Weather here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters has been actually rather pleasant for a change. Still hot enough that we have to run the AC but no where near as bad as it was. We’re still in a nasty drought here, though. Some rain has gone through but almost all of it has missed us for whatever reason. We’ve only had about 1 inch of rain over the last two months.
August is almost over as I write this, and that means it’s harvesting and processing season here.
Hmmm, salsa!
We promised ourselves in spring that we were only going to put in three tomato plants. Yeah, well… that didn’t last long. We had several volunteers pop up in various places and MrsGF didn’t have the heart to pull them so we ended up with eight plants, and all of them are loaded with fruit. Two or three days ago MrsGF did about six quarts of tomato soup and today it was salsa. So far we’ve been keeping up but they are just starting to come ripe so we’re going to be deluged with tomatoes here pretty soon. This is not a bad thing, of course. We’d rather have too many than not enough. If they start coming in faster than we can process and can them we just freeze them until we have more time.
One thing we’ve always had good luck with here is peppers. Dear lord, the peppers we got out there this year! We put in more banana peppers than bell peppers this year because we like the flavor better. We’ve been harvesting both varieties for two weeks or more and they’re still going strong. They are easy to deal with. We just wash them, remove the seed pods and then dice them up and freeze them for later use.
We didn’t plant sunflowers this year but we got some anyway. Probably from seeds from the feeder that were dropped by birds. I’m not sure why we didn’t plant any because we both love them and once the flowers fade away we get an additional show when the goldfinches find they have free lunch out there.
And then there’s that one up there. For whatever reason the marigolds have been spectacular this year. Just look at that color! The photo doesn’t do it justice. It’s so bright it almost glows in the dark.
On the telescope front, we finally had a relatively clear night and I was able to get the scope out for an hour or so and got this image.
NGC 7000
As the text says, that’s NGC 7000, the North American nebula. If you sort of squint and tilt your head it sort of kinda looks like the North American continent. According to the most recent data I can find it’s about 2,590 light years away from Earth.
I’m still enormously pleased with that little Seestar S30 Pro and the results it gets here in the poor conditions I have in town.
As I look back over the year, 2026 started out pretty crappy. Right after Christmas I ended up in the ER with a severe case of the flu. As soon as I recovered from the flu I came down with Covid and that laid me up through most of February. Then in May I injured my hip somehow and it wasn’t until mid July or so that I was back to normal.
At the end of July I took the bike in to get new tires. I’m astonished they lasted as long as they did. There were around 1,800 miles on them. While it was in the shop they went through the bike, adjusted the shifters, checked the brakes, did a firmware update on the bike’s computer, and I was finally back on the road again. I’d been inactive for so long that it took a while to back up to my normal level of activity. It wasn’t until this past week that I was comfortably back to doing 10 – 15 mile rides on a daily basis.
Let’s see… Oh, yeah, we have to get some major electrical work done on the house. Just about everything from the point where the electric wires attach to the house from the pole up through and including the meter, meter socket and the main breaker panel need to be replaced. The electrician was here early this morning to look things over. We’ll get a formal estimate in a few days but off the top of his head he figured it was going to be in the $5,000 – $7,000 range, which was actually quite a bit less than what I’d thought it would be. I told him to go ahead and get the ball rolling so he’s going to pull the necessary permits from the town and will get me on the schedule. Probably in about 3 – 4 weeks.
With most of the state being under moderate to severe drought conditions we’ve been watering the gardens almost every day for weeks now. Officially our location is listed as being under mild drought conditions. But that doesn’t take into account the fact that the rains we did see have been extremely localized. I just checked my rainfall monitor and we haven’t had any rain here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters while just a couple of miles away they got over an inch of rain the other day. Judging from the way the soil looks here, I’d classify the area here in this locality as being under severe drought conditions.
And no rain means empty rain barrels. So we’ve had to resort to using town water for the gardens and I’m sure I am not going to like our quarterly water bill when it comes in.
Anyway life goes on, as they say. And so does the garden. Despite the dry conditions things have been going pretty good. Mostly.
We’ve pulled all of the onions. They were way, way ahead of normal for whatever reason. We put in a mix of yellow, white and red onions. They generally store pretty well. We pull them, cut off the tops about 2 inches from the bulb, then let them “cure” for about 2 weeks or so before putting them in net bags and hanging them from the ceiling in the basement for long term storage.
Yes, onions are fairly cheap to buy in the store but it’s the flavor I’m interested in. Commercially grown onions just don’t taste good to me. The commercial varieties we see are too mild, too sweet. You shouldn’t be able to bite into an onion like an apple, for heaven’s sake. A good onion should bite back, hard, so to speak. And I only get that sharp, pungent real onion flavor and aroma from the home grown varieties.
The peppers are doing quite well this year. We put in a nice, slightly spicy banana pepper mostly this year, with a few regular bell peppers. They’ve both been producing beautifully with excellent quality fruits in both varieties. The ones we don’t eat fresh either get diced up and frozen for future use or get canned as pickled peppers. MrsGF tried a new recipe this year for a kind of refrigerator pickled pepper as an experiment and we took a pint of them along to a family event and they were a huge hit. People loved them on burgers or even just eating right out of the jar. So that’s going to be a keeper.
We’re going to start harvesting celery this week as well, I think. That’s been doing amazingly well this year. I mean just look at that stuff over there. Very intense, lush flavor. Again I know celery in the store isn’t that expensive, but the commercial varieties seem, at least to me, almost completely flavorless. I think people forget that celery isn’t just a vegetable, it was originally considered an herb and was grown for the flavor it added. This stuff will knock your socks off. I got in the habit of snipping off a stalk and munching on it when I’m out mowing the lawn.
Yes, those are #10 cans around the base of the plants. We’ve always grown it this way. The cans protect the plants when they’re small and first transplanted into the beds not just from wind and from early frost, but also give them some protection from the rabbits we have. We just leave the cans in place until the end of the growing season and then pull them out and use them the next year.
The beets are all done with. Mrs GF just pulled those last few you see in the left side of that bed over there this morning and is processing them as I write this. Some get par-boiled, so to speak, and frozen for use later. Most though end up as pickled beets that we like either as a main vegetable with a meal or just as a snack. There’s also a late crop of lettuce left in that bed. We’ll be using that this week for salads and then we’ll have that bed cleaned out.
The only issue we’ve had this year is blossom end rot on the tomatoes. That’s usually caused by a calcium deficiency I’m told. We’ve been using a calcium supplement but apparently not enough of it? Maybe? It’s very frustrating to see what looks like a nice tomato starting to turn ripe and go to check it and finding the bottom of it is rotted away. Grrr…
Sidenote: I’m making chili for supper tonight, and everything in that pot is stuff we grew ourselves <grin>. Canned tomatoes from last year, MrsGf’s award winning chili sauce, our home grown garlic, onions, celery and peppers. Only thing that we didn’t grow ourselves is the ground beef from our local butcher who sources his meat from local farmers. Ooo, I wish you could smell this stuff simmering!
Astronomy stuff:
I finally got an opportunity to get the Seestar telescope out two nights ago! That was the first time in weeks that we’d had relatively clear skies at night.
That’s an object called IC-1318A, part of the Butterfly Nebula. I did some post processing on this image to darken the sky a bit to improve the contrast. That’s mostly a cloud of ionized hydrogen gas called an emissions nebula. Intense ultraviolet radiation from nearby young, hot stars causes the gas to glow with that reddish color. Normally this is a very faint object that would require a rather large aperture telescope and very dark skies to see. It’s about 4,000 – 4,900 light years away from us. That I can get an image this good of this nebula with a little $500 automated telescope sitting in the driveway is still a bit astonishing to me.
Then there is this…
My sister in law has been remodeling her house and brought this out and set it up in the dining room. This piece is a bit melancholy for me. Let me explain. My wife’s sister married my best friend. John passed away four years ago today of a sudden heart attack. This piece has deep family connections in more ways than one. I made this as an anniversary gift for them many years ago. It was the first large piece of furniture I ever made. On top of that, it was made from white ash boards that were harvested on my wife’s family farm that had sat up in the barn for almost a hundred years from trees that were taken down during an ice storm. So seeing this cabinet out in the dining room on the anniversary of his passing was a kind of heart wrenching moment for me as it brought back many memories.
Anyway, that’s it for now! One of these days I’ll talk about the new Bambu Labs 3D printer in detail.
I had a chance to get outside with the SeeStar last night shortly after dark and got some surprisingly good images. Here are three.
M81, also called Bode’s Nebula or Bode’s Galaxy, on the left, with M82 on the right.
That’s M81 up there, that fuzzy blob just left of center. The more slender cigar shaped blob to the right of center is M82, another galaxy. The long streak you see to the right of M82 is from a satellite that streaked across the frame while the scope was making the image.
But a bit about the “M” designation first. It is the abbreviation of the name Messier, an 18th century astronomer from France. He published an astronomical catalog of about 110 objects that are now known as Messier objects, abbreviated as just M. Messier’s obsession was comets. He was fascinated by these fuzzy, blob like “visitors” and hunted for them whenever he had the chance. But he kept finding a lot of things that, with his primitive observing equipment of the time, looked like fuzzy blobs just like comets, but weren’t. Unlike comets, these objects did not appear to move, therefore they weren’t comets. So he started to chart these comet-like objects so he and other astronomers wouldn’t waste their time thinking these things were comets. The final catalog he published had 103 such objects listed, and eventually researchers discovered he’d found several more so now we have some 110 Messier objects. The objects in the catalog were not ones he studied scientifically, he thought they were annoyances, really.
The Messier object catalog and the “M” designation of these objects is still used even by scientists today because they are some of the brightest and most easily found deep space objects out there, and they are among the most popular targets for amateur astronomers.
Messier had absolutely no idea that when he was looking at M81 he was looking at a massive galaxy about 12 million light years away. In fact M81 and M82 are actually part of a whole group of galaxies known collectively as the M81 group.
M81 is a large, grand spiral type galaxy and is the home to a massive central black hole. It is relatively bright at my location this time of year and it is almost directly overhead, making it an ideal target at my extremely light polluted home.
It is called Bode’s galaxy (or sometimes Bode’s Nebula) because it was first discovered in 1794 by an astronomer named Johann Bode, not Messier, and was later included by Messier in his catalog.
If you can see M81, you can almost certainly spot M82 as well right away. It is also about 12 million light years from us and is part of the same group of galaxies. M82 is seen edge on and is sometimes called the Cigar galaxy. It is an extremely interesting one too because it is what astronomers call a starburst galaxy. It is generating new stars at a rate that’s 10 times that of the Milky Way. It is believed that the reason why is that M82 had a close encounter with M81 in the past, and gas it sucked up from M81 along with the gravitational disturbances the encounter caused are responsible for this.
Both M81 and M82 are relatively easy to see. A decent pair of binoculars will let you see at least a couple of small, fuzzy blobs at a dark site. A good telescope will show them in much more detail, of course.
Now we come to M97
M97, the Owl Nebula
That’s M97, also called the Owl Nebula. Not a very impressive image, I know, but that I could get an image of it at all from this location is a bit astonishing.
M97 is an entirely different kind of object. It’s a planetary nebula about 2,000 light years away. It’s called the Owl Nebula because some people who observe it under high magnification and large telescopes claim that it looks like it has two dark “eyes”. Personally I think they knocked back a few too many Schlitz (real astronomers drink Schlitz, of course. Or Grain Belt. But now that Schlitz is shut down they’re going to be stuck with Grain Belt.) before they started observing but, there you go.
That I was able to get an image this good with just a 4 minute exposure with this tiny telescope astonished me, frankly. When I computer enhance the images I can even see the two dark “eyes”.
The last object I imaged is M57, the Ring Nebula.
M57 the Ring Nebula
This is another planetary nebula and I was amazed the image turned out at all because the scope was aimed just off to one side of a street light that really should have ruined the image completely. It’s about 2,000 light years from Earth and while relatively bright and easy to see in even a fairly small scope, trying to get an image of it with the conditions I have here was a bit astonishing.
I am extremely pleased with the Seestar so far. After working with the 11″ Celestron for so long, getting results like this from a scope not much bigger than a hard cover book seems almost like magic to me. If I’m getting results this good from my terribly light polluted location here, what will the results be like when I get it out to a relatively dark site like my sister in law’s farm? I can’t wait to try that.
Very first photo with the Seestar s30 Pro telescope taken literally 15 minutes after unboxing the scope and setting it up on the driveway in the backyard, using the included solar filter. Showing the currently visible sunspot groups.
That’s the ‘scope itself over there in the photo on the left charging up on the kitchen table. Yes it’s tiny, about the size of a thick hard cover book, and weighs about the same.
I have to admit that I’m a bit in awe of this little beast. A telescope this small, this cheap, with that small of an aperture, should not be this good.
You can be darn sure you’re going to be seeing more images from this thing in the near future.
Yes, it’s iris time again. If you’ve been following this blog for a while you must know by now that I absolutely love irises. We have a whole garden devoted almost excolusively to irises. And they’re just coming into full flower now. Here are a few photos from earlier today.
And for no reason at all, here’s a silly cat image I stole borrowed from Pete over at https://beetleypete.com/ If you enjoy posts from a retired English gentleman who occasionally puts up very silly images, posts some delightful fiction and chats about life in general in the small town of Beetley, in Norfolk, go check it out. He is a lovely, gentle soul, with a wry sense of humor.
Other stuff:
Meanwhile I’ve been working on this…
It is, heaven help me, a cat riding a T-Rex through the deserts of Utah. Thats going to be engraved on a 37cm X 25cm panel inlaid into a gift box MrsGF is making. Sometimes the stuff I come up with when I sit down with Photoshop makes me wonder what’s wrong with my brain. But never mind.
BTW: If any of you out there would be interested in that image up there let me know and I could make it available for downloading here. I think. Maybe. It would be as a standard .PNG file that would be suitable for importing into a laser engraver. If you’re interested let me know at theoldgrouch@grouchyfarmer.com. I never really intended to set this up to download files but if people are interested in stuff like this I’d probably set up a separate page here with just a listing of downloadable files for laser cutting/engraving.
If you have comments or questions you can reach me at that email address as well.
Weather
The weather has been, well, odd, to say the least. Over in Two Rivers about 20 or s0 miles from here where friends of ours live, they had an intense and highly localized storm that leveled half the trees in the city the other day. Parts of the town were without power for three days. They estimate they had straight line winds up to 80 mph. Meanwhile just a few miles away they got nothing but some rain.
Temperatures have been highly erratic here. One day we have a high in the 50s, the next it can be well over 80. Yesterday it hit 92 here. Now it’s getting cooler and we might struggle to hit 65 by the end of the week. They were predicting thunderstorms last night but those fizzled out before they even really got started. We got about a tenth of inch of rain and that was it.
It’s very, very dry out there. We’re going to have to start watering the gardens already tomorrow.
Weather patterns are changing drastically all around the world. I have friends and family scattered around the globe and what I hear from them is often downright frightening. In India where my niece’s husband’s family is from, this May has been one of the warmest on record with temperatures pushing 113F in Delhi. One of my best friends lives in Barcelona half the year and they’re seeing temperatures pushing up to 100F or beyond. Even in the UK temperatures have been pushing up into the 90s.
Farming
With a name like grouchyfarmer I suppose I should talk about the ag industry at least briefly. Even though I’ve wandered far away from farming long ago and have dabbled in everything from writing to electronics to arts and crafts, I’m still a farmer at heart and what I see going on out there in the ag world is heartbreaking. Especially since all of the problems farmers are having right now are due entirely to decisions being made by power mad, greedy politicians who only care about enriching themselves and clinging desperately to their little bits of power and influence.
Farm bankruptcy rates are up by 50% or more in the last year, and look like they’re going to get even worse as time goes on.
Diesel, the fuel farmers use in their equipment, has gone up more than 60%, from about $3.47 to $5.60. Even as high as $7.50 in some places like California.
Fertilizer prices have spiked up 61% as well, and exactly at the wrong time when planting season is here and young plants need to be fertilized to get strong growth.
Meanwhile prices farmers get for two of their primary crops, corn and soybeans, have plummeted to the point where it looks like most farmers around here aren’t even going to be able to break even.
Dairy farmers are doing a bit better, but they have problems too. I know some farmers around here who are working 18 hour days because all of their hired help basically packed up and fled, even if they were in the country legally. Word is out that if you’re Hispanic, even if you’re in the country legally, you’re going to be swept up, detained for weeks if not months, and probably end up deported even if you have a green card. We used to have a fairly large number of Hispanic families here in town. Wonderful people who were hard working, honest, friendly and becoming part of the community. They’re all gone. All of them.
It’s going to be a hard year for farmers around here. A very hard year. And the tragic part of it is that this is 100% the fault of that bunch of sniveling, greedy, power mad politicians in DC. And I mean both political parties are at fault here. Democrats and Republicans both are more concerned with maintaining their little bits of power, trying to suck up ever more money from corporations and oligarchs through this system of legalized bribery we call a campaign financing system, that they’ve entire forgotten that they are supposed to be the representatives of the people in their home districts.
Okay, rant over. I swore I was not going to get political here in this blog and for the most part I’ve kept that promise. But when I see the sheer crap that is going on in Washington and here in Madison in the state legislature… Never mind. Enough.
Astronomy
It’s been so long since I talked about it here that you’ve probably forgotten that I’m also an amateur astronomer. That’s one of my telescopes down there, my 11″ Celestron.
I’ve reached a point in my life where I just have too many interests and hobbies and I’ve started to do a bit of triage. I’ve pushed aside some things like tinkering with electronics and a few other things to have more time to devote to the things I enjoy the most. So I’m able to spend more time with photography, art, the whole engraving thing and yes, astronomy.
My interests have changed a bit over the years. I’ve become more interested in astrophotography than in direct visual observation, especially photography of deep sky objects. The Celestron is a fantastic telescope but there are “issues”. It’s size and weight are one. That sucker is big and it is heavy. The optical tube assembly weighs in at around 60+ pounds and I’m not exactly a spring chicken any more. Trying to maneuver that thing up and down the stairs, getting it set up on its mount, etc, well I’m just not physically capable of wrestling with that thing without risking dropping $5,000 telescop down the back stairs. So it’s gone to live with my eldest son who is planning on using it as the core for a fixed observatory set up in his back garden with a small building with a roll off roof, concrete pier, power, internet, etc.
Meanwhile I have a new telescope on order that should be here by June 7, they tell me.
And as you can see, it is something entirely different from the Celestron. It doesn’t even look like a telescope to be honest. For one thing it is exclusively an astrograph telescope, it does photography only. It doesn’t permit visual observation at all. In fact I don’t even have to be near it to operate it. It is controlled by a tablet computer or app on a cell phone via WiFi or bluetooth so I no longer have to endure the clouds of mosquitoes that we get around here. Just set it up after dark, turn it on, and then sit in my nice, air conditioned house controlling it entirely by computer from the kitchen table. Or if I take it out to my sister in law’s farm to get away from the light pollution, from inside of my car.
I admit that I’m taking a bit of a chance here. I find it hard to believe that a scope this small and this cheap can get the results I see in the reviews of this thing. Supposedly this thing can get good images of even difficult deep sky objects like the Horse Head nebula in just a few minutes, even in relatively poor conditions. And it’s only about $600 compared to around $5,000 for something like my Celestron. It sounds too good to be true.
After I’ve had a chance to get it set up and have figured out how to use it, I’ll talk about it more.
Anyway, that’s it for now. Time for me to get out of here!
I don’t physically print a lot of the images I take but this is one that I think I’m going to run through the big photo printer and hang up somewhere.
I’d just got back from an early morning bike ride, about, oh, 6:30 or 7 AM, and the sun was just hitting the gardens in the backyard when I snapped this one with the iPhone. The colors were so intense it looked like it was glowing. I absolutely love those ‘dinner plate’ dahlias. It’s always worth taking a look for things on sale after the spring planting rush is over. I picked these up for half the price they were at the start of the spring season.
It’s thistle season!These were taken early in the morning as well, probably around 6:30 – 7 AM when I was out on the backroads with the bike. For whatever reason I’ve turned into one of those hated ‘morning people’ who is up before dawn. Not sure what happened there. For almost 20 years I worked 2nd shift, going to bed about 1 AM and not getting up until 8 or 9, and I liked it that way. I hated getting up early in the morning. But as soon as I retired, here I am, up at 5 in the morning. Sheesh…
When I was farming, thistles were a noxious weed that needed to be controlled. Now I think they’re one of the prettiest looking plants we have. Just look at those flowers. The structure, the color, everything about them is just stunning.
Then there are these goofy things – MrsGF cleaned out the flower beds along the south side of the garage the other week, taking almost everything out, and a few days later we noticed what looked like small asparagus stalks poking up through the soil. The weirdest looking things, just slender stalks with a bulbous end and the nastiest color you could think of. Sort of looked like zombie asparagus. Then we remembered these things had popped up a few years ago and surprised the heck out of us then. We didn’t plant these and we have no idea where they came from, but holy cow the flowers are stunning!
People sometimes ask us why we have huge sunflowers growing along the side of the house. Here’s why –
Goldfinches absolutely love these things and they swarm them as the flowers begin to fade and the seeds begin to develop. They are an absolute riot to watch, squabbling and leaping around, flitting around, hanging from the plants upside down like little acrobats. They don’t seem to notice that we’re standing on the other side of the window watching them. We’ll have a dozen or more of the little goofs working over the flowers at one time this time of year.
This is the time of year when all the work we put in on the gardens really begins to pay off. The bell peppers are beautiful this year. We have ’em tucked into a corner facing the south and west where the garage is built onto the house and they love it there. It’s warm and sunny and as long as we remember to keep them well watered they (and the wax beans planted near them) have been thriving. We go through a lot of sweet bell peppers around here. Everyone loves them. Most will end up diced and frozen, but we eat a lot of them fresh in salads, ingredients in sauces, stir fry, etc.
Hi there. I’m a goat.I’m not a goat.
Youngest Son and I had nothing else to do Saturday so we went to the Manitowoc county fair. Both of us don’t care about rides or that stuff, we’re more interested in A) weird food, and B) the exhibits. I get ridiculous sense of satisfaction to see how much better my produce and flowers look than the prize winners do. Petty of me, true, but it’s still satisfying.
Anyway, goats have become a big thing around here in the last ten or fifteen years. You almost never would see goats around here before then. Now there are more goat exhibitors than than sheep and pigs. I have to admit they’re fun. They’re charming and curious and don’t seem afraid of anything, and they all seem to have this ridiculous, goofy attitude about them.
For a while llamas and then alpacas were “the next big thing” that were going to make people tons of money. They didn’t, of course. None of these fads ever pan out. We’ve gone through bison, emu, llamas, alpacas and elk as “the next big thing” since, oh, the 1980s. (Emus are nasty. Think of a giant chicken, taller than you are, with a bad attitude. An emu would gleefully kill you and dance on your corpse if it thought it could get away with it.) There are still people in some parts of the state who think emus are going to be financially successful if only they could get a foot in the door with their emu products. You’ll still find gas stations and farmers markets where people are trying to sell emu jerky (shudder), emu oil which is useful for – well, hell, I don’t know what the hell emu oil is good for. Lubricating emus? Emu meat (tastes like chicken?) and I don’t know what all else.
Eldest son and his girlfriend took a short vacation way up along Lake Superior where the air is clear and there are no lights, and asked if they could take the big 11″ Celestron telescope along. I was glad to let them have it. The poor thing has been sitting under its cover in the closet for an embarrassingly long time. I love the scope but the thing is huge and heavy (the tube assembly weighs around 60 lbs). It’s almost impossible for me to lug it up and down the stairs and maneuver it through the doors to get it outside. And when I do get it outside the air quality here has gotten so bad and we now have so much light pollution from streetlights, houses and businesses that it hardly pays to even bother taking it out at all.
Anyway he sent me a text message telling me the scope has been working very well and he sent along the photo above. Very glad they like it. I hated seeing it sit unused. I was thinking of donating it to the school district I used to work at for their new STEM center. That’s what I did with my big camera drone when I got tired of playing with it. If ES is having fun with it, he’s more than welcome to keep it. Otherwise I may donate it to the science program at the high school.
That heading up there is not a typo. Monsanto ceased to exist as of June 7 when the merger with ag giant Bayer was completed. The name “Monsanto” will be retired completely within a few months, the company will no longer exist, and all of its business will be conducted under the Bayer name. The complete acquisition will take a few months longer. Bayer still has to sell off some of its business parts to satisfy the DOJ’s requirements for approval of the acquisition, but it’s pretty much a done deal.
If you don’t find these mergers concerning, well, you should. As the saying goes, “the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history”. The claim that these “mega-mergers” improve the efficiency of a company, reduce prices to consumers, etc., is pure nonsense. There were valid reasons for the rise of the “trust busters” in the late 19th and early 20th century as the abuses of the monopolies became so great and so obvious that not even their wealth and influence could prevent the outrage that caused the development of the anti-monopoly laws, lawsuits and legal actions that broke many of them up back then.
Trade Wars
Oh brother… I could go on and on about this nonsense. I won’t. I try to stay away from politics here because, well, why bother? You get flooded with enough of that nonsense in other forums. However, I find it more than a little ironic to have you-know-who here in Wisconsin celebrating giving away more than $4 billion in taxpayer money to a Chinese company to lure it to Wisconsin while at the same time engaging in never ending tweet-storms about unfair trade practices by that country.
Oh, I should add that the company quietly announced that, to paraphrase them, “oh, by the way, the factory we’re going to put up is going to be a fraction of the size we said it would, isn’t going to make the product we said it was going to make, and we’re only going to hire a few hundred people not the 13,000 we said, but that the big factory will be put up “real soon”. Maybe.”
What remains to be seen is where FoxCon is going to find any employees. The unemployment rate in the state is under 4%, and in some parts of the state it’s under 3%. Employers have tried hiring bonuses, improving benefits, even upping starting wages. Several companies here have now even dropped the high school diploma requirement.
How Hot Is It?
In a word, very. It hit 97 F here yesterday (Friday), with very high humidity. Heat index was up around 107 the weather people said. It’s supposed to be even worse today with a heat index pushing 110. It was already 83 when I got up at 5:30 this morning. Basically no one goes outside in this weather unless they absolutely have to.
I remember what it was like milking cows in this kind of weather. Dear lord, it was bad. The cows were miserable, we were miserable, the cats were miserable, the dog was miserable…
I don’t know what in the world made me think taking this photo was a good idea. MrsGF makes me wear the dopey vest. Make it easier for the police to find my body when I get hit by a truck, I guess.
While I looked at the poor bike sitting there in the garage behind the car, and was momentarily tempted, not even I am crazy enough to go out on the back roads and trails on a bicycle in this kind of weather.
I’ve become addicted to biking, though. Whenever the weather is even close to being decent I want to get out and put at least a few miles on. Being addicted to biking isn’t a bad thing, of course. It’s healthy, fun, relaxing.
But definitely not when it’s this hot and humid.
Amateur Radio Stuff
Okay, I have to admit it, I’m a bit bored with the FT8 mode. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not agreeing with the curmudgeons who think FT8 is ruining amateur radio. FT8 is just one of a long line of technologies that was going to “destroy amateur radio” according to the GOBs (good ole boys). If you get on some of the amateur radio forums like QRZ and listen to some of these people ranting, you’d think FT8 was the harbinger of the apocalypse, for heaven’s sake.
But dam, FT8 does work if you want to make contacts under bad conditions and with less that ideal equipment.
Speaking of the QRZ website, I don’t know what’s wrong with some of the people who stalk the forums. And I do not use the term “stalk” lightly. That’s what they seem to do. They haunt the forums just waiting to pounce on anyone they think they can get away with insulting. Newcomers to the hobby are the natural prey of these jackasses. The most innocuous question will result in them pouncing on them without mercy with snide remarks, sarcasm, insults, accusations of them not knowing what they’re doing.
It’s a shame, really. QRZ has some great resources and there are a lot of people in the forums who are genuinely willing to help when you run into problems or are looking for information. But this handful of jackasses really ruin things. The moderators really need to step up and shut this kind of crap down. Right now QRZ has become so toxic because of some of these people that I have started to tell newcomers to avoid it completely and when my current subscription runs out next year I might not renew it.
Astronomy Stuff
my 11 inch Celestron set up in the driveway. I must confess I don’t use it very often because the thing is almost impossible for one person to set up. Just the optical tube goes about 70 pounds.
Newcomers to this blog or whatever it is may not know I’m also an amateur astronomer because I haven’t talked about that in a long time here. I have two telescopes, the big 11 inch Celestron shown here, and a 3 inch Meade. I’ve been fascinated with astronomy since I was a kid. But as much as I love astronomy, there are aspects of it that I find more than a little tiresome, the main one being so-called scientists who claim life is everywhere out there.
It seems NASA spokespersons and even a lot of professional astronomers have gone right off the deep end with this. Mars could have life. Or may have had life billions of years ago. Moons of Jupiter and Saturn could have life. Hell, according to some of these people, Pluto could have life because they think there may be liquid water under the crust. Venus, which is as toxic a place as you can imagine with temperatures of 700+ degrees and sulfuric acid rain could have life, they tell us. And…
well, it’s all BS. I’m sorry, it just is.
As the Fermi paradox points out, if life out there is as common as some people claim, where the heck is it? Fermi pointed out that, given the number of stars in the galaxy and the age of the universe, if there was any intelligent life out there, there should be some kind of evidence that it exists that should be obvious to us by now. So where is it?
Despite the PR fluff pieces coming out of NASA and from astronomers who really should know better, there is no evidence of life anywhere outside of the Earth. The SETI project has turned up nothing but a few questionable signals that could be from natural sources or from man made sources. The Mars rovers have turned up some interesting results, yes, but any sign of actual life either now or in the past? No. A lot has been made of the presence of methane on Mars and they’re attempting to link that to some kind of life. But there are other, far more likely explanations for the presence of methane.
We have no evidence at all that there is life out there. None. All we have is speculation, theory, beliefs, claims, and no actual evidence.
A study by Oxford scientists Sandberg, Drexler and Ord that came out a short time ago, examined the Fermi paradox and the Drake equation and other factors with an unbiased eye and, well, the results aren’t good for the proponents of life being common. They found huge margins for error in the calculations and that the “evidence” presented to support wide spread life in the universe is little more than wishful thinking.
The Drake equation is pretty much worthless. The parameters assigned to the equation are, well, flat out guesses. No one knows for sure. The parameters are often wildly optimistic, failing to take into account known facts.
If you look at the actual facts, the results are less optimistic. As the authors said in their report, “When we take account of realistic uncertainty, replacing point estimates by probability distributions that reflect current scientific understanding, we find no reason to be highly confident that the galaxy (or observable universe) contains other civilizations.”
“When we update this prior in light of the Fermi observation, we find a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe.
“‘Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable.”
The world is coming to an end again. This time it’s going to end on Sept. 23 when a great whopping planet called Nibiru is going to smack us.
What? You didn’t know? Oh, dear. Well, if you have plans for anything after Sept 22 you might want to reconsider.
We know this because a “christian numerologist”, whatever the heck that is, has figured it out from a Bible verse that says– well, it says absolutely nothing about planets hitting us or anything else, really. That, along with lots and lots of made up numbers, tells him that we’re going to get smacked by a giant planet called Nibiru on the 23rd. And for whatever reason some tabloid media outlets have picked up on it and have plastered it all over the place.
There is no planet “Nibiru”, of course. Nor is a planet going to hit us any time soon. If there was we’d have seen it coming by now. In fact, we’d have seen it coming years ago. And there’s no point in claiming there is some kind of conspiracy by NASA and astronomers to keep the info secret because there are tens of thousands of amateur astronomers like me out here, and we’d have spotted it ages ago and would have gleefully been plastering our images of it all over the place. We love things like planets getting hammered by really big rocks and comets, stars blowing up. solar systems being eaten by black holes, galaxies colliding and stuff like that. So if there was a planet about to smack the Earth, we’d have been all over that.
This is about the fifth or sixth “end of the world” that we’ve had in the last couple of decades that I can remember. There was the Y2K nonsense, of course. Then we were going to get hit by a comet. Then the LHC was going to generate a black hole that would swallow the Earth… Oh, brother…
Why do we human beings have this fascination with the world coming to an end? You’d think we’d have enough other problems to worry about rather than let yet another scam artist or person who needs professional help who spouts this nonsense to influence our lives. Yet we do it over and over again.
I am especially fascinated with all of these so-called Christians claiming they can predict the end of the world when Jesus himself said that we can’t predict it. He came right out and said that when the end happens, we’ll never see it coming.
So ignore that little voice in the back of your head that’s saying but what if he’s really right? maybe I should cash in my 401K and have one last party. The 23rd will come. No planet is going to hit us.
And you jackasses in the media? Just stop it, all right? Just stop giving free publicity to the loonies, nut cases, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxers and the people who think you get ebola from wind turbines. When you run across that kind of stuff, just chuckle and go on past.
Oh, and while I got you media scam artists here, stop with the shark crap already? We’re sick of sharks, all right? More people are killed by cows than sharks. Seriously. More people are killed by their own cuddly dogs than sharks. And did you hear about that woman who was eaten by her own cats? Why wasn’t that plastered all over your stupid tabloids? Of course not, because it wasn’t a shark. If a shark had been involved you’d have been all over that one. But no, a few bucks slipped to you in the middle of a parking lot by the cat lobby and poof, you make it all go away, don’t you? Sharks are cuddly, lovely animals who respond positively to affection. Like my shark Leroy. See? Aww, isn’t that cute? He wants his nose robbed. Here Leroy… No. No, Leroy, my arm is not a chew toy, Leroy. Now stop that right now, Leroy… No. Let go… EEAAGGEEHHHHAAAA!!!!!
Mr. Spiny, the cactus we rescued from the town compost pile, has gone totally goofy this year. He now looks like this:
I counted around 13 flowers, with about a dozen more buds ready to flower in the next day or two. I kinda, sorta knew that cactus flowered, but I had no idea they did this! We thought it was a really neat plant before, but now– Wow.
Mrs. GF picked up a packet of old seeds on sale for a few cents earlier in the season, threw them in one of the gardens, and then these things came up —
I had no idea she did it so I was astonished and delighted when these brilliant orange poppies started to appear last week. The color on these guys is so intense they almost glow in the dark.
With some plants you don’t appreciate their beauty until you get up close to them and really look at them. Like the oregano we’ve been trying to kill off for years now. The stuff turned out to be horrifically aggressive, taking over the entire plot of ground, and even taking over the lawn in that area. And while it does smell amazing when I mow the lawn over there, we would like to grow something besides oregano there, so we’ve been rather ruthless in keeping what’s left in check.
But that very annoying plant, well, even it looks neat when it starts to come into flower as it is now.
The Fuji camera I use has a pretty darn nice macro-zoom lens on it and while depth of field and focus is a pain to get right when I get this close to something, the results are worth it.
Heck, even the lowly cucumber looks pretty when you get close to it:
Other stuff–
We’ve been going to state parks this summer. Wisconsin has one of the finest state park systems in the country. The places are absolutely beautiful.
Or perhaps I should use the phrase “had one of the finest state park systems”. The state government has decided, in its infinite stupidity, to cut off all funding for the entire state park system. It does not get any funding from the state any more and is going to have to survive entirely on entrance and camping fees, donations, and any other money it can scrounge up. I wouldn’t be surprised to find them out on the beaches with metal detectors looking for change people dropped to try to keep the parks running. The new paradigm down in Madison seems to be that if it doesn’t make a profit for someone who can funnel bribe money [ahem, excuse me] campaign contributions into their bank accounts or fund their PACs, it isn’t going to get any of our tax money. Sigh…
It’s been a while since I had a good rant, so I’m going to indulge. Please feel free to skip this one if you like. I occasionally go off on a rant when I run into an especially irritating bit of so-called “journalism”, and this is one of those instances.
When I was going through my various news sources this morning while having my coffee, I ran across a news item at Motherboard, part of Vice.com, about Proxima Centauri and it’s newly discovered planet, b. You can click here to jump over and read it yourself. The headline reads: “Our Closest Earthlike Planet Appears to be Covered in Water”
As I read it I frowned a lot. I might go so far as to say I was seriously irked. Unless someone, somewhere, had come up with something entirely new and unexpected, what they were implying in this little piece was irresponsible and so lacking in any kind of facts that it was pure fiction. And yes, they use weasel words like ‘could’, ‘possibly’, ‘may’. Technically the article doesn’t come right out and lie, but it is seriously misleading, perhaps deliberately so in order to generate clickbait headlines.
Let me give you some background for you non-astronomers out there. Proxima Centauri is the star closest to us. It is a very tiny and very dim red dwarf star about 4.2 light years away from Earth. While that is close in astronomical terms, in human terms it is very, very far away indeed. Light moves at 186,000 miles per second. Light takes 4.2 years to go from Earth to Proxima. I will leave it to you to figure out exactly how far that is. My calculator doesn’t have enough zeroes.
They recently discovered Proxima has a planet. They immediately gave it the amazingly creative name Proxima b. What we know about this new planet is, well, not much, really. We know it’s about 1.3 times the mass of the Earth. We know it’s between 0.9 and 1.44 times the diameter of the Earth. We know it orbits Proxima at a distance that is one tenth the distance of Mercury to our sun. We know how fast it goes around it’s star. We know it is tidally locked to it’s star. That means the same face of the planet is always facing the star. One side of the planet is in perpetual light, the other side is in perpetual dark.
Or I thought that’s all we knew until I saw this article. This article implies that B is covered with planet spanning oceans teaming with life. There’s liquid water everywhere, and because there’s water, there must be life! Oh my!
Now just a minute here. Really? I follow astronomy news fairly closely. If these discoveries had been made, why weren’t they all over the actual astronomical press? Something smells a wee bit odd here.
And here’s another thing that set off alarm bells. The quotes are all generic, never attributed to a specific person, but they instead use terms like “researchers said”, and “the research team said”, and “scientists concluded”. That kind of thing starts to set off alarm bells with me. It’s been my experience that legitimate news stories almost always give actual names, and if not the name of the person being quoted, at least the name of the press agent or the name of the spokesperson.
Then I started running into other rather odd things.
The Motherboard article posts a link to what supposedly was the original press release from the Marseille Astrophysics Laboratory which appeared in Agence Presse France, the French press agency. But when I click in the link, the APF’s website tells me there is no such story. So I started running searches on the APF’s news website, plugging in terms like Proxima, Proxima Centauri, Proxima B, the research group’s name, the university’s name, and found nothing. Not a single story anywhere on the APF’s website concerning Proxima’s planet, these researchers… Nothing. Unless I missed something, or wasn’t using the search engine properly, the story Motherboard quotes over at APF doesn’t exist according to APF. In fact, there is nothing anywhere on APF about Proxima at all that I could find after running extensive searches of its entire news site.
I freely admit that I might have been using their site wrong, was using their search engine wrong. So I did some more hunting for other related stories from other sources and found a lot of sciencey related popular websites with this same story. But all shared the same troubling traits. No actual names, vague references to universities and research organizations, quotes, again not from real people, but from “scientists” and “researchers.” Even more troubling, many of the stories in these websites were virtually identical, and I mean word for word identical in some cases, indicating that a lot of these places were engaging in good old fashioned cut and paste plagiarism.
I was getting increasingly obsessed with finding out what the hell was going on. Finally, I went to CNRS, the French science research organization, which supposedly was the source of all of this, and once I’d tracked down the actual original sources, I discovered what I had started to suspect already.
What the CNRS actually said about Proxima b bore little or no resemblance to what the media sources were claiming. What the CNRS actually said, if my horrible French and Google Translate haven’t failed me, is that we really know nothing about Proxima B except the few facts I already told told you about. But that if you make a whole lot of assumptions that are probably wrong, and if those assumptions are correct, which they probably aren’t, and if the planet has an atmosphere, which we don’t know, and if the planet has a magnetic field, which we also don’t know, Proxima B might be capable of having liquid water, maybe even large amounts of it, and if it has water, which we don’t know, it might have a chance to develop some sort of life. Maybe. But we don’t really know.
This is considerably different from the Motherboard headline that says “Our Closest Earthlike Planet Appears to be Covered in Water”. In fact, I have yet to find any legitimate scientist of science organization that has said any such thing.
There is, in fact, no evidence that it has any water at all. There is no evidence it has an atmosphere. The only things we know about the planet at all are it’s approximate mass, it’s approximate size, it’s distance from its star, and it’s orbital period.
If you look at the actual facts, what we do know about Proxima Centauri and its planet, the preliminary data indicates exactly the opposite. Everything we know about it so far tends to contradict everything the Motherboard article claims is possible.
B is very, very close to it’s star. And while Proxima Centauri is a very small, very dim star, it is still a star. Even worse it is a flare star. That means it regularly blasts surrounding space with high intensity radiation and stellar mass ejections. This means that solar radiation and stellar mass ejections would have eroded away any atmosphere and water that the planet might have had billions of years ago.
Some people are trying to get around this fact by claiming B has a magnetic field strong enough to protect it from it’s star, a field similar to the one that protects Earth.
But not only is there no evidence at all to indicate it has a magnetic field, simple physics tells us it pretty much can’t have a magnetic field. A planet’s magnetic field is generated by the rotation of its molten iron core. But Proxima B doesn’t rotate. It’s tidally locked to it’s star. If it doesn’t rotate, it can’t have a magnetic field. Period.
The world is coming to an end again. This time it’s going to end on Sept. 23 when a great whopping planet called Nibiru is going to smack us.
grouchyfarmer 