Four Random Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. Did you know that heavily-laden rafts travel down rivers faster than light ones? The reason might surprise you.

2. I keep a "computing hell" log in case I ever have to use Windows on a regular basis, and might have already reaped the reward of not having my laptop effectively bricked by a bad update. (A developer discusses what went wrong here.)

On a more positive note, I like a lot of these usability-enhancing registry tweaks for Windows 11 I ran into this morning.

3. Most of us enjoy the dream of mankind colonizing other planets, but almost as many would dismiss the idea of colonizing Mercury out of hand.

While I am not on board with his rationale for doing so, I think Jim Shifflett makes an intriguing case for the first planet being most feasible with current technology:

The first thought about Mercury is that it would have very high temperatures and no water, because the equatorial surface temperature ranges between -183^oC and 427^oC as the planet rotates. But an analysis of temperature vs. latitude and depth shows that the temperature is nearly constant at room temperature (22+/-1^oC) in underground rings circling the planet's poles, and deeper than .7 meter below the surface. Similar results are found using numerical techniques in an Icarus paper, Vol. 141, 179-193 (1999). [links omitted]

And with the heat problem out of the way, Shifflett also argues that there are sufficient water deposits nearby to enable self-sustaining underground colonies.

Bonus Time: We get our first family cat this weekend! Thanks to the men responsible for every kid in this generation named Aaron being called A-A-Ron, Mrs. Van Horn has had to shoot down naming him Jamar. (See cat around the two minute mark.)

4. During the covid pandemic, the commentary I found the most useful on the subject, apart from that of Amesh Adalja, was that of Derek Lowe, whose normal focus is drug discovery, but who writes entertaining material about many other related matters.

I rather enjoyed his post to the effect that he was backing down from writing so much about covid.

Aside from being eager for his writing on other subjects, I enjoyed his thoughts on the anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy nuts who made such pests of themselves:

So I think that the hypothesis advanced in the paper has not panned out. Most medical hypotheses don't, even ones that are backed up by far more reasoning and far more data than this one. It's not a crazy paper, but it's not irrefutable either, not by a long shot. Over the last 30 years, I have learned that even my best ideas get brushed aside by real-world data, and I don't take it personally. But this argument will not be persuasive to someone who is worried about the idea of getting a coronavirus vaccination in general. They either will not accept this response, or will wave it aside and move on to the next objection: "Well, what about this? Can we be sure that this other thing won't happen?" It never stops. [bold added]

Lowe is himself fond of saying you can't use reason to argue someone out of a position that they did not arrive at by reason. And I am fond of saying sometimes it helps just knowing that one isn't alone in one's annoyance with irrationality.

-- CAV