Wednesday, November 25, 2020

Sing of singularities & supernovae -- And how to do a 'safe inauguration' wonderfully well.

With sighs of tentative-delayed relief, let's turn from politics -- till the end of this post, when I'll propose how the new US administration could hold a huge, celebratory inauguration in a way that's win-win for us all.


Only first... 

    ...SCIENCE NEWS!!


== Wowzer goings on up there! ==


Fascinating recent claims that there may be a lot of stellar range black holes out there... perhaps enough to account for dark matter? If it's true, I'd have thought we'd see the effects on perturbed orbits of exoplanetary systems. But most discovered exoplanets so far are close to their primary. One test may be when we can statistically appraise Neptune-distance planets. 


Of course then there's gravitational micro-lensing which would also have observable effects, if some of our NIAC projects bear fruit. This is checkable...


... and if it is true, it might mean that interstellar space is a minefield of MACHO objects, affecting the probabilities that interstellar colonization, even by probes, is even possible.


A strange Research Paper Claims There’s a Black Hole at the Center of the Earth - No, don't get all lathered. The singularities at the Earth's core that I posited as plot devices in EARTH seem almost plausible, compared to this stuff. (And my concept of gravity lasers - or gasers - has passed every test, so far!) 

Most likely this 'article' is a discreditation sting, like the famous "Sokal Semiotics Paper" that revealed the credulous insipidity of postmodernist "scholarship."


An avid and clever and obsessed photographer calculated where to set up… and caught the NG-14 Cygnus mission to the International Space Station passing in front of the Moon on October 2nd, 2020. ‘It's wonderful to see the visible shockwaves emanating outward from the engines, separate from the superheated exhaust plume.’


The unexpected dimming of the supergiant star Betelgeuse was most likely caused by an immense amount of hot material ejected into space, forming a dust cloud that blocked starlight coming from Betelgeuse's surface. So, not an imminent supernova after all. We think. 


The star S62 whips around Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, at an extremely tight orbit. At its closest approach, it can travel faster than eight percent the speed of light, entering a regime where relativistic effects like time dilation become detectable, even at long range. 


Strong evidence that a supernova went off not very far from Earth about 2.5 million years ago, possibly setting off the era of ice ages. 


Along similar lines… Was the late Devonian extinction event caused by a nearby supernova that shredded Earth’s protective ozone layer and fried early land life and denizens of the sea surface for 100,000 years?


== Weirder space concepts ==


One possible candidate for “dark energy” may be compact analogues to black holes that are repulsive. “Back in the 1960s, physicists suggested that all that elusive dark energy could be hiding in ersatz black holes called Generic Objects of Dark Energy (GEODEs)… The only way that GEODEs could expand the universe without destroying everything around them is if they were isolated in empty pockets of the cosmos…  “ New papers suggest  that GEODEs gradually grow and start rotating so rapidly that they repel each other into those empty expanses, so GEODEs could explain universal expansion without conflicting other models of the universe.


That's a possibility oddly reminiscent of my short story “Bubbles.” published in Lightspeed Magazine, with an Audio version here.


== We are beings who can witness black hole mergers! ==


Seven billion years ago one black hole roughly 66 times the mass of our Sun, and another black hole roughly 85 times the mass of our Sun came close together, rapidly spinning around one another several times per second before eventually crashing together in a violent burst of energy that sent shockwaves now detected by our gravity wave observatories. And while it is fantastic we are a people who now can do such things as this, observing things like this… what stuns me above all is what it says about the sheer magnitude of this universe. I mean think of how short a time LIGO has been tuned well enough to spot such things… and we’ve spotted several. It means such collisions happened all the freaking time, while separated by distances unfathomable to human imagination. As Doug Adams said: The universe is big, possibly even the biggest.


That fine-tuning improvement campaign for gravity wave detectors has been prodigiously successful, allowing detections now more than weekly! "When you look at the catalog, there's one thing all events have in common: They come from mergers of compact objects such as black holes or neutron stars. But if you look more closely, they all are quite different," Frank Ohme, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, said in a statement. "We're getting a richer picture of the population of gravitational-wave sources. The masses of these objects span a very wide mass range from about that of our sun to more than 90 times that, some of them are closer to Earth, some of them are very far away."


Princeton scientists Feinberg and Milekhin (what a name for a physicist!) have a paper suggesting human scale wormholes could exist and allow personally instantaneous travel over great distances almost instantaneously. Long ago (Schwarzchild) wormholes were largely abandoned by General Relativity (gravitation) physicists are likely impossibly microscopic or hard to maintain or survive. It’s the other wing - quantum theoreticians  - who have rescued the concept in ways that are way outside my physicist practicing license!  It involves negative energy which can happen in the quantum world.


Then how to make them macroscopic? Well, let’s start with a FIVE dimensional cow…. and  these wormholes would resemble intermediately-sized, charged black holes that would generate similarly-powerful tidal forces that spacecraft would need to be wary of. (Sounding a lot like some speculations in my novel INFINITY’S SHORE!)


== Even weirder ==


A hypothesized alternative to Black Holes… a “Boson Star” would be compact and massive, but largely transparent. The most familiar bosons are photons, but also gluons, gravitons… the “particles” that mediate forces in the universe. They obey Bose-Einstein statistics letting them bunch together in total unison, as in a laser. The Fermions that make up matter  include protons, neutrons, and electrons, which follow Fermi-Dirac statistics and insist on their own identity being preserved. (Pauli Exclusion.) Though electrons can collectively form boson-like clusters. Phew! So what if some kind of bosonic particles gathered together into a “star”? Would it be something like a compact, self-sustaining laser?


In EARTH I posited a Gravity Wave Laser or GASER or GAZER that could form in the core of our planet and then be manipulated by humans on the surface… and does that qualify as yet another prediction from that novel that came eerily somewhat true? Sigh, let’s not get excited. Boson stars are even more speculative than my Gazers!


In the nearer term, the forecast becoming ever more likely is the Helvetian War, alas. 



== How to hold a BIG inaugural celebration safely and achieve a win-win-win-win! ==


Okay this is a science posting, but my idea for holding a fine, innovative inauguration of the new administration was so popular on FB -- and must be acted-on soon! -- that I will post it now for you blog readers.


New Chief of staff Ron Klain is planning for a minimized inaugural. 

No! Big mistake!


Think this through: 


(1) America and the whole world need a celebration on 1/20/2021! People will show up at the Capitol, no matter what. Vast vistas of flag-waving celebrants would do the nation good, especially in contrast to the recent past, but... 


(2)... sure, we're in a pandemic and responsible distancing is essential


(3) So? Everyone expects a change from tradition, so be creative! 


(4) it is insane for Biden, Harris and Pelosi to be in the same place, given the kind of paranoic jabber spewing across the QAnonsphere.


.... .... Put all that together and a solution comes to mind. One with tasty possible symbolic import.

HAVE KAMALA TAKE HER OATH ON THE STEPS OF THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL! Symbolically, it'd be a huge way to say - with both Lincoln and MLK gazing down - 'we've come a long way, baby!' And the swearing-in by Sonia Sotomayor would be a good offset to spotlighting John Roberts. But there's more...

Picture Harris giving her speech, then waving down the long, long Mall at the Capitol and calling out "Over to you, Joe!" ...

...past a vast crowd that now has plenty of room to spread out! 
 
Hand out a bazillion flags and flag masks and say:
"Use the flag to make a social distance circle. Let America's flag protect us, as we mean to protect and reclaim the flag!"

The images would be spectacular, denying the fox-o-sphere and Trump any "crowd size yammer rationalizations. It would also establish Kamala as a star and a voice of her own, not just a warmup act!

And then there's an added, somewhat paranoid reason. Keep her away from Joe! At least for most of this vulnerable ceremony in the open, so the 'proud-boogaloo jerks' and their backers won't see any tempting opportunities to violently spoil our day!


And just as desperately timely is this advice to Pelosi and the House dems to pass half a dozen bills that are one or two sentences each, and DARE those Senate GOP candidates in Georgia to support or oppose them!

 

Like as if any of you are in a position to get their ears... alas.

39 comments:

Jon S. said...

Microscopic black holes permitting instantaneous transit? Shades of Kevyn Andreyasin's teraport!

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2000-07-07

Tony Fisk said...

MACHOs could explain dark matter without invoking Rigg's New Law (although I have some sentiment for MOND). As for hazards to interstellar exploration... well, think about it. Aren't stars interstellar travellers themselves? Are they being continually swallowed up? (OK LIGO results...).
A 'black star' was the very first hazard 'Doc' Smith threw at the 'Skylark' (back in 1919!), but I think the worst hazard they represent is turning space into a game of bagatelle. Also, I think you might be able to detect lensing effects in, say, the background radiation before things got sticky.

I might pitch your idea to @Transition46. What could be the harm?

scidata said...

Wonderful post, thanks for all the astronomy. MPI, LIGO, GAZERs, all rich computational hunting grounds. Things are starting to look interplanetary again (from a comment I saw in a recent Boca Chica discussion). 15km flight now set for Monday (engine problems seem to be ironed out). I guess we'll see it when it happens. Actually, I'm just as interested in the signs of Super Heavy stacking.

Been busy with citsci stuff of late. All the dogmatists' torches and candles ever lit dim to invisibility in the light of a classroom Bunsen burner. Widespread scientific literacy/numeracy is feudalism bug spray. The lords know it. I and many others fix it so the serfs do too.

Calculemus!

ISS said...

You say "and DARE those Senate GOP candidates."

I have become unreasonably irked at the memes that say "I bet this won't get one post." or I"I dare you to post this!" Is it just me that doesn't like that kind of dig? I have not posted and not dared so much. If it is something that I like, say a flag and "the" say I dare you to repost this, I won't repost their obnoxious meme. I will find another picture of a flag and post it on my page. I know of several people who feel the same way. It would be nice if we could legislate without the double dog dare rhetoric.

Larry Hart said...

Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Americans.

This year, we at least have something to be thankful for. Although for just this year, we should probably move Thanksgiving day to the fourth Thursday in January.

Larry Hart said...

This reminds me of the bit in Asimov's Foundation where symbolic analysis of Lord Dorwin's reassurances to Terminus concerning protection from Anacreon turned out to be completely meaningless because "everything cancelled out."

https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Pres/Maps/Nov26.html#item-5

Yesterday, USA Today ran a story with the headline: "Biden says he won't order an investigation of Trump, president's legal troubles remain." What Biden actually said was: "I will not do what this president does and use the Justice Department as my vehicle to insist that something happened." What Biden meant was that he would not personally give an order to his AG to investigate Trump. Handling Trump would be the AG's call. That sounds plausible, given Biden's commitment to not politicize the Dept. of Justice. The other side of the coin is that if the AG decided to prosecute Trump, Biden wouldn't stop him. In short, Biden didn't actually say anything we didn't already know. In fact, you could argue that he really didn't say anything at all.

Robert said...

Thought this was an interesting essay by Monbiot:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/24/brexit-capitalism

David Brin said...

ISS yes, as an empty polemical gesture, "I DARE YOU!" is like a codpiece with nothing inside, a pathetic playground yowl...

But so is your complaint, which shows almost zero sapient discursiveness. Since the thing making it an empty gesture is the lack of commitment and STAKES. When you are willing to back up your explicit assertion with direct and meaningful consequences, if you can be proved wrong, that's different.

If I escrowed $5000 and had my attorney convey to you an iron clad offer of a wager, asserting the sun will rise tomorrow covered with clearly visible, purple paisley patterns, would you take the bet? And essentially $5000 for free?

Fine, then how about that poisonous meme you spead that you assert is the total truth? (I am not saying you, personally.)

All I can add is that it works. It makes them back off. It ALWAYS works, to some degree and it is the ONLY thing that ever works. Try it, instead of coming here and yammering without comprehension. And I say that with love.

Larry Hart said...

A perhaps-persuasive argument against self-pardons?

https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Pres/Maps/Nov26.html#item-5

When arguing this potential case, the solicitor general could easily give some practical examples, like: "If self-pardons are valid, the president could come barging in here with a machine gun and mow down all nine justices followed by a self-pardon. If his party controlled at least one chamber of Congress, he could not only escape impeachment and conviction, but also nominate nine new justices and possibly get them confirmed. You folks OK with that?"

Anonymous said...


Since a wager is an agreement and an agreement is a contract, it's the height of insincerity for contract-breakers, wordsmiths & fraudsters to promote wagers with one another in the hopes of creating an honorable agreement or contract.

All I can add is that wager-making between contract-breakers, wordsmiths & fraudsters does not work, It NEVER works; it never has worked; and it never will work without at least some degree of mutual trust, honor and respect.

This is how schisms are made.


Best

Smurphs said...

Ah, Locum found a way back in.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Larry Hart said...


Best


locumranch? Is that you?


Since a wager is an agreement and an agreement is a contract, it's the height of insincerity for contract-breakers, wordsmiths & fraudsters to promote wagers with one another in the hopes of creating an honorable agreement or contract.


Use of "wordsmiths" sounds as if you are implicitly criticizing our host, but really all three of those descriptions apply to Benedict Donald.

Not to mention taking one to know one and all.

Larry Hart said...

Maureen Dodd's brother is still an asshole. No other way to put it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/opinion/thanksgiving-dowd-2020.html

...
Donald Trump was not without his flaws, but he stood like a brick wall against an unfair and openly hostile press and, alarmingly, a deep state aligned against him.
...


But my takeaway from his screed--and I mean this as a sympathetic takeaway--is that seventy-some million American voters are so despairing of reality that reality no longer plays a part in their political decisions. They'd rather vote for great bull semen--even knowing full well that it is bull semen--than address reality in any meaningful way, because apparently they feel that reality just won't accommodate them in any case.

Had white Christian conservatives ever given the same license to poor minorities who ever despaired of the system enough to prefer burning it all down to working within it. But as long as they reserve that privilege only for themselves, then can very well pull themselves up by their own bootstraps--another physical impossibility, but since when does that ever stop them--the way they've whitesplained to so many others.

B.J. said...

Kamala Harris taking her oath on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial?

Okay, I like that one.

Der Oger said...

@Larry Hart:
"But my takeaway from his screed--and I mean this as a sympathetic takeaway--is that seventy-some million American voters are so despairing of reality that reality no longer plays a part in their political decisions. They'd rather vote for great bull semen--even knowing full well that it is bull semen--than address reality in any meaningful way, because apparently they feel that reality just won't accommodate them in any case."

But how to ween them off?
What makes it so attractive to choose bull semen instead of facing the reality?
What could help them to listen to the other side?
What could hinder them?



TCB said...

an unfair and openly hostile press and, alarmingly, a deep state aligned against him.

You mean those media corps that gave Trump over $2 billion in free air time, and those deep state (still unnamed) FBI operatives that torpedoed the Clinton campaign via the Comey letter?

-----------------------------------------------------

There's scuttlebutt that Biden fears to let the wheels of justice consume Trump, hoping against hope to 'let the country heal' or 'not inflame the spirit of revenge' or something... I hope that's not true.

If Trump is not convicted of at least one felony, he's positioned to run again in four years, and I wouldn't bet the farm against his armies of deluded dupes. And the next authoritarian president (Trump or otherwise) WILL imprison Biden and Harris for 'stealing' the 2020 election.

That, I would bet the farm on.

Smash Nazis now, on sight, always. The longer you wait, the harder it gets.

-------------------------------------------

Incidentally, I always like the cut of scidata's jib.

Calculemus!

David Brin said...

Ablogger glitch ate my last few attempts to answer, so:

1- someone remind me how long an exile I had sentenced locum to, after his dive into even-deeper lies and deliberate insanity and rudeness? Is it already exceded?

In any event, his recent foray followed a common pattern, assert something that might be semantically true, but is utterly deceitful and irrelevant. Yes, wagers are specious between two dark/despicable/lying traitorous parties. But in fact only one side fits that decription. While flawed, by comparison the party demanding wagers is honest, fact-centered, just and championing light.

2- At the end of the last postion, Dave Peticolas said...
"I'm still trying to wrap my head around the "blackmail is the only explanation" for certain behaviors line. I read the linked-to article and it seems to be a generic argument that blackmail is probably being practiced by somebody somewhere, given its historical prevalence and practical utility. It doesn't seem to follow that high-level US political figures are currently being blackmailed. What are the specific behaviors that can't be accounted for any other way? Wouldn't it be hard to hide such blackmail from US intelligence services?"

Process of elimination. When someone like L Graham or T Cruz openly shames himself vastly more than necessary to merely support their own side over pragmatic aspects of power, but grovels before a man they had previously called despicable... who does that over small increments of money or power, when they already have plenty of both? Blackmail entrapment isn't just theoretical, it is standard technique of Russian foreign operatives since Czarist times. And Borat showed how trivially easy it is, with Giuliani, even using appallingly amateur techniques.

Above all... Anthony Kennedy. Look it up, man. And yes our counter inel guys know it happens. Why was job#1 for Trump to get rid of our top counter inetl guy, Strzok?

Larry Hart said...

Dr Brin:

In any event, his recent foray followed a common pattern, assert something that might be semantically true, but is utterly deceitful and irrelevant. Yes, wagers are specious between two dark/despicable/lying traitorous parties. But in fact only one side fits that decription.


You're not taking the screed personally enough. I took him to be calling you a fraudster, wordsmith, and contract-breaker--that the reason no one takes you up on your bets is because your reputation is that of a welsher. YMMV.

* * *

Der Oger:

What makes it so attractive to choose bull semen instead of facing the reality?
What could help them to listen to the other side?


A ridiculously-simple version of the answer is that life gets hard.

In the 1950s, a white kid fresh out of high school could get a good union job that would support a stay-at-home wife and put a couple of kids through college. Those days are long gone, and the corporatists who have profited by sucking up much of the value that used to accrue to ordinary citizens have provided convenient scapegoats to blame--blacks and immigrants stealing jobs, taxation which provides handouts to undeserving slackers, and maybe above all, globalization, which devalues American labor by forcing it to compete with slave labor* in other countries. What I find amazing is how well the wealthy and powerful for whom globalization is a religion (and who predominantly support the Republican Party) have cast liberal academic Democrats as the root of that evil.

As I said, life gets hard. Nothing stays as it always was, and human beings have a hard time adjusting to that. I have a hard enough time adjusting to the fact that my favorite restaurants inevitably close. Heck, I have a hard time adjusting to the fact that my body doesn't work as well as it did forty years ago. In the larger world, workers in the Reagan/Thatcher era had to adjust to the fact that the corporate cradle-to-grave patriarchal system their fathers and grandfathers relied on would no longer support them or their kids. Reality sucks some times. But the snowflakes who presumed that they would always be the ones telling other people that they had to suck it up and live with the things that benefited them now apparently can't take what they've been dishing out all these years. They think they (and only they) have a friggin' Constitutional right "not to have things change"--that such a right is the very definition of democracy!

I don't know what would help them listen to the other side, because I would expect that being in the same boat as minorities and the less-fortunate who have always had to deal with a system biased against them would open their eyes--make them more sympathetic to those who they once looked down on. But that doesn't seem to work. Instead, they insist that they are nothing like those others, and that being nothing like those others is a part of their cultural identity that we intolerant liberals refuse to honor.

So I don't know.

* In Player Piano, a novel about mechanization which was incredibly prescient for its time (1953), Vonnegut has a character insist that he hates machines. When pressed as to why, he says he hates machines because they are slaves. Another character points out that, unlike human slaves, machines don't suffer or bristle at injustice or any such thing. And the first guy replies (paraphrasing from memory), "But they compete with human workers. And anyone who competes with slaves ends up becoming a slave himself."

Smurphs said...

Well, Doc, it has been more peaceful since you started moderating. But I fully realize I don't add much value around here, just some snark and the occasional pointed question.

That said, might I suggest waiting until January 21st?

Larry Hart said...

TCB:

"an unfair and openly hostile press and, alarmingly, a deep state aligned against him."

You mean those media corps that gave Trump over $2 billion in free air time, and those deep state (still unnamed) FBI operatives that torpedoed the Clinton campaign via the Comey letter?


Trump and his supporters remind me of Tonya Harding crying that her shoelace had become undone, as if that was all that stood between her and Olympic gold.


Smash Nazis now, on sight, always.


I'm living for the day that Nazis are viewed the same way that Holnists were in The Postman--feuding rivals would band together to hunt them down at any hint of surplus camouflage in the vicinity.

David Brin said...

Smurphs fine. The ban continues .

LH some of the high ride of white workers in the 1950s was our position as the industrial superpower. The Marshallian re-ordering of world trade encouraged the creation of new industrial middle classes everywhere on Earth. It was the wisest pax, by far, in all of history, but it came at the expense of US workers, even if they had not been ripped off by the Reagan+ eras' suck up to predatory oligarchy.

Larry Hart said...

Dr Brin:

LH some of the high ride of white workers in the 1950s was our position as the industrial superpower.
...
but it came at the expense of US workers, even if they had not been ripped off by the Reagan+ eras' suck up to predatory oligarchy.


The point is that the old way was great (for some) while it lasted, but it couldn't last forever, since nothing does. Mature adults understand that "Sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you," adjust to reality, and hope you come out on the winning side again some day. Immature babies find someone else to blame and vote against their own interests as long as they can "own" those someone elses. The greatest disappointment of both the 2016 and 2020 elections is how many tens of millions of Americans who are allowed to breed and vote are immature babies.

A letter to the editor I read recently interpreted our "personal choice" response to COVID as a scenario in which we're all standing on the same puddle of spilled gasoline and leaving it to each individual's choice as to whether or not to play with lit matches. The frightening thing is that 70 million Americans would sue for their right to play with those matches, and that a large subset would do so because horrifically burning to death in the fire they might start is an outcome they consider "no worse than" the quiet desperation they're living through now, and taking everyone else with them would be frosting on the cake.

Larry Hart said...

For the Thanksgiving holiday, I lightened up my reading list. I'm currently in the middle of a Kellerman "Alex Delaware" mystery, which just happens to involve a Neo-Nazi hate group. The book was published way back when the earth was cooling in 1990, so no references to immediate contemporary political topics, but I do get a strong sense of plus ca change, plus la meme chose.

A character describes a theoretical meeting between right-wing terrorists and racist white leftists who have broken with the black power side of the left wing, making a devils' bargain between them:


"Blacks were a prime target of Wannsee Two. The way the story goes, one of the intentions of the confederation was to foment hatred between the minorities. Pit the blacks against the Jews--have the blacks kill the Jews, which would be easy because the Jews were passive wimps, ready to march into the ovens again. Once the blacks had served their purpose, they would be annihilated. Also a snap, because they were so gullible and stupid. And of course, when the cowardly Hispanics and Asians saw what was going on, they'd leave the country of their own accord--go back to where they came from--and the borders of White America would be hermetically sealed."


Sounds to me like Kellerman made it all up, and it came true anyway.

Acacia H. said...

Back to science: Molten Salt Nuclear Reactors are capable of providing safe and fairly clean power, consuming 95% of the nuclear material used with the remaining 5% only being toxic for a couple hundred years. They're currently under testing pending approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission with a 10 MWe reactor. And seeing these things are air-cooled and don't blow up if there's no people involved, they are superior to light-water reactors. (The reason why they were not the future of nuclear power in the U.S. back 50 years ago is that the military wanted high-grade uranium and plutonium for use in bombs and those were created by the light-water reactors.)

Given we have 70 million voters having voted for the Devil They Know rather than the Devil They Vaguely Recall from four years ago, this five minute video on Cognitive Dissonance might be worth a quick view.

Low-powered lasers can be used to control the direction of lightning and reduce the chance of brushfires and the like. While the article talks about its potential use in manufacturing and medicine, I myself saw a different potential use - if we can develop high-capacity capacitors or batteries, we could direct a few lightning bolts from a passing storm to go into storage containers to power cities from energy in the atmosphere itself. Though I'm sure certain types would deride such a system and claim we're going to sap all the energy from the atmosphere itself by doing it. ;)

And here's a 10- to 15-minute video on the Penrose Singularity Theorem which states a singularity is found at the heart of every black hole which also shows that General Relativity is not complete because infinities should not exist in the universe.

Finally, on a more whimsical note, here's a short video on the science behind Parkour and how it's far less brutal on the body than gymnastics or other sports.

Acacia

scidata said...

@Acacia
Thanks for the Penrose link. Zero and infinity are the two most interesting numbers. Took me back to the Descartes (weird anti-AI argument) - Laplace (original Black Hole theorist) - Planck (UV Catastrophe) - Turing (less weird anti-AI argument) - Chomsky (digital yet infinite linguistics) et al trail I followed while ruminating on computational psychohistory a decade ago. Fun times. Don't think I could make that trip today alas.

@TCB Re: 'cut of my jib' compliment
Thanks, but I'm barely qualified to be in here. Perhaps you appreciate a Canadian sensibility. I just like SF, and Dr. Brin is the last, best hope for any serious continuation of Asimovian psychohistory.

BTW I don't disparage serfs - I am a serf. You'd have a really hard time painting me as an elite. I had a rural, romanticist, deeply religious upbringing. That all changed when I read "Foundation" for the first of many times.

One of the very few irksome things Biden has said is, "science fact, not science fiction". A flippant turn-of-phrase that intimates a poor grasp of fact, fiction, and science. Perhaps a speech writer with a hard SF background is called for to go along with other spectacular picks like the DNI chief. Hmm, anyone come to mind? The worm has turned -- bigly. I look forward to spending the next few years saying to my confederate friends, "Elections have consequences". I also like Larry Hart's "Go back to Russia" :)

David Brin said...

Scidata got a link for that Biden quote?

scidata said...

Huh, I can't find that exact quote. He says, "Fact over Fiction" all the time. The one that stuck in my head was right around election time. Maybe he said "Science fact over fiction"? If I heard it wrong, I certainly apologize. I'd be glad to be mistaken, because he's given some inspiring speeches lately that surprised his critics.

scidata said...

Odd, here's Harris saying it, but that was back when she was chosen as VP on the ticket.
https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/blog/2020/08/12/the-climate-mobilization-commends-bidens-choice-of-kamala-harris-for-vice-president/

Larry Hart said...

Finally!

https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Pres/Maps/Nov29.html#item-1

There was quite a number of responses to the letter from P.M. in Currituck last week. We selected half a dozen of them
...

J.A. in New York, NY, writes: I am very exhausted of this narrative that the Democrats constantly need to reach out to these Trump voters—who spent the better part of 4 years mocking the Democrats for losing, calling them names, telling them to keep crying, etc.—to understand what they're talking about or where they're coming from. Why do the Republicans never have to reach out to the Democrats to figure these things out? Even when they lose the popular vote, they make no concerted effort. Trump voters want Democrats to understand them? Why not try the same when the shoe is on the other foot? Maybe there needs to be some introspection on the right for a minute. Why do people think you are racist, ignorant yokels (P.M.'s description)? It makes this reader wonder if they have ever even tried to understand their political opponents.

I am sick of having to cater to right leaning "snowflakes," who insist on having their voices heard, but refuse to extend the same courtesy to the other side. I guess it's a good thing winter is coming, lest they melt.


Me again: "Thank you, Baby Jesus!"

Larry Hart said...

scidata:

Huh, I can't find that exact quote. He says, "Fact over Fiction" all the time. The one that stuck in my head was right around election time. Maybe he said "Science fact over fiction"?


If he said something like that, I'd be predisposed to believe he meant it in the sense of "Actual scientifically-proven facts over made up stuff like Donald Trump promotes." If he unfortunately besmirched the term "science fiction" by using it to mean "Fiction masquerading as science", I can forgive.

TCB said...

Nice article about the potential of metallic hydrogen to 'change everything'.

Scientists created the metallic hydrogen by pressurizing a hydrogen sample to more pounds per square inch than exists at the center of the Earth. This broke the molecule down from its solid state and allowed the particles to dissociate into atomic hydrogen.

The best rocket fuel we currently have is liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, burned for propellant. The efficacy of such substances is characterized by “specific impulse,” the measure of impulse fuel can give a rocket to propel it forward.

“People at NASA or the Air Force have told me that if they could get an increase from 450 seconds [of specific impulse] to 500 seconds, that would have a huge impact on rocketry,” Isaac Silvera, the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University, told Inverse by phone. “If you can trigger metallic hydrogen to recover to the molecular phase, [the energy release] calculated for that is 1700 seconds.”

They're testing to see if it is, indeed, metastable. I.e., you compress it and it stays that way until heated, like carbon pressed into diamond. It might even be a room temperature superconductor. Wild.

Der Oger said...

Question: I have got the impression that "Red-Scaring" is much more effective and used more often than "Brown-Scaring" in the US. Is that assumption correct? And why is it so?

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@Blog Article: If I look at the implication of myriad of hard-to-detect singularities and black holes driving interstellar travel, I cannot help but imagine those future stellar ships navigating much like those of the Age of Sail - requiring the right tools, skills, the guts and the luck to reach your destination, making it an adventure again.
Has a certain irony.

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Acacia, nice links. Especially enjoyed the Parkour video ... made me remember of a bunch of crazy, skilled young people I used to encounter more or less regularly before this terrible year started.

Energywise, I hope the Age of Fission will end soon, and the Age of Fusion will begin.
Or the Age of the Renewables?

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Metallic Hydrogen .... taking us to the outer planets ... wait!
You can collect your hydrogen for your tour back there! All you need is a way to siphon it from the Gas Giants and process it ...

Larry Hart said...

Der Oger:

I have got the impression that "Red-Scaring" is much more effective and used more often than "Brown-Scaring" in the US. Is that assumption correct? And why is it so?


I'm not sure I agree with more effective. Both seem to get the job done at demonizing Democrats.

But red-scaring does work in the US by equating common-sense "promote the general welfare" initiatives with the worst excesses of Stalinism. "First they create Medicare, next we'll all be sent to gulags and forced to renounce Jesus." That sort of thing.

A twist that might be uniquely American is to try to equate historical fascists with socialism, thus laying the blame for Hitler at the feet of leftists. A conservative I used to debate with on a different site would argue without irony that Obamacare demonstrated that President Obama was like Hitler. The "reasoning" being that nationalized health care was a concept begun by Otto Von Bismarck in Germany, therefore a precursor of Naziism, and so ipso facto President Obama was a Nazi. I suggested in vain that the main reason Americans tend to revile Nazis is not because they provided nationalized health care.

One must give points for chutpah to a philosophy that successfully says that right-wingers are good because they oppose socialists like Hitler. Then again, they already think that Confederate flags are pro-American, so what can I say?


Metallic Hydrogen .... taking us to the outer planets ... wait!
You can collect your hydrogen for your tour back there! All you need is a way to siphon it from the Gas Giants and process it ..


If you haven't already, you should check out an Arthur C Clarke novel called Imperial Earth, which (among many other things) touches on the economics of that very subject.

Larry Hart said...

Ok, this seems really weird to me:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/29/opinion/donald-trump-bankruptcy.html

As The Atlantic reported in 2017:

“In 1990, with Trump Taj Mahal in trouble, Trump’s father Fred strolled in and bought 700 chips worth a total of $3.5 million. The purchase helped the casino pay debt that was due, but because Fred Trump had no plans to gamble, the New Jersey gaming commission ruled that it was a loan that violated operating rules. Trump paid a $30,000 fine;


Aside from the mind-reading involved in that ruling ("no plans to gamble"?), the technicality could have been easily avoided by the simple expediency of Herr Drumph walking his 700 chips over to the roulette table and placing the entire wad on 00. And if he had somehow managed to accidentally win, he could have rolled the entire thing over again.

I know Donald isn't smart enough to think of that, but you'd think the father would be.

Der Oger said...

"The "reasoning" being that nationalized health care was a concept begun by Otto Von Bismarck in Germany, therefore a precursor of Naziism, and so ipso facto President Obama was a Nazi."

By the same argumentation, NASA would be a Nazi organisation, because Wernher von Braun was a Nazi.

But guess what inspired Hitler to his conquest of Eastern Europe and the Holocaust?
The American expansion, and the subsequent genocide of the Native American people.
(And of course the British concentration camps in South Africa.)

And guess what has also a slightly genocidal taste? The current healthcare situation in the United States:

https://www.apmresearchlab.org/covid/deaths-by-race

I could tie it even to the Nazi eugenics policies ... if I compare the Nazi term "Life unworthy of Life" with the almost willing disregard of a virus killing the elderly and those with "pre-existing conditions".

So, NOT PROMOTING universal healthcare and pandemic-hindering measures could be seen and denounced as a racist and socially sadist stance.

"One must give points for chutpah to a philosophy that successfully says that right-wingers are good because they oppose socialists like Hitler."

Point out that the "Socialist" part of the Nazi era died with Röhm and others in the Night of the Long Knives in 34 ... along with their conservative enablers. Hitler needed to do this ... to retain/gain the loyalty of the nobility, the generals, and investors such as ... Prescott Bush ... and many more:

https://www.toptenz.net/top-10-american-companies-that-aided-the-nazis.php

David Brin said...

This is true: "t the "Socialist" part of the Nazi era died with Röhm and others in the Night of the Long Knives in 34..."

And yes, the Anglo western expansion featured many regional "genocides' that are stains on our honor and conscience... though only on rare occasions matters of actual policy and usuall contravened policy... while you ignore the VASTLY more deliberate and murderous Spanish and Portugese expansion-calamities that happened much earlier... and the Bantu migration that rendered most Xhosa peoples extinct... and that Sanscrit peoples in India, pushing a relic Tamil population into the sourthern corner... or the Short Ears extinguishing the Long Ears on Rapa Nui... or what the Lakotian and Apache folks did to their neighbors... or the Euro Aryan migrations... then the Celts... who inturn were smashed by Romans and Britons by Saxons and Saxons by Angles and Jutes and Angle/"English" by Danes... waves of conquerors passing on piratical genes.

Acacia H. said...

Dr. Brin, it doesn't matter that the Spanish and Portuguese slaughtered more of the indigenous peoples of North and South America. What matters is Hitler based his policies specifically on U.S. "Indian Policy" and that's what we're talking about here. Yes, the U.S. did a lot of good in the world... but it has also done horrific things... and in the case of the Nazis, they were inspired by some of the horrid things that the U.S. did. It's just the Nazis took it to a scientific level of evil.

Acacia

Robert said...

But guess what inspired Hitler to his conquest of Eastern Europe and the Holocaust?

Eugenics was big in America. In the 30s the Nazis were impressed at the progress (in the sense of advancing their goal) that American eugenicists had made. I recommend the book War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race.

Also of note by the same author is IBM and the Holocaust, which details how Germany leased the tabulators that ran the death camps from IBM, and how IBM collected the money!

David Brin said...

Acacia, I'm gonna need citations on that assertion. I'd bet 70:30 against it. But yes, it is plausible Goebbels somewhere said something like that.

And the ravings of madmen are the ravings of madmen.

In fact, extermination was blabbed by a few drunken fools like Sheriden, but was NEVER US policy and in fact, the greatest sin of the Good whites of the USA was negligence at preventing predation and depredations by the worst whites, who swarmed in after some excellent and well-intentioned treaties were signed. Till EITHER nasty white punks or else sometimes native punks committed some foul idiocy that triggered another fight. A fight that the native peoples could never win and always lost land to voters.

The well-meaning side of America is seen in half of the PLACE NAMES where English speakers went, which are native words... while across Hispanic Americas almost all of those words were erased (except "Mexico" ) in favor of "San" this and "Santa" that.

Yes, the EFFECTS of US government negligence were almost indistinguishable from deliberate genocide. That's a fact that will stain us forever. But the official intent -- hypocritically unenforced -- was respectful a great deal of the time. Even guilt ridden from an early time. Read T Roosevelt.

onward

onward