Edition #1143

Wednesday.

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” Norman Vincent Peale, quoted in Fortune. Like it? I do. It feels very optimistic, something we all need.

I would say that I don’t like picking on Pete Hegseth, but that would be an obvious lie. Such a performative jackass, wearing his overwrought religiosity on his sleeve (showing how little he has absorbed from his religion), and attempting to display a virility that he clearly has not obtained. And so, in that light, you have to read this evaluation of his displays that are intended to show what a true man/soldier/bro should be able to do. In short, as you may have seen from time to time, he and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. have posted videos and images of their fitness routines. But for those in the know, Hegseth’s form in the chin-up and push-up, in particular, is very subpar. The proper way to do a chin-up is an overhand grip (the underhand used by Pete is acceptable but considered much easier…wimp), keeping your legs straight below you, and then pulling all the way up and then all the way down. While apparently Pete can do a few the right way, he soon morphs into a frenzy of leg kicking and back arching (kipping) that makes the exercise easier. Similarly with the push-up, you take yourself all the way down (sometimes even lifting your hands off the ground, and then push all the way up. But Hegseth cheats by not going all the way down and not going all the way up. You can hear in one video someone calling him out. The net of this is that, if he were being judged by those he wants to judge, very few of his reps would be counted. Seriously, his clownishness makes this effort way too easy and fun.

By now you may have heard that the most recent studies are concluding that drinking five cups of coffee a day is good for your heart health. Over the years, I have read many reviews of studies that go in all sorts of directions. Good for this physiological system, bad for that one, meh for some other. And this can be seen for almost anything we can put into or on our body. Of course, most of these studies seem to direct their attention to a single or just a few factor. So something that might be good for the heart can be bad for the liver or kidney or whatever. And, as I have stated multiple times before, the tendency of the media is to make the message very simple, losing the nuance and caution that is often included in the actual studies. The result is a misinterpretation of the message to the general public. While too much coffee, or caffeine intake, is known to be bad, I am sure there are some who will now greatly increase their coffee habits to the point of absurdity. But as a coffee drinker, I will admit that this new information is better than the opposite.

So the second attempt to launch Starship for the thirteenth time on Monday was a bust, following the same scenario as last Thursday (unless I watched the wrong video). But tomorrow at 3:45 pm Pacific Time, another attempt will take place. And given the importance of Starship development, as well as that of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon, we do want this to go well. So watch or not, but now you are in the loop.

So what do you do when you are tasked with flying past a small asteroid at great speeds as a follow-on mission for which you were not originally built? You make a very close pass. Not the kind of pass I made on a young ingénue some forty-four years ago, which resulted in the best decision I ever made. No, this is something entirely different. Usually, a probe will pass some sixty or so miles from an object like this to ensure a measure of caution. But Japan’s Hayabusa2 probe was not satisfied with that. Actually, such a distance would have been a bit silly. If you were paying attention, Hayabusa2’s original mission was to meet up with another asteroid, Ryugu, which it did. So its instruments were intended for a close encounter, in which samples were taken and delivered back to Earth. So at a distance of sixty miles from asteroid Torifune, the images of this small rock would have been kind of not worth the effort. So program directors fought a long and hard battle to get permission to get close. And close is what they got, venturing some eight hundred meters above Torifune’s surface.

………………..And What a Sight –

While looking a bit like a potato, this is a great example of a “contact-binary.” This is when two asteroids collide so gently that they merely move together, rather than explode in a major collision. And since the overall mission of Hayabusa2 is to collect data towards redirecting asteroids that may be on a collision course towards Earth, the existence of contact-binaries is a bit of a puzzle. If you want to redirect an asteroid by hitting it with some massive object to deflect it, you want to hit it on center, or at least where it is the most massive. If you hit a contact binary in the middle, it may just pass through with little effect. Or you might hit one lobe with no effect on the other. Anyway, I just liked the photo.

If you thought that Trump was the only one to be caught in an intricate, ingenious trap, you were wrong. In this war of survival, a spider is looking to munch down on the green tree ant, an ant known for its collective aggressiveness. To trap one ant on its own turf would invite retaliation sufficient enough to threaten the spider’s life. So cleverness is what is needed. And while the official name of this spider has not been determined yet, it is being called the ballista spider for its ability to build a version of a ballista, the ancient siege weapon that could launch a projectile quickly. What this spider does is build, over the course of four hours, an elaborate cone of webbing consisting of up to sixty strands that are pulled to great tension while the ends are glued to a surface. The webbing is then coated with a sticky substance to lure the ant. Once the ant is stuck and squirms to escape, the glue lets go and the ant is catapulted up to the spider’s main web. This all happens so fast that a blink of the eye will miss it. Which is the point, as the ant is gone before his compatriots can come to its rescue. Cool, no? Cool, yes!

Ever since seeing Frankenstein way back in the youth part of my life, I have wanted to have reason to scream out that phrase…”It’s Alive!!!” Just as Gene Wilder did in Young Frankenstein years later. Well, a group of Dr. Frankenstein wannabes now have the license to do just that. This group of scientists put together a cell from scratch, meaning that they took the basic ingredients of a cell using thirty-six genes and a few hundred molecules, and viola…somehow. The cells, containing a small fraction of the number of molecules of a naturally occurring cell, were able to feed, grow, and replicate, albeit on a reduced level. The cells had to be hand-fed (not sure how you hand-feed an individual cell), and after five generations, it gave up trying. And while the techniques that were used have been open-sourced for anyone interested in furthering the creation of life, isn’t that a bit dangerous? I understand the promise of creating new organisms that can solve some of today’s problems…medical, environmental, and more. But aren’t we, at the same time, opening the door for nefarious actors to do their damage to the world as well? And so “open source?” Has anyone thought this through?

Man, whoever said that I was getting old was right, apparently. I meant to include the image above in yesterday’s Food for Thought Nugget, but for some reason, I do know the reason, I forgot. Not that it is such a great photo, but it was supposed to be included, and it was not. Now it is.

Nothing really new happened while I was writing this. The cost of the Iran war is in the mid-thirty-billion-dollar range, assuming you do not include the damage that Iran inflicted on our bases and equipment. And our casualties were pretty minimal, if you do not count the number of injured personnel. In other words…” look over here!... Bright shiny object!” Stay healthy and be good to each other.

Me.