Here is the suspension section of the Oakland Bay Bridge:
Designed in the early 1930s and completed in 1936, the bridge spans one of the world’s busy shipping lanes into the port of Oakland. Hundreds of ships, including giant container ships, sail beneath this bridge every year, and have for decades.
Look a little closer:
Notice that giant steel-reinforced tower right in the middle? And those towers holding up the suspension cables are gigantic chunks of steel siting on their own little islands of steel and concrete.
Back in 1936, this bridge won all the engineering awards, not the more scenic and famous Golden Gate Bridge being built a few miles away at the same time. Later engineers opined that it was really wildly overengineered, that the tower in the middle was unnecessary. The original engineers put it there to make double and triple sure that, were a ship to run into it or one of the other towers, the bridge would stay up.
Almost 90 years later, it’s still standing. Having driven over it hundreds of times, it certainly feels solid, for what that’s worth.
Now look at the late Francis Scott Key Bridge, opened in 1977:
Now, I’m no engineer, but that thing looks like one good whack with a big boat, and it’s collapsing domino-style – Oh! Oops!
May the souls of the men who died in the collapse rest in peace, and may the Spirit comfort their loved ones left behind.
Next, I’ve been super busy and ill the last, oh, 2 months. Life has been eventful. I’ve been scarce around these here parts. Now, I have to fix up a couple rooms at Recusant Ranch for family visitors who are coming for my mother in law’s funeral.
She died a month ago, in her sleep in her own bed, after 86 years of life, leaving 11 children, 20+ grandchildren, and 4 great-grandchildren. We should all be so blessed. She lived with us, and my wife had taken care of her, for the last 6 and half years. Now, the family is gathering, half of whom live on the East Coast or in England, which is why there was such a long delay for the funeral. 50+ kids, grandkids, spouses, and great grand kids are coming in. I’ll be accompanying my daughter who will be singing Schubert’s Ave Maria at the funeral mass.
Anyway, school is out May 25th. I should have time to blog then. I kind of miss it.
The problem with the whole get woke, go broke thing I explained here. In a nutshell, scale has to be considered: if I’m a billionaire, I can buy a paper or a magazine for what to me is small change. If they lose a few million a year, it’s not material to me. As Kane put it in a conversation with his accountant Thacker:
THATCHER I happened to see your consolidated statement yesterday, Charles. Could I not suggest to you that it is unwise for you to continue this philanthropic enterprise -(sneeringly) this Enquirer – that is costing you one million dollars a year?
KANE You’re right. We did lose a million dollars last year.
(Thatcher thinks maybe the point has registered.)
KANE We expect to lost a million next year, too. You know, Mr. Thatcher – (starts tapping quietly) at the rate of a million a year – we’ll have to close this place in sixty years.
Citizen Kane
Adjusted for inflation, Kane’s million is more like 20-30 million today.
First SI cover. SI was the second magazine I ever subscribed to – after SciAm. Now, I wouldn’t line a birdcage with either.
So SI will continue down its woke path just so long as whoever owns it is willing to hemorrhage cash – to a reasonable extent. SI used to have some brilliant writers. Not sure if they still do, it’s been decades since I read any issue. I’d bet not, and that AI could replace all the current writers and nobody would notice.
But when the time comes to bail out, I’d bet another rich woke person will buy SI and start the cycle over again. Or, just maybe, someone non-wokester who understands what a brand is (or was) worth might buy it for the name, and try to figure out how to make money. I’d bet on the former, if I were a betting man.
On a related topic, the LA Times is evidently in a similar position – except that the owner had all his money in pharmaceuticals, has lost something like 90% of his fortune, so will soon fall out of the billionaires’ club. The point here: while he had billions in investments, he wasn’t sweating losing a few millions here and there. Now, he cares. Maybe.
The final factor here, different from back in Hearst’s time, is that there are far more callow billionaires, kids who executed one good idea and road it to riches, but otherwise have no experience with money. All those dot-com infants, for the biggest single group. Therefore, there is more money to be burned on virtue-signaling vanity projects than in the past.
On the good news side, I see no indication that such people are anything other than mindless followers who are desperate for approval. Today, approval comes from the woke crowd, who will also attack them if they fail to comply. But tomorrow, that may end as these weasels continue to eat each other.
As I pointed out on what I shall continue to call Twitter, the estimates as bunkum. They come from Frontier Economics and were first commissioned by the makers of Wegovy, presumably to make their effective but expensive weight loss drug look like a relative bargain.
Their previous estimate of the cost of obesity to “society” was £58bn. This year’s estimate is £98bn, most of which (£57bn) comes from lost quality-adjusted life years. As I tire of pointing out, these are internal costs to the individual which, by definition, are not costs to wider society. I can’t stress enough how absurd it is to include lost productivity due to early death as a cost to the economy. You might as well calculate the lost productivity of people who have never been born and claim that contraception costs the economy billions of pounds.
Since the previous estimate, the costs have been bulked up by including the costs of being overweight, but there is no indication in the wafer-thin webpage of what these are. Being merely overweight doesn’t have many serious health implications. The healthcare costs have doubled, but as in the previous report, the new estimate does not look at how much more healthcare would be consumed if there was no obesity. No savings are included. What we need is the net cost.
The “report” that The Times turned into a front page news story is no more than a glorified blog post. It contains no detail, no methodology and none of the assumptions upon which it is based can be checked. It comes with an eight page slideshow from Frontier Economics which is described as a “full analysis” but which doesn’t contain any useful figures either.
Estimates like this are bound to mislead the casual reader into thinking that they are paying higher taxes because of obesity. There is no other reason to publish them, as they have no academic merit. They are designed to be misunderstood.
Sure enough, the very next day The Times was explicitly claiming that the putative £98 billion — now rounded up to £100 billion — was a direct cost to government …
Jumping the gun on the conclusion to the counting trees essays: go through the thought process of setting up this ‘study’. You’ve got, off the top of my head –
What constitutes obesity? (Note this is a fairly contentious area, even excluding the ‘body positive’ lunatics. BMI, for example, is so basically flawed as to be useless – yet it’s used all the time.)
How is it measured? No, really – you throwing the *population* on a scale, one by one? Or – what? Any holes or biases in whatever your method is?
What constitutes a ‘cost’? How is it measured? (I have a finance degree. This is like a minefield-level question. Fights break out over the allocation of indirect costs.)
And dozens more questions. Let’s just stop there. Here we have *one* number presented as the *truth*. It should be obvious even without the writer’s takedown that it’s absurd.
…because I like being right. What I’m right about is how the Science! is settled right up until people get a better good look at, well, just about anything. As I point out here, among many other places, it’s a safe bet that things anyone has only seen from hundreds of millions of miles away will look different when seen from ‘only’ a million miles away, or that something seen only through the then-current gizmos will look a lot different when seen through the latest and greatest gizmos.
The humor here, at least for me, and the single greatest cautionary tale for anyone ‘following the science’ is how stone cold certain scientists are about their theories right up until they’re overthrown, and then how those same scientists get just as certain of the new theories they’ve cooked up to explain the new observations. After a brief period of fluster, rarely is the shift from Theory A to Theory B even acknowledged to have taken place. Rather, a serene, confident calm descends on the field – of course our Theory B is right! Rince and repeat – this is the real history of science.*
The James Webb doing its thing.
So ‘we’ – a handful of astrophysicists and related experts – have these way-cool theories about how old the universe is, how it formed, what the rules must have been 13+ billion years ago. And oops! they don’t seem to cover the new observations. Step 1: tinker under the hood. Maybe we just need a slight tune-up here or there to make it all better. Step 2: if the tune-up doesn’t get it done, then move on to finding the one problem child in the current theory we need to modify. Step 3: come up with an effectively new theory. Step 4: however the earlier steps were resolved, act as if nothing really happened, and trumpet the modified or new theory as The Science with as much confidence and certainty as the old theory was until recently proclaimed.
The educated layman should note that these cosmological theories are exactly the kinds of theories ripe for overthrow: they have no practical applications and so will never get practically tested, they are based on observations of extremely distant phenomena using more or less sophisticated yet necessarily limited tools, they are Russian dolls of nested assumptions.
This last point bears expansion. To take one case: the redshift. The concept of a wavelength shift due to the relative motion of the source and receiver is solid, testable science. So the idea that stars and galaxies are moving relative to us because the light coming from them is redshifted (or blue-shifted) is sound – but it should be noted, one step removed from direct observation. Now lay on top of that stellar and galactic motion Hubble’s Law. This is the idea that speed corresponds to distance, such that the more redshifted the light from a galaxy appears to us, the farther away it is. Here’s the catch – Hubble’s Law is only testable through independent observation for a small subset of comparatively near objects. Exactly where this Law is most applied – very distant objects – it is least testable, as in usually completely untestable. But the entire edifice of current theory stands upon it.
Scientists then back into age: that object is far away from us (using Hubble’s Law) moving at some ‘known’ (through the redshift) speed, so math says that what we’re seeing is really old – it has taken some number of billions of years for the light to come to us from that distance.
Now, all of this is results from perfectly sound logic, and maybe it’s exactly right, but it should be kept in mind that it stands on a heck of a whole lot of assumptions not backed by tests or observations. The Andromeda Galaxy is approaching the Milky Way and will get here in about a billion years. ‘We’ (certain specialists) ‘know’ this, because ‘we’ ‘know’ the distance between the galaxies (using ‘Standard Candles‘, I think) and because of the blue shift in the spectrum of the Andromeda Galaxy as observed from earth. (If there is some other, independent, way to reach this conclusion, I am not aware of it. I’m not really very up-to-date on this stuff, so please correct me.)
All of this makes sense. But so does phlogiston, as does the idea that the Earth is stationary. More to the point, so does the idea that planets develop in pretty much the orbits we see them in today. Problem is, phlogiston isn’t real, the earth does move, and planets seem to form in one orbit and then get moved into other orbits or even get ejected from their systems of origin. The Music of the Spheres evidently modulates across any number of keys.
These are three – phlogiston, stationary earth, and formation of planets – of many examples where following the science meant accepting theories that have since been proven wrong. They all three make a lot of sense. All three have decent sized mountains of evidence in their favor. Yet all three have been overthrown by contrary evidence – evidence you needed better equipment, better logic, or both to obtain.
So, hurray for the Webb! I am and have long been a huge fan. It is exceeding my wildest hopes, so far, by making a lot of scientists sweat a little. I love cosmology because, being completely useless, it is almost completely apolitical. Also, being completely useless, it will never get tested by application, so will remain a Wild West of sorts as far as theorizing goes. What’s a decade or more late and 300+% cost overruns compared to this level of fun?
* as opposed to technology. Once science becomes applied, people really do gain a degree of confidence not available in ‘pure’ science. The melting point of iron is well-established, not so much by scientists but by the millions of technicians who routinely melt iron. We have reached this point of science applied to real-life challenges in many fields, such that the basic, useful facts of those fields are established with a high degree of confidence: chemistry, metallurgy, electronics, various engineering fields, and so on. But in many fields, the less cautious of the practitioners overreach: we really don’t know much about genetic engineering, not in the sense that a good engineer knows that his bridge will stand up, based on centuries of his peers building such bridges. Geneticists may be able to do a wide range of interesting things in a consistent and repeatable manner – but centuries of repeatable successes in the real world are still centuries out. And all this applied science is on way WAY firmer footing than anything a cosmologist or astrophysicist theorizes about.
I am very sympathetic to this idea, and to the suffering of indebted students. I might even be convinced to support this as the least bad thing. I doubt it, but I might.
The basic problem is that calling the problem a ‘student debt crisis’ is Orwellian. The problem is a ‘government funding and corruption of higher education crisis’. A whole gamut of problems and evils are hiding under the suffering of indebted students and former students:
The high cost of college. As in medicine, the insane rise in college costs has very little if anything to do with market costs. Rather, once the government starts shoveling money your way in the form of loans to students, you’re highly motivated to charge as much as you can to sweep up every dollar that’s on the table.
The rise of ‘studies’ and critical theory. It’s simply not that expensive to provide a basic college education. Now that the colleges have vacuumed up all that cash, what are they going to do with it? Colleges now compete on the quality of their food service and their extra-curricular facilities -but that’s not enough! They can now hire all those DIE directors, critical theorists, ‘studies’ professors and so on. Nobody asked for any of this, and none of it correlates to success in real life, AND
Funding the destruction of Western Civ. Readers of this blog know all about the corruption and dishonesty of modern education. All those woke profs are now well funded in their efforts to destroy us.
Focusing on the plight of indebted students is playing into the hands of our enemies. It reminds me of how the press and government (but I repeat myself) blow every useful incident out of proportion if it can be used to distract and manipulate people. By worrying about debt slaves, we take our eye off the real nature of the upper education beast – which loan forgiveness will allow to keep doing its evil best to destroy us.
Anyway, here is my comment on Mr. Niemeier’s essay above.
Option 5: seize the endowments of every university and college, pay off the debts of their students and former students for as far as it will go, then, on the off chance there’s any money left, give it back to the colleges. Then ban government involvement in student loans. Man’s gotta dream.
The moral point you’re missing is that that 2 trillion went someplace – to the colleges and universities. Those institutions then used it to hire diversity directors and studies teachers and so on, in a patent effort to destroy western Civ, or, as we called in saner times, Christendom. The debt is not neutral – it was and is used to fund efforts to destroy people like you and me and our families. That practice must be stopped.
I have little beef with the students, who it’s easy to say should have known better, but they were getting ‘must have college degree!’ propaganda from the cradle, so I can cut them a lot of slack.
But your plan lets the colleges and universities get away with not just defrauding the tax payer, the students, parents, with zero negative consequences, but using that money to try to destroy us. Harvard, etc., should burn for this, and the ground salted. The smallest justice would be tar and feathering of all faculty; some, plus most of the administration, should be hanged.
So focusing only on the student borrowers is missing, I think, the major point of student debt debacle – it’s really a higher ed debacle, and I’m loath to take steps that let those bastards off the hook. (While recognizing the unlikeliness of any justice happening short of a civil war – and nobody wants that.)
(Also, as a relatively minor side note, you don’t really get economics if you think pretending debt can be waved away doesn’t have major negative consequences. For starters, it’s a more subtle way of debasing the currency – which given the current administration, is almost a joke, since they’ve done everything possible to debase the dollar and tax asset holders, such as old men who hold retirement funds (me, for example). Then there’s the moral hazard – you think it stops with student loans, once the precedent has been set? But again, in the context of our rule under this batch of insect overlords, all that stuff is comparatively minor. But eventually, the piper will be paid. Let’s hope it’s not in blood.)
St. Medard, patron of meteorologists, pray for us!
By which I mean the fictional Galileo of popular imagination, not the real Galileo. You know, the guy senselessly persecuted by the Church for the crime of being a real scientist?
That guy might have something to say about the literal pontifications of the current pontiff about climate change. William Briggs has the full story.
I will not read this new Apostolic Exhortation on climate change, firstly, because it’s difficult to imagine how reading such things could be anything other than an near occasion of sin – for me. YMMV. But also because it simply cannot be about matters of faith and morals.
Climate change is not a matter of faith and morals. It, like Galileo’s heliocentrism* in his day, is a highly-debatable and highly debated theory. Since the Church has evidently officially apologized for what was done to the popular fantasy of Galileo,** prudence would seem to dictate that old guys with funny hats should stick to their knitting, and stay out of science and, indeed, everything else that isn’t a function of their offices.
I should think sin in all its many manifestations is a big enough problem to occupy His Holiness, such that he could profitably leave highly politicized claims of Science! alone.
* please note that the idea that the sun is the center of the universe is no longer held by anyone. By the late 18th century, the dudes with telescopes and math chops had concluded that the sun could not be the center of the whole universe. The current fad is to believe there is no center of the universe.
** After reading Mike Flynn’s epic Great Ptolemaic Smackdown, it’s hard not to conclude that the real Galileo only got what he was asking for, and even a fairly light version of that.
… I have hinted at something of the psychology that lies behind a certain type of religion. There was a tendency in those hungry for practical results, apart from poetical results, to call upon spirits of terror and compulsion; to move Acheron in despair of bending the Gods. There is always a sort of dim idea that these darker powers will really do things, with no nonsense about it. In the interior psychology of the Punic peoples this strange sort of pessimistic practicality had grown to great proportions. In the New Town, which the Romans called Carthage, as in the parent cities of Phoenicia, the god who got things done bore the name of Moloch, who was perhaps identical with the other deity whom we know as Baal, the Lord. The Romans did not at first quite know what to call him or what to make of him; they had to go back to the grossest myth of Greek or Roman origins and compare him to Saturn devouring his children. But the worshippers of Moloch were not gross or primitive. They were members of a mature and polished civilization, abounding in refinements and luxuries; they were probably far more civilized than the Romans. And Moloch was not a myth; or at any rate his meal was not a myth. These highly civilized people really met together to invoke the blessing of heaven on their empire by throwing hundreds of their infants into a large furnace. We can only realize the combination by imagining a number of Manchester merchants with chimney-pot hats and mutton-chop whiskers, going to church every Sunday at eleven o’clock to see a baby roasted alive.
The trafficking of children to satisfy the perverted lusts of the rich is child sacrifice, often rather directly and literally. You think these children get to grow up and go home? Kids who have seen the inner workings of their captors and clients? If the sexual abuse of children by kidnappers doesn’t rile you enough, think child torturers and murderers. In some sense, the ancient rites of Moloch were kinder – babies were merely burned alive.
C.S. Lewis captures this same idea (although, mercifully, stopping short of depicting children as the immediate victims) in That Hideous Strength. The Inner Circle at the N.I.C.E searches for the most horrible acts to confirm their usefulness to the Macrobes – as the end approaches, these men, middle aged academics, strip naked, and then start beheading each other – all in an attempt to appease their Moloch and assume the desired spot of Last One to be Eaten.
Both Chesterton and Lewis focus on how this behavior – actively seeking the most debased and horrifying acts to compel demons to do what you want – is not the work of the ignorant masses or uncivilized barbarians, but by the elites of great civilizations.
What appears to anyone of remotely normal levels of sanity as a Good Thing – throwing some light on child trafficking – has triggered what at first seems an insane political response: that, somehow, wanting children to not be kidnapped, raped, and murdered is white supremacy or racism or alphabet-phobia, and makes the people who made or even watch this film literally Hitler. It’s insane unless you have something to hide.
We’ve hit a sore spot. We need to pound away at it.
In my most curmudgeonly moments, I’ve long been liable to mention that all these grand plans to colonize the Moon and Mars rely on one itty-bitty assumption: that people can live indefinitely in what amounts to a giant terrarium, set up in an utterly, fatally hostile environment from weeks to years away from any spare parts or food, eating only food they can grow themselves and water they either recycle or mine in that fatally hostile environment.
Putting on my amateur science hat, I say: show, don’t tell. Don’t tell me how nice it will be – build a model, stick it at the South Pole (a tropical vacation spot compared to Mars or the Moon) and leave a few volunteers inside for, say, a few years without any outside supplies or services. If that works, THEN we can have rational discussions on colonizing Mars or the Moon.
Most times I mention this, I get a lot of dismissive handwaving from supposed sciencey folks, who like big rockets and sci-fi. But as complex and sophisticated as SpaceX’s Starship is – and I’m a big fan – human beings and human societies are orders of magnitude more complex. After centuries of scientific observation, nobody really understands how the human body, let alone the human mind, works. For every detail researchers think they’ve figured out, there are a hundred more that remain a mystery.
And all of us are designed/evolved for this one very specific environment – earth. Mars and the moon are much more like each other than they are like earth, and, in human terms, they’re not at all much like earth.
Laser printed building inside a NASA warehouse? I guess OK for a first pass. Next one should be in the interior of Greenland or 10,000 feet down in the ocean – a little less accessible.
Those furnishings don’t look like they were selected for space transport- light, sturdy, compact – but rather like somebody raided a NASA break room.
Here’s a game: find the farm. Rule of thumb on earth is that it takes about 1/6 acre to grow enough food for 1 person. Now, under laboratory conditions with super-duper equipment and fertilizers, I suppose it’s some fraction of that. But even if the fraction is 1/10, you’d still need about 2900 square feet to grow enough food. That is about 1200 square feet more than this entire building.
NASA isn’t testing if this habitat is self-sustaining – but is instead worrying about the psychological health of people packed together in quarters much less dense and way more comfortable than most apartments in most cities in the world.
Here’s what NASA says. (Can’t help but notice that what NASA labels “goals” is just a description of a few ‘mission parameters’.)
Goals
To obtain the most accurate data during the analog, the habitat will be as Mars-realistic as feasible, which may include environmental stressors such as resource limitations, isolation, equipment failure, and significant workloads. The major crew activities during the analog may consist of simulated spacewalks including virtual reality, communications, crop growth, meal preparation and consumption, exercise, hygiene activities, maintenance work, personal time, science work, and sleep.
Might I suggest a more succinct goal? Goal: to see if people can survive indefinitely in isolation inside a giant terrarium. Ya know?
This is not at all what needs to be tested. I would want them to up the ante. I would suppose the mental health of people freaked out about possibly starving 45 million miles from earth might not be too copacetic. NASA might want to look into that.
This ‘experiment’ will succeed, and be utterly useless. People have tried the terrarium thing, most famously in the epic fail that was Biosphere. (Side note: the linked Wikipedia article, an earlier version of which I’m pretty sure I read many years ago, has now softened the criticism such that it sounds like Bioshere-2 sorta worked. No. If what you’re talking about is a closed ecosystem that can survive indefinitely without outside supplies and aid, it failed dramatically.) I suppose getting NASA-selected astronaut grade volunteers should make success, defined as the people in the structure not dreaming of killing each other, much more likely. But it will tell you nothing about that whole self-contained and isolated terrarium thing.
Is this a start? Not sure. Someone – Musk? – needs to take the same rapid development approach as SpaceX: build the best self-contained habitat you can, throw some people in it, and see how long it lasts. As soon as problems arise, fix them in a new habitat, and start another experiment. Rince, repeat, until you get one that seems to work. THEN take what you’ve learned, and translate it into something you could build on the Moon and Mars.
As of now, it’s just fantasy to imagine ‘we’ can just throw up habitats on the Moon and Mars where people can live indefinitely without constant resupply from earth. If you disagree, show me.
Cosmology, about which I know next to nothing, is nonetheless one of my favorite sciences. Why? Because it is totally useless, and, being useless, gets left more or less completely alone except by urgeeks. Here you have a field that’s mathematically and logically very demanding, yet full of elaborate theories that are essentially unprovable. Which theories make absolutely no difference to the day to day life of anyone who is outside the field.
As such, the history of cosmology and related fields is chock-full of theories that were fought over tooth and claw, that became shibboleths of orthodoxy, that then died a quick death when new evidence rolls in – only to be replaced by the new theory that then becomes the new shibboleth. Rinse, repeat.
A giant exoplanet way too close to its star – a poster one can purchase at Walmart.
Cosmology is full of stone certain – at least, I think many in the field would all but bet their lives them – theories that, to this amateur philosopher, seem like just-so stories awaiting death by inconvenient fact. Sure, dark matter and dark energy might be real – but it seems just as likely that they’re not. Red shift = distance? Seems like it, but – how you going to prove this in a manner that isn’t completely circular? Even the Big Bang, which hangs off Hubble’s Law, which hang off the red shift, seems ripe for contradiction.
Despite or perhaps because of this irrelevance to real life, cosmologists work their theories like nobody’s business. Here, I use a cosmological paper as an example of how science, as opposed to Science!, is supposed to be done:
“Now apparently the authors spent months checking their work, just to make sure it was robust and would stand up to very intense scrutiny because they knew it was going to get that. They checked it for measurement error and systematic error and statistical errors, but by the end of it they just couldn’t deny what they found. You know, even the most die-hard of dark matter fans could not deny what they found.”
Great stuff! Actual peers reviewing something, in a field without political gatekeepers! Whoa. Sure, the whole set of theories upon which dark matter and dark energy are built are just a house of cards, with not a single concrete observation to back them up. I mean, nobody has gone out there and checked or anything, and, barring faster than light travel, nobody ever will. But they are sure pretty theories.
What brought all this to mind is that the Webb, of which I am an unabashed fanboy, is messing things up. Seems all these elegant (if unprovable and untestable even in theory) theories about early star and galaxy formation preclude exactly the sort of things the Webb is ‘seeing’ so far out there that they are presumed to have been formed in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. According to theories that were pronounced in stentorian tones to wide-eyed students, there should not be massive galaxies so soon after the Big Bang. Nope, takes time, like a few billion years, for enough stuff to aggregate to make giant galaxies.
So, something’s wrong. Either the readings from the Webb, the theories by which we estimate age and distance (red shift, again) or – gasp! – our theories about how things must have happened 13.something billion years ago. Whatever it may be, a new theory will eventually be hashed out, the old theory demoted, and everyone will nod in agreement, and resume being way too confident about their theories.
Here’s an example: up until about maybe 20 years ago, the dominant theory of planetary formation said that accretion discs formed around stars, and planets condensed out of the discs, in pretty much the location and with pretty much the orbits they have now. Rocky planets formed close to the star (sun), because solar winds and heat drove off the lighter gases; gas giants congeal farther out, where the temperatures are lower and the winds comparatively mild. Seems reasonable – certainly, the only example we had of a solar system – our own – seemed to work that way.
Then astronomers started finding evidence of planets around other nearby stars, and – the theory just didn’t work. Specifically, Jupiter-scale gas giants were found in orbits very near to their stars. So, after squirming for a few years, astrophysicists came up with a new theory, which involves a lot more complex gravitational interactions between planets and their stars. A gas giant might indeed form far from its sun, but then, due to the conservation of momentum, creep slowly inward as launched inner planets outward. The momentum added to those inner planets had to come from somewhere – and that somewhere is theorized to be the momentum of the gas giant. The giant creeps inward as the inner planets are launched outward, possibly out of their system entirely.
So rather than the comforting notion that planets such as ours remain where they were originally formed, we have planets such as ours routinely launched out into the interstellar dark, joining other dead, frozen worlds. Meanwhile, the giants get closer and closer to their star, only to be evaporated or torn apart.
And that’s the current theory, more or less. The old theory was developed over decades and presented as fact to generations of schoolkids; the current theory, with not a moment of cognitive dissonance, is now taught (I presume) to school children with equal confidence.
Meanwhile, I now have 50+ years of experience watching over-certain theories die at the hands of new discoveries, only to be replaced by new over-certain theories.
Our science education would be much better if we dwelt on such issues instead of putting halos on schmucks like Sagan and Nye.
“America’ COVID Response Was Based on Lies” This is a Newsweek article, published today. In other words, a tactical ‘information’ release by some faction of our government. I’m not a student of the internal power struggles that characterize emerging oligarchies, so I have few thoughts on why, after three long years, an organ of the oligarchs is saying what every scientifically literate and non-terrified person was saying since April of 2020. Somebody perhaps wants to see certain people swinging from lamp posts, or at least fire a shot across the bow to keep opposing factions in line. Or maybe something else – but nothing gets published these days without getting run by some faction or other of the Ministry of Truth.
Here’s the list of lies from the article, along with some light commentary in italics. I could link back to articles here on this blog showing where I said pretty much the same damn things, but I’m beyond sick of this crap.
1. SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than the flu by several orders of magnitude. The coof is bad cold level dangerous. People forget the common saying: “Catch your death of cold”. Old people – and the median age at death “from” Covid is around 80 – very commonly die from pneumonia, where a cold or flu settles into their lungs for keeps. The coof is no different, and no more dangerous.
2. Everyone is at significant risk to die from this virus. If you’re under 50 and reasonably healthy, you might as well worry about getting struck by lightening as dying of the coof. If you are reasonably healthy at ANY age, coof adds very little to your overal risk profile.
3. No one has any immunological protection, because this virus is completely new. The very concept of a “completely new” virus reveals complete ignorance of basic biology and logic.
4. Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread. Here is a classic reversal: rather than the people making a claim providing the evidence that their claim is true, they assume they are correct, and attempt to make people challenging the unsubstantiated claim provide the proof. No. The way it works: you want me to do or believe something? You convince ME. I don’t have to prove to you that asymptomatic people spread a disease – YOU need to prove to me that they do. But such transmission was conclusively presumed, and anyone who pointed out the utter lack of evidence that it was true was vilified.
5. Locking down—closing schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-COVID medical care, and eliminating travel—will stop or eliminate the virus. Now we’re playing the game of pretending these brutal, totalitarian measures ‘worked’ in some vague sense, but certainly not the sense in which, you know, they slowed or stopped the spread of the virus.
6. Masks will protect everyone and stop the spread. Ignoring 100 years of studies and the experiences worldwide during the Spanish Flu, our betters produce the famous 70 studies within weeks all purporting to prove that masks slow the spread of the Coof, and vilifying anyone who dares disagree. Riiiiight.
7. The virus is known to be naturally occurring, and claiming it originated in a lab is a conspiracy theory. “Known to be” – how? How does one even go about proving such a thing?
8. Teachers are at especially high risk. Right. 80 year old teachers with cardiovascular failing in nursing homes, maybe.
9. COVID vaccines stop the spread of the infection. Too stupid to even address.
10. Immune protection only comes from a vaccine. Huh? Again, relying on the public’s complete ignorance of how immunity works.
And I’d add a Lie #11. More than 1 million American died from Covid. As Dr. Atlas more properly puts it: More than 1 million American deaths have been attributed to that virus. The processes by which they were so attributed guarantee that that number wildly overstates the true number of deaths *from* Covid versus deaths *with* Covid. Our CDC staunchly refused to collect and publish the data that would enable a reasonable person to determine how much the official death numbers overstate Covid deaths, but studies from other nations show something under 10% of attributed deaths were caused *by* Covid, as opposed to a person dying anyway but being diagnosed with Covid – such as the 50-60% of the Covid deaths that happened in nursing homes, where Americans go to die.
Yard Sale of the Mind 