Asleep @ the switch :)

Asleep @ the switch comes to mind when talking about a lazy black hole but what it means to star-making is anything but.

"Without the black hole actively pumping energy into its surroundings, the gas can cool enough so this impressive rate of star formation can happen," said co-author Carter Rhea, also of the University of Montreal. "This kind of black hole shut down may be a crucial way for stars to form in the early Universe."

Awesome to a fault. :)

Mid Summer

Beauty, stealth, survival and renewal, the four states of the cycle of life apply
to all living entities without exception. Enjoy.

Uranus ...

Factoids "r" us. :)

What’s the most interesting fact you know about Uranus? The fact that its rotational axis is completely out of line with every other planet in the solar system?  Or the fact that Uranus’ magnetosphere is asymmetrical, notably tilted relative to its rotational axis, and significantly offset from the center of the planet?  Or the fact that it’s moons are all named after characters from Shakespeare or Alexander Pope?

Any questions? :)

Sad but true

The Juice Media rocks without a doubt. :)

Climate change anyone?

Sad but true without question.

Swifts

Yours truly gets memorized by swifts hunting for insects in a meadow, endlessly flying in ways that seem to defy physics as we know it. Wonderful, never-ending, the common swift does something, save for raising chicks, no other bird does ... it stays in the air without landing, for years.

I found a dead common swift once, a husk of a bird under a bridge over the River Thames, where sunlight from the water cast bright scribbles on the arches above. I picked it up, held it in my palm, saw the dust in its feathers, its wings crossed like dull blades, its eyes tightly closed, and realized that I didn’t know what to do. This was a surprise. Encouraged by books, I’d always been the type of Gothic amateur naturalist who preserved interesting bits of the dead. I cleaned and polished fox skulls; disarticulated, dried and kept the wings of roadkill birds. But I knew, looking at the swift, that I could not do anything like that to it. The bird was suffused with a kind of seriousness very akin to holiness. I didn’t want to leave it there, so I took it home, swaddled it in a towel and tucked it in the freezer. It was in early May the next year, as soon as I saw the first returning swifts flowing down from the clouds, that I knew what I had to do. I went to the freezer, took out the swift and buried it in the garden one hand’s-width deep in earth newly warmed by the sun.

And they are doing more. As Dokter and his colleagues write, migratory birds orient themselves through a complex of interacting compass mechanisms. During vesper flights, swifts have access to them all. At this panoptic height, they can see the scattered patterns of the stars overhead, and at the same time they can calibrate their magnetic compasses, getting their bearings according to the light-polarization patterns that are strongest and clearest in twilit skies. Stars, wind, polarized light, magnetic cues, the distant stacks of clouds a hundred miles out, clear cold air, and below them the hush of a world tilting toward sleep or waking toward dawn. What they are doing is flying so high that they can work out exactly where they are, to know what they should do next. They’re quietly, perfectly, orienting themselves.

Read Helen Macdonald's extraordinary article in its entirety. Worthwhile to the max.

Delving into the small/Rev XX

Black Eyed Susan

A noontime snack

Holding Pattern

Strike a pose

In the grip of passion

Starting on a journey

Moons et al ...

They come in all sizes. :)

Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future ...

Earth may be due for a supervolcano eruption within the next 100,000 years. (Photo: Manjik/Shutterstock)

Treehugger has a long and interesting take on the distant future. Reminds one of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine as he delves into this topic as well. Enjoy. It's worth a read for sure.

Humanity has its hands full right now with global climate change, which promises centuries of stronger storms, longer droughts and other magnified disasters. Earth has seen a lot of climatic chaos in its 4.5 billion years, although usually at a much slower pace. Our species is just too young to know what it's like, having evolved only about 200,000 years ago during a relatively tranquil window in time.

Now, by overstuffing the sky with carbon dioxide, we're beginning to realize how lucky we've been. The human-aided greenhouse effect is already wreaking havoc with climates and ecosystems around the planet, threatening to undermine all our success over the last few millennia. Yet despite the world-changing urgency of climate change, nature is also capable of even greater devastation. Just ask the dinosaurs

The near ...

100 years: A sweltering century

Earth continues to heat up, possibly by as much as 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit (a change of 6 degrees Celsius) from today's average temperature. This spurs a cascade of crises around the world, including more severe droughts, wildfires, floods and food shortages caused by changing weather patterns. Sea levels are 1 to 4 feet (0.3 to 1.2 meters) higher than today, and the Atlantic generates more "very intense" hurricanes. The Arctic is ice-free in summer, amplifying climate change even further.

The far ...

250 million years: Continents, unite!

Continental drift once again smashes Earth's dry land into a supercontinent, which resembles the ancient Pangea. Scientists are already calling it Pangea Proxima.

The end? 

1010^10^76.66 years: Second (uni)verse, same as the first?

The universe may be in ruins, but given enough time, some futurists think something incredible will happen. It's like an endless string of poker games: Eventually you'll be dealt the exact same hand many times. According to 19th-century mathematician Henri Poincaré, quantum fluctuations in a system with fixed total energy will also re-create similar versions of history over inconceivable time scales. In 1994, physicist Don N. Page estimated the duration of "Poincaré recurrence time," describing it as "the longest finite times that have so far been explicitly calculated by any physicist."

Even if dying black holes leave nothing behind, however — and if quantum quirks don't grant us a cosmic mulligan — many physicists and philosophers still think nothing might actually be something. As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said in 2013 during a debate on the nature of nothingness, "If laws of physics still apply, the laws of physics are not nothing."

In other words, we have nothing to worry about.

Quite a trip, is it not? :)

Channeling Thelma & Louise & ... Bain Capital

We all know how Thelma & Louise turned out. With the repugs in charge, 

America might have its T&L moment as well.

In a normal country, we wouldn’t need a second round of expanded unemployment insurance benefits. The back-of-the-envelope math lawmakers did in late March would have been sufficient to see us through a temporary lockdown — the time it took to scale up testing, contact tracing, and the emergency production of masks, gowns, and ventilators. By now, we’d be savoring the few summer evenings left before students return to campuses and the rest of us resume our anxious tiptoe toward November.

Instead, four month of relentless carnage later, we have four million coronavirus cases and counting, states around the country are going back into lockdown and the president has just released a new campaign ad decrying “the left’s assault on Goya.” (The bean company.)

Remember, Mitch, Mitt, Linsey and Hatch are covered. No problem so they can continue to not care until the pitchforks come out. IMHO, these unconscious bastards are playing a very dangerous game.

It gets better.

Mitt channeling his inner Bain days ... Think Dunkin Donuts

Shortly after publicly ditching one attack on Social Security—the payroll tax cut—Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell confirmed Thursday that the Republican coronavirus relief package will include legislation sponsored by Sen. Mitt Romney that one advocacy group described as an “equally menacing” threat to the New Deal program.

The Utah Republican’s bill currently has 13 Senate co-sponsors, five of whom are members of the Democratic caucus. Last month, as Common Dreams reported, 30 House Democrats joined 30 of their Republican colleagues in endorsing the TRUST Act.

If passed, Romney’s bill would give the Treasury Department 45 days to deliver a report to Congress on America’s “endangered” trust funds. Congress would then set up one “rescue committee” per trust fund with a mandate to craft legislation that—in the words of Romney’s office—”restores solvency and otherwise improves each trust fund program.”

Legislation proposed by the committees would receive expedited consideration in the House and Senate—meaning no amendments would be permitted. Any bill would still need 60 votes to clear the upper chamber.

As George Carlin so famously said, "They coming for your Social Security Money, They want it bad so they can give to their rich Wall street friends, and they's get it because they one this fucking place."

UFOs ... may be real after-all

Seems the cat's finally out of the bag. Yours truly has thought UFOs were more than just possible and now, with videos like this, this rube may not crazy after-all.

No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public

For over a decade, the program, now tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence, has discussed mysterious events in classified briefings.

Despite Pentagon statements that it disbanded a once-covert program to investigate unidentified flying objects, the effort remains underway — renamed and tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence, where officials continue to study mystifying encounters between military pilots and unidentified aerial vehicles.

Pentagon officials will not discuss the program, which is not classified but deals with classified matters. Yet it appeared last month in a Senate committee report outlining spending on the nation’s intelligence agencies for the coming year. The report said the program, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, was “to standardize collection and reporting” on sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles, and was to report at least some of its findings to the public every six months.

No crash artifacts have been publicly produced for independent verification. Some retrieved objects, such as unusual metallic fragments, were later identified from laboratory studies as man-made.

Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the Pentagon U.F.O. program since 2007, said that, in some cases, examination of the materials had so far failed to determine their source and led him to conclude, “We couldn’t make it ourselves.”

Something's afoot - Sherlock Holmes