Posts Made By: James Brown

Originally Posted by Russ Carroll

What flies in the face of this is the Obamacare decision that Roberts made. I am no expert on the law, but it seems to me that what he said, when upholding the ACA, was something to the effect of "Hey, I'm not undoing this law on a technicality. If the country wants this gone, do it at the ballot box, not the courthouse" and he made what appears to me to be a twisted argument about a penalty being close enough in substance to being a tax that he rationalized his position. It didn't seem like he actually followed the law but wanted to preserve some concept of derived power of the law from voters. Of course 5 experts (that mattered) disagree with me on that.

Roberts is judicially conservative.  He does not want to overturn an act of Congress, unless he literally has no other choice.  I would agree that he bent over backwards in the ACA case to preserve the law.  I recall though, that his reasoning was well supported, and obviously persuasive to Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan.

I think this case is a good example of something from your original post.  Roberts' opinion was an expression of what he thought the legal outcome should be, under the law, in an extremely divisive case, even though this was possibly not his own personally preferred outcome.

Originally Posted by Darian Rachal

Jim, I suspect that most people, businesses, etc., if given the opportunity and not forced to do otherwise by governments, would dispense with masks, "social distancing", etc. and return to a fair degree of normality. I can't turn on local radio without constant babbling about the virus, phase II, phase III,.....

I suspect that the 250,000 motorcycle enthusiasts that were referred to are not going to be preoccupied with masks, "distancing", etc.. They'll very likely be exhibiting normal behavior.

I guess I sort of feel like I'm living in the Twilight Zone, seeing people around me "concerned" about a matter that is irrelevant to me.

Hi Darian:

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.  I definitely see more comprehensive mask wearing in Colorado now than I did in April or May.  The people here have really embraced it, and I think that the infection charts show that it helps.  When we visited South Dakota, the only masks we saw were in grocery stores, so you may be right about Sturgis.  

Louisiana has a pretty bad outbreak going on as of a few weeks ago, so I can understand why your state government is concerned.

Jim

Originally Posted by Greg Shaffer

Good lord.....Rich has reduced most of you to babbling, whiney children, competing to see who can win the get even with Rich competition, get a grip and act your age.....lol

Hi Greg:

You have a good point, Rich brings out a dark side in me for sure.   I'll work on it.  If you are going to be the adult in the room though, you ought to lose the finger emoji.  

Jim

Back to the topic at hand.  I have watched this graphic from Johns Hopkins quite a bit.  Each state is a square, green squares have declining infection rates.  Red squares have increasing infection rates.  The squares are live links to detailed graphs for each state.

As you can see this morning, the US is getting pretty green.  This was not the case two weeks ago, the SW and SE states were quite red.  I wish I had a screen shot from then, but AZ, GA, FL and some other states were setting new record levels of infection as recently as two weeks ago.  Now those states are in steep decline.

Why is the infection rate going down?  Will it come back up in most states as school starts in some fashion?  It is hard to say.  I am personally convinced that social distancing, work from home and mask orders are a big part of it.  That seems to be unlikely to account for the whole decrease though.  It seems clear that masks and social distancing are not the norm in a lot of states, and their curves are still going down.  It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.  I highly recommend this web site if you are a data geek.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/new-cases-50-states

Originally Posted by James Brown

Back to the topic at hand.  I have watched this graphic from Johns Hopkins quite a bit.  Each state is a square, green squares have declining infection rates.  Red squares have increasing infection rates.  The squares are live links to detailed graphs for each state.

As you can see this morning, the US is getting pretty green.  This was not the case two weeks ago, the SW and SE states were quite red.  I wish I had a screen shot from then, but AZ, GA, FL and some other states were setting new record levels of infection as recently as two weeks ago.  Now those states are in steep decline.

Why is the infection rate going down?  Will it come back up in most states as school starts in some fashion?  It is hard to say.  I am personally convinced that social distancing, work from home and mask orders are a big part of it.  That seems to be unlikely to account for the whole decrease though.  It seems clear that masks and social distancing are not the norm in a lot of states, and their curves are still going down.  It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.  I highly recommend this web site if you are a data geek.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/new-cases-50-states

Here is the click through on Georgia.  Cases peaked on July 24 at a new record and have been dropping since.  I don't think Gov. Kemp had anything to do with it, it was about then that he signed a controversial order barring municipalities from requiring masks (I think it was about then).  Curious if Greg saw any enhanced voluntary social distancing, masks and so on when the infection rate peaked?

As you know, I'm a mask in public guy.  If GA, FL, AZ and others have peaked and then will continue to drop, even though the same level of social distancing is in play, then something else is a driving factor.  I have read some theories, but I think this is a central unknown at this time.

And another thing 'bout Rich...just kidding.  

I just started trying planetary imaging.  Always been a deep-sky imager and probably will continue to focus on that since the seeing here is usually pretty sketchy, but the transparency and darkness are quite good.

Here are my first two attempts, July 30, about 11:30 or so local time.  This is an Io shadow transit that I just lucked into.  

I'm super pleased at how well these turned out for first attempts.  I'm not ready to post on Cloudy Nights and have all the 'experts' tell me what I am doing wrong, but still super pleased.  I tried planetary once with a ToUCam many years ago and the results stunk.

The credit goes to the software.  It is incredible.  I used FireCapture to capture, AutoStakkert to stack, Registax 6 to sharpen and WinJupos to derotate and color combine.  All Free!  This is an unbelievably rich software suite and it is all free.  Pretty steep learning curve though!  Definitely good enough to share with you knuckleheads.

Jim

Originally Posted by James Brown

And another thing bout Rich...just kidding.  

I just started trying planetary imaging.  Always been a deep-sky imager and probably will continue to focus on that since the seeing here is usually pretty sketchy, but the transparency and darkness are quite good.

Here are my first two attempts, July 30, about 11:30 or so local time.  This is an Io shadow transit that I just lucked into.  

I'm super pleased at how well these turned out for first attempts.  I'm not ready to post on Cloudy Nights and have all the 'experts' tell me what I am doing wrong, but still super pleased.  I tried planetary once with a ToUCam many years ago and the results stunk.

The credit goes to the software.  It is incredible.  I used FireCapture to capture, AutoStakkert to stack, Registax 6 to sharpen and WinJupos to derotate and color combine.  All Free!  This is an unbelievable rich software suite and it is all free.  Pretty steep learning curve though!  Definitely good enough to share with you knuckleheads.

Jim

Saturn too.  

Originally Posted by Brian McFarland

That's fantastic!  What camera are you using?

Thanks, ZWO ASI 290 MM - it is a usb3 mono camera so it is lightning fast.   I have a little manual color filter wheel.  I was able to capture 4000 full size frames for each filter and L in about 48 seconds per filter.  The stacking software was set to use the best 1000.

Originally Posted by James Lacey

I didn't vote for Abbot, but he's certainly earned my respect in this regard.

Funny, I didn't vote for our governor, Jared Polis, but I think he has done a fine job managing the pandemic too.