The UK’s absolutely suicidal surrender to/takeover by Islam and Muslims continues apace, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer appoints Muslim Shibana Mahmood to be his Home Secretary, apparently the equivalent of our Head of Homeland Security, and responsible for immigration issues and the border.
Mahmood is a women–sworn in on the Qur’an–who has been quoted in the linked article as saying that her Muslim faith “is the most important thing in my life” and is “the absolute driver of everything that I do….”*
Events of the past few days have clarified for me what leftists and Islamists have in common. They hate all those outside their groups and want to kill them.
From what I understand the people who published Japanese wood block prints retained the blocks themselves, not the artist and, sometime after the first issue, these publishers would reissue some very popular prints, sometimes with changes–things like a moon in the original woodblock being shaved off for a later printing, or colors being changed–thus giving rise to various “states” of some woodblock prints.
I took the trouble to listen to the entire video: the wave is actually a wave, the “not a wave” text is clickbait. It is shaped like Mt Fuji, but it’s a wave.
Montage of Charlie Kirk answering questions about Christianity in mostly college settings. I don’t recognize what he says near the end about the aspects of the four gospels account of the birth , but overall this was really good. You Tube so there are ads that pop up thru the video unless you are a subscriber. https://youtu.be/ZkfSfSsJjfw?si=wgmEVKahiRoHeOCK
This is something that has been on my mind for a while, and I’ve raised it here before.
I actually don’t think the author does a great job in making his point, but I agree with the sentiment of the essay.
Thanks for posting John baker. I just got back from five days in the wilderness, literally, Canadian Rockies, and came back to the news of Charlie Kirk. I was only vaguely familiar with him, and was looking for something to bring me up to speed on who he was. That was wonderful.
@Mike Plaiss:I agree with the sentiment of the essay.
I do too. It is very, very easy to mislead the public about physics, and lots of popularizers have been doing it for years; up until 20 years ago this was usually what I call “bong rip” popularizations where they emphasize and exaggerate the weird and mind-blowing aspects of “modern” physics (now in its second century! shouldn’t we be used to it by now?), often trying to give justifications for New Age-style ideas.
Since about 20 years ago it’s been more the hostile and conspiracy-theory characterizations. Used to be these were just “free energy” crackpots. (There is a legitimate physics term “free energy” but it has a very different meaning, the crackpots mean violations of energy conservation.) I used to correspond with some and I had quite a library of them at one time.
People like Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hossenfelder, and (twenty years ago) Lee Smolin are not crackpots, but they are people who have (at least for now) lost the argument with their peers and are taking it instead to the public. Which isn’t in principle wrong, the public pays for the vast majority of physics research. But they expose their audience to only one side of the story and they know their audience is mostly not equipped to judge their claims, not only the claims they make for themselves but their characterizations of mainstream physics. And Weinstein is saying some really weird stuff lately, trying to tar physicists with Jeffery Epstein(!).
I don’t always disagree with their criticisms either. I think there has been too much government money in science generally, and I also think that the low-hanging fruit in physics is already really well picked over, and that’s why it’s so much harder to make progress than it was.
But it’s not for lack of trying and it’s not from refusing to engage with new ideas. A new idea in physics has an EXTREMELY high bar to clear, because of all the things that are already so well-explained by the physics in place now. When you propose a big change, you have to think through all the interactions with all the other physical laws you didn’t change, and make sure that you’re not now predicting ridiculous and impossible things.
I can give an example where this happened: one of the early 19th century objections to light as waves rather than particles was that if that were true, then a spherical object’s shadow should have a tiny bright spot in the center. Well, they found the bright spot. It was really small. And then everybody switched over to light as waves–until photons were discovered and things got complicated…
Poisson studied Fresnel’s theory in detail and, being a supporter of the particle theory of light, looked for a way to prove it wrong. Poisson thought that he had found a flaw when he argued that a consequence of Fresnel’s theory was that there would exist an on-axis bright spot in the shadow of a circular obstacle, where there should be complete darkness according to the particle theory of light. This prediction was seen as an absurd consequence of the wave theory, and the failure of that prediction should be a strong argument to reject Fresnel’s theory.
However, the head of the committee, Dominique-François-Jean Arago, decided to actually perform the experiment. He molded a 2 mm metallic disk to a glass plate with wax. He succeeded in observing the predicted spot, confirming Fresnel’s prediction.
It’s a nice video essay, but I hate clickbait titles.
Mike Plaiss,
Here is a compilation of short videos of Charlie Kirk debating people that is not about religion per se. This one was put together by the NY Post.
…In his forthcoming book, “Dead Center,” Manchin — the former West Virginia governor who repped the Mountain State for more than 14 years in the Senate — accused prominent Democrats of undermining the system of checks and balances for more than a decade….
OK, OK, he could have done better, but the country owes him (along with Kyrsten Sinema) a lot, and we ought not forget it.
Not sure what to think of that WSJ article. We live in a time where social media dominates and even staid disciplines like physics are not immune.
Is physics in crisis? Yes and no. I think high energy physics deserves some real criticism, and is the main object of Sabine’s wrath. They’ve taken billions of dollars of public money promising paradigm shifting breakthroughs with not much to show. And they want more.
Meanwhile, condensed matter, atomic/molecular, fluid dynamics, etc move along with good developments. Not necessarily at the “frontier” but there’s a reasonable ROI for the public monies.
And in academia, all science, has been subjected to the big changes in the last 25 years where tenure/promotion is tied to grant money brought in. Administrators discovered the pot of gold that lies in science grants IDC and pushed faculty in that direction. The current administration is making a correction on this; I hope it works. So for survival, the faculty often chase the latest hot topic that is being funded rather than what they are really curious about. It’s science as a ” successful career” rather than a passion. I know several people personally who admit that they didn’t have a lot of interest in their own research, but pursue it for its career benefit.
Make of that what you will.
And in case anyone wasn’t—for whatever reason—paying attention…
…A few of the many other more recent correct calls Dowd has made include: interest rates topping and heading lower (they did), housing tanking and going lower (happening now), massive fraud propping up the Biden economy with illegal immigration (20 million brought in by Biden Admin) and the BLS just restated job creation numbers for 12 months ending in March.
The restatement revealed an eye popping 911,000 jobs were fake. Dowd said just after the 2024 election that “Trump inherited a turd of an economy.” Now, Dowd says, “Trump has to deal with a turd of a disaster.”
On the phony jobs number alone, Dowd says,
“You could say this is statistical fraud or bureaucratic incompetence. Let’s say it’s both. It such an egregious 7 standard deviation.
3.4 standard deviation is the chance of lightning hitting you at least once in your lifetime. It’s not likely. 7 deviation is suggestive of fraud–full stop.”
All the frauds propping up the Biden economy isn’t causing inflation now–just the opposite….
Indeed, “Biden” did “his” job exceeding well.
(And it’s clear that we can ALL blame—or thank(!)—Kamala Harris for enabling ALL of this to come to light.
C’mon Mr. Trump. D the right thing: Give ‘er a Presidential Medal of Honor!!!
I wonder about the (biological) men whose “romantic” partners are “transwomen”—do they self-identify as gay, or do they think they are straight because they really believe that “transwomen are women”?
In a world where anthropogenic global warming has been treated as fact i wouldnt proffer conspiracy physics so lightly
@miguel cervantes:I would call it heterodox physics
I’m sure you would, but you are assuming that there is a physics orthodoxy, which is itself the hostile characterization Mike Plaiss was talking about. People in physics are not anathematizing people like Weinstein, Hossenfelder, and Smolin. They are disagreeing with them and continuing to do their work.
Which is somewhat short-sighted: they might not realize it, or they might assume it’s somebody else’s job, but if only people who are hostile to physics as practiced today engage the public, it’s not going to be long before enough of the public is hostile that it keeps work from getting done, and by then it might be too late.
Honestly, like I said above, I think the low-hanging fruit in physics is already picked, and physics PhDs have been over-produced for at least thirty years now, and the way physics is funded is directly responsible for that, in my opinion, but that’s a longer comment and more inside baseball than most people probably want to read.
In a world where anthropogenic global warming has been treated as fact
Sabine says it IS fact. Make of that what you will.
@ huxley > ” I hate clickbait titles.”
Ditto, most of them don’t even give you the headline’s promised result.
For the subgenre of “not what you thought/believed” my response is generally “How do you even know what I thought or believed, if I ever considered this topic at all?”
A quasi-legitimate variant is “not what experts thought/believed” but even those depend a lot on just ignoring the experts that support their “bombshell” revelations.
Why not just advertise their often otherwise well done videos with “Of the two (or more) explanations that some people believe, here is why I think this one is correct.”
A related peeve is said BOMBSHELL REVELATIONS that turn out to be year or even decades old, and well-known in the field, if not to casual observers (and sometimes even to them).
So, just how many people did actually attend Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London two days ago?
Well, it’s always in the best interests of the rally organizers to claim that a huge number of people turned out.
(See, for instance, the controversy over pictures and crowd estimates during the Trump rally on the Mall in Washington.)
There is, for instance, an article quoting Robinson as saying police estimated three million people.
Of course, most of the leftist MSM wants to minimize and downplay this rally and it’s impact, so they report maybe 110,000 or even 150,000 people showed up.**
Moreover, in this day of CGI and AI, its increasingly hard to tell if drone shots of the crowd are real are, for instance, taken when the crowd has reached it’s maxim extent, or are even shots of the actual rally, and not of some other past rally in some other country.*
However, does this drone shot look to you like it might show only 100,000 or even 150,000 attendees.***
There is an odd idea about, that physicists (and mathematicians) lack imagination, unlike, say, artists. I would disagree, they need to be very imaginative, but they suffer from the additional need that they have to propose things that are true (physics) or at least not disproved (mathematicians). Those are very tight strictures.
About the great wave, I saw a photo of a real breaking wave that showed the same claw like fringe. It made me wonder how Hokusai managed to see it. If it wasn’t just an imaginative touch, it was a remarkable observation of reality.
@AesopFan:Why not just advertise their often otherwise well done videos with “Of the two (or more) explanations that some people believe, here is why I think this one is correct.”
Because they have done extensive, and expensive, A/B testing on their clickbait thumbnails and titles, and revenue is tied to response rate, not to making sense and being honest.
The videos are just an advertising delivery device. Anything to get you to look.
“In a world where anthropogenic global warming has been treated as fact
Sabine says it IS fact.”
Actually she has slowly been taking the red pill on that. Her initial post on AGW was party line, and she was called out a lot in the comments. And the last couple of posts showed she was starting to see some of the cracks. She’s got a long way to go, but there might be a small amount of progress.
@physicsguy:She’s got a long way to go, but there might be a small amount of progress.
Reading the caveats in the older IPCC reports would go a long way; not sure if anyone dropped those in her comments as I don’t follow her. Just not going along with the version propounded by activists and journalists is enough for the rage machine to gin up against anyone, and then she’d see what’s going on.
New post: Assassination and Political Violence in America
We are now pumping 37 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year … increasing each year.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. I see no reason to doubt adding that amount of CO2 each year doesn’t have an effect.
I just don’t see this is in the apocalyptic terms the climate change orthodoxy insists upon. Mine is called the lukewarmist position.
Whatever the effects are, however, I believe we are better off dealing with them as the arise rather than to attempting to abruptly dismantle the global energy infrastructure with Net Zero carbon emissions and convert to “sustainable” energy.
Even if we had to, I still think it would be a disaster to put the climate change folks in charge. They are a leftist political movement, not scientific. They would make things worse.
3I/Atlas Is Changing Course
According to the reports linked below NASA, Harvard, and others studying 3I/Atlas have detected that 3I/Atlas is changing it’s course.*
Moreover, they’ve also detected that 3I/Atlas is releasing gas on a precise schedule, every 17 minutes. Random ejections of gas by a comet, yes, but on a strict 17 minute schedule?
No comet does that.
So, it is increasingly looking like 3I/Atlas is some sort of Alien technology.
Current thinking is that, instead of passing well away from Mars–as it would have before these course changes–3I/Atlas could possibly strike Mars and, if it does so, the enormous amount of energy released by this impact, and its destructive power, will not only destroy all of our various rovers on the ground and our satellites in orbit, it will also eject a huge wall of debris which, it is estimated, several years in the future, will intersect with Earth.
“bof” asks one of the most interesting questions I’ve seen posited on this (I mean no offense) milquetoast conservative website. Essentially, do the gay men dating other gay men who “identify” as women square the circle in their minds that they are straight and hence “normal”? I can see the attraction to this thinking by the Kirk assassin who was raised Mormon. Then you have Iran, whose leader said in a speech at Columbia that they had “no gays in Iran” since they were all transgender women
Huxley,
Look up Beers law vis CO2. The 15micron photons available are depleted by 300ppm CO2. Adding more CO2 doesn’t have much effect on its greenhouse property. Water vapor, by orders of magnitude, is the primary GH gas.
Niketas Choniates on September 15, 2025 at 11:52 am
I didn’t view Plaiss’ linked content. But your comment is excellent.
My experiences as a physics educator spanned from fun, to pleasant, to miserable, but one of the high points was the one time I was allowed to teach basic physics. The course eventually arrived at the point where I, the lecturer, was supposed to say “Blah, blah, Poisson’s spot, blah, blah.” Well, I remembered my college physics course and how impressed I was by that example of wave theory, and this time I said, “Hell, let’s demonstrate this!”
I used a nice laser pointer, a hand-held lens to spread the beam, a small ball bearing glued to a microscope slide, and a sheet of Xerox paper as a screen. With the room lights off, it worked beautifully.
While I have a slight knowledge of physics history, I did not know that Poisson was a nay sayer on whether the spot would appear. Fascinating!
Niketas Choniates on September 15, 2025 at 11:52 am
I didn’t view Plaiss’ linked content. But your comment is excellent.
My experiences as a physics educator spanned from fun, to pleasant, to miserable, but one of the high points was the one time I was allowed to teach basic physics. The course eventually arrived at the point where I, the lecturer, was supposed to say “Blah, blah, Poisson’s spot, blah, blah.” Well, I remembered my college physics course and how impressed I was by that example of wave theory, and this time I said, “Hell, let’s demonstrate this!”
I used a nice laser pointer, a hand-held lens to spread the beam, a small ball bearing glued to a microscope slide, and a sheet of Xerox paper as a screen. With the room lights off, it worked beautifully.
While I have a slight knowledge of physics history, I did not know that Poisson was a nay sayer on whether the spot would appear. Fascinating!
Hello. Today, after ten full years of owning my current car, I discovered a minor but useful feature that had escaped me for the whole time. I was a little bit embarrassed. Does that happen to anyone else?
Look up Beers law vis CO2. The 15micron photons available are depleted by 300ppm CO2. Adding more CO2 doesn’t have much effect on its greenhouse property. Water vapor, by orders of magnitude, is the primary GH gas.
physicsguy:
Yes, I’m aware of that though not the name. Not much effect is still an effect.
My understanding is the effect is logarithmic. Each doubling of CO2 increases the radiative forcing. So it takes more and more CO2 to have a warming effect, but that doesn’t mean the effect goes to zero.
Water vapor doesn’t accumulate in the atmosphere as CO2 does. Different situation.
The wife and I got to see a travelling exhibit of “The Wave” in Kansas City last year, at the Nelson-Atkins museum of art. It was quite beautiful, with many examples of other artist’s interpretation of the work, plus a huge Lego version of it. I really came to appreciate the work involved in making these wood block prints. If you get the opportunity to see the exhibit, I highly recommend going!
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The UK’s absolutely suicidal surrender to/takeover by Islam and Muslims continues apace, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer appoints Muslim Shibana Mahmood to be his Home Secretary, apparently the equivalent of our Head of Homeland Security, and responsible for immigration issues and the border.
Mahmood is a women–sworn in on the Qur’an–who has been quoted in the linked article as saying that her Muslim faith “is the most important thing in my life” and is “the absolute driver of everything that I do….”*
* See https://amac.us/newsline/national-security/can-the-u-s-still-trust-britain/
Events of the past few days have clarified for me what leftists and Islamists have in common. They hate all those outside their groups and want to kill them.
From what I understand the people who published Japanese wood block prints retained the blocks themselves, not the artist and, sometime after the first issue, these publishers would reissue some very popular prints, sometimes with changes–things like a moon in the original woodblock being shaved off for a later printing, or colors being changed–thus giving rise to various “states” of some woodblock prints.
I took the trouble to listen to the entire video: the wave is actually a wave, the “not a wave” text is clickbait. It is shaped like Mt Fuji, but it’s a wave.
Montage of Charlie Kirk answering questions about Christianity in mostly college settings. I don’t recognize what he says near the end about the aspects of the four gospels account of the birth , but overall this was really good. You Tube so there are ads that pop up thru the video unless you are a subscriber.
https://youtu.be/ZkfSfSsJjfw?si=wgmEVKahiRoHeOCK
This is something that has been on my mind for a while, and I’ve raised it here before.
The Rise of ‘Conspiracy Physics’
https://archive.md/ADjdy
I actually don’t think the author does a great job in making his point, but I agree with the sentiment of the essay.
Thanks for posting John baker. I just got back from five days in the wilderness, literally, Canadian Rockies, and came back to the news of Charlie Kirk. I was only vaguely familiar with him, and was looking for something to bring me up to speed on who he was. That was wonderful.
@Mike Plaiss:I agree with the sentiment of the essay.
I do too. It is very, very easy to mislead the public about physics, and lots of popularizers have been doing it for years; up until 20 years ago this was usually what I call “bong rip” popularizations where they emphasize and exaggerate the weird and mind-blowing aspects of “modern” physics (now in its second century! shouldn’t we be used to it by now?), often trying to give justifications for New Age-style ideas.
Since about 20 years ago it’s been more the hostile and conspiracy-theory characterizations. Used to be these were just “free energy” crackpots. (There is a legitimate physics term “free energy” but it has a very different meaning, the crackpots mean violations of energy conservation.) I used to correspond with some and I had quite a library of them at one time.
People like Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hossenfelder, and (twenty years ago) Lee Smolin are not crackpots, but they are people who have (at least for now) lost the argument with their peers and are taking it instead to the public. Which isn’t in principle wrong, the public pays for the vast majority of physics research. But they expose their audience to only one side of the story and they know their audience is mostly not equipped to judge their claims, not only the claims they make for themselves but their characterizations of mainstream physics. And Weinstein is saying some really weird stuff lately, trying to tar physicists with Jeffery Epstein(!).
I don’t always disagree with their criticisms either. I think there has been too much government money in science generally, and I also think that the low-hanging fruit in physics is already really well picked over, and that’s why it’s so much harder to make progress than it was.
But it’s not for lack of trying and it’s not from refusing to engage with new ideas. A new idea in physics has an EXTREMELY high bar to clear, because of all the things that are already so well-explained by the physics in place now. When you propose a big change, you have to think through all the interactions with all the other physical laws you didn’t change, and make sure that you’re not now predicting ridiculous and impossible things.
I can give an example where this happened: one of the early 19th century objections to light as waves rather than particles was that if that were true, then a spherical object’s shadow should have a tiny bright spot in the center. Well, they found the bright spot. It was really small. And then everybody switched over to light as waves–until photons were discovered and things got complicated…
It’s a nice video essay, but I hate clickbait titles.
LEGO art version
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/hokusai-the-great-wave-31208
Mike Plaiss,
Here is a compilation of short videos of Charlie Kirk debating people that is not about religion per se. This one was put together by the NY Post.
https://nypost.com/video/best-charlie-kirk-debate-moments-compilation-revisited-in-wake-of-political-assassination/
Manchin comes in from the cold…with some fascinating kissin’ ‘n telling’…
“Manchin ripped Biden for ‘sending a f—ing check to everyone,’ dishes on ex-prez’s ‘very bad temper’ in new book”—
https://nypost.com/2025/09/15/us-news/manchin-ripped-biden-for-sending-a-f-ing-check-to-everyone-dishes-on-ex-prezs-very-bad-temper-in-new-book/
Key graf:
OK, OK, he could have done better, but the country owes him (along with Kyrsten Sinema) a lot, and we ought not forget it.
Not sure what to think of that WSJ article. We live in a time where social media dominates and even staid disciplines like physics are not immune.
Is physics in crisis? Yes and no. I think high energy physics deserves some real criticism, and is the main object of Sabine’s wrath. They’ve taken billions of dollars of public money promising paradigm shifting breakthroughs with not much to show. And they want more.
Meanwhile, condensed matter, atomic/molecular, fluid dynamics, etc move along with good developments. Not necessarily at the “frontier” but there’s a reasonable ROI for the public monies.
And in academia, all science, has been subjected to the big changes in the last 25 years where tenure/promotion is tied to grant money brought in. Administrators discovered the pot of gold that lies in science grants IDC and pushed faculty in that direction. The current administration is making a correction on this; I hope it works. So for survival, the faculty often chase the latest hot topic that is being funded rather than what they are really curious about. It’s science as a ” successful career” rather than a passion. I know several people personally who admit that they didn’t have a lot of interest in their own research, but pursue it for its career benefit.
Make of that what you will.
And in case anyone wasn’t—for whatever reason—paying attention…
“”Trump Inherited A Turd Of An Economy” – Ed Dowd Warns Of ‘Panic Rate-Cut Cycle’“—
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/trump-inherited-turd-economy-kevin-dowd-warns-panic-rate-cut-cycle
Key grafs:
Indeed, “Biden” did “his” job exceeding well.
(And it’s clear that we can ALL blame—or thank(!)—Kamala Harris for enabling ALL of this to come to light.
C’mon Mr. Trump. D the right thing: Give ‘er a Presidential Medal of Honor!!!
I wonder about the (biological) men whose “romantic” partners are “transwomen”—do they self-identify as gay, or do they think they are straight because they really believe that “transwomen are women”?
Apologies if this has been mentioned elsewhere. Very important and absolutely has to be done: Sen. Mike Lee to File Bombshell Legislation to Crush Deep State Propaganda Machine – Restores Smith-Mundt as the ‘Charlie Kirk Act’ https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/09/sen-mike-lee-file-bombshell-legislation-crush-deep/
I would call it heterodox physics
In a world where anthropogenic global warming has been treated as fact i wouldnt proffer conspiracy physics so lightly
@miguel cervantes:I would call it heterodox physics
I’m sure you would, but you are assuming that there is a physics orthodoxy, which is itself the hostile characterization Mike Plaiss was talking about. People in physics are not anathematizing people like Weinstein, Hossenfelder, and Smolin. They are disagreeing with them and continuing to do their work.
Which is somewhat short-sighted: they might not realize it, or they might assume it’s somebody else’s job, but if only people who are hostile to physics as practiced today engage the public, it’s not going to be long before enough of the public is hostile that it keeps work from getting done, and by then it might be too late.
Honestly, like I said above, I think the low-hanging fruit in physics is already picked, and physics PhDs have been over-produced for at least thirty years now, and the way physics is funded is directly responsible for that, in my opinion, but that’s a longer comment and more inside baseball than most people probably want to read.
In a world where anthropogenic global warming has been treated as fact
Sabine says it IS fact. Make of that what you will.
@ huxley > ” I hate clickbait titles.”
Ditto, most of them don’t even give you the headline’s promised result.
For the subgenre of “not what you thought/believed” my response is generally “How do you even know what I thought or believed, if I ever considered this topic at all?”
A quasi-legitimate variant is “not what experts thought/believed” but even those depend a lot on just ignoring the experts that support their “bombshell” revelations.
Why not just advertise their often otherwise well done videos with “Of the two (or more) explanations that some people believe, here is why I think this one is correct.”
A related peeve is said BOMBSHELL REVELATIONS that turn out to be year or even decades old, and well-known in the field, if not to casual observers (and sometimes even to them).
So, just how many people did actually attend Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London two days ago?
Well, it’s always in the best interests of the rally organizers to claim that a huge number of people turned out.
(See, for instance, the controversy over pictures and crowd estimates during the Trump rally on the Mall in Washington.)
There is, for instance, an article quoting Robinson as saying police estimated three million people.
Of course, most of the leftist MSM wants to minimize and downplay this rally and it’s impact, so they report maybe 110,000 or even 150,000 people showed up.**
Moreover, in this day of CGI and AI, its increasingly hard to tell if drone shots of the crowd are real are, for instance, taken when the crowd has reached it’s maxim extent, or are even shots of the actual rally, and not of some other past rally in some other country.*
However, does this drone shot look to you like it might show only 100,000 or even 150,000 attendees.***
*** See https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2025/sep/13/aerial-footage-shows-scale-of-unite-the-kingdom-rally-video
See https://thepeoplesvoice.tv/millions-turn-up-for-unite-the-kingdom-rally-in-london/
or https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/how-many-people-at-unite-the-kingdom-rally-tommy-robinson-397888/
or See https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/what-massive-unite-kingdom-march-london-reveals-about-british-politics-1744069
or See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek7gzi0ysS8
Here’s an article reporting that the police would not be making a crowd estimate at https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/tommy-robinson-london-metropolitan-police-londoners-waterloo-b1247548.html
** Rally Image of the crowd from the New York Times at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/13/world/europe/london-far-right-rally-robinson.html
physics has an EXTREMELY high bar to clear
There is an odd idea about, that physicists (and mathematicians) lack imagination, unlike, say, artists. I would disagree, they need to be very imaginative, but they suffer from the additional need that they have to propose things that are true (physics) or at least not disproved (mathematicians). Those are very tight strictures.
About the great wave, I saw a photo of a real breaking wave that showed the same claw like fringe. It made me wonder how Hokusai managed to see it. If it wasn’t just an imaginative touch, it was a remarkable observation of reality.
@AesopFan:Why not just advertise their often otherwise well done videos with “Of the two (or more) explanations that some people believe, here is why I think this one is correct.”
Because they have done extensive, and expensive, A/B testing on their clickbait thumbnails and titles, and revenue is tied to response rate, not to making sense and being honest.
The videos are just an advertising delivery device. Anything to get you to look.
“In a world where anthropogenic global warming has been treated as fact
Sabine says it IS fact.”
Actually she has slowly been taking the red pill on that. Her initial post on AGW was party line, and she was called out a lot in the comments. And the last couple of posts showed she was starting to see some of the cracks. She’s got a long way to go, but there might be a small amount of progress.
@physicsguy:She’s got a long way to go, but there might be a small amount of progress.
Reading the caveats in the older IPCC reports would go a long way; not sure if anyone dropped those in her comments as I don’t follow her. Just not going along with the version propounded by activists and journalists is enough for the rage machine to gin up against anyone, and then she’d see what’s going on.
New post: Assassination and Political Violence in America
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/75075.html
I think anthropogenic global warming is a fact.
We are now pumping 37 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year … increasing each year.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. I see no reason to doubt adding that amount of CO2 each year doesn’t have an effect.
I just don’t see this is in the apocalyptic terms the climate change orthodoxy insists upon. Mine is called the lukewarmist position.
Whatever the effects are, however, I believe we are better off dealing with them as the arise rather than to attempting to abruptly dismantle the global energy infrastructure with Net Zero carbon emissions and convert to “sustainable” energy.
Even if we had to, I still think it would be a disaster to put the climate change folks in charge. They are a leftist political movement, not scientific. They would make things worse.
3I/Atlas Is Changing Course
According to the reports linked below NASA, Harvard, and others studying 3I/Atlas have detected that 3I/Atlas is changing it’s course.*
Moreover, they’ve also detected that 3I/Atlas is releasing gas on a precise schedule, every 17 minutes. Random ejections of gas by a comet, yes, but on a strict 17 minute schedule?
No comet does that.
So, it is increasingly looking like 3I/Atlas is some sort of Alien technology.
Current thinking is that, instead of passing well away from Mars–as it would have before these course changes–3I/Atlas could possibly strike Mars and, if it does so, the enormous amount of energy released by this impact, and its destructive power, will not only destroy all of our various rovers on the ground and our satellites in orbit, it will also eject a huge wall of debris which, it is estimated, several years in the future, will intersect with Earth.
* See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCDgjo7qcqo
and see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCDgjo7qcqo&t=15s
“bof” asks one of the most interesting questions I’ve seen posited on this (I mean no offense) milquetoast conservative website. Essentially, do the gay men dating other gay men who “identify” as women square the circle in their minds that they are straight and hence “normal”? I can see the attraction to this thinking by the Kirk assassin who was raised Mormon. Then you have Iran, whose leader said in a speech at Columbia that they had “no gays in Iran” since they were all transgender women
Huxley,
Look up Beers law vis CO2. The 15micron photons available are depleted by 300ppm CO2. Adding more CO2 doesn’t have much effect on its greenhouse property. Water vapor, by orders of magnitude, is the primary GH gas.
Niketas Choniates on September 15, 2025 at 11:52 am
I didn’t view Plaiss’ linked content. But your comment is excellent.
My experiences as a physics educator spanned from fun, to pleasant, to miserable, but one of the high points was the one time I was allowed to teach basic physics. The course eventually arrived at the point where I, the lecturer, was supposed to say “Blah, blah, Poisson’s spot, blah, blah.” Well, I remembered my college physics course and how impressed I was by that example of wave theory, and this time I said, “Hell, let’s demonstrate this!”
I used a nice laser pointer, a hand-held lens to spread the beam, a small ball bearing glued to a microscope slide, and a sheet of Xerox paper as a screen. With the room lights off, it worked beautifully.
While I have a slight knowledge of physics history, I did not know that Poisson was a nay sayer on whether the spot would appear. Fascinating!
Niketas Choniates on September 15, 2025 at 11:52 am
I didn’t view Plaiss’ linked content. But your comment is excellent.
My experiences as a physics educator spanned from fun, to pleasant, to miserable, but one of the high points was the one time I was allowed to teach basic physics. The course eventually arrived at the point where I, the lecturer, was supposed to say “Blah, blah, Poisson’s spot, blah, blah.” Well, I remembered my college physics course and how impressed I was by that example of wave theory, and this time I said, “Hell, let’s demonstrate this!”
I used a nice laser pointer, a hand-held lens to spread the beam, a small ball bearing glued to a microscope slide, and a sheet of Xerox paper as a screen. With the room lights off, it worked beautifully.
While I have a slight knowledge of physics history, I did not know that Poisson was a nay sayer on whether the spot would appear. Fascinating!
Related (Bjorn Lomborg):
“Fear mongering predictions about climate change keep falling apart”–
https://nypost.com/2025/09/15/opinion/fearmongering-predictions-about-climate-change-keep-falling-apart/
Hello. Today, after ten full years of owning my current car, I discovered a minor but useful feature that had escaped me for the whole time. I was a little bit embarrassed. Does that happen to anyone else?
Look up Beers law vis CO2. The 15micron photons available are depleted by 300ppm CO2. Adding more CO2 doesn’t have much effect on its greenhouse property. Water vapor, by orders of magnitude, is the primary GH gas.
physicsguy:
Yes, I’m aware of that though not the name. Not much effect is still an effect.
My understanding is the effect is logarithmic. Each doubling of CO2 increases the radiative forcing. So it takes more and more CO2 to have a warming effect, but that doesn’t mean the effect goes to zero.
Water vapor doesn’t accumulate in the atmosphere as CO2 does. Different situation.
The wife and I got to see a travelling exhibit of “The Wave” in Kansas City last year, at the Nelson-Atkins museum of art. It was quite beautiful, with many examples of other artist’s interpretation of the work, plus a huge Lego version of it. I really came to appreciate the work involved in making these wood block prints. If you get the opportunity to see the exhibit, I highly recommend going!