Discovered Locklin on Science a little while ago, and I’ve been trolling through his archives. Found several gems – Spotting Vaporware, Nano Nonsense, The Airship: An Aesthetic Appreciation, The Atlantic: Tool of the Oligarchy, To Learn About the Future, Study the Past, How Hackers Ruin Everything With Computers, and finally, A Peregrination on the Nature of Money. That’s a lot of links, but I commend all of them to you.
The Amish don’t get Autism. This goes into the whole vaccination/autism thing, about which I am undecided. I probably lean towards vaccination.
Homeless Planets may be common. I thought homelessness never appeared in the media unless there was a Republican in the White House. Some catastrophists have speculated that Saturn and its moons were homeless, until captured by our Sun. It is interesting that several planets have almost identical axial tilts.
Comet collides with Sun during massive CME.
According to NASA’s SOHO, a bright comet, most likely from the Kreutz family of comets, which was discovered by amateur astronomer Sergey Shurpakov, slammed into the sun, but as it dove into it a coronal mass ejection blasted out. There is no correlation between the strike and the solar eruption; it was just a coincidence.
I guarantee it was not a coincidence. As the comet comes in from the outskirts of the Solar System, it will be moving into a differently charged regime. That is why comets have tails. This was an electrical connection between the comet and the sun, and this isn’t the only time that this has happened. There’s a whole bunch of EU comet articles here.
Comet theory of North American extinctions coming under fire. Shame, it was a cool theory.
Looks like there is a link between cosmic rays and cloud cover, modulated by solar activity. This, if true, would invalidate most of the AGW we’ve had shoved down our throats for the last decade or so.
Alfven and the electric universe.
In an ESA report last month the high-resolution of the Herschel space observatory produced another surprise, “The filaments are huge, stretching for tens of light years through space and Herschel has shown that newly-born stars are often found in the densest parts of them… Such filaments in interstellar clouds have been glimpsed before by other infrared satellites, but they have never been seen clearly enough to have their widths measured. Now, Herschel has shown that, regardless of the length or density of a filament, the width is always roughly the same. “This is a very big surprise,” says Doris Arzoumanian, Laboratoire AIM Paris-Saclay, CEA/IRFU, the lead author on the paper describing this work. Together with Philippe André from the same institute and other colleagues, she analyzed 90 filaments and found they were all about 0.3 light years across, or about 20,000 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. This consistency of the widths demands an explanation.”
So what is the favored conventional explanation? What else but “sonic booms” generated by “exploding stars!” But where are these exploding stars? And explosions should impose some degree of radial curvature on these filaments. But what we see is more like the tortuous paths of cloud-to-cloud lightning bolts. For that is what they are, in fact, on a cosmic scale.
The ‘father’ of plasma cosmology, Hannes Alfvén, wrote in 1986, “That parallel currents attract each other was known already at the times of Ampere. It is easy to understand that in a plasma, currents should have a tendency to collect to filaments. In 1934, it was explicitly stated by Bennett that this should lead to the formation of a pinch. The problem which led him to the discovery was that the magnetic storm producing medium (solar wind with present terminology) was not flowing out uniformly from the Sun. Hence, it was a problem in cosmic physics which led to the introduction of the pinch effect…
However, to most astrophysicists it is an unknown phenomenon. Indeed, important fields of research, e.g., the treatment of the state in interstellar regions, including the formation of stars, are still based on a neglect of Bennett’s discovery more than half a century ago… present-day students in astrophysics hear nothing about it.” [Emphasis added]
The constant width over vast distances is due to the current flowing along the Birkeland filaments, each filament constituting a part of a larger electric circuit. And in a circuit the current must be the same in the whole filament although the current density can vary in the filament due to the electromagnetic pinch effect. Therefore the electromagnetic scavenging effect on matter from the molecular cloud, called Marklund convection, is constant along each current filament, which simply explains the consistency of widths of the filaments. The stars form as plasmoids in the Bennett-pinches, also known in plasma labs on Earth as Z-pinches.
Here’s two sites which, regardless of whether you end up buying it or not, are just fun: Ancient Destructions and Saturnian Cosmology.
And, Bosnian pyramids.
And Zero Hedge dips into weird science: Earthquakes and Weird Atmospheric effects. Strange phenomena have been associated with earthquakes since the classical era, but seem to be largely dismissed nowadays.