Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.
I love this whole Bretbug splat. As usual David Simon brings it:
David Simon
Verified account @AoDespair
David Simon Retweeted
WTF. You had this your feed 10 days ago, and now you’ve narced on some college professor because he called you..checks notes..a “bedbug.” Motherfucker, any day I don’t get addressed here as a libtard, cuck, Hollywood Jew and (((David Simon)))? I’m not even trying. You hypocrite. https://twitter.com/BretStephensNYT/status/1162362697347981314 …
Bret Stephens
Verified account @BretStephensNYT
Ricky Gervais: “When a comedian apologizes, I go oh, ‘F***ing don’t apologize!’ You can’t please everyone, and you shouldn’t. You can’t legislate against stupidity, and you shouldn’t.”
Mike Drucker
@MikeDrucker
·
47m
Bret Stephens, waking up this morning like, “Well, now that I’ve safely put this bedbug insult to rest, let’s see what topics people are discussing online”
Talia Lavin
@chick_in_kiev
·
9h
bret stephens would not survive 3 minutes of being a woman on twitter tbh.
Bret, who recently wrote a column about how Free Speech was more important than people’s stupid hurt feelings, has apparently now deleted his Twitter account.
First hard frost of the season for my area this morning. Last hard frost was like….July 11th. I’m not ready for “summer” to be over, it just got started!!
No, this is not an April Fool’s joke:
Chris Christie launches public policy institute in farcical attempt to elevate discourse
The same Chris Christie who made a career of of bullying people?
What’s next, someone close to Trump launching a campaign to reduce bullying? Oh, yeah…
@Jax:
A couple of cool days, but just a tease. We have two more months of shorts and sandals. Sometimes we get a frost in October, but rare.
I’ll take 98 degree heat anytime.
Was just googling to see if anyone was trying to relate the dark matter in the universe and the excess of matter (as opposed to antimatter), and came across this:
Antimatter is very rare in our universe compared to regular matter, but there are small amounts of antimatter all over the place in the natural world, including inside your body. Antimatter is created by many types of radioactive decay, such as by the decay of potassium-40. When you eat a banana, you are eating trace amounts of antimatter-producing atoms. The amount is so small, that it does not really affect your health. But it is still there. Why doesn’t antimatter build up in your body? The key is that our universe is mostly made of regular matter, so antimatter cannot stick around for very long. Very soon after antimatter is created, it bumps into regular matter and gets destroyed again. Antimatter is also produced by lightning and cosmic rays. It is well understood by physicists, and is predicted by standard particle physics theories.
I’m thinking that someone needs to create a Banana Diet fad that promises weight loss due to the antimatter in bananas.
@Mister Bluster: Automobile models that with the exception of the Ranger are no longer manufactured? (I know that this is the wrong answer, but I thought I’d try. Can’t resist a trivia quiz even though I no longer connected well enough to pop culture to do well at it.)
It’s a bit complicated. if dark matter exists at all, then it does interact with regular matter at least through gravity. That’s how we suspect it even exists, through the work Vera Rubin did measuring the spin of galaxies.
I like the idea of matter not wanting, or for that matter, wanting, to do something.
I’m thinking that someone needs to create a Banana Diet fad that promises weight loss due to the antimatter in bananas.
Wow, that would be so preposterous, and so tenuously based on fact, that it ought to be a most popular fad.
If Wikipedia is accurate, then the half life of Potassium 40 is about one and a quarter billion years, and only 0.001% of the time it decays to Argon does it produce a positron (that’s the antimatter particle in question, which annihilates when it contacts an electron).
A positron weighs about 0.000538 times as much as a nucleon (proton or neutron). But multiply that by 2, as it takes the electron it interacts with as well. so 0.001076 nucleon equivalents are gone.
No clue how much potassium there is in a banana, but most of the fruit will be carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen anyway. Carbon alone has 12 nucleons, plus 6 electrons.
So, most potassium is not radioactive. What is radioactive, about 0.012% of all potassium, only emits antimatter 0.0001% of the time, and the long half-life means you’re far more likely to digest several bananas before even one potassium 40 atom decays. And then the loss of mass is so negligible as to require math and physics to detect.
It’s a winner. debunking it would involve reading something like what I just wrote, and that includes partial confirmation. The hard problem is to monetize it.
Dark matter a terrible name really. Things we typically called dark are things which absorb light. Dark matter just doesn’t interact electromagnetically.
And yes it’s there. I never did astrophysics, but the astrophysicists I listen to say that alternatives such as MOND don’t fit the data as well.
Banana Antimatter Diet is a preposterous idea, on the other hand yesterday I posted to Facebook a photo of hydrogen infused water which is some grade-A bullshit, yet you can buy it on Amazon for $3 a can.
@Teve: I have problems with a theory that says we cannot interact with 85% of the matter, except through gravity, and that it is so diffuse (one squirrel’s worth on earth) that we can never meaningfully test it.
It’s possible, sure, but it’s also possible that it’s the modern Ether. I’m a dark matter skeptic.
I don’t think there’s a grand Chinese conspiracy to get research grants and make us change our economy, I just think we are a ways off from an experiment that shows the existence or non-existence of dark matter.
Simply put, MOND may not be MO enough.
I’m also a dark energy skeptic. If the universe itself is expanding, that effect falls into our current equations an an energy, and it’s a useful abstraction, but I’m not sure it’s really an energy.
It’s possible, sure, but it’s also possible that it’s the modern Ether. I’m a dark matter skeptic.
Half the time, I am too.
I may be splitting hairs, but I like the analogy to the hunt for Vulcan, the planet that had to exist between Mercury and the Sun in order to make sense of Mercury’s orbit within the framework of Newton’s laws of gravitation.
See, Mercury did not comport as Newton predicted, but everything else did. A “dark” planet would explain it. Galaxies spin faster than all our knowledge of gravity say they should. “Dark” matter would explain it.
Mercury’s orbit dynamics proved we did not understand gravity well enough. Perhaps galactic spins prove the same thing, perhaps this time there is matter unaccounted for. Either way, determining what the deal is should point to, or uncover, fundamental aspects of physics we know nothing about.
I don’t know much about astrophysics, I only had two or maybe three classes from astrophysicists. And my advisor was one of the big names in the shock-waves-through-supernova-debris subfield but we never talked about that stuff because I really didn’t give a shit about astrophysics. I was in the lab cooking up gold nanoparticles and making monolayers and playing with AFMs and such.
Previously undiscovered particles that solve a mass problem but don’t interact electromagnetically would be not terribly different from how neutrinos were first hypothesized and later discovered. And the people who study this stuff for a living say that it’s a lot easier to expect that to exist than some bizarre modifications to gravity which would additionally break general relativity.
I like the idea of matter not wanting, or for that matter, wanting, to do something.
There is actually a lot of debate in quantum mechanics circles about the necessity of the observer. According to the standard theory, the wave function doesn’t collapse into an actual event until it is observed. Which implies that there were no events, just a very complex wave function, right up until the first time the universe produced an observer. But how could such an observer be ‘produced’ without any events actually occurring? Is a potential observer enough? How much consciousness is required for an observer to be able to collapse wave functions?
There are serious physicists out there who have concluded that the standard theory implies that consciousness is primary and the material universe is just a side effect…
(Next week we can talk about the Possible Worlds interpretation vs. the Copenhagen School…)
@DrDaveT: observation doesn’t mean in physics what it means in normal discussion. You can set up a detector to take the ‘observation’ and make a recording, no consciousness involved. There are a few people who have that strange philosophy you mention, but they’re pretty fringe. There have been some physicists who were borderline loons, John Wheeler comes to mind.
@Tyrell: The summer temps make the winters around here bearable….the summer just doesn’t last long enough! Rarely above 90. And as far as the cold…..once it hits -10 regularly, -40 isn’t all that much different unless the wind picks up. And it makes 20 degrees feel like a heat wave! 😉
Trish Regan went on Fox news and said a bunch of really stupid Fox-type things comparing Denmark to Venezuela etc. Some Denmarkian* replied to her comments in a 2-minute video. You should watch it. It’s fun. 🙂
Previously undiscovered particles that solve a mass problem but don’t interact electromagnetically would be not terribly different from how neutrinos were first hypothesized and later discovered.
I may have it all wrong, but I got the impression the neutrino was hypothesized as necessary to balance nuclear reactions. I think it had to do with the some kind of conservation law involving muons or leptons. It’s been a while.
I should add I read that in a book by Isaac Asimov, who was not a physicist.
Speaking of XKCD, Randall Munroe has a new book, and audiobook, out next September called “How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems.” The audiobook is read by Wil Wheaton, who also read Munroe’s “What If.”
It behaves oddly for something nonexistant. There are some galaxies that are mostly dark matter, others that have very little dark matter. On the large scale, it clumps in different locations than galaxy clusters.
My Polish grandfather once referred to Flemish people as “the Flames.” This got a big laugh, but I think he was basing it on the analogy of Denmark –> Danes.
Banana equivalent dose (BED) is an informal measurement of ionizing radiation exposure, intended as a general educational example to compare a dose of radioactivity to the dose one is exposed to by eating one average-sized banana.
@SenyorDave: my favorite part was, paraphrased, “since it doesn’t cost anything to stay in school, nobody ever graduates. Anyway, the graduates…” Like, can you even fucking hear your own mouth?
I may have it all wrong, but I got the impression the neutrino was hypothesized as necessary to balance nuclear reactions. I think it had to do with the some kind of conservation law involving muons or leptons. It’s been a while.
in beta decay a neutron turns into a proton or vice versa by giving off an electron or a positron, but the mass / energy wasn’t balancing out, and somebody realized if there was a small invisible particle that didn’t interact electromagnetically and was carrying away some of the mass everything would work out.
-ino, I now happily understand, is the diminutive in Italian, so neutrino means something like ‘little neutral one’.
Sometime late this spring by my reckoning, conservatives got a feverish idea that any government program equals Venezuela. This new idiotic belief has compelled them to make fools of themselves in a slightly new way for several months now.
@Teve: @charon: The Ether solved a lot of problems up until it didn’t — and it was way more intuitive than something that redefined physics. It also was a fine placeholder that let people solve different problems, and eventually come up with a framework that allowed them to ask questions… including, eventually, the Mitchelson-Morley experiment.
The Ether was great. I mean no disrespect to dark matter when I compare it to the Ether. We’re just lacking an experiment that shows dark matter either exists or cannot exist.
“85% of the matter in the universe cannot be directly observed, and there’s basically none right here” is a pretty bold claim, that needs a bit more evidence than “it fits the existing model for what happens at large scales if we assume another structure that we can’t directly see.” Especially when the more you look at it, the more crazy properties it must have — at one point the claim was that dark matter passes through regular matter (and dark matter) without colliding (which would mean we cannot simply put out a trap for that dark matter squirrel)
It’s not as ridiculous a prospect as the earth centric solar system where planets have to do crazy loopy-loops. I wouldn’t be surprised if we did all-but-prove it exists at some point, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if some random boy/girl/enby genius in South Africa or somewhere comes up with a better model one day.
It used to mean “North Korea,” but since their dear leader found himself in love with the butcher of Pyongyang, it’s no longer politically correct for them to say so.
I’ve always felt like I was riding through a magical place when I’m riding through the aspen groves in the mountains. Also felt like I was being watched by something much wiser and older than me.
Especially when the more you look at it, the more crazy properties it must have — at one point the claim was that dark matter passes through regular matter (and dark matter) without colliding
which isn’t weird at all if you know anything about neutrinos. In the time it took you to read that last sentence of mine, probably around 10^16 neutrinos from the sun passed through your body and 0 of them interacted. And neutrinos participate in Weak Force interactions, a hypothetical dark matter particle that only participated in gravitational interactions would pass through you even easier.
yeah it sucks that we can’t do experiments on it right now, but that’s one of the unfortunate facts about cosmology. You virtually never get to do an experiment, you just have to wait for nature to do something you haven’t seen before.
@Kathy: because neutrinos interact so rarely you need a huge number of them coming from some nuclear process and then you need to pass them through some big tank with lots and lots of atoms and look for light being given off with very sensitive photo multipliers. The first actual detection of a neutrino took place in a tank in the mid-50s, about 20 or 30 years after the neutrino was first postulated.
Sometimes you have good reasons to suspect something is there theoretically, even when confirmation doesn’t happen for several decades.
According to the chart my doctor gave me, about 267 mg. in a medium sized one (however big THAT is). Sweet potatoes are a better source nutritionally @~370 mg/4(?) oz.
“85% of the matter in the universe cannot be directly observed, and there’s basically none right here” is a pretty bold claim, that needs a bit more evidence than “it fits the existing model for what happens at large scales if we assume another structure that we can’t directly see.”
there’s a lot of parts to the model of our modern view of physics. Quantum mechanics, Quantum field theory, general relativity, the standard model. and that big clump of theory explains a lot of shit. I mean a lot of shit, it’s really fantastic the amount of shit those notions all smushed together explain. But they don’t explain all the observations. The observations we’ve made for a hundred years about the shape and speed of galaxies, and the strength of gravitational lensing, are really out of whack. If you stipulate some clumps of matter that we just can’t detect through the usual electromagnetic means in certain places, then the theory matches up much better with observations than without the mass.
That’s not the only possibility, there could be some kind of bizarre fifth force we don’t know about, or special terms on general relativity as yet undiscovered, but dark matter is right now the winner in an Occam’s Razor kind of sense. If you assume a certain density and certain places, you get a closer fit to the data than any of the other modifications people have thought up. And if that’s not very satisfying, well there’s a reason I quit science. The leading edge of science is never anything but frustrating.
because neutrinos interact so rarely you need a huge number of them coming from some nuclear process and then you need to pass them through some big tank with lots and lots of atoms
I’ve a notion of what’s involved, including in many cases having the detector deep, deep underground to shield it from other types of radiation. I know all or most neutrinos detected are solar neutrinos, seeing as how we have a huge, energetic Sun conveniently nearby.
But, IMO, just because fusion in the Sun produces neutrinos, doesn’t mean beta decay does as well.
Sometimes you have good reasons to suspect something is there theoretically, even when confirmation doesn’t happen for several decades.
@Jax: Yeah, I get that. I lived in Korea for 8 years and the cold never troubled me that much (although I’m not sure that it got down to -40 as we measured in Celsius). Business not clearing their snow off their walks to the point that I needed to by crampons to walk to school on their patches of ice was another subject, though. 🙂
@Kathy: There is a chain of interactions that happens in the sun that involves first the weak force and goes very very slow and then secondarily the strong force which happens relatively quickly, and it’s called the proton-proton chain, and the first step with the weak force involves beta decay.
I haven’t actively done any physics since about 2006, though, so we’re kind of running up against my limits here. 🙂
Lawrence O’Donnell is saying this is not confirmed yet but there is one anonymous source who is telling him that Trump’s Deutsche Bank loans required Russian oligarch co-signers. Obviously don’t put a lot of faith in it yet but if that’s true that very likely could come out soon.
@Doug Mataconis: O’Donnell did not say it was the tax returns, but other financial documentation, to which a Deutsche Bank “insider” could have access.
Still, like you, I remain skeptical of single-source reporting like this. Remember “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
@Mikey: I am also very skeptical, hence all the disclaimers. But a lawyer friend of mine in Chicago says Seth Abramson has claimed this for several years. So I’m curious.
Boris has also decided to send a Letter to Liz to prorogue Parliament, which has REALLY put the cat among the pigeons….
There’s no one really left to root for in the mess the Brits are making of their country. At present, it’s all politics. It’s like watching a car going at full speed ahead, everyone grabbing for the steering wheel, and nobody caring at all that the car is aimed at going off the cliff.
I think the problem is that the British Empire has never had a habit of planning anything. “The great amateur” and disdain for professionals and experts which has afflicted them since time immemorial is now coming home to bite them on the bum. There’s a thread over at The Torygraph about how wonderful it will be for the U.K. to become a “junior partner” of the U.S. because our cultures are so similar….what a collection of bloody fools.
@Doug Mataconis: O’Donnell was quite clear last night that this was one leaker at DB with no confirmation. DB was required to report whether the subpoenaed documents include tax returns in whole or in part. I believe the subpoena includes both tax and loan documents.
As Reynolds repeatedly points out there is a huge mystery underlying Trump, why is he behaving toward Russia and Putin as he does? A mystery Mueller carefully avoided looking into. Maybe still having dreams of Trump Tower Moscow explains it, but that hardly seems sufficient. It seems reasonable to suspect, not conclude, suspect, that his unexplained financial recovery may explain his behavior. IF, as O’Donnell and Teve both said, IF this report is true it would allow a lot of pieces to fall into place. No?
As I’ve noted before, is beyond a reasonable doubt the appropriate criterion for considering whether or not the President* is a foreign asset? Another hypothetical (IF again) worth considering is whether, should documentation of this surface, would being in the pocket of a hostile foreign power be enough for Moscow Mitch to consider impeachment?
Meanwhile, Trump is telling his staff to do whatever it takes to build the wall, and if it’s illegal, he will pardon them.
“When aides have suggested that some orders are illegal or unworkable, Trump has suggested he would pardon the officials if they would just go ahead, aides said. He has waved off worries about contracting procedures and the use of eminent domain, saying “take the land,” according to officials who attended the meetings. “Don’t worry, I’ll pardon you,” he has told officials in meetings about the wall.”
He has waved off worries about contracting procedures and the use of eminent domain, saying “take the land,” according to officials who attended the meetings.
And still the self-styled “conservatives,” CHAMPIONS! of “limited government” and “individual liberty” and STAUNCH OPPONENTS! of “federal overreach,” will support him, even though he has clearly stated his desire to mobilize the power of the federal government to seize individual citizens’ land in violation of the Constitution…to fulfill an imbecilic campaign promise he assured America we wouldn’t have to pay for.
@Mikey: I suspect (hope?) that if they actually follow his instructions and seize private property, it might be one of the few things that actually gets through to his numbskull supporters. Property is “real” to them in a way many other things are not.
Of course what I really expect is that Trump will once again be saved by his underlings ignoring his orders.
If you stipulate some clumps of matter that we just can’t detect through the usual electromagnetic means in certain places, then the theory matches up much better with observations than without the mass.
If you stipulate a guy with a big white beard moving things about, then the observations are perfect.
Why is He spinning those galaxies faster? What havoc is He causing? What about any life forms there? What have they done to Him? He said He wouldn’t destroy His creation again after the flood, He gave us a pretty rainbow and everything, but I bet He’s done that countless times… I mean, look at this Guy’s history.
(When referring to God as “this guy”, do you capitalize both “this” and “guy”?)
@Teve: I”ll be honest with you; it’s been so long since I’ve needed to explain any temperature differences to US friends, that I can’t do Fahrenheit to Celsius in my head and before I learned how to do it while I needed the info in Korea, I was completely innumerate about it. Almost failed 1st quarter chemistry in high school.
@Teve: Do you know if these are “bidets” or “water guns?” I ask because Korean toilet seats have both settings and they are different. (The bidet attachment graphic shows a water spray aimed at a woman, the water gun at a butt outline.)
@Teve: O’Donnell has backed up and retracted that.
I used to follow him more, but now he hollers too much and seldom has people on with differing views.
He does some good charity work.
Dan Crenshaw is an unusually dishonest and/or stupid politician. That is all.
when you don’t know what you’re doing but you’re happy to be involved.
I love this whole Bretbug splat. As usual David Simon brings it:
#BretBug is so great.
Bret, who recently wrote a column about how Free Speech was more important than people’s stupid hurt feelings, has apparently now deleted his Twitter account.
First hard frost of the season for my area this morning. Last hard frost was like….July 11th. I’m not ready for “summer” to be over, it just got started!!
@Jax: where on Earth do you live?
nurdles–plastic pollution you’ve probly never heard of.
@Teve: The arctic tundra of Big Piney, Wyoming. We have a little sign that says “Ice Box of the Nation” as you come into town. 😉
linky
@Jax: driving back to Florida from Seattle I took i-80 all the way across Wyoming until I hit I-25 and went South into Colorado to buy some weed 😀
@Teve:
In other words, DOA.
@OzarkHillbilly: you should read the article.
@Teve: 600 berders
@Teve: No time now, but #MoscowMitch.
About half the time I worry there may not be such a thing as dark matter.
The other half I hope there isn’t.
@OzarkHillbilly: Maybe we get lucky and Moscow Mitch is only a problem for another 16 months. A boy can dream.
No, this is not an April Fool’s joke:
Chris Christie launches public policy institute in farcical attempt to elevate discourse
The same Chris Christie who made a career of of bullying people?
What’s next, someone close to Trump launching a campaign to reduce bullying? Oh, yeah…
@Jax:
A couple of cool days, but just a tease. We have two more months of shorts and sandals. Sometimes we get a frost in October, but rare.
I’ll take 98 degree heat anytime.
@Kathy: sometimes I wonder whether dark matter doesn’t interact with other matter because it can’t or whether it just doesn’t want to.
85% of the matter in the universe has just given up.
(Or is waiting to spring its trap.)
Was just googling to see if anyone was trying to relate the dark matter in the universe and the excess of matter (as opposed to antimatter), and came across this:
I’m thinking that someone needs to create a Banana Diet fad that promises weight loss due to the antimatter in bananas.
@Tyrell:
Shorts and sandals, or shorts and scandals?
I hope the fine, upstanding men and women in your idyllic 1950s community are not led astray by all that flesh.
@Mister Bluster: Automobile models that with the exception of the Ranger are no longer manufactured? (I know that this is the wrong answer, but I thought I’d try. Can’t resist a trivia quiz even though I no longer connected well enough to pop culture to do well at it.)
@Mister Bluster: Cars.
@Mister Bluster:
Aircraft: Cessna Citation, Vought F4U Corsair, Vans RV7 Ranger, Piper Pacer
@Gustopher:
It’s a bit complicated. if dark matter exists at all, then it does interact with regular matter at least through gravity. That’s how we suspect it even exists, through the work Vera Rubin did measuring the spin of galaxies.
I like the idea of matter not wanting, or for that matter, wanting, to do something.
Maybe dark matter isn’t dark, just introverted.
@Gustopher:
Wow, that would be so preposterous, and so tenuously based on fact, that it ought to be a most popular fad.
If Wikipedia is accurate, then the half life of Potassium 40 is about one and a quarter billion years, and only 0.001% of the time it decays to Argon does it produce a positron (that’s the antimatter particle in question, which annihilates when it contacts an electron).
A positron weighs about 0.000538 times as much as a nucleon (proton or neutron). But multiply that by 2, as it takes the electron it interacts with as well. so 0.001076 nucleon equivalents are gone.
No clue how much potassium there is in a banana, but most of the fruit will be carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen anyway. Carbon alone has 12 nucleons, plus 6 electrons.
So, most potassium is not radioactive. What is radioactive, about 0.012% of all potassium, only emits antimatter 0.0001% of the time, and the long half-life means you’re far more likely to digest several bananas before even one potassium 40 atom decays. And then the loss of mass is so negligible as to require math and physics to detect.
It’s a winner. debunking it would involve reading something like what I just wrote, and that includes partial confirmation. The hard problem is to monetize it.
Dark matter a terrible name really. Things we typically called dark are things which absorb light. Dark matter just doesn’t interact electromagnetically.
And yes it’s there. I never did astrophysics, but the astrophysicists I listen to say that alternatives such as MOND don’t fit the data as well.
Banana Antimatter Diet is a preposterous idea, on the other hand yesterday I posted to Facebook a photo of hydrogen infused water which is some grade-A bullshit, yet you can buy it on Amazon for $3 a can.
@Teve: I have problems with a theory that says we cannot interact with 85% of the matter, except through gravity, and that it is so diffuse (one squirrel’s worth on earth) that we can never meaningfully test it.
It’s possible, sure, but it’s also possible that it’s the modern Ether. I’m a dark matter skeptic.
I don’t think there’s a grand Chinese conspiracy to get research grants and make us change our economy, I just think we are a ways off from an experiment that shows the existence or non-existence of dark matter.
Simply put, MOND may not be MO enough.
I’m also a dark energy skeptic. If the universe itself is expanding, that effect falls into our current equations an an energy, and it’s a useful abstraction, but I’m not sure it’s really an energy.
@Gustopher: But which squirrel is it? WHICH SQUIRREL????
@Gustopher:
Half the time, I am too.
I may be splitting hairs, but I like the analogy to the hunt for Vulcan, the planet that had to exist between Mercury and the Sun in order to make sense of Mercury’s orbit within the framework of Newton’s laws of gravitation.
See, Mercury did not comport as Newton predicted, but everything else did. A “dark” planet would explain it. Galaxies spin faster than all our knowledge of gravity say they should. “Dark” matter would explain it.
Mercury’s orbit dynamics proved we did not understand gravity well enough. Perhaps galactic spins prove the same thing, perhaps this time there is matter unaccounted for. Either way, determining what the deal is should point to, or uncover, fundamental aspects of physics we know nothing about.
I guess there are no wrong answers to this so far.
What prompted me to pose the question was this item.
This Day In Market History: The Debut Of The Edsel, Ford’s Biggest Flop
These were the four models of Edsel when it first came out.
Someone in my neighborhood had one of the models that was a hardtop convertible that I thought was really neat!
XKCD for the win 😛
I don’t know much about astrophysics, I only had two or maybe three classes from astrophysicists. And my advisor was one of the big names in the shock-waves-through-supernova-debris subfield but we never talked about that stuff because I really didn’t give a shit about astrophysics. I was in the lab cooking up gold nanoparticles and making monolayers and playing with AFMs and such.
Previously undiscovered particles that solve a mass problem but don’t interact electromagnetically would be not terribly different from how neutrinos were first hypothesized and later discovered. And the people who study this stuff for a living say that it’s a lot easier to expect that to exist than some bizarre modifications to gravity which would additionally break general relativity.
XKCD – MOND
@Kathy:
There is actually a lot of debate in quantum mechanics circles about the necessity of the observer. According to the standard theory, the wave function doesn’t collapse into an actual event until it is observed. Which implies that there were no events, just a very complex wave function, right up until the first time the universe produced an observer. But how could such an observer be ‘produced’ without any events actually occurring? Is a potential observer enough? How much consciousness is required for an observer to be able to collapse wave functions?
There are serious physicists out there who have concluded that the standard theory implies that consciousness is primary and the material universe is just a side effect…
(Next week we can talk about the Possible Worlds interpretation vs. the Copenhagen School…)
@DrDaveT: observation doesn’t mean in physics what it means in normal discussion. You can set up a detector to take the ‘observation’ and make a recording, no consciousness involved. There are a few people who have that strange philosophy you mention, but they’re pretty fringe. There have been some physicists who were borderline loons, John Wheeler comes to mind.
@Tyrell: The summer temps make the winters around here bearable….the summer just doesn’t last long enough! Rarely above 90. And as far as the cold…..once it hits -10 regularly, -40 isn’t all that much different unless the wind picks up. And it makes 20 degrees feel like a heat wave! 😉
Trish Regan went on Fox news and said a bunch of really stupid Fox-type things comparing Denmark to Venezuela etc. Some Denmarkian* replied to her comments in a 2-minute video. You should watch it. It’s fun. 🙂
(* Yes I know, but Denmarkian is funnier)
@Teve:
I may have it all wrong, but I got the impression the neutrino was hypothesized as necessary to balance nuclear reactions. I think it had to do with the some kind of conservation law involving muons or leptons. It’s been a while.
I should add I read that in a book by Isaac Asimov, who was not a physicist.
Speaking of XKCD, Randall Munroe has a new book, and audiobook, out next September called “How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems.” The audiobook is read by Wil Wheaton, who also read Munroe’s “What If.”
@Gustopher:
It behaves oddly for something nonexistant. There are some galaxies that are mostly dark matter, others that have very little dark matter. On the large scale, it clumps in different locations than galaxy clusters.
@Teve:
My Polish grandfather once referred to Flemish people as “the Flames.” This got a big laugh, but I think he was basing it on the analogy of Denmark –> Danes.
@Teve: My favorite moment was Regan saying “School’s free. University’s free. That’s lovely”. His response: actually, it is.
This really was vintage Fox News. Basically for no reason they go after Denmark because of Trump.
@Gustopher:
Banana equivalent dose
@SenyorDave: my favorite part was, paraphrased, “since it doesn’t cost anything to stay in school, nobody ever graduates. Anyway, the graduates…” Like, can you even fucking hear your own mouth?
in beta decay a neutron turns into a proton or vice versa by giving off an electron or a positron, but the mass / energy wasn’t balancing out, and somebody realized if there was a small invisible particle that didn’t interact electromagnetically and was carrying away some of the mass everything would work out.
-ino, I now happily understand, is the diminutive in Italian, so neutrino means something like ‘little neutral one’.
Sometime late this spring by my reckoning, conservatives got a feverish idea that any government program equals Venezuela. This new idiotic belief has compelled them to make fools of themselves in a slightly new way for several months now.
@Kylopod:
And if a person from Poland is a Pole, that makes a person from Holland …
@Teve:
I’ve read about neutrino detection. but I wonder, has anyone caught a neutrino issuing from beta decay specifically?
@Teve: @charon: The Ether solved a lot of problems up until it didn’t — and it was way more intuitive than something that redefined physics. It also was a fine placeholder that let people solve different problems, and eventually come up with a framework that allowed them to ask questions… including, eventually, the Mitchelson-Morley experiment.
The Ether was great. I mean no disrespect to dark matter when I compare it to the Ether. We’re just lacking an experiment that shows dark matter either exists or cannot exist.
“85% of the matter in the universe cannot be directly observed, and there’s basically none right here” is a pretty bold claim, that needs a bit more evidence than “it fits the existing model for what happens at large scales if we assume another structure that we can’t directly see.” Especially when the more you look at it, the more crazy properties it must have — at one point the claim was that dark matter passes through regular matter (and dark matter) without colliding (which would mean we cannot simply put out a trap for that dark matter squirrel)
It’s not as ridiculous a prospect as the earth centric solar system where planets have to do crazy loopy-loops. I wouldn’t be surprised if we did all-but-prove it exists at some point, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if some random boy/girl/enby genius in South Africa or somewhere comes up with a better model one day.
@Teve:
But then you don’t get to make a Great Dane pun.
@Teve:
It used to mean “North Korea,” but since their dear leader found himself in love with the butcher of Pyongyang, it’s no longer politically correct for them to say so.
I’ve always felt like I was riding through a magical place when I’m riding through the aspen groves in the mountains. Also felt like I was being watched by something much wiser and older than me.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/pando-the-trembling-giant
@Gustopher:
which isn’t weird at all if you know anything about neutrinos. In the time it took you to read that last sentence of mine, probably around 10^16 neutrinos from the sun passed through your body and 0 of them interacted. And neutrinos participate in Weak Force interactions, a hypothetical dark matter particle that only participated in gravitational interactions would pass through you even easier.
yeah it sucks that we can’t do experiments on it right now, but that’s one of the unfortunate facts about cosmology. You virtually never get to do an experiment, you just have to wait for nature to do something you haven’t seen before.
@Kathy: because neutrinos interact so rarely you need a huge number of them coming from some nuclear process and then you need to pass them through some big tank with lots and lots of atoms and look for light being given off with very sensitive photo multipliers. The first actual detection of a neutrino took place in a tank in the mid-50s, about 20 or 30 years after the neutrino was first postulated.
Sometimes you have good reasons to suspect something is there theoretically, even when confirmation doesn’t happen for several decades.
@Not a Thomas coley Grad: That make’s a lot more sense, but I didn’t see Vans aircraft when I looked for other possibilities on the intertubes.
@Kathy:
According to the chart my doctor gave me, about 267 mg. in a medium sized one (however big THAT is). Sweet potatoes are a better source nutritionally @~370 mg/4(?) oz.
Apparently, the AG is going to throw is mega holiday bash at Trump’s DC hotel. Estimated cost: $30K.
I can’t let a contractor buy me a $3 cup of Starbucks, but this guy can blow $30K up his boss’s backside. Unfuckingbelievable.
there’s a lot of parts to the model of our modern view of physics. Quantum mechanics, Quantum field theory, general relativity, the standard model. and that big clump of theory explains a lot of shit. I mean a lot of shit, it’s really fantastic the amount of shit those notions all smushed together explain. But they don’t explain all the observations. The observations we’ve made for a hundred years about the shape and speed of galaxies, and the strength of gravitational lensing, are really out of whack. If you stipulate some clumps of matter that we just can’t detect through the usual electromagnetic means in certain places, then the theory matches up much better with observations than without the mass.
That’s not the only possibility, there could be some kind of bizarre fifth force we don’t know about, or special terms on general relativity as yet undiscovered, but dark matter is right now the winner in an Occam’s Razor kind of sense. If you assume a certain density and certain places, you get a closer fit to the data than any of the other modifications people have thought up. And if that’s not very satisfying, well there’s a reason I quit science. The leading edge of science is never anything but frustrating.
@Teve:
I’ve a notion of what’s involved, including in many cases having the detector deep, deep underground to shield it from other types of radiation. I know all or most neutrinos detected are solar neutrinos, seeing as how we have a huge, energetic Sun conveniently nearby.
But, IMO, just because fusion in the Sun produces neutrinos, doesn’t mean beta decay does as well.
Like the Higgs Boson or gravitational waves.
@Jax: Yeah, I get that. I lived in Korea for 8 years and the cold never troubled me that much (although I’m not sure that it got down to -40 as we measured in Celsius). Business not clearing their snow off their walks to the point that I needed to by crampons to walk to school on their patches of ice was another subject, though. 🙂
@Kathy: There is a chain of interactions that happens in the sun that involves first the weak force and goes very very slow and then secondarily the strong force which happens relatively quickly, and it’s called the proton-proton chain, and the first step with the weak force involves beta decay.
I haven’t actively done any physics since about 2006, though, so we’re kind of running up against my limits here. 🙂
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Did you think you were going to slide that past me?
@Teve:
@Just nutha ignint cracker: This is why we at least need a laugh button, if we can’t post funny pictures!
Lawrence O’Donnell is saying this is not confirmed yet but there is one anonymous source who is telling him that Trump’s Deutsche Bank loans required Russian oligarch co-signers. Obviously don’t put a lot of faith in it yet but if that’s true that very likely could come out soon.
@Teve:
I am skeptical of this report. Tax returns do not ordinarily require the identification of co-signers on loans.
@Doug Mataconis: O’Donnell did not say it was the tax returns, but other financial documentation, to which a Deutsche Bank “insider” could have access.
Still, like you, I remain skeptical of single-source reporting like this. Remember “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
Kinja Deals has a $65 bidet attachment for $33 today.
@Mikey: I am also very skeptical, hence all the disclaimers. But a lawyer friend of mine in Chicago says Seth Abramson has claimed this for several years. So I’m curious.
@Teve:
Clearly you’ve forgotten more physics than I ever suspected existed 😉
I suppose we’ll have a blog post on this, it’s big (she understated), but for now I want to say: Someone told Boris to go f**k himself and he agreed enthusiastically.
@Mikey:
Yes but the only thing DB was required to report to the Court on is the tax returns
O’Donnell and Maddow have both made claims like this in the past based on “sources” and they’ve never been substantiated.
Boris has also decided to send a Letter to Liz to prorogue Parliament, which has REALLY put the cat among the pigeons….
There’s no one really left to root for in the mess the Brits are making of their country. At present, it’s all politics. It’s like watching a car going at full speed ahead, everyone grabbing for the steering wheel, and nobody caring at all that the car is aimed at going off the cliff.
I think the problem is that the British Empire has never had a habit of planning anything. “The great amateur” and disdain for professionals and experts which has afflicted them since time immemorial is now coming home to bite them on the bum. There’s a thread over at The Torygraph about how wonderful it will be for the U.K. to become a “junior partner” of the U.S. because our cultures are so similar….what a collection of bloody fools.
@Doug Mataconis: O’Donnell was quite clear last night that this was one leaker at DB with no confirmation. DB was required to report whether the subpoenaed documents include tax returns in whole or in part. I believe the subpoena includes both tax and loan documents.
As Reynolds repeatedly points out there is a huge mystery underlying Trump, why is he behaving toward Russia and Putin as he does? A mystery Mueller carefully avoided looking into. Maybe still having dreams of Trump Tower Moscow explains it, but that hardly seems sufficient. It seems reasonable to suspect, not conclude, suspect, that his unexplained financial recovery may explain his behavior. IF, as O’Donnell and Teve both said, IF this report is true it would allow a lot of pieces to fall into place. No?
As I’ve noted before, is beyond a reasonable doubt the appropriate criterion for considering whether or not the President* is a foreign asset? Another hypothetical (IF again) worth considering is whether, should documentation of this surface, would being in the pocket of a hostile foreign power be enough for Moscow Mitch to consider impeachment?
Meanwhile, Trump is telling his staff to do whatever it takes to build the wall, and if it’s illegal, he will pardon them.
“When aides have suggested that some orders are illegal or unworkable, Trump has suggested he would pardon the officials if they would just go ahead, aides said. He has waved off worries about contracting procedures and the use of eminent domain, saying “take the land,” according to officials who attended the meetings. “Don’t worry, I’ll pardon you,” he has told officials in meetings about the wall.”
@Moosebreath:
And still the self-styled “conservatives,” CHAMPIONS! of “limited government” and “individual liberty” and STAUNCH OPPONENTS! of “federal overreach,” will support him, even though he has clearly stated his desire to mobilize the power of the federal government to seize individual citizens’ land in violation of the Constitution…to fulfill an imbecilic campaign promise he assured America we wouldn’t have to pay for.
@Mikey: exactly.
@Mikey: I suspect (hope?) that if they actually follow his instructions and seize private property, it might be one of the few things that actually gets through to his numbskull supporters. Property is “real” to them in a way many other things are not.
Of course what I really expect is that Trump will once again be saved by his underlings ignoring his orders.
@Kylopod: Possibly so, but since the Flemish live in Flanders, what would be the right thing to call them?
@Teve:
If you stipulate a guy with a big white beard moving things about, then the observations are perfect.
Why is He spinning those galaxies faster? What havoc is He causing? What about any life forms there? What have they done to Him? He said He wouldn’t destroy His creation again after the flood, He gave us a pretty rainbow and everything, but I bet He’s done that countless times… I mean, look at this Guy’s history.
(When referring to God as “this guy”, do you capitalize both “this” and “guy”?)
@SC_Birdflyte: Possibly so, but since the Flemish live in Flanders, what would be the right thing to call them?
Damn
Jessi Combs
RIP
Gillibrand is Peace Out Bitches.
@Teve: I”ll be honest with you; it’s been so long since I’ve needed to explain any temperature differences to US friends, that I can’t do Fahrenheit to Celsius in my head and before I learned how to do it while I needed the info in Korea, I was completely innumerate about it. Almost failed 1st quarter chemistry in high school.
@Teve: Do you know if these are “bidets” or “water guns?” I ask because Korean toilet seats have both settings and they are different. (The bidet attachment graphic shows a water spray aimed at a woman, the water gun at a butt outline.)
@Just nutha ignint cracker: these are bidets. I wish I had $40 to spare right now, I’d have ordered one myself.
@Teve: O’Donnell has backed up and retracted that.
I used to follow him more, but now he hollers too much and seldom has people on with differing views.
He does some good charity work.