I just signed up for Damus purple.

So much winning!

James Grenning is the person in my network who is most connected to the Embedded world. He does a lot of training in that space. Do you need an introduction?

It's done. Biden is gone. Trump is in office. The horrors of the last four years will be repaired and reversed.

If California democrats actually believed that the Climate Crisis increased the risk of wildfires, then they would have done something to mitigate that risk. They might not be able to stop the Chinese from building coal fired power plants, but they could have managed the dry fuel that was blanketing the hills around LA. They might not be able to force everyone in India to drive electric cars, but they could have kept their own water reservoirs full. They might not be able to stop the Saudis from pumping oil, but they could have increased the funding of their fire and water departments. But they didn't do any of those things. And so either they are supremely incompetent, or they don't actually believe in the Climate Crisis, or (and I think this to be the most likely case) both.

Given the recent changes at Meta, I wonder if all the lefties will abandon Facebook for BlueFace.

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Why I voted for Trump. During his first term: * The economy was good, * Worker's wages were increasing, * We were energy independent and approaching energy dominance. * There were no new wars, * Immigration was decreasing and under control, * NATO began to contribute their fair share, * Peace was breaking out in the Middle East. And the Democrats: * Concocted the Russian Collusion Hoax * Spied on his campaign and presidency. * Impeached him for looking into Biden's treason. * Suppressed the Biden Laptop. I could go on. I'm happy to answer any questions.

Isn’t it remarkable that the solution of the differential equations that describe the implosion of the plutonium core of the first atomic bomb can be approximated with nothing more than: {one, zero, nor}.

""Remember as a developer, you are a stakeholder. You have a stake in the software that you need to safeguard. That's part of your role, and part of your duty. And it's a big part of why you were hired" - #[4] Clean Architecture #teams #agile #foodforthought

Hey! I’ve got a really great idea. Get this. First, let’s demoralize and defund the police nationwide reducing their numbers to the point of being ineffective. Then let’s throw the southern border wide open so that Venezuelan gangs and Islamic terrorists can pour, unimpeded, into the country. Then, let’s make sure the cities elect radical prosecutors who will refuse to charge and hold criminals; making sure that those gang members and terrorists stay on the streets. Oh yeah, and then let’s make sure the city legislators declare their cities to be sanctuaries that refuse to turn criminal illegal immigrants over to ICE for deportation. Sound like a plan?

Twenty three hundred years ago Aristotle described the universe as a series of concentric spheres made of a crystalline material called "Quintessence" (The Fifth Element). The Sun, Moon, planets, and stars were all embedded into their own individual spheres which rotated around the Earth at different rates. Four hundred years later, the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy could not reconcile his observations with the circular motions implied by Aristotle. But circles were perfect, and the heavens must also be perfect, so he invented "epicycles". He said that the heavenly bodies each moved in small circles around a point, and that point moved in a circle around the Earth. Over the centuries, as observations improved, Ptolemy's epicycles weren't enough. So more were added. Wheels within wheels. And even they were not enough so other contrivances of speed and angle were added. In the middle of the sixteenth century Copernicus, who believed that God lived in the Sun, moved the Sun to the center and found he could eliminate some of the epicycles and other contrivances used to match observations. But many still remained. In the early part of the following century Johannes Kepler showed that the shapes of the orbits of the planets were not circles, but were ellipses, with the Sun at one focus of the ellipse. Just a few decades later Isaac Newton collapsed all the previous centuries of observation and reasoning down to one simple formula. F=Mm/r^2. A century later, Einstein, stimulated by the work of Maxwell, Michaelson, and Morley showed us that Newton's formula was an approximation of a rather more complicated rule having to do with time, space, and the speed of light. He called it his general theory of relativity. Two decades later, using the best theories of gravity at his disposal, and Hubble's distance laws for galaxies, Fritz Zwicky noticed that the galaxies in the Coma cluster were moving too quickly for gravity to hold them together. He proposed that there must be more material in the cluster than was visible. He called that material, Dark Matter -- a term first coined by Henri Poincaré to describe a different phenomenon. By the 1960s there were many observations that galaxies rotated too quickly to hold themselves together. The speed of the stars at the outskirts of the galaxy move well beyond the escape velocity of the visible matter. Today we conclude that the universe is full of something we call Dark Matter. It forms the seeds of galaxy clusters, and it's shape outlines the webs of those clusters that are woven through space. We think that this dark matter outweighs visible matter by a factor of nearly six to one. And we have not the slightest clue what this stuff might be.

Neutrons in isolation are unstable. They will energetically decay, becoming a proton, electron, and an anti-electron-neutrino with a half-life of about 10 minutes. This is called ß-decay. This reaction is reversible through a process known as electron capture. If a proton and an electron are forced into near proximity, they can combine to form a neutron, emitting a normal electron-neutrino. In the collapsing iron core of a high mass star, in the last microsecond before it blows itself to kingdom come as a type 2 supernova, the electrons and protons within the iron are forced together and undergo this inverse ß-decay becoming neutrons and emitting an overwhelming barrage of neutrinos. The newly formed neutrons rapidly sort themselves out into energy shells. Neutrons are fermions. Identical fermions cannot co-exist together in the same system. Thus the neutrons in the collapsed core separate into a vast number of different energy shells. Low energy neutrons are deeper in, higher energy neutrons are farther out. There is no way for the higher energy neutrons to lose energy since all the lower shells are full. All those neutrons are in a constant state of vibration and collision. Higher energy neutrons vibrate and collide faster than lower energy neutrons. All that vibration and collision creates an outward pressure that holds back the inward crush of gravity. So the object, now only a few miles in diameter, settles into a stable state called degenerate matter. This object is often called a neutron star; and the degenerate matter within it is sometimes referred to as neutronium. A teaspoon of neutronium would weigh several billion tons. Much of the angular momentum of the original star remains within the neutron star. However, since the radius has shrunk by three or four orders of magnitude, the angular velocity has increased by a corresponding factor. These objects can spin at thousands of RPM. Moreover, much of the original star's magnetic field is trapped within the neutron star, and has likewise been compressed by several orders of magnitude. Thus, the neutron star is a very powerful spinning magnet. When you spin a magnet you create an electric field. The electric field across a newly formed neutron star is enormous. That field accelerates vast numbers of charged particles to stream outwards from the magnetic poles. However, the powerful magnetic field lines force those particles to move in a spirals as they stream outwards. When charged particles move in spirals they induce electromagnetic waves -- light. And those light waves travel in straight beams emitted from the magnetic poles of the neutron star. Those beams of light carry away some the rotational energy of the Neutron star. This creates a drag on its rotation. But given that the star contains a solar mass of neutronium spinning at thousands of RPM, it has plenty of kinetic energy to spare and so the reduction in rotational velocity is very gradual. If the magnetic poles of the neutron star are not perfectly in line with its spin axis, then those beams of light swing around through space like a lighthouse beacon. If they happen to be in line with the Earth, we see the object emitting pulses of light as the beams pass by. We call these pulsating stars Pulsars.

The Sun, our local star, is just under a million miles in diameter. The surface temperature is about 5,000K, and the power output is about 4E26 watts. All that power is coming from the innermost 10% of the star -- the core -- where the temperatures are around 17E6K, and the pressure is ...um... crushing. At those temperatures the Hydrogen atoms cannot hold onto their electrons. So protons and electrons are free to zoom about without binding. The velocities of the protons are so high, and the pressures are so great, that every once is a great while two protons will get close enough that the strong nuclear force will bind them together into Helium. This happens to about 500 metric tons of Hydrogen each second. In that reaction a lot of high energy gamma rays are released. Those gamma rays are trapped within all those charged particles in the core. They bounce around in the core, doing a random walk for thousands of years. But eventually they reach the outer shell of the core where they can heat the Hydrogen gas outside the core. The bouncing around of all those gamma rays creates an outward pressure that keeps the core of the Sun from collapsing under the weight of the Hydrogen above it. The hydrogen outside the core, heated by the gamma rays escaping the core, rises to the surface of the star in a massive convection current. Upon reaching the surface, the heat of that gas is radiated at 5000K and reaches us ~8 minutes later. This process has been going on for nearly five billion years, and will continue for another five billion or so. However... The Helium building up in the core takes up space. This impedes the fusion reaction. Fewer gamma rays are produced, causing the core to contract. This heats the core driving the fusion rate back up, but at a slightly higher temperature. Thus, the Sun is gradually warming. It is about 10% hotter today than when it formed, and it will continue to get hotter and hotter as the eons pass. In about 200 million years, it will be too hot for water to remain liquid on the surface of the Earth. So, I guess we'll have to move the Earth a bit farther out.

Kamala is tough on crime. Kamala is tough on immigration. Kamala will kill tax on tips. Kamala will drill baby drill. Kamala is Trump. Who knew?

We are currently in an ice age, which is defined as any period during which there are ice caps. The current ice age began 2.5 Mya. It is suspected that the cause was the gradual reduction in CO2 caused by the weathering of the Himalayas, the migration of Antarctica over the South Pole, and the closing of the isthmus of Panama blocking ocean heat transfer at the equator. There have been over a dozen significant glaciations since the ice age began. They are likely driven by the orbital cycles of the Earth. In the last million years they’ve fallen into a regular pattern of ~90,000 years of advancing cold and ice, and ~10,000 years of retreating ice and relative warmth. We are in one of those warm periods now. It started ~12,000 years ago. Winter is coming.

I'm writing a chapter that contains a simple walk through of writing, and cleaning, a python application.  What a hoot!  It's been years since I wrote any significant python, but this is brining back to me why I love, and don't love, the language.