Mercury in Retrograde

[Greg]

I am pretty needy that way.

Just took a walk like a peasant. I didn't photograph the sunrise or the kittens that chased Maeve and I. The walk was done in only the sounds of nature because I couldn't listen to a podcast. How do people live like this? Does the beautiful sunrise even happen if I don't share it to Social Media. Vengeance!

[Drunk Monk]

• December 28, 2022, to January 18, 2023
  
  
• April 21 to May 14
  

This thread is over until April 21. We need a new thread for your whining. Maybe we can call it 'shit happens'...

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

MERC-IN-RET! Why not post all of the crappenings here in one thread? Your arbitrary dates for crappy happenings will be rendered meaningless, science will prevail, and we can all still whinge.

[Greg]

What the Yeti said.

[Drunk Monk]

Hey now

I don’t make the rules. Retrograde motion was established centuries ago by astrologer who believed the sun revolved around the earth. Far be it from us to defy such generated beliefs. It’s astronomicalogical, doncha know!

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

DM wrote: I'm officially ttt-ing this to be our Shit Happens thread because everyone knows that you can NOT post in the Mercury in Retrograde when it's not in retrograde. That's be like posting Sasquatch stories in any of our Yeti threads.

Today has sucked on the web. My main spam axe Buffer decided to process information in a completely new way so all my excel file breaks get mushed together instead of being separated by spaces. That's extremely frustrating and I hope it's just a glitch for today and not a shift in the program. What's more, I had two data crashes, one on the KFM form and another on my remote KFM email access - both of which cost me a chunk of work (under a half hour each so I didn't resort to breaking stuff in a blind frustrated rage). On top of that my remote access bailed for a while asking me for my password, causing me to search in futility until I finally gave up and reset it.

I hate the web today.

---

Sounds exactly like Merc-In-Ret to me!

[Drunk Monk]

Oh I see how it is here...

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Oh I see how it is here...

Hey, that Wandering Earth movie was pretty good. No complaints.

[Greg]

I love our forum.

[thatguy]

Umm... not Merc in Ret, but I wonder what this means:

https://www.sciencealert.com/earths-inne...-direction

Earth's Inner Core May Right Now Be in The Process of Changing Direction


Few of us give much thought to Earth's swirling, spinning contents until some sudden movement, an earthquake or a volcanic eruption, jolts us to our senses.

Geoscientists, though, are a little more clued into the dynamics of Earth's guts, and have just discovered that Earth's solid inner iron core – which usually spins within a near-frictionless molten outer envelope – appears to have slowed to a grinding halt.

Before anybody panics and searches for a copy of a terrible 20-year-old science fiction movie predicting such an event in hopes of inspiring a solution, it's not the first time record of such an event. It's not even the first in recent history.

"We show surprising observations that indicate the inner core has nearly ceased its rotation in the recent decade and may be experiencing a turning-back in a multidecadal oscillation, with another turning point in the early 1970s," geophysicists Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song of Peking University in Beijing write in their published paper.

We've only known for a few short decades that Earth's inner core rotates in relation to the mantle above it, since it was confirmed in 1996 by Song and fellow seismologist Paul Richards at Colombia University. Before their work, the idea that Earth's inner core rotates separately from the rest of the planet was an unproven theory, predicted by an unproven model of Earth's magnetic field.

Since then, earth scientists have been trying to figure out – from a distance of 5,100 kilometers (or 3,170 miles) – how fast or slow the inner core spins.
At first, the inner core was thought to make a full revolution every 400 years, driven by electromagnetic torque and balanced by gravitational pull. But other scientists soon theorized that it spins much slower, taking 1,000 years or more to fully revolve.

The speed of this rotation, and whether it varies, is still debated today. Yet the inner core carries on its merry way, unaware of the raucous debate above.

Weighing back in, Song returned to the same method he and Richards used to infer that the inner core rolls around. In 1996, the duo tracked seismic wave readings from repeated earthquakes called doublets that traversed through the inner core, from the south Atlantic to Alaska, between 1967 and 1995.

Had the inner core not moved, the shock waves should have traversed the same path. But Song and Richards showed that the seismic waves got a fraction of a second faster from the 1960s to 1990s.

Now, in the new study with Yang, Song has revisited that old data, comparing it to more recent patterns of near-identical seismic waves which suggest the inner core has slowed to a stop – and could even be reversing.

They found that since around 2009, paths that previously showed significant temporal variation have exhibited little change as seismic waves coursed through the core and out the other side. Any time difference had disappeared.

"This globally consistent pattern suggests that inner-core rotation has recently paused," Yang and Song write.

It also seems that this recent stalling of the inner core is associated with a rotation reversal, Yang and Song say, the solid iron sphere slipping back the other way as part of a seven-decade oscillation.

Based on their calculations, a small imbalance in the electromagnetic and gravitational forces would be sufficient to slow, and then reverse the inner core's rotation as observed.

That's not all. The researchers point out that the seven-decade switcharoo coincides with other periodic changes observable at Earth's surface, in the length of day and magnetic field, both of which have a periodicity of six to seven decades. Decades-long patterns in climate observations, of global mean temperature and sea level rise, also seem to weirdly align.

To Yang and Song, this frequent, slow-shifting, barely discernible oscillation that swings back and forth every 60 to 70 years seems to indicate "a resonance system across different Earth layers" – as if the planet is all humming to one, droning tune.

Since Earth's inner core is believed to be dynamically linked to its outer layers, tied to the outer core by electromagnetic coupling and bound to the mantle by gravitational forces, the study could also aid our understanding of how processes deep inside our planet affect its surface – the thin crust on which we live, sitting on top of a swirling interior.

"These observations provide evidence for dynamic interactions between the Earth's layers, from the deepest interior to the surface," Yang and Song conclude.

The study has been published in Nature Geoscience.

--tg

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Earth's-core-in-ret is legit, it is only the lack if whinging that makes me question putting it here. Hmmmm...

Stupid, goddam Earth's core made my computer cord break and then disappear which made my spam-bot achieve sentience and screw up traffic on Hwy 17, thus making my netflix stutter.

There. It belongs now.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

G-Man wrote:

Where is the thread for when things go extremely right? Or maybe this a shit happens thread? You make the call.

My iPhone bricked. No lights. No cute noises just a hunk of glass and aluminum and electronic bits. I went and got a new phone, but they told me if my phone had worked, I could have gotten some money for it. I showed the guy at the ATT store my brick to see if he would help me and he just dismissed it. I am not a fan of the ATT store guy. He also immediately tried to upsell of which I am also not a fan.

It bugged me i couldn't get the phone to work so I could at least get some money back on my phone. I figured I would take the phone to an Apple Store and see if they could fix it. I planned on the price of the repair being less than the rebate and I would get some bucks in the difference. Dammit, I want money! Unfortunately, the Apple Store was in Fresno which is a bit of a hike but I was able to couple the visit to the Apple Store with a visit to my Ophthalmologist (That story is elsewhere)

As I walked to the Apple Store (In a mall, no less. A mall full of people, too) I passes a kiosk that offered cell phone repair that included iPhones. I continued on to the Apple Store where the greeter told me I still had seven minutes before he could check me in for my genius bar appointment. Okay. I went back to the kiosk. I told the guy he had six minutes before my genius bar appointment and was there anything he could do for my dead iPhone. He took the challenge and said he needed a few minutes to charge the phone. If there was a battery problem, it would be $60 to replace the battery. Three minutes later, he said my phone was fine.

What the what? What magic did you do? He said he just hard reset the phone and it fired up? I said I did a hard reset and nothing happened. Oh, well. He had the magic fingers. He looked in my settings which showed the battery was fine. It just needed to be charged. Yeeha. He gave me the phone. I went back to the Apple Store and cancelled my appointment which confused them to no end. Was I sure I didn't want to keep my appointment? Look, all I needed for the trade-in offer was my phone to turn on and it was currently doing that.

My old phone is currently in a box by the door waiting to go to ATT. It works fine. I probably didn't need a new phone after all since this one is working.

---

Gotta be consistent about these things

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

DM wrote:

So yeah, I took Yuki to the dog park even though it was raining. It was really just a heavy mist. He didn’t run about at all. There was a husky there but they weren’t interested in playing. Yuki leads me to the gate so I figure we should go.

On the way out, he nibbles some grass. He does that a lot. It doesn’t mean he’s trying to make himself puke. But this time he did. I put him in the passenger side and he must have covertly snuck over the the driver’s side whilst I was walking around the car. Yeah, I sat right in it. Yuki puke.

But I didn’t notice until I got home. We were both kinda wet so the dampness of my bum as the dog vomit seeped through my layers didn’t register.

He seems better now. And I’ve changed my pants and underwear.

Not one of our better dog outings. Nope.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

pm)Drunk Monk Wrote:
(Tuesday, February 21st, 2023, 05:23 pm)Greg Wrote:
Some members of Doom still have working parts? Amazing.

My right arm is okay. My sword arm.


Oh bother. I spoke too soon.

I got to my mom’s house and discovered a section of her backyard fence blew out. If y’all remember, my mom’s house backs up to Ortega park, so the downed fence leaves the yard very exposed. So cancelled my errands for tomorrow and headed to Ace to get some deck nails and new wood. What I really needed was my Makita & wood screws because my dad’s tools include a heavy steel encased drill that needs a long extension cord to reach the fence (I don’t even know if it works anymore) and a hand drill. A hand drill? Wth?

The fence posts are sturdy but a lot of the wood has rotted, mostly the bottom board that held the slats in place. I reinforced the section with new upper & lower beams and then gingerly nailed the slats in as best as I could, trying not to crack the old wood. Lots of splinters. Lots of cussing. But it stands again now. It even looks like a fence again if you don’t look too closely. Hopefully it will withstand the wind storm.

My right forearm is tight as a pickle jar lid all the awkward hammering. I was never great with a hammer.
So much for my right arm going ok.

I will have to come back with my Makita and wood screws to reinforce it all.

Looks like the windstorm has knocked out my wifi here. So my work for tonight and tomorrow comes to a screeching halt.

This afternoon/evening did not go well at all.

[Drunk Monk]

• December 28, 2022, to January 18, 2023
  
  
• April 21 to May 14
  

This thread is over until April 21. We need a new thread for your whining. Maybe we can call it 'shit happens'...

from bicycle day to 4/20 to today

let the whinging begin…