Month: January 2024

It was cold on Monday night: 33°F at the top of Palomar Mountain, where I did this month's bit of astrophotography. I thought my fingers were going to fall off.

The sky wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good and nothing went wrong. I got a full night's worth of images and all of them were usable to create the final image stack. My target was the Crab Nebula, aka M1, the remains of a supernova that exploded in 1054. It's fairly small and distant, which puts it at about the limits of my telescope. In the end though, the image turned out better than I expected. There are a few odd artifacts in the interior, but the colors are nice and the resolution is fairly good. The stars aren't quite round, which suggests my guiding was mediocre. The noise that I've gotten previously when I use the narrowband filter is mostly gone thanks to increased dithering. And refocusing with the filter in place produced a nice, sharp image.

So overall, not bad. Until I get a bigger scope, this is as good as it's going to get.

Finally I have a chance to post some cheesecake with a genuinely newsworthy purpose:

This might not look especially racy to you, and when I first heard about it I figured it was just an ordinary case of a conservative guy trying to make a buck. But no! Vox informs me today that it's become a flash point on the right:

It’s called “Calendargate,” and it’s raising the question of what — and whom — the right-wing war on “wokeness” is really for.

....Last month, Ultra Right Beer — a company founded as a conservative alternative to allegedly woke Bud Light — released a 2024 calendar titled “Conservative Dad’s Real Women of America 2024 Calendar.” The calendar contains photos of “the most beautiful conservative women in America” in various sexy poses. Some, like anti-trans swimmer Riley Gaines and writer Ashley St. Clair, are wearing revealing outfits; others, like former House candidate Kim Klacik, are fully clothed. No one is naked.

But this mild sexiness was just a bit too much for some prominent social conservatives, who started decrying the calendar in late December as (among other things) “demonic.” The basic complaint is that the calendar is pandering to married men’s sinful lust, debasing conservative women, and making conservatives seem like hypocrites when they complain about leftist immorality.

Fabulous! I only wish that I believed this would become a huge, ongoing fight rather than petering out (so to speak) after a few weeks. But this isn't the kind of thing Fox News will obsess about, so it's unlikely to last.

Or—and hear me out on this—maybe Donald Trump will get involved. The guy behind the calendar has said he doesn't support Trump, which is usually all it takes to bait Trump into a wild Truth Social screed. Wouldn't that be something? Donald Trump insisting he's offended by a slightly sexy calendar and its objectification of women? But it might be good for his recent campaign to persuade Christian conservatives that he's really one of them.

It's usually liberals who conduct internecine wars over trivia like this, so it's nice to see conservatives taking a crack at it. Let's keep it going, OK?

The Artemis II mission to orbit the moon has been pushed back:

The space agency had planned to send four astronauts around the moon late this year, but pushed the flight to September 2025.... NASA cited safety concerns with its own spacecraft, as well as development issues with the moonsuits and landers coming from private industry.

Damn. It's only January 10th and already one of my predictions for 2024 has failed. I knew I was being aggressively optimistic when I made it, but I foolishly went ahead anyway. I should have remembered my own advice: Everything takes longer than you think.

Alex Tabarrok takes on federal dishwasher regulations today:

Why do today’s dishwashers typically take more than 2 hours to run through a normal cycle when less than a hour was common in the past? The reason is absurd energy and water “conservation” rules. These rules, imposed on dish and clothes washers, have made these products perform worse than in the past, cleaning less well or much more slowly. One of the best things that the Trump administration did (other than Operation Warp Speed, of course) was creating a product class–superwashers!–that cleaned in under an hour and were not subject to energy and water conservation standards.

First off: Operation Warp Speed was a sham. All the important work had been done by Congress long before Donald Trump came up with his (admittedly terrific) marketing slogan.

But back to dishwashers. Honest question here: Why does anyone care if a dishwasher takes two hours to finish a cycle? I typically load the dishes at night and then turn on the dishwasher. The next day I unload it. Who cares how long it took?

Obviously (I guess) there must be people out there who run their dishwashers in the middle of the day and then sit on the edge of their seats until it's done. But why? This isn't like a clothes washer, where you might want to put in another load right away.

Can somebody help me out here?

Ha ha ha:

Former President Trump won’t make his own closing argument in his New York civil business fraud trial after his lawyers objected to the judge’s insistence that the former president would stick to “relevant” matters.

Poor Donald. The judge won't allow him to rant about how unfair everything is, so instead he's going to sit at his table and pout. Poor baby.

Here is the average rental price of a vacant apartment over the past couple of decades:

Note that this is the asking price for a vacant apartment, so it represents the actual cost of moving into a new place. Income is for nonsupervisory workers, who represent about 80% of the workforce, so it isn't skewed by the top 5%.

Rents increased steadily after the Great Recession and then surged during the pandemic, rising from 30% of income to 35% of income in only four years. For the most recent quarter, average national rent was $1,462 compared to average blue-collar income of $4,245 per month. This puts rent at 34.4% of individual income. As a percentage of the median household income it's about 25%.

As always, keep in mind that this is a national average. Rents are higher in hot markets and lower in rural areas and the burbs.

Today we have a new entry in the Annals of Pseudoscience: an estimate from Bloomberg News that war over Taiwan would be really expensive:

This is based on some handwaving estimates that in the event of war Taiwan's GDP would fall 40%, China's would fall 17%, and US GDP would fall 7%. Add it up and world GDP drops 10.2%. And that's just the first year.

Bloomberg's writeup is light on details, which I suppose is inevitable, but appears to be based on an assumption that a war would cut off 100% of Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing.

Maybe so. Who knows? But I imagine that your guess is as good as Bloomberg's.

Joshua Benton of Nieman Labs points us today to a recent study about people who "do the research" on fake news. In a nutshell, the researchers found that when people searched Google to check out a news article, it more often than not made them more likely to believe misinformation.

But why? Here's the technical explanation:

Evidence from these results suggest that lower levels of digital literacy correlate with exposure to unreliable news in search results after conditioning on demographic characteristics. A standard deviation increase in ideological congruence also appears to increase the probability of being exposed to unreliable news by a Google search engine.

As the chart shows, a Google search increased confidence in true news being true and fake news being true. In other words: The internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber. What the study showed was that lots of people have no idea how to use search engines and frequently just type in the headline of a fake news article. This is more likely than not to lead them to sources that confirm the fake news.

One more thing: In case your immediate response is a snide comment about conservatives, the study finds that liberals are a little more likely to be misled by a Google search. So there's that.

This whole Lloyd Austin thing is damn weird. He went into the hospital on January 1 due to "complications" from surgery but didn't tell anyone until four days later. I had a vague thought that maybe it was because the surgery was for something he didn't want to make public, like a vasectomy or syphilis scarring. But no:

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had surgery last month after a prostate cancer diagnosis, officials disclosed Tuesday, detailing for the first time what condition led to medical complications and a lengthy hospitalization that he kept secret from the White House, Congress and the American public for several days.

Why would you keep something like this secret? As it happens, this episode doesn't really touch a hot button for me,¹ but obviously it has for a lot of people. It's sure peculiar as hell.

¹As you might guess, this is true of a lot of things that people hyperventilate about. I think we'd all benefit by calming down just generally. It's one of the reasons I liked Barack Obama so much.

Why has illegal immigration skyrocketed over the past few years? Steven Camarota provides a common explanation:

Once it became clear that the administration was not going to detain people, send them home quickly, or require them to wait in Mexico, the number of people coming to the border skyrocketed.

Here are total border encounters over the past few years:

I understand that this topic has long since become so politicized that no one cares about a fair interpretation of the actual data. Immigration hawks will look at this chart and say that the surge at the border began the instant Joe Biden won the election, but does that really make any sense? Are migrants from Latin America so tuned into US politics that they started surging to the border based solely on some vague campaign promises?

It's possible, I guess. But nothing actually changed on Election Day and very little changed even after Biden took office. It wasn't until June 2021 that Biden tried to halt the Remain in Mexico program, his first significant border action.

It seems most likely to me that Biden's policies began having an effect after perhaps six months in office. But by that point illegal immigration had already reached more than 200,000 per month and has stayed at roughly that level for the past couple of years.

I don't have a big axe to grind over this. Maybe it really was campaign promises that caused the huge surge. It just doesn't seem very likely. What seems much more likely is that the immigration surge began under Donald Trump and border policies both before and after Biden's election have had little effect. The surge had other causes.

But what were those causes? I confess that's mysterious. My best guess is that it was mostly a thermostatic response to a desperate demand for more workers at a time when the illegal immigrant population had been declining for years. But that's just a guess.