Backlog after the Mars paper.

More backlog.

Still catching up with the backlog. for a change, I'm looking at my most-recent listing.

• Planet Formation Mechanisms (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14430) - a book chapter for something that hasn't come out yet. (Is it a proceedings volume/ review collection from Protostars and Planets VII, April 10th – 15th of 2023, Kyoto, Japan ? Lots of links on that page to recordings of the conference proceedings, such as "The Solar Neighborhood in the Age of Gaia" - now that looks a valuable seam to mine, once the current problems with downloading from YT are fixed.) Quick read ... disk-instability versus core-accretion models (which are end-members of a continuum). It all happens quickly - order of a million years, and in the middle of a dusty nebula, making it inherently hard to observe. (More data, extending into the thousands of exoplanet, improves the chances of finding examples in that 1-in-5000 time period for the Solar system analogues.) All in, that looks a very valuable resource. Time for me to watch some YT, while making supper.
  [Later] Lots of stuff over my head, so far concentrating on aspects of assembling matter into protostars. (Well the conference was titled "Protosatars and Planets", and as presented on YT, the conference seems to have worked systematicay from interstellar space down to assembling planets. So, more watching to do. Worth the investment - and when YT's download blocks are broken again, I'll be back to DL them. Probably worth it's own posting, when I've got recordings that I can pause/ rewind.
• "Projections of Earth’s technosphere. I. Scenario modeling worldbuilding, and overview of remotely detectable technosignatures." - a bit difficult to asssess this one. The astronomical point of view is that looking into the future like this helps sharpen the focus on potential bio- and techno-signatures we could find in the atmospheres of exoplanets. Worth doing. Not sure how to assess this though. Interesting, and not terribly optimistic that their Abstract sums up the results as "Our scenarios include three with zero-growth stability, two that have collapsed into a stable state, one that oscillates between growth and collapse, and four that continue to grow. Only one scenario includes rapid growth that could lead to interstellar expansion."
  I'm not sure how to assess their methodologies, but it's one for the "futurologists" to consider (if they do anything other than navel-gazing and tea-leaf reading).
• "The Accelerating Decline of the Mass Transfer Rate in the Recurrent Nova T Pyxidis" This just caught my eye and reminded me to check on how "T CorBor" is going (Magnitude 10.2 ; Error - JD 2460607.194 ; Calendar Date - 2024 Oct. 23.69400; Magnitude 10.2; Filter Vis.; Observer MQA. It hasn't gone yet.) In comparison to T CorBor, "The recurrent nova T Pyxidis has erupted six times since 1890, with its last outburst in 2011," - 20-odd years, which compares to the 80-year recurrence (one recurrence!, poised on tenterhooks for the second) of T CorBor ; "[...] indicates that T Pyx must have a massive white dwarf accreting at a high rate." Well, it does if there is any validity to the accreting WD model - which I've heard no serious counter-proposals against. "the magnitude decline of T Pyx from ∼ 13.8 (before 1890) to 15.7 just before the 2011 eruption" Ah, that would explain why it's less well known - you need ... at least a 150mm (six-inch) telescope to see that and do any meaningful measurements on it. In the context of T CorBor being around a month "late" for it's bookings as a TOO (Target Of Opportunity) for just about ever professional telescope in the northern hemisphere, the complexity of this stars varying recurrence rate makes the delay in recurrence all the more understandable.
  This star is inferred to have at least one feedback system, where the heat of material transferring onto the WD component inflates one side of the companion star to increase the transfer rate ... leading to more complex behaviour. T Pyx' recurrence intervals of 12, 18, 24, 23, and 44 years suggests there is a lot more complexity to it's behaviour than implied for T CorBor.
  T Pyx is a bit odd. If Wiki is right (an important "if"), then the WD has a mass of 0.7 M_☉ while the companion has a mass of 0.13M_☉. Which puts it down in the brown dwarf margin. And the total mass of the system is 0.87 M_☉ - which is well below the Chandrasekhar limit (about 1.4 M_☉. So the big concern is ... ? Whatever things T.Pyx has up it's binary sleeve, a type 1A supernova isn't among them. [Checking the references for that mass estimate … Uthas et al (Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 409, 237–246 (2010)) do give that figure, but in a context of a WD:donor mass ratio of 5:1. That still leaves the donor as being very small, for feasible WD masses (≤ Chandrasekhar), and the total mass marginal for producing a SN.
  Odd system. Big can of worms. (I also see that Schaeffer - the guy who was headlining the "T CorBor is gonna blow!" story - has a long history publishing in the recurrent nova field. As one would hope. The data densities for nova records from the 1920s to [recent] are instructive - dozens of photometric measurements increasing to hundreds per eruption.) Moving on.
• A cosmic formation site of silicon and sulphur revealed by a new type of supernova explosion. Everyone knows the "onion" model for nucleosynthesis in (massive) stars. Less well-known is the existence of "stripped" stars where hot massive stars lose their hydrogen-dominated envelopes, revealing a He-dominated core (Wolf-Rayet stars, particularly sub-type WN). Digging deeper (ejecting more of the envelope, one gets the carbon/oxygen shell exposed (Wolf-Rayet WC/WO stars) and their corresponding type 1_CN supernovae, with their unusual sets of emission lines. This paper reports a supernova whose spectrum implies stripping all the way to expose the sulphur/silicon layer of the core. SN 2021yf is proposed to show such a star's destruction with lines of multiply ionised silicon, sulphur, and argon (Si_III-IV, S_III-IV, and Ar_III with an absence of lighter element lines. Which they interpret as being the detonation of such a core stripped back well into the S-Si shell.
  Nice find. I was aware thaat W-R stars were stripped, and hot, bright (so, short-lived) stars. But I hadn't realised they were - at their extremes - taking their own cores apart. "Die young, stay pretty", on a stellar scale.

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And that's another couple of days worth skim-read.

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Tri-axial Mars - the Mars Kim Stanley Robinson forgot

A synchronous moon as a possible cause of Mars’ initial triaxiality

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.14725

This came out of the backlog. Some editing from that.

28 August 2024 - A synchronous moon as a possible cause of Mars’ initial triaxiality

Oh, that's interesting. Mars presents a lot of questions because it is the closest Earth-a-like we can study in any detail.

On the other hand, many people forget how different Mars is to Earth (@twitter.com@elonmusk - are you listening? Of course not - you talk, not listen.) Yes (FTFA), "It turns out that a moon of less than a third of the lunar mass was capable of producing a sufficient initial triaxiality." may be true, but it glosses over that Mars is now (and probably always was) one tenth of Earth's mass. Is that comparison with the Moon in absolute mass, or relative mass? In either case it is ridiculously larger than Phobos or Deimos, or their combination.

Where did this Moon go? And why?

I saw an interesting SETI "lunchtime lecture" on the Martian "hemispheric dichotomy" (N. Polar Basin vs Southern Highlands) a number of years ago. Accepting the "giant impact" hypothesis for that structure (itself a natural expectation of "hierarchical growth" [should that be "oligarchic growth"? From Wiki, The next stage is called oligarchic accretion. It is characterized by the dominance of several hundred of the largest bodies - oligarchs - which continue to slowly accrete planetesimals. No body other than the oligarchs can grow. ] - little things accrete to make bigger things - models of planetary growth), then the possibility that after the last "giant impact" the body is significantly non-spherical becomes ... well, plausible, but not guaranteed. Late-stage impacts are going to deliver a lot of energy so that the planet is effectively a droplet of a low-viscosity fluid. And you've got to have a large enough body ("Moon-size", or larger ; the Moon is about 1.25% of the mass of the Earth), close enough to affect the shape of the (slowly) cooling mass.

Time to RTFP!

"Motivation :" Mars’ triaxiality makes itself most evident through the equatorial ellipticity produced by the Tharsis Rise and by a less prominent elevation located almost diametrically opposite to Tharsis and constituted by Syrtis Major Planum and an adjacent part of Terra Sabaea Yeah, well we all know Tharsis - volcanoes, possibly still recently active. Maybe a mark of "single plate tectonics and where the heat gets out. Tharsis, volcanic peaks excluded, is about 7km above the mean elevation of the planet (or is it to a reference elevation, not a "mean" - a bit of Martian cartography I'll have to check up on) while the elevation he gives for Terra Sabaea is only 2.1~2.3 km. The author then goes on to consider the ellipticity of Mars without the Tharsis contribution (which the mappers, Zuber and Smith (1997), had also considered). Even [without Tharsis] Mars retained much of its triaxiality. - Which I'll take as read. They then propose the initiation of a "seed" triaxial component from their putative moon, later amplified by tectonic processes dumping heat and magma onto the Tharsis high point. Unfortunately, this gets rather iffy already. Mars is reported to undergo a lot more "polar wander" than Earth (justifying the horrible SF consequences of losing the Moon, and all sorts of other doom) and that the current near-polar position of the North Polar Basin and the (sub-equatorial) Tharsis bulge are near-coincidence. I don't think you can have both at the same time. I agree with this next quote - but am not blind to the problems of moons turning up then going away : The seed asymmetry of the equator was considerable if the synchronous moon existed already at the magma-ocean epoch, and was weaker if the moon showed up at the solidification stage.

Whence had it come, whither gone?

The author's title, not mine. But yes, it's a big question.

Had the impact happened during the magma-ocean stage, it would hardly have influenced the subsequent development of Mars’ global structure.

I couldn't put it more succinctly myself. See my above "droplet of a low-viscosity fluid" comment.

On the other hand, had it [a large impact] happened during the formation of crust, it may have, speculatively, left some signature - whence the question arises whether that impact could be the one responsible for the north-south hemispherical dichotomy, a theme beyond the scope of our study.

I don't think the author has seen Marinova's SETI lecture on her work, or the associated papers. Her modelling of a Polar-basin forming impact has the redistribution of 10~20 km thickness of crustal thickness from the (putative) impact site to the rest (other 2/3) of Mars' surface - which would literally outweigh this proposed minor lunar re-shaping. There's the non-trivial point too that the crust and upper mantle would have isostatically adjusted towards following the (gravitational) spheroid or (rotational ellipsoid. Rocks are not solid, even on a cold, dead planet like Mars - they creep under forces.

He doesn't really address the "whence" question - he lists some features of protoplanetary discs, and says they might be factors, while ignoring the blunt fact that most people in the field accept the really large satellites in the Solar system (Luna, Charon) are the products of "giant impacts", and this "Nerio" (some Roman mythological associate of Mars/ Ares) would fall into that category too.

What does he say about "whither"? Well, he blames it on the LHB (Late Heavy Bombardment), with a proviso that it would have to have been early in the LHB, so that later LHB impacts would overprint the expected equator-biased impacts from bits of the moon falling to Mars.

Colour me unconvinced on that front. It's plausible, but far from convincing. The whole "LHB" concept is itself rather dependent on a relatively small number of radiometric dates from a relatively small area of the Moon, all rather close to the Imbrium Basin. There are geological challenges from terrestrial observations too. It's an idea seriously needing better support (e.g. from sample-return missions from the Lunar far-side).

The remaining 27 pages of the paper are mathematical arguments which are over my head. The author obviously thinks they show that his sequence of events is mathematically plausible, and I'm willing to accept that (besides, it's plain from the reference list, that this is his field, and he's worked with many others in this area, and presummably they accept this work when they reviewed the paper. "plausible" ≠ "true".

My summary : plausible, but I don't think it's likely. Worth a read ; not worth studying the maths (which I assume is correct).

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2024-10-13 More backlog, up to tri-axial Mars)

Between one thing and another (which includes my laptop deciding to power-down half-way through an OS upgrade), a week of inactivity. Fortunately, nowt published, so let's see what is in the pile.

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Bottom of the list : 16 August 2024
Oh, before I go any further, T CorB still hasn't "gone". Yet.
• Portability of Fortran's `do concurrent' on GPUs How to execute code on $GPU$ in a relatively transparent manner - because those who write the code may not know who is running the code, and on what hardware. - Really, that's very interesting. But is it astronomy?
• Time-Evolution Images of the Hypergiant RW Cephei During the Re-brightening Phase Following the Great Dimming A year and a bit ago, there was much screaming and shouting about Betelgeuse having a "dimming event". But this is normal behaviour for relatively large large stars. Totally normal.
• 28 August 2024 - A synchronous moon as a possible cause of Mars’ initial triaxiality
  Oh, that's interesting. Mars presents a lot of questions because it isd the closest Earth-a-like we can study in any detail.
  On the other hand, many people forget how different Mars is to Earth (@twitter.com@elonmusk - are you listening? Of course not - you talk, not listen.) Yes (FTFA), "It turns out that a moon of less than a third of the lunar mass was capable of producing a sufficient initial triaxiality." may be true, but it glosses over that Mars is now (and probbly always was) one tenth of Earth's mass. So, presenting the same data differently suddenly sounds less impressive : "It turns out that a moon of three times the relative lunar mass of Luna to Earth ..." sounds less impressive. That, and requiring a deus ex machina to take the moon off-stage before we get to see it ... unconvincing. It's plausible that the author (one-off : Michael Efroimsky, US Naval Observatory, Washington DC 20392 michael.efroimsky @ gmail.com! ; always a good sign of something that hasn't passed an in-house peer review before seeing the outside world. The author may be right, but as it stands, it's his name that he'll blacken, not his institution) is correct, but I won't hold my breath.
  Maybe worth reading about the "initial tri-axility" though. Between rotational forces, and the possibility of small bodies to exhibit "single-plate tectonics" (never (??) seen on Earth), there are some interesting questions there. Wossname did an interesting SETI "lunchtime lecture" on the Martian "hemispheric dichotomy" (N. Polar Basin vs Southern Highlands) a number of years ago. Accepting the "giant impact" hypothesis for that structure (itself a natural expectation of "hierarchical growth" - little things accrete to make bigger things), then the possibility that after the last "giant impact" the body is significantly non-spherical becomes sort-of obvious. not guaranteed though - late-stage impacts are going to deliver enough energy (which cannot leak away fast enough) that the planet is effectively a drop of a low-viscosity fluid. And you've got to have a large enough body (Moon-size, or larger ; the Moon is about 1.25% of the mass of the Earth) close enough to affect the shape of the (slowly) cooling mass. Hmmm. Before reading TFP, that's not looking very liklely. OK, I've done enough thinking on this, it's worth it's own post.

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Have to get back into the habit

/styles

Bloody hell, pushing 3 months since I touched this. Got to get back into this. 6 weeks visiting Dad didn't help, but I've got to get back into the habit.

So, what other things are in today's (well, yesterday's) list from Arχiv ?

• Another MOND publication. An interesting topic, but primarily because the Internet Kook Department loves a conspiracy theory, and the (bullshit) "suppression of heterodox opinion" by the Illuminati, the Physics Orthodoxy, and Uncle Tom Cobbley is high on the list of popular idiocies. I've been tracking this for a while, mostly to piss-off the conspiracy wingnuts (TL;DR version - the field remains a moderate, but minor part of science publication). But in a random pick from Arχiv, there it is. [Distant sound of deflating Internet wind-bag. Or maybe not.]
• Ultrashort Recurrence Time Nova M31N 2017-01e "Recurrent novae" are rare beasts. So it shouldn't be a great surprise to see that at least one has been spotted in the Andromeda Galaxy ("Messier 31", "M31" in the object's designation) because we can see most of the disc of that galaxy and half of the core, compared to under 1/3 of our galaxy. Which should remind me to check the status of the famous "T" variable in Corona Borealis ("T Cr B"), which has been observed to erupt twice, and which was predicted - with good clear reasoning - to erupt in May 2024 ± 6 months. Which prediction period we're getting to the end of. And it hasn't "gone" yet. Regarding the pattern-matching which constituted that "good, clear reasoning", it looks as if there is another cycle of the binary star's orbit to go before it goes "bang". That's the difficulty of making predictions, particularly regarding the future.
  It'll almost certainly go bang ; but when? That's the problem of dealing with small data sets - in this case a single recurrence after the original nova.
  What is this paper about? Prior to this report, the star had 4 known eruptions (discovery in 2017-01 ; a pre-covery in 2012-01, and subsequent observations in 2019-09 and 2022-03 ; see previous comment about datasets of 1) ; with an additional two eruptions the estimated timing has improved to 924 ± 7 days. Which is oddly consistent for a process that should have a significant random component to it. A 900-day recurrence time implies a very high accretion rate of material onto the (inferred) white dwarf. So, a potentially important system.
• Narrowing down the Hubble tension to the first two rungs of distance ladders. OK, I'm not going to introduce the "Hubble Tension" here. But I bet @Dr_Becky covers this on her YouTube channel of "Night Sky News this week. Which reminds me of something else to do tonight. Long story short - because they had a large (and increasing) data set, they could divide the data into smaller groups where the derivation of distance had been done by different methods. And they found that the values of H₀ derived with different distance estimate techniques show a discontinuity where there is a change from stage 2 (Cepheids-bearing host galaxies for SNe, z <e; 0.03) to stage 3 (using SNe as standard candles, 0.02 <e; z <e; 2.3) of the "cosmic distance ladder". Which suggests a systematic problem in one or other of stage 2 or 3. Which is pretty much what most people had been hoping to find, to resolve the "Hubble tension". The problem isn't solved - yet - but this is a pretty big step forward.
  What does Dr_Becky have to say? Well, she's back from holiday. Ah, bollocks - I forgot that youTube had started a new round of whack-a-mole against video downloaders. But since it's a Thursday paper, when she produces her videos, it hasn't made it into this week's NSN.
• "Limits on planetary-mass primordial black holes from the OGLE high-cadence survey of the Magellanic Clouds" Pretty much does what it says on the tin. Almost any discussion of astrophysics or astronomy, even accompanying a well-based repoting set-up such as @Dr_Becky's (above) will almost inevitably have someone chiming in in the comments section, "What if Planet 9 were a black hole?" or "What if a runaway black hole were to come into the Solar system tomorrow?" While they're perfectly fair questions, the askers generally don't seem to know that we've been taking a census of such non-incandescent material in the Milky Way (and the part of it's halo towards the Magellanic Clouds), and (this is what upsets them) there's not a lot of it about. Not enough to solve Vera Rubin's early-1970s discovery of "flat" galactic rotation curves. Not enough to have a credible chance of ex-President Trump being head-shot by a primordial black hole.
  Such non-glowing conventional matter is present - but not in sufficient quantities to make long standing cosmological problems go away.
  Worse - we've known this since the first reports from such occultation programmes in the mid-1980s (I personally remember reading the reports in between lectures, over a cup of tea in the Student's Union.) They're a nice idea to solve various problems - but there are not enough of them about, and several whole (academic) generations of astronomers have known they're an insufficient solution to observational problems. Sorry, guys!
• In-situ crystallographic mapping constrains sulfate deposition and timing in Jezero crater, Mars. That's a very geological one. Ca-sulphate minerals (they're careful to not say "gypsum" nor "anhydrite", so they plainly mean something else) have been reported from Mars for a while. Studying the crystallinity of these materials reveals some veins/ deposits were deposited more than 80m below then-current surface (so ... 80+m of erosion since then, to breing them to the present surface), while other veins were deposited much closer to the surface. Both types of rock sample are already cached for sample-return. Fun stuff, but it doesn't make Mars any the more habitable.
• Anything from the oldest collection that I haven't thrown away yet? All the way back to June 30th.
• A transiting multi-planet system in the 61 million year old association Theia 116 It's only 2 planets, but it's a very young system - possibly as young as when Earth suffered it's "Moon-forming impact. At 3.6 and 6.2 days orbital period, it's going to be a very different system to the Sun's.
• An ancient Indian Solar eclipse recorded in myth. The Rig Veda (hindu holy book ; one of several) records an eclipse "vanquished" by Invisible Sky Fairies (&TM;). Based on "the eclipse [...] having occurred when the Vernal Equinox was in Orion, and three days prior to the Autumnal Equinox [... the authors] identify ‘Atri’s eclipse’ as the one that occurred on 22 October 4202 BC or on 19 October 3811 BC." There are considerable uncertainties when looking back this far (6000-odd years), not least of which is that the tidal friction of the Moon (well, the sub-lunar ocean bulge) starts adding up to thousands of seconds, or hours of Earth rotation, which is a substantial fraction of the sub-solar point's travel through the regions of Central Asia where the ancestors of the Hindu aristocracy were inhabiting in the time interval. The several centuries of time uncertainty also allow for up to 30°ree; of longitude variation between eclipses that would have been visible near the Iranian-Kazakh border (today), or sites as far east as the modern Afghan- Pakistan-China border.
• What's this, Lassie? From the Aug 5 collection, "On Interstellar Quantum Communication and the Fermi Paradox"- sounds fun!
  Well, it does sound fun. Someone (the author) obviously thought "what sort of apparatus would be needed to transmit (and to receive) quantised data structures called "QuBits". Which, yes, fair enough question. Maybe the old stand-by of throwing "quantum" at a problem, like the Fermi Paradox ("where is everyone?") could result in a solution, sweetness, light and the odd Nobel gong for the lucky thinker.
  Tough luck : between Earth and Proxima Centauri, you'd need telescopes around 100km in diameter. Not going to happen soon ; may never happen. But worth feeding the guy while he scratches symbols on the blackboard.

And that's enough for this effort.

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My Favourite Caving

My Favorite Caving

When I were nobbut a spotty young shit-bagger, we had a sudden rush of cavings when CBU. Shakers completely blinded, OBM gushing over the top of the shakers, sand-trap level sensors plummeting - which is why I hauled myself down to the shaker house to see what was going on. The poor shaker hand (Zander, it was ; not long after he was made up to derrickman) was standing on the shakers, desperately shovelling to try to un-blind the shakers, and looking anguishedly at the squwak box to call the driller. So, I phoned upstairs (Terry French on the brake) told Frenchy what was going on, he cut the pumps back and we got things under control.

While we were getting the hole clean, this little beauty came up.

"Block 22" is a licensing district of the North Sea, a little east of the infamous Forties field. I didn't know the stratigraphy of the North Sea very well then, but I'm pretty confident in my assignment of it to the Miocene ; I might even go as far as the "Lark Formation", but I wouldn't go to the gallows over that. It's a thick mudrock series above the productive Forties and Andrew sandstones (new name : Mey Sandstone ; it's not worth trying to keep up with the ever-changing nomenclature).

30cm end-to-end is pretty unhealthily respectable for a caving. This was not a healthy borehole, but we did manage to get the casing down, IIRC. Bit of a struggle, but we did it.

It's not particularly obvious from the pictures, but the caving is strongly curved, concave towards the camera. When measured, the inner diameter was pretty close to 17.5 inches. I didn't realise this at the time, but that was a good sign - which I'll discuss later when we look at the other side. For now, note the sub-parallel sub-horizontal scratches at various places, including just above-right of the printed label. I interpret these as being scratches made by the bit (or possibly some of the downhole tools, but I think we were on a fairly simple BHA because we were on an appraisal well - more or less vertical.

Let's flip it over.

[Hmmm, definite depth-of-field effect there. The "feathered" convex-to-camera surface is in focus in the middle of the field, but towards the edge of the caving it's out of focus.]

From the geometry of the cutting, this was a surface within the rock, which failed because of stresses within the rock which weren't counterbalanced by the drilling mud. That (and 8 other functions) is what mud is for. (The formal title of my job then was "mud logger", not shit-bagger.)

On this surface there is a faint "feather" structure with a central spine running circumfrentially to the wellbore and many plumes splaying out to either side. This is the mark of the propagation of the initial fracture when the rock failed. What triggered the failure isn't clear - maybe a large microfossil, or an existing fracture or vein.

This next picture zooms in on the "feather structure". It's worth putting this into your mental collection of "search images". You see this structure in your cuttings dish (or in more obvious cavings) and you know you've got a pore pressure problem, regardless of what pore pressure modellers, mud men, Uncle Tom Cobbley or even the company man says. They can ignore the problem, or rub woad into their communal belly button and pray for it to go away. But you, youngling-geologist, have to report it.

Zooming in further, I wonder what dragged across the caving to cause this tool mark. I was pretty careful handling it - "Pretty! Precioussss!" - keeping it in a paper bag to slow it's drying, avoiding point sources of heat, carefully wrapped in my kit bag to go home. I don't know if this happened coming up the hole, or on surface.

The Company Man got a batter cutting - nearly 50% of the wellbore circumference. But he kept it on the shelf above the radiator in his office and it crumbled to dust the day before my crew change. He tried bribery and corruption to get mine. Once. " Precioussss!" Didn't work. Again, I did tell him "don't dry it too aggressively". Not responsible for advice not taken.

cm and mm scale ; the other side of this scale has American bananas. I've had to do too many conversions for people who can't handle a different unit system to what they grew up with.

This last picture is taken with "oblique illumination" to show the "feather structure" better. It has around a half-mm relief from the general surface.

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Filed under geoPr0n, which is a very specific type of Pr0n.

2024-07-23 World's Tiniest Violin .com, .org, .net, ... none squatted ?

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To my (mild) astonishment, nobody has snagged, used, or even cyber-squatted "World's Tiniest Violin" in any of it's obvious permutations worldstiniestviolin.org, worldstiniestviolin.com, worldstiniestviolin.net, worlds-tiniest-violin.org (etc). worldstiniestviolin.mil or .gov would be entertaining, if rather ... revalatory.

I should do something about that.

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2024-07-23 Slashdot Submission : Cocaine with sharks on it's Lasers. Or something like that.

An article submitted to Slashdot. It should have the elements necessary to make the cut, but you never know. Also, 27 other people may have submitted it.

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The BBC are reporting sharks have tested positive for cocaine. A bakers dozen of sharpnose sharks which were captured off the coast near Rio de Janeiro were tested for the drug in liver and muscle tissue samples and returned positive results at concentrations as much as 100 times higher than previously reported for other aquatic creatures.

The research was published in Science of the Total Environment. The little-known "sharpnose" sharks were examined because they spend their entire lives in coastal waters, and so are likely more exposed to drugs from human activities than the more cinematic species starring in "Cocaine Shark" or "Cocaine Sharks", two recent productions on the subject featuring hammerheads and tiger sharks (the "trash cans of the sea").

The likeliest source is effluent from drug processing labs inland, though the snorting population of Rio may have pissed their contribution in to the sewers too. (Which begs the question - does nobody make cocaine-reclaiming filters for users - or enterprising apartment block concierges? Yet?)

Whether cocaine is changing the behaviour of the sharks is not known. Perhaps it would affect their aim with their head-mount lasers, bringing their conquest of the land with it's tasty, tasty humans closer. Hollywood, hopefully, has (tyop!) the answers.

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2024-05-21 A little archaeological rant. ; Youtube comment formatting.

First find versus first occurence..

I was watching some thing on YouTube, about the "mysterious" "perforated batons" found across Eurasia for 50,000-odd years. Conventional theory has that they're tools for making some sort of rope - maybe plant-stem cordage, rather than sinew ... maybe also good for preparing sinew. No huge mystery there. But why are most 1- or 2 hole, but a few 3- or even 4-hole batons? Clearly not totally solved, but the "rope preparation/ handling tool" is pretty strong.

But I came up with this little rant, which is more generally applicable, and I think it's worth keeping a copy of. (YT comments use the USENET convention of *bold*, [hyphen]strikethrough[hyphen] or _italic_ AFAIK. I really ought to check up on their formatting rules.)

@YouTubeCommentator5527 "As it turns out they were invented 72.000 - 60.000 years ago"

They were invented before 72-60 kyr BP ; the oldest successfully dated finds are dated to 72-60 kyr BP.

In general, finding a technological artefact means you've found a widespread, popular, well-developed technology. The first several thousand years of a Palaeolithic "Leonardo of Ug", slaving away trying to get his "throw sticks at mammoth, but harder" device to work properly probably resulted in 1 small pile of broken prototypes outside a single ivory tower [mammoth ivory? it was used as a boulding material] at "Ug". But 10 years after he got it working, every single "Ug[X], of Ug" would have had one. A year later, their neighbours the Uggs of Ugli wanted ones, with "go-faster" stripes. Then Marketing came up with a "better" name (an atlatl - really?) ... and soon everyone on the continent had one. Including the inevitable ones that get lost.

The odds of finding those prototypes are far worse than finding the effective, widespread production model. Where is Benz's first "automobile"? One copy, in one single museum. Where are the Model-T Fords? In every second ditch, and abandoned barn ; broken by the side of innumerable roads. Everywhere.

I like that rant. I'm going to save it for re-use! Polish it a bit. If he weren't ded, yet, I'd apologise to Pterry for mis-(?)appropriating Leonardo of Quirm's Palaeolithic ancestor for a starring rôle.

From the same video, but quoting someone un-named : "the easiest way to be wrong about our ancestors is to underestimate them." Very true. Grahaam Hancock and the "Ancient Aliens" people don't dare think that, becaasue it would harm their sales.

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YouTube Comment Formatting markup

Inevitably, there's a video. 25MB to download (plus adverts if you don't block them) to express what takes less than a line of text (all above - there is no more). Sheesh. It's also one of those incredibly annoying American drawls where you need to connect your phone to the defibrilator to get wake-up calls for a new byte of information. That is modern communications?

OK, I needed to edit that for clarity. The USENET encoding was of the form :

[tag] [no whitespace] emphasised text [no whitespace] [tag]

… and that seems to be what YT expects too. Reasonable enough - no need for wheel re-invention here. Somebody will probably try redesigning it to use picking from several thousand near-identical emojis, becauuse that is somehow "easier" than using a keyboard. [Shrug]

Now I need to focus on that Venus article.
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