out, it is too(?) coïncidental that different planets all line up to the same density, a coïncidence not seen at TOI-178.

"No core" here means the Elkins-Tanton / Seager Rustworld: the planets formed by iron-oxide and... not much else. The authors say, it remains to be seen whether a geochemical model can be constructed which results in high oxidation of iron throughout the processes of planet formation and evolution. All I can say to that is... I'll say.

I am inclined to have most of these as waterworlds, myself; especially the outermost. Micro-Neptunes. Although the inmost b and c worlds should be hotter than Venus [TOO MUCH SO 3/27/23 b is Mercurial 6/21 as is c]. d, with Earth's insolation, is only Mars sized and indeed Mars-dense. Coïncidences do happen: why shouldn't d be a warmer Mars with the others as water-heavy? The larger planets keep their (hot) water which [bc]d couldn't.

As the authors also point out, the composition of the star is unconstrained. Looking at Mg/Fe and Fe/Si ratios, especially (remember Planet Factory?). They're hoping someone books time on the JWS Telescope. They'd also like more d and h transits in hope of finding a planet i beyond them all. My prediction, for what it be worth, is that a planet i does exist, and might even be found but if so, it won't be found by transit.

Shields up, captain

I've been looking at SVL2 not least to shield from "radiation". Project Rho is telling me that "radiation" differs depending on what is radiating. This close to the sun, I am that much closer to Proton Storms. That is ionic hydrogen.

Not neutrons. I don't think [UPDATE 2/2] solar neutrons are NOT going relativistic, not if Alfvén-powered protons are only at 200 km/s. So any neutrons decay into hydrogen ions long before they get to Venus. So never mind the boron or the vanadium or whatever.

From L2 and its tightest Lissajous I'm shielded from the main body. Yay! Except that my shield is Venus' cloud tier which has now added to the ions in its own ion wind . . . Also I am still in space so I still get cosmic radiation, whatever shield blocks the Sun. These get pretty powerful.

From ions, it is a bad idea to shield any enclosed space with metals alone. The German word is Bremsstrahlung: apparently ions hit metals and bathe the interior with X-rays.

Some mad lads recommend superconductors, to blow off the ions with f'ing magnets. That might work if my engineers are awesome and stick to the L2 point. Otherwise I won't count on them. SVL2 is as a rule Vesta cold, not Triton cold. And the inner Lissajous orbit I expect more like our own Moon in daylight.

I should be shielding my outer shell with paraffin - with something that can soak up hydrogen and other cations, anyway. Low density. The inner hull thus shielded can be made of whatever, doesn't have to be lead; good ol' titanium should do it. Certainly my outer shield will be thicker up front than on the side but the side will need sheathing too.

TOI-178

We have astronomy news from 200 years ago at TOI-178. It's a K star, of type sometimes marked as prime for habitability. Earlier some planets were found around this one, but in a weird pattern. It was previously conjectured that they were a couple planets sharing an orbit, presumably on the Trojan / Greek plan. But the authors used the CHEOPS telescope and sussed it out: there are six of them and several share a resonance. Here's the arxiv.

Specifically the orbits' periods are: 1.91, 3.24, 6.56, 9.96, 15.23, 20.71 days. Those last five are in Laplace, 2:4:6:9:12. This is a stable one so we're assuming TOI-178's planets remain in that configuration should we use the Alcubierre drive to visit them today.

"TOI" stands for "transit" so we not only have their mass, we have their radius (at least to the cloud layer) and density. Also some of the transits interfered with one another which is how we got their resonance sorted.

These fine fellows have estimated the temperatures of the planets in question. Obviously they're all very close to their star, cool as that star is. Indeed the innermost is 1040 K and outermost 400 K. For reference Mercury runs 90-740 K, on account it has no atmosphere and its nights are long due to rotation. Earth should be 255 K but, hooray for Eemian / Holocene interglacials.

As masses go, they're all bigger than Earth. The innermost two are Earthlike in density. The others are much less dense.

I think some of the TOI-178 inner planets may end up tidally-locked similarly to Mercury. The outer planets should be Venuslikes but, like, more so. Looking especially at the third planet "d", 2.57 Earth radius and 0.177 density (and 690 K). Compare Neptune 0.29 or Uranus 0.23. Some kind of compressed hot water ice?

As to why we should care: well, we shouldn't... directly. Indirectly the authors liken the system to the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone's content remains interesting only to Ptolemaic scholars. But its three (3) languages opened scholarship up to the whole world of pre-Coptic "pagan" Egyptology. The TOI-178 authors hope that others might use this system to tease out so-far unconstrained properties of other Laplacian exosystems.

The paper lists them: GJ 876, Kepler-60, Kepler-80, Kepler-223, Trappist-1, and especially K2-138 so far the best-observed. Trappist-1 is the one you'll have heard about since its planets are coolest - possibly habitable. Gliese 876's 1:2:4 giants (not innermost d) used to get more love from being only 15 years out, hiding in front of Skat at Delta Aquarii just below ecliptic, and (c and b) being habitable-zone. Mind, Gliese 876's set don't transit for us, inclining 53-59º as they do - hence why they're not on the paper's density chart. Although c has no moon, b might have one. Mind the flares and the planetary magnet, though.

For TOI-178 [unlike GJ 876] is hope for finding other planets further out, now that the main perturbations to this star are accounted. CHEOPS is a LEO 'scope so maybe an L2 would be better.

The shoe fits

Ed Driscoll at PJM has a sad that people are calling CoVID deniers, deniers. It's a horrible slur, to liken them to Holocaust revisionists!

Yeah. It's a slur on David Irving, to liken him (flaws and all) to Peter Hitchens and Ed Driscoll. More so on David Cole\Stein and the rest of them.

The Brits seem to be doing better at running such deniers to the margins where they belong. The TalkOrigins of the science seems to be CoVID-19 FAQ.

Stone Spring

As I'm collecting this year's LOCKDOWN LIST, I just notched up another one - a fiction, for once. Stephen Baxter's Stone Spring, intimated here. Strange Horizons reviewed it.

This was a product of the late 2000s so, unfortunately, had taken on some fads from that time, in particular Across Atlantic Ice. In our story some European Hunter Gatherers, of R / X clade, make that westward trip skirting the glacier, to rescue the last survivors of the White Apocalypse thence to bring them back "home" [to Europe]. Baxter does have an appendix explaining most of his scholarship. The appendix somehow failed to credit Kyle Birstow.

Not that this blog is going to fault a book for its "racism". This blog is going to fault that book for being a pain in the arse to read. Actually a pain in several nether regions.

Back when I was still commenting at Ace's "book thread" I posted a rant "stop raping your characters" with Stone Spring very much in mind. I'd bought the book six years ago or more but couldn't finish (then) because Baxter really, really likes rape. He does it again in Proxima which book I refused to finish. In this book Baxter is driving home how squalid and Stone Age all these European early-hunter-gatherers are, with a touch of the Jericho Aceramic Mesolithic. Well, fine. But does the author really have to get into detail?

You can skip the forced boning and enjoy all the scenes where the protagonists - when not raping girls, or in Zesi's case seducing underaged boys - are doing poops in the great outdoors. Or, in Jericho Boy's case, stealing stuff. It all gets a bit better when the characters were building that glorious seawall. Here Jericho Boy magically stops being klepto and becomes instead... homosexual. Because when two men become friends, especially when the newbie meets the local priest; it's inevitable that the porn soundtrack starts up.

As for what it says about Strange Horizons that they prefer the squalor and rapine in the first third of this story to the rest of it, when the characters are Getting Stuff Done: I'll leave that to others. Maybe to Vox Day.

I suppose I'm okay with forcing myself to finish this book. I rate this as an inferior Helliconia Spring.

I'm told that in this alt-future we don't get Christianity or Islam. Well, maybe. There is dyotheletism here, in the tension between bisexual priest and Ana the queen of Etxelur, who end up married. (Sorry Jericho!)

The 1776 Report

Conservative media went all agog over one of Biden's moves, to abandon Trump (the loser)'s "1776 Commission" counter to the 1619 narratives. Jason Colavito is on the job.

The 1776 report is no longer on the WH page because Trump lost. But you may read it here.

Many historians believe that Trump, who didn't #winning, got it all wrong. Sean Wilentz of Princeton, had this to say: It reduces history to hero worship. It's the flip side of those polemics, presented as history, that charge the nation was founded as a ‘slavocracy’, and that slavery and white supremacy are the essential themes of American history. Wilentz reveals hereby he is no 1619 man himself.

As I read the 1776, I see MLK on the report's second page. It was hardly an alt-right broadside. It was basic-bitch Republican hrr drr dems wur reel rayciss. Wilentz is right, on that much, to call out the humbug. I assume Colavito gets Carl Becker right, himself. I hadn't so much as heard of Becker.

As for Colavito's attacks on McCarthy... keep in mind, Colavito got blacklists of his own he'd enact: against "transphobes", "Islamophobes", "racists", the whole deplorable basket. As mentioned earlier, we all pick sides and, when we do, we lose that ethical standing.

The rest of the Colavito blogpost meanders into "SEE? SEE?!" gotcha commentary - attacking the report for promoting a diversity of authors. Whitman? Gay! "Twain" Clemens? Antiwar! Trump was of course pro-gay, and claimed to be antiwar too (tho' not as antiwar as Tucker Carlson); so all this is in keeping with Trumpism.

If the 1776 Commission didn't have Trump's name attached Colavito should... be for it, mostly. I also note that the Iranians are the one nation which Trump did nearly war with. So what's Colavito's angle - should Trump have gone through with that? should he rather have left Iran and its Islam to its pro-trans, anti-homo agenda? Or maybe that paragraph's about when the third shot of Tito's kicked in...

But hey. As I may have mentioned, Trump lost, and those with him lost too. Some of those with him deserved it; the 1776 Commission assuredly thereamong.

DONE AND DUSTED 4/27: Brion McClanahan delivers the coup-de-grace.

Jason Colavito, former Islamophobe

Jason Colavito has been sqwawking "Islamophobia! Transphobia!" recently. I find this a bit rich, from him.

Colavito came to my attention in the first place for posting against claims made by... Muslims. This very blog has made use of Colavito's crusade against Hamidullah.

As for the "transphobia", I'll spot him that Colavito is no transphobe. Interestingly enough, neither are the Muslims! The Islamic Republic of Iran has pushed sexual reassignment surgery - in its own jihad against homosexuality. It seems we can have "transgenderism" or we can have gays and lesbian bars - for that latter matter, we can have female athletes. We must pick a side, like Iran has. Maybe this is Colavito's redemption-arc... homophobia. And misogyny.

Or: keep on keepin' on preaching power to truth. It sure is a lot easier to call your opponents Deplorable names than to address the issues. You lose something of your stature as a scholar, though.

The reason I still go there is because Colavito gets it spot-on right on the Ancient Alien memes. I'd even say he's doing the Right a real favour, like in 2013 he did a favour to the Muslims (whom he felt the same way about). The Right has gone insane and it must abandon, for a start, Q. (Cf, Rod Dreher.) Note that this is to do everyone else a favour as well. As even Jon Scalzi has pointed out, you cannot keep going Left forever; there's going to be a point where you have to stop and think about what the Left is trying to do. You'll want the (hopefully improved) Right as allies.

If you can quit namecalling them long enough.

Dying Europa

Science Daily was low on astro news lately. That long weekend where we honour Martin Luther King (PhD*) by preventing public schoolkids from their education likely affected that. Today came a dump of information: axions btfo again, carbonaceous meteors, nitrogen from the early inner solar-system. There is also this.

Our planets tilt, to varying degrees, Jupiter only inclining three (3)° and Venus being nearly upside down. Saturn tilts 27°. The argument made this week is that when a moon is large and also far from the planet, the moon both gets affected by other planets (usually in resonance) and acts like a lever to tilt the main one. Saturn is coming to resonance with Neptune; Jupiter, with Uranus. For Saturn, the big moon is Titan, and Titan is both pulling away from Saturn and tilting Saturn's orbit. The article also reminds its audience of Jupiter. I'd missed that.

Jupiter will not be 3° forever. It will tilt, as its moons pull away from it.

This implies that Europa and Ganymede will have less internal heat and, also, less radiation from Jupiter - Jupiter itself will be cooling internally over this time, and will take less tides from its moons. The sun will be heating Jupiter's outer layers and its moons, in those billion-year scales. The moons'll also acquire "seasons" as they tilt with respect to the ecliptic.

This means, I think, that Europa's ocean will freeze, since it is driven from the inside not outside. The other part of Europa will go less "ice" and more "snow" as the radiation sublimes the water off and, in "winter", drops it down again. The insulation will be better thus delaying radiation into space, but still.

The good news for Earth colonists is that Ganymede, further from Jupiter, will be easier to land on and leave from (less delta-V); and will take less radiation from Jupiter. It trades that for more insolation but solar is a more useful irradiance, as solar power.

Callisto will be even better off in terms of delta V and energy; it never had much rad from Jove. They tell us Callisto at 400.5 hours is not in resonance with the other moons. By that they mean not Laplacian. If Callisto revolved 400.65 hours that is 3 months : 7 Ganymede months (G'month=171.7 hr). Maybe the two inner moons might jostle that. Anyway, if it is jostled, 457.8 hours at 3:8 is coming then 516 at a cool 1:3. Those stages might buy the Europan dynamo a little more energy.

BELTALOWDA

From Instapundit, the Ceres colony.

The Finns are mooting that this colony wouldn't be on Ceres itself, even spun up like on The Vomit Zombie Book; the colony would be on an O'Neill rama orbiting Ceres. The key phrase is "space elevator" meaning: demetresynchronicity; ion ships can dock with the orbiter without bringing a thruster to land on the planet(oid). Eventually that orbit would host several such colonies.

UPDATE 11/14: Ceres at 2.77 AU would get 1.369 mSv / (2.77 x 2.77) = 130 nSv from our Sun; which is about twice what we get on Earth. Less protection from cosmic rays, mind. So about a Callisto level.

Ceres has the nitrogen, and the water, and the salt, and presumably other elements useful to life. The rama colonists mine these materials on Ceres and take the spoils up to the rama. Pekka Janhunen (pdf) thinks they'll have space elevators. Hop David was pretty sure they'd drill moholes.

As for average distance from Earth is comparable to that of Mars: for that, read "delta-V". Nobody in this field cares about distance, they care about delta-V.

I have to admit, it does make more sense than TVZB's notion: to spin Ceres itself, bodily. Spinning Ceres is about as practical as raising Phobos to mamerostationary, or raising Mercury to Venus-Hilda.

Cornwall isn't drained of metals just yet

Lithium iron phospate batteries got a writeup over on Ineffable Island. Here's Penn State's release.

That would all be excellent if we actually had the phosphorus and the lithium, both of which are in short supply on this planet. Hence why I've been touting sodium and graphene here. That said, lithium may need to be our mainstay for everyday use, as expensive as it is.

In that light, Cornwall's mining industry is back in the news, for the first time perhaps since Late Antiquity, on account of its lithium deposits. I missed this article at the time but we're told we can pan the lithium, in effect, from Cornwall's aquifiers, on their way out to sea.

Now, I don't much care about CO₂; and Cornwall, being coastal, won't care about H₂O. The Cornovii will care about the land. And that it's coastal will assuredly help in shipping the Li out to whoever needs it.

IPFS

Vox Day directs us to the Brave browser. It seems that it's now natively looking to IPFS as an alternative to HTTP.

Best I can tell, IPFS is a load-balancer that allows friendly nodes to host a site otherwise #cancelled. Like the Daily Stormer, famously. In future the ICANN / DNS group might #cancel any other site, like sites which claim the American election was recently stolen, whether or not we accept the result. Even if ICANN allows a site your service-provider might block it because muh captalizzm.

ReclaimTheNet likens its tech to BitTorrent. So at least ICANN is no longer in this loop.

This aims to return the Fight Against Disinformation to where it should be, to the arena of ideas. Those arguing that the election was stolen may still argue that point. We can then counter them by ... well, someone else can counter them.

I do hope IPFS has a means around ISPs that simply say "nahh that is a service we do not provide for our basic customers". Or ISPs who look at what you're reading like they already do for BitTorrent.

The Plan: recruit insane fanatics

I didn't read Taleb's Skin In The Game but I do know the proverb to which it refers. You don't listen to some yokel who tells you that your antique is totally worth $4000 yo if he is not writing "to the order of four thousands dallaz, no sentz" in his checkbook. In that spirit, here is Mark Brahmin: What exactly are Q-followers "giving up" or "quitting" if they stop believing in the theory? After all they are not part of the supposed benevolent Q-conspiracy/revolt. They are doing nothing actively to fulfill it.

The biggest boosters of the Q "drops" - Vox Day, NeonRevolt, Anonymous Conservative to an extent - were not telling their readers what they could do to help The Plan. I mean, sure: "Opp Seck". But if there was some secret chessmove going on, Vox Day would have given commands out to his "evil legion of evil".

Ahh but that assumes that Neon Revolt cared. Him and all those other assholes had no skin in this game. For f's sake Beale doesn't even live in the US.

Plenty of Q followers had skin in this game. They were the ones demanding something more substantive, even several of those "Blackpill-ers" now getting banished. Not that stupid raid on the Capitol, I mean something effective. If you claim an entire leeegion of your best Imperial stormtroopers, you had two months to use them.

Instead what Vox Day really, really wanted was for his commenters to shut up about it all, unless to give [ineffectual] praise. Some would even argue that the latter be worse than the former, as far as getting sh!t done. But not Beale; he's delivering a blacklist of the first to surrender.

What surrender? There was no fight.

It was all attention-seeking to build up the fanbase. And indeed that's how you winnow out the chaff: build up the false hope in the full knowledge that nothing is going to happen. Now you got yourself a cult: a coterie who will believe anything (the place was already demanding moon-landing denial and other clear absurdities). You're holding the little red football.

Well, whatever. If you want terrorists, you can keep your terrorists. Don't expect a lot of sympathy when USG / Kamala goes out to hunt down your terrorists.

SV-Hilda

Last year I found out about Hilda orbits, which orbit a large body at 3:2 resonance with a midsized body. Jupiter has a lot of these. I've scattered ideas what to do with the Sun-Venus Hilda-belt (0.552 AU, 150 days); I seem to have a critical mass, as it were, for at least a micro-fusion blogpost.

This belt can meet L3, L4, and L5 at slow speeds; the main planet at high speeds. UPDATE 12/24-26/22 J=-10.955. The Jacobi-Integral map suggests planet-capture orbit as the easiest route outward (3.0007826) followed by L3 (2.9999976, eeep). If the large body is the Sun it also gets more energy than the planet would; and, of course, energy for anything in-system becomes cheaper.

Ideally I'd move Mercury out to be this Hilda, but that's kinda gonzo. Although I think we'll end up gonzo enough. Human presence would be in a stone Rama because, well, it would have to be.

I'd considered using this orbit for occasional ferrywork between Mercury and Venus (Libration anyway). Another idea would be to dock rescue-vessel torch ships for anywhere else in the Solar System.

The Hilda does anything requiring even more energy than Venus gets, if we got time to spare between getting the product out the Solar well. Making antiprotons and tritium (which decays to Helium-3), especially; also endothermic chemistry like reducing silicon. The energy here should be enough to spark fusion reactions, which gives even more energy; enough to direct the neutrons somewhere decent, like toward making more tritium.

UPDATE 10/30: As to some actual maths on making tritium, meet CANDU: 100 grams per year for a 600 MW reactor. At Hilda, our reactor is the Sun. Just need surface area, to catch some rays.

Hilda can serve the B612 Foundation's Sentinel telescope at SVL3... might also be in some position to trap hydrogen and helium blazing out from the Solar wind. Tho' man does not live on hydrogen alone.

Winter's end (over Venus)

Venus under her blanket of cloud and carbon, orbiting almost circular and with its axis almost upside down, does not notice seasons. But her orbits notice - barely, dealing with that 177.4° "obliquity" tilt. Satellites need the date of vernal equinox to fix Right Ascension of Ascending Node. Ascending Node of the sun's [apparent] orbit would be the day of vernal equinox; Right Ascension is something like longitude.

I found difficult to find other planets' equinoxes on account Google stuffs the results full of Earth. I did however get NASA on 2000. That vernal was 24 February 1930 UT. Two metonics ahead, at 2016 this should have been 19 February maybe 2130 UT. Yes we account for leapyears, of which Why Too Kay was one.

An autumnal equinox will come a half-meton from a vernal, so Venus should have had one 18 Feb 1600 UT on 2020. 49 days into that year; then another one early 274 days in, and (given the leap year on Earth) one 132 into 2021. Now we are set to get the vernal again!

During this tail-end of Synod D, then, about 20 January 2021 cometh the spring to Venus' orbital satellites.

Antiproton/Uranium microfission

Winchell Chung today hath diggen up ICAN II. This was a fusion torchship idea but the idea's core is fission.

As we recall from Bikini Atoll, fusion demands high energy even to get started - which gets worse if we don't want neutrons and haven't sussed out spin. Edward Teller solved that little problem by blowing up a fission bomb to get the fusion fusin'. Teller was making bombs though, not anything good. People trying to get around the AEC looked into chemical explosives but the chemistry was theoretical in 2009 and here we are now.

Suppose where we WILL be is in space, trying to be constructive not destructive. [UPDATE 7/27] Although I am not here considering lowering NuScale power-generation; we're doing Orion or NERVA here. - or sparking a larger reaction...

Say we move the ship to ELL2, aiming to spark some fusion there. The problem with that is the same Every Gram Counts problem we've been enduring since Tsiolkovsky launched his first firework. Chemical reagents for the big bang, assuming it's not total unobtainium, will be, like, heavy, man. Looking to the nucular realm the Uranium-235 also isn't great: 52 kilos to criticality. U-233 "thorium" is lighter: 233/235 as much per atom but more to the point, only 15 kg critical. UPDATE 2/28: Curium-247 is half even that.

Over the 1990s, came a proposal to cut the critical mass. Ship less uranium with... an antiproton (pdf). Yeah, antimatter is expensive to make. But we might pay that down on launch savings. Antimatter itself can be scooped from cosmic radiation in the high Van Allen.

I note that as launch costs per kilo have plummetted, I haven't found much interest in the microfission notions (hate to say, "meme"). If we were ever to fire a torchship from Earth orbit - much less from Mars or Luna - we may as well send up the heavy metals, for it. We might even store up solar energy in some massive orbiting capacitor and light the fusion candle from that. No need for nukes, there; just silicon panels. UPDATE 2/6: Although given Lawson this would likely be a tritium drive which has her own problemata.

I think, though, may come a time and place where the uranium gains in expense again. As to who needs to carry around their own tinder for a fusion reaction: that's for de-celeration, to a hitherto unsettled planet or 'stroid, I do think.

Then and there, it may come cheaper just to make an antiproton or three, saving precious metal. That manufacture is done as close to the sun as you can get, where energy is cheapest. Classically authors have given over Mercury for this but I'm thinking Venus Hilda.

Air launch

Virgin is now competing with Rocket Lab and SpaceX in getting (small) satellites into orbit. Like the other two, Virgin is going for booster reuse. Where Rocket Lab aim for retrieving a booster from parachute, and SpaceX is landing the booster back on the pad: Virgin is firing from an aeroplane. That 'plane, of course, is landed. Since after launch it's over another longitude, I suppose it just turns around and flies home on what remains of its fuel.

Blue Origin is following. They're planning on 100 km: not in orbit, but well within the exosphere so fit to look down upon the blue marble. More for the sort of people with the spare cash to marble-watch.

Virgin has been doing a lot with aeronautics of late. This time, they used a Boeing 747. I hope Branson by this past success has earned some of his money back; last I heard, his ledger was in the red.

I do like using a moving aerofoil as base for rocketry. By surfing on the atmosphere starting out, you're not using the Rocket Equation like a jerk. When you must fire the rocket you take the air-resistance out of said equation. Especially if you're at 62 km on up, you're physically nearer true LEO; and you're approaching orbital velocity. You even get to reuse the 'plane.

Last year I was wondering about ramjets / scramjets which might not be rockets at all, as we know them. Although from Mach 7 or whatever I'm unsure how retrievability would work.

The anti-scuba

Out in space, including any outdoor activity in a low-grav planet or moon, astronauts must wear suits. They can breathe near-pure oxygen at low pressure, or nitrogen/oxygen at 100 kPa like we do down here. Low-pressure is for the nimble suits, the ones which do the high-precision work. On the move between higher to lower pressures those astronauts get Da Bends, when the nitrogen naturally locked up in our system boils out to the bloodstream. Rapture-of-the-deep is what happens when the nitrogen dissolves back in. Space is, thus, the anti-scuba.

Better if our astronauts didn't have gas in their bodies in the first place. That was the idea behind Apollo One, to fill the cabin with pure oxygen. Ooops.

To replace nitrogen we need such nontoxic, nonflammable, room-temperature gas as doesn't dissolve in ... well, in us. That is: in lipids, per the Meyer[-Overton] correlation. Our mix needs be the exact opposite of chloroform!

I have heard tell of deep-sea divers breathing helium/oxygen. Helium of course does not dissolve. It is also expensive and makes your voice squeaky. But then I started thinking about other noble gases, or any other insoluble gas. Argon is cheap. Is there an argon/oxygen mix out there?

Turns out: there is. There's research in using argon / nitrogen / oxygen at 40:40:20, for Mars. Mars' atmo is 1.9:1.9:96.2, where that last is mostly carbon dioxide. Scrub that out by... leaving the mix overnight and scraping the dry-ice off. For heavens' sake the atmo at the poles may be at that mix already. Mind you, nobody on Mars is breathing over 100 kPa...

I was actually surprised that scuba divers don't use "Argox" already but, turns out, divers warn us that this is more narcotic than the 0.9:78:21 we get naturally. It does dissolve in oil. Argox has been mooted as a decompression-gas up top to fight off the bends; a narcotic might actually help, in that case. Nobody's studied this much on humans.

Apparently hydrogen is 55% soluble as nitrogen, which I readily believe, given how much unbound hydrogen isn't in our hydrosphere. But good luck finding a volunteer for a hydrogen/oxygen mix in a spaceship. Apollo One meets Hindenberg!

Neon is comparable to helium here and, indeed, is sometimes used in place of nitrogen. It is more expensive than helium however.

If Argox dissolves more readily than nitrogen, it might bubble out more slowly and spread out the Grecian Bends effect. We still want as little of it as possible so I'm unsure it's a good fit for the ship's cabin.

The best idea is to have a high-oxygen chamber-suite next to the outer airlock. They sit there doing mostly non-electronical chores whilst their nitrogen boils off; literally in detox. We might not have space for that in a short-duration ship fresh off Earth, but we can assuredly get one in a larger space station, or in a Mars colony. If you're Kim Stanley Robinson or (inshallah) Elon Musk, your home is indeed an apartment in the colony, you can let the outdoorsmen deal with this little problem.

Speaking of. Bob Zubrin in How To Live On Mars didn't talk much about shifting between 100 kPa argox and low-pressure oxygen when he sent his libertarian pioneers off roaming the surface. I don't recall that Andy Weir harped on this, either - but to his credit, Weir did illustrate what happens when some damnfool botanist allows his surface hab[itat] to skew high in oxygen. Both models are close to the Great Outdoors with easy access to the suit. So - yeah, not going Apollo One should be given more weight than it is.

Lock it down

The Right is spreading A NEW STUDY FROM STANFORD around the place. That link goes to Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, "Poppin' Fresh" as he's affectionately known when he is not in agreement with the Right consensus.

Wow. If even the librul DEMONRATS at Stanford are saying it, it must be true! REOPEN NAO

... if we ignore the last name on that New Study's author-list. It's John Ioannidis. You'll remember him from earlier New Studies last year when he was spreading the Just A Flu Bro assurances and getting his predictions totally, completely wrong. He is still wrong.

Ioannidis shouldn't be allowed within a parsec of this line of academe. Anyone citing him is a sucker. His coauthors are all so many Jonathan Chaits beside Stephen Glass.

As for the "lockdowns", start with what they aim to do: to get the people to do the right thing. Doing the right thing - voluntarily - should be to move activities out of doors, and to wear masks where that's not possible. Restrictions don't work when people don't follow them; masks don't work when people don't wear them, or when they wear bad masks wrongly without distancing.

It is because we have bad citizens that we must bear authoritarian rulers. Where men cannot support civilisation, civilisation must be provided for them. Up to and including stealing elections from them.

Beyond that, if need be - hence, lockdowns. Fortunately Conservatives (what is left of them) are stupid lunatics so, in a fight with better men, will lose.

IDW 1/18: On to muh classical liberals Eric Weinstein is not covering himself in glory, either. You want people to call you alt-right, beyond the pale? Keep pandering to antivaxx.

Magellanic novae

A supernova blew up in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Around AD 300, light from it reached Earth's southern hemisphere. 14 January, John Banovetz told the American Astronomical Society at their meeting. Sadly I don't find video.

Nobody knew about this until Banovitz and his Purdue University team tracked its halo in space. As to why, keyword is "Magellanic". Meaning: Magellan's crew were the first literate people to record and describe the whole darn nebula. The Cloud can be seen up to 15° N but you have to be on a flat empty plain for that.

All that said, several equatorial cultures AD 300 were literacy-adjacent: Nicaragua, Somalia, the Tamil-stan, south Vietnam, Philippines. South of that, Polynesians maintained a rich oral tradition. For one thing, they didn't have much else to do down there but retell stories - but more to the point, astronomy was how they did navigation. The Magellanic Clouds featured in their tradition, possibly because (as a whole galaxy) it was such a nova cluster.

The Polynesians were still stuck on Samoa and Tonga; Moana wouldn't get out to Tahiti until AD 700. Maori tell of the Mahutonga - but that legend pinpoints "the Cross". It might be the Crux or the "False Cross" (Vela) but either way, nowhere near the Nubecula Minor. It's been considered the AD 185 nova, if so, spotted long before the Maori came to Aotearoa; lately Vela Jr has been proposed, AD 1271. We're agreed not to take Brakenridge seriously.

Any historical account of this Magellanic nova, or of any other southern nova before Magellan himself, may have to await the recovery of the great Somalian library. Maybe something (somehow) copied from the Tamil and/or Javan kingdoms.

Outer orbit and L2

I'm pondering the uses of space-stations. Venus is what we do here, so:

What we have there are orbits around L2 (at a million km from the planet, darkside), which vary between true halo and tight Lissajous; and the outer orbits around the planet proper. The latter orbits are of two types. One planetary orbital type is polar, adjusted such that it keeps as far from Venus as possible - maybe 600000 km. The main orbital type stays in the sphere-of-influence as a sphere so it's no higher than 530000 km.

Sun-facing polar orbits need to station-keep, to stay facing the sun and L1/2 so with its plane orthogonal to the line joining them all. Their advantage is that each is always the same distance from all these points. Well over a million km from L1 and L2 - but at least there is a line-of-sight. They're relays.

The stable outer orbits might be polar but we don't station-keep them, sun-facing or otherwise. That's why they're further-in. But on half their orbit they may be on the other side of the Sun. In this case we may as well run them at inclination zero - going toward L2 and then toward L1 on the other side. Up to full period 48 and a third Earth days if it's running with the ecliptic.

Assuming the outer orbit and L2 are in communication, what I'd have the outer orbit do is anything L2 wants that it would plant one day and then harvest in fifty days. One obvious job is fixing spacecraft, that you know will take that long to finish, and we're not keeping here. From Earth they got, what, 447 days before they even need it again. Also: shuttlecraft between loading Earthbound Hohmann and preparing for the Venusbounds in a few weeks. UPDATE 1/20: It might not do the high-energy stuff itself but it can certainly pick up Hilda's work to boost to the other side of the planet.

On topic there are such amenities of that orbit as face Venus. Medical quarantine is one idea which ProjectRho noted. Tho' those might want in on lower Venus altitudes so it takes 24 days rather than 48 or even the Italian quaranta giorni. And Hohmann should have allowed any Earth plague to run its course before then...

Up at L2 everything must be station-kept. That's nice for space junk - it's not staying. But there's also not quite as much room to move the stations about in. 1900 × 800 km really is nothing for satellites running in km/s speeds. Fortunately we also get true halo up to 680000 × 700000 km, quite comparable to a 340000 km semimajor from the planet herself and fifty times wider than our LEO. Unlike assisted-polar these librations aren't always the exact distance from L2 point, but (1) they are always closer and (2) a 68 × 70 variance really isn't that much.

What we keep in L2 would be, furthest out, the same sort of relay as we might get from assisted-polar. Further in, anything visiting that we don't need to keep there: parking garage, foremost.

Also useful would be observatories, run here especially during Hohmann season, to ensure everyone gets to/from where they should be. These can be robotic. When not in use those stations can be sent to park elsewhere, mostly to cool off. Perhaps docked into an orbiting station; if small enough they might float as statites in umbra.

Not really Scottish, it's just -

While we're all finding out who our friends are, the Behind The Black site isn't done poasting stupid. Lately: These rioters in the Capitol are not Trump protesters.

That would be news to the crowd Nick Fuentes riled up. GaySeric and his Village People Vandals weren't being told to disrupt the Electoral College on behalf of anti-fascism. They were being told to disrupt those proceedings on behalf of Trump. This was of a piece with a whole subculture of #crosstherubicon hashtagging, which Trump summoned thither personally. Behind The Black wasn't part of that mob; if we're to believe PJMedia, Donald Trump himself was not part of that. So why cover for that?

I don't have very many friends, I admit. The friends I do have are honest. Or at least my friends grant my intelligence and, for that matter, ability to do research some credit. On topic -

One conclusion for BtB's covering for the #RUBICON! mob is that... well, that they're friends. Not BtB and the Orks, I hasten to point out. But certainly BtB and the protest. The mob broke bad and that was when BtB's proprietor decided not just they weren't his friends no mo', which is fair enough; but they were never his friends. Forgive me if I say that might wash in court, but it won't wash for the rest of Planet Earth. Trump marched to the #RUBICON! and all too many of his supporters were cheering him on, until some of his gitz crossed it for him. Up to then those absolutely were BtB's gitz as well.

(And I fully can believe, there were Left agitators in there. See here. This last hour - 5:20-6:20 PM MST - we've learnt of John Sullivan. Because he had a cloning-machine. Or maybe mind-control rays? None of this matters to me. If baseline Conservatives are this easily run amok and bamboozled, maybe they should sit out the next few elections or at least primaries.)

I agree, of course, that the Democrats stole this election. I'm not even taking the coward's way out of Asking Questions. Personally this blog has made peace; I do not demand of BtB that it be so sanguine. We all, however, must figure out how to resist what's coming. BtB failed to warn its gitz not to fall into the 6 January trap. And that site's attempt to extricate the good gitz, who didn't enter the Capitol; with the bad gitz who did, is also a failure. Might I suggest that a truer friend might have informed his readers something to that effect, earlier?

But hey - let's Reset, Grandly. If we're starting over from today, a good stance is Roger Simon's stance: don't go to the Inauguration. It's glowing so hard with Feds, it's in X-Ray frequencies. Sun Tzu has words about when and where to meet the enemy. Hint: not where he wants.

For the months ahead, the BtB blog should stick with space, and with "space capitalism".

FREN 1/11/22: Zimmerman lost some frens. Well what did he expect; he done told them in public he was done considering them his friends. And what do ex-friends do? They say you can't come 'round here no more. Those are the rules.

R1a as outgroup

Davidski and David Anthony are having Mutual Words. Yamnaya is (mostly) R1b-Z2103, from the mightiest Kurgan to the shallowest grave. R1a is associated with Balts and Aryans today - lots of Greeks and Armenians as well. Especially -M417.

David Anthony, the best archaeologist of the mid-to-late 2000s, is learning genetics. He proposed that R1a was an underclass. Davidski counters that R1a is a minority population but not a caste population; they're about 1/10 top to bottom.

When R1a really starts mingling with R1b Indo-Europeans is not Yamnaya (much less Single-Grave) but Corded Ware.

Davidski rather undercuts that argument when he notes a socially disenfranchised Yamnaya clan. There may be a difference between "underclass" and "marginalised clan". I don't read what that is. Beyond that I'm stupid for asking what that is. Yay, Davidski.

AD 969 on

Presented is the AD 969 chronicle of carbon. Actually from 4 January. "Solar" activity but this may incorporate supernovae, as well.

This confirms the 11 year sunspot cycle. It has netted also the AD 993 spike. Two more spikes are found AD 1052 and 1279, which should be of interest to historians, because we're well into the High Middle Ages now...

They say it's all already included in IntCal20. It might be of interest that AD 1052 is just two years before the Crab Nebula was visible.

BACKDATE 1/19: Press release. I do not know why we did not get this 4 January when Nature Geoscience published.

Lissajous' parking garage

I posted on SVL2 February. Let's look at the radius of L2's darkest circle.

Start with the angle along L2's solar revolution ellipse: between when the sun touches Venus, and then the sun most-perfectly surrounds Venus. The inherent penumbra angle is just arctan(6100/108020000) = 5.64710238 × 10^-5 rad. Maybe a bit more given I assumed here that the Sun is a pinpoint but - never mind. L2's distance from that pinhead is 109034200 km so: 5.64710238 × 1090.342 = a 6157 km circle, from centre to edge. As a sanity-check that's not much more than the radius of Venus herself. We are 0.73 AU away from the Sun.

That is not the darkest circle; that is the circle outside which something near that L2 point is no longer in Venus' shade at all. Given the sun looks 1.0612 times the width of Venus from out here, I may have 375 km radius (at this point my pen broke, I'm using crayon). O'Neill said he only needs ten (10) km in radius for his Rama. Less if we're happy to keep 'em at 8.7 ms^-2.

All this means I'm not worried about expanding my station, or really my propellant-depot, beyond the shade of Venus. I don't just get Vesta's insolation, I also get well over her radius.

I am worried about station-keeping. This is where halo calculations come in. The Russians have bad news and good news. The bad news is, the Lagrangian halo orbits never enjoy the shade. The good news is the Russians have calculated an alternative: the Lissajous orbital family, many of which are tighter. They believe they can revolve a SVL2 in a 1900 × 800 km rectangle, at 340 km deviation with delta-V only 1.2 m/s per year. Basically they want another Webb there.

Nobody is taking the superheated plasma wind into account and it's still all penumbra. The 1900 × 800 km box claims illumination 0.11-0.30... which checks out; I predicted the L2 point at 0.126 which I rounded down. That box should get daytime Mars to Moon insolation. Not the best for storing volatiles or for cryo; but assuredly adequate for lifesupport, since we have the practice in our own LEO. Mostly this all looks like a parking garage.

For the volatile-depot, I'd tighten this still further at cost of more delta-V. It wouldn't really be in halo at all but in an unstable statial trajectory. I'd conceded an ion-drive anyway.

Chocolat

Rod Dreher among (many) others proposes Trad Life. There are reasons the Trad Life failed. The main reason was - what if your eternal husband is / becomes a jerk.

I did not like the movie Chocolat, I do not approve it, it didn't find an audience at the time, and objectively it painted its characters badly. But... there was something in it. Same as was in Pleasantville.

Anyone proposing an alternative to modernity needs to argue that alternative's benefits. Such a one should probably work on constructing those benefits. Ephesians and the Quran, and whatever other scriptures are out there, might not be enough anymore.

What next?

After the weekend that was, let's take into account the thoughts of people who weren't there and who had warned people not to be there, and certainly not to Go There. Q's Plan, we now know - well, you might now know, I've known since mid 2018 - was never to be Trusted. Like the Satan at the Qiyâma, Q laughs at his own followers and leaves them where they go all to the mercies of the punishing angels. The dies irae is now upon us.

Start with Cerno (backup). He'd actually organised a "Stop The Steal" protest in Arizona mid-November. A foolish consistency has never been among Cerno's hobgoblins - but anyway, read him now before he changes his mind again. Cerno's thought is that the Left has won, so the time has come for Left magnaminity, at least to the shiftless young men in that mob, who deserve a better shot at life including, er, at Tha Pu$$y. Some might suspect me of some self-interest in this topic. But there are many millions like me - but also militant, which I am not.

OnePeterFive offered prayers for this nation. A fuller exploration of the topic comes from Rod Dreher, who proposes a Catholic underground like that which Father Kolakovic mounted in Slovakia under the 1950s Red Army. America already has an underground church; unfortunately for her, it is Q. For the sake of those per una selva oscura, she needs a better church.

CALLED IT 7:45 PM: Sura 8:48. But when the two forces came in sight of each other, he turned on his heels, and said: "Lo! I am clear of you; lo! I see what ye see not; Lo! I fear Allah. for Allah is strict in punishment." h/t to Spencer... Richard Spencer. Sorry, dear readers; he saw what ye did not. And he's not Iblis, here; he's the mu'min rasul who warned you against these lures.

Hydrogen production again

They keep trying to get hydrogen out of water. h/t Instapundit.

Hydrogen is, today, mostly pulled out of methane. With strontium iridate (SrIrO₃), they're talking about lowering the cost of water electrolysis so as not to pull hydrogen from this planet's colon. "Sustainability" being the keyword here; you know what that means.

I'd use this out where the water is pure ice, starting with the Martian poles or maybe if we get to mining comets. Brines need other means.

Heed the warning! - no, not that one, the other one

Robert Zimmerman reminds of his 9 July warning against genocide. The upshot is, it is enabled when normal decent men refuse to believe the bad news.

That article links to a piece all of THREE DAYS earlier, that argues for . . . refusing to believe bad news, then about CoVID.

That moment in July, CoVID case-count was dropping off and hospitals were getting better at handling the sick. We "alarmists" were arguing it was all plenty bad enough and set to get worse in winter, so we should instead concentrate on a Zero CoVID strategy as had been working in New Zealand.

I am not here (just) to "dunk" on Zimmerman. I'm chasing this guy around the court not because he is a moron, but because he's among the smartest of that side of the Right - the side which just lost.

I'll post about why that side lost, some day. This is not that day. [UPDATE 1/30: This is that day.] For now I will note that the side which has callously cost America 375,000 lives in the space of twelve months - lives clustered heavily in low-paying, minority-staffed positions and communities - is in no moral position to argue against "genocide". Those rioters in DC overlap heavily with the anti-mask / REOPEN NAO protests; including in supermarkets, including on aeroplanes.

Zimmerman's side can achieve a moral position when it takes a stand against plague. Until then, frankly, many people on the side of this culture which Zimmerman accuses of genocidal tendency are taking that side because they fear It's Us Or It's Them.

UPDATE 1/10/22: I linked to Topol above - for the first and only time. I think over the last 365 days I'd scented something hinky about that guy, like about Eric Feigl Ding. I recently got alerted that Topol was a stopcounter; he helped rig - excuse me, fortify the election. Thus contributing to the vax-hesitancy which has killed, and is killing, so many of our people. Evil sociopath, is Topol.

Trying to decide if Topol is as evil as PJM, which is riding this thing for clicks. I am thinking - less. Topol kills his enemies. PJM sucks blood from those it pretends are friends.

Pulling carbon

Here is an overview of various schemes to lower the carbon content of our atmosphere. Some of them look better than others.

I have looked at the maths and I do NOT rate the carbon in our atmosphere, even if we torch ALL our deposits, Silent Hill / Centralia style, as an Early Triassic problem. Instead I find opportunity. Carbon-dioxide is good for water desalination, for a start - as is noted in the article. And if we worry about Rising Sea Levels (or if you've read Stone Spring and want the Dogger Bank back) then, by all means, let us mingle this molecule with the water molecule and go wild with organic chemistry. The "Carbon Engineering" facility seems best for that.

In that light, anyone proposing to bury carbon into the Earth should be laughed out of the room. Climeworks needs to give up on that and focus on their CO₂-to-fuel line. I note they also sell "carbon-credit" indulgences.

I smell grift, in a lot of this. Spotify are involved - yes, those guys who #canceled President Donald Trump this weekend.

For more honest suppliers, the technology seems like an excellent fit for our carbon-atmophere planets: Mars and even more so, Venus.

Precession

The Venus / Earth metonic is 8 years. It has two leap years in there. (Usually. We'll get to that.) Earth's position on its orbit - its sidereal angle - may be expressed in Earth calendar days. Preferably with more Leap Days than the Caesars proposed, so: anti-Gregory. Earth's position relative to Venus is just another day, and this day will differ even when they "meet up" again after the metonic. This has implications on relative angles and (mostly Earth) eccentricity. In short, Synod A's budget for Venera 4 in AD 1967 will not be the same in 2047. Every 96 years is 12 metonics. So, let's ask a Babylonian to look into how the schedules shift.

Based on the Stjerneskinn almanac, we can use Inferior Conjunction: 12 May 12:00 UTC AD 2100, 14 April 10:00 UTC in AD 2196. Earth's position relative to Venus falls back 29 days and 2 hours. To round out the century, it falls back 30 days and 7 hours.

Every 400 years is a leap year again. Superior Conjunction (i.e. opposition) 11 June 10:00 UTC fell to 15 May 1:00. Obviously this fell less, 27 days and 9 hours. Round off that century to 28 days and 15 hours.

Take the first three centuries together for 90 days / 21 hours; then add the fourth for 118 days and 36 - that is, 119 days and 12 hours.

153 Earth/Venus metons for 1224 Earth years should take us to about a full return. Luckily for Hard SF authors, it's a pentagram. Even luckier: the 243 Julianesque year (plus 2-3 days, by Gregorian year) span marks the Transit Cycle. We confirm Gregorian with the "Superior Conjunctions" 1 May 1901 (observed 30 April) and - predicted - 2 May 2144 / late 29 April, 2152. Compare Hop's schedule: 2005.7927 (E, like Mariner 10) with 2232.8022 (B) down at the end. For B, it doesn't take much extrapolation to predict 2248.789. This is all very rough for me but then, it was rough for Hop before me. I must, though, trust the almanac more ... and the transits most.

From Venus' side, that's 395 of her sidereal years.

Pope Gregory's equinoxes are his problem and (to a lesser extent) the Greeks'. Venus' problem is to fit 151-2 five-synod metonics into 1215 Earth sidereal years. Maybe lose a synod from meton #152? or a half-synod Hohmann orbit?

Ah, there's over a millennium to figure that out. I suggest to compare 9 November 1973 (E) with Hop's 2168.8558 (B); January 12 1969 (B), with 2196.0330 (D). If you - the Babylonian - are calculating delta-V budgets, and you're looking to the historical period such that the 1967-73 table will make sense again: AD 2168 is as early as you should start. I'd lean more to AD 2210, myself.

Luhman 16

The Luhman 16 system is 3.52 light years from Proxima Centauri (presently). Mostly the other side of it from us. But we can image it and that's what's just been done.

So far we can see two brown dwarves orbiting a common focus. Let's call them Big Bear (33J+) and Little Bear (28J+). Proportionately, they're more evened out even than Pluto / Charon; these don't get stable L4 or L5. We have "precovery" images going from 1978's sky-survey, so we're pretty sure on their period: 27.54 years. Mutual semimajor is about 3.56 AU, with 0.343 eccentricity which is a lot: periapsis 2.34 AU. That's from the barycenter, 62J well above Big Bear's core. I want to say these planets are 4.82 AU apart when at semimajor, so Big Bear orbits over 1.26 AU away.

At 18.36 years we might see a Hilda between these two, orbiting Big Bear. A search for Neptunelikes or other perturbations hasn't come up with anything but, we haven't had that many ursine years to check; they just rule out such a monster in two-year orbits, around either. Beyond, say, 10 AU I do expect a shell of comets.

I'd be interested if either bruin has a Jovian-like system of dwarf planets. As bruins neither has any way toward an Earthlike. But Iolikes and Europalikes seem possible if such is bracketed by ice dwarfs further out in resonance. They'd have to be a bit further than our Io given either bruin's mass, but should still be secured from the other bruin. Their equivalent(s) to Callisto will have an elongate orbit. As for the mass of these subplanets, up to Mars seems possible to me.

CLOSEST 1/14: It's still the game in town. Closest game in a 65 LY search anyway...

COLONY 1/14: At three lightyears away from the nearest star obviously solar energy isn't going to work here. And I'd not count on radioactives nor on any other metals. I'd look at the bruins' magnetic fields, at the planets' geothermic, and at hydrogen fusion. But here's one fine idea: creating, feeding, and pulling energy from a black hole.

Now that it's over

Bronze Age Mantis casts judgement.

I'll have to look up Cola di Rienzi because I'd not heard of him. This despite that he lived during the Avignon era - or maybe because, given that he lived in a then-irrelevant Rome.

Donald John Trump was about a 7/10 President served by 2/10 men... up until the New Year 2020. It was after his impeachment that he became a post-Watergate Nixon. Not for the reason under which the Swamp impeached him; but for his truly impeachable weakness throughout the CoVID crisis and then the "BLM" hysteria. For whatever reason he further ignored investigations on vote-tallies over the summer, including one by CNN on the Dominion machines in... Georgia.

Trump may have ended up a victim of his own vanity. For three years, his vanity served him well - and us. He stubbornly refused bad advice, and then he resisted an evil and illegal impeachment process. By doing what the Washington élite didn't want, more by not doing what they wanted; he instinctively did much good. But 2020 was a time to follow élite opinion, at least where it coïncided with epidemiology (I am not including the CDC here). Facts, as they say, do not care about your vanity.

From what I see on Matt Drudge, about now is when people get tracked down and arrested. I am not here to assure you that Officer Sicknick's murderers should be immune.

As for whether Trump should be prosecuted after his departure... I'll accept that if a full prosecution is simultaneously launched against the Clinton Foundation. And if we get an impartial accounting for Teh Voting Irregularities. Throw in that arraignment against Dick Cheney for torture that the Dems were promising back in the 2000s. Otherwise no; it will be a selective and punitive retaliation against a man guilty mainly of Governing While Republican (however poorly). We cannot permit this in a supposedly First World polity.

Take that last sentence as you will.

Two men come to a river

My position on the ongoing US election - a transfer of power by legitimate means, ideally - is that Trump lost.

Not that Biden won; certainly not that Biden got an honest tally of Electoral College votes. I have observed that an array of forces willed that Trump not stay on for the second half of his octaeteridal metonic. Those forces have ensured that Trump's octa be a tetra. Those forces were not American-certified voters.

I am with Moldbug's grey-mirror on this one (as usual): Trump is done. In fairness Trump never really wanted to be that GOD EMPRAH which his followers wanted, which maybe his followers needed. Trump was always a... troll. When you troll, some people take you serious-like. Some of them might even believe you.

I think that Trump's voters enacting a tantrum about all this is Cope. The Duck, who will assuredly be banned again maybe even by the time I finish typing all this, is delusional if he thinks that THE EMPRAH is going to save him. I also, however, think that this exchange is Cope. If you think that this election was honest, and that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris deserve the respect due to (say) a Ronald Reagan or a Jimmy Carter... I don't know what to say to you.

And with all the respect which HBDChick is due, and I owe her a lot of that respect, I cannot spare sympathy for the "I've been ill" excuse. You were online the whole time posting commentary. In that time you could have spared the time to look up the facts. If you're doing astronomy, you do the damn math; even bad math can be checked. Electoral commentary is also a mathematic.

Or you could just admit you're happy that the side which you supported did a better job of cheating. I've grown to accept this, myself (although I voted the other way). The Democrats' side did, this one time, steal from the right people. I mean, just look at 'em. Just look at us...

Two parties came to the Rubicon. One side brought planks and nails, and engineers. The other brought Ernst von Salomon's fishing-pole. Maybe both parties got what they wanted. The rest of us ... we must hope (or pray, if that is your thing) that the competence displayed in breaking rules can be redeployed in making them.

RIP MIDNIGHT MST: Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick. EYEWITNESS 1/11: Terry Bouton.

WHAT ABOUT THE PLATYPUS

The platypus is now sequenced: Yang Zhou, et al.. This work has been a disideratum for a long while; Christian obscurantists keep citing our subject for evidence of muh creation, not quite considering what that says about their creator.

This (para?)mammal's ancestors, like many birds and reptiles, had used a cloaca for essential outgoing functions; they were (and often are) "monotreme". As a relic surviving on that relic continent, the platypus maintained its monotrematic nature and a few other fossil features, like venom (probably). They also have non-mammalian sex chromosomes; instead of two like us, they got ten (10). These are more like the ZWs of birds - and presumably of dinosaurs.

The first mammal, at least our latest common ancestrix, dates 191-163 Mya well within Jurassic after the Hadrocodium skull (let alone Morganucodon). That fuzzy reptile had mammary-glands.

After maybe 50 million years (130 Mya), one such monotreme laid a special sort of egg - a defective egg. Where birds have genes for eggs, and with these one for yolk; one female such creature lost that for yolk. She found other means of feeding her miscarried young. The mammary-glands developed into full organs. Note: independently of our ancestor as marsupials-and-placentals. It lost its genes for teeth 120 Mya.

The monotremes survived to southeast Australia including Tasmania, spreading to the Deponia series of games. Eventually Australia broke off, and stranded them. At some point better-suited mammals (marsupials, at first) swam over there from America replacing most of the monotremes. But not all went so gently. (Until nowadays sadly...)

I'd love to see how this compares with the Wackyfunothere of Malagasy. I have a notion this mammal also be a monotreme... but, perhaps, not with our Monotremata. David W. Krause's quartet puts the adalathere with Euharamiyida. Wikipedia doesn't yet know when/where to put the multituberculata; Alexander O. Averianov's crew dates one to Bathonian and (Figure 10) spins that family from those Euharamiyis.

Right Ascension, Inclination, desperation

Say I have launched a nice, sun-facing satellite with inclination of 90 degrees, give-or-take. From this orbit, I want to beam energy and/or data to a shaded pseudosatellite at SVL2. Should I let my satellite sit here, that satellite's sidereal longitude will change, day to day, returning to form in 224.701 days. Say I am at 600000 km. This will meet back up with its original position in 48.1 days. I want to stay at 600000 km, whence I worry it shall escape Venus' influence should its angle go too far Sunward. For that, I need delta-V, when it returns to the orbital nodes which are near the north or south poles, every 24.05 days.

That span is over a tenth of the freakin' Venus year. I need to adjust 38.53° in that time. I think I have a fixed Ω, the longitude of the ascending node. I need to push that. I need to do... maths, again. As they say, no time like the present:

Aside 1: On assumption of near zero eccentricity the 38.53° inclination equation leads to delta-V of 8232.84 x cos(ω+f) km per day, max 95.2875 m/s. "'cause - ohhh WTF", indeed. Them orbital mechanics ain't just whinin' when they complain about pushing inclination.

Since I'm circular, I don't have periapsis so I can neglect ω. "ω+f" (or ω+ν) boils down to argument of latitude, u: my angle from the ascending node.

Aside 2: as to how this relates to true longitude: let us talk Right Ascension of Ascending Node. Ascending Node of the sun's [apparent] orbit would be the day of vernal equinox; Right Ascension is that relative longitude.

The sun rises over the equator; RAAN (or O₀) is where my satellites rise on that day. If I have a polar orbit those suckers are rising north or south, fixing their RAAN to some function of 90° or 270°. Here is an Earth example: RAAN 247.3207°, less than a trigonometric minute off 270° minus Earth's 23.45° obliquity.

Over Venus I think my polar's RAAN is 92.6°.

Against the ecliptic, my sat's angle is purest 90°. I'll take the cosine of 92.6°. Its Delta-V for adjusting 38.53° at 600000 km altitude, is 7.3276 m/s.

As I keep saying, I do not expect my life to be perfect. For my sat's orbit I don't expect its eccentricity to be zero - especially when I first get such satellites going, which I will likely be doing The Pioneer 12 Way. Still, even a 8 m/s is not that bad: it's like jumping off Deimos, or driving 17-18 mph. It's much worse for us here at LEO, clearly. Best of all over Venus I take 2620 Wm^-2 from the Sun and some density of "solar-wind" with it. If I can amortise this 8 m/s over 24 days, and my payload is light: solar sails would do the job.

DERP 1/13: I mistook inclination, always polar; for the face it shows to the sun, which is longitude. So: just read Kerbal fora.

Dude! Hologram!

Ever since Stephen Hawking got involved, black holes have been weird. Janna Levin didn't talk about Cauchy horizons; but she did bring up what Pournelle had reported 45 years ago. Stuff about us being a hologram.

I think what this means is that, with the information beamed into a black hole from without, anyone on the inside can see a 2-dimensional video of the universe outside. As noted space and time don't quite work the same from inside the Event Horizon. The black hole can be described in two dimensions; it is, from our perspective, just a shell, maybe with spin (mass corresponds to volume, so I guess - just radius and oblateness?). A 3-D object that can be described, without a frame-of-reference, in only two dimensions is holographic.

When you take this up to four dimensions and try to describe them in three, congratulations, you're Grisha Perelman.

An aside to those who assume black holes are spheres: well, according to relativity, sure, but quantum theory adds some provisos to that. These lads over in Stack Exchange compare Schwarzchild to Kerr. Kerr's holes spin, rather should spin since we've not seen it, so shall be oblate. I forgot above to mention some Kerr holes, already theoretical, may have charge too so are "Kerr Newman". Thus, the three hairs of the otherwise famously bald black hole - and we observe only the first, the mass (a couple years ago we dramatically saw the disc of M87's).

We think we live in three dimensions in which case we are projecting ourselves upon black holes' monitor screens. But, some say, we might actually be playing out our lives inside a black hole and projecting ourselves upon the space of the universe. We'd just need to change our coördinate systems.

Again, Dude! Hologram! is a mathematical / theological question, not a question of physics. Worse, if the holographic-principle math makes a physicist's job harder and gives nothing back, we have not gained anything; much like how Einstein does not help us build rockets in a Keplerian system. Discovering Kerr and Newman properties for a black hole, by contrast, is a question of physics. I should start there.

How to observe Kerr and then Newman, oblateness and then charge? Gravity waves would help, for which we use "interferometer" detectors. The in'ferometers we got are good enough to detect a hole grabbing (much) more mass; but they are not rated for telling much about the holes beyond mass. We need better ones which means, bigger ones.

WORMHOLE 4/18/23: Ryan Bilotta. I'm not following the logic myself, but maybe you can.