Astronomy

I have been struggling for several years now, intermittently, to get my Losmandy G811G goto mount to work. I am quite sure it us pilot error. Supergrok has been walking me through the process. Every night I get a bit closer. Tonight's discovery was that the watch battery that keeps static knowledge of date and time needs replacing.

Semester is Over

Grades submitted. For the first time in many semesters, no one failed. A number of students withdrew who were clearly either not ready or too busy for this class.

I was pleased that A students were largely the ones who most clearly relied on HI not AI. This may be my last semester teaching. College of Western Idaho only employs Idaho residents.  This makes sense: Idaho taxpayers are paying the salaries; we are no longer short of well-educated people here. I am not sure what my chances are of getting an adjunct position in eastern Tennessee.

Such a Beautiful House and View

If only we could pick it up and move it to East Tennessee. 

Busy Day

We had a moving garage sale with our daughter and son-in-law.  Leas stuff to pack, load, and ship and a small amount of cash in return. 

More Fraud Convictions

5/14/26 CBS News:

A woman who earned a West Michigan Woman of the Year award will serve over five years in federal prison for a $1.4 million fraud scheme that misdirected money meant for preschool services, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Michigan said.

Nkechy Ezeh, 61, of Kent County, was sentenced on Wednesday in U.S. District Court to 70 months on fraud and a concurrent 60 months for evading income taxes, the district attorney's office said. She was ordered to start serving the prison time immediately.

Ezeh was also ordered to pay a total of $1.4 million in restitution to the victims of the scheme, along with $390,174 to the Internal Revenue Service.

Her nonprofit organization, Early Learning Neighborhood Collaborative, shuttered in 2023, with 35 people laid off as a result, the district attorney's office said.

A million here, a billion there, to paraphrase Sen. Bayh, after a while, it adds up to real money. If all this welfare state funding was making poor people better off, you might excuse the good intentions.

Someone Did Not Read the Last Page of the Book

Marc Elias, Democrat attorney, is so upset that the Virginia Suoreme Court told them their gerrymandering was unconstitutional that he is quoting the Virginia Constitution's right to revolution clause. Is he proposing the people of Virginia abolish the state government which is entirely controlled by Democrats.  Sedition! Very J6, if you ask me. 

Democrats are fast losing the plot. As the meme says: Democrats have not been this upset at Republicans since they took away their slaves, prosecuted the KKK, and integrated public schools. 

Maybe the Blue Wave Will Not Happen

The Court ruled last week that the Voting Rights Act violated the Constitution.  Remember: "The only way to stop discrimination is to stop discriminating " 

5/11/26 SCOTUSBlog: Alabama adopted new non-racially discriminatory district lines in 2013, which of course infuriated the party which caused Congress to pass the Voting Rights Acts in 1965. which The courts blocked the new maps because Democrats are dependent on racist districts.

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The Court just applied last week's decision to Alabama.  Thry are now allowed to use the 2013 map.

Too Horrifying to Quote

5/12/26 Daily Mail describes the report of what was done to the October 7th victims. Useful for your friends who insist that the Israelis a

Dow 50K

The Dow Industrials are above 50K  i remember when Abby Cohen Goldman was hyping that it was going to break 20K just before the dot-com bust in 2000. I am not seeing the same sort of absurd overconfidence.  I am seeing a lot of doom and gloom sorts claiming the market is bubbillicous. Some have saying thus for many months. 

I wonder how much of this seeing the Democrats getting ready to fail to retake the House, and how much is an endorsement of Trump’s policies  

Not a Small Fraud Problem

 Over on X, I have been seeing TDS sufferers complaining that allegations of Medicare fraud are overblown and are just a small number of bad actors. The scale of bad actors matters.

5/14/26 CBS News:

The owner of a healthcare software company was convicted of massive Medicare fraud on Thursday, the Department of Justice said, ending what Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche called "one of the most egregious fraud schemes in Florida history." ...

Blackman and his co-conspirators billed Medicare and other federal healthcare benefit programs over $1 billion throughout the course of the scheme, the Department of Justice said. Medicare and the other programs paid out more than $450 million.

How in the Heck Did This Happen?

My wife wanted to reduce the mass of ammo to move, so we pulled it out and stacked it up.

And there are several thousand rounds of .223 below the table. If you are local and need .223,  308, 9mm, .380, .45; or  22LR, let me know. I need to pull some aside. If I can sell most of this at current prices, I can replace it in Tennessee. A few hundred rounds can move with us by car. But several thousand rounds takes up a lot of space and may make it harder to camouflage its nature in the car.

Another reason not to move it is that there is a small possibility that we might sell our house and need to move without a new house bought there so shipping it would be hard.

If You Grew Up Watching the Roadrunner Cartoons

You will look forward to this movie: Coyote v. Acme in which Wile E. Coyote hires an ambulance chaser to sue Acme for all the  injuries.

One Thing I Will Miss When I Move

5/12/26 CBS channel 2:

BOISE, Idaho (CBS2) — A 22-year-old Boise man convicted in two separate cases involving sexual abuse and strangulation was sentenced Tuesday morning to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

When we first moved here, I read Idaho Supreme Court decisions to get a feel for the place. I read a decision upholding life + 20 for two counts of child molestation. What? The statute at that time made sexual abuse of a child punishable by 1 year to life 

Greenland

5/12/26 BBC:

 The US has been holding regular negotiations with Denmark to expand its military presence in Greenland, according to multiple officials familiar with the discussions, with talks between both sides progressing in recent months.

US officials are seeking to open three new bases in the south of the territory, a semi-autonomous part of Denmark, as they work to resolve a diplomatic crisis sparked by President Donald Trump when he threatened to seize Greenland by force.

Trump’s style of negotiation is brusque and ugly. It usually works. 

Teaching Historical Research and Writing in the Age of AI

I am flummoxed by the problem of teaching historical research and writing in the era of AI. It is not that AI cannot produce first year research papers. It can. They are often well organized and usually well written. The problems are:

1. They hallucinate. They make up sources. They cite work with no relevance to the subject. Example: a paper about colonial religion referenced a book about Spurgeon, a 19th century evangelist.

2. The usually do pretty shallow analysis of texts.

3. Fundamentals of Chicago Manual of Style such as page numbers, headers, double spaced first line indented seems to be beyond many of these programs.  In a sense, these minutiae do not teach either research methods or writing.  They do teach attention to detail.

One approach that some universities are tsking is scaffolding: breaking the process apart into individual parts.

1. Show me the question you are going to answer..

2. How did you find sources to answer that question. AI may be a perfectly fine method of finding sources. (Are your old enough to remember Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature?)

3. Your sources: explain their relevance to this question; what do they say about the topic?

4. What are the topic sentences for each paragraph? What is the sequence of topics you are going to cover?

4. Show me your bibliography.  Get it in Chicago Manual of Style. Again, using AI to do the housekeeping is quite mechanical. 

6. Write the paper filling in the paragraphs for each topic sentence.

7. Show that you can do the formatting for Chicago Manual of Style: header, page numbers, paragraph formatting.

8. Submit the paper.

The student must complete each step that can often be done by AI. You can ask the student to explain how he/she/indeterminate made those decisions and provide feedback for how it is supposed to be done. The full laziness of prompting AI and doing a copy pastae into Word is eliminated. Even if every step is AI-assisted, the student learns what each step looks like and can presumably do it in a post-EMP world using dead trees sources.

Thoughts?

I Blame Trump

5/10/26 Axios:

Violent crime fell sharply across the largest U.S. cities in early 2026, extending a nationwide decline that began after the pandemic-era crime spike.

 

Why it matters: Data from 67 major U.S. law enforcement agencies show violent crime fell across major categories during the first quarter compared with the same period in 2025.

Curiously, one of the cities that had a big drop was DC. Remember when the left was in an uproar because Trump used the National Guard to deal with their crime problem? 

A Change of Relocation Plans

My wife and I will chauffeur the dogs cross country in her car. This also simplifies getting all the guns and ammo there as well as the two telescope mirrors  

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Also, a nice road trip!

The Cadillac goes in a closed carrier for about $1300.

Democrat Desperation

5/10/26 New York Times article about Virginia Democrats are discussing lowering the mandatory retirement age for the Virginia Supreme Court to 54 to forcec all the justices on the court (many Democrats) to leave so the Democrats can appoint lapdogs.

This is a sign of desperation.  Even Democrats commenting over there recognize the absurdity of it.

Blessed Are the Peacemakers

 5/9/26 BBC:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he thinks Russia's conflict with Ukraine is coming to an end, addressing reporters after a scaled-back military parade in Moscow marking the Soviet victory in World War Two.

"I think that the matter is coming to an end," he said, referring to the "special military operation" in Ukraine, while condemning Western support for the Kyiv government.

Russia's annual parade lacked the usual display of tanks and missiles, due to security concerns as authorities feared Ukraine might target Red Square with drones.

A last-minute ceasefire between Moscow and Kyiv, brokered by US President Donald Trump, reduced the danger of any attack and the parade passed off without incident.

Of course, Putin has talked peace before and it meant nothing. But if Trump's efforts lead to peace, the Democrats will lose it even more than they have already 

Just Saw This on X

More Packaging Crimes

I ordered an eight pound counterweight recently.  A box arrived about the right size but way too light:

After digging through brown paper wrapping paper and a packing list:

Yes, 5 stainless steel setscrews that could have been mailed in a tiny padded envelope.

Things That AI Is NOT Good For

Anything mechanical. If SuperGrok or ChatGPT was gven control of a robot their lack of mechanical sense and inability to accurately read manufacturer manuals and diagrams would destroy vast numbers of cars, generators, turbines, hand tools,:and houses the first day.

I think jobs for historians and blue collar workers remain safe, for the moment. AI  is, i think, the dot-com bubble of the 2020s.

Oh yes, and too much of, "Use a bigger hammer."

I Need a Very Short Piece of 3" Aluminum Rod

I mean under 6". I do not need a foot of it. Ideally somewhere near by. I have looked at Big Box and hardware store web sites. I am going to replace the knobs on my refea 

The Amazing Autism Increase

5/9/26 Fox News quoting North Carolina auditor:

Boliek is sounding the alarm on potential waste, fraud, and abuse within the state’s Medicaid program, specifically calling out in an interview with Fox News Digital a 47,000% explosion in autism therapy billings that he has flagged since taking office last year. 

"Those are vital services to folks and individuals that need that therapy," Boliek said. "But when you have, like in North Carolina, a system that went from $1.4 million or so in total billings for autism therapy to more than $660 million a year in billings on autism therapy within a five-year range, that begs an audit from the state auditor, who in North Carolina, we are the top watchdog agency for taxpayer waste, fraud, and abuse prevention. So we've dug down into that or in the middle of that."

There has long been concern that additives have caused the dramatic increase in autism. I think i see a more likely reason.

AI Hallucinating: Why AI Will Not Be Replacing Us Soon

 A student turned in a paper that cited The Puritan Moment: The Influence of Protestant Thought on Early American Political Culture (Oxford University Press, 1998). Worldcat.org cannot find it in any library worldwide; books.google.com has not heard of it; a general Google search does not find it. There is a similarly titled book: William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Oxford University Press, 1983). 

"Manifest Destiny": Historians Usually Credit John L. O'Sullivan With This Phrase

In 1845, John L. O'Sullivan (1813-1895), editor of the Democratic Review, referred in his magazine to America's "manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions."  student moved it to 1839 because of a secondary source.

Because I knew this was wrong, I went searching for where O'Sullivan first used this phrase. Indeed, it was 1845.

But extending my search range to earlier years, I found that he was not the first American to use that phrase, and in that general sense.

"Hard-Right": What Does That Mean?

5/8/26 NBC News:

LONDON — Early results Friday from nationwide elections in Britain suggested a historic drubbing for Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and sweeping gains for hard-right Reform U.K., led by Trump ally Nigel Farage.... [emphasis added]

Labour losses and Reform gains were no surprise; polls had long telegraphed the direction of travel just two years after Starmer led Labour to power in a 2024 landslide. However, with votes still being counted, the scale of Labour’s losses appeared epic.

Reform won hundreds of local council seats in working-class areas in England’s north, wiping the ruling party out in places like Hartlepool that were once solid Labour turf.

Farage called it “a truly historic shift in British politics” and that Labour was being “wiped out by Reform in many of their traditional areas.”

Reform is hostile to Labour's enthusiasm for making Britain more multicultural by allowing largescale immigration from the Third World. The Pakistani child rape gangs, short-lived NHS support for incestuous marriages, are all perfectly good reasons for the support Reform enjoys. Deporting illegal immigrants, having police go after violent criminals instead of prosecuting Britons using antisocial media, rebuilding British military power (whose weakness was shown recently by their inability to get a ship to Cyprus in a timely manner), backing away from net zero.

Hard-right. What is happening is that much as Democrats abandoned blue collar and middle-class Americans for the far more trendy LGBTWTF, illegal immigrant, and millionaire segments (to the benefit of Republicans generally and Trump specifically), Labour abandoned their traditional base.

Why Do So Many People Distrust Public Education?

5/7/26 Daily Mail:

 A group of Canadian schoolchildren were forced to flee a theater performance about Indigenous rights after a drag queen began gyrating and 'putting their boobs in kids faces.'

Campbell Collegiate students in Saskatchewan were pulled out midway through a performance at the Globe Theatre this week after the 'production reached levels of maturity beyond expectations,' according to teachers.

I guess that i should be pleased that the teachers realized that indigenous rights claims mattered less than sexual depravity.  Admittedly, it is Saskatchewan a fairly conservative part of Canada   

Well Pump Installation Under Way

So looking forward to a shower.

It took less time thsn expected so less than $5000.

Things to Know About Well Pumps

I was thrilled that Burgess Pump & Well had a technician at my house in an hour. After troubleshooting the segment from the pump controller to the well it seemed clear the problem was down the well. He lifted the well pump and motor out in 20 foot sections. Pull 20 feet up unscrew that section pull up another 20 feet.

The well is 250 feet deep. The pump was at 120 feet. The pump part was okay. The motor was toast. Whoever put in the well cheaped out to get a lower bid. The pump was rated for 3 horsepower; the motor was 1 1/2  horsepower. The extra load of running the motor at too  high a load burned it up a few months out of warranty.

Anyway, the cost of replacing it is about $5200. At least when we list it, "New well pump under warranty."  American Home Shield will cover $1500 of it. I expect authorization tomorrow and new pump same day or next. I am getting tired of not showering, doing dishes, laundry, and turning flushing into a complex reloading process.

AI May Destroy Teaching But It Is Going to Revolutionize Many Fields

4/30/26 Science:

If you walk into an emergency room (ER) in 10 years, you’ll encounter a new type of caregiver: an artificial intelligence (AI) system designed to get you a diagnosis faster and help your care team make more informed decisions. While you sit in the waiting room, you’ll be hooked up to a blood pressure cuff that’s constantly and autonomously monitored. All the while, an AI agent will be listening in while you and your doctor talk about your symptoms, ready to flag any mistakes your physician makes or suggest next steps.

This vision of AI-assisted emergency health care may soon be reality. In a new study, researchers show that a type of AI known as a large language model (LLM) often outperformed physicians at diagnosing complex and potentially life-threatening conditions, including decreased blood flow to the heart, even in the fast-moving stages of real ER care when information is limited, they report today in Science. In early ER cases, the model identified the correct or a very close diagnosis in about 67% of cases, compared with roughly 50% to 55% for physicians. And the technology is only getting better.

“Evaluating AI in medicine demands both depth and breadth across different clinical tasks and settings,” and these authors were able to incorporate both in this study, says Shreya Johri, a computer scientist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who was uninvolved with the new research. Still, she notes, wide adoption of these AI systems in health care will hinge on knowing the contexts in which they’re most reliable.

Fine with me as long as the LLMs are not filled with antiracism crap which denies that there are genuine physiological differences, at least at the means between races. 

Faster, no exhausted ER doctors at the end of a long shift, less fear of lawsuits. For some specialty medical care, shorter wait times and larger supply.

This is also an earlier version of OpenAI. Everything is getting better and faster.

Well Pump

After repeated calls, our home warranty company has authorized us to get a local vendor to come and do an estimate. 

When the Communists Come to Power...

whining millionaires

Yes. They will pass by her mansion because she showed her solidarity with the people! $12 million means she could invest it in municipal bonds of her state and enjoy $480,000 a year income exempt from federal and state income tax. Can you live comfortably on $40,000 a month. Let's see her try 

History

 It is an article of faith that the enormous loss of Indian life after the Spanish arrived was because the Indians had no immunities to measles, smallpox, and a bunch of other diseases that had been killing people in the Old World long enough that our gene pool had selected the weak ones out. One of the student papers referenced a CDC article that I found fascinating:

Abstract

The native population collapse in 16th century Mexico was a demographic catastrophe with one of the highest death rates in history. Recently developed tree-ring evidence has allowed the levels of precipitation to be reconstructed for north central Mexico, adding to the growing body of epidemiologic evidence and indicating that the 1545 and 1576 epidemics of cocoliztli (Nahuatl for "pest”) were indigenous hemorrhagic fevers transmitted by rodent hosts and aggravated by extreme drought conditions.

Now, this was not entirely without Spanish involvement:

These infections appear to have been aggravated by the extreme climatic conditions of the time and by the poor living conditions and harsh treatment of the native people under the encomienda system of New Spain. The Mexican natives in the encomienda system were treated as virtual slaves, were poorly fed and clothed, and were greatly overworked as farm and mine laborers. This harsh treatment appears to have left them particularly vulnerable to epidemic disease.

Warming Up

Time to pull out the Hawaiian shirts. The next few nights will be 70 degrees when I roll out the telescope at 10:00 

Not Much Activity; Well Pump Failed

I have been busy solving other problems.  Our well pump (or at least part of the supporting electrical system) has failed.  American Home Shield, our home warranty company, has performed well on the only other problem we have had but that was a dishwasher, which is nice but hardly an emergency. Not having water in the house for cooking, laundry, dishwasher, and especially toilets is another matter. 

Our first service request yesterday is apparently working through the system. I called this morning to emphasize the emergency nature of this.  We are promised a service provider call today. 

I confess to being rather spoiled by past experience. The house I had built above Horseshoe Bend was never a problem. I designed it with self-sufficiency in mind although I was not truly off-grid. The backup generator ran off the LP gas tank.  It powered the well pump, the pressurization pump, the furnace and A/C and the kitchen.  When Idaho Power dropped the ball, as they often did, it had little impact.  We had a 1000 gallon tank.  I have no idea how much gas the backup generator used but we never ran out. 

The well pumped water into a 1000 gallon cistern which had enough elevation to give us 5 psi. This was enough that when the pressurization pump failed once, we still had enough water to hand wash dishes and flush toilets.  Also, 1000 gallons takes a long time for two people to use.

I miss that house. 

Anyway, after going through a lot of bottled drinking water to flush toilets, we suddenly realized that the canal water for the sprinklers, as gross as it, will flush toilets just fine. My wife labeled some of our empty drinking water bottles Toilet.

Whoever put together our sprinklers did something a little clever. Our Red Lion sprinkler pump in most applications needs to be primed every spring. The air trapped in it, will hold a bubble that the incoming low pressure canal water can not push through.  The system we have uses pipe with a faucet to allow air to escape. 

When the air finishes bleeding through, irrigation water comes out, even if the pump is not running. I hooked up a hose to that faucet.  Irrigation system gravity pressure let me fill up those jugs in a hurry.

What Do You Do If There is a House Blocking Polaris?

Worst of all, it is your house? Getting a telescope mount lined up true North which is within a degree of Polaris is very important.

I am using my Losmandy GM8 mount at the moment while waiting for an 8 pound counterweight to properly balance the G811G goto mount.

The GM8 is not goto. This is a very solid older mount. The solution:

1. Align to North as accurately as Google Maps allows.

2. Pick an object in the sky with a known Right Ascension and Declination. Google "Jupiter RA and DEC right now". 

3. Center the telescope on it and see how far from that DEC the declination setting circle is. In thus case, it should be +22 degrees. Move the polar axis in whatever direction seems most likely to correct it to the correct DEC. On the GM8, there is a azimuth adjustment screw good for several degrees either direction. 

4. Keep moving polar axis until recentering Jupiter, in thus case, gets it at +22 degrees. You are aligned with the universe's coordinate system. You chi is probably adjusted now as well as a besutiful aura.

5. The RA axis circle is only lightly bound to the polar axis. Turn it until the RA there matches the RA of the object.

6. Whatever you want to see, turn declination axis to that DEC and polar axis to that RA. You are done. As long as you do not move that driven RA setting circle and keep the clock drive running, you are set for the night!

AI

 As I continue to grade papers, I see troubling items. Sometimes not AI. From a comment on a paper:

No page numbers or headers are often signs that a student copied and pasted from an AI program. There are enough grammar errors and clumsy sentences that I doubt you used AI, unless it was developmentally delayed AI.

Another paper with AI fingerprints all over it.  Some of these, even if not provably AI, are so bad that many AI programs need to go to college. Vague, general, shallow obvious statements with references to unnamed documents. Has anyone figured out where we go after AI? Assuming colleges and universities still have a use.

I Do Not Generally Repost Memes, But This Was Too Good

The Voting Dead

 No, not a sequel to The Walking Dead. 4/29/26 Fox News:

The North Carolina State Board of Elections identified approximately 34,000 dead people on the state's voter rolls following a comprehensive data comparison with a federal database.

Earlier this month, the NCSBE submitted over 7.3 million voter records to the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database as part of an initiative to strengthen the accuracy and integrity of the state's voter registration list. The NCSBE clarified that the identification of deceased individuals on the state's voter rolls does not necessarily indicate illegal votes were cast.

"While we expected to find some cases, this is higher than we anticipated," Sam Hayes, the executive director of the State Board of Elections, said in a press release. 

Hence, why Blue states are resisting DOJ efforts to remove the dead from rolls. It is too tempting to cast mail in ballots for the dead.

A Nice Surprise: Taiwan Not PRC

It was time to start the sprinklers and nothing happens.  The pump does not sound happy. While waiting to get someone to look at it, I ordered an oscillating sprinkler to keep the lawn from dying