TheVat

Thanks. Watched about half of it, up to the speculation on Von Neuman probes. (had to watch without sound...automated captions are entertaining - Lick Observatory was captioned as "leak observatory") Some interesting hypothesizing on such objects. UAO seems like a good name for them, unidentified astronomical object. If it's an ET artifact, then it's also a question of how distant (far enough that it shows as point images without any elongation along their trajectory) and if it is entering or leaving the solar system. The odds that any object's trajectory would be straight at Earth are extremely small, even if Earth is its destination. After all, a trip to Earth would involve first a path of deceleration, then a solar orbital insertion of some kind, then an Earth orbital insertion, with maybe some kind of maneuver like a Hohmann transfer or a lower energy transfer. Or it could be some kind of fly-by, without an Earth orbital insertion. A lot depends on the delta-v budget, as it's called, i.e. the amount of fuel available and the thrust it produces. Unless it's using some kind of solar sail, or other externally derived energy. I think the video mentions some speculation about an object that is quite flat and thin, which happens briefly to have its reflecting face pointed at the Earth observatory. What's needed are more UAOs spotted and recorded, to maybe narrow down some of this meandering speculation. Same old same old.

The strong dependence on nurture is underscored by the studies of families (cognitive tests) which show a regression to the mean, in children.

Sure! Reading the pdf on the RB47 encounter, I was struck by the three different channels of information consistently presented to crew over a distance of six hundred miles. I could see no explanation that would be consistent with either natural phenomenon or secret cutting-edge technology in 1957. New induction range. Which, I'm told, Joe B will reimburse me for sometime this year.

No worries. A pdf file is basically an image formed from scanning something, so without some kind of OCR software there is no way to extract pieces of text. (if you pay for Acrobat you can get it) I will read through it tomorrow morning. Today was one of those glorious but exhausting ones - remodeling and operating at slightly above my skill level. I enjoy house wiring, but 8 AWG is not forgiving.

NASA, after putting men on the moon, co-building a space station, sending probes throughout and beyond the solar system, landing sophisticated exploration robots on Mars, and spending trillions to usher in a new age of exploration, today celebrated the removal of two stuck fasteners on a box of dust! The Guardian reports: Curators at Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in Houston have said they are “overjoyed” to have finally got a canister of asteroid dust open, four months after it parachuted down through the Earth’s atmosphere into the Utah desert. The space administration announced Friday that it had successfully removed two stuck fasteners that had prevented some of the samples collected in 2020 from the 4.6bn-year-old asteroid Bennu, which is classified as a “potentially hazardous” because it has one in 1,750 chance of crashing into Earth Most of the rock samples collected by Nasa’s Osiris-Rex mission were retrieved soon after the canister landed in September, but additional material remaining inside a sampler head that proved difficult to access. After months of wrestling with the last two of 35 fasteners, scientists in Houston managed to get them dislodged. “It’s open! It’s open!” Nasa’s planetary science division posted on Twitter/X. The division also posted a photograph of dust and small rocks inside the canister. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/jan/21/nasa-bennu-asteroid-dust-rock-samples-johnson-space-center

Well I guess that's better than Continue the embalming whilst reminding myself that a moment of weakness doesn't make me a bad mortician.

My favorite execution fact (if "favorite" is really the word in such a grim context): when they give a lethal injection they have to swab your skin at the injection site with alcohol. So you dont get an infection.

Otto: Apes don't read philosophy. Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don't understand it. JK (really, I will take any excuse to drop in an AFCW quote) Back to topic, sort of: what are people's impressions of the Snapple teas, which were unleashed onto the world in the late eighties? I'll start: a repellent, nay unspeakably vile, concoction which proves that you can bottle diabetic cat piss and convince the gullible that it is tea.

Sugar in tomato sauce, however, remains wrong. Universally. Brands like Newmans Own marinara have no added sugar and are far better than the sugared brands on American supermarket shelves. (this post guaranteed chutzpah-free) So it's okay to add Cream to a forum thread? sorry

Well, I knew somw Quakers and they expressed their stance on DP as a question: Why do we kill people to teach that it's wrong to kill people? Succinct.

Probably aluminum. Aluminum is amphoteric. It interacts with acids and bases to form a salt and hydrogen.

Right on. If coffee needs sugar, then someone has brewed some bad beans, probably cheap Robusta. Good coffee from Arabica beans needs no sugar. I also recommend Slippery Elm bark tea, for an infusion that needs no sugar. Great for sore throat, too.

@Moontanman suggestion not sounding quite so bad now. I remember Utah still had the firing squad when Gary Gilmore was executed in 1977. It's still available there as an option (prisoners can request it). The doctor pins a paper target where the heart is located and then the team fires. No one knows for sure who fired the lethal shot. They don't shoot the head as the disfigurement is considered objectionable. And yeah, there would be no supply chain problem in the US getting rifles. 🙄

I think he's channeling Jean-Luc Picard.

This was my confusion as well. In deep diving, nitrogen narcosis has been described as like being drunk and rather pleasant, hence the slang term "rapture of the deep." ( @Genady would probably know more about that.) That led me to think there would be less distress than CO2 or the old gas chamber with cyanide. Also unclear is how exhaled CO2 is handled with the mask method being used in Bama. Metabolism is still producing CO2, so it has to go somewhere. I think gaseous nitrogen, though not a noble gas, is functionally inert in our respiratory cycle.

Now there's a use for tea I had not considered. I've heard brown rice is a bigger threat for that (especially rice grown in former cotton fields), so I stick with brown basmati grown in California, a state which never grew cotton. I think the better brands have gone back to natural fiber bags - will post a link if I can figure out where I read that. Anyway, glad to hear your donkeys are getting some stimulants. I recall a chat here about them eating wood ashes.

In the Vat household, where some are very particular about their brew, it is believed that loose leaves in a steel tea ball (or infuser) are the way to go. None of that weird bag taste or potential polyester nanoparticles. And brew times not to exceed five minutes - after that, tannins (the source of bitterness) tend to build up. Milk or cream is considered an abomination. As for listening to Yanks on arcane practices like adding salt, you should remember that we once had a famous tea party which resulted in very salty tea... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party

Just today have learned of the passing last week of Peter Schickele, musical humorist without peer. Am starting with Iphigenia in Brooklyn, then perhaps Oedipus Tex, and then all week sampling from the oeuvre of PDQ Bach, the last and least of Bach's children. and Iphigenia found herself within a market place and all around her fish were dying, and yet their stench did live on.... He will be missed. I don't know how well known he was overseas but I imagine our UK members who liked, say, Anna Russell, Dudley Moore, or Spike Jones, would find Prof. Schickele to their taste. A snip from the Washington Post obituary... Jokes meant for experts on composition were intertwined with gags that required only a cursory knowledge of music — the interruption of a serene baroque adagio with a few bars of boogie-woogie, for example, or an overlay of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” on a J.S. Bach prelude. The works of P.D.Q. Bach often parodied the titles of popular classics. Among them were “The Seasonings” (after Haydn’s “The Seasons”), the “Sanka Cantata” (after J.S. Bach’s “Coffee Cantata”), “Oedipus Tex” (after the Sophocles fable, but set in the Wild West, with Billie Jo Casta and Madame Peep among the characters) and “Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice” (a conflation of the Humperdinck opera and filmmaker Paul Mazursky’s satire about swingers). P.D.Q. Bach’s instrumentation offered twists of its own. Although pieces such as the “Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons” used commonplace objects not typically heard in an orchestral context, others required Mr. Schickele to build instruments of his own. When he conceived the early “Concerto for Horn and Hardart,” for example, he knew the title — which alludes to a then-popular (but now defunct) chain of self-service restaurants — would only work if there were a “hardart” to play alongside the horn. So he made a nine-foot gizmo loaded with cartoonish wind instruments (kazoos and ocarinas), zany percussion (buzzers, bells and mixing bowls, as well as exploding balloons), a set of automat-style coin-operated windows and a coffee spigot. For his P.D.Q. Bach shows, Mr. Schickele adopted an alter ego, Professor Peter Schickele, head of the Department of Musical Pathology at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. Typically, he arrived late and with maximum commotion, his shirt untucked, his tuxedo in disarray, and wearing work boots. Until the early 1980s, his entrances often involved swinging to the stage from the balcony on a rope, knocking over as many music stands and chairs as possible; in later years, he would run down an aisle and belly flop onto the stage, or be lowered in a basket.... (end snip) I will always treasure the memory of attending one of his concerts (in that concert hall, he rappelled down a wall, iirc), which included such masterpieces as Throw the Yule Log On Uncle John, My Bonnie Lass She Smelleth, and Only He Who is Running Knows. There was also a piece that incorporated somewhat unconventional symphonic instruments, one of which was called a wind-breaker....yes, pretty much what you'd think. RIP. Or even better, having some big laughs with Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and all the other classical musicians he loved to satirize.

Yes, still interesting as an unusual transient and for its one hour appearance on the exact day, July 19, 1952, of the famous DC sightings. If it was located at the near end of its possible distance, i.e. within the solar system, then I can at least see how someone would speculate that it was a formation of ET craft firing their engines to decelerate on approach to the Earth. My doubt (aside from the sheer improbability factor) is regarding the profile of the three transients - there being no observable elongation due to movement. When bright in 1952, the most isolated transient source has a profile nearly the same as comparison stars, implying the sources are subarcsec in angular size and they exhibit no elongation due to movement.

I was taught (in a geology course) that sodium cation is the least stable in water, so it tends to more quickly hook up with a chloride or other anion, and so becomes the dominant salt. That, paired with sodium being the most easily leached from surface rocks as rain washes over, and you get saline oceans. In fact, the oceans would be even more saline were it not for subduction. And sedimentation. Was tempted to add, take my comment with a grain of salt.

Well, the Oxford U P link, on the triple transients, is worth reading the abstract and then the summary section at the end, where the range of possible distances of the objects is calculated. Between 2 LY and somewhere in the solar system (but not in Earth orbit). It's a mystery on several levels, including if they are actually three objects (no more than 6 AU from each other, if the dimmings are causally connected) or a single one with some unusual gravitational lensing effect. Not thunder, but still an anomaly worth following up on.

😀

Not that I know of. Which is why I used it. Why do you ask?

Wash Post mentions some of the blaming going on.... Something to that first one. Younger women were more supportive of Haley, but getting to the gyms was not easy last night. I found it interesting that 2/3 of Haley supporters are polling as they will not vote for Trump in the general. That could be a fatal slice in November if that holds (big if) in other states. As much as fifteen percent of LVs perhaps.

Two SF Ballet dancers perform this wonderful George Harrison classic: