Sunrise, Sunset

It's a bit of a puff piece, but this WaPo bit on the solar shenanigans in American's northernmost decent-sized town, Utqiagvik (née Barrow) in Alaska, is full of interesting bits of triviata. 

Meanwhile here in Hoosieropolis, sunset tonight will be at 5:27. Fortunately, though, it will rise again about 7:30 tomorrow morning, rather than in frickin' 2025.

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Know Nukes

With all the data center construction that's accompanied the AI... boom? bubble? ...the demand for power is off the charts and this is leading to talk, wild speculation, and outright misinformation about nuclear power and potential reactor construction.

Here's a dude who knows something about the topic talking about small modular reactors:

Tech giants are signing deals with nuclear power companies to supply energy to their data centers. Many of these deals revolve around unproven Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). This is a relatively new term for most people, so I figured it as worth it to dig in a little to help it make sense.

First to get the hysteria out of the way. No, Microsoft and Google will NOT be running nuclear reactors. No, AI will not be running nuclear reactors. These SMRs will be operated by highly trained operators licensed by the NRC, just like I was on my reactor. Every licensed operator is personally responsible for ensuring nuclear safety. Like go to prison personally responsible. It doesn’t matter who’s name is on the front gate.

Go thou and RTWT.

And remember, any talk about running a technological civilization on clean power that doesn't involve nukes is fundamentally unserious.

I could have told you that.

Some recent studies of domestic cats show that they have a remarkable ability to pick up the meanings of spoken words just by observation and without specific training.

Even if your cat hasn’t gotten your tongue, it’s most likely getting your words. Without any particular training, the animals—like human babies—appear to pick up basic human language skills just by listening to us talk. Indeed, cats learn to associate images with words even faster than babies do, according to a study published this month in Scientific Reports. That means that, despite all appearances to the contrary, our furtive feline friends may actually be listening to what we say.

As anyone who's spent time around cats knows, they aren't dumb at all, they just DGAF.

As the Wind Blows...

There's a good explainer here on what caused the rapid intensification of Hurricane Milton, why "bigger" doesn't necessarily mean "stronger" when it comes to hurricanes, and what's likely to happen over the next couple days as Milton continues to track to the northeast and encounters less favorable (for the hurricane) atmospheric conditions while still remaining over unusually warm Gulf waters...

The hurricane went from a Category 1 storm at midnight to a Category 5 hurricane by noon. And it didn’t stop there.

By 8 p.m. on Monday, the storm’s maximum sustained wind speeds had increased to 180 miles per hour, making Milton one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes ever. Based on wind speed, it joined a handful of other hurricanes to rival the strongest Atlantic storm ever recorded: a 1980 hurricane named Allen, which had a peak wind speed of 190 m.p.h. before it made landfall along the United States-Mexico border.

As a small, compact system, however, Milton was more similar to Hurricane Wilma in 2005, which holds the record for the lowest pressure in a hurricane, another measure of a storm’s intensity. Its small size, an excess of extremely warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico and calm atmospheric conditions allowed Milton to “explosively” intensify, as hurricane center forecasters noted Monday afternoon.

The standard meteorological definition of “rapid intensification” is 30 knots in 24 hours, or roughly 35 miles per hour daily. Milton increased by more than double this definition on Monday, at a pace similar to that of Wilma and another record storm, Hurricane Felix in 2007.

It's funny that, like, the sixth post ever made at this blog, just over nineteen years ago, was about politics making people stupid about hurricanes...

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Tab Clearing...

• Chris Arnade walks the Faroe Islands.


• The Throwing Madonna.


• A Rape in Cyberspace.

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Miscellaneous Linkery...

• "I'm not saying they were right or anything, but their tanks sure were cool..."


• Don't poke the author. It's rude.


• Resilient Wheat


• 1969 Camaro RS/Z28

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Creepy Swimmies

I'm not much of a fan of bugs in general, and the bigger they are, the more they creep me out. So I definitely would not have liked going for a swim during the Paleozoic, when six-foot long gigantic sea scorpions were the apex predators of the Iapetus Ocean off the coast of Gondwanaland.

Summer Summer Summer

The solstice is today, the longest day of the year. It's the official start of summer and, thanks to the vagaries of celestial mechanics, it's occurring earlier in the year than it has since 1796.

The last time the summer solstice was this early, there were only sixteen states, George Washington was president, and Napoleon was running roughshod over Italy.

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Meme Dump...

Eek.

"Scott Napper, a biochemist and vaccinologist at the University of Saskatchewan, can easily envision humanity’s ultimate doomsday disease. The scourge would spread fast, but the progression of illness would be slow and subtle. With no immunity, treatments, or vaccines to halt its progress, the disease would eventually find just about every single one of us, spreading via all manner of body fluids. In time, it would kill everyone it infected. Even our food and drink would not be safe, because the infectious agent would be hardy enough to survive common disinfectants and the heat of cooking; it would be pervasive enough to infest our livestock and our crops. “Imagine if consuming a plant could cause a fatal, untreatable neurodegenerative disorder,” Napper told me. “Any food grown within North America would be potentially deadly to humans.”

This nightmare illness doesn’t yet exist. But for inspiration, Napper needs to look only at the very real contagion in his own lab: chronic wasting disease (CWD), a highly lethal, highly contagious neurodegenerative disease that is devastating North America’s deer, elk, and other cervids."

Well, if you want me to read your article on CWD and other prion diseases, that's certainly an effective hook of an opening paragraph, let me tell you.

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Shark Size

Here's an interesting point made in an article about a scientific debate that's raging over the size and build of the extinct giant shark, megalodon.

It’s not unusual for paleontologists to disagree about ancient animal bodies — sometimes with a ferocious intensity. Gottfried recalled witnessing some scientists get into a heated disagreement over the angle of the thigh bone when assembling a triceratops specimen.

John Hutchinson, a professor of evolutionary biomechanics at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London, is part of the team that put forward the controversial 3D model of the megalodon. He said that the stakes are always high in science, but particularly when working on species that attract both public and scientific fascination.

“The more celebrity an extinct animal has, and the rarer it is, the more competitive or heated the disagreements can be,” Hutchinson said. “I know this all too well. I worked on T. rex.”

Hutchinson said that, early in his career, people used 2D illustrations of fossilized skeletons and shrink-wrapped skin around them, making them quite skinny. Based on these models, people believed Tyrannosaurus rex was around 11,000 pounds. But now, using various methods, scientists mostly agree that an adult T. rex would have been somewhere around 17,000 pounds.

The bit about shrink-wrapping the skin around the skeletons was interesting. I have a book on my Kindle shelf titled All Yesterdays that's a neat look at how illustrations of prehistoric animals have evolved over time, and also has some freaky-looking pictures of modern animals if they were reconstructed by yesterday's paleontologic illustrators from skeletal remains. You'll never look at cows... or your cat ...the same way.

When I was a kid, brontosauruses dragged their tails across the ground as the slid through the bog from one lake to the next, now they gallop in herds... and T. rex has feathers. Science is always on the move and adapting to new data.

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We Live in a World of Miracles & Wonders

This is a headline that describes an actual thing that really happened:

Tomato lost in space by history-making astronaut has been found

H/T to Kevin D. Williamson

As Quiet as a Middle Finger

Interesting article about the National Radio Quiet Zone in Green Bank, West Virginia:

"As we exited the observatory’s parking lot, the truck’s computer monitor started bleeping angrily. Before we reached the main road, we picked up 13 wireless signals. Within a half mile, we found 66 signals. Niday’s gadgetry was going berserk. But instead of jumping out of the truck to ticket Wi-Fi offenders, he simply took note of the sources of radio noise and kept driving, unfazed.

Within five miles, we tallied more than 200 signals, some coming from the homes of staff living on the observatory’s own property—a blatant violation of the facility’s regulations.

[snip]

A house across the street from the observatory had Wi-Fi with the network name “Screw you NRAO,” an unsubtle middle finger to the observatory’s calls for quiet."

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Good Sleep is a Performance Enhancing Drug

Cats are some of the most efficient little predators on land. Do you know what else cats are really good at?

Relatedly, I just listened to a great Tactical Tangents podcast featuring a doctor whose specialty is healthy sleep habits.

"The downsides of sleep deprivation are legion: irritability, poor judgment, even lowered testosterone. Yet the duties of the .mil and LE career fields are well known for demanding odd and/or long hours that can make it hard to get good sleep. Mike talks with Dr. Paul Sargent of O2X, a specialist in human performances and sleep factors, in how to get the good shut-eye."

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Out of the blue and into the black...

Just finished reading The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Oceans, which I'd mentioned a bit ago.

The author, Susan Casey, is fascinated with the deep sea and there's a whole chapter covering William Beebe, whose adventures in his Bathysphere fascinated me when I was in elementary school. I used to draw elaborately layered views of the ocean depths, teeming with all the strange critters he reported.

She also talks about diving off Hawaii in the Pisces-class subs operated by the Hawaii Underwater Research Laboratory and the book climaxes with her accompanying Vescovo* for part of his Five Deeps Expedition.

Although a journalist, Casey writes with a novelist's eye for people and action, and the book steps right along with a very "you are there" vibe. Definitely recommend.

*Vescovo is the only dude to have been to the top of Everest, the bottom of the Marianas Trench, and outer space. (Also the North and South Poles.)

It got me to click, alright...

This was the blurb in the sidebar at the NYT this morning:

I chortled. "Well, that sure puts them one up on the average American voter."

But I clicked through. It's an interesting bit of experimentation that shows that, after repeatedly swimming into something, box jellyfish will adjust their behavior and stop bumping into it.

"After a handful of collisions, the box jellies changed their behavior. Less than eight minutes after arriving in the bucket, they were swimming 50 percent farther from the pattern on the walls, and they had nearly quadrupled the number of times they performed their about-face maneuver. They seemed to have made a connection between the stripes ahead of them and the sensation of collision."

Meanwhile, despite actually physically having a brain, the average voter sends the same people to Congress over and over again and it's shaping up that next year's presidential election is going to be a rerun of 2020's Battle of the Fogies.

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Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving...

One of the most interesting findings from the Webb telescope has been the existence of very large, well organized galaxies at unimaginably vast distances from Earth.

Now, thanks to the laws of relativity, remember that the farther away from Earth you look, the farther back in time you're looking. The light from those galaxies left them a long long time ago...so long ago that, uh, according to the current cosmological models of the universe, it was farther back in time than large, well-organized galaxies should theoretically even exist.

"Cosmology is not like other sciences. It’s not like studying mice in a maze or watching chemicals boil in a beaker in a lab. The universe is everything there is; there’s only one and we can’t look at it from the outside. You can’t put it in a box on a table and run controlled experiments on it. Because it is all-encompassing, cosmology forces scientists to tackle questions about the very environment in which science operates: the nature of time, the nature of space, the nature of lawlike regularity, the role of the observers doing the observations."

This feels like one of those scientific moments where they're either going to have to add ever more epicycles, or decide that maybe the Earth really does move.

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Projectile Monkeys

From the time our Australopithecine ancestors took to bipedaling their way across the savanna, our signature trait was being able to throw things at other things. 

By the time H. erectus came along, the orientation of the shoulder the torso, the twist to the humerus, the tendons and ligaments to store energy, and the waist mobility that lets us throw from the hips were all there. Our fastballs have just been getting better ever since.

Humans are the only primates that can throw the way we do.

Sure, our chimpanzee and gorilla kin are much stronger, but they throw like wimps. Only H. sapiens throws hard enough to kill.

In fact, the fastest motion generated by the human body is the rotation of the humerus during a hard throw.

Our projectile-oriented nature is thought by some to be a reason hunter-gatherer societies tend to be more egalitarian, less hierarchal, than either the typical primate troop or later, settled agricultural or urban ones. If one or two dudes in a hunter-gatherer tribe got too big for their britches, it was too easy for the rest of the group to stand off at a distance and pelt him with rocks...or spears, or arrows.

"Boehm has discovered that, among the tribal and hunter-gatherer human societies he studies, the development of projectile weapons is a key step in the growth and maintenance of equality: it puts the strong at greater risk from the weak. Such weaponry is one reason that human societies are more equalized than those of other primates.

But weapons aren’t enough to make equality last. Boehm finds that, to really maintain the new social order, the dominated need to trust one another. They must have stable social bonds and anticipate a long future together. Most important, they must be able to communicate effectively."

I first ran across the ideas Boehm is talking about in the Peter Turchin book, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend doing so.

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Oppy and the Speed Bump...

Today's trivia:

In July of 1942, Robert Oppenheimer left his meetings in California and headed via train for Michigan. There, on the shores of Lake Otsego dotted with holiday cabins, a fierce discussion and debate took place: Could the test of a nuclear weapon set fire to the atmosphere?

Oppenheimer's opposite was Arthur Holly Compton, a renowned Nobel Prize–winning physicist. You will not see him portrayed in Christopher Nolan's just-released Oppenheimer, but he was one of the scientist's closest friends. It was Compton who put Oppenheimer in charge of the Manhattan Project and who years later defended him against bogus charges of Communism. And if you're wondering what all of this has to do with cars, well, Arthur Holly Compton also invented the modern speed bump.

Click through to RTWT.

This watch hit a speed bump.

Down the Wikihole

"Just as fish presumably don’t know they’re wet, many English speakers don’t know that the way their language works is just one of endless ways it could have come out. It’s easy to think that what one’s native language puts words to, and how, reflects the fundamentals of reality."

This piece from John McWhorter is a banger if you're a language nerd.

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