And Hawking radiation. Hawking radiation is pretty “dark” for solar-mass scale black holes and up, but it can become relatively very intense for smaller holes.

For the holes we observe astronomically, the things we can see are the accretion disks and the orbits of stars around the black hole.

UPDATE: As the deadline expired today, the prosecution dropped this motion which discloses that they searched an attorney’s phone with a warrant.

Because the stuff on this phone is a landmine of attorney-client privilege, they contend, there must be a complicated and lengthy clean room-style process to sort the privileged stuff from non-privileged.

Comey disagrees and wants to challenge the search warrant first.

I strongly suspect they didn’t actually turn over much of anything today, but we shall see.

You missed “CM,” which was common in copyright statements in the 20th century.

“White House” gave the big rant, not Trump. I wonder what Trump’s doing that could possibly be more important than this? My money’s on illness.

BUT this time her own children are facing the premium hikes. That makes everything totally, completely different.

Just for context, almost every federal court is a branch of a state court.

This is not true at all.

Federal courts are part of the judicial branch, not the executive branch. So they don’t shut down when the executive branch “shuts down”, because the shutdown laws don’t apply to them. As a practical matter federal courts can keep running for a while using saved up court fee revenue. They will eventually run out of that money and gave some tough choices about what to do.

Ah, you misunderstand. Venezuela is both a stable country that these 300k people can return to and a narco-state run by Tren de Aragua that regularly sends drug shipments into the Caribbean Sea on ordinary fishing boats.

You just have to develop a knack for holding onto both of these ideas at the same time.

The soybeans are not solely grown for export. They also fix nitrogen into the soil for the massive corn crop. And as to the corn, I think some of it is exported, but a lot of it is going to animal feed and high fructose corn syrup. So there’s a vector for food price impacts, particularly at the cheap and processed end of the domestic food supply.

Guys, gals, and non-binary pals, I present to you the Kavanaugh Stop:

Moreover, as for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U. S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.

It’s pretty well settled mathematics that infinities are “the same size” if you can draw any kind of 1-to-1 mapping function between the two sets. If it’s 1-to-1, then every member of set A is paired off with a member of B, and there are no elements left over on either side.

In the example with even integers y versus all integers x, you can define the relation x <–> y = 2*x. So the two sets “have the same size”.

But the real numbers are provably larger than any of the integer sets. Meaning every possible mapping function leaves some reals leftover.

There’s a rule that the flight has to be within so many minutes of a diversion airport at all times, and this is hard to do in Antarctica.

Nowadays, 180 minutes is fairly common, and there are some planes and airlines that can go to 240 or even as high as 370.

If you’re getting into private jets, you should also know that brands have reputations even there.

Gulfstream is a luxury brand within the private jet world. You can easily get a comparable product from Bombardier or Cessna Textron that performs equivalently, but only pay half as much operating costs as Gulfstream. Like Gucci, you pay a lot of money just for the Gulfstream name.

At the low end of the market, Honda makes a small jet. (This is in the Very Light Jet category which bumps up against the turboprop market).

At the very high end of the market you get into Boeing Business Jets, and the Airbus equivalent. These are converting airliners to your exact interior design specifications. Airliners are like another order of magnitude higher cost to operate.

“Scorched” is the right word here:

• The judge photocopied a handwritten anonymous post card he received directly at the top of the page, before the case caption.
• The post card reads like a veiled threat: “Trump has pardons and tanks. What do you have?”
• then the judge writes a public letter to the post card writer, inviting them to read the opinion too see how it works. At the very end, he invites the post card writer to come see the administration of justice in person, at the Boston court house.
• Out of 161 pages, the judge spends 12 pages talking about Donald Trump’s flaws as a person and as a President. This section is not super related to the main opinion, which is about the first amendment and immigrants.
• This judge was appointed by Ronald Reagan, and he’s been on the bench since approximately forever ago.

The whole piece seems to have serious literary aspirations, not typical of a judicial opinion. Especially with the post card as a literary framing device. The judge seems to be talking, not just to the litigants in this case, but to the average MAGA American, represented by the post card writer. And also to all patriotic Americans, now and in the future. This is a bugle call, cutting above the din, calling to ordinary Americans to retake Constitutionalism as Americanism. The rule of law as American patriotism.

One of the progress sliders on the sickbay monitor really did say “health insurance remaining.”

There’s a class of orbits called “polar orbits” that are sideways and perpendicular to the spin of the earth. These orbits are useful for satellites whose main job is taking pictures of earth, because they will cover nearly all of the earth’s territory over time. You get into a polar orbit by launching to the north outer south.

Aside from that, nearly all launches go towards the spin of the earth, because it’s a free boost. The fancy rocketry word for this is “prograde”.

The sun appears to traverse from east to west in the sky. This means that the earth is moving the opposite way: west to east. So if you want to take advantage of the free boost, the rocket needs to take off in an easterly direction.

The amount of spin you get is greatest if you launch from the tropics near the equator, and it falls off at greater north or south latitudes. In theory, if you set up a launch pad at the north pole, the spin boost would be zero in all directions, because you’re just rotating in place. At the equator, the free boost is around 1000 mph or 1600 km/hr.

So the ideal launch site is as close to the equator as possible, and it has low population off to its east, in case the rocket blows up or crashes. The United States has two sites that meet these criteria: one in Florida and one in extreme south Texas. Both of these face an ocean to the east. Europe launches Ariane rockets from French Guiana in South America. Russia uses Kazakhstan, which is on the southern ends of the old Soviet Union.

Red is crap. Gotta go blue or clear.

It certainly seems to be going that way. If Trump can just choose not to spend money that Congress appropriated… Well, that’s a lot more power than even George III had when Thomas Jefferson wrote out that listicle of 28 reasons why he sucked.

This is the fringe legal theory called unitary executive becoming not so fringe at all. In fact it seems to be headed towards firmly mainstream, precedential status.

Article II, section 1:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

Everyone used to think this sentence was pretty harmless. It was put in to say there’s one President at the top, instead of an executive committee (which was proposed and debates at the convention).

But to the unitary executive theorists, that one sentence actually means that all of the executive Power must flow through the President, and there can be no executive Power that does not.

The previous thinking is that this power was only talking about the powers specifically listed in Article II, which is not a lot. (Veto, cabinet nominations, pardons, and a few other things). And that if Congress chose to delegate part of its Article I power to the executive branch by passing a law, it could put whatever limitations, checks, and balances it wanted to.

He has the kind of legal defense where they file a motion challenging the constitutionality of the entire federal death penalty because, hey, it’s worth a shot.

This is absolutely the best representation that can be had at any price.