Month: February 2024

Guest Contributor – TomD – 27FEB2024 – The Best Camera is the One You Carry

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

That looks to be a fossilized “rolly polly” insect. The ones that roll up into small armored balls. I ate one one, thinking it to be a chocolate chip fallen from my cookie. I won’t repeat that mistake, ever.

BTW: Below is a side by side photo of my new “carry around” Sony A6600 next to my “main camera” Sony A7IV.

A7IV Vs A6600.jpg
A7IV Vs A6600.jpg

Down here in Florida where self defense is considered to be a right, there is a maxim among the people who commonly carry weapons. That the best weapon for self defense is the weapon which you are most likely to have with you.

The same principle applies to cameras. If I’m going somewhere on a photo shoot, I’ll very probably have the larger camera with me. It is the more capable but not to the degree you may suspect. But the other 99.999% of the time, the bulk and cost precludes it as a constant companion as I travel about. But the smaller camera fits in my console or even a pocket with a smaller lens. And I constantly find photo subjects for which I wish I had a more capable camera than a cell, even my capable (for a phone) Pixel.

I used to get really good early dawn shots while going to work, when I worked.

At one point, I had an earlier version of the A6600 but I gave it to my wife when she dropped and destroyed her camera. I asked for it back but was cursed at.

Joy Reid Achieves Terminal Stupid

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MSNBC proudly displays Joy Reid to the world like some sideshow exhibit.  She is a very strange individual in many ways.  But let’s be kind and put everything else aside.  Let’s just concentrate on her words and ideas.  She say that the United States has over 327 million people so why does it need kids?

Now maybe this is a failure of the school system where Joy was allegedly educated but does she think people live forever?   Is she unaware that the young adults procreate and then raise up the next generation and then give way to their children and the whole cycle begins again.

Or is she aware of this but thinks that the current deficit in births to native born women in the United States should be replaced with illegal aliens walking in?  Well, let’s be kind and say that’s what she means.

I wonder if she thinks that this country will stay as it is now if the demographics continue to change as drastically as the current influx of third world migrants indicates it will?  Does she assume that there will still be a need for Joy Reid on television?  Does she think there will still be a need for MSNBC?  Or for that matter will there be the where withall for cable television to still exist?

I know it’s unthinkable that we would have to get along without Joy Reid but I suspect if things go along the way they currently are Joy Reid is going to have to find a new gig.  And from what I can see and hear of her skills I think DMV clerk is gonna be a stretch.  Maybe bathroom attendant at the local high school might make more sense.  I’m sure she could figure out how a mop and ringer work.

 

What Do We Keep and What Let Go? – Part 2 – Freedom

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I’ve heard lots of people say that freedom was the Enlightenment Era’s original sin.  By demanding freedom, we opened ourselves up to all the ills of our society.  But I don’t believe this.  All the stuff about equality running us into a ditch because it was the source of feminism and the other isms may be true.  But I contend that any society that allows me the freedoms that are enumerated in the Bill of Rights has given me the basis of a happy life.

My idea about what has to be changed is nothing more complicated than to demand the complete restoration of these freedoms.  We must resist any demands to give up any part of our rights for the sake of some misbegotten crusade to make everyone “more equal.”  People are as equal as they’ll ever be.  Which is, not at all.  Every individual is just that, an individual.  And as long as we provide them with the same freedoms, they’ve got nothing to say about anybody else’s pursuit of happiness.

The beginnings of the restoration of these rights have finally made some headway.  The Supreme Court recently outlawed affirmative action in college admissions.  Well, that’s a good start.  But outlawing it completely in the federal government is what is needed.  It’s the feds that have used quotas to force all kinds of businesses and organizations to hire or admit people on the basis of race or sex or sexual deviancy.  This is the basis for most of the misery that has gripped this country.  Free association is one of the fundamental behaviors of a free people.  Choosing who you want to work with or play with is the way you try to make your life yours.  We’ve all seen what happens when an affirmative action hire turns out to be a disaster.  It builds up animosity and frustration throughout the organization.  And it forces the people around the mismatched employee to work twice as hard to make up for the employee that cannot be cajoled or forced out.

And think of how many fraternal organizations were ruined when they were forced to admit women.  Half of the reason for the organization was to get away from wives to spend a few happy hours with the guys in a mens-only environment.  The same goes for the Boy Scouts.  Admitting girls and then gays was a betrayal of the basis of the organization’s reason for existing.  And for what?  There is already Girl Scouts.  There could be a scout’s organization that let anyone in and that didn’t mention God or chivalry or normalcy.  But the real point was destroying something that didn’t include them.

And since that’s the point why should we feel bad if we manage to stop this shakedown racket.  But you’ll be told that discrimination will be happening.  Well, of course it will be.  Everywhere you look in life there’s discrimination.  How many kids that end up in Harvard and Yale are there because their fathers and grandfathers went there?  And how many of those kids are smarter than the thousands that are rejected?  And how about the kids who are let in just for the color of their skins.  They’re not as smart as the rejects either.  So, discrimination is okay if it’s done for the elites or for their pet projects.  What’s that old saying?  You know who’s in charge by who gets to break the rules.  Well, let’s stop with the games.  They want to have their kids go to Harvard.  Then let’s stop pretending that the people in charge play by the rules they make for us.  And let’s just let people live their lives the way they want.  If the Bushes and the Romneys want to belong to their secret societies and wouldn’t let me in if their lives depended on it, why should I care?  And if my poker game looks like the older version of the kids I grew up with and doesn’t have enough diversity, equity and inclusion why should anyone care?

Let’s face it.  With a country as multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-religious as America has become the only way, we can avoid going for each-other’s throats is if we give each other some room to breathe.  The happiest and ultimately the most efficient way to let people organize their lives is to let people organize their own lives the way they want.

And that is what most needs to change in this country if we want it to survive.  Drop the affirmative action and drop the policing of employment and membership in organizations and just leave people alone to live their lives the way they want.  That is after all the real reason most people came to this country.  The nineteenth century immigrants from eastern and southern Europe were under no illusions that they’d be hobnobbing with the Astors and the Rockefellers.  They knew they’d be lucky if they got to clean out the chimneys and drain pipes of the Astors and Rockefellers.  What they did hope for was the opportunity to pursue their dreams through hard work and enjoy the community of fellow immigrants who huddled together in the various ghettoes of places like New York City.  And each ethnicity, even each village had its own neighborhood.  Maybe a few city blocks and a church and some store fronts.  And all these neighborhoods were cheek to jowl with each other and many of them didn’t get along very well.  But as long as they had their own clubs and festivals and customs it worked.  All they had to do was obey the law and mind their own business.

And that’s still pretty good advice.

Guest Contributor – TomD – 26FEB2024 – Cosmological Cannibalism

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

Just stumbled on this, from Popular Mechanics:

A Theory Says Our Universe Keeps Expanding Because It’s Eating Baby UniversesDarren Orf
Mon, February 26, 2024 at 7:00 AM CST

Theory Says Our Universe Is Eating Baby Universes Javier Zaya

The cosmological constant, which explains how and why the universe is expanding, has been previously described by astrophysicists as “the worst prediction in the history of physics” due to its deviation from observations.

  • This has led astrophysicists to explore other avenues for explaining why the universe’s expansion is accelerating.
  • A new paper published in December of 2023 suggests a novel idea that our universe is absorbing baby universes—and was even absorbed itself in its early years.

The biggest mystery in the Standard Cosmological Model is dark energy—the stuff that is “presumably” the engine behind the acceleration of the universe and which makes up 65 to 70 percent of the entire universe. Dark energy forms the backbone of the idea of the “cosmological constant”—first conceived by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity to refute the conception that the universe was actually static and not expanding or contracting.
When researchers in the 1990s discovered that the universe was not only expanding, but accelerating in its expansion, Einstein’s “universal constant” (which he labeled lambda, or Λ) became surprisingly relevant again. When plugged into equations used to understand the growth of the universe after the Big Bang (known as the Friedmann equations), scientists arrived at the modern “cosmological constant.” However, there’s a couple problems—scientists have never actually observed dark energy (hence the “dark” moniker) and the cosmological constant is pretty lousy at explaining observed phenomena.
Because science abhors a epistemological vacuum, astrophysicists have instead explored other theories that could explain what’s happening in the universe. In one of those theories, published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics in December of 2023, University of Copenhagen astrophysicist Jan Ambjørn and Yoshiyuki Watabiki at the Tokyo Institute of Technology explore a novel idea that doesn’t require the yet-undiscovered dark energy to explain the acceleration of the universe, and negates the need for a cosmological constant as well.

Instead, this new paper argues, our universe is actually swallowing up ‘baby universes’ as it expands.
“The main finding of our work is that the accelerated expansion of our universe, caused by the mysterious dark energy, might have a simple intuitive explanation,” Ambjørn tells LiveScience, “the merging with so-called baby universes, and that a model for this might fit the data better than the standard cosmological model.”
The idea is deceptively simple—as our universe grows, it absorbs other universes in its path, thereby “accelerating” its boundaries. Perceived by our telescopes, this would look like an increased acceleration of universal expansion. When Ambjørn and Watabiki ran the calculations for this ‘baby universe’ theory, the calculations fit more closely with real-life observations than those using the Standard Cosmological Model, the researchers claim.
The paper also attempts to answer another mystery of the early universe called “cosmological inflation,” wherein the early universe rapidly expanded for some unknown reason. A current theory suggests that a hypothetical field, called the “inflation field,” drove this expansion, but this new paper suggests another mechanism could have been at work.
“The fact that the universe has expanded…in a very short time, invites the suggestion that this expansion was caused by a collision with a larger universe, i.e. that it was really our Universe which was absorbed in another ‘parent’ universe,” the paper reads. “It is difficult to judge if such a scenario could take place in a way that would actually solve the problems inflation was designed to solve, but one interesting aspect of such a scenario is that there is no need for an inflation field.”
This isn’t the only theory that boldly eschews the need for a cosmological constant. In July of 2023, another paper argued that the expansion of the universe could simply be a mirage caused by the evolution of electrons and protons over immensely long time scales.
For now, no alternative theory has dethroned dark energy and the cosmological constant as the best explanation of the universal acceleration. But it’s always important to keep a cautiously open mind—especially in science as cutting-edge as universal expansion. Sometimes interesting and helpful ideas can come from very odd place. Never say never.