An American wind energy company has admitted to killing at least 150 bald and golden eagles, most of which were fatally struck by wind turbine blades, federal prosecutors said.
Nice going, Greens. If the rest of us even pick up an Eagle feather from the ground we can go to prison, but your corporate buddies just cop a plea and, the cost to electricity rates, and go back to collecting their subsidies.
I'll believe that the Greens are serious when they insist on prison time for this sort of thing.
Loretta Lynn passed on a week ago. The Choir Invisible's gain is our loss.
She was a force of nature, both professionally and personally. Professionally she is the most awarded female country artist ever; personally she was as tough as they come. She said of her husband that he never hit her where she didn't hit him twice. The Coal Miner's Daughter wasn't of a mind to back down.
Her music defined country music in the 1970s, when she was awarded artist of the decade. The 1980 film Coal Miner's Daughter (starring Sissy Spacek who won the Best Actress Oscar that year) wasn't so much a movie as it was a national singalong - Mom and Dad went to see it at a theater in Brewer Maine and said that the audience knew all the words to all the songs. Lynn was asked whether Sissy Spacek could sing the song in the film and Lynn replied, "Well, she's a-gonna."
Tough, and not of a mind to back down.
We've lost something here. Only Dolly is left from the trio of 1960s break through country women.
I ran across this photograph somewhere in the last couple of weeks:
It was from the Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927. IIRC, 16 of these gentlemen and one lady received Nobel Prizes. There are only 29 people in the photograph, so that's a 58% Nobel rate. I suspect that's a world record for a scientific conference.
Aesop says that we are in a Scientific Dark Age,* and I agree. He says we may have been in it for a couple hundred years, and that's where our opinions part. I think that it's been since July, 1969.
I am currently reading Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feinman. Feynman will need no introduction here, but for those unfamiliar with him he worked on the Manhattan Project and then taught Physics at Princeton for Decades. He was the guy on the Space Shuttle Challenger Investigation Committee who showed that O-Rings lost their ability to seal pipes when they were cold.
He had a fascinating career - one of the world's greatest scientific minds, he rubbed shoulders with the rest of the world's greatest scientific minds. One theme that continually comes out in his memoir is a passion to question why things work the way they do. He independently derived methods of solving mathematical problems that in some case were superior to the "Official" ones. His was a strict allegiance to experimental proof:
It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong.
So something happened between July 1969 and today. Back then we were able to make atomic bombs, invent integrated circuits, and land a man on the moon. Now it's arguments over string theory and why we can't detect more "Dark Matter".
Feynman could have told people about that last one. I suspect that today they wouldn't listen, because they don't want to listen. Careers will be lost if the scientific grant gravy train gets upended.
And the funniest part? That gravy train is controlled by the same Government Leviathan that challenged the scientific community to land a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade.
Mission accomplished. But what to then do with the gravy train? Well, never let a gravy train go to waste. And thus the beginning of the Scientific Dark Age dates to July 1969. It sure as shootin' hadn't started when the 1927 Solvay Conference was fresh in the rear view mirror. It took the Feb.Gov to royally screw up Science.
They're still having physics conferences at Solvay. There's a table here showing who chaired each conference. After Oppenheimer in 1964, the roster lists a bunch of nobodies.
* Interestingly, the picture that appears at the top of Aesop's post is of Percival Lowell in his Flagstaff observatory. Lowell is best known for his maps of the Canals of Mars, so this shows that the scientific rot had set in well before 1969.
I was going to post about this a couple of months ago, but the story is getting even more interesting. The new James Webb Space Telescope is showing images of the most distant galaxies ever seen, and it is raising questions on basic, fundamental theories about the universe - most notably, the Big Bang theory.
It is not too complicated to explain why these too small, too smooth, too old and too numerous galaxies are completely incompatible with the Big Bang hypothesis. Let’s begin with “too small”. If the universe is expanding, a strange optical illusion must exist. Galaxies (or any other objects) in expanding space do not continue to look smaller and smaller with increasing distance.
Beyond a certain point, they start looking larger and larger. (This is because their light is supposed to have left them when they were closer to us.) This is in sharp contrast to ordinary, non-expanding space, where objects look smaller in proportion to their distance.
Put another way, the galaxies that the JWST shows are just the same size as the galaxies near to us, assuming that the universe is not expanding and redshift is proportional to distance.
Smaller and smaller is exactly what the JWST images show. Even galaxies with greater luminosity and mass than our own Milky Way galaxy appear in these images to be two to three times smaller than in similar images observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the new galaxies have redshifts which are also two to three times greater.
This is not at all what is expected with an expanding universe, but it is just exactly what I and my colleague Riccardo Scarpa predicted based on a non-expanding universe, with redshift proportional to distance. Starting in 2014, we had already published results, based on HST images, that showed that galaxies with redshifts all the way up to 5 matched the expectations of non-expanding, ordinary space.
I love the first word in the title, although rather think that the authors used this with tongue firmly planted in cheek.
The wagons are being circled by the scientific establishment (which is what makes this story interesting to me). Space.com has an article filled with the usual name calling: "pseudoscience", "disinformation", claims of "misused" and "out of context" quotes, "serial denier", "anti-science", and even "flat-earth". The article quotes (at length) a guy who wrote a book called "How To Talk To A Science Denier".
Whew! That's a lot of insults to pack into a single article. I'm glad to see scientific discourse advanced!
Now I'm not an astrophysicist (although older brother is), so I don't know which is right - Big Bang or Non-expanding Universe. Or maybe neither. Who knows?
But the reaction to this challenge to "Scientific Orthodoxy" is fascinating. And the science.com brings to mind that quote from Hamlet: Methink the Lady doth protest too much. It also brings to mind two very old posts of mine. In The Iron Law and the Bureaucratization of Science I write about the curious fact that scientific progress does not seem to be accelerating, despite hundreds (or thousands) of times more scientists and funding. In it I posted a chart from Nigel Calder's blog (he founded and edited New Scientist magazine):
These are Calder's opinion but are a reasonable comparison. It certainly does not seem like things are speeding up - certainly not by a factor of 100x. There's a lot in my post of complaints by eminent scientists about suppression of views dangerous to the scientific establishment. I encourage you to click through and read the whole post. Remember, this is more than ten years old. And think about the science.com article linked and all their name calling.
This is not a one-off, a "black swan" event. The scientific establishment has been doing this for a long, long time. In Soviet Science, I wrote about how the head of CERN prohibited employees there from commenting on Svenmark's experiment (likely because it casts doubt on Global Warming theories). In it, I point out the breakdown in the scientific method on display:
At this point, I must confess that I'm an old faht, getting my science education back in the 1970s, from teachers and professors who got theirs in the 1940s. I was taught that the Scientific Method went something like this:
Observe something happening.
Formulate a testable hypothesis about what might be causing it.
If your hypothesis isn't falsifiable (i.e. cannot be shown to be wrong), go back to 2.
Formulate a Null Hypothesis (likely alternative) for your hypothesis in 3.
Construct an experiment to test your hypothesis against the null hypothesis.
Perform the experiment, and document the results.
Explain which hypothesis was closer to matching the observed reality in 1, and why.
It seems that the head of CERN - one of the biggest scientific research organizations in the world - doesn't want his people to do that last step. Everything else is OK (for now, at least), but that last one is right out.
You can read more about Svenmark's hypothesis and experiment here. The scientific establishment seems to hate this theory, as it's so not helpful to the Global Warming position. Unfortunately for them, it has been experimentally confirmed (see the link) - in great contrast to much of establishment climate science.
So what gives with all of this? I mean, this is not the public image of cool, rational scientists advancing our understanding of the universe. I wrote (again) at length about this a long time back in Science and the Cold Civil War. The post has multiple examples of how the scientific research funding game is played. The Climategate emails make an appearance here, as does the term "Saganized". I know that I'm throwing a lot at you, but this is important as a description of the (dare we say it?) pettiness of the scientific establishment. Physician, heal thyself.
Lastly (I can hear the cheers of relief) is Science as practiced today is very sick. This seems pertinent as it lets us circle back to the both science.com article and Calder's wonderment at the slowdown of scientific advancement:
Developing new methodologies is harder than inventing new particles in the dozens, which is why they don’t like to hear my conclusions. Any change will reduce the paper output, and they don’t want this. It’s not institutional pressure that creates this resistance, it’s that scientists themselves don’t want to move their butts.
How long can they go on with this, you ask? How long can they keep on spinning theory-tales?
I am afraid there is nothing that can stop them. They review each other’s papers. They review each other’s grant proposals. And they constantly tell each other that what they are doing is good science. Why should they stop? For them, all is going well. They hold conferences, they publish papers, they discuss their great new ideas. From the inside, it looks like business as usual, just that nothing comes out of it.
It also has what may be (but probably isn't) my first link to RetractionWatch.
So is the Big Bang theory right? Maybe. But as older brother told me long ago, the Scientific Method isn't replacing a falsehood with a truth, it's replacing a falsehood with a more subtle falsehood. But the Big Bang theory is not the point here. Rather, it's Physicists behaving badly:
The Queen Of The World and I loved that show, and a lot of the reason is in that clip.
So the issue is not whether the Big Bang theory is right or wrong, it's why won't the establishment allow actual scientific discussion of so many issues. There are too many sacred cows (and gravy trains) at risk.
Linemen have reportedly restored power for roughly two million customers in Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) Florida in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian last week, the governor said on Sunday.
45,000 linemen from all over the country* were pre-positioned before the storm hit. In 4 days (Friday - Monday) they're restored ~ 80% of all outages.
The media are biased jerks who have changed Mark Twain's old addage. It used to be "If you don't read the newspaper you're uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you're misinformed." Now you're uninformed no matter what, but you're only misinformed if you read the paper.
* I saw one in the last day or two from Kansas City. That's a long way to come to help out, and we appreciate it.
The hurricane hit Florida last week, an old story made new by Mother Nature. The story is so old that there's a great film about it - the 1948 movie Key Largo staring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Claire Trevor. The great Max Steiner wrote the score which delivers (ignore the picture in the video which is from a different Humphrey Bogart/Max Steiner film):
Claire Trevor won the Oscar for best supporting actress, playing a washed up, alcoholic bar singer. She wants a drink and the villain makes her sing a song before she gets one. The song is about a cruel boyfriend, and Edward G. Robinson plays that part to perfection. Trevor realizes as the song goes on that she's in the same position as the girl in the song. Her despairing performance is what is said to have won her the Academy Award that year.
More impressive is that Trevor repeatedly asked the director (John Huston) to rehearse the scene. He repeatedly put her off because "there's plenty of time". Then one day he told everybody to shoot the scene. Trevor sang the song both unrehearsed and a Capella which is unbelievably impressive and way more than Huston deserved. Here's her one take wonder:
First, the message: Napoleon famously said that an army marches on its stomach, and Big Country is trying to provision his army of attorneys to save his grand daughter from a completely messed up home situation. I expect that you've already heard about this (I expect that 95% of our readers also follow him), but any spare change you can toss his way would be very much appreciated. You can donate here.
Plus he's made an appearance in Chris Muir's Day By Day cartoon. Pretty darn cool.
Now for a quick update. It's been nothing but asses and elbows for a week, first getting ready for the storm and then cleaning up after. Long days, and it's shown me that I'm not in very good shape physically. Need to start working out.
The Queen Of The World is hurting pretty bad - back, hip, and knees have been an issue for a while now, and all the lifting and carrying has not helped. Today is a day off, by executive order. I'll post more tomorrow, but we're both pretty wiped out now.
Borepatch will give a full report when they are reconnected with the modern world. Neither he or I know when that might be. I heard from him by text message tonight. I don't have much any other information, but I know the regulars were waiting for some report so there ya go.
Generator works - some spray brake cleaner through the carburetor did the trick. Thanks to everyone who left a comment - useful info.
We have lots of water and food, batteries, and everything. All in all we're bedded in tighter than a tick on a dog.
But this looks like a big one, and the eye of a CAT 4 hurricane will pass within 20 miles. Weather Underground says it should pass late today. Good luck to the Florida bloggers.
And Wolfgang doesn't want to go out to do his business when the wind is blowing the rain horizontally. I expect he'll reconsider once his eyes start to cross.
And especially if you're trying to predict a hurricane's track.
Divemedic has a great series of posts up about hurricane preparedness (this post will lead you to the others). He sounds ready.
The Queen Of The World and I are ready, too, although I'll get another 5 gallons of gas for the generator tomorrow. We have some things that Divemedic didn't include on his list. For example, a Homer Bucket (5 gallon orange bucket from Home Depot) with a toilet seat and some cat litter makes a makeshift toilet. Hope we don't need that one, but it's not a bad idea - although Divemedic's idea of filling the bath tub for toilet flush water will be plan #1 ...
But he also points out that predicting the track of a hurricane is not the most accurate science. We're keeping our eyes on the forecast, and it's changing multiple times a day:
At 11:00, Weather Underground said maximum wind speed on Wednesday for our location would be 80 mph (exciting!)
At 2:00, Weather Underground said maximum wind speed on Wednesday for our location would be 45 mph (not so exciting)
Now (6:00), Weather Underground said maximum wind speed on Wednesday for our location would be 25 mph (not exciting at all)
I don't mind if the storm track moves away from us, but there's no reason it can't move back again. We both are pretty confident that we can ride this out if it does, and the running around earlier was time well spent.
But Divemedic's post is today's must-read if you're anywhere near the southeast.
In other news, I Just Want 2 Ride is still posting. I think the first time I linked there is seven years ago which is pretty long for the blogsosphere.
