Angel's Egg

 

At The Center of Everything

Vega, the fifth-brightest nighttime star, beams almost straight overhead early this month and may be the most important luminary in the sky after the Sun. But how exactly do you say its name? Is it VEE-guh or VAY-guh?

In July 2006, Sky & Telescope's Tony Flanders addressed the question:

"In 1941 the American Astronomical Society (AAS) formed a committee of Samuel G. Barton, George A. Davis, Jr., and Daniel J. McHugh to consult with astronomers, educators, Arabic scholars, and planetarium lecturers and come up with a list of preferred pronunciations for common star names and constellations. 

Their final report, adopted by the AAS, appeared in Sky & Telescope for June 1943, page 12." They decided that Vega should be pronounced VEE-guh. This made sense because for centuries it had been known as Wega and spoken as WE-guh, which means descending eagle in Arabic. 

Later, the W evolved into a V, but the pronunciation remained the same: VEE-guh. As a budding amateur astronomer in 1966, I owned an Edmund planisphere that included an instruction manual with a pronunciation guide in line with AAS standards.

Yet somewhere along the way Vega became (mostly) VAY-guh, leaving me and my ilk in the minority. Nowadays, the online Merriam-Webster dictionary gives both pronunciations, while the American Heritage Dictionary lists VEE-guh. Recognizing that language evolves, I tell newcomers to the hobby that either is correct.  READ MORE...

Golden Sun

Predicting A Stroke

Research could lead to potential new ways to predict and prevent strokes in young adults.

A person’s blood type may be linked to their risk of having an early stroke, according to a new meta-analysis of research. The meta-analysis included all available data from genetic studies focusing on ischemic strokes, which are caused by a blockage of blood flow to the brain, occurring in younger adults under age 60. 

The study was led by University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers, and the findings were published on August 31, 2022, in the journal Neurology.

“The number of people with early strokes is rising. These people are more likely to die from the life-threatening event, and survivors potentially face decades with disability. 

 Despite this, there is little research on the causes of early strokes,” said study co-principal investigator Steven J. Kittner, MD, MPH. He is a Professor of Neurology at UMSOM and a neurologist with the University of Maryland Medical Center.

Kittner and his colleagues conducted the study by performing a meta-analysis of 48 studies on genetics and ischemic stroke that included 17,000 stroke patients and nearly 600,000 healthy controls who never had experienced a stroke. 

They then scrutinized all collected chromosomes to identify genetic variants associated with a stroke. They discovered a link between early-onset stroke – occurring before age 60 – and the area of the chromosome that includes the gene that determines whether a blood type is A, AB, B, or O.  READ MORE...

Windy Day

 

The Truth is Still The Truth

Sunset & Waves

 

Wars Are Hard to Stop

Ukrainian gunners prepare to fire with a self-propelled rocket launcher near a front line in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, on Aug. 27. ANATOLII STEPANOV/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
AUGUST 29, 2022, 12:00 PM



I’ve written several columns on important foreign-policy ideas that national leaders forget at their peril, such as the balance of power, nationalism, and the security dilemma. This week, I’m offering up another one, a simple observation that every world leader or foreign-policy advisor ought to have prominently displayed on their desk, on their office wall, or maybe just tattooed on the inside of their eyelids so they don’t ever, ever forget it: “It’s much easier to start a war than to end it.”

Illustrations of this phenomenon are ubiquitous. As Geoffrey Blainey described in his classic book The Causes of War, many past conflicts were fueled by “dreams and delusions of a coming war,” and especially the belief that it would be quick, it would be cheap, and it would yield a decisive victory. 

In 1792, for example, the armies of Austria-Hungary, Prussia, and France all rushed to the battlefield believing the war would be resolved after a battle or two. The French radicals thought their recent revolution would quickly spread to others, and the opposing monarchies believed the revolutionary armies were an incompetent rabble that their professional soldiers would easily sweep aside. What they got instead was nearly a quarter-century of recurring warfare that dragged in all the major powers and spread around the globe.

Similarly, in August 1914, the nations of Europe marched off to war saying the soldiers would be home by Christmas, blissfully unaware that the anticipated Christmas homecoming wouldn’t take place until 1918. 

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein succumbed to much the same illusion in 1980, believing that the 1979 revolution had left Iran vulnerable to an Iraqi attack. The resulting war lasted eight years, and the two states suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths and vast economic damage before calling it quits.

Even highly successful military campaigns often lead not to quick victories but to interminable quagmires. The 1967 Six-Day War lasted less than a week, but it resolved none of the underlying political issues between Israel and its neighbors and merely set the stage for the more costly War of Attrition (1969-1970) and the October War in 1973. 

Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was a near-total success militarily, but the resulting occupation of southern Lebanon lasted 18 years, cost hundreds of lives, led to the creation of Hezbollah, and laid the groundwork for several even more costly clashes. 

One would be hard-pressed to find a more successful military operation than Operation Desert Storm in 1991, but Saddam managed to cling to power after his army was ousted from Kuwait, and the United States ended up patrolling no-fly zones over Iraq and conducting occasional aerial attacks for another decade.  READ MORE...

Stars

French People Urged to Save Energy

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday that his country was ready to deliver gas to Germany this coming winter should Europe's gas squeeze make such a move necessary, urging French citizens to reduce their energy consumption in order to stave off rationing and cuts.


Macron said French gas could help Germany to produce more electricity which, in turn, would allow Germany to contribute electricity to the French power grid during peak hours.


"We are going to complete the gas connections that will allow us to deliver gas to Germany," Macron told reporters after a video call with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.


Both Germany and France are scrambling to replenish gas reserves after Russia curtailed deliveries in retaliation for western support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.


Germany is more dependent on Russian gas than France, which generates most of its electricity in nuclear power stations.  READ MORE...

Dancing

 

China's Property & Credit Bubble

Buildings developed by China Evergrande Group that authorities have issued a demolition order on in Danzhou, Hainan Province, China, January 7, 2022. Picture taken with a drone.(Aly Song/Reuters)



The country’s property and credit-market bubble is now showing every sign of bursting — at a dangerous time for both China and the world at large.


The late American Enterprise Institute economist Herb Stein famously wrote that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.


Mr. Stein might very well have had in mind the unsustainable, decade-old, property and credit-market bubble in China, which is now showing every sign of bursting. 

Compounding matters, it is doing so at the very time when the Chinese economy is experiencing a perfect economic storm as a result of President Xi’s zero-tolerance Covid policy, his attack on big business, and his ramping up of political tensions with the United States over Taiwan now coinciding with a severe drought. 

A Chinese economic slowdown would have major implications for the world. Not only is China the world’s second-largest economy; until recently, it was also the world’s main engine of economic growth and its largest consumer of internationally traded commodities.

Over the past decade, China’s economic miracle was heavily based on an unsustainable property and credit-led economic-growth model. 

That led to a situation where private-sector credit grew by more than 100 percent of GDP: a pace of credit expansion faster than that which preceded Japan’s lost economic decade in the 1980s, or that which preceded the 2007 bursting of the U.S. housing and credit-market bubble.  READ MORE...

Campfire

 

A Week At Myrtle Beach

 

Today, my wife and I drove to Myrtle Beach, SC for a week's vacation although I am not sure why because we have been retired since 2015 and don't really need vacations.  Still, we like to travel and it is nice to get away since we have not been anywhere for over a year.  This is only our second vacation since COVID appeared on the scene.

Because of my back surgery, we had to stop every two hours...  so instead of 6 & 1/2 hours in the car, we spent a little over 7, stopping for about 15 minutes each time.  The traffic was not bad and that might have been because of the day.  We left at 7am and arrived at 3pm but stopped for gas and coffee before we left town.

Today, we are reminded of the terrorist attack inside our borders and even though it was 2 decades ago, for some of us, it is like it just happened yesterday.

Do you remember where you were?

I was at work and it was about 30 minutes before my shift started so I was in the lounge watching whatever was on the TV and saw a plane crash into a high rise building.  I thought it was a movie.  But, was soon told, it was the news.

For 20 years we have worried about another attack and for 20 years nothing has happened.  However, I am sure that the Arabs who hate us, have planned numerous events but all have been avoided because of our alert status with the military and homeland security.

Was COVID another terrorist attack except this time, it was unleashed by the Chinese?  And, why is our government protecting the Chinese when they are our sworn enemy?

Well, enough of this troublesome shit...  I'm at the beach and I'm going to start enjoying myself and I suggest that you do the same.

Remembering the 911 Terrorist Attacks

 

911: Two Decades Later

Americans watched in horror as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, left nearly 3,000 people dead in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Nearly 20 years later, they watched in sorrow as the nation’s military mission in Afghanistan – which began less than a month after 9/11 – came to a bloody and chaotic conclusion.

The enduring power of the Sept. 11 attacks is clear: An overwhelming share of Americans who are old enough to recall the day remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. Yet an ever-growing number of Americans have no personal memory of that day, either because they were too young or not yet born.

A review of U.S. public opinion in the two decades since 9/11 reveals how a badly shaken nation came together, briefly, in a spirit of sadness and patriotism; how the public initially rallied behind the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, though support waned over time; and how Americans viewed the threat of terrorism at home and the steps the government took to combat it.

As the country comes to grips with the tumultuous exit of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan, the departure has raised long-term questions about U.S. foreign policy and America’s place in the world. Yet the public’s initial judgments on that mission are clear: A majority endorses the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, even as it criticizes the Biden administration’s handling of the situation. 

And after a war that cost thousands of lives – including more than 2,000 American service members – and trillions of dollars in military spending, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that 69% of U.S. adults say the United States has mostly failed to achieve its goals in Afghanistan.  READ MORE...