Michael Flynn's Blog, page 18

Sundry Unrelated Items

Bending the Aether




Space is full of lines.

NASA has discovered that Einstein was right, again.

Time and space, according to Einstein's theories of relativity, are woven together, forming a four-dimensional fabric called "space-time." The mass of Earth dimples this fabric, much like a heavy person sitting in the middle of a trampoline. Gravity, says Einstein, is simply the motion of objects following the curvaceous [sic] lines of the dimple.

This is what Einstein in his 1920 speech in Leyden called the "relativistic ether."

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The Shipwrecks of Time -- and a new excerpt

Frank Bacon

"Antiquities," wrote Francis Bacon in one of his more lucid moments, "are remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwrecks of time."

To  put  matters more statistically, as TOF knew you would expect, the objects and documents of the past are not a random sample, but a haphazard congeries and there is room in the gaps for all sorts of startling things to happen.

A commentator elsewhere wonders why there is no document in the "Egyptian records" that mentions the escape of the Hebrew slaves in the Exodus.  This tellingly reveals the Late Modern mindset, which cunningly expects the bureaucratic paperwork regime of the Modern scientific State to be replicated in earlier ages.  It so happens that for the reign suspected of including the Exodus, there are only three inscriptions that have survived to the present day.  Whatever else may have been written down has perished in the shipwrecks of time.
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Math is Hard

Teresa Ghilarducci, at the New School for Social Research, describes a trip to North Carolina, which left a colleague "shell shocked." The colleague asked: "How can it be legal to have so much poverty in such a wealthy state?"

Aside from the intriguing notion of ending  poverty by simply passing a law making it illegal -- what an idea!  We could do the same with gun violence -- there is the following observation.

According to Kids Count, New Hampshire has the lowest rate of child poverty, at 11 percent. Ranked worst is Mississippi, where a third of children are poor. But Mississippi is poor over all; it has the lowest median income in the nation. And New Hampshire is rich; its median income is the third highest. I get that. So the child poverty numbers may say more about income than about the management of the state budgets.
But let's look at North Carolina. It is the 39th richest state, and yet it ranks 12th for the percentage of children living in poverty--only 11 states fare worse.

There are fifty states.  The 39th richest state is the same as the 12th poorest state.  And NC ranks 12th in the percentage of The Children™ living in poverty.
h/t WSJ Best of the Web

Hiatus on Hiatus

TOF has been off-line lately, but now he is back.

The A-Team

A is for AstronomyWhen TOF was just a whippersnapper, he had a telescope.

So what?  Read More

How True, How True

h/t Wm. Briggs, Statistician to the Stars

Twinkle, Twinkle

It seems that the rate of supernova occurrence (black line) is pretty much a dead match for biodiversity -- the normalized marine invertebrate genera count (blue line).  The gray is the error band around the biodiversity count.



When Sagan said we were made of star-stuff, he had only half the picture.  Apparently, the stars really do affect life on earth.  The Permian extinction falls right in:

Svensmark notes that the Late Permian saw the largest fall in the local supernova rate seen in the past 500 million years. This was when the Solar System had left the hyperactive Norma Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy behind it and entered the quiet space beyond.

Through a variety of mechanisms, too few supernovae resulted in warmer air, reduced circulation, poor nutrient mixing, ending with a shortage of oxygen in the atmosphere.  Nearly all life on earth went extinct.
But once upon a time an abundance of nearby supernovae chilled the earth so badly it kicked into Snowball Earth.   So, Goldilocks, human life arose in a period of "just right" insofar as supernovae are concerned.

ISMism

Back in the Olde Days, when TOF was a practicing Quality Engineer, there was a popular three-step process for implementing the techniques known as "statistical process control" -- or better yet: SPC.  (The benefit of TLAs is that you don't have to think about what the words mean.)  The three steps were:

The massive training of everyone in sight
The great control chart race
Beating up the vendors





SPC, Science™, and other panaceae

Of special interest are the first two steps.  Statistical process control -- which meant only that one should take account of the variable nature of manufacturing processes and not make adjustments unless there are reasonably certain evidences that the process has actually shifted -- was seen by some as a panacea.  Convinced of the great value of this technique, they would go hog-wild and start hanging charts everywhere.  Management would mandate that everyone would have charts; departments vied to see how many charts they had hung.  Yee-haw!

It was belief in magic.  It was "control chart-ism."  If only we hang these Shewhart charts, magic will happen.  Magic did happen.  Whoever hung the charts eventually disappeared.
The Allegory of the VCD Machine READ MORE

The Glorious Fourth

Denn du sollst es haben!On this day in history, Vicksburg surrendered to Grant and Lee retreated from Gettysburg.

On 2 July 1863, the Confederate attack on Culp's Hill drove the defending German-Americans back until one Louisiana soldier put his hand on a gun of the Pennsylvania artillery, crying "I claim this gun!"
The German gunner replied laconically, "Denn du sollst es haben!" (Then you shall have it!) and pulled the lanyard, blowing Louisiana away.

MORE HERE

Return of the Shipwrecks!

After several months in which the sciatica was too distracting for serious writing, TOF has returned to the WIP; viz., The Shipwrecks of Time. Presently, plans are underway by the Youth Council to picket at Judge Cannon's house in Wauwatosa, and Frank has written a letter of apology to Sorgensson for lying to him during his visit.

But for our excerpt , we are dipping back into the narrative to late February 1966, when Frank asks Carol to go to a movie with him.  It introduces a background note to the narrative.  Two earlier scenes I may also post later on: the premiere of Batman on TV, and the parade honoring native son Jim Lovell, who had spent more time in space (with Frank Borman) than anyone else.