If the Milky was actually rotating, you might think that all the stars in the Milky Way would just head off into the great beyond. Pictures of spiral arm galaxies sure look like they are rotating, though I can never decide whether they are winding up the spiral arms (clockwise in the above picture) or flying apart (counter-clockwise). But then there is gravity. Hard to believe that it could exert any noticeable force over a distance of 25,000 light years.
All of which got me to wondering how fast the Sun is traveling, so off to the spreadsheet.
Satellites in low earth orbit, like the International Space Station, travel around 5 miles per second. The earth is traveling around the sun at 19 miles per second, so the sun traveling at 130 miles per second has got the hammer down. Except all our neighbors are going the same way at the same rate. Except for Barnard's Star, which is hustling along at 57 miles per second relative to the sun, going who knows where.
40 years ago I was going to school in Austin and the place was booming. There was a highway northwest of town that was getting more and more traffic every year. It was so bad that a bumper sticker showed up saying 'Pray for me, I drive 183'.
I didn't go to San Antonio very often, but I remember one trip that was just ghastly. Traffic was creepy-crawly all the way home. That might have something to do with why I didn't go to San Antonio very often.
Now they've done something about it: they built a toll road with the 'highest posted speed limit in the country'. Not sure about that, speed limit in Wyoming is 80 MPH.
They also did something about traffic down in Houston, but it didn't help.
Seems like every week I hear about another outfit modifying their behavior to accommodate China. Each time it happens, I think, well, they are in business, and there is money to be made in China, so I can't really fault them. But when you seem them all put together in one place like this, it is a little disturbing. On the other hand, democracy is a mostly foreign concept in Asia. The place has always been run by dictators, so I don't know what else we could expect.
Near as I can make out, having a functioning democracy requires a population that not only believes in it, but is willing to take responsibility for their choices. This becomes problematic when people are so wrapped up in their own lives that they can't see beyond the weekend.
Aluminum reacts with iodine. The reaction produces a lot of heat so that the iodine sublimates and produces the characteristic violet vapor.
I vaguely remember hearing about how iodine was good for you when I was a kid. It impressed me enough that I still buy iodized salt. I didn't know that it had any effect on intelligence until Iaman sent me a link.
I've seen several maps recently that show that people from temperate zones are more intelligent than people from the tropics. I wonder if iodine is a factor.
Ben Simmons leads the 76ers to a thrilling finish vs. the Trail Blazers | 2019-20 NBA Highlights
Watched a couple of games on Saturday: the University of Oregon Ducks college football team against the University of Southern California Trojans, and the Portland Trailblazers professional basketball team versus the Philidelphia Seventy-Sixers. Both games held a couple of surprises.
Both games were playing at the same time, so we switched back and forth between them. The Ducks trounced USC. At one point we switched over just in time to see USC kick-off, an Oregon receiver caught the ball on the goal line and proceeded to run straight for the other goal and score a touchdown. I don't think any of the USC players managed to lay a hand on him.
The final seconds of the Blazers game was also surprising. The Blazers started the fourth quarter with a good size lead (10 points maybe?), but the 76-ers managed to whittle that down. In the last minute of the game the lead changed four times. The 76-ers pulled ahead and with something like 10 seconds left, the Blazers got the ball and managed to sink a shot and get the lead back. That left something like 4 seconds left. Surely the 76-ers aren't going to be able to score in that short amount of time, but they did, which left something like half a second on the clock. The Blazers managed to inbound the ball and get off a hail mary shot, but it missed. Actually not sure if Damian Lillard got it off in time.
I don't like my cable bill, but it gets us what we want, so I pay it, but YouTube has been advertising YouTube TV and it sounds like you can get all the sports stations you want, but you can't. The NBA has their market sewn up tight. The only way you can get your local team is through your local station, unless it is being broadcast nationally, or it's the 3rd Sunday after a full moon. I got cross-eyed trying to sort out all whose-its and where-fores, but eventually the line about local stations sank in, and then I realized that the only way to get what we want is by paying the cable company a bunch of money.
Except there is something called nbastream. It used to hosted on reddit, but reddit isn't doing it anymore. Not to worry, the torch has been picked up by the nbastream website. They blather on about how they have all the games and they are free, and so on, but there is no mention of where they are getting their feeds. Are we really depending on some big hearted guy uploading his cable feed to this website? Actually, a dozen guys would have to be doing it every day to keep the demands for nbastream satisfied. The world is full of sports enthusiasts and computer aficionados, so I could see that there could be enough people that were both that they could be the source.
So, I could drop cable and get the Blazers off of nbastream, but what about the college football games? There is a probably a similar site that provides the same service, but I'd have to go dig them out. And what happens if the NBA gets excited and decides to bring the smack down on these pirate sites? And what happens if that happens right before the game starts? I don't think the cable company can reconnect me in a matter of minutes, I would expect them to take days, which kind of screws our game watching. Actually, they could proably connect me in a matter of seconds, but being as it's a giant, soulless corporation, I doubt whether anyone there cares whether I get connected now or in a week.
Now it might be that the NBA knows about the piracy but lets it go for the same reason that musical groups (mostly) stopped trying to take their stuff down from YouTube - the exposure leads to more sales. Having more people watch the game increases the ciritical mass of people ensuring that everyone will hear about it.
It is one thing to disagree with someone politically and hope that ones own views triumphs. This is perfectly normal. However it is quite another thing entirely to try and ruin the life of someone who disagrees with you politically.
Such an attempt encapsulates the type of personalities involved in the PC witch-hunts . I am surprised that more is not made of the obvious personality disorders / deep level neuroses associated with those involved.
If I was to witness a man on the street racially abusing a random stranger unprovoked I would assume that the man is laboring under some sort of defect of reason . I would assume not unreasonably that he has an underlying personality disorder and that the racial abuse is a symptom of this disorder.
In a similar vein it is clear that the type of people who accuse others of being racist, sexist etc on the flimsiest of pretexts have serious personality disorders and or/ anger issues. It clearly goes much deeper than whatever the apparent matter at hand is.
I wonder if PC ideology makes its strongest proponents vicious attack dogs who have no compassion for those they seek to destroy or perhaps it is a case that the ideology attracts these sort of people in the first place. - Caleb
