Rick's b.log - entry 2024/10/09

My friend is fine

What he wasn't able to cancel are the repayments of the mobile phone that the salesman talked him into having. A nine hundred quid mobile phone.
When he said that, it was damn near me on the floor. Nine hundred? He's nearly eighty. His life is not online at all. Zero socials - social to him is him and his friend going to the pub to talk about fishing or whatever.
Maybe it has a damn good camera, but really for the sorts of things he'll be using it for, a cheap'n'cheerful Xiaomi or Samsung A-series would be more than enough. And a fifth of the price.
And, you know what? When his mobile contract ends, and I don't think his BT has any internet provision, that sexy-as-hell (it had better be for that price) all-singing-all-dancing phone will become a very expensive paperweight.

Really wish I'd been there to knock some sense into that bastard salesperson who was clearly more interested in a good commission rather than what the customer actually really needed.

Anyway, he's okay. That's a big relief.

Hurricane Kirk

Just a spot of rain.

This needs a yellow plastic bath duck.

I was watching the water rise on the security camera while I was at work. It came up, backed up the big pipe, touched the back wall of the house, said "Boo!", and then went away, like those annoying little brats that ring doorbells and scarper ^[*].

It's still there, hours later. Unlike the flash flood earlier in the year, this water will take a long time to go down because it just rained heavily since yesterday evening, so instead of being a sudden layer of water on top, it has soaked into the ground and is making it through to the land drains.

Still, if this is all that happens then that's... not great but not something to particularly worry about. The water stayed away from the house, that's the important thing.

* - For what it is worth, I have never rung a doorbell and legged it. It seems a rather cruel trick to play on somebody.

Printer weirdness

So, turned on the printer. Left it a little while to do all of its connecting stuff. Put the new cartridge in. Blinky light - invalid. Put the old one in, it recognised it, but failed to print anything without messing up. New cart? Blinky blinky.

So being me, I stripped the printer down. Multimeter to test the ribbon cable (seemed okay). Cleaned the contacts in the printer. Twice. Okay, I had to use a Q-Tip and hand gel as I don't have any isopropyl and given the trouble I had trying to buy that from a chemist in the UK in 2001, I'm just not even going to attempt to get it from one over here in France where... let's just say that there are a lot of annoying restrictions on "medical" things. It's why phones like the Samsung S9 with a blood sensor can read your pulse and tell if you are "stressed" (by looking for how your pulse changes during a long read) but it cannot tell you your blood oxygen level, which the hardware is quite capable of doing. Why? Well, it's a medical diagnosis and a sensor on a smartphone is not permitted to give you a medical diagnosis. To show the utter idiocy of this sort of reasoning, a fifteen euro piece of Chinesery from Lidl will tell you exactly that by shining a light through your finger. <shrug>

Anyway, poking, prodding, nothing wanted to work. So I put the non-functional new black cartridge into the machine and closed the front flap. I can't stick the packing tape back onto the print head, so the next best thing is just to leave it in the printer.

About five minutes later it spat out an alignment page and... uh... it works.

WHAT?

Don't ask me, I don't understand it either. But for now it is working.

However, I have fifty euros in gift coupons that the worker's committee gave everybody last year as a Christmas present. They expire at the end of November and, well, I was planning on getting a new microwave but I'm not so taken with the idea of 700W models. So they have been there, unused, since last winter. I might look to see if they have a replacement HP inkjet and transfer the Instant Ink over to that and retire my little 3630. It's done a good long time and the ink splatter inside is bordering on being some peculiar sort of modern art piece.

Writers have no sense of scale

This time, let's look at distances. Specifically the Moon. Or Luna, if you prefer. If you look up in the night sky, it's far away. But it's not that far away, right? I mean, you can make out details with your eyes, and a basic pair of binoculars or crappy cheap telescope will show you craters. Plus, we've been to the damned thing and joyridden a buggy on it. Walked upon it. So, yeah, it's up there and it's not so far away.

Right?

The diameter of Earth is 12,742 kilometres. It, along with all of the other planets, is slightly fatter than it is tall - it isn't a perfect sphere - because it spins. This makes it bulge slightly in the middle.
The Moon, by comparison, is 3,475 kilometres. So it's a little under a third of the size of Earth. It is, actually, quite a large moon and there are numerous theories of where it actually came from. Suffice to say, its gravitational pull affects the tides, which in turn affects the weather (by winds and their influence on the heat dispersal from the oceans). It may even be a factor in female menstruation. Even worse, the Moon's pull helps keep the Earth's tilt fairly evenly balanced. There is a slight wobble, but it's not much. With nothing to tug on the Earth to keep it stable, it's possible that the tilt could alter drastically. With no tilt, there wouldn't be any seasons. Just bands of cold, warm, hot, warm, cold. Insert your preferred definitions of cold and hot, but lean towards the inhospitable. Even worse would be if the Earth tilted right over so one of the poles was pointing at the sun. Half the planet would be a burning hot wasteland with constant scorching light, the other half a barren frozen wasteland of utter darkness. And in the middle, maybe a thin strip where some sort of life survives. Except tardigrades, they'll go wherever they please.
An interesting quirk of how the Earth and Moon are arranged is that the Moon is just the right size to exactly block out the sun during an eclipse, so the corona can be seen. A little closer and it would block the corona, a little further and it would not block the entire sun. Another interesting quirk is that the Moon's orbit matches up with its orbit around the Earth, so we always see the same view of the Moon. It doesn't drift over decades or centuries, it's the same. The exact same. Just like the exact right placement to make eclipses something magical.

If we work our way up from the Sun, the first planet we come to is the impossibly hot Mercury. At 4,879 kilometres across, it's a little larger than the Moon. If you find a picture of it, it's just a lump with craters. You could probably swap it for a picture of the Moon and far too many people wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

The next planet we come to is Venus. At 12,104 kilometres across, it has been described as Earth's twin... if Earth had an atmosphere that would melt you into goo, squish it, and boil it away that. There's a reason why we have very little in the way of Venutian photography. A space probe sent there has to survive 467°C and around 1,350psi of air pressure on the ground. Oh, and for added fun those big imposing clouds that cover the planet and make it so you can't ever see the ground? They are clouds of sulphuric acid. Nice place. Oh, and as if that's not enough, winds blow at about 360km/h (though on the surface, should you make it that far, it's a gentle breeze). There's a reason why everybody with money and phallic rockets wants to go to Mars.

Skipping over the third rock, we come to Mars. At only 6,779 kilometres across, it's dinky. Half the size of Earth, but it features the deepest known chasm (Valles Marineris) and biggest known volcano (Olympus Mons). Red due to iron oxide, and with an atmosphere (just) that is mostly carbon dioxide. People talk about terraforming the planet, but they may have underestimated the difficulty in having such a small planet hold a hospitable atmosphere. At surface level, your blood would boil due to the lack of pressure (not heat, temperatures are -78°C to around 6°C depending on night/day and season). Mars has two very distinct and different hemispheres. The northern lowlands are fairly flat and smooth with a crust that is around 32km thick, while the southern highlands are rocky and rough and with a much thicker crust. The boundary between the two is, quite shocking, often a flat valley to the north butting onto a cliff wall that is in places nearly two kilometres high. It is almost as if two similar sized (but not exactly the same) planets were cut in half along the equator and the bits shoved together.

We leave the inner planets and head to the giants now. The first of which is Jupiter with it's infamous red dot. At 139,820 kilometres across, it is massive. Nearly eleven Earths side by side. It is the third brightest object in the night sky (after the Moon and Venus). You might be able to make out the four Moons - Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. There are ninety one more to try to spot. The planet itself is a gas giant, it's mostly hydrogen and helium and may or may not have a solid core. Some people have described Jupiter as a failed star, but being only a tenth of the size of the Sun, and the Sun itself being a relatively small star, it's likely that even with all of the right elements in the right places, Jupiter is just too small to be able to fuse hydrogen and become a star.

Next up is Saturn. At 116,464 kilometres across, it is a little smaller than Jupiter and has a lot less mass. It boasts a massive 146 known Moons (63 have been named), not to mention a very impressive ring that even a basic 3-ish inch telescope can see from Earth.

Moving on, Uranus, that people try to say as "yor-ann-us" to avoid the amusing-in-English-if-you-are-an-eight-year-old other way of saying it, it's a big old ball of frozen (nearly -200°C) gas (83% hydrogen, 15% helium, some other stuff like methane and ammonia). At 50,724 kilometres across, it's the third largest in the Solar System. It actually has a ring, but it's dark so is rarely seen. Uranus is visible to the eye, if it's really dark and you know where to look.

Next is the weird-orbit one, Neptune. At 49,244 kilometres across, it is smaller than Uranus but is the most dense giant planet.

And, finally, Pluto. At a mere 2,376 kilometres across, it's smaller than the Moon and doesn't tend to be counted as an actual planet these days - otherwise you'd have to consider Eris, Ceres, and so on as potential planets.
But, hey, when I was young the Solar System had nine planets and Pluto was the last of them, and that's that.

Now let's add these all together, shall we?

  Mercury     4,879.4 km
  Venus      12,104   km
  Mars        6,779   km
  Jupiter   139,820   km
  Saturn    116,464   km
  Uranus     50,724   km
  Neptune    49,244   km
  Pluto       2,376.6 km

  TOTAL       382,391 km

Now let's give them some space. Eight planets, so that's seven times... let's pick a nice round value like 222km. This makes the total become 383,952 kilometres. Now let's add 224km to each end and the total is therefore 384,400 kilometres.

This number is important. Why? Because that is how far away, on average, the Moon is from the Earth.

No, really. This following image is impossible "because gravity", but if that wasn't an issue, then this picture is entirely correct, and more or less correctly sized (about as much as is possible using ChangeFSI and Paint!).

That's Earth on the far left, and the Moon on the far right. In between, all of the other planets in order, sized appropriately. They all fit into the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Not only that, but they pretty much fill the space between the Earth and the Moon. There's only about 2,000km slack, not quite enough to squeeze in a second Pluto.

Earth image from the esa, all of the rest from Wikipedia. Saturn rotated to fit. ☺

So...
...the Moon is exactly the right distance from the Earth to block out the Sun and only the Sun during an eclipse.
...the Moon rotates at exactly the right speed that as it orbits the Earth we only ever see the one side.
...and the Moon is exactly the right distance from the Earth to tidily fit all of the other planets of the Solar System with only a mite of wiggle room.

Consider your minds blown, and next time you look up at the Moon, just think, that's as far away as all of the other planets lined up.

Your comments:

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jgh, 10th October 2024, 01:18

Bizaire, I was reading about the Earth-Moon space being just enough to fit everthing else in just a few days ago.    Also, I think there's something in celestial mechanics that makes it inevitable that the Moon's orbit will end up settling into a stable orbit in the same place, just as it's inevitable that you get the same face facing the primary. I'm not sure of the details, I'm not a celestial mechanic.

jgh, 10th October 2024, 01:20

Nine Hundred Quid???? I bought my Mum a basic "old person" phone a few months ago for thirty quid. Even my LG4 smartypants phone cost only £35.

Rob, 10th October 2024, 15:11

The space-distance that always makes me do a double take is the height of Geosynchronous orbits. Where all the tv satellites live. At an altitude of 35,786 km (Wikipedia) that's almost three times the diameter of the earth, straight up! So all the pretty pictures that say "not to scale" really mean it.    This also explains why we've not built any space elevators yet. Sure, they sound simple - stick something heavy in GEO, drop a cable down to earth, have a vehicle drive up it. I'm not sure if material science has yet come up with anything that can support it's own weight at those sort of distances. Plus, how fast would the vehicle need to scale the cables to get that far - further in one round trip than many cars do in their lifetime - in anything like a reasonable timescale.

A tree-dwelling mammal, 12th October 2024, 21:58

To echo jgh's comment - 900 quid for a phone? I bought a SIM-free Motorola g54 for £140 (5G, decent camera by phone standards, 256GB storage, decently fast CPU and stereo speakers) and I'm currently running a SIM-free EE contract for £15 per month with unlimited everything.    Also, call me old-fashioned, but I still have (and use) my BT landline. Since the BT / EE merger, BT now do free calls to mobiles from the landline. Plus I sort of need the landline to be in situ (even without a telephone service) for the broadband to work. Roll on full fibre though.

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