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Jupiter is ~5.2 astronomical units from the sun, so it gets (1/5.2)^2 as much energy per unit area, or ~1/27, which is about 3.7%

The original reference came via a link on the Sky News website https://news.sky.com/story/us-recovers-key-sensors-from-suspected-chinese-spy-balloon-12810536 That link led to an article behind a subscription wall on the NYT which I couldn't initially access. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/us/politics/ufo-spy-balloon-china.html I don't normally cite articles behind pay/subscription walls as many readers don't want to sign-up for them just to read an article that may be of only limited relevance to them. As this one seems to be of interest however, I did create a log-in on the NYT site, and quote from it here: The U.S. intelligence community has linked the Chinese spy balloon shot down on Saturday to a vast surveillance program run by the People’s Liberation Army, and U.S. officials have begun to brief allies and partners who have been similarly targeted. The surveillance balloon effort, which has operated for several years partly out of Hainan province off China’s south coast, has collected information on military assets in countries and areas of emerging strategic interest to China including Japan, India, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines, according to several U.S. officials, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. ------ Hainan, one of the locations where officials said the balloons are based, is an island off the southern coast of China that has long been a PLA command and control location. Though known more for its naval facility, it features an airfield that was the home base for the Chinese J-8 interceptor fighter jet that collided with an American EP-3 spy plane in 2001. In January, the U.S. military disclosed what it characterized as an unsafe maneuver in December by a Chinese fighter jet that U.S. military officials said flew too close to an American reconnaissance aircraft in international airspace near the island. The Chinese J-11 fighter pulled within 20 feet of the American plane’s nose, “forcing the RC-135 to take evasive maneuvers to avoid a collision,” U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said in a statement. -------------- Those are the two specific references to Hainan in that lengthy article I could find, and they indicate US intelligence agencies routinely fly Lockheed EP-3 and Boeing RC-135 electronic spy planes in that area. The article also confirms as you suggest that the balloons are overflying Korea and Japan en route as well e.g. Officials have said these surveillance airships, operated in part by the PLA air force, have been spotted over five continents. In Japan in 2020, an aerial orb drew speculation. “Some people thought this was a UFO,” said a Japanese official. “In hindsight people are realizing that was a Chinese espionage balloon. But at that time it was purely novel — nobody had seen this. … So there’s a lot of heightened attention at this time.” Some of the balloons have been launched from China on flight paths that took them around the entire globe, officials said. etc.

= Kinetically Imparted Common Knowledge

See my post - you also need to take into account the radius/diameter of the planet (therefor, the area facing the Sun) and albedo. Read both Wikipedia articles carefully.

You definitely should. The very reason why there are gauge fields is better understood in terms of the Lagrangian formalism. It's a beautiful language to express every fundamental physical theory we know. It also makes hard problems look simple. The downside is perhaps that it's far less intuitive than thinking about forces of different kinds. Another downside --and a very big one, mind you-- is that systems with dissipation are not possible to describe by means of Lagrangians. That's because friction is an emergent behaviour.

The Earth's surface receives 1370 W/m^2 per surface area facing the Sun. Some of it is reflected, some is absorbed by the atmosphere, and some is absorbed by the land and sea. Knowing the distance of the Sun from the Earth, the total power generated by the Sun can be calculated. Then you can do similar calculations (check the inverse-square law) for any other space object on your list and find out what Watts/m^2 they receive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo

Two absolute legends jamming. The sadly late and truly great Don Partridge. Definitely the best real busker ever.

Why would you want to be misled by encouragement when an idea is flawed? Most ideas are wrong, and discussion helps us find the parts we need to rethink. Even while speculating, you should keep a foot firmly in the science we consider our best current explanations. Why are you taking any of this personally, when it's your ideas, not you, that are being discussed? Some people spend years working on their personal explanations for various phenomena, then start discussing it with peers only to find out they misunderstood some part of the science, or didn't use the right calculations. If you know the science mind at all, you'll know we can't NOT point out mistakes, and part of that is that nobody wants to see you waste good learning time.

It might be bagpipe soundsthat are earworms for me:

Neither do I. And I can assure you I won't. Absolutely. I would even go as far as to say that there are several assumptions that are unphysical in my picture. In my 'defence,' my attempt was not meant to illustrate how real wind behaves. A spatially-confined gust of wind that's hitting a wall obviously does not correspond to my simpleminded 'model' of particles coming from -infinity and bouncing off an infinite wall, back to -infinity, while keeping completely parallel to each other. It's just an illustration of how a continuous supply of particles hitting a wall at a certain velocity will transfer momentum per unit area, but you have to give up on F=ma, not because it's any the less true, but because that relation is not the one that's useful. What's useful is transfer of momentum per unit area per unit time. Unfortunately, my model cannot be made consistent with the continuity equation, which I now realise after having thought about it for a while --even if it gives the right result by tinkering with the numbers. I think Studiot is thinking of a slightly different setting than you are, with no ground to sustain the wind so as to produce eddies, as you have pictured. But maybe he will be willing to ellaborate on that. I do believe @Boltzmannbrain has probably understood the main point, without getting bogged down in finer details of zero-velocity areas, stationary currents circulating, and the like, of which I'm --partially, at least-- guilty. The take-home lesson is: A continuous supply of particles at speed v, and constant density d, hitting a wall, will exert a force on a wall that's more simply expressed as proportional to dv2. The calculation of the dimensionless coefficient being a matter of correctly applying fluid mechanics. What's going on is transfer of momentum. Shall we leave it at that? I am happy with that, at least, for the time being. But if you want to discuss more, I'll be happy to take a back sit and learn --or refresh my memory-- a little more.

Another time ,another planet.

Indeed. Or Sex with Ducks.

The details are actually quite complicated, but I can start simple (and my apologies if it is too trivial) and maybe start with comments on some of the trickier parts. As you mentioned, the terms LDL and HDL do not refer to the cholesterol itself. Rather, cholesterol is transported packaged by lipoproteins, the mentioned high-density lipoproteins (HDL) and low-density lipoproteins (LDL). In addition there are also very low density lipoproteins (VLDL) and intermediate density lipoproteins (IDL). The measurements therefore refer to the fraction of cholesterol associated with particles of specific density that circulate in the bloodstream. To complicate matters on this level a bit, there are slightly different assays that measure the fraction of LDL in different ways (often indirectly, e.g. using the Friedewald equation, whereas direct methods often also measured IDL and VLDL). There is some data suggesting that using ApoB (which only not associated with HDL) could be a better biomarker for cardiovascular health, but that is under discussion, too. But one way I think about VLDL- IDL-LDL is that they are different maturation steps where the very large VLDL are reduced in size and then can enter the intima. Now, originally it was believed that LDL is a transport vehicle to move cholesterol to peripheral tissue and organs and HDL moves surplus cholesterol back to the liver. In part, the idea is then that very high LDL-cholesterol leads to deposits that can cause arteriosclerosis, for example. However, when trying to look at associated mechanisms, things get complicated pretty fast. For example, it was found that the vast majority of cells actually have an active lipid metabolism and most cholesterol are produced where they are used and are not necessarily delivered via LDL. Then, there is the issue that a lot of LDL cholesterol is derived from HDL and a lot of them is taken up by LDL-receptors in the liver. I.e. of the LDL is actually directed to, not away from the liver, making it questionable whether delivery to the periphery is really the main function of LDL. Likewise, HDL has been known to be critical for cholesterol efflux capacity (removing cholesterol from macrophages and transport to liver), but now studies suggest that LDL amplifies these efforts by HDL pathways. So taken together, the classic dichotomy of LDL vs HDL (cholesterol) has become rather questionable but we do not have a fully articulated model yet that can be used for better health prediction. Edit: I should add that my expertise is mostly limited to biomarker analysis, and not the clinical aspects, so it is therefore biased a bit more on the molecular/analytical side and may not reflect clinical standards. Therefore none of it should be considered medical advice of any sorts.

Okay, listen and watch.