The collapsing iron core of a massive star that has exhausted its fuel will quickly reach densities at which electrons and protons can no longer remain separate. They combine to form neutrons in an extremely violent reaction that tears the rest of the star apart and blasts it's contents all over the sky as a type 2 Supernova. At the time of the explosion the structure of the star looks like an onion. There is an outer shell of Hydrogen gas, then a shell of Hydrogen fusing into Helium. Below that is a shell of Helium fusing into Carbon and Oxygen. Deeper still is a shell fusing Carbon into Neon, Magnesium, Sodium, and Aluminum. Deeper still is a shell fusing Neon into Oxygen and Magnesium. Still deeper the Oxygen fuses into Silicon, Argon, Sulfur, and Calcium. And finally a shell that fuses Silicon into an isotope of Nickel that decays into Iron. All this material is blown to smithereens when the barrage of outrushing neutrinos produced by the core's transmutation into neutrons collides with those shells. The over-pressures cerated in that collision stimulate even more fusion. The environment of the explosion is rich with free high energy neutrons, and alpha-particles (Helium nuclei). These particles are absorbed by the elements within the explosion, transmuting them further into the vast majority of the elements on the periodic table up to element 36. All these nuclei are scattered amidst the rapidly expanding cloud of debris and eventually mix with the interstellar medium, polluting the existing clouds of neutral hydrogen and, if close enough, stimulating them to collapse into planetary systems. The Oxygen and Nitrogen in our atmosphere. The Carbon and Calcium in our bodies and bones. The Sodium in our seas, and the Iron and Aluminum in our buildings, originated from this process. Those elements all came from stars that blew their guts up all over the sky, and seeded future stars with the elements of life and civilization.

Most of the stars were see in the night sky are extremely luminous giants. Stars the size of our Sun are too faint to be seen beyond a few dozen light years. This is ironic because the Sun is much larger than the majority of stars. There are a vast number of nearby stars that we simply cannot see with the naked eye. Giant stars burn very hot, and very bright, and for a very short time. A giant can fuse hydrogen into helium thousands of times faster than the Sun. It can exhaust its fuel in as little as ten million years. In their cores, they first fuse hydrogen into helium, then helium into carbon and oxygen. However, unlike the Sun they are massive enough to continue the process and fuse carbon into a number of other elements, that eventually are fused into silicon At each stage the rate of fusion must increase because the reactions become less efficient. On the very last day of a giant star‘s life, it begins to fuse silicon into iron. This reaction is so feeble that the star will burn through a full solar mass of silicon in a matter of hours; all the while a nugget of iron, the size of the Earth, with the mass of the Sun, accumulates in its core. Fusion reactions with iron are endothermic. They consume energy as opposed to producing it. So when the silicon is exhausted, and the iron begins to fuse under the weight of the star above it, the core cools. The cooling core collapses, it can no longer produce the energy needed to hold up the mass of the star. The collapse proceeds so rapidly that the material at the center approaches a sizable fraction of the speed of light. The rest of the matter within the star is pulled down with it at a slower pace. When the core has shrunk to approximately 10 miles in diameter the pressures are so great that the electrons and protons within it are forced to combine into neutrons. This reaction creates a barrage of neutrinos heading outward at the speed of light. Meanwhile the neurons in the core rapidly arrange themselves into an energy shell structure that resists any further collapse. The collapse stops dead. The outrush of neutrinos carries a vast amount of energy that is more than sufficient to reverse the inflowing matter of the star and blow it out into space at a fraction of the speed of light. This reversal creates temperatures and pressures that stimulate even more fusion within the outrushing guts of the star. The explosion is so energetic that the dying star’s luminosity increases by approximately twelve orders of magnitude. For several weeks it will outshine the galaxy it lives in. This is a type 2 supernova, and we don’t want to be close to one. 50 light years is not far enough. Within that radius the radiation slamming into the Earth would be disastrous for life. Fortunately there are no stars within that radius that are likely to blow up soon. But keep your eye on Betelgeuse — it’s likely to blow in the next few thousand years — maybe tomorrow. At 500 light years it would put on a hell of a show. It would be brighter than the full moon and you could read by it at night.

Out in the vast interstellar emptiness float huge clouds of dust and gas -- mostly neutral hydrogen, H2 molecules that are loosely bound together by their diffuse gravity. The masses of such clouds are sufficient to create hundreds of stars like our Sun; but the thermal energy of their temperature, and their weak but non-zero angular momentum, are sufficient to prevent their gravity from collapsing them. They are stable structures that will last hundreds of millions, if not billions of years, if not disturbed. But disturbance can come in the form of a shock wave from a distant supernova or stellar explosion. That shock wave can compress portions of the cloud into densities with sufficient gravitational potential to enter a runaway collapse. As the collapse proceeds it can stall if the collapsing fragment has too much angular momentum. The cloud, now spinning much faster because of the collapse will often assume a dumbbell shape and the two lobes will separate. With most of the original angular momentum having been shed into their mutual orbit, the two lobes are free to continue their collapse into a binary star system. Most of these new stars are small, and will collapse into an object roughly the size of Jupiter with little or no internal energy. We call them brown dwarfs. They have been heated by their collapse to glow in the infra red, but will gradually cool. Some clouds are larger and will collapse to the point where fusion reactions will begin in their cores. First it is the deuterium that fuses, generating quite a bit of heat. But deuterium is rare and that fuel is rapidly exhausted. If the new star is massive enough it may begin to fuse regular hydrogen into helium. Many of these objects are one tenth the mass of the Sun and glow in the red, and near infra-red. We call them red dwarfs. They burn slowly and will last for tens of billions of years. Some have about the mass of our Sun. They are comparatively rare, but will shine brightly in the visible spectrum, fusing Hydrogen to Helium, and then eventually Helium into Carbon. In the final stages of their live they will become red giants, and will end their lives by repeatedly ejecting their outer shrouds of hydrogen, until only the white hot carbon core remains. These are White Dwarf stars. But as noted earlier, stars often form in binary pairs. And sometimes the two partners are as massive, or even more massive than the Sun. The first to die will spread into a Red Giant and disgorge massive amounts of material into the space around it as it pulsates through its death throes. Sometimes that material reaches the partner star, adding slightly to its mass, and reducing the distance between them through friction. When the Red Giant finally become a White Dwarf, it may be close enough to the partner star to gradually steal material from it -- especially if the partner enters the Red Giant stage. Matter, mostly hydrogen, builds up on the hot surface of the White dwarf. The White Dwarf may have half the mass of the Sun, and be only a few thousand miles in diameter, roughly the size of the Earth or Mars. Thus the gravitational potential at the surface is huge, and the infalling hydrogen is strongly compressed and heated. This process continues until the hydrogen accumulating on the surface of the White Dwarf reaches the temperatures and pressures sufficient to ignite hydrogen fusion. This results in a massive thermonuclear explosion called a nova. The explosion is strong enough to blow all the accreted material off the White dwarf and re-expose the carbon core to begin the process again. From our point of view the binary pair will brighten by many orders of magnitude every few decades. We may just see one of these this Summer or Fall in the constellation of the Northern Crown (Corona Borealis)

The Sun, our local star, is just under a million miles in diameter. The surface temperature is about 5,000K, and the power output is about 4E26 watts. All that power is coming from the innermost 10% of the star -- the core -- where the temperatures are around 17E6K, and the pressure is ...um... crushing. At those temperatures the Hydrogen atoms cannot hold onto their electrons. So protons and electrons are free to zoom about without binding. The velocities of the protons are so high, and the pressures are so great, that every once is a great while two protons will get close enough that the strong nuclear force will bind them together into Helium. This happens to about 500 metric tons of Hydrogen each second. In that reaction a lot of high energy gamma rays are released. Those gamma rays are trapped within all those charged particles in the core. They bounce around in the core, doing a random walk for thousands of years. But eventually they reach the outer shell of the core where they can heat the Hydrogen gas outside the core. The bouncing around of all those gamma rays creates an outward pressure that keeps the core of the Sun from collapsing under the weight of the Hydrogen above it. The hydrogen outside the core, heated by the gamma rays escaping the core, rises to the surface of the star in a massive convection current. Upon reaching the surface, the heat of that gas is radiated at 5000K and reaches us ~8 minutes later. This process has been going on for nearly five billion years, and will continue for another five billion or so. However... The Helium building up in the core takes up space. This impedes the fusion reaction. Fewer gamma rays are produced, causing the core to contract. This heats the core driving the fusion rate back up, but at a slightly higher temperature. Thus, the Sun is gradually warming. It is about 10% hotter today than when it formed, and it will continue to get hotter and hotter as the eons pass. In about 200 million years, it will be too hot for water to remain liquid on the surface of the Earth. So, I guess we'll have to move the Earth a bit farther out.

Harris campaign caught editing WDAY Radio and other news outlets headlines | WDAY Radio - AM 970 and FM 93.1 https://x.com/unclebobmartin/status/1824287000519659624

We're All Far Right Now (Official Music Video) via #[1]

Read the first paragraph. https://becketnewsite.s3.amazonaws.com/20240813183534/injunction.pdf

Imagine an empty room with 1000 coins on the floor. The room sits above a subway line, and when trains go by it jostles the coins and flips some over. The room is locked and you have the only key to this room. You come into this room for the first time on Tuesday and you count 300 heads. On Wednesday you count 400 heads. What do you believe the count was on Monday and why? And what does this have to do with the universe at large?

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Kamala is tough on crime. Kamala is tough on immigration. Kamala will kill tax on tips. Kamala will drill baby drill. Kamala is Trump. Who knew?

We are currently in an ice age, which is defined as any period during which there are ice caps. The current ice age began 2.5 Mya. It is suspected that the cause was the gradual reduction in CO2 caused by the weathering of the Himalayas, the migration of Antarctica over the South Pole, and the closing of the isthmus of Panama blocking ocean heat transfer at the equator. There have been over a dozen significant glaciations since the ice age began. They are likely driven by the orbital cycles of the Earth. In the last million years they’ve fallen into a regular pattern of ~90,000 years of advancing cold and ice, and ~10,000 years of retreating ice and relative warmth. We are in one of those warm periods now. It started ~12,000 years ago. Winter is coming.

If the idea of curved space time, as described by General Relativity (GR), confuses you, consider the following analogy. The theory of GR was sparked by Einstein’s “happiest thought”, that gravity and acceleration are equivalent. That means that you, standing on the ground, are accelerating upwards. But you can detect no motion in that direction. How does that make sense? Consider the amusement park ride sometimes known as “The Rotor”. It is a room sized cylinder that you walk into and stand against the back wall. Then the cylinder is spun up and you are pressed against the wall by centrifugal force. For you, gravity seems to shift and you feel as though you are lying on your back with the center of the cylinder above you. Your acceleration vector is toward the center of the cylinder. But your velocity vector is parallel to the back wall, 90 degrees away from the acceleration vector. So, when you are standing on the ground, accelerating upwards, your velocity vector, as you move through curved space time, is shifted 90 degrees into the dimension of that curvature, which is a dimension you cannot directly perceive.

OK, OK.  Maybe my satire about the tax laws in the Great State of Bobolia might smell a tad of politics.

It takes a little thought, and a little geometry, to explain this. Source: https://x.com/unclebobmartin/status/1822956128998658545

It takes a little thought, and a little geometry, to explain this. Source: http://x.com/unclebobmartin/status/1822956128998658545

I am utterly amazed (and aghast) at the number of people who have told me that the lockdowns all happened under Trump.  These folks have very short memories, and no clue how our federal government actually works.  They must think the president is some kind of absolute ruler.

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I'm writing a chapter that contains a simple walk through of writing, and cleaning, a python application.  What a hoot!  It's been years since I wrote any significant python, but this is brining back to me why I love, and don't love, the language.

Western society was the salvation of this planet. Billions were hauled out of poverty and hunger. The rise of the middle class was a miracle. Now Western society, in it's lazy ignorance and self-satisfied navel gazing, is on the verge of letting all that get torn down.

This was a fun interview about my Clean Coder book.