Author: Mark J. Heinicke

THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE EVER, Part 2: Exoplanet Binge

Stunning Revelations from Kepler Space Telescope Exoplanet Survey: MANY small planets

On June 19, 2017, NASA announced the release of the eighth Kepler catalog of exoplanet candidates—now totaling 4,034, of which 2,335 have already been verified as planets.  Here’s a link to the press briefing materials on the NASA website, that includes some absolutely cool visuals.

Kepler survey announcement June 2017

The news in June was that another 219 candidates had been added since the last announcement, 10 of which had characteristics of size, distance from host star, and sun-like nature of the host star,  that suggest conditions hospitable to life as we know it.  Rocky planets with diameters between 0.7 and 2 Earth diameters are the most promising if they fall within the “Goldilocks Zone” where liquid water could exist on their surfaces.

Turns out, contrary to what I had been expecting from the news about huge exoplanets dribbling out over the last decade, now we hear that “small planets are common”  according to NASA. Note that “small” is in the eye of the beholder. NASA qualifies a planet as “small” if it is less than four Earth diameters.  The trend toward the discovery of “gas giants” exoplanets early on was due to the difficulties, with less sensitive instruments and less sophisticated methodology, of detecting the smaller objects.

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Let’s NOT Get over It: Always Learn from History

“Just Get over It” is (usually) shallow and mean-spirited

Oh dear, sorry for this but I am once again sucked into political commentary, provoked by other persons’ commentary.  Here I was hoping to concentrate on the soothing cerebral task, the Most Amazing Year in Space Ever, but my mid-brain took over thanks to following a link on The Daily Kos.  It’s not my fault, but here goes anyway:

In the context of taking to task Budget Director Mick Mulvaney’s sickeningly callous statements about government-funded food assistance programs (here ) brought to us by Kos Media, a number of folks commenting engaged in an argument over Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss  in 2016.

Once again we heard some voices on the left telling those of us who deplored past attacks on Clinton from within her own party that we should  “just get over it.”

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THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE, EVER, Part 1B: Eclipse, Sun, & Earth

 

In Part 1A of the eclipse drama, we talked about the Moon. Now for the Sun and Earth.

First The Sun.

The gigantic sphere of plasma* (2.7 million miles in circumference, weighing 330,000 Earth masses) that is our Sun is orbiting the center of the Milky Way Galaxy at about 514,200 miles per hour, a speed which takes it once around the galactic center every 230 million years. (Since the extinction of the dinosaurs, it’s made it a little more than a quarter of the way around.) It helpfully drags us around with it, enabling us to observe intergalactic space in many directions over time. Physically, it’s about as normal a star as you can find in the local neighborhood (less than 1,000 light years away). Its relative “normality” is nice for astrophysicists, who can learn a lot about other stars from observing this one close at hand. Despite being sort-of normal, the Sun has a lot of electromagnetic storms and bursts of plasma that can do monstrously scary stuff to us (discussed in another of my posts here). Yet, it is tame relative to many other stars, whose volatility may make the evolution of life around them a crapshoot.

We’ll talk about the speed of the galaxy itself relative to other galaxies in a later post (promise: before we’ve completely orbited the galactic center).

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THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE EVER, Part 1A: Eclipse and the Moon

For solace, look to the heavens.

While one terrible thing after another was happening on Earth in 2017, the news from outer space was chock-full of amazingness to a degree rivaled in my lifetime only by the Apollo moon missions. Those of us fortunate to live in the relative calm and prosperity of the First World have the opportunity, in rare moments of serenity, to bask in a new era of cosmic discovery made possible by extraordinary technology in the service of science’s ceaseless voyage toward truth.

The moon landings were amazing, all right, and especially heartening for Americans at a time when the country was in a state of turmoil and division unique to the 20th Century. It prompted me to buy my first TV, a small black and white device, not that color mattered for a moon landing. But for sheer scale, the exploits of puny humans on our nearest heavenly body 50 years ago can be compared with the significance of 2017’s Year in Space as a Home Depot compared with the One World Trade Center.

Do I exaggerate?  Let’s go down a list, in order of least amazing to the most spectacularly profoundly spine-tinglingly amazing:

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Will Work for Crumbs: Why Republicans May Hold the House

Pocketbooks will fatten just enough to get scammers on the congressional Right re-elected

It couldn’t be more transparent, that the middle class has been bought off with token tax relief in the Republican tax bill, while billionaires and corporations continue to top up their coffers with still bigger tax breaks.

But the transparency doesn’t mean much, since the cynical middle class has had to resign itself to getting Something rather than Nothing for the last few decades.  They’re inured to it. Now a few crumbs tossed to ordinary folks will suffice to keep Republican politicians in the House afloat for at least another year.  That’s because elections usually turn on pocketbook issues, and if by November the average taxpayer has received $1,500 worth of reductions  in withholding, then s/he will settle for the status quo. (Even a status quo with Trump at the helm, as long as he does not actually start a major war.) Put that together with gerrymandering, and seeing that the House Republicans would have to lose 46 seats to lose majority, I imagine they will hold it.  Especially because there are bound to be more rounds of attempting to repeal the ACA—even though McConnell is now loathe to touch it in the Senate—which will rally the conservative base.

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Ignorance as Policy: Rare Consistency in the Trump Administration

Parade of know-nothing judicial nominees marches on

Of recent Trump judicial nominees: two were yanked by the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, conservative Charles Grassley, for lack of competence. A third (Matthew Petersen) withdrew after being grilled on basic points of the the law by Republican senator John Kennedy, during which the senator’s consternation over Petersen’s hedging and failure to answer was ill-disguised.

News organization such as the Washington Post bring to light the most flagrant cases of  incompetence on the part of Trump nominees who are seeking lifetime judicial posts, but we can safely infer that many of those being confirmed, without our hearing of it, are likely to have only marginal  credentials. They get confirmed because they are conservatives, and the committee is in a hurry to cram them in—so much of a hurry that committee Democrats are largely frozen out of the loop (as with the tax bill, although these judgeships may be more consequential in the long run; the tax bill can be undone by future legislation, but these federal judges’ positions are for life—ironically, that provision was meant to insulate the judges from politics, but these nominees are coming in with plenty of conservative political baggage from the get-go).

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Climate Change Denial not Unanimous in Coal Country

Awareness of Climate Change and coal’s contribution penetrates coal country, makes a few converts
As reported by JOHN RABY AND MICHAEL BIESECKER
of the Associated Press, voices in favor of the Obama Clean Power Plan were raised at a public hearing in Charleston, WV.  One veteran of coal mining who now has black lung disease, looked ahead a couple of generations.  He admitted that he’s in a minority in his hometown, and his voice couldn’t do much to affect Trump administration climate policy, but at age 72 he would continue to soldier on in the fight  against climate change. He’s in the minority in coal country, but he is not alone.
When you don’t have much to lose, truths will out . . .
That Mr. Sturgill is retired may be key to his outspokenness.  In the U.S. Senate, we have members about to retire (Jeff Flake, Bob Corker) who have come out swinging against President Trump while their colleagues have remained muted or completely silent at one presidential outrage after another.
Thanks to Mr. Sturgill, I have managed to find another example of what term limits might mean for lawmakers.  Or even those in the executive branch.  It may be that forcing them to retire will encourage frankness in areas where the prospect of losing donors and losing future elections has been sealing their lips.

Hidden Effects of AGW: Kelp Death, Urchin Barrens, and . . . You Name It

More Reasons for that Sinking Feeling

So much of the damage from Anthropogenic Global Warming goes on literally and figuratively beneath the surface.  Such is the case with many of the world’s kelp forests, where legions of heat-loving, kelp-munching sea urchins are reducing once-luxuriant kelp forests to vast tracts of sea floor populated almost exclusively by sea urchins—”urchin barrens.” The action is not where the kelp lie at the surface, it’s where the sea urchins dwell cloaked from view on the ocean floor.

For a quick visual of the onslaught’s progression, scroll down to the set of three photos in this report from Yale Environment 360: Kelp devastation off Tasmania

For those of you who have taken my repeated advice to subscribe (free) to the electronic Yale Environment 360 (highly recommended), you may have already got this message about one more wound torn in the living body of the planet.

With so much human misery brought to our attention every day, it’s hard to put these less dramatic, less heartbreaking events in perspective.  It’s only plants! But you can’t help but look at the 3-photo sequence of the kelp forest being wiped out, without a deep sense of loss. (That is, anyway, if you are the typical reader of this blog.)

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Twofold Dangers from John Kelly

John Kelly Exceeds His Station

Many of us breathed a sigh of relief when John Kelly became Trump’s chief of staff—at last, we thought, someone who could contain Trump’s most egregious outbursts, throttle down volatility in the White House, and act as gatekeeper, in particular minimizing the casual comings and goings of  members of the quasi-Royal Family in and out of the Oval Office.

Kelly has managed to limit access to the President, but has largely failed in containing Trump’s emotional outbursts  on Twitter and suppressing volatility in the White House.  But, perhaps in frustration from his own ineffectiveness, Kelly overstepped his station when he got into a feud with Representative Frederica Wilson over the notorious phone call the President made to a Gold Star family. Actually, I understood Kelly’s point about Wilson’s grandstanding, even though he made a factual error (a natural symptom of the misinformation disease caught by anyone who associates with Trump).

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How to Cripple an Economy, Part 1: Inequality

Does inequality matter in the big economic picture?

I’m not going to discuss here why economic inequality is worsening.   That it’s getting worse is an unarguable fact. What drives the worsening is not yet perfectly clear—is it mainly the inevitable outcome of market forces, or is it a side-effect of “rent-seeking” by rich folks and rich corporations?  (I will treat rent-seeking issue in another post.)

Does increasing economic  inequality harm the economy as a whole? Does it suppress growth in total wealth? (Agreed that definition of “wealth” is slippery.  IMO the Gross Domestic Product does not exactly measure wealth, since it includes the production of a lot of Stuff no one really needs, some of it downright absurd, such as the more than two billion annually spent on Halloween costumes for pets. But the movement of the GDP is the best guide we have to economic growth, or the lack of it.)

I’m not addressing the somewhat different issue of fairness here.  It is obvious that huge inequalities are  unfair to those on the lower rungs. Enough people are talking about that, that I don’t need to chime in.

Aside from fairness, does the canard that the “Rising Tide Lifts All (or most)Boats” hold, when economic inequality is a main driver of the tide?

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