Swans on Tea

A Public Service Announcement on Guns and Bullets

What I saw there, while interesting from a mildly voyeuristic point of view, disturbed me in two ways. The first, and obvious one, was that I was upset that this was happening in my country, again. The second was concern, because it was really evident from some of the footage, that my fellow Americans watch way too much television and thus have a false understanding about bullets. So this afternoon’s public service announcement is to try and prevent possible harm that might otherwise be avoided.

An excellent article, as far as I can tell, with one caveat:

Power, with guns, is dictated by physics. As my father the physicist taught me at way too early of an age, F = M x A. Force = Mass x Acceleration. The striking, or penetrating, power of the bullet is determined by how heavy (mass) it is, multiplied by how fast it is moving. Thus, a small bullet, moving at extreme speeds, can cause a lot of damage. A large bullet can move at much slower speeds, and cause the same damage. All other things being equal, however, the higher the speed, the greater the penetration. Now, that word “penetration” is one you should think about.

He’s not describing F = ma here. Mass*velocity gives the momentum, but one also needs to look at the kinetic energy. A small bullet moving at some speed has the same momentum as a bullet of twice the mass, moving at half the speed, but it also has twice the energy, and that has some effect on penetration. The salient point, I believe, is that you don’t want that energy deposited in your body, and that’s true regardless of which case you have.

BREAKING: Huge Meteor Blazes Across Sky Over Russia; Sonic Boom Shatters Windows [UPDATED]

Apparently, at about 09:30 local time, a very big meteor burned up over Chelyabinsk, a city in Russia just east of the Ural mountains, and about 1500 kilometers east of Moscow. The fireball was incredibly bright, rivaling the Sun! There was a pretty big sonic boom from the fireball, which set off car alarms and shattered windows. I’m seeing some reports of many people injured (by shattered glass blown out by the shock wave). I’m also seeing reports that some pieces have fallen to the ground, but again as I write this those are unconfirmed.

I’ve been reading about some people expressing frustration that they are still in a bad way after hurricane Sandy — no power, long lines for gasoline, etc. Yes, it’s tough and you have my sympathy and empathy (90 hours without power this summer after being hit with a derecho gives me an inkling of the troubles)

But this was no small thing. The NOAA website discusses the energy released in a hurricane

It turns out that the vast majority of the heat released in the condensation process is used to cause rising motions in the thunderstorms and only a small portion drives the storm’s horizontal winds.

A typical hurricane releases an average of 6 x 10^14 Watts of power — it’ll be higher where there is more rainfall — which is 200 times the electrical energy generation in the world. The wind energy is a fraction of a percent of that, but is still half the world’s electricity generation level. And Sandy was bigger, so the numbers will be higher. All of that, focused on the mid-Atlantic/Northeast coastal areas.

The point is that there was a lot of fury unleashed last week, and it takes some time to recover from that. Gasoline in short supply indicates some of the logistical problems going on. A lot of people, requiring a lot of energy, all of it needing to be imported somehow. All of the behind-the-scenes things we take for granted, until a disruption occurs.

It’s Global Warming, Stupid

An unscientific survey of the social networking literature on Sandy reveals an illuminating tweet (you read that correctly) from Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. On Oct. 29, Foley thumbed thusly: “Would this kind of storm happen without climate change? Yes. Fueled by many factors. Is storm stronger because of climate change? Yes.” Eric Pooley, senior vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund (and former deputy editor of Bloomberg Businessweek), offers a baseball analogy: “We can’t say that steroids caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther. Now we have weather on steroids.”

Latest Hurricane Sandy’s Satellite Photos and Videos (Updating Live)

Don’t know if I’ll lose power, but I’m prepared for a few days without it.

Maple syrup heist baffles Quebec

Thieves in the Canadian province of Quebec may have pulled off the sweetest heist of all time, siphoning off a reservoir of maple syrup from a warehouse and cleverly covering up their caper to evade detection, an industry group said on Friday.

Rocks remember, and so do we

Neil Armstrong: 1930 – 2012

Neil Armstrong: 1930 – 2012: Made ‘Giant Leap’ as First Man to Step on Moon

A week in space: Dragon docks, dark matter doesn’t not exist (maybe), and the many ways you could have seen the eclipse

Plus the upcoming transit of Venus.

There’s a science-literacy backbeat to several of the recent supposedly-superluminal-neutrino stories, and it really manifested itself in a barrage of tweets a few days back, responses to the WSJ “science” article I discussed where the author mused that because of the neutrino experiment, the global warming science isn’t settled. Lampooning such denialism is pretty easy (and fun) and it’s summarized in Be(c+)ause Neutrino and ‘Settled Science’ and CO2. The tweets went with the format of

If serious scientists can question Einstein’s relativity, there must be room for debate about [silly argument]

And fun was had by all. But it occurred to me that there are a lot of people who wouldn’t get the joke. As I tweeted, serious scientists question Einstein ALL THE TIME. That’s what we DO. This is something I think the most people probably don’t get, and that the crackpots who liken science to dogma and scientists to priests certainly don’t. ANY time you do an experiment you are questioning and testing the principles at play in that experiment. If you get some unexpected result you may have discovered new science. Most of the time, of course (and more so the further you are from the cutting edge), you either get what you expected to get, or you made a mistake that you might later uncover. But that’s not due to science being a religion or some conspiracy, it’s because the science is on a solid foundation. So any experiment that uses relativity is a test of relativity, just as any experiment using chemistry principles is a test of those principles, and for biology and geology.

Once a theory has been tested numerous times, you gain confidence that it’s right. Toppling it is not really an option once you have established that it works over the range of problems it’s meant to address — at best you might have to modify it. If you let go of an object and it rises, you don’t rush out and declare “gravity is dead!” (unless perhaps you’re Charles Krauthammer). What you do is look to see if there is some other influence at play — the object is a helium balloon, perhaps, or there’s a strong air current. Established science mandates the adage that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Established science defines what ordinary is.

And ordinary does not get toppled with a single experiment. While some abbreviated history lesson might point to these paradigm shifts, the reality is that the experiments were repeated or other experiments were done and there was invariably a period of debate. Paradigm shifts are slower than the history books sometimes depict. The famous 1887 Michelson-Morely experiment, for example, was a higher-precision repeat of an 1881 experiment that hinted at a discrepancy with the expected answer. The 1881 experiment was insufficient to topple the idea of the aether as a medium (representing an absolute frame) we moved through (but it most certainly was a test of the current paradigm) but at the time, so was the 1887 experiment. Other experiments were subsequently done, and new hypotheses arose to explain the results, such as the partial entrainment of the aether and the ad-hoc FitzGerald–Lorentz contraction. Michelson-Morely may have been the mortal blow for the aether, but it took decades for it to actually die.

Evolution is another example. It took a long time for the theory to be accepted, but by now has accumulated so much evidence and been tested in so many ways, no single bit of evidence is going to topple it. Theories are either shown to be systemically wrong, or they get modified. The early thermodynamic theories of phlogiston and caloric were tossed out because they were wrong — they were not examples of a simplified version of a more complete theory, as with relativity and Newtonian systems. Atomic models came and went as more data were obtained, and the Bohr model had its day as quantum mechanics was developed. The Rutherford scattering experiment may be the closest example of which I am aware of a single experiment toppling a model, but that model was not particularly well-developed and certainly did not have 100 years of testing and confirmation behind it.

Because 4% of the Energy Controls 100% of the Photons

It may have happened already, but if not, it’s just a matter of time before some jackass complains about how Irene was overhyped* because the damage/devastation was not as bad as it was feared. Which completely ignores that getting people to properly prepare is a huge part of minimizing the damage.

*I know Ron Paul has called for the elimination of FEMA, but that’s pre-existing jackassitude.

We maintain that arbitrary killing is not a solution to political problems and crime’s adjudication as Justice must be seen to be done.

When I read that in Statement From the Family of Osama bin Laden, my irony meter broke. They owe me a new one.

I was out of town on May 1 (and all of last week), and have had only intermittent chances to catch up on all of the happenings, but do have some thoughts. There are only a few things that bother me at all, I think. The kind of celebration I saw Monday night/Tuesday morning made me a tad uncomfortable; I understand it, but the first thing I thought of was the media coverage of the reaction in some (not all) places in the middle east after 9/11. It wasn’t obvious that they were celebrating justice or reveling in revenge. That gives me pause. Labeling it as justice also has some issues. I don’t know what a better description would be, but the word implies that this was somehow tied in with the criminal justice system, with due process and rights. It wasn’t. This was a military action, and it was justified.

Terrorism is a strange mix of criminal activity and war. But one must not forget that it is still war in many of its actions. Bin Laden declared war on the US in 1998 and carried out overt acts, killing thousands, and not just in the US. The attribution of these deeds solely as criminal acts is, I think, naive and simplistic. This did not take place on US soil. The notion that the appropriate response to locating him, in foreign territory, would to be to serve an arrest warrant is ludicrous. Good men put their lives at risk in this operation, and would have been at greater risk if they had been under a restriction to capture but not kill, or with similar rules of engagement. Keep in mind that we had other options, like sending a missile or a GPS/laser-guided bomb. An enemy general in a war does not need to have a pistol in his hand at the time of action in order to justify bombing his headquarters. This, I think, is no different. This was a war of bin Laden’s choosing, and it is likely that the only way the ending could have been different would be if he had surrendered of his own accord. Which he had the option to do at pretty much any point.

Fred Clark at slacktivist has some excellent posts (its predecessor is linked within) on the reasoning behind the justification. There is a mention of the Nuremburg trials after WWII in a post by Glenn Greenwald, which I have not read. Those trials took place after the war was over, with prisoners who had been captured, many of whom were captured after hostilities had ceased. That’s an important distinction, I think. Prisoners are taken when they have made an overt act of surrender. Absent that, they are considered combatants, and don’t have to explicitly “go” for a weapon to be considered dangerous. I would not consider the risk trading even one more life for Osama bin Laden’s capture to have been acceptable. His killing was not arbitrary, nor was it the execution of a criminal sentence. It was part of the war that he declared, and unlike the slaughter of civilians he orchestrated, was justified.