Parade of planets (?)

For some weeks, all the planets have been reasonably well placed for viewing in the evening sky. This is not rare, though it only happens every few years.

Somehow the story grew in the telling, and journalists who don't look at the sky have been reporting that the planets would "line up" in a spectacular "once-in-a-lifetime" grouping at some particular instant this month.

Not quite. The planets are always in a line because the Solar System is roughly in a plane. The planets did not form a compact or dramatic grouping; they were (and are) spread across the sky. But I did get to photograph four of them a few nights ago. (Mercury, Saturn, and Neptune were too low in the sky after sunset.)

Each of these is a stack of the best 50% or so of thousands of video frames, taken with my Celestron EdgeHD 8-inch at f/10 and ToupTek 678 camera. The steadiness of the air was variable; the first picture of Jupiter showed more detail than the later ones. I was gratified to get a picture of Uranus that is brighter on the right than on the left; that's due to the polar cap, which I didn't think would show up at all.

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The Rosette Nebula

On the evening of the 25th, I put the Altair 26C camera on the AT65EDQ refractor (6.5 cm, f/6.5, apochromatic quadruplet) and got this, a stack of 45 2-minute exposures. The nebula is a cloud of hydrogen gas. Note the cracks or dark lines in it.

Happy birthday, Cathy!

May God bless you for many more years!

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The mysterious staircase of Loretto Chapel

While we're on the subject of mysteries (see yesterday), I want to reflect on the mysterious staircase in Loretto Chapel, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

This is not a deep investigation; I want to present this as an example of how to approach a mystery. There may be more information that would change the picture.

Briefly: The chapel was built for a convent and school in Santa Fe in the late 1870s. It is a beautiful building, but the French architect died before it was complete; in particular, it lacked a staircase giving access to the choir loft.

In those days architects did not draw complete plans in advance, and subsequent builders, trying to take over the job, could not figure out how to fit a staircase into the small space available.

The nuns prayed to St. Joseph, and then — we are told — a mysterious man appeared (possibly riding in from the desert on a donkey), built the staircase, and left without accepting payment. It was also determined that he had not charged anything to the project's account at the local lumberyard.

The resulting staircase is remarkable in both engineering and construction. It is a tight spiral, supported on curved stringers without a central column, and is made of a type of wood that is unfamiliar to the area.

So... Was the mysterious man St. Joseph himself (the earthly father of Jesus and a carpenter by trade), as many think?

Let me pause and note that Catholics are not required to believe the miracle story; as far as I know, it has no official status; it is not part of a case for canonization, or anything like that. And one can believe that the mysterious builder was an answer to prayer without being a miraculous appearance of St. Joseph.

One warning sign is that some versions of the story say that the construction took weeks, and some say that it was completed overnight. That shows us that the story may have grown in the telling.

Without assuming that God can't do miracles, I have to ask whether there is specific evidence for a non-miraculous explanation. And there is.

In the area lived a French rancher, Jean-Francois Rochas, who was known as an expert woodworker and who was credited, in an 1895 newspaper, with having built the staircase.

The architect who died, the other architect who was working on the cathedral nearby, and the Archbishop were also all French. Surely, if there were four French people in Santa Fe, they would know each other. As a woodworking enthusiast, M. Rochas may even have conferred with the French architect who died, and may have known something about the plans for the staircase.

And it is quite possible that M. Rochas (1) rode in from across the desert as if appearing from nowhere (actually coming from his ranch), and (2) built the staircase as a donation to the convent, without collecting payment or revealing where he got the wood.

At least, that is the "null hypothesis," as scientists would say. I have not researched this deeply and don't know what other facts might turn up that weigh against it or for it.

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Replacing an SSD in my ThinkPad T490s

During COVID I bought two laptops, a 17-inch ThinkPad P17 and a 14-inch ThinkPad T490s. The first one turned out to be too heavy to carry to the library conveniently, and has short battery life, so it has become my main home computer. The 14-inch T490s is delightfully lightweight, and I take it everywhere I go. I also use it at the telescope.

But its 256-GB SSD was cramping my style; I was becoming reluctant to install more software. It also has a slot for a Micro SD card, which I populated with a 256-GB device, and that became drive D, convenient for storing data but not nearly as fast as drive C, and in particular, not fast enough for quick transfer of astronomical data files.

So I decided to replace drive C with a 1-TB unit. Following this video, I found the process easy. The steps were:

(1) Disable Bitlocker on the old drive C. (I want to be able to read it elsewhere if I need to, after it's taken out.) Decryption took only half an hour.

(2) Install the new drive in an external USB enclosure and connect it to the computer (it is an unformatted device with no drive letter).

(3) Using Macrium Reflect Home (free on 30-day trial), clone the existing drive onto the new, unformatted drive, expanding the partition that is drive C to include additional space (which is actually the default in Macrium when you tell it to copy partitions). (There are other partitions for restoring the system, and the like, and they need to be included but not expanded.)

This, too, might have taken all night, but in fact took under 30 minutes.

(4) Power off the computer, remove the bottom cover, and install the new drive inside it.

That's all! The computer runs fine, with no noticeable loss of battery life from the bigger drive. I still need to enable BitLocker on the new drive.

Conclusions? Macrium makes excellent software (extremely well thought out, easy to use, with lots of attention to detail), and ThinkPads are easy to work on.

I'm going to keep Macrium on my list for when I need new backup software or disk cloning.

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Majorana

The Microsoft quantum computing chip is named after Ettore Majorana (pronounced Maiorana), the 1930s physicist who discovered a type of subatomic particle used in it.

Majorana is the subject of one of Italy's long-standing mysteries. He disappeared in 1938. He had written a note that might suggest he was going to kill himself, but no one ever found his body or any other evidence that he had done so.

Current thinking is that he foresaw nuclear weapons, did not want to contribute to them, and abandoned his career abruptly, possibly to go into a monastery. There is evidence he was seen alive in South America in the 1950s (which is not incompatible with his having entered full-time religious life, but would explain why he wasn't seen much). Books have been written about him — but I have not read them.

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Fame thrust upon me

I ran into upquote.sty unexpectedly the other day. It's turning up everywhere. And it may be the most enduring piece of software I ever created.

It's a package for LaTeX that makes quotation marks in the verb and verbatim environments look like the ones on the keyboard, rather than the curved quotation marks that are usual in TeX (and are so elegant when typesetting English). For those unfamiliar with it, verb and verbatim are for computer code, not English text, and ASCII characters in them ought to look like what they are.

I am grateful to many who have updated and maintained upquote.sty. It is now used in Pandoc, R Markdown, Quarto, Jupyter Notebook, and I have no idea what else.

%%
%% This is file `upquote.sty',
%% generated with the docstrip utility.
%%
%% The original source files were:
%%
%% upquote.dtx  (with options: `package')
%% 
%% Copyright (C) 2000 by Michael A. Covington
%% Copyright (C) 2003 by Frank Mittelbach
%% Copyright (C) 2012 by Markus Kuhn (current maintainer)
%% 
%% Released under the LaTeX Project Public License v1.3c or later
%% See http://www.latex-project.org/lppl.txt
%% 
\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
\ProvidesPackage{upquote}
   [2012/04/19 v1.3 upright-quote and grave-accent glyphs in verbatim]
\newcommand\upquote@cmtt{cmtt}
\newcommand\upquote@OTone{OT1}
\ifx\encodingdefault\upquote@OTone
  \ifx\ttdefault\upquote@cmtt\else\RequirePackage{textcomp}\fi
\else
  \RequirePackage{textcomp}
\fi
\begingroup
\catcode`'=\active
\catcode``=\active
\g@addto@macro\@noligs
   {\let'\textquotesingle
    \let`\textasciigrave
    \ifx\encodingdefault\upquote@OTone
    \ifx\ttdefault\upquote@cmtt
    \def'{\char13 }%
    \def`{\char18 }%
    \fi\fi}
\endgroup
\endinput
%%
%% End of file `upquote.sty'.

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Short notes

As you might guess, I've been busy lately. Several different lines of activity are picking up.

In the meantime, Trump continues to move fast and break things, but he's now attracting lawsuits. I think it is a mistake to think, as our leaders apparently now do, that the Executive Branch is the seat of power. "Separation of powers" doesn't mean the Executive Branch is king. It's nearly the opposite — the Executive Branch exists to execute the plans made by Congress.

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Discontinuing the penny?

For once I want to endorse one of the Trump administration's proposals — discontinuing the penny (one-cent piece), which costs more than 3 cents to make.

But I think we should go farther, and discontinue all circulating coins except the quarter.

The half dollar is already effectively discontinued; it became unpopular back in 1964, when people started seeing it as a JFK/LBJ campaign piece. In the 1970s and 1980s, I never got a half dollar in change, even once.

The nickel costs appreciably more to make than its face value. But if you discontinue just the penny and nickel, you create an awkward situation where the quarter isn't the smallest coin but can't be broken into smaller coins.

More to the point, when the half-cent was discontinued in the 1850s, one cent had the purchasing power of about 35 cents today — that is, more than today's quarter. That was considered small enough.

People say that if we discontinue the penny, prices will go up. Only if people are shopping with pennies in the first place. Who does that any more? I haven't spent any cash at all in several weeks. For two or three years I have carried no coins in my pocket; there's paper money in my wallet, but it's very seldom accessed.

Federal taxes and some other large transactions are already rounded to the nearest whole dollar. And as a computer programmer, I would jump at the prospect of no longer handling fractions of dollars. Computers handle whole numbers much better than decimals. This is especially the case because 0.01 — that is, one cent — has no exact representation in binary, for the same reason that 1/3 does not have an exact representation in decimal. So to handle cents, the computer has to simulate decimal arithmetic in various roundabout ways. Handling whole numbers is built into computer hardware and goes much faster.

Some people may shed a tear that it's no longer 1958. But... it really is no longer 1958!

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"Move fast and break things"

(From Facebook.)

At risk of having everyone hate me because I open my mouth about politics, I want to bring out an issue that has been lurking in the background.

I am in favor of trimming government spending and eliminating waste. But I do not consider rank-and-file federal employees, nor scientists and students supported by federal money, to be ENEMIES who need to be PUNISHED.

Apparently quite a few people do, and they feel a thrill at the prospect of making these people suddenly worse off. "The government doesn't owe anyone a job," said one person today — but when the government does hire someone, surely it has the same responsibilities as any other employer, to deal with them in good faith and not break promises or cause needless hardship.

"Move fast and break things" means "Move fast and hurt people" and is not good management, much as it thrills a certain kind of person. Waste can be trimmed in an orderly way. And most of the waste is in large programs, not small specialized ones.

Don't punish the employees and students. Give them an orderly path to a soft landing. In fact, look inside yourself. Ask whether you yourself want to make people worse off, and if so, why, and what it says about your character.

Addendum: Trump and Musk's campaign to "eliminate fraud and waste" strikes me as bizarre. It started with firing the Inspector Generals (whose job is to eliminate fraud and waste) and has shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Public communications have been suspended so that the FDA cannot announce food recalls and the CDC cannot tell us their measurements of COVID and flu prevalence. Research grants and stipends have been cut off suddenly so that, as far as I can determine, graduate students and postdocs were suddenly left without their paychecks. This is not what good government looks like.

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Solving a contradiction in the Bible

St. Paul became a Christian when he saw a blinding light and heard the voice of Jesus in Heaven. The people around him saw the light. It is unclear whether they heard the voice.

Acts 9:7 says, "The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one" (ESV).

Acts 22:9 says, "Now those who were with me saw the light but did not [hear] the voice of the one who was speaking to me" (ESV: "understand").

The context of the first verse seems to indicate that the light was visible to all, so that's not a contradiction. The question is what the men heard.

The Greek words for "voice" and "hear" are the same in both verses. There is a slight difference of grammar; the object of "hear" is in the genitive case in the first one and the accusative in the second. Scholars differ as to whether this indicates that in the second verse it meant "understand." That is not perfectly clear.

So how do we approach this?

Some would say, "See, this proves the Bible is all blarney." But I respond that even if this episode were total fiction, you'd expect a careful writer not to contradict himself, especially since the text was copied many, many times by scribes who would notice problems.

A second possibility is that — since two different people are describing the incident — one of them was mistaken or less informed. The first verse is the narrator of Acts (presumably St. Luke) speaking in his own voice; the second is Paul giving a speech.

But the third, the one for my money, is that the incident was something that could be honestly described both ways.

That is the approach I'd take to a contradiction in a book that didn't claim divine inspiration: Assume the author had something coherent in mind, and figure out what it was.

That brings us back to the interpretation that the men heard a sound (the word for "voice" can mean "sound") but did not understand the voice (the word for "hear" can mean "understand"). Case closed?

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Another wide-field view of Monoceros

On February 3 I got the same equipment out again — Askar 200-mm f/4 telephoto lens, Altair 26C camera, and Losmandy GM811G mount with iOptron iGuider — and took aim at Monoceros again. Much time was wasted because the guide camera was loose in its holder, and this led to bad guiding, as well as error messages such as "Guiding stopped because the telescope has slewed" when it definitely hadn't.

But I ended up with a series of 75 2-minute exposures, which stacked very nicely. Here is a large part of the end result, followed by a more tightly cropped presentation of the central region. The blue-green color in some of the white areas is due to the Orion SkyGlow filter.

M42 (Orion Nebula) by Askar and Altair

Yesterday evening was clear and not too cold, and I decided to try the Altair 26C camera on my Askar ACL200 200-mm f/4 astrographic lens, a combination I had not yet tried. This is a stack of 28 2-minute exposures with an HDR (high dynamic range) effect applied to bring out detail in the bright areas.

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A wide field in Monoceros

My second target for the night was part of the constellation Monoceros, including an almost uncatalogued nebula I've been paying attention to, plus many other dramatic clouds of dust and gas. Unfortunately, I forgot to cool the camera sensor, but the effect on picture quality was small. Like the previous picture, this was taken with the Askar 200-mm f/4 astrographic lens and Altair 26C camera, with an Orion SkyGlow broadband nebula filter. This one didn't have HDR effects applied, and unlike in the picture above, you're looking at the entire field of view. This is a stack of 49 2-minute exposures.

The state of AI

For two weeks, for several projects, I've been intensively surveying the current state of generative AI and LLMs. And here's something interesting...

I haven't heard even one clear mention of consciousness or "artificial general intelligence."

The objective now is to do useful work by mixing techniques any way that helps.

People are no longer trying to prove that a table of word frequencies can become conscious and take over the world. Instead, they mix LLMs with other software (both conventional AI and non-AI) to get things done.

Up-and-coming ideas include fine tuning (giving an LLM extra training on authoritative documents, to override less accurate information in the original training set), reinforcement learning (further training the LLM with feedback from human users and/or other AI, including good old-fashioned rule-based AI), agents (letting the generative system create a series of tasks rather than a series of words), and tools (letting the AI call upon other software to get exact answers).

This may be a bigger change than we had a couple of years ago when ChatGPT went public.

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Batting near zero?

Now that we can track packages on the Internet, I'm seeing how much can go wrong.

A package that I mailed to Miami has reportedly been delivered twice, several days apart, at the same location. I mean they are reporting completed deliveries, not delivery attempts. I haven't heard that the recipient actually got it. It's parts from a broken laptop, but it's packaged like a normal laptop, and I suspect there's about to be a very disappointed thief in South Florida.

An auto part that I ordered from RockAuto in Las Vegas was due here yesterday, but instead, it's taking an unscheduled multi-day vacation in Tucson. It's a taillight cover, and I need it before driving the car in the rain, if possible.

And — this isn't about shipping, but rather telephone follies — one of Melody's prescriptions at a mail-order pharmacy was snagged for two weeks because they couldn't send a text message to our home telephone number. It's not a cell phone! It took them two weeks to get around to dialing it and talking. They got me on the phone, but if I hadn't been here, it would have made a recording. Yes, youngsters, there are still telephones in the world that don't receive texts.

That would be comical, but a two-week delay with a new prescription is not a good thing.

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