Death and Taxes

 My telephone bill, just plain old telephone service, was $26.95.  Of this, $15.30, better than half, was federal tax.  It's not one tax, it is seven different taxes, designed to disguise how much Uncle is nailing me for. 

Movie the Golden Compass. 2007

 Based on a fantasy trilogy by Phillip Pullman, The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass,  The books were good, they are young adult (YA) which I read as more interesting and better written than Adult Fiction.  The movie was pretty good.  Dakota Blue Richards does a fine job of playing Lyra, the main protagonist, even though she was only 13 years old at the time.  I thought she did more for the movie than Nicole Kidman or Daniel Craig.

   It is too bad that they never made movies from the other two books of the trilogy.  It could have been mediocre earnings from the Golden Compass.  From a budget if $180 million, they only made $70 million in the US and Canada.  Worldwide earnings were better, $370 million, so they should have made a fair amount of money on the Golden Compass. 

Abolition:

 Way back when, long before the US Civil War of 1860, slavery was confined to the Southern colonies which would form the confederacy for the Civil War.  The North was into small farms owned and operated by free men.  The big slave worked plantations were a Southern phenomenon.  And the two systems did not interact much. 

   Starting back in the early 1700’s a feeling began to grow in the North that slavery was unfair, cruel, and close to a mortal sin.  Abolition it was called later.  For the Revolution, this feeling was submerged, all hands North and South, understood that to beat the Redcoats we Americans needed unity in the face of the enemy and we could not afford the political strains that abolition would bring, at least not until we had won the Revolution. 

After the Revolution abolition grew apace.  A lot of protestant preachers spoke in favor.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe became a best seller, selling nearly as many copies as the Bible.  The Republican Party was created to push abolition.  When the Republicans elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the Southern states seceded from the Union.  When the South fired upon Fort Sumter the Civil War was on.  If the south had just let Major Andersen’s Fort Sumter garrison continue manning their guns, the North might well have let the South secede in peace.  But after the South fired on the Union flag, the North sprang to arms,  It took 600,000 casualties, more that all we suffered in all the other wars we ever fought to win the Civil War and free all the slaves. 

   We didn't fight the Civil War for white supremacy.  We fought it for freedom and liberty. 

DISH. Slow and a little flaky

 I got tired of Spectrum's endless price hiking and switched to DISH.  DISH works, most of the time.  The data rate is plenty fast enough for me.  What is slow is switching from one web site to another.  I fear this works by your system transmitting a request for change up to the satellite, and waiting for the satellite to respond.  Since every DISH owner in North America is transmitting requests up to the poor over burdened satellites, it is not surprising that some of the requests get lost and have to be re-transmitted.  When two requests to the satellite arrive at the same time, they jam each other and other requests must be re-transmitted.  Net result, it takes DISH noticeable longer to switch to a new web site than cable modem Spectrum.  

Disk comes with a massive video box which has instructions so complex I have not mastered them yet.  And the video box ("Hopper") occasionally dies.  If I cycle power and wait long enough (several hours last night) the video comes back.  

Is a Lush Beard a Signal of Having More Testosterone?

 Title of a piece on the Web.  Actually since many (most?) guys shave their faces every morning, it is hard to believe that a beard is attractive to chicks, or anyone else.  If they were, more guys would grow beards. Or that a beard is a mark of better genes or more testosterone or anything else other than being a guy.  And I have never heard a Darwinian (or any other science based argument) about why guys grow beards and chicks don't.

2 1/4 inches of snow in the Notch

First real snow of this winter.  It ain't enough to open Cannon, but it helps.

Dark Matter could be Macho's rather than WIMPs

Astronomers discovered a free planet, some 100 light years away.  It's a sizeable beast, several times the size of Jupiter and way out in free space, no star anywhere close.  Free planets are very hard to see since they lack a sun to light them up.  This one was detected by its infra red emissions.  

Are free planets the "Massive Halo Objects" (Macho's) of the missing mass discussion?  We are pretty such that the universe needs more mass, a lot more mass, than we can see glowing in the night sky.   This bit of knowledge comes from watching galaxies rotate.  Speed of rotation depends upon mass of the galaxy.  Heavier galaxies have to rotation faster to create enough centrifugal force to prevent the stars from getting sucked down into the galaxy center.  This bit of physics comes to us from Isaac Newton and is taught in freshman college physics.  That is where I learned it. 

   The mass of the galaxies was estimated by counting all the stars in the galaxy and assuming that the stars were of average mass.  Doing this came up short of mass, a lot short, say one or two times the observed (luminous) mass.  Two solutions were suggested.  There might be a new sub atomic particle with mass like a proton but as hard to detect as a neutrino.  This was dubbing Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (wimp for short).  This came up shortly after the Higgs boson was discovered, leaving a lot of particle accelerators and accelerator physicists looking for something to do.  The other idea was a "Massive Halo Object" (Macho for short).  

This newly discovered free planet is a Massive Halo Object.  There might be more, they are hard to detect so there might be a lot more.  Question:  How many free planets would there have to be to furnish the missing mass?  Is it a reasonable number?  Or is the required number so high that we would have noticed free planets zipping by the earth already?