We respond…
Again Elizabeth Stauffer is using her column inches (~70% to 80% of them)… to fuss about what she says is “0.7% of America.”
I find it… boring.
Most Americans do too, Bits.
Listen to Sununu, in your own tribe. You could do worse than to follow his advice.
Cheers.
Out.
We will re-run an older, Cassini-era graphic here — but you may see the newly imaged water plumes at the NASA/JWST story, here.
Here’s the latest bit, from NASA, ESA and JWST:
…A water vapor plume from Saturn’s moon Enceladus spanning more than 6,000 miles — nearly the distance from Los Angeles, California to Buenos Aires, Argentina — has been detected by researchers using NASA’s [newest] Space Telescope. Not only is this the first time such a water emission has been seen over such an expansive distance, but Webb is also giving scientists a direct look, for the first time, at how this emission feeds the water supply for the entire system of Saturn and its rings.
Enceladus, an ocean world about four percent the size of Earth, just 313 miles across, is one of the most exciting scientific targets in our solar system in the search for life beyond Earth. Sandwiched between the moon’s icy outer crust and its rocky core is a global reservoir of salty water. Geyser-like volcanoes spew jets of ice particles, water vapor, and organic chemicals out of crevices in the moon’s surface informally called ‘tiger stripes….’
Love the tiger stripes… smile. Now you know. Onward.
नमस्ते
Paul goes on and on tonight, about how mean some in the GOP are being to DeSantis.
Of course, underneath his unseemly bleating, lies a rather solid point: if the GOP regulars keep tearing DeSantis down, they will make it at least marginally easier for Tangerine to win the GOP nomination. And the regulars hate that thought, more than death.
So… there is nothing about Paul’s blog installment tonight… that I do not love.
Where he goes astray, though — is in assuming that if DeSantis wins the nomination, he might win in the general. [We all agree — Trump will never win this time, in a fair general election. No way.]
But as EmptyWheel cogently points out, there is no scenario where (if Trump doesn’t win the nomination at the GOP convention) Trump goes away quietly. He (being a sociopathic narcissist!) will 100% certainly then launch third party, solely to scorch the DeSantis’ Earth. To salt… ALL GOP fields.
And again, I will cheer.
But there is a small danger, per EmptyWheel now — that Trump is jailed by mid-2024, or at least, convicted of multiple felonies.
That would (unfortunately, for Democrats!) end his bid, as a matter of law, if not a matter of fact. You see, in many states he won’t even be eligible to be on the ballot (with a pending felony, or if incarcerated). And that might just hold enough of the GOP together, to eek out a DeSantis win, in the general.
But the probability of all THAT aligning, by late summer of 2024… is well under 1%.
So — I am grinning ear to ear, as Paul reconfirms that Frum said “the only difference between DeSantis and Trump is that DeSantis arrives at work on time, not watching TV until 11 AM every weekday.”
Gotta’ love that!
Of course, this is all (STILL) to cover for Hinderaker’s lies (as at right).
And of course, most of the worst mis-steps were due to Trump golfing for about 70 days, while senior citizens died, by the thousands — and he kept saying it will just “magically disappear”. Just as John said it would.
It did not.
And in the end, far more died than needed — approaching the level of the Spanish Flu of 1918, due primarily to the fecklessness of these hard right frothers, running red states.
Damn.
Out.
This was the last time we saw a small issue with MIRI ops, when one of the mirrors took a micro-meteorite hit, last year. But this is a new, internal glitch.
It seems the sensors in medium resolution imaging mode are recording less light, at ultra-long wavelengths than expected. The simple solution is just to take a slightly-longer exposure picture. But the team will continue to bird-dog the issue, even though nothing, science wise, is being impacted.
It is important to know whether it is hardware (a fried circuit from another micro-strike) or software — simply some bad lines of code, in the millions of lines running the rig. Here’s the latest:
…Last week, NASA shared a blog post saying they detected a sensor glitch associated with the… Telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). For some reason, the sensor for MIRI’s Medium Resolution Spectroscopy (MRS) is receiving less light than expected at the longest wavelengths.
NASA is investigating the cause, and said that the instrument is not at risk and no effect has been seen for images taken by MIRI. According to agency officials, all other modes of JWST and MIRI remain unaffected, and they are searching for the underlying issue.
The glitch was found this month during regular calibration and monitoring of the telescope’s performance. NASA said they routinely monitor all 17 observing modes of the telescope and when they compared the brightness of standard stars that have been well-cataloged by other observatories to what MIRI was receiving, team members noticed a discrepancy in the data….
So it goes…. And now, onward, to a sunny BBQ with my baby-girls!
नमस्ते
Hilarious.
In a word, Mr. Otis: Nope.
Yammer and grunt and whine all you like.
I think public and certainly private universities will still be able to broadly consider race and other “diversity” factors in admission, when the dust settles from the Harvard and UNC cases.
But you carry on, in your vain attempts at storming that castle, son. That battle (from your perspective) was lost in the last decade of the last century; the world moved on.
You and your Luddites ought to, as well.
Cheers.
The data — beamed back from the moon, before loss of signal — points to a series of mistaken altitude readings as Hakuto-R glided toward the lunar surface.
The Japanese team’s automated guidance systems mistook a crater’s lip as flat plain-land, and assumed Hakuto-R was three miles nearer to touchdown than it was.
Consequently, the lander spent all its fuel well before final touchdown, and had nothing left to drop the gravitational acceleration / falling rate, for a soft kiss touch-down. Thus the hard landing caused loss of signal, and subsequent NASA photos from orbit indicate a shattering of the larger Hakuto-R components. Here’s that report:
…Hakuto-R, the brainchild of the Japanese space company ispace, was set to become the first private lunar lander to successfully touch down on the moon, but it unexpectedly lost communication with ground control during its final descent. After several failed attempts to reestablish communication, ispace’s team concluded that the spacecraft had suffered a “hard landing,” impacting the moon rather than landing gently.
The next day, April 26, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) passed over Hakuto-R’s landing site, snapping 10 images. Scientists compared these images with previous photos of the region in hopes of pinpointing the Japanese lander’s final resting place….
Now you know. Indeed, as we’ve said… essentially forever, space really is hard. Onward, just the same. We press… on.
नमस्ते
I just have to laugh: this afternoon, Hayward is waxing in outrage, over stuff he saw literally 40 years ago in San Fran.
He thinks it damns Democratic candidates… in 2023-24.
Yep. I’ll just chuckle.
Steve — man, the world of that prior century has faded to immutable… dust.
Get over it — and yourself.
Sheesh.
This is an amazing time — in the course of democratized scientific exploration — to be alive, to be certain.
Not even 100 years ago, spotting such objects in the night sky would be reserved for only the most ultra-wealthy people on the planet (or to those most deeply connected to major universities with their own observatories, on a very dark mountaintop, somewhere). The equipment alone would consume 50 years of an average person wages, just to amass.
But here and now (for about the last half-century, in truth), people who are essentially hobbyists may properly earn the sobriquet “Mr. Supernova” — having found several of them, on his own. Amazing! Here is the latest, an about once in a decade find, at least for those popping off in our local neighborhood:
…A new supernova in the Pinwheel Galaxy, aka M101, is the closest to Earth in a decade. Amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki discovered it on May 19, 2023. The supernova should remain visible to amateur astronomers with backyard telescopes for a few months. The supernova – named 2023ixf – lies in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major, near the end of the handle of the Big Dipper.
The last supernova in M101 was in 2011. Andy Howell, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, explained on Twitter that the 2011 explosion resulted from a white dwarf that underwent a thermonuclear supernova. Andy said that the new supernova is most likely from a different cause, from a core collapse of a massive star at the end of its life….
And the brightening should be visible (if you live far away from city light pollution), on a clear night, after the moon sets, even to the naked eye. Now you know, with a hat tip to our erstwhile Anon. commenter — with eyes on the night skies, like Galileo. Grin.
नमस्ते
Here this afternoon (perhaps having seen my suggestions — for more psychologically balanced column inches!), she would tell us that because people talk about him, he is the front runner.
Gosh — (for the sake of the Democratic chances!) I sure hope so. But that is simply her delusional thinking, once again, up in the sauce.
Either way, the Democratic Party will hold 1600 Penn in 2024, but a dog-fight between DeSantis and Tangerine will be a very good thing (for all of the Democratic candidates).
Bitsy tries to make this sow’s ear into a silk purse — but not even her own party faithful is buying that load of dung.
DeSantis is lethal to business interests — ones that fail his faux X-tian “moral edicts”.
That makes him a pariah in the GOP. Even if he is nominated he cannot win (unless Trump is his Veep). And we know that will never happen.
And when Tangerine fails to win the GOP nomination… he will run third party, and kill the field — leaving it wide open for a Democratic landslide, the likes of which were last seen when Mr. Obama secured his first term.
H I L A R I O U S.
Out.
