Congrats to OldNFO

Blogging 19 (!) years. 

1500 dogs rescued from Wisconsin puppy mill

Wolfgang would welcome the outcome, but would want to bite the old owners.

The breeder lost his license but likely won't go to jail.

Animal rescues in Minnesota are welcoming dozens of beagles into their care this week from a biomedical research breeding facility in Wisconsin.

Late last month, Big Dog Ranch Rescue and The Center for a Humane Economy announced they bought the beagles for an undisclosed sum from Ridglan Farms near Madison.

The purchase followed a settlement with Wisconsin state regulators where Ridglan agreed to give up its breeder’s license in exchange for avoiding criminal charges.

"Researchers" - we all know what that means, don't we Dr. Fauci?  Odd isn't it that cruelty to animals often precedes cruelty to humans ...

And this part is infuriating: 

But [Special ProsecutorGruenke did find that Ridglan allowed non-veterinarians to perform eye operations on some animals without general anesthesia in violation of Wisconsin’s animal mistreatment law.

 

Wolfgang would definitely want to bite that SOB.

 

 

Interestingly, this is the first post tagged Blinded By Science where actual blinding by scientists was involved.

Buddy Guy - Mustang Sally

I don't know if this is on everyone's Top Ten list of great blues songs.  I suspect it is on everyone's list of Top Ten Blues Songs to Sing at Karaoke. 

Massachusetts demonstrates the futility of gun control

Via Insty, here's proof of the utter futility of gun control:

A man named Tyler Brown opened fire on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, Mass., this week, turning an ordinary Monday afternoon into a rolling ambush near Harvard and MIT.

Middlesex DA Marian Ryan said Brown, a 46-year-old Boston man (notice no doctor was needed to identify Brown as a man), fired roughly 50 to 60 rounds from a rifle at vehicles on the roadway.

A Mass Statie and Our Hero (legally carrying, natch) shot the dirty perp.  So well done!  And I hear you ask, what's the tie in to gun control.  This:

Brown didn't appear from thin air; his criminal record included a 2020 shootout with Boston police, and he had pleaded guilty to charges tied to armed assault with intent to murder. He was reportedly out on probation when the Cambridge shooting unfolded. 

OK, so Massachusetts is run by dumbasses.  Dude was out on parole for armed assault with intent to murder, and he shot up a bunch of stuff, including a Massachusetts State Police cruiser.

But here's the punch line:

[The perpetrator] survived with non-life-threatening injuries and faces serious charges, including armed assault with intent to murder. [Emphasis mine - Borepatch]

This time he'll be sorry! 

Some Masshole judge will release him in 4 or 5 years.  But more gun control is just the thing.  Oooooooh kaaaaaay.

It's quite a mystery why all the retarded Massachusetts liberals think they're so much smarter than we are.  The evidence is against them. 

 

No, the Climate Change Establishment has not changed their approach

Friend Burt emails me to say that the U.N. Climate Panel Quietly admits Its Doomsday Climate Scenarios were completely "Implausible".

They've been admitting this for years and years.  Here's a post from the archives from 2019:

Climate scientist Judy Curry testified before Congress, and this is really interesting:

Some people (including one of the Members) took issue with the following statement in my testimony:

“Based upon our current assessment of the science, the threat does not seem to be an existential one on the time scale of the 21st century, even in its most alarming incarnation.”

I referred to AR5 WGII:

“Every single catastrophic scenario considered by the IPCC AR5 (WGII, Table 12.4) has a rating of very unlikely or exceptionally unlikely and/or has low confidence. The only tipping point that the IPCC considers likely in the 21stcentury is disappearance of Arctic summer sea ice (which is fairly reversible, since sea ice freezes every winter).”

The IPCC is the same "U.N. Climate Panel" getting headlines today.  The IPCC Assessment Reports are the "State of the Science" reports they release every five years.  They are considered the Gold Standard for establishment science, and they've been very quietly burying exactly this point for a long, long time.

The only thing they've given up is keeping these scenarios for the screaming headlines.

The only thing interesting here is why they are doing this now?  I think it's the mad dash to AI, with AI datacenters springing up everywhere.  Each of these has a ravenous power appetite, and the (very wealthy) folks behind AI have told the IPCC to tone down the climate alarmism.

Money talks, so the mainstream climate science establishment walks. 

Downstream prosperity

Via Chris Lynch, this is a very interesting post: 

You’ve probably heard of the PayPal Mafia. When eBay bought PayPal in 2002 its founders took the money, scattered, and built the next generation of digital monopolies.

Peter Thiel founded Palantir and seeded Facebook. Reid Hoffman set up LinkedIn. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen started YouTube. Max Levchin founded Affirm.

Elon Musk—who had merged X.com into PayPal two years earlier—went a different direction. He took his payout and leased a small warehouse in the El Segundo area of LA.

He bolted a sign on the front that read “Space Exploration Technologies Corp.”

We all know where that's gone. 

Most people still think SpaceX is “just” a rocket company. But it’s actually a machine for producing world-class talent. A talented engineer takes a job at SpaceX, learns the Elon Musk “way” of solving impossible problems, then graduates as a force of nature ready to transform other industries.

After meeting dozens of SpaceX graduates in warehouses across LA, I’m convinced:

The SpaceX Mafia will create more wealth than the PayPal Mafia—possibly more than all of Silicon Valley combined.


If you can track only one alumni group in business today, this is the one. SpaceX is the new Harvard.

A hedge fund buddy of mine told me: “I’d pay real money for a database of ex-SpaceX employees.”

The article then goes on to list four companies founded by SpaceX alums - the "SpaceX Mafia" who are already solving really hard (and expensive) problems.  Only two are space companies. 

 Highly, highly recommended.

The 2026 sports photo of the year

The horse on the left is Golden Tempo, a 23-1 long shot who won the Kentucky Derby.  The jockey is Jose Ortiz who won the Kentucky Oaks race yesterday - only the ninth jockey to win both in the same year.

The horse on the right is Renegade, at 4-1. The jockey is Irad Ortiz, Jr., Jose's brother.  Irad has won the Belmont Stakes twice.

That's a horse riding Dynasty. 

Efficiency and the Space program

danielbarger left a comment to yesterday's post about Starship:

As long as we are limited to chemical rockets where 90% of the weight is fuel and rocket with only 10% payload we will never be able to make use of the solar systems resources efficiently. The problem is there is no viable alternative...not even a theoretical one. It's an enormous hurdle to becoming a space faring species.

I have two comments.

1.  Efficiency factors into the price.  Starship may get the cost of payload to orbit down to $50/pound.  That's what King Crab costs.  It's hard to call this "inefficient" when it is reducing cost by three orders of magnitude.
2. Agreed with danielbarger and others that this does not get us to Interstellar travel.   The DC-3 didn't get us to the moon, either, but it was a damn fine start.  

I'd like to see where things are 30 years from now.  For sure we won't still be on Starship but we will be a lot further ahead than we are now.  And guaranteed people will no longer be optimizing for mass.

Casey Handmer covers this well in the post I linked to:

Consider the two critical metrics: Dollars per tonne ($/T) and tonnes per year (T/year). Any effective space transport cargo logistics system must aggressively optimize both these metrics simultaneously. Starship is intended to reach numbers as low as $1m/T and 1000 T/year for cargo soft landed on the Moon. Apollo achieved about $2b/T and 2 T/year for cargo soft landed on the Moon. Constellation 2.0 as described above [NASA's SLS-to-the-moon program - Borepatch] would be more like $4b/T and 2 T/year.

Not only is this architecture obviously worse than Starship, it’s also significantly worse than Apollo or any existing lunar delivery system. For example, the Blue Moon lander could be flown on Falcon Heavy, delivering perhaps 10 T to the surface for <$200m. Indeed, the Constellation architecture is worse than the current state-of-the-art by roughly the same factor that Starship promises to be better. That is, it takes the key metrics of $/T and T/year and runs as far as possible in the wrong direction. It is also a programmatic dead end, since none of the individual components can be upgraded in a meaningful way without restarting development of the entire system from scratch. It’s an expensive, interlocking failure.

I'd say that Starship is an enormous efficiency improvement. 

Starship - Past and Future

The Silicon Graybeard (among others) links to a really interesting video from SpaceX about Starship:

Something that needs to be shared is a video from SpaceX, called Starship - Test Like You Fly and while it's nearly a half hour long, it's absolutely worth watching. 

That's near-term Starship past and (implied) future.  But watching it made me think about a 2021 post from Casey Handmer - Starship Is Still Not Understood.  In it, he remarks on just how far Starship had come in the previous couple of years:

While I am 100% certain that the Starship design will continue to evolve in noticeable ways, the progress in two years cannot be understated. Two years ago Starship was a design concept and a mock up. Today it’s a 95% complete prototype that will soon fly to space and may even make it back in one piece.

The odds of Starship actually working in the near future are much higher today than they were two years ago. Across the industry, decisions are being made on a time horizon in which Starship operation is relevant, and yet it is not being correctly accounted for.

He then goes on to lay it all out: 

Starship matters. It’s not just a really big rocket, like any other rocket on steroids. It’s a continuing and dedicated attempt to achieve the “Holy Grail” of rocketry, a fully and rapidly reusable orbital class rocket that can be mass manufactured. It is intended to enable a conveyor belt logistical capacity to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) comparable to the Berlin Airlift. That is, Starship is a powerful logistical system that puts launch below the API.

Starship is designed to be able to launch bulk cargo into LEO in >100 T chunks for <$10m per launch, and up to thousands of launches per year. By refilling in LEO, a fully loaded deep space Starship can transport >100 T of bulk cargo anywhere in the solar system, including the surface of the Moon or Mars, for <$100m per Starship. Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows, in addition to serving other incidental destinations, such as maintaining the Starlink constellation or building a big base at the Lunar south pole.

The fact that Starship flown expendably would be perhaps 10 times cheaper, in terms of dollars per tonne, than even Falcon is not relevant.

Jerry Pournelle used to say that the only space metric that counted was cost per ton delivered to orbit.  I don't see this as a Berlin Airlift; it's a Liberty Ship.  Mass Produced in huge numbers and able to shuttle large amounts of generic cargo to and from space.  Handmer emphasizes this point:

Historically, mission/system design has been grievously afflicted by absurdly harsh mass constraints, since launch costs to LEO are as high as $10,000/kg and single launches cost hundreds of millions. This in turn affects schedule, cost structure, volume, material choices, labor, power, thermal, guidance/navigation/control, and every other aspect of the mission. Entire design languages and heuristics are reinforced, at the generational level, in service of avoiding negative consequences of excess mass. As a result, spacecraft built before Starship are a bit like steel weapons made before the industrial revolution. Enormously expensive as a result of embodying a lot of meticulous labor, but ultimately severely limited compared to post-industrial possibilities.

Starship obliterates the mass constraint and every last vestige of cultural baggage that constraint has gouged into the minds of spacecraft designers. There are still constraints, as always, but their design consequences are, at present, completely unexplored. We need a team of economists to rederive the relative elasticities of various design choices and boil them down to a new set of design heuristics for space system production oriented towards maximizing volume of production. Or, more generally, maximizing some robust utility function assuming saturation of Starship launch capacity. A dollar spent on mass optimization no longer buys a dollar saved on launch cost. It buys nothing.

The implications are huge, and probably require a change in the institutions themselves (e.g. JPL and NASA):

NASA centers and their contractors build exquisitely complex and expensive robots to launch on conventional rockets and explore the universe. To take JPL as an example, divide the total budget by the mass of spacecraft shipped to the cape and it works out to about $1,000,000/kg. I’m not certain how much mass NASA launches to space per year but, even including ISS, it cannot be much more than about 50 T. This works out to between $100,000/kg for LEO bulk cargo and >$1,000,000/kg for deep space exploration.

Enter Starship. Annual capacity to LEO climbs from its current average of 500 T for the whole of our civilization to perhaps 500 T per week. Eventually, it could exceed 1,000,000 T/year. At the same time, launch costs drop as low as $50/kg, roughly 100x lower than the present. For the same budget in launch, supply will have increased by roughly 100x. How can the space industry saturate this increased launch supply?

...

This is where the risk to the space industry originates. Prior to Starship, heavy machinery for building a Moon base could only come from NASA, because only NASA has the expertise to build a rocket propelled titanium Moon tractor for a billion dollars per unit. After Starship, Caterpillar or Deere or Kamaz can space qualify their existing commodity products with very minimal changes and operate them in space. In all seriousness, some huge Caterpillar mining truck is already extremely rugged and mechanically reliable. McMaster-Carr already stocks thousands of parts that will work in mines, on oil rigs, and any number of other horrendously corrosive, warranty voiding environments compared to which the vacuum of space is delightfully benign. A space-adapted tractor needs better paint, a vacuum compatible hydraulic power source, vacuum-rated bearings, lubricants, wire insulation, and a redundant remote control sensor kit.

I suspect that Jared Isaacson understands this.  The Space industry five years from now will be very, very different that any projections we can make today.  Starship's future - while brightly described in SpaceX's outstanding video - is much more interesting than almost anyone suspects.

Earth Day

I would have something to say about this nonsense but The Silicon Graybeard has it pretty much covered.

Miguel, too. 

Artificial Intelligence confirms Borepatch

Sixteen (!) years ago I posted about how the climate databases did not show any warming since 1850:

So what does the raw data look like for all 4495 stations?

Other than a short term blip in the 1990s, we see no warming at all since 1850. None.

Let me say this simply: The raw (unadjusted) weather data from the largest historical data set shows no warming for the last 150 years.

Now Grok 4.1 has answered a query about the same subject:

When correlated systematic errors and the realistic treatment of infilling problems are properly accounted for, the global mean temperature curve before 1950–1970 (and partly even today) cannot physically be determined with an accuracy better than ±0.5–1 °C. Consequently, a claimed trend of +1.3 °C since 1850 is **not significantly distinguishable** from a zero trend. This is not “skeptical exaggeration”; it is simply what error theory and metrology **mandate**

So you can't show any warming that is statically valid.  Always trust content from Borepatch! 

I'll just wait quietly over here for my long-delayed Nobel Prize ...

Friday Night Rumba*

45 minutes of sultry music.  You're welcome.

*See what I did there?

The Aral Sea is coming back to life

This is unexpected good news.  You have to click through to watch because embedding is disabled.  

Update on the Bluehammer exploit

Steven emails in to ask if this is real.

1. Yes, this is a real vulnerability. 

2. It impacts all Windows 10 and 11 systems.

3. There is still no patch from Microsoft (i.e. a true Day Zero exploit)

4. A successful exploit results in exceptionally bad things happening (access to the SAM database, get password hashes, and Administrator privileges). 

5. The exploit code has been posted to Github.  This is Biblically bad - fire and brimstone, etc.

The only good news (and it is legitimately good news) is that this does not look like it can be exploited remotely.  Corporate IT departments will be pulling their hair out about their users gaining Admin access to their corporate laptop, but users at home shouldn't panic (you are already admin).

Microsoft has not covered themselves in glory here - heck Forbes has an article on this.  That's not good PR. In my experience, Microsoft was pretty good at disclosure, but that was a long time ago.

Also, the researcher did not cover himself with glory either.  There are something like a billion vulnerable systems out there and he uploaded the warez to Github?  Not cool. 

And all of a sudden, I was ten years old

I am surprised at my reaction to the Artemis II mission.  I mean, it's a huge bucket of money to throw at well connected aerospace contractors - and one that imperils the astronauts because it's so expensive that they couldn't really test the heat shield.

And yet suddenly it's 1968 and the teachers are rolling televisions into the classroom so we can watch the spaceships return to Earth.

Sure, it's crazy expensive, but we just sent men people around the damn Moon.

And we did it without that ridiculous Metric System ... 

For a moment, America is the Old America that can do things.

Doris Day - Fly me to the moon

Yeah Artemis is crazy expensive, but it's still a big deal. 

And we love us some Doris Day ...

Miklós Rózsa - Overture to Ben Hur

When it was released in 1959, Beh Hur became the second highest grossing film in history (behind Gone With The Wind) - saving MGM from bankruptcy.  It won an astonishing 11 Academy Awards, including best musical scoring by composer Miklós Rózsa. 

It's good music for Easter.  I hope that you (like we) are enjoying it with family. 

Where's Borepatch?

The Queen Of The World's son is visiting for Easter, along with his best buddy Mario from Basic Training.  The weather was perfect, and so we met up with one of his High School buddies who happened to be here:

Anna Maria Island, off Sarasota Bay.  The High School buddy brought a drone and took this photo.  Yeah, I'm down there somewhere.

Man, I love Florida. 

I Didn't See This Until Today

 Obviously, I'm a couple of days late. 

The photo of the year for America's 250th birthday

Photo via The Silicon Graybeard.

Sure, NASA spends taxpayer money like a drunken sailor.  Sure, Congress is using this program to throw taxpayer money at favored corporations.

But today, no other country can do what we are doing, just like what Old America did half a century ago.  And no other country has a SpaceX waiting in the wings to drop mission cost by a factor of 40. 

Considering the epic amount of fraud from California's (and other states) Medicare programs (not to mention Learing Centers), all I can say is that this is waste I can get behind.