Luna

 

Soft light, particularly when the sky is overcast, is the hallmark of when the moon is full, something readily seen in this short clip.

12.9 billion ...

In a universe far, far away ...

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe’s birth in the big bang – the farthest individual star ever seen to date.

The find is a huge leap further back in time from the previous single-star record holder; detected by Hubble in 2018. That star existed when the universe was about 4 billion years old, or 30 percent of its current age, at a time that astronomers refer to as “redshift 1.5.” Scientists use the word “redshift” because as the universe expands, light from distant objects is stretched or “shifted” to longer, redder wavelengths as it travels toward us.

The newly detected star is so far away that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, appearing to us as it did when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age, at redshift 6.2. The smallest objects previously seen at such a great distance are clusters of stars, embedded inside early galaxies.

This detailed view highlights the star Earendel's position along a ripple in space-time (dotted line) that magnifies it and makes it possible for the star to be detected over such a great distance—nearly 13 billion light-years. Also indicated is a cluster of stars that is mirrored on either side of the line of magnification. The distortion and magnification are created by the mass of a huge galaxy cluster located in between Hubble and Earendel. The mass of the galaxy cluster is so great that it warps the fabric of space, and looking through that space is like looking through a magnifying glass—along the edge of the glass or lens, the appearance of things on the other side are warped as well as magnified.

Credits: Science: NASA, ESA, Brian Welch (JHU), Dan Coe (STScI); Image processing: NASA, ESA, Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

Factoids ...

When Stars Align

The research team estimates that Earendel is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun and millions of times as bright, rivaling the most massive stars known. But even such a brilliant, very high-mass star would be impossible to see at such a great distance without the aid of natural magnification by a huge galaxy cluster, WHL0137-08, sitting between us and Earendel. The mass of the galaxy cluster warps the fabric of space, creating a powerful natural magnifying glass that distorts and greatly amplifies the light from distant objects behind it.

Thanks to the rare alignment with the magnifying galaxy cluster, the star Earendel appears directly on, or extremely close to, a ripple in the fabric of space. This ripple, which is defined in optics as a “caustic,” provides maximum magnification and brightening. The effect is analogous to the rippled surface of a swimming pool creating patterns of bright light on the bottom of the pool on a sunny day. The ripples on the surface act as lenses and focus sunlight to maximum brightness on the pool floor.

This caustic causes the star Earendel to pop out from the general glow of its home galaxy. Its brightness is magnified a thousandfold or more. At this point, astronomers are not able to determine if Earendel is a binary star, though most massive stars have at least one smaller companion star.

12.9 indeed. 

Conventional wisdom ...

Pool photo by Mikhail Klimentyev

An interesting and insightful post from Bret Stephens of the NYTimes titled What if Putin Didn't Miscalculate? makes imminent sense when you look at how this guy operates, cool, ruthless and cunning, characteristics in concert with the long game he might be playing as articulated in this excellent piece. 

To whit ...

The conventional wisdom is that Vladimir Putin catastrophically miscalculated.

He thought Russian-speaking Ukrainians would welcome his troops. They didn’t. He thought he’d swiftly depose Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. He hasn’t. He thought he’d divide NATO. He’s united it. He thought he had sanction-proofed his economy. He’s wrecked it. He thought the Chinese would help him out. They’re hedging their bets. He thought his modernized military would make mincemeat of Ukrainian forces. The Ukrainians are making mincemeat of his, at least on some fronts.

Putin’s miscalculations raise questions about his strategic judgment and mental state. Who, if anyone, is advising him? Has he lost contact with reality? Is he physically unwell? Mentally? Condoleezza Rice warns: “He’s not in control of his emotions. Something is wrong.” Russia’s sieges of Mariupol and Kharkiv — two heavily Russian-speaking cities that Putin claims to be “liberating” from Ukrainian oppression — resemble what the Nazis did to Warsaw, and what Putin himself did to Grozny.

But maybe ... 

The possibility is suggested in a powerful reminiscence from The Times’s Carlotta Gall of her experience covering Russia’s siege of Grozny, during the first Chechen war in the mid-1990s. In the early phases of the war, motivated Chechen fighters wiped out a Russian armored brigade, stunning Moscow. The Russians regrouped and wiped out Grozny from afar, using artillery and air power.

Russia’s operating from the same playbook today. When Western military analysts argue that Putin can’t win militarily in Ukraine, what they really mean is that he can’t win clean. Since when has Putin ever played clean?

But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the West is only playing into Putin’s hands once again?

Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).

Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.

Photo by Zbynek Burival on Unsplash

Time seemed to have stopped ...

Operation Hardtack Poplar, July 1958.Credit...Photograph via Wikimedia Commons

This pix of an H Bomb going off resonates to yours truly in terms of just how horrific said tech truly is. Without question, man has the ability to destroy civilization at the push of a button. The question now is, will we push it?

In a nuclear detonation, the thermal and shock effects are the most immediate and are unimaginable. The fission-fusion process that occurs in a thermonuclear explosion happens in a millionth of a second.

As I watched from 20 miles away, all the materials in the bomb, barge and surrounding lagoon water and air had been vaporized and raised to a temperature of tens of millions of degrees.

As the X-rays and neutrons from the bomb raced outward, they left the heavier material particles behind, creating a radiation front that was absorbed by the surrounding air. The radiation, absorption, reradiation and expansion processes continued, cooling the bomb mass within milliseconds.

The outer high-pressure shock region cooled and lost its opacity as it raced toward me, and a hotter inner fireball again appeared.

This point in the process is called breakaway, occurring about three seconds after detonation, when the fireball radius was already nearly 5,500 feet.

By now, the fireball had begun to rise, engulfing more and more atmosphere and sweeping up coral and more lagoon water into an enormous column. The ball of fire eventually reached a radius of 1.65 miles.

Time seemed to have stopped. I had lost my count of the seconds.

The heat was becoming unbearable. Bare spots at my ankles were starting to hurt. The aluminum foil hood I had fashioned for protection was beginning to fail.

I thought that the hair on the back of my head might catch on fire.

The brightness the detonation created defies description. I worried that my high-density goggles would fail. - Rod Buntzen

Read on, the power of this tech run amok is both mesmerizing and terrifying at the same time.

Operation Hardtack Oak, June 1958.Credit...Los Alamos National Labs

In love of the weird ...

I'm all for the weird as long as it's funny and ... as long as it doesn't infringe on governance, something not the case regarding what is happening in the good ole USA regarding Ginni Thomas, the loose cannon "better" half of Clarence Thomas, a marginal supreme for the ages.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the two-headed main character Zaphod Beeblebrox finds himself fed up with a particularly bewildering receptionist who does not appear to be making sense. “Don’t try to out-weird me, lady,” he growls. “I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.”

That pretty much pegs where I’m at today. In a land where Donald Trump was and could again be president, where a huge swath of the populace angrily denounces BandAid-level technology meant to thwart a murderous pandemic, and where a slap at the Oscars merits equal press ink with a civilian massacre in Europe, one must eat their Wheaties in triplicate and bank eight good hours of sleep before daring to reach the new and utterly terrifying threshold of modern-day “weird.”

Enter Ginni Thomas, wife of Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Please place your seat backs and tray tables in their proper positions, prepare for turbulence ahead, and oh God tell my mom I love her.

The weird gets biblical.

In the process, Ginni Thomas began keeping some very interesting company. Most noteworthy was Mark Meadows, White House chief of staff, who began exchanging text messages with Thomas in the immediate aftermath of the election. Before getting into the subtext here, it is important to read some of the actual texts in their frothing apocalyptic Christian glory.

Thomas to Meadows, 11/10/21: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!! … You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”

Meadows reply, 11/24/21: “This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”

One must eat their Wheaties in triplicate and bank eight good hours of sleep before daring to reach the new and utterly terrifying threshold of modern-day “weird.”

I but wait what? King of Kings? Was he referring to God or Trump? The fact that the question needs asking definitely meets the Beeblebrox Standard for Weird, and according to The Washington Post, there are at least 29 more just like these. “They didn’t just approach the election fight with religious zeal,” writes David French for The Atlantic, “they approached it with an absolute conviction that they enjoyed divine sanction. The merger of faith and partisanship was damaging enough, but the merger of faith with lawlessness … represented a profound perversion of the role of the Christian in the public square.”

Clarence and Ginni Thomas at a Heritage Foundation event to celebrate his 30 years on the Supreme Court last October.Credit... William Mebane for The New York Times

Ginni Thomas insists, in her council biography, that she and her husband operate in “separate professional lanes,” but those lanes in fact merge with notable frequency. For the three decades he has sat on the Supreme Court, they have worked in tandem from the bench and the political trenches to take aim at targets like Roe v. Wade and affirmative action. Together they believe that “America is in a vicious battle for its founding principles,” as Ginni Thomas has put it. Her views, once seen as on the fringe, have come to dominate the Republican Party. And with Trump’s three appointments reshaping the Supreme Court, her husband finds himself at the center of a new conservative majority poised to shake the foundations of settled law. In a nation freighted with division and upheaval, the Thomases have found their moment.

Question, why is this political operative still on the court? Houston, we have a problem.

Zaphod Beeblebrox

Soft power of a different kind ...

 

Graphicarts/Getty Images

Yours truly actually remembers this scene when Gramps bought a very early RCA color tv during the halcyon mid 50s when the government was in the black and America was the hegemon of the world. Separated by two oceans, the US created a unique pop culture other countries gravitated to while at the same time, the lack of knowledge on the part of the US regarding other countries remains even today,  both astounding and disturbing without question.

In the mid-1990s, an American college student named Max Perelman was traveling through Sichuan, China, more than 1,500 miles from Beijing. While holed up in the southwestern province during the winter months, he encountered a group of Tibetan travelers heading to their capital, Lhasa. The group embraced the young American, sharing food from their rucksacks, perhaps over a fire or in a hostel. The Tibetans had apparently never traveled far from their village before nor had they seen technology like Perelman’s camera. Yet at some point in the conversation, one of the Tibetans turned to Perelman and asked: How is Michael Jordan doing?

That these Tibetan travelers in rural China not only knew about an American sports league but also followed one of its stars and his team—the “Red Oxen,” as the Chicago Bulls are known in Asia—reveals a defining feature of the contemporary international order: The rest of the world is glued to the United States. Foreigners follow American news stories like their own, listen to American pop music, and watch copious amounts of American television and film (in 2016, the six largest Hollywood studios alone accounted for more than half of global box office sales). Sometimes the attention cast toward American culture comes at the expense of foreigners knowing about their own countries. Canadians, a 2008 study found, tend to know more about American history than about their own national history.

Exporting culture equates to soft power of a different kind.

The story of how the U.S. came to dominate global culture—the French called it “coca-colonization”—is one that has been told before. The focus of A Righteous Smokescreen is broader. It is a study of both sides of the globalization ledger: As the U.S. exported its culture in astonishing amounts, it imported very little. In other words, just as the U.S. took command as the planetary superpower, it remained surprisingly cut off from the rest of the world. A parochial empire, but with a global reach.

Lebovic picks apart the lofty rhetoric of reciprocity—especially the ambiguity-addled “free flow of information”—by focusing on what he calls “quotidian world-ordering.” Examples include visa regulations, civil aviation treaties, and educational exchanges, all of which constituted the very processes that laid and limited the transnational paths that information and culture traveled along. Although Lebovic’s claim that most scholars of this period study more seemingly grandiose geopolitical problems is a bit hyperbolic—consider Daniel Immerwahr’s work on the international battle over screw-thread standards or Arissa Oh’s research on the origins of international adoption in the early Cold War—his approach is wildly innovative and helps us dramatically rethink the postwar U.S. and the limits to the world order it helped construct. Containment, Lebovic shows, wasn’t just a territorial strategy committed to holding back Soviet expansion into Europe and Asia. Rather, it began at the American border and it involved policing the flow of people and ideas that were potentially inimical to the American status quo (this form of containment caught a much wider array of ideologies than just Soviet communism in its net). An Iron Curtain, to rejig Churchill’s famous speech about Soviet policies in Eastern Europe, had descended around the U.S.

When the dust settled after World War II, the United States stood as the world’s unquestionably pre-eminent military and economic power. In the decades that followed, the country exerted its dominant force in less visible but equally powerful ways, too, spreading its trade protocols, its media, and—perhaps most importantly—its alleged values.

Frittering it all away ...

 Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Frittering it all the away applies, beginning with Ronnie deregulating everything to enable corporations to offshore manufacturing to China in order to gin profits for stockholders to a disastrous Middle East foreign policy iniative costing America 8 trillion with nothing in return save death and destruction, thus rendering this country fundamentally broke except for the weapons manufacturers making tremendous profits while the rest of the country splinters into a nation in name only, rabidly focused on non-economic hot button issues like women rights, Critical Race Theory and the ongoing insanity of Trump world instead of actually trying to rebuild the country into a viable entity able to deal with the complex vagaries of a hostile world facing the existential issue of climate change while maintaining access to high tech, the prime driver of the world's economy as civilization moves further into the 21st century.

Taiwan chip industry emerges as battlefront in U.S.-China showdown

The U.S. currently can’t make our own semiconductor chips. We’re actually trying to make a deal with Taiwan so they’ll make more for us. China can rebuild their capabilities, but their technology lags Taiwan by a decade. Essentially, both the U.S. and China have found themselves almost completely dependent on Taiwan for all of its technology.

This situation is going to get worse…

Climate change isn’t going to suddenly stop destroying key semiconductor sites. If anything, it’s going to keep shredding our economies along with our capabilities to make electronics, including cars and appliances. Whoever dominates the production of tech and key resources will, basically, rule the world. Nobody will be able to oppose them.

The US is clueless ...

If you’ve been paying attention, China has only solidified its economic and political partnership with Russia over the last year. They’ve all but come out in support of their invasion of Ukraine. They’ve very quietly agreed to offer economic and military assistance.

Meanwhile, China has also been making all kinds of deals with countries that don’t like the U.S. very much. They’re making oil deals with Saudi Arabia, who pretends to be our ally. They’ve started singing love songs to India, despite border tensions. They’ve also recently made a security pact with The Solomon islands. We don’t even know about some of these deals until leaked documents reveal them to us.

China has invested a lot of energy in making friends with countries that westerners have ticked off. A growing partnership between China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and a handful of other resource-rich countries is nothing to sneeze at. China is building a coalition of economies that can make western sanctions worthless.

They’re making powerful friends.

It gets better ...

China has been preparing for the worst.

While climate change decimates us with pandemics and natural disasters, Americans are getting high on wishful thinking.

China hasn’t.

The Chinese government has made massive investments in clean energy. They’re been building hydro plants, solar plants, and wind plants. They’re even building nuclear plants. Soon, they’ll have something western countries have toyed with for decades — true energy independence. I don’t just mean from other nations, but from fossil fuels.

China has also been hoarding grains. They’ve been telling their own people to stock up on food. Between drought and fertilizer shortages, they know the world is in for rough times.

They’re going to weather it.

We won’t.

Over here in America, we’re more reliant on fossil fuels than ever. We’re so dependent that we’re having to send stimulus checks for gas, just to keep our own citizens from rioting in the streets.

Frittering it all away ... applies

1/137

1/137, an odd fraction to be sure but it seems it's rather important as it defines how charged particles interact with the electromagnetic force and, as researchers note, no one knows where it came from. 

A seemingly harmless, random number with no units or dimensions has cropped up in so many places in physics and seems to control one of the most fundamental interactions in the universe.

Its name is the fine-structure constant, and it's a measure of the strength of the interaction between charged particles and the electromagnetic force. The current estimate of the fine-structure constant is 0.007 297 352 5693, with an uncertainty of 11 on the last two digits. The number is easier to remember by its inverse, approximately 1/137. 

If it had any other value, life as we know it would be impossible. And yet we have no idea where it comes from.

The fine-structure constant is a seemingly random number with no units or dimensions, which has cropped up in many places in physics, and seems to control one of the most fundamental interactions in the universe. (Image credit: Wikimedia)

In this Feynman diagram, an electron (e−) and a positron (e+) annihilate, producing a photon (γ, represented by the blue sine wave) that becomes a quark–antiquark pair (quark q, antiquark q̄), after which the antiquark radiates a gluon (g, represented by the green helix).

The mystery deepens ...

The introduction of a constant wasn't all that new or exciting at the time. After all, physics equations throughout history have involved random constants that express the strengths of various relationships. Isaac Newton's formula for universal gravitation had a constant, called G, that represents the fundamental strength of the gravitational interaction. The speed of light, c, tells us about the relationship between electric and magnetic fields. The spring constant, k, tells us how stiff a particular spring is. And so on.

But there was something different in Sommerfeld's little constant: It didn't have units. There are no dimensions or unit system that the value of the number depends on. The other constants in physics aren't like this. The actual value of the speed of light, for example, doesn't really matter, because that number depends on other numbers. Your choice of units (meters per second, miles per hour or leagues per fortnight?) and the definitions of those units (exactly how long is a "meter" going to be?) matter; if you change any of those, the value of the constant changes along with it.

The Tao beckons ...

So why does it have the value it does? Remember, that value itself is important and might even have meaning, because it exists outside any unit system we have. It simply … is.

It's all about energy ...

A rendering of a light-harvesting complex from a bacterium.Credit...Iain Johnston

Life's economical. It takes the easy way out in stealing energy from the environment in order to survive. A smart way to do it lies with symmetry as repeats and system modularity saves energy by doing repeats and not build anew in order to stay alive.

Symmetry runs rampant in nature. It’s present wherever mirror images are repeated, like in the right and left halves of elephants or butterflies, or in the repeating patterns of flower petals and starfish arms around a central point. It’s even hiding in the structures of tiny things like proteins and RNA. While asymmetry certainly exists in nature (like how your heart is off to one side in your chest, or how male fiddler crabs have one enlarged claw), symmetrical forms crop up too often in living things to just be random.

Recursion and feedback loops rule.

In a paper published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers analyzed thousands of protein complexes and RNA structures as well as a model network of molecules that control how genes switch on and off. They found that evolution tends toward symmetry because the instructions to produce symmetry are easier to embed in genetic code and follow. Symmetry is maybe the most fundamental application of the adage “work smarter, not harder.”

“People often are quite amazed that evolution can make these incredible structures, and what we’re showing is that it’s actually easier than you might think,” said Ard Louis, a physicist at the University of Oxford and an author of the study.

As proof ...

Symmetry and simplicity spontaneously emerge from the algorithmic nature of evolution

Why does evolution favor symmetric structures when they only represent a minute subset of all possible forms? Just as monkeys randomly typing into a computer language will preferentially produce outputs that can be generated by shorter algorithms, so the coding theorem from algorithmic information theory predicts that random mutations, when decoded by the process of development, preferentially produce phenotypes with shorter algorithmic descriptions. Since symmetric structures need less information to encode, they are much more likely to appear as potential variation. Combined with an arrival-of-the-frequent mechanism, this algorithmic bias predicts a much higher prevalence of low-complexity (high-symmetry) phenotypes than follows from natural selection alone and also explains patterns observed in protein complexes, RNA secondary structures, and a gene regulatory network.

As often stated, for life, it's all about harvesting and using energy in the most efficient way possible. :)

Conway's game of life applies, does it not? :)

Red glider on the square lattice with periodic boundary conditions

Just 5 seconds ...

Natural light, like that of the Blood Moon, makes one think in terms of the enormous impact light of all type has on animal behavior.

To whit ...

In the world's darkest oceans, turning on a light has profound effects, SHIFTING ENTIRE ECOSYSTEMS WITHIN A MATTER OF SECONDS — and not for the better.

How animals behave in the deep sea depends on their environment, and these creatures like it dark. A new study shows that light pollution from ships may disrupt ecosystems below the ocean surface as much as 200 meters deep.

The artificial light fundamentally alters how fish and zooplankton living at these depths behave.

That means research ships which emit light could throw off their own samples, calling any scientific knowledge we claim about these deep, dark oceans into question.

Natural light also plays a part as seen by the Black Swift 

and it's connect to full moons. 

An international research team led by Lund University in Sweden has managed to study the flight behaviour of the mysterious black swift. They found, among other things, that the black swift rises to extreme heights during a full moon, seemingly catching insects in the moonlight. And, during a lunar eclipse, the birds simultaneously lost altitude. The results are published in Current Biology.

Them Changes - (Buddy Miles/Jimi Hendrix) 

5000 & counting ...

What do planets outside our solar system, or exoplanets, look like? A variety of possibilities are shown in this illustration. Scientists discovered the first exoplanets in the 1990s. As of 2022, the tally stands at just over 5,000 confirmed exoplanets. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Waiting for the Webb applies as said instrument, a near and mid-infrared light sensing device, has the resolution and proper wavelength bandwidth to analyze exoplanet atmospheres in detail, something promising to change how man views the universe the moment Webb starts doing science beginning in June.

The count of confirmed exoplanets just ticked past the 5,000 mark, representing a 30-year journey of discovery led by NASA space telescopes.

Not so long ago, we lived in a universe with only a small number of known planets, all of them orbiting our Sun. But a new raft of discoveries marks a scientific high point: More than 5,000 planets are now confirmed to exist beyond our solar system.

The truth is out there ...

Symphonia

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

Symphonia (Greek: συμφωνία "accord") is a normative theory or concept in Eastern Orthodox Christian theological and political thought, especially within the Eastern Roman and Russian Empires, which posits that church and state are to complement each other, exhibiting mutual respect with neither institution presuming to dominate the other.[1]

Chilling says it all but religion has almost always allied itself to government as its all about the money ... and power, something most readily seen in what's happening in Ukraine and Russia's way to rationalize why this atrocity is happening.

Beneath the gold onion domes of the Danilov Monastery a few miles south of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin’s chief shaman explains why Russia is hell-bent on destroying Ukraine.

“If we see [Ukraine] as a threat, we have the right to use force to ensure the threat is eradicated,” Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill recently preached to his church’s 90 million faithful followers. “We have entered into a conflict which has not only physical but also metaphysical significance. We are talking about human salvation, something much more important than politics.”

The wartime coalition between Putin and his patriarch is called symphonia, an ironclad alliance between church and state that assures reciprocal reverence, with neither institution presuming to dominate the other. Theologians have spent centuries bickering over the fine points, which have now impaled 44 million Ukrainians as the victims of a bloodthirsty land-grab that Putin and the Patriarch have packaged as a holy campaign to cleanse souls.

The word assume applies.

To be sure, the only lingering question is how far into repression and hideous cruelty can Putin and his patriarch descend before the means no longer justify the ends.

Byzantine and Orthodox church historian Henry Hopwood-Philipps reckons NATO and all those who stand against Putin’s klepto-theocratic regime are in for a long wait. “The information war, the military war against Putin looks to be effective,” Hopwood-Philipps says. “But for all the West’s digital gunpowder, we’re up against nearly 700 years of a deeply entrenched otherworldly belief system.”

“Putin and Kirill are attached at the hip.”

As the patriarch sees it, Ukrainians are sinners. “Many people out of weakness, stupidity, ignorance and most often a willingness to justify sin condemned by the Bible is a test of our ability to profess faith in our Savior,” Kirill has told his flock.

The dark ages loom.