Star Older Then Universe

The star HD 140283 has been called the "Methuselah star" for its extreme age. At an estimated over 14 billion years old, it’s the oldest star we know, at least within our galaxy. A star that old is certainly interesting, particularly when it is so close to us it can be seen with binoculars, however, that appears to put it older than the universe. How that can be? A closer examination reveals the star is special, but not that special.


The standard estimate of the time since the Big Bang is 13.79 billion years. The figure is derived from the rate of expansion of the universe using Einstein's relativity but has been validated through a variety of methods. However, that number is now facing at least three distinct challenges. As evidence, proponents point to the existence of stars estimated to be either older than 13.8 billion years, or so close to that age that there shouldn’t have been time for them to form.


Not surprisingly HD 140283 gets prime billing (helped by its catchy nickname derived from a Biblical ancestor of Noah said to have lived to 969) due to a 2013 study using Hubble data that estimated it is 14.46 billion years old, plus or minus 800 million years. That would make it potentially older than the universe.


The biggest claim regarding HD 140283 is that it disproves the Big Bang. After all, if there is even one star 14.5 billion years old then the explosion that started the universe couldn’t have happened less than 14 billion years ago. The Big Bang is now so central to our cosmology that were it to be disproved it would create a scientific revolution the like of which we have not seen for a long time.


A smaller, but still dramatic, change would be required to adapt to the recent claim that the Big Bang happened, but almost twice as long ago as most estimates put it, at 26.7 billion years ago.


Neither of these views has much support among astrophysicists, but some do suspect we’ve got our estimates of the timing of the Big Bang more modestly wrong, and the universe is really around 15 billion years old. Although such an estimate would raise a few questions about why our estimates for the universe’s expansion rate are out, if proven, accompanying changes to our thinking would be evolutionary not revolutionary.

In that context, it’s worth asking: if the universe was 26 billion years old, wouldn’t we expect to find 20 billion-year-old stars? It’s true we’ve only really looked across a small portion of the galaxy, but if the universe is that old, Methuselah looks suspiciously young. Then take that question a step further and ask what we might expect to see if the universe had no beginning and has always been here.  READ MORE...

Street Art

 

Goodbye Robbie Robinson - The Band

 

USA Down For The Count

 I have known for a long time that the US of America is FLAWED...  and, perhaps that is the wrong word...  being corrupt is not the right word either although most politicians are, in fact, corrupt...  if not with foreign countries then with lobbyists who want certain bills to be passed.

The word I am thinking about is more like intellectual arrogance coupled with greed.  It is almost like Americans were and still are of the opinion that they can do any damn thing they want to do because they know better than anyone else.

That philosophy and feeling is absolutely wrong.

1. We got involved with slavery because we thought it was the right thing to do at the time.
2. We took land away from Native Americans because we thought it was the right thing to do at the time.
3. We fought a war with Mexico over land at our southern border because we thought it was the right thing to do at the time.
4. We got involved in WWI and WWII because we thought it was the right thing to do at the time because, if we won, it would lead to us rebuilding the world.
5. We tried to promote our brand of Democracy in South America and Africa, the Middle East, and Europe because we thought it was the right thing to do at the time.

WE WERE WRONG IN EVERY SINGLE INSTANCE...

The US of America became WEALTHY at the expense of everyone else.  Now the rest of the world is no longer enamored with us.  

• South America dislikes us
• Africa dislikes us
• The Middle East dislikes us
• Russia dislikes us
• Asia dislikes us

Our economy is weak.

Our military is weak.

Our country is divided.

Our national debt is enormous.

Our education sucks.

Our politicians are corrupt.

Liberals try to censor conservatives.

We want to do away with fossil fuels.

Crime and violence are out of control

Illegal immigrants is now a crisis.

HOW LONG DO YOU THINK IT WILL BE BEFORE CHINA DECIDES WE ARE PERFECTLY VULNERABLE FOR AN ECONOMIC TAKEOVER?   Rhetorical question...

Taking What You Want

 

THREE INTO ONE

 According to Freudian psychology:

the id - is the primitive, basic, and fully unconscious part of personality. It contains all of the unconscious energy that is directed toward fulfilling a person's most basic needs.

the ego - is a person’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance.

the super ego - is to suppress entirely any urges or desires of the id that are considered wrong or socially unacceptable.

Not that I am as smart, clever, or as well-educated and experienced as Freud, but there are some issues with his analysis that have always bothered me.

It is easy to accept his definition of the ID and EGO as they both seem to be rather straightforward and do not require a whole of effort on the individual's part to display.

However, the SUPER EGO is not that straightforward as a person's definition of right and wrong and what is or is not socially acceptable is going to be different.   To me, this means that the super ego is going to be different in every person.  Now, if the super ego is different in every person then it should also stand to reason that the ID and the EGO would be different as well.

Another issue is with the ID.  In all babies, the ID operates the same...  it is not different, in that when a baby is hungry the baby cries.

As a child grows, the ID realizes that crying no longer works.  But, is that the ID or is it the EGO that is regulating the primitive conditions of the ID?

Freud's analysis has been so popular that we just accept it as being the way it is for everyone.  I am not sure if these three components of one's personality are real.

One's personality can change over time as one ages, but the primitive side of that individual is still there...  for example, when a wife learns her child or husband has been killed, she yells out like an animal.  Is that the super ego allowing the ID to control actions, or is that simple a grief response?

Constant pain can also cause someone's ID to take control over their personality and the super ego does not seem to care because it is allowed to happen.  So, why then did the super ego back off?

Personality is a complex issue that is influenced by factors both within as well as outside our ability to control.  

Another issue is how does the SUPER EGO know when something that was not socially acceptable becomes socially acceptable.  Who or what tells the super ego to change because society has changed?

What in the personality has changed that informs a man that he is now a woman instead of a man and that his EGO or self-esteem should change?

The Bermuda Triangle

 

Extinct 87 Years Ago

Researchers often think about how and when their results will be published. However, many research projects don’t see the light until decades (or even centuries) later, if at all.

This is the case of a high-resolution atlas of the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine brain. Carefully processed over 140 years ago, it is finally published recently in the journal PNAS.

SIMILAR, BUT NOT WOLVES
Thylacines were dingo-sized carnivorous marsupials that roamed through Australia and New Guinea prior to human occupation. They became confined to Tasmania around 3,000 years ago.

The arrival of European colonists and the introduction of farming, diseases, and hunting bounties quickly led to their extinction. The last known individual died on September 7, 1936, at Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo. As a commemoration, September 7 became the National Threatened Species Day to raise conservation awareness in Australia.

Thylacines looked remarkably similar to wolves and dogs (that is, canids). This is a textbook example of a process known as evolutionary convergence: when the body shapes of animals are really similar, despite them coming from different lineages.

However, whether thylacine brains are also similar to wolves has been very hard to find out due to a lack of material available for microscopic studies. In the newly published study, my colleagues and I uploaded high-resolution images to a public repository and studied brain sections prepared for microscopy from a thylacine that died in the Berlin Zoo in 1880.  READ MORE...

Bound

 

Alternatives to College

Currently, our education system, K-12, although it does not really start being a problem until about the 7th grade, has been DESIGNED for all students to go to college.

Whoever designed that system is an arrogant IDIOT because not everyone has the mental capacity or desire to go to college...  so they MUST SUFFER THROUGH HIGH SCHOOL...  along with all the bad behavior associated with that suffering.

Most of the high school graduates that attend college, must borrow money to pay for the high cost of education.  Typically, it is somewhere around $50,000/year to attend college which includes tuition, books, meals, housing,  transportation, clothing, and misc expenses such as toiletries, cosmetics, and hair care.

Obviously, some of these college students live with their parents and commute each day but a vast majority of them do not.

Once the student graduates, they typically have $200,000 in debt that they must pay off...  providing they can find a job.

ALTERNATIVES:

1.  Go to a Community College for your first two years then transfer to University that your grades would not let you into as a freshman.

2.  Go to a trade school and learn to be a carpenter, plumber, electrician, construction, mechanic, etc.

3.  Just go out and get a job with the idea in mind that you want to move up in the ranks and once that is proven to management, they will pay for you to go for more education related to your job or a potential job.

4.  Go to work in a restaurant as a waiter/waitress with the idea in mind that you want to manage the restaurant in a few years.

5.  Go into the military for 20 years...  18-38, then you have another 20 years to work for another company 38-58, based upon what you learned in the military.

6.  Start your own company.  While that is a little difficult to accomplish without any experience, it can be done.  A high school graduate started a swap shop where you could trade in an old music CD for a new music CD for a small fee.  Another high school graduate started a lawn care business.

One issue is for certain, this is your life, and no one really cares about your life except for YOU...

Smile

 

Fusion Energy is Really Possible

As Earth’s inhabitants suffer through what may wind up being the hottest year on record, there’s a Promethean spark of hope. Virtually unlimited fusion energy appears to be, if not right around the corner, at least within hailing distance.

Last December, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility finally succeeded in forcing the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium to undergo a self-sustained fusion reaction. It was an encouraging advancement, though not exactly a breakthrough. 

NIF’s small net energy gain didn’t factor in the energy it took to fire up the 192 ultraviolet lasers that initiated the reaction, which lasted “for the briefest blink of a moment,” as Dina Genkina reported for IEEE Spectrum. While there are lessons to be learned from NIF’s successes and failures, laser-based inertial confinement fusion doesn’t yet provide a practical path to commercial-scale power generation.

There’s also a lot to learn from Iter, the world’s largest fusion experiment, which is now being built in southern France. Since 1985, the project has brought together 35 countries and thousands of scientists and engineers. 

ITER’s magnetic-confinement fusion experiments will happen inside a giant doughnut-shaped device called a tokamak, where powerful superconducting magnets will force hydrogen isotopes to fuse.

Even if Iter succeeds in touching off a sustained fusion reaction, though, it will never harness the energy produced. That crucial engineering step will be accomplished by some other group. 

One team vying to take fusion energy to market is Commonwealth Fusion Systems, in Devens, Mass., whose six founders all did research at Iter. In “Tale of the Tape,” page 30, writer Tom Clynes takes us inside CFS’s Sparc pilot project to create a new kind of commercially viable, compact fusion reactor.  READ MORE...

Wild Animals

 

A Creature of Habits

Unless I have a doctor's appointment, I am unusually not awake and out of the bed until just before 9am.  

How can I be so precise? 

The first thing I do is pee, then make the bed, then take my thyroid pill, turn on the TV to FOX News, then make myself a cup of coffee.

I use McCafe coffee pods in my Keurig coffee pot, selecting the 12 oz amount, then add 3 spoonful's of sugar free cappuccino mix.

When I get back to my chair in the living room Bill Hemmer has just started so I know it is right around 9am.

I watch FOX News until 11am...  then I take the 9 pills that I am supposed to take for my cancer and my heart to keep everything balanced.

If there is anything to do around the house or outside, I typically do it then except for mowing the yard.  I wait until 7pm to do that.

My chores last a couple of hours and I make myself my first meal of the day.  Sometimes, it is a breakfast and sometimes it is a carton of something that I made a day or two ago.

If I have breakfast, it is usually a protein bar or a frozen waffle that I heat up in the microwave for 30 seconds and put strawberry on.

The afternoon is always set aside for either writing on my novel or taking a nap.  Before we moved house locations, I would have worked on my novel, but since we moved my novel interest is not there so I take a nap.

After my nap, I will either watch two episodes of a series I have been watching like Yellowstone, 1883, or a BBC detective show.  I have found that BBC series are better than American series.

After my nap and TV watching, I will usually make something for dinner that will last for 2-3 nights and then work on my blog.

If I take any kind of break while working on my blogs, it is usually to play solitaire or spades on my phone.

The last thing that I do before retiring to bed for the night is wash the dishes I used during the day and heat a cup of water.  This time the cup will contain only 10 oz. to which I add 6 heaping spoons of sugar free cappuccino mix.

Since there is no caffeine, the warm liquid helps me to fall asleep rather quickly each night.

There is always time during midday when I am doing something outside to talk with the neighbors if they are out and about.

Sometimes, I will go grocery shopping with my wife and every once in a while, we will do this shopping around 3pm and have an early dinner.

If we go out to breakfast, it is usually on Sunday morning to either IHOP for scrambled eggs, sausage, and waffles or the PERKINS for an omelet, breakfast potatoes, and pancakes.

If PERKINS is the choice, I bring half the omelet and breakfast potatoes homes along with the 3 pancakes to eat other mornings.

I will heat up the pancakes and put peanut butter or jelly on them, but never both at the same time, although I am not sure why I don't do this.

This is pretty much my retired routine and as you can see, I am a creature of habit.  There is NOTHING that I feel like I am missing with my life.

Hello

Lady Justice Hides

The RULE OF LAW has gone on an indefinite leave of absence in an effort to avoid retribution, retaliation, and extinction...

The Department of Justice is now the handmaiden of the Biden Administration and has been weaponized against any and all conservatives that pose a threat to their BRAND OF DEMOCRACY...  somewhere between progressive democracy and socialism.

The progressives would rather have a society of entitlements rather than a society that is protected by a strong global military presence.

To achieve their Machiavellian results, they have opened all US borders and embraced ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION in the strongest of terms.  These liberals know exactly the chaos that will be unleashed against the current American society.

These ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS bring with them:

1. uneducated minds
2. unskilled labor
3. unvaccinated children
4. potential disease
5. potential criminals
6. potential terrorists

These ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS have no family here in the USA to take care of them.  They have no prospect of jobs or any means of earning a living.  They cannot pay for housing, food, medicine, or clothing.  The slums that they lived in before they came here, they will bring with them by default.

How much money will the USA spend on taking care of these ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS?

How much crime will these ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS create in order to pay for normal living expenses?

These ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS and their uncanny desire to have babies will eventually turn the USA into a THIRD WORLD COUNTRY because of all the resources that they will consume without returning anything to the USA and her legal citizens.

In the meantime, high tech companies have BALLS TO THE WALL in AI/Robot research and development that will replace AMERICAN JOBS in the next couple of years.

How will the USA deal with not only ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS who are unemployed but with AMERICAN CITIZENS that are unemployed as well?

If you are an ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT and you know that you came into the USA ILLEGALLY how much respect do you think these ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS will have for our Rule of Law?

America's National Debt is increasing and there are no signs that anything will change any time soon.  Our bond rating has been down graded because of our National Debt.  BRICS and Saudi Arabia and numerous other countries are no longer using the US dollar in their trade negotiations.   The rest of the world DOES NOT LIKE THE USA because of all of our global transgressions trying to get the rest of the world to be like us.

AMERICA WHERE ARE YOU NOW???

Muscle Girl

The Present Does Not Last Long

Fortunately, or unfortunately, mankind is forced to live in the present. We are aware of the past, especially the immediate past, because we just lived through it.  The distant past is a little more of a problem, but we have photos to help remind us of what we did...  although in some cases photos still don't help us remember.

The future is another story altogether because it has not yet happened, even the immediate future which is sometimes rather obvious.  However, if we look further into the future, it is more difficult to predict even with historical data on which to base our predictions and forecasts.

However strange that it might seem, when the future gets here it is only momentarily in the present before it flows into the past.  It is even more difficult to state how long the present actually lasts...  it is a second?  or, a nanosecond?  or, even faster than that?

The other issue that I see as problematic is how long is the past and how long is the future.  If we measure both of those relative to ourselves, then it is simply how long we live.  However, if we measure the past and future relative to the beginning and ending of time itself, then it is a little more difficult to develop an accurate number.

The obvious first question here is WHY?

And, the obvious answer is that we do not know exactly when time began, nor do we know when time will end.

Now, the issue, at least in my mind, that complicates this analysis is the notion that time IS or IS NOT connected with the creation of the universe.  That is to say, could the universe have been created before time existed?  Or, was time created in the same instant that the universe was created in?

Again, we have no definitive answer...  just a lot of speculation and conjecture.

Some people, and this is beyond my comprehension, believe that the universe was created out of nothing rather than created out of something.

I've always had a problem with the universe being created out of something....  BECAUSE where did that SOMETHING COME FROM?

While creation out of nothing makes more sense, it also seems illogical...

Pineapples

 

Kim Jong Un - Weapons Factory

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un toured the country’s key weapons factories, including those producing artillery systems and launch vehicles for nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, and pledged to speed up efforts to advance his military’s arms and war readiness, state media said Sunday.


Kim’s three-day inspections through Saturday came as the United States and South Korea prepared for their next round of combined military exercises planned for later this month to counter the growing North Korean threat.


Tensions on the Korean Peninsula are at their highest level in years as the pace of North Korea’s missile tests and the joint U.S.-South Korea military drills, which Kim portrays as invasion rehearsals, have both intensified in a tit-for-tat cycle.


Some experts say Kim’s tour of the weapons factories could also be related to possible military cooperation with Moscow that may involve North Korean supplies of artillery and other ammunition as Russian President Vladimir Putin reaches out to other countries for support in the war in Ukraine. 

Koo Byoungsam, spokesperson of South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs, said Friday that Kim’s staged visits to the arms factories are possibly aimed at both demonstrating North Korea’s military might in the face of U.S.-South Korean drills and also communicating an intent to export weapons.  READ MORE...