INTERESTING TIMES

 If times were ever interesting, these are getting right up there.  In America, the Executive Branch sent an attack mob to the Legislative Branch of our government.  Marched them right down the avenue from the White House and up the Capitol steps.  One week ago.  That mob overwhelmed all barriers and invaded the Capitol through the windows, during a session.  The building was under lockdown for hours, with our representatives hidden in a subterranean chamber.  You can see the patriot invasion on youtube.  According to potus his mob looked "low class".  But then later he pronounced "we love you" to the same crew.

Then today the president is impeached for the second time.  How interesting.  Twice. May that be followed by a Senate trial and prompt Removal.  

The inauguration is planned to be a "hard target" so attacks may divert to state capitols which are considered "soft".  White supremacists have been booted to the backroads of the internet and are developing clandestine communications to sort out their next grand move.  They would enjoy a chance to kick some ass; a race war would do nicely.

The Executive Branch has been subverting the Judicial Branch by filling benches with sympathetic judges, but it is still a very separate Branch of power.  Lawyers and especially judges tend to be smart and willful and develop their own thinking rather than adopting half-baked ideology.  They see the obvious bogusness of the Big Lie.  The election wasn't stolen.  Those Attorney Generals, all 17 of them that signed on to a Texas lawsuit trying to flip the election, they aren't stupid.  They have been corrupted.  They must be getting rich.  Or have their nuts in a vise.  Or both.  Barr is probably still trying to get his nuts out.

Oh yeah and the pandemic.  Isn't that interesting?  What fascinates me the most is how utterly ignorant most people are about how the body works, and how a virus works, and why some people live and some die from the same virus.  The TERRAIN matters, my friends.  If your organs are sick, you can be weakened and susceptible without knowing it.  Science is really cool, too, it explains so much.

Ignorance about our government and institutions is also prevalent.  Broad ignorance is the terrain on which half-baked ideologies grow.  The difference is education.  But our schools have gotten as lazy as our Capitol defenses.  Believing that America truly is the greatest nation on earth has led to complacency and then denial.  What?  No problems here, we say, but the world knows better.  America was a great experiment in government, still is as of this moment. 

There is the possibility that Trump will function like a vaccine.  Just a tiny dose, well four long years.  Maybe that will autocrat-proof America.  Or maybe the booster shot will be worse.  And on top of that there is the possibility that this Republic will fail.  Trump tried to bring down this government and to date has failed.

Interesting, huh.

 Being ignorant
is not so much a shame
as being 
Unwilling to Learn.

--Benjamin Franklin

I attended the May 12 meeting not really expecting much, but the program was excellent, both informative and amusing.  The speaker was Andrew Greenberg, and the subject was the Oregon Satellite Project and STEM Education.  Specifically he taught us a thing of two about space, orbits and nanosatellites.  I wanted to share just a few factoids that I got from him with you.

Andrew is adjunct faculty at PSU and helps students build rockets and satellites, in addition to his day job  He had recently done an OMSI science pub about the same subject, so he was well prepared and practiced. The OreSat mission is to use an actual satellite project to bring STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering and Math) to all Oregon high schools and to study cirrus clouds.

The Von Karman line is an arbitrary line dividing outer space from not space.  It is 100km above the surface of the earth.  Some balloons fly at 30km above the earth.  Cirrus clouds are the highest clouds and they are about 12km up.

There are three main layers of orbits, labelled LEO (low earth orbit), MEO (medium), and GEO (geostationary earth orbit).  Geostationary satellites have to be highest up and go the fastest to maintain their position relative to the surface of the planet.  Satellites cruise at around 200km from the earth, and they have to go really fast (8km/second or 17,500 miles per hour) to keep from falling back to the earth.  

NASA has a research satellite that was just launched May 5 this year.  It's the InSight mission and it intends to land on the surface of Mars.  The rocket that launched InSight also launched the first two CubeSats, which are small satellites that can be designed individually then connected together.  The high schoolers in Oregon are designing their own CubeSat, which NASA will launch!  They didn't expect to get awarded the opportunity to launch the satellite when they applied, but NASA called their bluff and now they're working on it.  All the software is open source.  The 2U (two unit) CubeSats from Oregon will get "hucked" from the space station into its orbit. It will stay aloft for 6-12 months, or maybe longer if they get lucky. 

The OreSat is scheduled to be deployed in fall 2019.  For the sake of the high schoolers, he's calling the OreSat a "400km selfie stick", because each time it flies over Oregon the high schoolers will be able to receive a packet of information from it, including a picture of their location.  

Then Andrew explained what he means when he says "Space Sucks".  Quite literally it sucks because it is a vacuum.  It speeds up the outgassing from any material that can, challenges welders to prevent leaks, and makes it tricky to keep anything at a reasonable temperature because it gets cold on the dark side and screaming hot in the sun.  The radiation from space does harm to transistors.  Solar cells are only ~30% efficient meaning it's not easy to power systems on satellites, and if they fail, they have to reboot without a mechanic coming to fix them.  "Watchdog systems" monitor the functions of the satellite and attempt to make things right before there is a system failure.

He also mentioned Planet Lab Doves, which are privately owned satellites that basically remap the earth's surface every day.  Exciting stuff.

Anyway, this talk was just a taste of what is happening.  Satellite technology is moving fast and the very first satellite put into orbit by anyone in the state of Oregon will be built by high school and college kids.  That's a fun way to approach STEM education.

Whenever I bemoan the culture of "safe spaces" and "microaggressions" on college campuses, said Andrew Sullivan, people argue that "the real world isn't like that."  But that's no longer true.  More and more of our public discourse is now shaped by the neo-Marxist Left's "identity-based, 'social justice" worldview, in which all interactions are defined by a hierarchy of power and oppression.   Free speech itself is falling into disrepute, as a tool of the patriarchy.  When some feminists recently got wind of a forthcoming Harper's essay criticizing the #MeToo movement, they not only personally vilified author Katie Roiphe, they also tried to force the magazine to drop the piece before publication--a "real-world echo" of students shouting down speakers.  Writers, like students, now know that one "incorrect" opinion on sensitive issues of race and gender can result in "instant social ostracism" and demands they be fired--so they remain silent.  Men cannot discuss sexual harassment; whites cannot talk about racism.  The goal of our society is not "the emancipation of the individual," but permanent placement of the individual in the proper identity group: white, black, brown, female, gay, etc.  "We used to call that bigotry.  Now we call it being woke."

--Summary of Andrew Sullivan's article (NYMag.com) from The Week February 23, 2018.

 Your confusion is not pathology, it is path. It has something to show you that clarity could never reveal. The nature of chaos is wisdom, but you must provide a home for it to receive its mysteries.

Your feeling of disconnection is not neurotic, it is intelligent. It has something to show you that oneness could never reveal. If you will practice the yoga of non-abandonment and provide safe passage – it will disclose an unmet doorway.

Your loneliness, your shakiness, and your fear are not mistakes. They are not obstacles on your path. They *are* the path. The freedom you are longing for will never be found in the eradication of the unwanted, but only in the core of the love and information it carries.

There are surges of somatic activity that contain very important information for your journey. If you will offer safe passage for the unknown aliveness, you will meet the messengers of illumination. Nothing is missing, nothing is out of place, and nothing need be sent away.

Yes, you may burn until you are translucent, but it is by way of this burning that your wholeness will be revealed.

~ Matt Licata

The surest way to corrupt a youth
is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem
those who think alike
than those who think differently.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

Foresight isn't
a mysterious gift bestowed at birth.
It is the product of particular ways of thinking,
of gathering information,
of updating beliefs.
These habits of thought can be learned and cultivated
by any intelligent, thoughtful,
determined person.
--Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner on page 18 in
Superforecasting; the Art and Science of Prediction

Bring carbs
Eat protein.

Dr Paul brings ribs from a restaurant.  He's in his 90's and doesn't mind spending his money on food for others.  He's a retired physician, orthopedic surgeon to be specific.  His sons are all in medicine too, some clinical and some research.  He gave me the Mayo clinic book on Alternative Medicine.  They basically have a stoplight rating system for all things alternative, and the majority of treatments get the yellow light based on the science that they found.  I appreciate it pretty much.  They don't damn naturopathic medicine, it gets yellow also.  There are good and bad parts.  I wish they'd do the same approach for conventional medicines.  People might be shocked how weak the evidence is for some of them.  The degree to which pharmaceutical businesses drive the FDA and the delivery of medicine is apalling.  I love it every time I read of another review that shows reasonable conventional doctors understand that some of the uses of pharmaceuticals are unsubstantiated and may do more harm than good.