Kevin Drum

Today is astronomy week. First up is our newest comet, C/2022 E3, aka "The Green Comet."

Comet photography is tricky. Normal subjects, like galaxies or a nebulas, don't move across the field of stars, so you can tell your scope to guide based on star positions and everything will be fine. But if you do that with a comet, the stars will be sharp but the comet will be blurred due to its own motion.

The bottom picture is from a stack of 60-second test exposures at Palomar Mountain that were guided on the star field. You can see some artifacts in the core of the comet as a result of that.

The middle picture was taken last night in the desert. It's from a stack of 300-second exposures that were guided on the comet but then integrated by the software based on the star field. As you can see, it doesn't represent the comet accurately at all.

The top picture is the final and best image. It's from the same stack of images, but this time the software integrated the stack based on the comet's position in each frame. As a result, you can see lots of star movement in the background, which I toned down in order to put the focus on the comet. Thanks to the 300-second exposures, you get a good view of the dust tail (broad haze), the ion tail (long, thin streak), and the small antitail at the bottom.

Even in the best picture the comet is blurry, of course. This is because it's just a small core emitting vast clouds of gas and dust, and that would be inherently blurry even if you were riding along right beside it.

I don't remember who pointed me to this, but here's a short excerpt from a 2022 survey done by Populace, an education think tank, about what people expect of K-12 education:

Only a third of Americans have college degrees, so I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that "prepare a meal" ranks higher than "prepare kids for college." However, it is a surprise (to me) that college prep turns out to rank #47 overall—a gigantic drop from the previous year. What's more, this is in spite of the fact that the average prediction from survey-takers is that other people rank it #3.

In any case, if this survey is accurate at all it's cause for despair. Everything is important, and certain things are especially important to certain people. But overall? The only things on the list that should have made the top five are #2 and #4. And #2 is so vague and conventional that I have my doubts about that too.¹

But I'll take it anyway. Here's my top five:

• Students can demonstrate mastery of basic reading, writing, and arithmetic—especially reading.
• Students are prepared for college, a job, or a career.
• Students are regularly tested to measure mastery of subject areas.
• Students develop the ability to routinely do work they don't necessarily want to do—without going nuts or becoming unemployed and homeless.
• Students develop the ability to think critically and ask appropriate questions.

What about you?

¹And call me a cynic, but I'd say the actual behavior of most Americans puts the lie to any suggestion that they really value critical thinking.

Here's an incarceration chart from my buddy Rick Nevin:

It looks like incarceration rates went down in both 2020 and 2021, and indeed they did. Between 2019 and 2021 the prison incarceration rate for ages 18-19 declined from 1.07% to 0.84% to 0.55%. For the entire age cohort of 18-24 year-olds, prison incarceration rates went down from 4.0% to 3.2% to 2.7%.

The incarceration rate for ages 18-24, including both jail and prisons, also went down between 2020 and 2021—from 6.5% to 6.2%.¹

Rick has more data here. Note that he and I are showing different things. He focuses mostly on male crime and shows it over the long term. My stats are for everyone and focus just on 2020 and 2021, since those are the years when crime supposedly exploded among the young.

But it didn't. The murder rate exploded among the young, and that's obviously a problem. But when it comes to overall violent and property crime, the incarceration data is yet another data point indicating that it continued to go down.

POSTSCRIPT: Stats for the prison population are available at the BJS site for 2019, 2020, and 2021. Stats for the jail population in 2020 and 2021 are available here. Check my arithmetic!

¹I don't have a figure for 2019-2020 because jail rates by age are inexplicably not available before 2020.

You've probably heard that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has banned the new AP African American test because it is "inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value." No further explanation or detail was provided, so nobody knows precisely what this means.

However, if you're curious about which sections of the test probably offend DeSantis, here's a very short summary of several sections from Unit 4 of the class curriculum:

I don't know much about these subjects, nor am I familiar with most of the authors who are recommended reading. However, other people do, and this is likely the battleground they'll be fighting on.

Apparently Britain's National Health Service is having problems these days. What's the solution? More privatization? More accountability?  More doctors from overseas?

I don't want to pretend that the NHS's problems aren't complex. But at least one of them is pretty simple. Consider this chart from a couple of years ago:

This is plain enough. In 1997 Tony Blair and his Labour government took power and increased NHS funding growth to 6% per year (in real terms). In 2009, Labour lost power and Conservatives slashed NHS funding, approving real growth in its budget that averaged about 1.5% per year.

Remember those dates: 1997 and 2009. Now let's look at a chart showing public satisfaction with the NHS:

The bright red line indicates patients who are very or quite satisfied with the NHS. This number started to go up around 1997, peaked around 2010, and has been going down ever since then.

(It's gone down even further since 2018, but that's largely due to COVID-19 and a change in survey methodology. It's unfair to include that, so this chart stops at 2018.)

This shows a pretty simple picture: When Conservatives slashed spending growth from 6% to ~1.5%, service levels dropped and patient satisfaction went down. In absolute terms, that growth rate of 1.5% from 2009-18 compares to a real growth rate of about 3% for Medicare in the US. By any measure, the NHS is pretty starved for funds.

You can usually get away with this for a while, but eventually it all catches up to you. In Britain, "eventually" is now.

Any other questions?

Here are average SAT scores since 1980:

These scores have been adjusted for a couple of renorming and recentering changes since 1980, so they're comparable from year to year. The exception is 2017, when a scoring change was made that can't be adjusted for. Scores from 2017-2022 are presented with no adjustments.

It's an odd thing: SAT scores were generally up all the way through 2005 (a little bit for verbal, a lot for math), when they suddenly started to drop. This drop affected both verbal and math scores and both male and female students by similar amounts.

So what happened in 2005?

By popular request I have searched for a simple comment editing plug-in. I found one called Simple Comment Editing Plug-In, which sounds like just the thing.

Anyway, I installed it, so now you can allegedly edit your comments within ten minutes of posting them. Give it a whirl and let me know if it works.

UPDATE: I guess the limit is actually five minutes. Write fast!

Here is Charlie watching the second round of the Australian Open. He was, of course, rooting for the unseeded young American Jenson Brooksby to beat the jötunn of Norway, Casper Ruud. Which he did. Mainly, though, Charlie just liked watching the little pong thingie that kept going back and forth across the screen.

Sami Scheetz, a state representative in Iowa, tweets today about a bill introduced by state Republicans that restricts the kinds of food that can be purchased with SNAP (food stamps):

It's obvious that this is intended to make low-income workers on SNAP even more miserable than they already are. But there's more. As the list of what's allowed and what's not gets longer and longer, it becomes more and more of a hassle for supermarkets and corner stores to keep track of it. Some will decide it's not worth the bother and just stop accepting SNAP.

So SNAP will be harder to use and will restrict you to a diet not dissimilar from that of your average American prison.

This single tweet encapsulates about 90% of why I'm not a Republican. They're just so goddam meanspirited.

Which state has suffered the worst change in its economy over the past 12 months? Here are the bottom 20 in job openings and layoffs:

Oddly, there are only five states that are on both lists (Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, Indiana, and Utah). You'd think there would be overlap, wouldn't you?