Category Archives: Science

Finally, masks are back…

Well…as you know I still wear a mask whenever I’m out and around people because I’m not going to get that damn disease…and it doesn’t bother me in the least when people give me dirty looks (hasn’t really happened much) when I’m grocery shopping…but today something weird happened…I’m normally the only one that has a mask on but not today…I must have counted almost 20 people in masks at Meijers and Aldis…and that surprised the heck out of me since people aren’t taking covid seriously anymore…but I am and I will continue to after reading the serious health effect of getting it just once…wear a mask to prevent brain damage? Yep…wear a mask to prevent Alzheimers? Yep…wear a mask to prevent heart and lung damage? Yep…you get the picture…my body is wearing out fast enough without letting a damn virus speed that up….at least more people are starting to figure that out, too…geez…

The stupidity, it burns…

Well…there’s a new meme about solar panels going on over at fox news and all across the right wing media today that has me just shaking my head about the stupidity of the right wingers in this country…you want to know what it is? Reports all across the right wing stupidsphere are breathlessly reporting that solar panels won’t create electricity when it’s cold outside…okay, I wonder if anyone remembers the first place solar cells were used to generate electricity? If you grew up in the 60′s, you know…in space! Do any of the idiots spouting this nonsense know how cold it is in space? It’s -454 degrees…yep MINUS 454 degrees, at least three 4 times colder than it ever gets even in the coldest place on Earth…so I really think they just might be wrong about this one….damn, the stupidity, it burns! Geez…

The two hottest days ever recorded…

Well…I wonder what the climate deniers are going to say about this? Monday and Tuesday of this week were the the two hottest days since records have been kept…and climate scientists have physical records in the trees and ground that it is the hottest two days in the past 140,000 years…with the highest concentration of co2 since that time, too…so what is the repub response to getting to the tipping point where whole ecologies are going to die? To try to outlaw doing anything about it and giving more subsidies to the oil giants to keep dumping more and more garbage into the air….if we just took the money we give to the oil companies every year and invested it in renewables, we could start digging ourselves out of the hole the fossil fuel industry has dug for the planet. People are dying all over the planet and no one wants to do anything about…I fear for my grandchildren and the world they are going to have to live in…geez…

Okay this is different…

Well..I’m sure you’ve read the news about the submersible that was trying to go down to the Titanic wreck and imploded from the pressure and killed the 5 people who were in it…as the news comes in, it appears that this accident can be put down to the hubris of the owner of the company who built it…just today, it was revealed that the sub was not certified by any of the normal agencies that do that kind of stuff…and normally outside engineering teams are brought it to check their work so to say…but this company did none of that…no testing, no nothing and now 5 people are dead from it…look, trying to go that deep is not an easy thing and that’s the reason that there aren’t hundreds of the subs around….they should at least have sent it down to that depth remotely piloted to make sure it was safe but no, these guys thought they knew everything but they didn’t…and they are dead….geez…

A supernova…

Well…let’s get away from politics for a minute and talk a little astronomy…on the 19th, an amateur astronomer saw a supernova in the galaxy M101…and. as you know, since the galaxy is 21 million light years away, it actually happened 21 million years ago and the light is just getting to us now…it is the closest supernova to Earth in almost a decade…it has continued to brighten over the past few days an will probably get almost bright enough to see with a small telescope which I wish I had…that would be so cool to see the light first hand…supernovas happen when a star runs out of hydrogen and start to fuse other elements like helium and oxygen until the star gets to trying to fuse iron that the star doesn’t have the energy to do so the star collapses and then explodes to make a supernova…and that process can happen very quickly…in some stars it only takes minutes for the entire process…so, pretty cool to think about other things than politics for a change…

Cheap elon did it…

Well…it is starting to trickle out that the failure of starship this past week is a direct result of ole elon being cheap…when I was watching the launch, I noticed that 6 or 7 or the outer ring engines were dark and knew it couldn’t be good…and they were dark because elon cheaped out on the launch pad and didn’t build flame deflectors for under the pad…he just dumped the exhaust from the 39 engines onto the concrete pad and the aftermath photos showed that the pad was totally destroyed from it…and debris from the pad bounced up and destroyed the engines…some of the chunks of concrete flew almost a half mile and destroyed a bunch of cars…and the dust and dirt from the pad covered the sensitive wetlands the pad is built on…and the reason he built in Texas was that he could do whatever he wants with no regulation…typical billionaire bullshit that they get away with all of the time…now one question I have is where were the engineers as all this crap was going on? The math should have told them that the concrete under the pad was not strong enough to take the exhaust of 39 engines fired at once but not one of them said a thing since ole elon is notorious for firing people who tell him no…so, all of this is on elon and I hope the feds step in and at least fine spacex for the damage this launch did…we know Texas won’t…geez…

Starship go boom…

Well…again, even though I hate elon….it was cool to see the super heavy with starship take off this morning…but, that was about all that was good about it…the first and second stage failed to separate and the whole thing started to tumble so it was destroyed…one good thing was the look on ole elon’s face sitting in the control room when it blew…poor, poor, elon…I’ll do one in politics when I get back from having my teeth cleaned at 2…

Space X launch…

Well…just a short one on the SpaceX launch of the Falcon super heavy and Starship that is happening in 36 minutes…as much as I hate elon musk, I do still like that there is progress on rockets and space ships…not sure how much it will do to lift my mood…don’t think there is anything that will help with that…oh, and it is snowing here…in the middle of frickin April…

An effect of electric cars…

Well…with reading an article today about the effect that the adoption of electric cars is going to have, it reminded me that I had this same idea a couple of years back so I thought I’d talk about it a bit….in this article, the author posits that at the current pace of adoption where 17% of the cars in California are already electrics, there will be 50% less gas stations for the rest of us that will probably still have ICE cars…and the possibility of only having 1-2 stations in a town the size of Muskegon…right now, gas stations don’t make any money on gas but on the snacks and other stuff they sell…without people coming in for gas, though, they won’t have enough traffic to stay in business…so there is going to be huge disruptions in business related to ICE cars as less and less of them are on the road…I wonder if I’ll see a ban on them in my lifetime…could be…