Another Coincidence

There are very close to one mole of stars in the universe:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cm8F_iHDj_a/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY%3D

(Sorry, embedding doesn't work.)

Coincidence?

Number of humans who have ever lived ≈ 100 billion  

Number of stars in our galaxy ~ 100 billion

Number of galaxies in the universe ~ 100 billion

Pictures of Trump's Arrest

 Via Wired.

 This are all fake, produced by AI: 

Making pictures of Trump getting arrested while waiting for Trump's arrest. pic.twitter.com/4D2QQfUpLZ

— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) March 20, 2023

Higgins indicates how to spot these as fake, but I sure can't see that. These are excellent. 

La Fin du monde

La Fin du monde ("The end of the world") is a woodcut by the French astronomer and author Camille Flammarion. 

In the lower left corner is a toppled hourglass of sand.

Perhaps appropriate today (except for the direction of the temperature change) with the release of the IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report, which says (page 25), among many other things:

"...for thousands of years."

From The Guardian:

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said: “This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.”

"Everything, everywhere, all at once" -- I like that phrase. Sadly, there's no chance of it happening, of course. 

Kaisa Kosonen, a climate expert at Greenpeace International, said: “This report is definitely a final warning on 1.5C. If governments just stay on their current policies, the remaining carbon budget will be used up before the next IPCC report [due in 2030].”

Censored By Google

I received an email from Google (who owns Blogger) about my July 2019 blog post "I Am Now Too Old to Use the Internet".

Your post titled "I Am Now Too Old to Use the Internet" was flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content; the post is visible at 

http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2019/07/i-am-now-too-old-to-use-internet.html. 

Your blog readers must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.

     Why was your blog post put behind a warning for readers?

     Your content has been evaluated according to our Adult Content policy. 

Please visit our Community Guidelines page linked in this email to learn more.

But why? All I can figure out is that I used the word "fuck" twice in that post. There's nothing else at all controversial there that I can see. Just me musing, a bit emotionally.

So really? Now you can't use the word "fuck" in a Blogger post? Seems pretty ridiculous, and very heavy. 

I wonder if an enemy of mine (?) turned me in to Google for such a piddling issue.

I never use the f-word in real life, among people. But I do use it when I stub my toe. 

I did use it here twice when emotional. I'm hardly going to apologize for that.

Fuck Google's unthinking AI. 

Weird and it makes me a bit angry. Of course, there's no sense in trying to fight this, even if I could figure out who to write to--there doesn't seem to be any way to contact them to ask questions.

Reminds me of the time I was banned from posting to Facebook for two months because I posted this picture:

What an amazing picture, full of strength and opposition.

And the unthinking robotic bitches at FB blocked it.

I don't do much of anything with Facebook anymore.

Maybe now Google will also ban me to for posting this amazing picture. If so, fuck them.

Alcohol and Pi

This is International Pi Day (3-14, get it?), which personally never excited me much, although the number itself is interesting per se. 

Anyway, in an article about pi in the New York Times, a commenter noted the following mnemonic for the first 15 digits of pi:

And it's true; count the number of letters in each word: 3-1-4-1-5-9-2-6-5-3-5-8-9-7-9.

Not very exciting either, really, but there you have it. If you can remember the mnemonic. 

I've always been a little intrigued that pi appears in Einstein's field equations for general relativity, his theory of gravity that says essentially "mass tells space how to bend, and space tells matter how to move" (John Wheeler). 

where the R's and g's specify the shape of spacetime, and the T specifies the matter distribution in the spacetime. This is actually a total of 10 different equations, but that doesn't matter here.

Why does pi appear on the right-hand side? And an 8? Weird. What does gravity  have to do with a circle, as pi is defined at the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter?

The 8πG/c⁴ is called the "Einstein constant" κ (kappa). G is Newton's gravitational constant, and c is the speed of light.

Wait, first, why does the speed of light appear here? It turns out that if you solve these field equations for a traveling wave, its speed in vacuum is that of light, c. Gravity travels at the speed of light. But it seems to me that it's more that light travels at the speed of gravity, because gravity--the very shape of space(time)--is more fundamental than electromagnetism. It's electromagnetism that exists in spacetime, so its fundamental properties are determined by spacetime.

I don't think the 8π is anything mystical or mysterious. OK, in a flat vacuum a gravitational wave would travel outward with its furthest points on a 4-dimensional sphere (3-dimensions of space and one of time). Something circular, since the circumference and surface area of a sphere also contains π. I think it's more that someone could have defined one of the items in the equation better, if they had deeper foresight. 

Which one? Maybe Newton's gravitational constant should have absorbed the 8π, so instead of G in Newton's equation, the proportionality constant would be G', where

G' = 8πG 

so Einstein's constant would be simply 

κ=G'/c⁴

But then why the c⁴? Newton had no reason to deal with that; he didn't even know if the speed of light in a vacuum was a constant. So naturally he just used G for the proportionality constant in his equation that gives the force between two masses. So an 8π popped out the other end, because our view of the universe is nonrelativistic.

No doubt there are plenty of people who have some insight into this instead of my banal musings. I wonder what they would say.

World GDP per Capita

In 2010 dollars:

About three times higher since I was born. Enough?

Real Income per Worker, US

2012 dollars:

(I really should fix that.)
 

2 People For Every Job

Unemployed per job openings, US:

 

Indoor Mile Record

This 2019 video of a world record set in the indoor mile really shows how incredibly fast these runners run:

 

I mean, I could never have run that fast, even for a single lap, when I was young. Not even half a lap. Not even down the back stretch.

I know the runner who set a world record here is genetically gifted, thin and tall, with a long stride. Sometimes I think this ruins world class athletics, that it's really only open to those who have the exact genome to excel in their event. Consider sprinters (Usain Bolt) versus this mile sprinter versus a champion weight lifter. All built very differently, and their events aren't open to those who aren't similarly born.

I'm not suggesting that everyone be weighted down a la Kurt Vonnegut. (Did Vonnegut ever assess his own advantages?) I guess most people enjoy watching a genetically gifted person run a mile in a record time. I do too.

But the same also applies to society at large. Smart people, people born smart for no reason of their own, will tend to do well in high-powered jobs in engineering or science or finance, while those who aren't as genetically blessed will not. No one ever wants to talk about this. Everyone feels they worked their way into their success an never wants to recall all their advantages, whether genetic, the environment of their youth, or luck. 

It's the ultimate discrimination.

Goalie Scores a Goal

For only the 16th time in NHL history, a goalie scored a goal. 

Two days ago, Linus Ullmark of the Boston Bruins put on in in the last minute of the game, into an empty net after the opposition pulled their goalie.

 

All of these have been since 1979.

I assume all goalies dream of this. Only 13 have scored. Some scored multiple times -- three for Martin Brodeur of the New Jersey Devils, and two for Ron Hextall of the Philadelphia Flyers, who is now the general manager of the Pittsburgh Penguins (who aren't doing so great this season).

Here are more if you want to see them:

About Ukraine

Record Warmth in New England

In an article about the loss of ice for skating in New England, the Washington Post wrote: 

Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont all experienced their warmest Januaries ever. After a short burst of extreme cold early this month, the mild temperatures returned.

The article is about this beautiful resort on the Vermont-New Hampshire border hasn't been able to open its famous four-mile ski trail on a lake until early February, and with only six inches of ice.

There's a saying that "Vermont is nine months of skiing and three months of bad skiing." Looks like that needs updating. 7 and 5? What a shame.

New England is warming faster than nearly every other part of the country, and the region’s winters are warming twice as quickly as the other seasons, said Stephen Young, a professor of sustainability and geography at Salem State University in Massachusetts. Any activity that relies on the cold, whether skiing or making maple syrup, is looking at an unstable future.

In New Hampshire it's been the same. The "ice-in" date for Lake Winnipesaukee -- the date when the boat MS Mount Washington can no longer make it to every one of its ports on the lake -- wasn't declared until Feb 5th. It's the latest ice-in date on record, and the first time it's happened after February 1st.

They've also had to cancel several winter activities there, or move them to a smaller lake: ice fishing, fishing derbys, hockey tournaments, a think a car fell through the ice....

New England in January is really beautiful, so cold and pristine it's like a different planet. March, April and the first half of May are tough though, when cabin fever sets in. 

It's so sad that these kind of experiences are going to end for so many people. Even growing up in Pennsylvania I have very fond memories of sledding down hills and nearly getting killed by trees, sledding down driveways and trying to avoid cars, even roads when there was a big snowstorm and school was cancelled. We used to stay out late on weeknights to where my mother could barely pry our boots off when we came into the cellar, they buckles were jammed up with ice. Warming back up actually hurt sometimes. 

Maybe kids don't go outside anymore anyway -- when was the last time you saw a group of kids playing baseball or football in a vacant lot? They were all over the place when I was a kid. I guess video games are too enticing now. Or they won't leave the security of Mommy and Daddy. Or Mommy and Daddy are afraid to let them run off on their own. Or they're off playing in traveling teams where they have to drive hours every weekend for a tournament. Honestly, I kind of feel sorry for today's kids.

Not my photo, not my field, before my time. But it 

was something like this.

Wild Sweet Orange

 It's a crime this band never made it.

Just got my external Bose speaker working again. Nice.

Stuff

"The richest 1 percent of people on Earth made almost two-thirds of the new wealth created since the pandemic began, Oxfam said in a report released Monday, the opening day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, a ski resort in the Swiss Alps." (WaPo, a while ago) 

Humans have the largest ratio of brain mass-to-body mass of any mammals, but of all species ants have the largest ratio at about 15% (NdT)

(Ants are insects, not mammals.)

Anyway why is it the ratio that matters? If the brain is basically a computer, why isn't its size (proportional to the number of neurons and synapses?) the relevant metric, and not its relative size to body mass?

The Japanese Meteorological Association has measured 2022 to be the 6th-warmest year since 1890.

I also heard on YouTube Shorts that all mammals take 21 seconds to empty their bladder, regardless of their mass and size. (Can't find the link, sorry.) My own investigations have varied somewhat, but I'm no longer at the optimum human age. 

I don't want to live in a world without elephants, if from human avarice and stupidity they ever go extinct. What a miserable planet that would be. Just take me too.

Book recommendation: The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. Once I started it was difficult to put down.

Then, don't ever see the movie. How dare they.

Sea Ice Extent Update

Sea-ice extent in the Arctic was 3rd-lowest for Januarys, starting in 1979.

For the Antarctic it was the lowest ever for Januarys. 

But the Antarctic SIE continues to be...weird...inscrutable...confusing...intriguing. Here's its 12-month moving average:

The data are here -- choose #2.

The Direction of Suicide Jumpers on the Golden Gate Bridge

I came across this chart of the locations of suicide jumps on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, from Wikipedia:

This is strictly a technical observation...but I think it's very interesting that the vast majority of jumps have occurred on the east side of the bridge, which faces the city and communities beyond (like Oakland and Berkely), compared to the west side of the bridge, which faces out to the huge and endless Pacific Ocean. [Views]

Caption: West to the right, east to the left.

Of course I don't know why, and can only speculate. I would guess that view to the east, the side of the bridge from which the vast majority of jumpers jump, is more "friendly" -- in the direction of people, of humanity, of life. The view to the west is pretty rough, just impersonal ocean, waves and current going out rapidly.

Why would jumpers prefer to jump towards civilization instead of into a relative abyss? Of course, I don't know that either. Maybe it's some bare, atavistic impulse to still want to be involved in life, even as it ends.

I remember the story, when I lived in New Hampshire, of a man with a terminal illness. He had always loved hiking in the NH mountains, of which the White Mountains are the most prominent and spectacular. To die he choose to climb to the top of one of them, in a colder time of the year, and sit there until he froze to death. 

Dying alone, that's got to be a tough choice. Hardly typical. Except suicide is always a lonely choice. But maybe, just perhaps, brave in a way. I wonder if jumping to the west of the Golden Gate Bridge isn't somehow equivalent, when jumping to the east might be a last, if fatal, sign of hope. These things are very deep and I don't know if we can ever understand them. I don't really need to. But the Wiki chart made me think and wonder.

--

Added: the Golden Gate Bridge now has suicide nets, since 2013:

They do seem to have helped some, though not solving the problem completely:

Added: trailer for the documentary film The Bridge.

Added: the story of one jumper who came out unscathed. (Only about 1% of jumpers survive.)

US Government Finances

Mostly recovered since the depth of the pandemic, but still not great. 

Here's the federal deficit at any point in time for the prior 12 months:

Data Source: Monthly Treasury Statement.

 

This and That

 Items I found interesting:

• songbirds reach 90% of their adult weight 10 days after they're born. (Via The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman, which I'm currently reading.)
• "US renewables generated more power than coal and nuclear: More than one-fifth of all electricity in the US now comes from hydropower, wind, and solar, meaning that renewables have narrowly overtaken coal and nuclear, which make up 20 percent and 19 percent of the energy mix respectively. The only other year this was the case was 2020—but back then overall power generation was reduced due to the pandemic." (Wired) 
• Dana Milbank on the spectacle of the Republicans being unable to elect a House speaker:

  "This is what happens when a political party, year after year, systematically destroys the norms and institutions of democracy. This is what happens when those expert at tearing things down are put in charge of governing. The dysfunction has been building over years of government shutdowns, debt-default showdowns and other fabricated crises, and now anti-government Republicans have used their new majority to bring the House itself to a halt.
  
  "This is insurrection by other means: Two years to the day since the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol, Republicans are still attacking the functioning of government. McCarthy opened the door to the chaos by excusing Donald Trump’s fomenting of the attack and welcoming a new class of election deniers to his caucus. Now he’s trying to save his own political ambitions by agreeing to institutionalize the chaos — not just for the next two years but for future congresses as well." (Washington Post)

Faulkner Quote and Book

I've been avoiding Faulkner for a few decades, ever since I struggled through the first section of The Sound of the Fury, which is told as a stream-of-consciousness thinking of a very mentally disabled young man. I never did finish the section or read the three others than came after that. 

But the other day I decided it was time to try Faulkner again, as I've had As I Lay Dying on my bookshelf since (checks inside cover) April 1994, when I bought the book in (checks inside cover again) Albuquerque, New Mexico. What a fabulous book. It's also told in a stream-of-consciousness style, this time from the points of view of about a dozen different characters. It's set in Mississippi in the 1920s, and the main characters are poor, rural people, so their streams can be a little hard to grasp. To get started it helps to have a look at the character list and, gradually, the plot synopsis.

Still, the characters are, with only a couple exceptions, uneducated, so their diction and thinking can be lean, subtle and sometimes confusing. You have to pay close attention, and when you think you are missing something (like one woman's shy visit to a pharmacy seeking medication for an abortion, in a time and place where that issue wasn't talked about except in very general terms that beat way around the bush), it helps to glance quickly at the plot summary. But Faulkner also puts noble thoughts in their presentations, like the quote above, words that sometimes seem above them and are really Faulkner putting his own ideas and philosophies into their stream.

But soon the book starts to make sense as you get the characters straight in your mind, and their mission, which revolves around the trials and tribulations of transporting their dead mother 40 miles away by mule-and-wagon for her burial with her people. The story was gripping and, to my surprise, I couldn't put the book down once I was about a third of the way into it.

I highly recommend this book, if only to see what all the acclaim about Faulkner is about (though he didn't always write in a stream-of-consciousness style). You just have to read carefully and look outside the book when you need a little help. 

The best books I've read this year!