B&W/Rev IV

2 Birches

Old Timer

Petite Waterfall

The Tempest

Just another example ... :)

Just another example of just how wonderful Calvin and Hobbes truly was. :)

The Hubble in 360 ... explained. :)

The Hubble, another gem from NASA/Goddard

In living color ... :)

& yet another gem ...

Morphing eight images of the star V838 Monocerotis taken by
Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has been observing the V838 Mon light echo since 2002. Each new observation of the light echo reveals a new and unique "thin-section" through the interstellar dust around the star. This video morphs images of the light echo from the Hubble taken at multiple times between 2002 and 2006. The numerous whorls and eddies in the interstellar dust are particularly noticeable. Possibly they have been produced by the effects of magnetic fields in the space between the stars.

The Mars Chopper :)

Awesome tech from ... you guessed it, NASA/JPL. :)

K. Vonnegut/2 for the price of one :)

K. Vonnegut is one of my favorite writers due to his dry and ironic wit and his take on science fiction. With this being said, here are 2 clips, the first an excerpt from an unpublished and previously undiscovered short story from the 50s, the 2nd from a talk given by the esteemed K regarding killer lampreys and such from 1970. Enjoy.

Editor’s note: While reading through Kurt Vonnegut’s papers in the Lilly Library, at Indiana University, as they worked on the first comprehensive edition of his short fiction, Vonnegut’s friend Dan Wakefield and Jerome Klinkowitz, a scholar of Vonnegut’s work, came across five previously unpublished stories. Klinkowitz dates “The Drone King,” one of those five, to the early 1950s, when Vonnegut hadn’t yet written a novel and was only beginning to publish short fiction. Complete Stories will be published this month by Seven Stories Press.

and ...

3 for the price of one indeed. :)

The Cassandra effect

This powerful Vanity Fair pix indirectly links to Cassandra, able to predict the future but forever doomed to not be believed because of refusing Apollo's advances, rings true in 2020 without question.

Named for the mythical princess of ancient Troy who prophesied her city’s downfall but wasn’t believed, the “Cassandra Complex” is what philosophers call pervasive doubt about a true or obvious prediction. The phrase has been cited in modern times to describe prescient warnings about everything from climate change to stock market crashes that, once upon us, are met with incredulity.

In the age of pandemics, we’re now realizing who the Cassandras were that cautioned us about the coronavirus contagion—prognosticators like famed epidemiologist Larry Brilliant. In 2006, he took the stage at TED to alert the world about the disastrous effects of pathogens run amuck. “The key to preventing or mitigating [a pandemic],” said Brilliant in that talk, “is early detection and rapid response. We will not have a vaccine or adequate supplies of an antiviral…The world as we know it will stop.” He predicted that perhaps a billion people would become infected and over 100 million would die. He also imagined global depression, lost jobs, and a cost to the economy of up to $3 trillion. Sound familiar?

Any questions?

Cassandra & the burning of the city of Troy

Forgetfulness 101 ... :)

The COVID-19 mass effect ...

The COVID-19 mass effect ...

With that being said, stunning drone footage of Newark Avenue, one of the busiest streets in Jersey City, was uploaded to YouTube on Saturday morning. The short video shows shuttered shops and the overall area resembling a ghost town. The video confirms the Social Distancing Scoreboard app's finding of how many residents in the state have reduced travels. During the video, maybe two people were spotted. 

The mass effect indeed.

First three passes on G. E. Studio :)

First three takes on a very powerful app. More to come after I get my feet wet. :)



My feet are getting wet. :)

Google Earth Studio - A freebie for us rubes.

I have a lot to learn here without question. :)

A very guilty pleasure ...

A very guilty pleasure indeed if ... you're safe and free of the virus and ... the web works. If so, you can do nothing and sit on your ass without a care in the world as long as you are financially secure. This dark but accurate take is rarely expressed but Wired's piece rings true without issue.

To whit ...

HERE’S A LITTLE secret about the coronavirus crisis: If you and your loved ones are healthy and financially secure—for now—then some not-so-small part of you might just be enjoying this whole thing. Lazy days at home, ALL CAPS headlines, desolate parking lots, that warm-and-fuzzy-end-of-the-world feeling. The turmoil is thrilling from afar. The internet works just fine. And, let’s be honest, you needed a break from the daily grind.

Postapocalyptic stories have long shown the lighter side of disaster. In the 1970s, science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss coined the term “cozy catastrophe” to describe a fictional plot in which a bourgeois protagonist finds pleasure while the world goes to shit. “The essence of cozy catastrophe is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off,” Aldiss wrote. He was writing in reference to the postapocalyptic landscapes of John Wyndham, author of The Day of the Triffids, a bio-disaster novel in which, as Aldiss saw it, the narrator not only survives but thrives. 

BRT has talked about disruption and how good can come from it if we have the courage to make it so. Glad to see yours truly is not alone on this thought as well.

Less forebodingly, there’s a political element to our enchantment with catastrophe. Every MAGA Trumper and Bernie Bro agrees, albeit for very different reasons, that American society is fundamentally broken. People are exhausted, overworked, and world-weary. Like draft day for a suffering sports team, our response to the pandemic represents a rebuild opportunity, and many commentators—see: a recent piece at Politico featuring the predictions of 34 “big thinkers”—are casting the aftershocks of coronavirus as potentially chaotic good. Best of all, like John Lennon’s revolution from bed but with a Slack-connected laptop, Americans can overturn the system while wearing their PJs. A different kind of change is in the air. (So are contagious respiratory droplets; please, stay at home.)

Dr. Strangelove also applies if you're connected. Black humor has a role, just ask Moliere, Carlin and Chevesky about this if you would. :)

Be well and ... be safe in these most uncertain times.

When everything stops ...

An informative piece to the max with a photo essay from the International Space Station showing befores and afters of public places all over the world. 

At the heart of the Great Mosque of Mecca, Islam’s holiest site, sits the Kaaba, the cubic structure that orients Muslims’ daily prayers around the world. At the peak of the pilgrimage called the Hajj in late-July and early August, some 2 million people from around the world make their way to the site at once. On Feb. 27, Saudi Arabia closed its borders to international pilgrims. The nation took further steps to limit access to the shrine over the next three weeks until it temporarily suspended all entrance and prayers on March 20, leaving the site empty.

Check it out. The difference between the befores and afters is astounding to say the least.

The ISS

$1200 isn't enough

Disruptive times calls for disruptive ideas, like a universal income, universal healthcare and a reduction of the military industrial complex as this country is now in deep free fall and the political leaders in place either haven't a clue or lack the guts to change things for the better as COVID-19 ravages this once great nation known as America. From education rackets to crony capitalism, this country has been systematically violated and it's time for we the people to take it back. For starters, term limits and forgive the debt would help without question because Germany did it in 1948 with little or no repercussions.

The NYTimes piece titled 'We Have Lost It All': The Shock Felt by Millions of Unemployed Americans describes what it means to become destitute in an NY Second.

To whit:

For the millions of Americans who found themselves without a job in recent weeks, the sharp and painful change brought a profound sense of disorientation. They were going about their lives, bartending, cleaning, managing events, waiting tables, loading luggage and teaching yoga. And then suddenly they were in free fall, grabbing at any financial help they could find, which in many states this week remained locked away behind crashing websites and overloaded phone lines.

“Everything has changed in a matter of minutes — seconds,” said Tamara Holtey, 29, an accountant for an industrial services company in the Houston area, who was on a cruise to Cozumel, Mexico, as the coronavirus outbreak intensified in the United States and was laid off on her second day back at work.

This is like a car accident caused by someone texting, one second you're alive, the next, you're not. Time to change the ethos of this country now before it's too late.

End of rant for now.

Eerie says it all ...

A superb piece from Rolling Stone titled Ask an Expert on the Fall of Rome: Are We F-cked? details the eerie connect between the fall of Rome and the US in ways both disquieting and apt to a fault.

Patrick Wyman

Crises like these — whether it’s a crisis of political legitimacy, or a pandemic that demands response, or some kind of major external war that crops up out of nowhere — the chances are good that whatever snaps under the pressure of that crisis was probably straining already, was probably barely chugging along already. There’s some kind of deep problem that a crisis is going to expose, bring to the fore, and then break very dramatically for everybody to see.

We see the crisis and we see the break — and we equate the two. We’re narrative creatures. That’s how we understand the world. We understand things as a story with a climax, and the break has to be the climax. It’s very hard for us to turn a more analytical eye and see the collection of very small things that lead up to a systemic break. It’s just difficult. But these disasters don’t create these trends so much as they supercharge them.

Rolling Stone

What kind of breaks, systemic failures, and supercharged trends are you seeing with our response to COVID-19? Your point about systems breaking that were already stretched thin reminded me of these reports that somewhere between 90 and 98 percent of our nation’s ICU beds are being used all the time.

Patrick Wyman

That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. When you have a society that has optimized for some ideal of efficiency or shareholder value, as opposed to redundancy or resiliency, this is the kind of result that you get. From my point of view, that amounts to a break. Something like repeatedly cutting ICU capacity in order to deliver more shareholder profits, that looks like a broken system to me, or at least one in which the incentives are not necessarily aligned with public welfare.

Put on a slightly different scale, if you have an economy that’s set up such that having to reduce consumer spending in order to preserve public health places such a massive strain on it, there’s probably something underlying that’s unhealthy about that system as a whole. If your system of political economy is not healthy enough to withstand a shock like that or respond to that, something’s wrong. If we end up with 20 or 25 percent unemployment, if we end up with large numbers of people who can’t eat, who are going to be paying thousands and thousand of dollars from medical bills if and when they get sick … those are systemic crises that grew out of problems that existed before the coronavirus.

Makes sense does it not and ... read the piece in its entirety. It's the smart thing to do.

PSA: How to shop safely in the age of COVID-19

How to shop safely in the age of COVID-19. Awesome to a fault.

Look before you leap

Look before you leap is prudent, so is intelligent analysis before doing anything of consequence, something not being done by Trump regarding COVID-19 and what it could mean for America if he opens up the country too soon. 

President Trump says he wants the United States “raring to go” in two and a half weeks, on Easter, with “packed churches all over our country.” He and many other political conservatives suggest that we are responding to something like the flu with remedies that may be more devastating than the disease.

To this end, The NYTimes has created an interactive chart showing how the numbers play out in terms of people getting infected based on input by researchers who know their stuff regarding pandemics and the viral agents that drive them. 

These numbers offer a false precision, for we don’t understand Covid-19 well enough to model it exactly. But they do suggest the point that epidemiologists are making: For all the yearning for a return to normalcy, that is risky so long as a virus is raging and we are unprotected.

“Anyone advising the end of social distancing now needs to fully understand what the country will look like if we do that,” cautioned Dr. Tom Inglesby, a health security expert at Johns Hopkins University. “Covid would spread widely, rapidly, terribly, and could kill potentially millions in the year ahead, with huge social and economic impact.”

Look before you leap sounds smart to me don't you think?

Addendum: Another must-read regarding the virus ... Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance depicts in greater detail why Look before you leap is more than just apt. 

Summary of the article: Strong coronavirus measures today should only last a few weeks, there shouldn’t be a big peak of infections afterwards, and it can all be done for a reasonable cost to society, saving millions of lives along the way. If we don’t take these measures, tens of millions will be infected, many will die, along with anybody else that requires intensive care, because the healthcare system will have collapsed.

Any questions?

Greyscale & then some ...

Of days gone by ...

Into the distance

A touch of yellow

Winter's End

The n-body problem

Being rather limited in math, to say the least, yours truly follows science and physics from the visual & verbal perspective so when brilliant researchers describe complex issues in ways I can follow, the topic discussed becomes fascinating to the max.

To whit:

The n-body problem is a famous problem in astrophysics. It arises as you add more bodies to a gravitationally interacting system.

The movements of two bodies of comparable size in orbit around a central point are relatively simple to mathematically predict, according to Newton's laws of motion and Newton's law of universal gravitation.

However, once you add another body, things become tricky. The bodies start to gravitationally perturb each others' orbits, introducing an element of chaos into the interaction. This means that, although solutions exist for special cases, there is no one formula - under Newtonian physics or general relativity - that describes these interactions with complete accuracy.

Here's where it gets really interesting.

When running n-body simulations, physicists sometimes return time-irreversibility in their results - in other words, running the simulations backwards doesn't get them to the original starting point.

The three bodies in the system are black holes, and they were tested in two scenarios. In the first, the black holes started from rest, moving towards each other into complicated orbits, before one of the black holes is kicked out of the system.

The second scenario starts where the first one ends, and is run backwards in time, trying to restore the system to its initial state.

They found that, 5 percent of the time, the simulation could not be reversed. All it took was a disturbance to the system the size of a Planck length, which, at 0.000000000000000000000000000000000016 metres, is the smallest length possible.

"The movement of the three black holes can be so enormously chaotic that something as small as the Planck length will influence the movements," Boekholt said. "The disturbances the size of the Planck length have an exponential effect and break the time symmetry."

Five percent may not seem like much, but since you can never predict which of your simulations will fall within that five percent, the researchers have concluded that n-body systems are therefore "fundamentally unpredictable".

How cool is that?

Chaos rules yet again as one cannot retrace exactly the paths
3 or more bodies take in any given length of time.

A animation of a double-rod pendulum at an intermediate energy showing chaotic behavior. Starting the pendulum from a slightly different initial condition would result in a vastly different trajectory. The double-rod pendulum is one of the simplest dynamical systems with chaotic solutions.

It's different now/Rev III

Michael Ramirez, a brilliant political cartoonist, nails it regarding COVID-19 and the US economy as it's different now and will remain so, possibly forever, due to political and financial malfeasance of a different kind altogether.

The hologram of capital that was not really there dissolves before our eyes. That capital, you understand, was our notion of how wealthy we used to be, like, five minutes ago. And now the capital, the money, the mojo of modern life is going-going-gone. The hologram was projected by a fantastically hypercomplex hologram machine jerry-rigged with frauds, swindles, and false promises to pay tomorrow for that proverbial hamburger today. The people running it left the robots in charge and went off to frolic with the likes of Jeffrey Epstein, speaking of the profane. Then, the hologram machine broke and the iridescent image just plumb flickered out.

And so it goes. - K. Vonnegut

Uncharted waters ...

In 2008, it was the great recession, in 2020, it's uncharted waters with the distinct likelihood
a depression of unimaginable proportions looms. 

Greg Daco, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, says the economy is assured of a recession — at least two consecutive quarters of economic decline — with output falling 0.4 percent in the first quarter and 12 percent in the second. That would be the biggest quarterly contraction on record, but Goldman Sachs upped the ante on Friday, saying it expected a 24 percent drop in the second quarter.

“This is not just a blip,” Mr. Daco said of the outlook. “We’ve never experienced something like this.”

No we have not. 

The proposed federal stimulus — which in a Senate Republican version would include checks of up to $1,200 for taxpayers — would be helpful, economists say, but it would probably only blunt the pandemic’s impact, not stave it off.

“A $1,000 check, or even a $2,000 one, won’t pay the rent in New York City, and I suspect it would run out pretty quickly in most parts of the country,” said Beth Ann Bovino, chief U.S. economist at S&P Global. “It’s nice and it’s needed, but it’s just a Band-Aid.”

If the power elites get bailouts like in 2008, a revolution is nigh as it's now life or death with COVID-19 and financial destitution for main street and the middle class. The pols better listen up and do what's right as their future, along with the power elites is in play now. Just ask the French how that went down beginning in 1789. Food for thought, is it not?

Goldman Sachs says the next weekly total of initial jobless claims could be 2.25 million. Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Family & friends made me do it :)

A legend in yours truly's mind. :)

Think Spring :)

Spring is here. Go outside and check it out as it's one of the things we can do without issue. :)

Cutting a path ...

Black holes cast a shadow on the image of bright surrounding material because their strong gravitational field can bend and trap light. The shadow is bounded by a bright ring of light, corresponding to photons that pass near the black hole before escaping. The ring is actually a stack of increasingly sharp subrings, and the n-th subring corresponds to photons that orbited the black hole n/2 times before reaching the observer. This animation shows how a black hole image is formed from these subrings and the trajectories of photons that create the image. Credit: Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian

Science has figured out how to get razor-sharp images of black holes, something not even conceived of just one year ago prior to getting the first pix of M87.

Last April, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) sparked international excitement when it unveiled the first image of a black hole. Today, a team of researchers have published new calculations that predict a striking and intricate substructure within black hole images from extreme gravitational light bending.

"The image of a black hole actually contains a nested series of rings," explains Michael Johnson of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian (CfA). "Each successive ring has about the same diameter but becomes increasingly sharper because its light orbited the black hole more times before reaching the observer. With the current EHT image, we've caught just a glimpse of the full complexity that should emerge in the image of any black hole."

Because black holes trap any photons that cross their event horizon, they cast a shadow on their bright surrounding emission from hot infalling gas. A "photon ring" encircles this shadow, produced from light that is concentrated by the strong gravity near the black hole. This photon ring carries the fingerprint of the black hole—its size and shape encode the mass and rotation or "spin" of the black hole. With the EHT images, black hole researchers have a new tool to study these extraordinary objects.

How cool is that?

M87 raw image

What M87 will look like after intense data collection and image processing.

Fig. 1 Time-averaged image of a GRMHD simulation of M87.

This model has parameters chosen to be consistent with the 2017 EHT data and corresponds to the high magnetic flux “magnetically arrested disk” accretion state. It has M = 6.2 × 109M⊙, a/M = 0.94, θobs = 163°, rhigh = 10, and mass accretion rate matching the 1.3-mm flux density (5). The spin axis points left when projected onto the image. The time average was performed over 100 snapshots produced from uniformly spaced GRMHD fluid samples over a time range of 1000M (approximately 1 year). Although visually prominent, the thin, bright ring contains only ~20% of the total image flux density.

Stellar without question.

Reality ... is random

Albert Camus

Camus is one of my heroes as his take on life echoes my own as reality is random, there is no certitude, only probabilities driven by the laws of quantum. As in Tao, the only constant, in reality, is change and the key to living the right way starts with assuming nothing, something Camus wrote about with clarity and power in all of his work.

With this being said, Alain de Botton's Camus on the Coronavirus NYTimes essay eloquently details how man copes with the randomness of death using Camus' The Plaque as prime example as to why this is so.

For Camus, when it comes to dying, there is no progress in history, there is no escape from our frailty. Being alive always was and will always remain an emergency; it is truly an inescapable “underlying condition.” Plague or no plague, there is always, as it were, the plague, if what we mean by that is a susceptibility to sudden death, an event that can render our lives instantaneously meaningless.

This is what Camus meant when he talked about the “absurdity” of life. Recognizing this absurdity should lead us not to despair but to a tragicomic redemption, a softening of the heart, a turning away from judgment and moralizing to joy and gratitude.

Camus speaks to us in our own times not because he was a magical seer who could intimate what the best epidemiologists could not, but because he correctly sized up human nature. He knew, as we do not, that “everyone has inside it himself, this plague, because no one in the world, no one, is immune.”

Alain de Botton

Civil Liberties ... in the cross hairs

Italy has imposed unprecedented restrictions on its population to control the virus outbreak. Will the US resort to similar measures? Photo credit: © Fotogramma/Abaca via ZUMA Press

Could civil liberties be permanently snuffed out because of COVID-19? Good question isn't it as the disease continues to wreak havoc on the world 24/7.

“Courts matter” in achieving a balance between protecting public health and respecting civil liberties, said Goodwin. In the Hickox case, she observed, the Ebola crisis had become politicized, and the court ruled that the state had not proven its case that she was a public health threat.

But civil liberties advocates have less faith in the courts under the present administration, she added: “Let’s be clear. The terminology being used in many quarters is that the President has stacked the court,” said Goodwin, who directs the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy at the University of California, Irvine. There are concerns about the influence of “political expediency” on the independence of judges, and whether they can be counted on to rely “on the evidence at hand,” she said.

Given “who sits on the courts these days,” she said, “maybe … we ought to be far more concerned about individuals’ civil liberties.”

The number of conservative judges in federal courts has surged. By the end of 2019, President Donald Trump had successfully appointed 187 of them — including roughly a quarter of all sitting circuit court judges, and two Supreme Court justices.

As stated before in BRT and FB, this is Trump's legacy to America and it's not a good one by any stretch of the imagination.

Congrats to Maine nurse Kaci Hickox and the other Ebola Fighters on being honored
as TIME's People of the Year 

It's different now/rev II

It's different now/rev II is coming on like a runaway train, with no one at the controls able to bring it back into the fold based on the revenge of mother nature and the finalization of the world's business with No. 1 moving manufacturing to China and 2, enabling tech to convert dollars into bits, able to be manipulated in ways thought impossible just 10 years ago. With this in mind, Charles Hugh Smith's take on the vagaries of money is both wise and insightful and his view on It's different now proves yours truly is not alone in sensing the world we know now will not be the world we see just a few years hence.

To whit:

That governments around the world will be forced to distribute "helicopter money" to keep their people fed and housed and their economies from imploding is already a given. Closing all non-essential businesses and gatherings will crimp the livelihood of millions of households and small businesses that lack the financial resources to survive weeks without any revenues.

The only question is whether governments which can borrow or print fresh currency will get ahead of the implosion or fall behind, creating a binary choice: go big now or go home.

Half-measures in helicopter money work about as well as half-measures in quarantine, i.e. they fail to achieve the intended objectives. Dribbling out modest low-interest loans is a half-measure, as is cutting payroll taxes. Neither measure will help employees or small businesses whose income has fallen below the minimum needed to pay essential bills: rent, food, utilities, etc.

A day of reckoning is nigh ...

Meanwhile, the ruling elites will be under increasing pressure to bail out greedy financial elites and gamblers--the same scoundrels and parasites they bailed out in 2008-09. But this is not just another speculative bubble-pop, this is a matter of life and death and solvency for the masses of at-risk households and small businesses. It is a different zeitgeist and a different crisis, and bailing out greedy parasites (banks, indebted corporations, speculators, financiers, etc.) will not go over big while households and small businesses are going bankrupt.

The Federal Reserve, was just handed a lesson in the ineffectiveness of the usual monetary "bazooka" in bailing out the predatory-parasitic class of overleveraged gamblers. Nearly free money for financiers isn't going to save the economy or non-elites sliding toward insolvency.

Instead of leaving the bottom 99.5% to twist in the wind while enriching the predatory-parasitic class, the ruling elites will have to let the top 0.5% twist in the wind and save the bottom 99.5%. This will require going against all the thousands of lobbyists, all the chums at the club, and all the millions in campaign contributions, but it's a binary choice.

Either save your citizenry or sacrifice your legitimacy by bailing out the predatory-parasitic class. If the ruling elites save their parasitic pals, the public will demand the scalps of the predatory-parasitic class, and as the crisis deepens, they will eject every craven, greedy elected toady who caved in to the predatory-parasitic class.

So listen up ruling elites: either go big or go home. Either accept that it's going to take several trillion dollars in helicopter money to insure the most vulnerable households and real-world enterprises remain solvent, or quit and go home.

Any questions?

A new copper age ...

A new copper age is coming, why? Because copper destroys viruses and pathogens on contact, something India has known about for millennia.

In China, it was called “qi,” the symbol for health. In Egypt it was called “ankh,” the symbol for eternal life. For the Phoenicians, the reference was synonymous with Aphrodite—the goddess of love and beauty.

These ancient civilizations were referring to copper, a material that cultures across the globe have recognized as vital to our health for more than 5,000 years. When influenzas, bacteria like E. coli, superbugs like MRSA, or even coronaviruses land on most hard surfaces, they can live for up to four to five days. But when they land on copper, and copper alloys like brass, they die within minutes. “We’ve seen viruses just blow apart,” says Bill Keevil, professor of environmental healthcare at the University of Southampton. “They land on copper and it just degrades them.”

It gets better.

The effect looks like magic, he says, but at this point, the phenomena at play is well-understood science. When a virus or bacteria strikes the plate, it’s flooded with copper ions. Those ions penetrate cells and viruses like bullets. The copper doesn’t just kill these pathogens; it destroys them, right down to the nucleic acids, or reproductive blueprints, inside.

“There’s no chance of mutation [or evolution] because all the genes are being destroyed,” says Keevil. “That’s one of the real benefits of copper.” In other words, using copper doesn’t come with the risk of, say, over-prescribing antibiotics. It’s just a good idea.

Intense or what. It's too late for COVID-19 but not for future bugs so hospitals and us rubes should recognize the fact a new copper age is upon us. The ancient Greeks would be proud. :)

"Ain't" science grand? 

The Sun - The Moon

On one special day, sunrise and moonrise were shot marking the end of winter. Enjoy.

Winter's End

Winter's End depicts the end of a mild 4th season in CT both inland and on the LI Sound with melting ice and the raucous sounds of seabirds and hawks calling for their mates. Enjoy.

It's all about profit, right?

It's all about profit, right? The question to ask here, as the world shuts down,
where is said profit? Something to think about don't you think?

It's different now ...

Gee, I didn't know that :)

Italian astronomer and scientist Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642) performs his legendary experiment.

Everybody "knows" that when one throws a ball, the path it takes is a parabola but that's not the case in a detailed and entertaining Forbs piece titled We All Learned Physics' Biggest Myth: That Projectiles Make A Parabola.

To whit.

Anyone who's ever taken a physics course has learned the same myth for centuries now: that any object thrown, shot, or fired in the gravitational field of Earth will trace out a parabola before striking the ground. If you neglect external forces like wind, air resistance, or any other terrestrial objects, this parabolic shape describes how the center-of-mass of your object moves extremely accurately, no matter what it is or what else is at play.

But under the laws of gravity, a parabola is an impossible shape for an object that's gravitationally bound to the Earth. The math simply doesn't work out. If we could design a precise enough experiment, we'd measure that projectiles on Earth make tiny deviations from the predicted parabolic path we all derived in class: microscopic on the scale of a human, but still significant. Instead, objects thrown on Earth trace out an elliptical orbit similar to the Moon. Here's the unexpected reason why.

If you wanted to model the gravitational field at Earth's surface, there are two simplifying assumptions you could make:

1. The Earth, at least in your vicinity, is flat rather than curved,
2. That Earth's gravitational field points straight down relative to your current location
3. The earth is a sphere.

Ergo, because the earth is round, any object traveling below escape velocity will gravitationally point directly toward the earth's center while following the curvature of the planet as per the diagram seen below, which means ... ellipses rule, not parabolas. :)

Galileo was right. :)

Gee, I didn't know that. :)