I Can’t Quite Figure Out

…whether or not this blog is serious, or if it’s a put-up job by someone to make the anti-war types seem even dumber than many of them are. It drips of stupidity from every corner, even to the title itself (“…the most important issue of all time, ever: The Iraq war being wrong”).

Either way, it’s entertaining reading.

[after reading a bit more]

The more I read, the more I’m compelled to believe that it’s a spoof. If it’s not, the author is (as one commenter noted) suffering from some site-specific brain lesion.

[Update a little later]

I should warn that reading too much of this site will have a deleterious effect on your IQ. I think mine plunged about twenty points in as many minutes. It was fun, though.

Deja Vu

Many forget, but one of the things (besides Ross Perot, and the bogus supermarket scanner story, and his seeming unfeeling toward those who felt that the recovering economy wasn’t recovering fast enough) that resulted in George Herbert Walker Bush’s loss of his second term, was the limp response of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to Hurricane Andrew in the summer of 1992 before the election, in southern Florida. If his son is smart, he’ll have FEMA ready to aid the Gulf Coast immediately this weekend, if Charlie is even a small fraction as devastating as many are predicting.

[Update at noon Pacific Friday]

Welcome, Corner readers. It occurs to me that this is now likely to be worse than Andrew was, in terms of property damage. It’s at least as strong a storm, and there’s a lot more population in the current track. The Gulf Coast hasn’t been hit in over forty years, and there are a lot more people living there now than in the early sixties. It’s very likely to set a new record for financial losses from a natural disaster.

Interesting results from cluster spacecraft

Recent results from Cluster shed some light on the mechanism that brings particles from the solar wind into the Earth’s magnetosphere, creating the Aurora and radiation belts. The basic mechanism is vortices generated in the sheared flow region between the magnetosphere and the solar wind. The mechanism behind the vortices is called the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, and it’s fairly generic to low velocity sheared flows, as the discussed in the article.

The same mechanism will affect any craft powered by mini-magnetospheric plasma propulsion (M2P2), but the particle transport will be the other way – from inside the magnetic bubble to outside (since the inner particle density will be higher than the solar wind particle density, at least in the tail region). This will cause loss of ions from the bubble, and may turn out to be the limiting factor for M2P2.

There is a nice picture of Kelvin-Helmholtz waves in the Earth’s atmosphere here.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!