Chaos Manor View, Monday,
This will be brief. The weekend was no fun. Roberta had two trips to the doctors, and I had one. We are now in the process of recovery and the symptoms are changing in the right directions, although neither of us feels very good. We’re better than awful, anyway.
My brain is not working very well. I’ll try to catch up with some mail but it’s short shrift time – I don’t think my comments would make sense.
If you get the current crud, take it seriously. Meanwhile here are some thing to think about..
: Turns Out It’s Not Comets
Jerry,
I hope you and Roberta are both feeling better. It’s been a winter of lingering bugs here too, which has been cutting productivity to an annoying extent. Worst behind now, fingers crossed – behind or not, I have to be getting started on the program for the next Space Access conference. JIT as usual!
Meanwhile, it turns out that KIC 8462852’s odd variability probably isn’t comets after all. Someone looked back in a Harvard archive of old astronomical photos and discovered the star’s brightness had previously gradually dropped by 20% overall between 1890 and 1989, a result that would require an improbably large number (and I suspect also an improbably even distribution) of comets.
So, is it aliens after all? The IR you might expect from structures intercepting the visible light and re-radiating as heat is still absent, and building structure to intercept 20% of a star’s output in a mere century is a *lot* of construction. I’m sure we could both come up with plausible aliens-building-stuff scenarios that’d still fit this, of course, but the way to bet is still some natural process.
Until that natural explanation comes along, though, it’s like the Powerball – a cheap license to dream. (FWIW, I would have set up a C-3 dedicated to sponsoring development of the low-cost space-ops tech that NASA keeps putting off to pay for mega-pork rockets.)
best
Henry
More from Dr. McCulloch on the ‘Pioneer Anomaly’
Hello Jerry,
We have been assured by ‘experts’ that there is in fact NO Pioneer anomaly. What seemed to be an ‘anomaly’ was actually the effect of the pattern of thermal emissions from the spacecraft.
Now it turns out that the Ulysses spacecraft, with a different physical design, different thermal emission profile, and a dramatically different orbit which carries it well out of the plane of the ecliptic ALSO shows a trajectory ‘anomaly’ of the same magnitude as the Pioneer Anomaly, within the limits of error.
Dr. Mike McCulloch claims that his MiHsC theory explains both ‘anomalies’ (and a lot of other cosmological ‘anomalies’) directly, within the error budget, without any fancy thermal modeling, without any adjustable parameters, and without requiring such wondrous stuff as Dark Matter and Dark Energy, whose existence is so far only in evidence by their being required so that the universe behaves as predicted by the equations of ’Settled Science’. Plug the numbers in Dr. McCulloch’s theory (he says) and the universe behaves as they predict.
Here is what Dr. McCulloch has to say about the subject:
http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.com
I’m certainly not qualified to adjudicate the matter, but Dr. McCulloch DOES have a PhD and from where I sit it is much more palatable to have a NEW equation that predicts observations directly than to have an OLD equation which predicts observations only if you assume that 95 odd percent of the universe is unobservable mass and undetectable energy, distributed in such a manner as to make the observed behavior of the 5% we can see fit the old equation.
Bob Ludwick
properly…
Researchers Are Teaching ATLAS To Do Household Chores Like Rosey from The Jetsons,
Jerry
We are getting closer to Door Into Summer:
http://gizmodo.com/researchers-are-teaching-atlas-to-do-household-chores-l-1753179792
Ed
Euthanasia rollercoaster’s fatal journey is ‘euphoric’, ‘elegant and meaningful’ | Daily Mail Online
Jerry:
This is not quite as macabre as Soylent Green.
Just think of it as evolution in action?
It reminds me of the catapult that I designed as a whimsical suggestion of how to deport illegal aliens.
James Crawford=
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
