Nautical units

I had heard of the term ‘nautical mile’ and also of the term ‘knots’ but had no idea where they came from, only that they were terms used by aircraft pilots and seafarers. I knew that a nautical mile was a little longer than a standard mile (one nautical mile is now defined as exactly 1,852 meters or 1.151 miles) while a knot is just one nautical mile per hour. Why we still used two units of distance and speed that were so close to each other was unknown to me. I assumed that nautical miles and knots were retained for sentimental reasons.

But I have learned that those units have an interesting meaning and practical use in that one nautical mile originally was defined as one minute of latitude. If one takes the circumference of the Earth and divide it by 360 degrees (the number of degrees in a full circle) and then again by 60 (the number of minutes in a degree), the number that you get is one nautical mile. So by knowing the difference of two latitudes in degrees, one could immediately calculate the distance between them along a great circle (i.e., following a line of longitude) in nautical miles by multiplying it by 60.
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The terrible budget bill that just passed

Congress has passed Trump’s budget bill and, to no one’s surprise, it is an appalling piece of legislation that is reverse Robin Hood, taking from the poor and giving to the one-percenters, plus feeding his xenophobic passion to expel people whom he thinks do not belong here.

Here are the lowlights.

The wealthiest households would see a $12,000 increase from the legislation, and the bill would cost the poorest people $1,600 a year, mainly due to reductions in Medicaid and food aid, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analysis of the House’s version.
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The bill would provide some $350 billion for Trump’s border and national security agenda, including for the U.S.-Mexico border wall and for 100,000 migrant detention facility beds, as he aims to fulfill his promise of the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history.

Money would go for hiring 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, with $10,000 signing bonuses and a surge of Border Patrol officers, as well. The goal is to deport some 1 million people per year.
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The threat posed by masked law enforcement

There have been a vast number of news stories and videos of masked plain clothes ICE agents going around in unmarked cars and grabbing people, striking terror with this death squad-like behavior. Astonishingly, the attorney general Pam Bondi claims that she is unaware of this practice.

The attorney general, Pam Bondi, professed ignorance of reports of immigration officials hiding their faces with masks during roundups of undocumented people, despite widespread video evidence and reports that they are instilling pervasive fear and panic.

Challenged at a Wednesday Capitol Hill subcommittee hearing by Gary Peters, a Democratic senator for Michigan, Bondi, who as the country’s top law officer has a prominent role in the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy, implied she was unaware of plain-clothed agents concealing their faces while carrying out arrests but suggested it was for self-protection.

“I do know they are being doxxed … they’re being threatened,” she told Peters. “Their families are being threatened.”

Bondi’s protestations appeared to strain credibility given the attention the masked raids carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents have attracted on social media and elsewhere.

Yes, she has the nerve to claim that the federal agents who are terrorizing ordinary people are the real victims and scared. Law enforcement officer have long had their names and badges visible so why are ICE agents so scared? It is because they know that they are doing wrong. They are probably ashamed to have their friends and neighbors know what they are doing.
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Blog comments policy

At the beginning of every month, I will repost my comments policy for those who started visiting this site the previous month.

As long time readers know, I used to moderate the comments with a very light hand, assuming that mature adults would know how to behave in a public space. It took outright hate speech targeting marginalized groups to cause me to ban people, and that happened very rarely. But I got increasingly irritated by the tedious and hostile exchanges among a few commenters that tended to fill up the comment thread with repeated posts about petty or off-topic issues. We sometimes had absurdly repetitive exchanges seemingly based on the childish belief that having the last word means that you have won the argument or with increasingly angry posts sprinkled with puerile justifications like “They started it!”

So here is one rule: No one will be able to make more than three comments in response to any blog post. Violation of that rule will result in banning.

But I also want to address a couple of deeper concerns for which a solution cannot be quantified but will require me to exercise my judgment.
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Great moments in legislation

The Republican controlled legislature of Louisiana has passed a bill that bans what they call ‘chemtrails’, the sinister sounding label given to contrails (short for condensation trails) that form, if the atmospheric conditions are right, when hot, humid air from the plane’s jet engines mixes with the cold, dry air of the upper atmosphere, causing the formation of ice crystals. 

Louisiana is not alone. Seven other states have passed similar bills.

Believers in chemtrails hold that the aircraft vapor trails that criss-cross skies across the globe every day are deliberately laden with toxins that are using commercial aircraft to spray them on people below, perhaps to enslave them to big pharma, or exert mind control, or sterilize people or even control the weather for nefarious motives.
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Despite the outlandishness of the belief and the complete absence of evidence, a 2016 study showed that the idea is held to be “completely true” by 10% of Americans and “somewhat true” by a further 20%-30% of Americans.

At least eight states, including Florida and Tennessee, have now introduced chemtrail-coded legislation to prohibit “geo-engineering” or “weather modification”. Louisiana’s bill, which must pass through the senate before reaching Governor Jeff Landry’s desk, orders the department of environmental quality to record reported chemtrail sightings and pass complaints on to the Louisiana air national guard.

While there are no penalties for violations, the bill calls for further investigation and documentation. Opponents fear it could be used to force airlines to re-route flights, challenge the location of airports and bring legal action against carriers.

There are many outlandish things that people believe and this may be one of the more harmless ones. But unlike many other wacky conspiracy theories, (like the moon lading being faked or alien spacecraft having crashed to Earth), this one requires a vast number of people to be involved, as this critic notes

In order to undertake such a conspiracy, literally tens of thousands of people across the globe would have to be in on it, including people manufacturing the fictional weather control chemicals and dispersing equipment, the baggage handlers standing there while the fake technicians are loading it into planes, pilots, plane mechanics, air traffic controllers, and political leaders of countries that don’t like each other. That’s not even considering the untold thousands of red-tape loving, approval stamp wielding bureaucrats needed to undertake such a feat.

But once you have swallowed the big idea, all these other things are seen as just minor details.

The moves to stop Zohran Mamdani have begun

The win by Zohran Mamdani in the New York mayoralty Democratic primary has provided a much needed boost to the spirits of progressives everywhere and stunned political observers. Andrew Cuomo, with nearly $30 million dollars donated by wealthy people, had been comfortably in the lead until Mamdani started making gains in the closing weeks. Mamdani’s supporters had been hopeful of pulling off an upset win but even they expected it to be a drawn out affair, with Cuomo likely leading at the end of the first round of counting and Mamdani hoping to pull ahead with the second and lower preference votes of the other candidates, especially those of Brad Lander, who came in third. Few expected to have Cuomo concede as early as 10:00pm on election night.

It is astonishing that the Democratic party establishment decided that the candidate they would back should be a 69-year year old disgraced former governor who was forced to resign due to allegations of sexual harassment. Even after the election, party leaders like Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries have refrained from endorsing Mamdani. That shows how stuck they are in their old mindset, that they cannot not see that their time is over. But on the other hand, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez strongly backed him all through the campaign, and Jerry Nadler, a New York congressman and one of the city’s most prominent Jewish leaders, endorsed Mamdani after the election, though not before.
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The dangerous practice of subway surfing

Just when I thought that the needless risks that some people take for thrills could not get any crazier, along comes news of something called ‘subway surfing’. This is a phenomenon spurred by social media, where people climb onto to the roofs of subway cars and stand while the cars move. As you can imagine, this can, and does, sometimes end in tragedy when they fall off.

Jaida Rivera’s 11-year son, Cayden, was supposed to be in school at Brooklyn’s Fort Greene preparatory academy on the morning of 16 September last year. Staff saw him in the cafeteria after his grandmother dropped him off at 7.45am.

But 30 minutes later he was marked as absent. Cayden had somehow slipped out, boarded a G subway train traveling south and was riding on top of one of its carriages when he fell on to the tracks at the Fourth Avenue-Ninth Street station just after 10.00am. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

The boy was the youngest of six to die subway surfing in New York City last year – a highly dangerous practice of balancing on top of the swift-moving subway trains as they rattle through the city. It is typically attempted in Brooklyn and Queens, where New York’s subways often run aboveground, and typically in warmer months when schools are in session – suggesting that it has become a dangerous type of after-school activity often spurred by social media cachet.

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