What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

January 6 Tapes?

Where are the tapes? Anyone, Anyone? Bueller? Johnson??

Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.

News Flash

Today, it is still the case that Joe Biden didn’t Win.

I realize that to some readers, this might be a shock; surely at some point things must change and Biden will have actually won.

But the past cannot actually be changed.

It will always and forever be the case that Joe Biden didn’t win.

And if you, Leftist Lurker, want to dismiss it as dead white cis-male logic…well, you can call it what you want, but then please just go fuck off. No one here buys that bullshit–logic is logic and facts are facts regardless of skin color–and if you gave it a moment’s rational thought, you wouldn’t either. Of course your worthless education never included being able to actually reason–or detect problems with false reasoning–so I don’t imagine you’ll actually wake up as opposed to being woke.

As Ayn Rand would sometimes point out: Yes, you are free to evade reality. What you cannot do is evade the consequences of evading reality. Or to put it concretely: You can ignore the Mack truck bearing down on you as you play in the middle of the street, you won’t be able to ignore the consequences of ignoring the Mack truck.

And Ayn Rand also pointed out that existence (i.e., the sum total of everything that exists) precedes consciousness–our consciousnesses are a part of existence, not outside of it–therefore reality cannot be a “social construct” as so many of you fucked-up-in-the-head people seem to think.

So much for Leftist douchebag lurkers. For the rest of you, the regular readers and those lurkers who understand such things: I continue to carry the banner once also carried by Wheatie. His Fraudulency didn’t win.

Let’s Go, Brandon!!

His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

(I’d like to add, I find it entirely plausible, even likely, that His Fraudulency is also His Figureheadedness. (Apparently that wasn’t a word; it got a red underline. Well it is now.) Where I differ with the hopium addicts is on the subject of who is really in charge. It ain’t anyone we like.)

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

The Asteroids

In 1772 Johan Elert Bode citing Johan Daniel Titius, formulated the Titius-Bode law, more commonly just “Bode’s Law.” They had noted a rather interesting pattern in the distances of the planets from the Sun, when expressed in AUs. Let’s show the ones known as of 1772, plus the Hugh Janus, discovered in 1781.

The thing is, there’s a pattern here…sort of, and that’s Bode’s Law. It’s a mathematical progression. Start with 4. Then 4+3. Then 4+(3×2). Then 4+(3×4).

Or slightly more clearly: 4, 4+3×2⁰, 4+3×2¹, 4+3×2², 4+3×2³, etc. It’s not quite a perfect series because there’s no way to get 4+0 by adding 3×2^some-power to it. Anyhow, let’s divide these numbers by 10 and compare to the planet distances:

It’s a decent (but not great) fit! And when Uranus was discovered in 1781, it almost fit too, albeit missing by a bit over 0.4 AUs. This made it seem more and more like this law might actually mean something. But if so, the glaring WTF in the whole thing is the fact that we seem to be missing a planet at 2.8 AU.

(I’ll pause here to point out that we no longer think of this as a law. It was valid to think of it as one back then, since a “law” just says “things behave this way, for whatever reason.” Neptune is in completely the wrong place, plus extrasolar planets don’t even remotely follow anything like this even if you scale for the fact that most of them orbit red dwarfs and do so much closer to them.)

But back then, it certainly looked as if we might have a planet to find, especially after Hugh Janus’s discovery made the notion of undiscovered planets thinkable, and Hugh Janus was even at close to the right distance!

On the other hand, Immanuel Kant, when he wasn’t doing things that would later piss off Ayn Rand, did do some theoretical astronomy and he wondered if perhaps Jupiter’s gravity had created the gap.

Many people (not nearly enough in Ayn Rand’s opinion) paid no attention to Kant, and tried looking.

We didn’t have to wait all that long. Just for a new century.

On January 1, 1801, technically the first day of the 19th century, Giuseppe Piazzi, working at the Palermo Astronomical Observatory in Sicily…[OK, I can’t even see the word “Palermo” without hearing in my head a British voice telling Field Marshal Montgomery that Patton had taken Palermo…to which the response was “Damn!” Thanks to the movie Patton.] Anyhow, Piazzi first sighted an object, and repeated his observations from night to night…and it was moving against the background stars! He was able to tell it was not a comet.

We had our planet, named Ceres after the Roman god of agriculture, in keeping with the classical mythological theme; all other planets were named after Roman gods and goddesses, except for Uranus, which was named after the Greek sky god, father of Saturn/Kronos, who was in turn the father of Jupiter/Zeus. (The Roman name would have been “Caelus.”)

It was even at the right distance, 2.77 AU on average, varying between 2.55 and 2.98 AUs.

[Speaking of Uranus…the metal uranium (discovered 1789, isolated in pure form 1841) was named after Uranus, the metal cerium (discovered 1803, isolated in pure form 1838) was named after Ceres. Unlike uranium, you probably have some cerium in your house; typically the enamel on the inside of a self-cleaning oven is largely cerium oxide, which helps cause hydrocarbons to burn during the cleaning.]

It wasn’t much of a planet; it appeared as no more than a point of light in telescopes, whereas other planets showed a disc. And then, before we could really confirm it, it ended up in conjunction with the Sun…in other words, it was directly behind the Sun as seen from Earth. Carl Friedrich Gauss calculated where it would show up after the conjunction, and on 31 December of that year, it was picked up and tracked.

But then it got crazy. Three more asteroids were discovered over the next three years, Pallas (->palladium), Juno, and Vesta. And then nothing, for decades, when Astraea was found in 1845. Then they started coming in, 15 asteroids had been found by 1851, and 100 by 1868.

All were tiny. Ceres had a respectable size, but even it is much smaller than the Moon. In fact it turns out to be bigger than all of the other asteroids put together. Here’s an illustration of the first ten asteroids’ sizes against the Moon (in gray).

By convention, asteroids are numbered in order of discovery, hence 1 Ceres, 2 Pallas, 3 Juno, 4 Vesta, 5 Astraea, and so on. In the mid 20th century the numbers were still below 2000. Today the number is 1,382,205 (this includes other small bodies in the solar system, though, not just asteroids…but back then we had no inkling of such things). By the way when Pluto got demoted, it was instantly given the next number in the sequence, which back then was 134340.

Vesta, though much smaller than Ceres, is lighter colored, and technically it’s just barely visible to the naked eye…if you’re somewhere out in the middle of the ocean and eat a lot of carrots.

OK so what’s going on here?

At first, we had the notion that perhaps there had been a full-size planet there, but it had blown up or otherwise been destroyed. As it turns out, there’s not nearly enough stuff there. Now most astronomers believe that Jupiter’s gravity probably prevented a planet from forming there…so Kant was right.

With all of the other small bodies discovered more recently, asteroids are now defined as non-cometary bodies in the inner solar system (i.e., inside the orbit of Jupiter). Comets are largely made up of ice…not necessarily water ice…and will present a tail close to the sun. Asteroids, on the other hand generally fall into three categories, C-type or carbonaceous, M-type or metallic (iron-nickel plus other goodies), and S-type or silicaceous (rocks). They can be solid bodies, or in some cases, they’re basically piles of rubble, not even a single body.

Most asteroids are well-behaved, orbiting in the “asteroid belt.” It’s estimated that there are anywhere from 1.1 million to 1.9 million asteroids larger than 1 km there, and countless smaller objects. If you plot their semi-major axes (i.e., average distance from the Sun), the belt ranges from a bit over 2.1 AUs to 3.3 AUs. But there are gaps! Virtually no asteroid has a 2.5 AU orbit, nor one at 2.82 AU; they’re also scarce at a few other distances. Here’s what I mean:

These gaps are called the “Kirkwood” gaps, and the diagram gives a clue as to what causes them. In essence any body that orbits the Sun three times for each time Jupiter orbits once, will get perturbed–its orbit will change size–and will no longer be in that spot. This is a 3:1 resonance, and 5:2, 7:3 and 2:1 resonances also exist, and asteroids can’t be in those resonances for long.

This is not to say that no asteroid will ever be at that distance. If it’s in an elliptical orbit it could spend some time closer in than the gap, then farther out; of course it must cross through the gap.

Oh, and by the way: Forget what you saw in Star Wars or for that matter any of a hundred other space operas. Although there are a lot of asteroids…there is a lot more space. So it’s mostly empty space. Your chances of encountering one if you travel through the belt are miniscule…unless you aim for one. It’s certainly not the game of space dodgeball you see in Star Wars. (We’ve sent probes through the asteroid belt quite a lot.)

Asteroids Not in the Asteroid Belt

Not all asteroids live in the asteroid belt.

We have the Trojan asteroids. The first of these was discovered in the same orbit as Jupiter…but either 60 degrees ahead or behind Jupiter. These are actually stable places to be, according to work by Joseph-Louis Lagrange in 1772. (In general, any system with two large bodies orbiting each other will have stable locations at these locations, forming equilateral triangles between the two bodies and the locations; these are now called L4 (ahead of Jupiter) and L5 (behind Jupiter). Objects placed in orbits here will tend to stay there; even if they drift away, they’ll be pulled back, rather than pushed away, like a marble at the bottom of a bowl.)

As you might have guessed there are L1, L2 and L3 points but they are metastable; if an object starts to drift out of those locations, they will tend to move further away, like a ball set at the top of a hill.

The following diagram shows the Earth and Sun (not Jupiter and the Sun) complete with Earth’s moon; you can just ignore that.

The first such asteroids were named after heroes of the Trojan War, and this became a convention. In fact the ones at the Sun-Jupiter L4 point are named after the Greek side, while L5 denizens are named after people on the Trojan side. (However 624 Hektor (at L4) and 617 Patroclus (at L5) were given their names before the convention was established so they are in the “wrong” groups.)

It’s now estimated that there may be as many asteroids in these Trojan groups as there are in the “main” asteroid belt.

The term Trojan became standard for a body in any planet’s L4 and L5 points, and there are a few of these; in fact there are two in Earth’s L4 point.

But the more immediately–even urgently–interesting asteroids are the ones whose orbits are inside the asteroid belt. There are several groups of these Near Earth Objects…and that name should tell you why we are so concerned with them:

Amors (named after 1221 Amor) have an orbit larger than the Earth, and their minimum distance to the Sun is greater than Earth’s maximum distance to the Sun. As such, they pose no collision hazard with the Earth. Unless, of course, something mucks with their orbit, like a near pass with another body.

Atiras (named after 163693 Atira), their orbits are entirely within the Earth’s orbit. No hazard now, but the same caveat applies.

Apollos (1862 Apollo) and Atens (2062 Aten) are asteroids whose orbits cross that of Earth, in other words their furthest distance from the Sun either exceeds our minimum distance, and their minimum distance exceeds our maximum distance, or both. Apollos have an average distance greater than 1 AU, Atens have an average distance less than 1 AU.

Or there’s this handy-dandy chart you can use.

These are the scary ones. We are very, very aware of the consequences of a collision with a sizeable asteroid. Most life was extinguished by a 10 km asteroid 66 million years ago, and in historic times we’ve had two explode over Russia with megaton force (1908 in Tunguska and 2013 in Chelyabinsk)–and these were small bodies, roughly 50-60 and 18 meters across, respectively. Neither asteroid actually hit the Earth (at least not in one piece), rather they exploded high in our atmosphere when their trajectories grazed it.

50,000 or so years ago we did suffer a direct hit from a 50 meter iron-nickel meteorite, in Arizona. This left a 3900 foot crater you can visit today:

Note that we failed to spot the Chelyabinsk meteor before it hit, though we saw another one that completely missed the Earth not long before that.

We’ve bent considerable effort to trying to locate all Near Earth Objects and we think we’ve spotted the really big ones. But even a 100 or 50 meter object can cause a lot of damage, and no we haven’t spotted even a significant fraction of those.

Goodies

I mentioned earlier that metallic asteroids are made of iron and nickel, as well as other goodies.

This was important in the past, and will be again. Before we learned how to smelt iron around 1300 BCE (a very rough date, the end of the Bronze age), the only source of iron we had was meteorites. In fact, going back to the Trojan war, one of the gifts given to a Greek warrior was a meteorite he could use to make iron armor out of. Priceless! (Especially given that that particular mixture of iron and nickel is in fact much better material than pure iron would be.)

But what are the “other goodies”? We think these iron-nickel meteorites were once in the core of a larger body (not a full planet), which had melted and begun to differentiate, with the iron, nickel, and other heavy metals sinking into the core, leaving the outer layers relatively bereft of these metals. Earth has an iron core due to this very mechanism. We also have relatively little gold, platinum, PGMs, etc in our crust, because of this process. Although rare even in the core, they are less so there than up here.

Iron nickel meteorites do have some variances but are often 1 part per million or more of gold and/or iridium. This would be considered very good ores (especially for iridium which is normally less than a part per billion).

In fact it’s that relative abundance of iridium that was the smoking gun that established that an asteroid hit the Earth at about the time the dinosaurs were wiped out (there are still some holdout paleontologists who insist that most of the job was done by volcanic activity before the meteorite arrived). Sediments deposited at that time show “spikes” in the concentration of iridium.

That’s the past. What about the future?

We are pretty confident that 16 Psyche is a large iron-nickel body. It has been measured at 220 meters in diameter (it’s a bit irregularly shaped).

Its mass is 23 quadrillion (metric) tonnes. Or 23 million billion tonnes. That is a LOT of iron, more than we’ve ever used certainly, and…well, that’s going to be 23 billion tonnes of iridium, 23 billion tonnes of gold…but we can’t readily access it.

Yet.

We are sending a probe, named Psyche, to get a closer look and confirm what we think about it. It launched on 23 October of last year and is expected to arrive in 2029, shortly after the beginning of JD Vance’s first term as President.

Spot Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $2,622.40
Silver $31.24
Platinum $986.00
Palladium $1090.00
Rhodium $5,075.00
FRNSI* 125.859-
Gold:Silver 83.944-

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $2,658.90
Silver $31.72
Platinum $1,010.00
Palladium $1,038.00
Rhodium $5,100.00
FRNSI* 127.624+
Gold:Silver 83.824+

Gold was as high as 2,670-something or so but then got hammered on Friday. Silver was over $32 even Friday morning, but the usual Friday beat-down occurred. Palladium’s bid price (i.e., the price they offer, not the price they ask) is lower than platinum’s bid price. (Usually when you see news stories about the price of these metals, they work off the bid price. I quote the ask price because you should be buying this stuff up, not selling it.) Silver again seems to be undergoing wider swings than gold, but the gold silver ratio ends up barely moving, somehow.

Gold futures contracts for December delivery apparently breached the $2,700 mark for the first time sometime on Thursday.

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.