Proving the world is round (from sea level)

My annual short but well earned break is, for a change, taking place with a fair bit of ocean view. Like this: 

It occurred to me today that, although I have stayed in ocean view apartments before, I had never tried very hard to check out the old proof of the world being round by watching closely how a tall ship disaplears from view. The problem is, of course, that you need to spot a ship going in the right direction away from the coast, and not just parallel to it. This is likely the reason I hadn't done this before

Today was my lucky day, and to prove it, I even have the shots taken through my binoculars. 

Here's the first shot (just holding the phone lens up to the binocular's eyepiece): 

Let me crop that for you: 

This was exciting: a ship heading away by about a 45 degree angle. It did go behind a tree for about 20 to 30 minutes. 

But when emerged into sight, there was a lot less to see: 

Close up crop: 

And finally, a bare white smudge, being the top of the ship: 

And thus we have the  reverse of a tall ship's mast being sighted before the rest comes into view. 

I thought this cool, even though my kids just rolled their eyes. 

Anyway.. Back to holiday stuff.. Like testing out night mode on my phone's camera:

Nice. 

Christmas 2020

I don't recall reading about the first Christmas card before, but this is it. Smithsonian magazine explains that it was privately produced for one family in England in 1843, and it does contain the surprising detail of young children apparently being given wine to drink. And to think both of mine have now reached adulthood and I never gave that a try.

Have a good Christmas, folks. 

Fancy

This video is more or less an ad for Otis elevators, but the imagery it presents of the re-vamped Empire State Building is still pretty pleasing.   (I see now that this renovation has been open for a year or so, but this is the first I have heard of it.)

Conjuncted

Lo and behold! Brisbane actually got clear-ish skies for this evening's viewing of the Jupiter and Saturn conjunction. Here it is, taken just on my phone and cropped... Your can see it's two dots.. just: 

 

Ah, no...now that it's on my laptop, the dots are bigger than I expected.  Cool.

Some beautiful videos from the far North

A month or two ago, Google suggested I watch an 8 minute BBC video about Svalsbard, the island up north of Norway which used to be Spitzbergen.   Its legal status is pretty unusual, as Wikipedia explains:

Svalbard (/ˈsvɑːlbɑːr/ SVAHL-bar,^[3] Urban East Norwegian: [ˈsvɑ̂ːɫbɑr] (listen); prior to 1925 known as Spitsbergen, or Spitzbergen, (lit. Sharp Peaks; Russian: Шпицберген) is a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Situated north of mainland Europe, it is about midway between continental Norway and the North Pole. The islands of the group range from 74° to 81° north latitude, and from 10° to 35° east longitude. The largest island is Spitsbergen, followed by Nordaustlandet and Edgeøya. While part of the Kingdom of Norway since 1925, Svalbard is not part of geographical Norway; administratively, the archipelago is not part of any Norwegian county, but forms an unincorporated area administered by a governor appointed by the Norwegian government, and a special jurisdiction subject to the Svalbard Treaty that is outside of the Schengen Area, the Nordic Passport Union and the European Economic Area.

Apparently, this means that you do not need a visa to go work there, which,  as the video explains, means that some people go there on a whim to see if they can a living, and end up happy enough:

All Knowing Google, thus detecting I was interested in the place, took some weeks to do so, but eventually recommended the Youtube channel of Cecilia, a (I think) Swedish woman who lives there (with a boyfriend and a beautiful dog.)   

I haven't watched them all, and maybe she will soon run out of new things to show, but I have to say that the images she puts up of the place are remarkably beautiful and pretty interesting.   (Even just watching her shop in the town's one big store was interesting.)

Anyway, here she is, showing exactly what the midnight sun looks like back in April, at the start of 4 months of permanent sun!:

 

 Her videos are not exactly slick - some of the explanatory stuff goes no longer than necessary - but for an amateur just showing the world the really remarkable and unusual part of the world she lives in, I find it very pleasing.   Here she is showing us a spectacular example of the Northern Lights:

 

I recommend watching them on you big smart TV if you have one. 

One other thing that's pretty interesting about the place - it has coal mines.   I find it quite surprising that Norway found it economically viable at the start of the 20th century to mine coal in such a frigid part of the world.  It's also a big reminder about how much the Earth has changed over its geological history.

I'm not sure I personally need to visit such an isolated part of the world (even though I would love to see Norway generally.)   But an amateur vlogger can make you feel as if you're experiencing the next best thing anyway.

Guilty pleasure admitted

I quite the new Spicy Pepper Paneer pizza now in Australian Domino's.   It's vegetarian too.   In fact, I don't mind their regular Vegorama too.

I get the feeling, reading lots of liberals from America on Twitter, that it's the opposite of hip to admit liking Domino's.   But I do.

And in other completely unimportant fast food news:   needed a quick lunch yesterday and McDonalds as nearby.   I know I have posted about it before - probably this year in fact -  but when you haven't eaten anything there for 6 months or so, you can get completely surprised all over again at how their main burger diameters have shrunk so much that they look like toy food or something.    

End Times noted

Phil Plait has a fun post up noting that, provided protons do not decay, the last big thing to happen to the universe might be black dwarves (modest size star remnants) exploding a bit like supernovae.   But it will take a very, very, very long time:

When enough iron builds up, they too will collapse and explode, leaving behind a neutron star.

But pycnonuclear fusion is an agonizingly slow process. How long will that take before the sudden collapse and kablooie?

Yeah, I promised earlier that I'd explain this number. For the highest mass black dwarfs, which will collapse first, the average amount of time it takes is, well, 10^1,100 years.

That's 10 to the 1,100th power. Written out, it's a 1 followed by eleven hundred zeroes....

And that's the black dwarfs that go first. The lowest mass ones take much longer.

How much longer? I'm not terribly glad you asked. They collapse after about 10^32,000 years.

That's not a typo. It's ten to the thirty-two-thousandth power. A one with 32,000 zeroes after it.

 He also points out, though, that at time frames like that, the expansion of the universe will mean that the observable universe is actually pretty small, so that you would have to be lucky to even have one of these explosions observable. (!)

All sound rather implausible - which Plait acknowledges readily, since it seems more likely that protons do decay, this puts a much "shorter" timeframe for everything to disappear.

Anyway, I expect everyone will have moved via black holes into alternative, much younger and newer universes well before this.

 

 

Funny and true

A restaurant worth noting

I've been so busy I have not got around to praising a Brisbane restaurant.

Last Friday night, I was shouted to a fantastic meal at Moda, a tapas restaurant/bar at Paddington, Brisbane.  It was not planned ahead of time, we had just headed into Paddington hoping to get into another restaurant without a booking, but of course in this Christmas post-COVID season, a lot of places were full.

I like tapas bars as a concept, but its been a while since I have been to one where I thought every plate was great and good for the price.

Well, let's deal with the price issue first:   Moda is not cheap.   But - the quality of each and every item we had was fantastic.   (Making it simpler, if expensive, we had the $95 a head chef's selection of plates, mains, and desserts.  It was pretty much a blow out meal that you probably really only want to tackle if you have missed lunch.  Which I had.)   

What can I remember of the dishes?   A duck liver parfait that was just about the best I think I have ever had; ceviche that was also pretty spectacularly nice; an octopus salad; some pipis in a cream sort of sauce; baked figs with something or other;  a couple of croquette type things; some lamb; some beef with something (the details are starting to get fuzzy) and the desserts cake and pastry pieces.  

To drink, we had a $60 bottle of Spanish cava - which I continue to say I find to be a more reliably pleasant sparkling wine than French champagne.   And a glass of chilled French muscat at the end - it was delicious too.

Service was great, and the food came pretty fast and at pretty much the right rate (a bit surprising especially give that the place was packed inside, while we managed to have a pretty pleasantly quieter time at a table outside).

Honestly, it was the best restaurant meal I have had for years.   I wish the place well.

Oh, and now that I look at reviews for it (as I said, we just ended up there by luck, really), it's not just me who thinks it's good:

 

Heh

 

A Senate problem

Greg Sargent's column on Mitch McConnell's attempt to convince every single Senator to not object to the Democrat electors in January explains it as well as any.   (He fears that if forced to vote, the Trump base will be able to identify specifically those who have abandoned Trump, and want to punish them.)  

I would think it hilarious if dimwit curly hair Rand Paul ruins this plan.  

Yes, I certainly have mixed feelings about what China is doing at the moment

I have also been meaning to say this:   an unfortunate effect of Australia feeling lucky in its avoidance of COVID 19 (the heavy lifting for which was to a large extent done at State level) is that Scott Morrison is getting approval ratings he really does not deserve.  

And yet conservatives still support him

 

 

Yay

Just happened an hour or so ago:

 

I am guessing that Parler is going off.

Also - how stupid of Republicans in some states to be assigning what someone on Twitter called cosplay alternative electors.   

Seriously, I think the party has to split for any part of it to regain credibility.
 

That Supreme Court decision

It was good news yesterday that the Supreme Court in the US stopped the Texas/Republican anti-democracy action.   

Now that so many Republicans signed up for it (completely foolishly - since what was the point of joining in on a Trump loyalty test when it was so unlikely that the case could be successful?), and yet still the Proud Boys want to destroy the GOP, we go back to the question I have been asking - how bad is the split in the GOP going to be between Trump loyalists who want to treat him indefinitely as the next president in waiting, and those who want to put an end to his era?

I am not alone

 I felt that way after only two episodes.

John Oliver on Pringles

John Oliver can be pretty funny, and his ranting about Pringles amused me this week:

 

 

 

Like him, I have questioned the point of Pringles. I'll eat them, but I agree - a well made normal chip is much nicer.

How stupid

 As someone else tweets:

He's right, I think, and as I keep saying, I reckon it spells trouble for the Republicans in the coming years, until Trump either goes to jail, has a stroke, or otherwise loses interest in trying to control the Republicans as a vanity project.

Or - I could be completely wrong.   I mean, who can tell with the weird, weird state of American politics now?

Republicans and the civil war fever

Noticed this on Twitter:

His article at Daily Kos, written in early 2019, is a good reminder about how long the wingnut Right has fantasised about getting to use their guns in a civil war.

Busy but some thoughts

The office workload is high at the moment:  it is always is at this time of year, and it always dispels any sense of a holiday mood.  Oh well.

Anyway, some various thoughts I normally would have posted separately about:

 *  By virtue of falling asleep and waking up with the TV still on, I found myself watching on SBS last Friday a documentary about Hank Williams, of all people.   Like most Australians, I guess, I knew the name, would probably recognise a couple of songs as being him, but had absolutely no idea about his life.  I would have guessed he lived into the 1960's, but he died aged 29 in 1953, seemingly of a combination of alcohol and medically administered morphine.

So yeah:  turns out he was like he was like the early country version of Amy Winehouse:  big talent, unhappy life, drugs and alcohol their ruination.  (Not that I know much about Amy Winehouse either, but I think that's the general gist.)   Fame is good for very, very few people.

* This Texas Supreme Court last ditch effort to try to stop Biden becoming President:  it's too cute by half, surely?   Given that the litigation is only against those States where Biden won, the political motivation is just too obvious - I mean, couldn't they find a Trump voting State where some technical argument might be possible about how that State had changed its voting procedures in the last year and join them in the action to try to gain some pretence of it not being purely about trying to install Trump?   

And if the Supreme Court gave it any credibility, surely it would be opening a Pandora's Box of potential future litigation. 

I see that a lot of people have noted that the 17 States joining in are basically the States of the old South, making it like a revenge attempt for losing the Civil War.   It's also been noted that its being run by the "States rights are important" party - sure, until they vote for the wrong President.

I am no expert on American constitutional law - but it seems wildly improbable that this will go anywhere.

* Assuming that this is all done and dusted soon - the biggest story of 2021 will be how seriously the Republican party splits.  Here's a bit of speculation:  the "best" thing that could happen for the party to recover would be for some QAnon, "the election was stolen" nutter to shoot or blow up up some Democrat (or even Republican who didn't endorse Trump's fake win claims) office - this would finally give the appalling "leadership" of the Party a reason to say "Enough is enough.  The election was lost legitimately and people have to stop believing it was all a conspiracy that's going to be cured by armed rebellion."