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December 14, 2019
At the Soft Café...
... make yourself comfortable.
And comfortably, softly shop — if you need to shop — through the Althouse Portal to Amazon.
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"... make yourself comfortable."
Sarah Vaughan:
https://youtu.be/AhkDnZo2EAM
So if "anti-impeachment Democrat Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey" switches to the Republican party, as has been rumored, what happens to his staffers? Do they stick with their principal or do they stick with their principles and remain with the Democrat party, thus ending up unemployed, at least temporarily?
Final score: Aircraft 20+, Geminids ~4.
It actually wasn’t a bad night to watch a meteor shower here in Florida: Clear, mid-60s, light breeze. I knew that the radiant cane up over the horizon about 7:15, and that the nearly-full moon was due to rise at 8:10, which would make viewing conditions deteriorate rapidly. I went out at 7:15 and walked to a dark undeveloped street not far from home. I saw four definite meteors and three or four more flashes on the edge of my peripheral vision that might have been something or might not. Saw lots of airplanes, though. This was nothing compared to the Leonid meteor storms I saw in 2001 and 2002, where I saw dozens of meteors as well as a fireball that I actually heard sizzle across the sky. But this wasn’t a total bust either.
In the bleak Midwinter
Via Rantburg:
An Wisconsin judge on Friday ordered the state to remove hundreds of thousands of people from Wisconsin's voter rolls because they may have moved.
The case is being closely watched because of the state's critical role in next year's presidential race. Ozaukee County Judge Paul Malloy also denied the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin's petition to intervene.
Lawyers for the League and for the Wisconsin Elections Commission indicated they will appeal and asked Malloy to stay his ruling pending those appeals, but he declined.
At issue is a letter the state Elections Commission sent in October to about 234,000 voters who it believes may have moved. The letter asked the voters to update their voter registrations if they had moved or alert election officials if they were still at their same address.
The commission planned to remove the letter's recipients from the voter rolls in 2021 if it hadn't heard from them. But Malloy's decision would kick them off the rolls much sooner, and well before the 2020 presidential election....
Via Powerline:
Madrid (AFP) – A UN climate summit in Madrid risked collapsing Saturday after marathon negotiations between countries left them more divided than ever over on how to fight global warming and pay for its ravages.
Diplomats from rich nations, emerging giants and the world’s poorest countries — each for their own reasons — found fault in a draft agreement put forward by host Chile in a botched attempt to strike common ground.
Faced with five-alarm warnings from science, deadly extreme weather made worse by climate change, and weekly strikes by millions of young people, negotiations in Madrid were under pressure to send a clear signal that governments were willing to double down in tackling the crisis....
"Final score: Aircraft 20+, Geminids ~4."
Try looking through a telescope. The satellite barrage is unrelenting. And Musk's atrocious Starlink program isn't even off the ground yet.
GWTW was on Turner Classic tonight, including the interact and the intermission. They sure did make some good movies, once upon a time in Hollywood.
I refuse to use cloud services, but I'm about to exceed 5GB of cloud space on my Apple account. Several emails have encouraged me to.....Up your cloud space now! They want me to pay money for something I'm not using.
It's like the world demographic is 14-year-old girls with too much baby-sitting money!
I also know some octogenarians that spend money to mitigate loneliness/relevance.
The Wisconsin Badgers women's volleyball team defeated Nebraska 3-0 today as predicted by David Begley. The Badgers are headed to the volleyball Final Four next weekend in Pittsburgh where they will play Baylor in a semi-final match. They have been fun to watch this year.
Faced with five-alarm warnings from science, deadly extreme weather made worse by climate change, and weekly strikes by millions of young people, negotiations in Madrid were under pressure to send a clear signal that governments were willing to double down in tackling the crisis....
All countries, rich or poor, could make a big difference by turning off all the lights at night.
North Korea a leader in the movement.
If government climate alarmists believed in the doom and gloom they espouse, no lights is a no brainer.
Like the 55 mph speed limit once upon a time, good for saving the earth, but too inconvenient in the real world to maintain.
I refuse to use cloud services, but I'm about to exceed 5GB of cloud space on my Apple account.
With persistent Internet connections, fixed or addressable dynamic addresses, affordable hardware, and reliable energy, there's an opportunity for development of personal servers to locate, secure, parse, and present locally. To free us from the so-called "cloud".
I humbly suggest that "double down" is a dead metaphor. Thoughts?
High 50's and rain today, high in the low to mid-40's tomorrow, then a turn to more seasonable 30's; just in time for MIL's arrival from FL. The ankle length winter coat is out and the heat will be raised.
I love this time of year.
Too cloudy for Geminids so far.
Phidippus, if you liked Selfish Gene, try Menno Schilthuizen's Darwin Comes to Town--things are adapting to and evolving with urbanization more profoundly, and quickly, than I ever imagined.
Narr
Ciao
Tonight - Cal high school championship game: De La Salle (NorCal) v St John Bosco (SoCal). Bosco is ranked no. 1 in country. Has 25 D1 players - the QB is going to Clemson next year.
Tradguy
It is being rereleased in theatres next year. Limited release. Great to see the scolds have not killed art.
Faced with five-alarm warnings from science...
Five-micro alarm warnings from a consensus, daily extreme weather made worse by political climate change, a mechanism characterized in isolation and efficacy inferred in the wild, proxies and myths, models or hypotheses that have demonstrated no skill to hindcast, forecast without "tuning", let alone predict a future state, strikes by thousands of green people with diverse beliefs and motives, and a crisis of epic creation exacerbated by investors, activists, published media, social steering, and empathetic appeals.
"deadly extreme weather made worse by climate change"
I'd like to see the actual data that support that claim. News outlets all over the world uncritically repeat (or make up) the most absurd statements blaming every ill on the earth on climate change, but the data mostly don't exist. But if you convince enough politicians, you don't need data...
I'd like to see the actual data that support that claim. News outlets all over the world uncritically repeat (or make up) the most absurd statements blaming every ill on the earth on climate change, but the data mostly don't exist. But if you convince enough politicians that there's money in it for them, you don't need data...
@hawkeyedb, FIFY
So if "anti-impeachment Democrat Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey" switches to the Republican party, as has been rumored, what happens to his staffers? Do they stick with their principal or do they stick with their principles and remain with the Democrat party, thus ending up unemployed, at least temporarily?
@Clyde, if they take option (2), being unemployed, at least temporarily, do you think they'll wind up giving thanks to Trump for a full employment economy?
Who am I kidding, right?
We saw "Richard Jewell" tonight. Highly recommended. Clint rips the FBI a new one.
The hysteria about the reporter for the AJC is way overblown. She flirts with the FBI guy. No sex.
The Sally Fields character in "Absence of Malice " is far more critical of female reporters. She slept with the suspect,
The reporter, Scruggs, is said to be "deceased" and can't defend herself. Yes, she died of a drug overdose and the character fit that profile.
Turn off your cloud service. If you get a new phone and want to migrate your data, turn on the cloud, upload, activate your new phone, restore your data to the new device from the cloud, then delete the cloud data. And turn off cloud storage. Keep it off until you need it again.
Its the squirrel narrative, how about the fact that scruggs scoop was wrong, that the ones who settled on jewell were crimimally incompetent
Try looking through a telescope. The satellite barrage is unrelenting. And Musk's atrocious Starlink program isn't even off the ground yet.
The future of astronomy lies in inexpensive orbital installations.
Original Mike said...
"Final score: Aircraft 20+, Geminids ~4."
Try looking through a telescope. The satellite barrage is unrelenting. And Musk's atrocious Starlink program isn't even off the ground yet.
******************
The field of view through a scope is much too narrow to catch all the incoming meteors.
Satellites move much less fast than meteors, so there's little chance of confusing them.
I once looked up and saw six meteors in ten seconds. Way cool.
Women are fighting back against hair oppression
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50786370
"My hair is empowering,
and through all the relaxers, flat irons, weaves, and braids, my hair tells a story. It's going to continue telling these stories through every kink and curl."
"The field of view through a scope is much too narrow to catch all the incoming meteors."
I wasn't suggesting observing meteors through a telescope.
"The future of astronomy lies in inexpensive orbital installations."
I don't believe. There is no substitute for aperture.
MPs demand Zelensky, Trump investigate suspicion of U.S.-Ukraine corruption involving $7.4 bln
"...investigate suspicions of the legalization of $7.4 billion by the "family" of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych through the American investment fund Franklin Templeton Investments, which they said has ties to the U.S. Democratic Party."
https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/press-conference/625831.html
Say what?
https://www.axios.com/house-dems-trump-ball-impeachment-c3c3006b-59fc-47d0-92fb-b260bffaed19.html?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=fbsocialshare&utm_campaign=organic&fbclid=IwAR01NJPUwM7UdW50PuZuj1ohT6TyYD-CIoBRBRtbHMv6AzsE4IfM0_pOxdY
I'm bringing this forward from a previous day's cafe (where there had been a General Relativity discussion), as a public service because numbers of people here might suffer from a similar delusion — principally as a result of (mostly forgotten) undergraduate physics classes where Einsteinian Relativity had been (slightly) encountered….
Fernandistein said…
“… from another point of view it's perfectly correct to regard the Earth as (not flat!) but a spheroid which lies totally at rest, while the rest of the cosmos including the sun rotates around it, once every 24 hours.”
Bzzt. Relativity uses "inertial reference frames", which the earth isn't because: There is evidence that the earth is rotating: the Foucault pendulum, the coriolis force, etc = 'fictitious forces' = not an inertial reference frame.
___
Bzzt! Wrong — right back at'cha! I just knew I'd get this kind of response — despite my explicitly addressing this particular, ignorant “point” up-thread. It's sad, in general — even though I'm laughing in this (not so) special case. The distinction between the special and the general, indeed, lies at the crux of this dispute!
The fact is that the requirement that “reference frames” (systems of coordinates describing points [that may be moving] in space) be inertial (i.e., non-accelerated) in relativity is only a restriction found within Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (published in 1905) — which is all that's normally taught to undergraduates (even physics majors), and thus all that they become even slightly familiar with.
Einstein, however, in his succeeding General Theory of Relativity (published in 1915) explicitly removed this limitation; and it is general relativity which has become the modern theory (“law”) of gravity in physics — replacing Newtonian physics with its gravity — in which role relativity has been outstandingly successful for more than a century.
Thus, non-inertial frames certainly are allowed in general relativity. More than “allowed”: in fact it is precisely those kind of (accelerated) reference frames which provide general relativity's solution for how gravity operates!
This connection — identity actually — between acceleration (i.e. inertia) and gravity is absolutely fundamental in general relativity (as central as the union between matter and energy, expressed in the famous E = Mc^2 formula). The conceptual unification between inertia and gravity is known as the equivalence principle in general relativity.
Beyond that, speaking of so-called “fictitious forces,” according to general relativity the “fictitious force” of centrifugal force (the “force” on rotating bodies such as merry-go-rounds that tends to throw you radially off the ride) is actually real, live gravity. (Ditto for being pushed back in your seat as your car accelerates — or being forced to one side as it and you go round a corner.)
It's amusing in these cases seeing how folks' recollections of their college physics classes (if any!) decades stale have gotten progressively dimmer and dimmer over time — so that terms like special (applied to what one knows) — and general (applied to what one doesn't know) — become harder and harder to recall, until one thinks one knows it all. Relativity, no problem!
Lol.
GWTW will be a better movie in another hundred years. People nowadays forgive Shakespeare for making peasants and common people look like half wits and only allowing nobility to be noble. In another hundred years, maybe the racial characterizations in GWTW won't look so awful. I will say this for GWTW though. The black characters have speaking parts and have impact on the narrative. In Lillian Hellman's plays about the Old South, the blacks are dignified coat holders and are just there to lend local color. They're not really part of the drama.....Vivien Leigh's performance holds up, and Clark Gable is reliably Clark Gable. Leslie Howard is kind of hammy. Olivia DeHaviland is excellent as Melanie. Hattie MacDaniel has her moments, but that's not a role that any black woman today would feel comfortable playing.....It's a shame Vivien Leigh never played Becky Sharp. She's one of the great characters in English lit, and there's never been a great screen characterization of her. The dynamic with Scarlet/Melanie mirrors that of Becky/Amelia.
...got any more of them Krampi ??? Today's Feel-good video
Muslim migrants try to disrupt Austrian parade of St. Nicholas — Big Mistake
In Central European folklore, Krampus is a horned, anthropomorphic figure described as "half-goat, half-demon", who, during the Christmas season, punishes children who have misbehaved.
https://www.citizenfreepress.com/column-1/muslim-migrants-try-to-disrupt-austrian-parade-of-st-nicholas-big-mistake/
Clyde said...
So if "anti-impeachment Democrat Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey" switches to the Republican party, as has been rumored, what happens to his staffers? Do they stick with their principal or do they stick with their principles and remain with the Democrat party
--
Look to their "civil servant" options if they apply.
Bureaucrats gonna beaureaucrat, I assume.
@madasHell (and any Seattle-ites)
New movie premiering at the Varsity this Thursday at 7:00 if you are interested.
No ticket needed -just tell them that you are seeing 'Captain Jarvis'.
It just won Best Writer, and was nominated for Best Narrative Feature, at ALTFF in Toronto. As one person has told me, it is 'batshit crazy'. In a good way.
Will be having drinks at the bar next door before (and after) the show.
I am Laslo.
Michael K said...
We saw "Richard Jewell" tonight. Highly recommended. Clint rips the FBI a new one.
--
Think your daughter will see it?
Laslo,
Not likely hubby and I would try to make our way into Seattle (from Microsoft Land) on a Thursday night, but always interested in finding out more about anything you recommend. Couldn't find anything online re: Captain Jarvis. More info, if you have it.
MY UW Alumni magazine landed today - cover page is photo of the Varsity Theater with caption "The new U District".
The hysteria about the reporter for the AJC is way overblown. She flirts with the FBI guy. No sex.
So as I thought. The criticism of the movie is as accurate as the criticism of The Joker.
The hysteria about the reporter for the AJC is way overblown. She flirts with the FBI guy. No sex.
I was working 6 miles away from bombing. Word from the people who knew her: "I wouldn't put it past her".
They are just trying to damp down the box office for the usual liberal reasons.
@Michael McNeil
Can you direct me to discussion / material laying out Mass energy equivalency formula derivation
No Safe Spaces tomorrow... Jewell next weekend. Thanks for the tipoff!
Remember "The Wind Done Gone," "Gone With The Wind" from the point of view of the slaves?
The NYT review of the book:
"When a United States Court of Appeals overturned an injunction, won by the Margaret Mitchell estate, that would have prevented the publication of Alice Randall's parodic sequel to ''Gone with the Wind,'' it was a victory for the author and for First Amendment rights. Alas, the legal battle surrounding this first novel is more interesting than the book itself, which never rises to the promise of its clever, controversial premise -- that Scarlett O'Hara was half sister to a slave, the illegitimate daughter of Scarlett's father and her beloved Mammy. Randall's book, which picks up about a month after ''Gone With the Wind'' left off, is made up of the stilted diary of this overlooked woman, Cynara. Throughout, Randall lifts characters and plot lines directly from Mitchell's novel, though she tweaks the names -- Scarlett is ''Other''; Rhett Butler is ''R.''; Tara becomes ''Tata.'' Randall's own plot inventions consist mostly of expository back story: Cynara, sold away from Tata as an adolescent, is now the 28-year-old mistress of none other than R. As the novel opens, Cynara visits her estranged Mammy, who is dying at Tata -- where Other still lives. In what becomes a frustrating pattern, Randall undermines the potential drama by avoiding direct conflict between the characters (the rivalrous half sisters barely speak a word to each other). ''The Wind Done Gone'' is a fairly obvious study in contrasts with Mitchell's original, and not just because of its simple reversals of the racism in Mitchell's work (in Randall's story, it's the white characters who are portrayed as foolish incompetents). Where Mitchell's Scarlett O'Hara was brave, vain, irritating and -- above all -- interesting, Randall's Other is a simpering wraith. Cynara is described as being more beautiful and worthy than Other, qualities that, at least here, prove tedious. Where Mitchell's novel was epic, vibrant and accessible, Randall's narrative is spare, flat and oblique. "
I look at these pictures and I think about the novels of Gene Wolfe, whose great inspiration was his beautiful and kind wife Rosemary Wolfe, and I realize that maybe I should have spent my life in the midwest, with all those rivers and lakes and shorelines and midwestern trees, and then I remember that none of us really get to choose where we live if we care about other people, and so here I am, far away from the Central Time Zone, knowing that i probably am never going to visit the Midwest in the future, where I spent the best years of my life, again, looking at wonderful pictures of a lake somewhere in the Wisconsin that I will never visit again ....
even though I could list a hundred reasons why Wisconsin has been close to my heart
a thousand reasons
almost infinite reasons.
oh well. at least I care about other people, which is more important than getting to live in the state you want to live in.
"Gone with the Wind" is a book that I never read; my father read it and liked it, probably because it was epic, vibrant and accessible ..... just guessing ....
in real life I am the kind of person who the Rhett Butlers of the world treat with respect, so it would be hard for me to sit down and read a book where the flashy little fellow goes from episode to episode treating everyone in a condescending way.
Add one more Geminid to the count. Driving to work through pockets of dense fog at 4:30 this morning, I came to a clear area near the power plant. Suddenly, I saw a bright green streak cross the sky through the right part of my windshield. It was the best meteor I saw all night and it came under conditions that I wouldn’t have bothered going outside to look for them. You never know...
Me: Bzzt. Relativity uses "inertial reference frames"
___
Bzzt! Wrong — right back at'cha! I just knew I'd get this kind of response —
I left out the word "special" in "special relativity" because that was the relativity of the discussion, not gravitation and time - get over it.
despite my explicitly addressing this particular, ignorant “point” up-thread. It's sad, in general —
TL;DR
I left out the word "special" in "special relativity" because that was the relativity of the discussion, not gravitation and time - get over it.
Obviously, if we're talking about non-inertial reference frames — such as the earth being regarded as not spinning on its axis — then “the relativity of the discussion” is not “special” relativity — unless you're profoundly ignorant about what that means, which is certainly what strongly appears to be the case.
TL;DR
So remain complacently ignorant — it's no skin off my nose — but I'll happily point it out again and again whenever I see it!
No eye contact, Fernandistein.
Can you direct me to discussion / material laying out Mass energy equivalency formula derivation
Sure. The mass-energy equivalence formula's derivation can be done starting from the first principles of special relativity. Here we see it in two versions: simplified (with some arm-waving pointing at the latter) and complex (with calculus).
Blogger walter said...
Michael K said...
We saw "Richard Jewell" tonight. Highly recommended. Clint rips the FBI a new one.
--
Think your daughter will see it?
I doubt it. She seems to have gone over to the other side whereas I thought she had seen through Hillary. Maybe her mother (my ex-wife) will want to see it. They live together.
Note to self.
Add Micheal McNeil to the "Do not argue with unless I am absolutely sure of my facts and willing to go the distance" list.
Right below J. Farmer.
I've got a lot of highly credentialed friends and acquaintances (in fact most of my F and A are pretty highly credentialed) who are firm in their faith that Trump has been a criminal since he turned twelve, and is on the verge of being busted at last.
This, despite the fact that the guy has been a famous rich public figure for many decades now;
he's either much cleaner than a lot of people think, or a lot smarter--which includes smarter than they are themselves.
Narr
Credentials, good God y'all, what are they good for?
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