"BrexitExit" and the costs of Hubris

In the aftermath of the disastrous (for the Tory Government) 2017 general election (for clarity - the one in June ; I remember 1974 and the two general elections that year, and I'm not going to rule out a second one this year), the question of how badly the UK Government's team at the upcoming "Brexit" negotiation will be weakened is obviously of importance. On one side will be a team from the UK's DUP-CUP Coalition of Chaos, constantly looking over their shoulders to see if they're getting the sack this afternoon, and on the other side a team of professional negotiators with homes to go to and careers that won't be badly affected one way or the other by the result. It's not going to go the way that the Government  or their Brexit supporters want. And the deal that will be aimed at by the professional EU negotiators will be one that is so bad for Britain that it becomes an unavoidable question whether or not it is worth carrying on.
 The UK Government is going to have to try to exit from Brexit. Hence the tag "#BrexitExit".

At that point, one would expect - "require", even, since part of the charge of the EU government is to extend and enhance the EU - the EU negotiators to extract some political payment. If membership of a club is considered an attractive thing, then defectors must be punished, and punished publicly. 

I think one of the high probabilities of a demand for suspending Article 50 and ceasing Britain's efforts to leave the EU will be Britain signing up for the Euro.

The fact that this would be utterly repugnant to many of the political engineers of the whole Brexit debacle would, of course, be one of the motives for making this demand. There are swords which have not been fallen upon, and that is not an acceptable end point of the process. 

I'm also trying to remember an aphorism to the effect that "Those who the Gods wish to destroy [for their sin of hubris], they will first drive insane." [See footnote-2]

Boy, was PM Theresa May suffering a severe attack of hubris when she called the election, and now it's either Furies or Harpies that are keeping her awake at night.

---

Links : (submitted as comment/ idea to a journalist on NZZ, Neue Zürich Zeitung) Back-link?

Footnote 1 : "DUP-CUP" Democratic Unionist Party is well known ; the official name of the Tories has always (well my political lifetime, at least) been the "Conservative and Unionist Party" ; normally Tories refer to themelves as "Conservatives", but when first toadying to the DUP, May started using the full name, and telegraphing what was coming by that wording.

Footnote 2 :  That phrasing actually seems to be from the 1870s by Longfellow, but the concept has been traced back via multiple re-uses to Sophocles' Antigone lines 622-624

that a man can reason the bad
into good, when a god
seduces his wit.

 That's the common (in 5th century BCE Athens) condemnation of Sophists.

Musings on Climate Change and it's Mitigation.

What to do about global climate change?

Lots of BLAH but several things are clear :
- Climates are complex. Certainly more complex than we DO understand;  possibly more complex than we CAN understand (without using machines) ;
- People are in deep - ostrich mode (obvious from coverage) ;
- by combination, the two above mean that nothing will be done, until too late. (It may already be too late.)
Hence, the increasing interest in "geoengineering". But which of the many possible schemes to follow? Surely a more difficult, and important, question.

The first point is important. Many proposed schemes interfere with complex systems in complex ways. It is perfectly hard to predict the consequences. Another concern is the time LAG between action and effect and (not unreasonable ) concerns of overshooting the desired end point. Another reasonable concern is the plausible disproportionate effect of controls on people less responsible for the problem.
SO . . .  I see the simplest solution as
(1) change insolation, not the atmosphere. The atmosphere is just too complex.
(2) change the insolation in space
(3) add components  (and so effect) in small but simply additive increments.

My proposition: combine magnetic force propulsion with solar sail technology and the properties of the L1 Lagrange point.
- Orbital objects near L1 stay there with little station-keeping effort.
- This is an area around 1Gm (a million km) from Earth, on the Sun-Earth line.
- The Sun (and Earth) has a non-trivial magnetic field in the region of L1
- At L1 the area covered by the Sun is AROUND 10000 km across. Area ~750000 sq.km.
- We have TRIED  (failed, not for relevant reasons) to launch a solar sail of around 100m diameter. 0.03sq.km
- To reduce insolation by 1%, 7500sq.km of blocking solar sail would be needed. That is a lot of launches, but not immense. Incremental improvements will increase effectiveness of each vessel and launch.

---

Update : Does the Earth's magnetic field extend out to a million km (L1)?

Eta Carinae - (yet) Another Hypothesis

Was the nineteenth century giant eruption of Eta Carinae a merger event in a triple system?

2015 paper referring to the 1838 to 1860-ish Eta Carinae outburst
S.F. Portegies Zwart and E.P.J. van den Heuvel

They propose that before 1838 (in Earth's reference frame) Eta Carinae was a triple massive star system. The 1843 outburst was the result of a merger in 1838 (which formed the ~90 MSol main star of the present system), followed by the 1843 impact of the third (non-merging) body of the initial trio with the expanded envelope of the merged star.

Interesting idea. Stimulates the obvious question of what is the prognosis?

Ohhh, I hope they passed it through a native-English speaker (or translator) before publishing things like "Also if our model would finally not be the one that explains all the characteristics of Eta Car, still and evolution as discribed and modelled here is expected to happen not rarely in nature."

So, what is the lookout for the future of Eta Car? Apart from "uncertain"?

Issues with Oolite

Contradictory messages in Stellar Serpents.OXP(z)

Someone got to it first.

New Year 2015-2016.

New Years pretty sky things.

 London skyline from Primrose Hill. A huge pall of smoke from the fireworks drifts east  from the Eye (site of the firework display) ; the Post Office Tower shines somewhat excessively in the foreground. And the Moon and Jupiter look down on the whole lot, unconcerned.
The park's ground has been trashed. And rubbished severely too. Both Oksana and I got hit by flying (falling) champagne corks in the last minutes of the nominal old year.

 More traditional firework photos.




New Year's Eve weird things. The sheep in the back row has 3 horns.

Seriously. I suspect a developmental problem. But this being the Land of the Inbred Yokels (Cotswolds), it could be someone's idea of a joke.

Close up :

Quite how someone could attach a third horn to a sheep is one question ("Why" is another), while I could envision developmental issues where a horn could be duplicated. Then there's always the "parasitic twin" explanation.

Methusalah's star

I'm composing a mail for His CeilingCatness at WEIT, but it needs work.

So far : 

A common attack tactic for creationists is general assault on science - which they frequently support by deliberate mis-reading of reports, and/ or mixing of data from different eras. As you well know.

A popular target is that in the mid-late 1970s some stars had their ages estimated up in the 10+Ga (giga-annum, billion years ago) age range, while measurements from the ground put the cosmic microwave background at around 6 to 7 billion years. Obvious fodder for the god-squaddies. "Science can't be right, therefore God!"

This factoid sometimes gets described as the "Methuselah Star" and variations thereof.

One of the particular stars involved, and the most extreme example is in the Henry Draper star catalogue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Draper_Catalogue, number HD 140283 (catalogue data and references at http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-basic?Ident=HD+140283&submit=SIMBAD+search). This is a spectroscopic catalogue that was published 1918-1924. 19-teens era spectroscopy required relatively bright stars, and it should be no surprise that "Methusalah's Star" is quite close (parallax 16.1140+/-0.0720 milliarcseconds (from SIMBAD, link above) - translating to 62+/-0.1 parsecs, 202.4+/-0.3 light years. That's about the total thickness of the Milky Way's "disc" ; the Milky Way has a shape similar to a CD or DVD disc. Really quite close! Corollary : in the rest of the galaxy, there are probably a lot of equally old, if not older, stars.

Multiple measurements since the 70s have improved our estimate of the age of the universe (BOOMerang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOOMERanG_experiment, WMAP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WMAP Planck, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_Surveyor), and converged on 13.772±0.040 Ga as the age of the CMB - which is about 370,000 years after the big bang ( 0.00037 Ga - compare with the uncertainty cited above). Obviously that no longer conflicts with the age estimate for "Methusalah's Star".

Having updated the age of the universe, and the distance to the "Methusalah Star", what about it's age? Well that has been updated too. (Arxiv link below) Unfortunately, stars don't come with "Best Before" dates, or even interesting sets of isotopes (which we can read at many trillions of km range), so estimating their ages is rather difficult. But that has improved even more since the 1970s then the age estimates for the CMB.

What initially attracted attention to HD 140283 - why indeed, the astronomers producing the catalogue considered it worth taking note of - is that it's spectrum contained very few, weak absorption lines for what the astrophysicists call "metals" (their jape is that anything which is not hydrogen or helium is a "metal" ; hilarious!). In the 19-teens that was just a datum. As the characterisation goes, astrophysics at that time was more "stamp collecting" than "science". However when Hoyle (and others) developed a theory of powering stars by nucleosynthesis in the 1930s and 40s, this both justified the value of "stamp collecting science" and provided a tool for understanding the ages of stars.

[explain stellar age modelling]

Need to keep the emphasis on nucleosynthesis and core heat production, not get side-lined into primordial elements.

Basket Katz

"Basket Katz" (Mikki) is a friend's cat. In Bavaria.

 The reason for his nickname is fairly obvious.

A human side to a giant

A Neil Armstrong Anecdote

I like my science fiction, so some years ago I made a strategic decision : one of the proven routes for a novice SF author to get known, and to get experience in writing, is to write short stories and get them published in a magazine. So I took out a subscription to Fantasy and Science Fiction - not necessarily the highest in the pantheon, but they were in danger of going under, so I thought - that's a decent punt.
I'm getting what I expected : some great stories, some poor ones, some tedious editorial (I do not need to read about yet another bloody werewolf-vampire romance!) and some great editorial. Though to be honest, I'm less than diligent about reading them when they arrive - I tend to chuck them into corner of the bookshelf and take them to the rig for bedtime reading.
So, I rip open an un-opened envelope on the plane to Gabon here ... and it's the Nov/Dec 2012 edition. Been laying on the bookshelf since just after we moved. Oops.
And there's a great little anecdote in the editorial about the (then recently deceased) first man on the Moon, Neil Armstrong.
Now, there's a lot of hagiography about the man. First Man on the Moon ; the Right Stuff ; fluffed his lines on the biggest outside broadcast in the history of humanity. But there's not a lot about the man himself - after he retired from NASA, he didn't do a lot of public stuff, retiring into the background. His second-in-command, Buzz Aldrin, has been more famous in recent decades, if only for punching out the lights of a Moon Landing Conspiracy whackjob. Way to go, Buzz! and give him one in the nuts from me!
But back to the Neil Armstrong anecdote. The editorial, as befits the last number for the year, looks back at major events of that year, including, unsurprisingly Neil Armstrong's death. Gordon van Gelder, the F&SF editor, then recounts the following anecdote of a more human Neil Armstrong, ascribing it to one Lucius Shepard, though it doesn't appear on Sheperd's website.

I kinda met Neil Armstrong once back in the late '70s. My brother-in-law and I ran a T-shirt company and we had a couple of lines we sold to museum shops and at science fiction cons and like that. We were coming back from a sales trip, driving through rural Ohio, when we spotted a sign advertising the Neil Armstrong Museum in some little town. What the hell, we said. Maybe we can dump some shirts, so when we got to the museum we sat down with the curator, who was also the buyer for the gift shop, and pitched the shirts. We had a kids' shirt that resembled the body of a NASA space suit and the guy bought about 7, 8 dozen of those, along with shirts that had maps of the moon and Mars, the big red spot on Jupiter, etc. I don't recall how the subject came up, but I asked the curator if Neil ever came around the museum and the curator said, "Oh, sure. He's here all the time. I think he's here now." I asked if we could meet him and he said that Neil wasn't big on meeting new people and besides, he was probably sleeping. "He likes to sleep in the lander," he said. "He spends a lot of time in there."

"The moon lander?" I asked.

"It's a replica," the curator said. "It's up in the Moon Room, on the second floor. You can go on up if you'd like. Maybe you'll see him."

We went up to the second floor. There was a walkway that ran across the building, a bridge of sorts, then a gap that separated us from the Moon Room, which was a display of a life-sized lander sitting on some pumice-like material, and in the distance some painted crater walls, lunar mountains, and a black sky with stars. It probably looked fairly real when the lights were off, but the lights were on full and it looked pretty fake.

We hung out for around five minutes and then gave up on the idea of seeing Neil.

We went back downstairs, finished some paperwork and had a cup of coffee with the curator. I said I thought it struck me as weird, Neil Armstrong sleeping in the moon lander. The curator said maybe so, he'd never given it much thought.

Before we left we ran back up to the Moon Room to try and catch sight of Neil...and there he was. He was standing on the ladder leading up to the hatch. A guy with buzz-cut hair was all I could make out. We waved at him and after a second or two he waved back. I had a feeling he'd been on the verge of leaving the lander, but after that one wave he ascended the ladder and closed the hatch behind him.

That's all there is. Not much of an encounter. I used to think I'd write a story about seeing him, but it never came to anything. I liked thinking about Armstrong sleeping in the lander, though, the kind of dreams he had there and all. It made him seem a lot more real than that BS one small step for mankind quote that someone wrote for him. And it makes his death go down smoother to imagine him curled up in that cramped space on his padded couch, on his way to somewhere no one else has ever been.

 Well, yeah. That's nice. Different to the run of the mill. I'm really going to have to make more of an effort to read things when they are new.
(There are some good stories in that number of F&SF. You can get a copy, or a subscription, from their orders page.)