Rorschach Test Debate

As I expected, last night's presidential debate was "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" to quote the bard.  Everyone sees what they want to see.  Like the famous ink blot test, each person interprets the same picture differently.  Biden's fans are convinced he won.  Trump's fans are convinced he won.  We don't know yet what the undecided people truly thought.  In reality, as I said before, I don't think it will mean much.  I note Borepatch has a similar take, wondering why we even have these things any more.  

You may see an ordinary moth or the skins of two animals.  I see Mothra.  

PJ Media's Matt Margolis points out some aspects of the chatter after the debate in which he argues Biden's team really thinks Trump won.  His main argument goes like this:

Matt Lewis of The Daily Beast, a Never Trumper, concluded that Biden “won the debate” but added the caveat: “If Joe Biden were looking for a pretext to skip the next two debates, he found it.”

If the candidate you support won the debate, why wouldn’t you want them to participate in the remaining debates?

He then goes on to name several other Biden supporters who say essentially the same thing.  Margolis finally says, “You don’t call for your candidate to skip the remaining debates if you think they help your candidate. You just don’t.”  My take on it is this is reasonable if they think their candidate slam-dunk wiped the floor up with Trump.  But what if they're putting on a big show about saying they won while inside they either really think they lost or they think Biden somehow got through by the skin of his teeth and they don't want to take the chance again?  The last thing Team Biden wants is for the idea to get around that Biden can't go toe-to-toe with Trump and therefore isn't strong enough to face foreign leaders.

On California Banning Gasoline or Diesel Cars by 2035

It was in May of 2017 that I noted California decided to become uninhabitable in 10 years (2027).  The reason?  The state legislature had mandated they reduce carbon emissions to 40% of the state's 1990 levels by the year 2030.  The new levels were to be 60% of the required 2020 levels passed previously.  Using advanced technology called a pocket calculator and an available number estimating CO2 sensitivity, I calculated how much difference this would make on world temperatures.  

In a piece I wrote in 2010, my first year here, I found a number for the amount of CO2 required to raise global temperature 1 degree C - according to the warmist's models. 1.8 million million metric tons.  California is going to reduce emissions by 172 million metric tons.  Since 172 is close to 180, lets be generous and round their reduction up to that.  That means they will reduce global temperature rise by 180/1,800,000 or .0001 degree C, which simply isn't detectable in a system as big as the planet.   

Not to be outdone by previous virtue signalers, Governor Gabbin' Nuisance (D - Uranus), issued an executive order on the 23rd banning the sale of internal combustion engine cars by the year 2035.  

“This is the most impactful step our state can take to fight climate change,” Newsom said. “For too many decades, we have allowed cars to pollute the air that our children and families breathe. You deserve to have a car that doesn’t give your kids asthma. Our cars shouldn’t make wildfires worse – and create more days filled with smoky air. Cars shouldn’t melt glaciers or raise sea levels threatening our cherished beaches and coastlines.” 

That's just full of nonsense.  I tell you what, I'll say it might possibly be true that Internal Combustion Engine exhaust is contributing to kids getting asthma.  Cars are having no effects on wildfires.  Historical records show the number and intensity of wildfires going down for the last hundred years.  What you're seeing, Gabbin', is the effect of your terrible forest management.  Cars aren't melting glaciers or raising sea levels, which have been rising since the end of the last ice age (and you'd best be damned glad they're not going down now because that would indicate the glaciers are coming back).  That's too much to get into the space here tonight.  

As full of nonsense as that is, my favorite quote is this from Newsom's Twitter account:

By 2035 every new car sold in CA will be an emission free vehicle.

There is simply no such thing as emission free vehicles if you look at the total environmental cost.

But ignore for the moment that the cars need to be produced from raw materials that are extracted and refined in ways that produce emissions, and are higher emission than ICE-powered cars.  Electric cars run on fuel, too, it's just not in a tank inside the vehicle.  In particular, they run on natural gas, coal, or whatever is producing electricity in the state (which in California these days is practically nothing).  In 2019, U.S. domestic production of electricity was 12.9 quadrillion BTUs (quads) from natural gas followed by 9.4 from crude oil, 5.3 from coal, 8.5 from nuclear, 2.7 from wind and 1 quad from solar power. The last two (wind and solar = 3.7 quads) can’t even begin to replace the first three (oil, gas and coal = 74.6 quads).  [Note: my numbers derived from numbers on that EIA.gov website]

Eric Worrall, writing at Watts Up With That notes:

Governor Newsom in his interview said “we no longer need to drill things or extract things to advance our economic goals” (see the Twitter video above).

Every study I have seen about renewables suggests that any serious attempt to go 100% renewable would require far more drilling and extracting than a fossil fuel powered economy, like a 2700% increase in lithium extraction. Even carbon intensive cement production would have to increase substantially – all those wind turbines and solar panels need cement bases.

Manufacturing cement largely consists of heating limestone or other Calcium Carbonates to 825C (1517F) degrees, to separate the limestone into Calcium Oxide and CO2. There is a lot of CO2 in limestone. Current cement manufacture accounts for 8% of global annual CO2 emissions. Cement does not last forever. A substantial permanent increase in global cement production would pretty much cancel any CO2 savings from going renewable.

If California continues their silly commitment to not having nuclear power and creating more "renewable energy", they'll be clear cutting forests to make way for wind turbines and solar panels, and then turning the Sierra Nevada mountains into strip mines to mine the rare earth metals there.  

Which raises the possibility that California is deliberately trying to get most of its population to leave the state.  That would reduce their energy demands to meet their Green Dreams. 

An early electric car from here.  Electric cars predate IC engine cars by nearly 80 years - the US Department of Energy says primitive electric cars were around in 1828, and it wasn't until the Model T in 1908 that IC engine cars left them behind.  Interesting that the range hasn't gone up in proportion to the other advances in cars today. 

Two Cents on the Debate

I seriously doubt I'll watch the debate tomorrow night.  These aren't debates, they're press events.  A moderator asks some questions and the candidates recite their platform.  Sometimes they throw a barb at each other.  Whoop-ti-do.  These things have been very over-rated (IMO) ever since the Nixon-Kennedy debate in 1960.  Very few are as big as that one was.  Early in the life of this blog, I summed up my feelings about day-to-day politics this way:

Preparing for an election is like cleaning out the litter box.  It's a disgusting, revolting task that exposes you to all sorts of dirty, filthy things you'd rather never see, but if you don't do it, the job gets even more disgusting and revolting.

My two cents is that the right has so thoroughly and dramatically lowered the bar for Biden that all he has to do is not obviously soil himself and it'll be his win to the media.   He just needs to stay mostly coherent for the duration.  

I've seen and smiled at the memes as much as anyone, like this meme from 90 Miles From Tyranny:

His campaign office has put a lid on stopped taking calls or letting him talk after mid-morning.  People make references to him displaying Sundowner's syndrome, a recognized symptom in certain types of dementia that cause patients to lose coherence in the evening.  This is just lowering expectations; lowering the bar.  He's a doddering old senile fool, we expect him to start talking about Corn Pop or the hair on his legs. 

Has anybody been considering that maybe they're shifting his body clock so that he's at his best at night?  Have him sleep all day, get up at 7PM and prepare for the debate, knowing that to his body clock this is the best time of day.  At the worst, that change takes one day per time zone, but I'm sure age and general health affect that.  I've flown 8 time zones away and was doing fine the next day.  How long have they been shutting down in the morning?  A week?  12 days, so that he gets up at 6 or 7 PM instead of 6 or 7 AM?  Practically, if someone is shut off from all external cues, like seeing the sun, they can live by any arbitrary clock, so all his handlers need to do is keep him indoors with no windows and get compliance to the clock.  They do this for everyone working on a submarine, after all.  It's not "cruel and unusual."  With no external cues, you go to bed when you're told and wake up when you're told.  It doesn't matter what the time of day really is somewhere outside. 

Last week, Bayou Renaissance Man ran a post positing that Biden's campaign was Elder Abuse and that “we” shouldn't stand for it.  Peter, should you happen to be reading this, recognize that the one pushing Joe Biden isn't just the Democrat establishment, it's his wife, Dr. Jill Biden.  She's pushing him because she's wanted to be first lady, and the power behind the throne, for ages.  People are betting who replaces Joe when he obviously can't do the job.  Kamala?  Mooch Obama?  Don't overlook Dr. Jill re-enacting how Woodrow Wilson's wife Edith took over the country. 

Sunday Leftovers

Small items from the previous week. 

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had a couple of winners this week; at least in terms of what he can do.  For legislation, he proposed a bill that will put teeth behind clamping down on riots - violent or disorderly displays, not "peaceful protests" - when they destroy property, and threaten lives. It stiffens penalties for many of the things we see rioters get away with in other states, and invokes RICO laws for anyone who organizes or funds a violent or disorderly assembly.

Outsiders might not know Florida has cities that are as blue as anywhere, and vast stretches of counties that are sane.  I think the proposed legislation might keep a riot in Ft. Lauderdale or Palm Beach from turning into the kind we're seeing in Seattle, Portland or Minneapolis.  

The second thing he did was to authorize the state to move to phase 3 of Covid-19 recovery, lifting restrictions that kept restaurants and theme parks from going to full capacity and lots more.  He issued executive orders aimed at preventing localities from setting up the virus mask equivalent of speed traps, essentially fund-raising on mask mandates.  At $100/violation there are stories of city of Miami police waiting in grocery store parking lots, ticketing people who get out of the store and take their mask off before getting in their car to leave.  They've been said to have raised over $14,000, which ought to be easy at $100/pop.  

Naturally, the response to the gov. is along strict party lines with most of the newspapers in the state opposing him and wanting to hide behind their placebo masks.  I heard him interviewed by someone (Laura Ingraham?)  the day he released this.  He said he had a panel of epidemiologists from around the country and they said the time for lock downs is over.  All they do is "flatten the curve", or "slow the spread" while creating their own damages that are harder to measure.

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A word on Amy Coney Barrett.  From everything I can read about her she seems to be a stellar pick.  Even Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law Professor with nearly fatal levels of Trump Derangement Syndrome, endorses her.  One thing that strikes me as odd is the attacks she's getting for being Catholic when we hear Nancy Pelosi defending herself by declaring she's Catholic whenever it's convenient.  I believe both Biden and Knee Pads claim Catholicism.  It's like a wink and a nod saying, "we're Catholic, but only only Sunday and only during mass, every other hour of the week we're as secular as Karl Marx."  It's as if people are allowed to have beliefs, but only if they're like a coat: put them on to go to church, take them off as soon as you're out.

But Judge Barrett herself had a wonderful answer to this, reported by PJ Media.  

“I think when you step back and you think about the debate about whether someone’s religion has any bearing on their fitness for office, it seems to me that the premise of the question is that people of faith would have a uniquely difficult time separating out their moral commitments from their obligation to apply the law. And I think people of faith should reject that premise,” she added.

“All people, of course– well, we hope, most people– have deeply held moral convictions, whether or not they come from faith. People who have no faith, people who are not religious, have deeply held moral convictions,” Barrett noted. “And it’s just as important for those people to be sure– I just spent time talking about the job of a judge being to set aside moral convictions, personal moral convictions, and personal preferences, and follow the law. That’s a challenge for those of faith and for those who have no faith.”

Makes me like her even more.  

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Long time readers will remember me pounding on then chair of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke (the Bernank, among other names); his successor Janet Yellen, and more pretty regularly.  (Yo, Fed Heads - if I missed you it wasn't because you were good, it's because something else caught my attention).  I found this cartoon on Pinterest showing how the most secret part of the Fed works.

As always, found on Pinterest, the Great Sargasso Sea of the internet.  If it's yours and don't want it here, let me know. 

All Three Competing Moon Landers Pass NASA Design Review

The story broke last May that NASA had selected three companies to begin initial development of lunar landing systems that will take astronauts back to the surface of the Moon by 2024.  The three companies got different payment amounts; Blue Origin and the "National Team" was awarded $579 million, Dynetics was awarded $259 million and SpaceX was the lowest of the three at $135 million.  Those awards are for a period of 10 months.

Today's story, courtesy of Teslarati, is that all three companies have passed their first review, a Certification Baseline Review (CBR).  

NASA’s acceptance criteria for CBR documentation is about as general as the space agency gets, requiring providers to demonstrate at least a basic level of maturity and expertise. Like the name suggests, it sets a baseline from which NASA and SpaceX, Dynetics, and Blue Origin’s National Team will hone in on challenges and concerns specific to each system. SpaceX’s proposal is almost certainly unique, however, given that the company is the only one anywhere close to performing actual flight tests of a (relatively) similar system.

The post and CBR leads one to believe there's nothing here but paper.  A month ago, Blue Origin delivered a full-scale, engineering mock-up of their lander to NASA for feedback on control positions and how the astronauts like the inside layout of the lander.   Dynetics followed up by delivering their own full-sized, mock-up lander on September 15th.  It's intended for the same purpose: gather feedback on how the end users like the control layouts.  I haven't heard about SpaceX delivering a similar mock-up; my guess is the instrumentation is going to look like the Crew Dragon that NASA knows.  SpaceX proposed a derivative of the Starship design, which can be seen at any time. 

Dynetics' lander concept is quite different from Blue Origin's.  Dynetic's concept is, to borrow the term, landscape mode, while Blue Origin's is portrait mode.  I put together this graphic last May to show the three landers being developed. 

Left to right, Blue Origin, Dynetics, and SpaceX.  If you can envision the Dynetics lander without the massive solar panels, it's squat and wide.  

The Dynetics lunar lander mock-up as delivered to NASA.  Their photo, of course.

About That Other Topic Sucking Up My Attention

In a comment to my post about concealed carry insurance, John Galt posted this link to a graphic created over at Sniper Country that compared most of the plans.  I used that graphic as the starting point for my own spreadsheet, which was not done in as pretty a format as Sniper Country's.  I checked as much data as I could on their graphic because it was dated December of '19 and I wanted to make sure it was still accurate.  Then I expanded their graphic.  That was because they only listed one option from the providers that had several tiers of coverage to choose from.  In all cases, it was the company's top of the line (most expensive but highest benefits) coverage.  It didn't take too long for me to realize that it would be a ton of work to list every option from every seller.  On top of that, not every provider lists their coverages in a straightforward way that makes it feasible to get the information I want.     

Without further setup, let me show you a screen capture of the full spreadsheet; click it to embiggen it:

This is a 1568x924 sized jpeg so hopefully legible to everyone interested. I've expanded the original four columns to eight, adding a second column for a lower level service at CCWSafe, a column for 2nd Call Defense and two columns for USCCA, expanding it from one to three. 

Interpreting legalese and advertising isn't the most straightforward thing in the world, but I tried. 

There were questions that I simply can't answer.  The very first question, by BladeRunner1066 was:

Is this "insurance" listed with your state insurance commissioner? Do you have a legally enforceable contract?

I believe the only company in this list that's an insurance company is 2nd Call Defense, although the USCCA might be insurance as well.  The others are agreements for law services.  They seem to work (extrapolating off the end my data, so beware!) much like cost sharing services that have sprung up for medical costs.  They pool the monies they get in fees for membership and whatever else, then use that to pay for the services.  The companies all have lists of excluded states they can't operate in.  That question is probably closer to the bottom of the ones I'll ask.

An anonymous comment asked:

- Would Zimmerman be covered?
- Would the two lawyers in St. Louis be covered?
- Would Rittenhouse be covered for going and looking for trouble and finding it?
- Would whatshisname the recent restaurant owner be covered?

All I can tell you is what I've read.  As I always I say, I'm not a lawyer, I'm some dood with a blog.  I saw nobody bragging about covering Zimmerman and I'd think the other cases are too new to be in their ads.  If I'm remembering properly, Zimmerman was acting as some sort of unofficial guard (that is, not a "real," licensed, bonded, private security company) in his community and that has got to change the odds of his having an armed encounter.  I can't imagine workers in a security company would have the same insurance and pay the same rates as armed civilians. 

My impression, because this is the way the companies seem to talk, is that their model is the one on one interaction where someone is on their property in some way (house, car, yard, you name it) and another person or persons tries armed robbery, armed home invasion, something like that.  Those are relatively straightforward classic self defense cases.  It seems to me that anything going on in these riots has to be pushing the boundaries of what any of our insurance plans pay for, from homeowner's to car insurance to anything. 

Things Are Popping Over at Boca Chica

Only one thing actually popped: SN7.1 finally popped early this morning.  

The culmination of three nights and more than 20 hours of concerted effort, SpaceX was finally able to fill Starship test tank SN7.1 with several hundred tons of liquid nitrogen before dawn on September 23rd. With just an hour left in the day’s test window, SpaceX closed the tank’s vents, allowing its cryogenic contents to boil into gas and expand with no outlet. At 4:57 am CDT, SN7.1 burst, bringing its lengthy test campaign to a decisive end.

This video should start about 2:10 into the timeline, and a few seconds before the pop.  There's no real reason to watch more than about 30 seconds, IMO.  As for the test, there's no word on whether it performed as desired, or was excessively strong (such that they could make the metal thinner and save some weight); I'll say being excessively weak is unlikely, thinking earlier tests would have blown the tank if it was too weak.  Ordinarily SpaceX doesn't release specifics; those are tweeted by Elon Musk. 

Everything else out at Boca Chica is really hopping, though.

With the destructive test over, the totally new phase begins.  As commenter BillB and I wrote about on Monday, and as Teslarati writes about after this morning's test, it looks like Serial Number 8 will be wheeled to the test stand early tomorrow - or possibly a bit later if needed to finish configuring it for test.  A series of tests will ensue, and with reasonable progress, SN8 will hop to around 60,000 feet in the not too distant future.  I could see it making its big hop by mid-October.  Photographer Mary, Boca Chica Gal, took this photo of number 8 for NASASpaceflight.com today:  

As you can see, SN8 already looks quite different from the flying grain solos we've already seen (SN5 and 6); but it doesn't have a nose cone.  The speculation is just when that gets added.  

As of September 23rd, SN8’s twin aft flaps – large aerodynamic control surfaces meant to stabilize free-falling Starships – have been fully installed alongside ‘aerocovers’ that will protect each flap’s control mechanisms. The only hardware Starship SN8 is missing is a ~20m (~60 ft) tall nosecone, two smaller forward flaps, and the plumbing needed to access a smaller liquid oxygen “header” tank located in the tip of said nose.

At the moment, SpaceX has installed one Starship nosecone prototype atop five unpressurized rings – creating a full nosecone stack. That particular prototype has no liquid oxygen header tank, however, meaning that SpaceX would likely need at least a day or two to weld one of the noses with a header tank atop one of several finished five-ring sections. In other words, to transport SN8 to the pad tomorrow, there’s almost no chance that SpaceX will have time to finish and install a proper nosecone on the prototype, meaning that the company has chosen to test the Starship before that milestone.

It appears the answer is that they will test what they can without the nosecone.  This morning's successful pop of SN7.1 was followed by road closure notices for SN8’s transport to the launch pad around dawn tomorrow, September 24th, and another closure just labelled “SN8 Testing” set for September 27th, Sunday.

Another very interesting thing to note is that the first sections dedicated to a prototype Starship Heavy booster have begun their assembly in the shipyard.  The High Bay itself isn't quite fully assembled, but details like that don't seem to slow them down too long.  The first Super Heavy sections can be seen from around the 12minute 30 second mark through the end of this NASA Spaceflight video.  Valuable more for what they represent rather than how impressive they look.

Kiwi Rocket and Satellite Manufacturer Set to Launch From US Soil

We've met and talked about Rocket Lab, the New Zealand rocket and satellite startup, in these pages before.  Last summer ('19), I noted that they had signed a contract to launch from Wallops Island, Virginia.  Last week, they completed all their preparations for their first mission from Virginia and are now just waiting on a safety review from NASA before setting the date for their launch. 

The California-based company, which has launched 14 missions to date from its New Zealand site, just wrapped up a "wet dress rehearsal" at its Launch Complex 2 (LC-2), at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Wallops Island, Virginia. 

During the exercise, a Rocket Lab Electron booster was rolled out to the newly built pad, raised vertical and fueled. Mission managers then took a simulated countdown all the way to 0, to verify that all procedures will work as planned on launch day.

The topic of the safety review?  It's actually a review of a control system NASA is developing and not specific to Rocket Lab.  It's an autonomous launch abort system. 

The Rocket Lab statement also clarified that before a launch window is assigned for their first US-launched mission, NASA will first conduct its final development and certification of their Autonomous Flight Termination System (AFTS) software for the mission. The NASA AFTS, according to its Flight Opportunities webpage, is an independent subsystem for the agency's range safety operations. Using Global Positioning System (GPS) and Inertial Navigation System (INS), it can create flight termination decisions without human intervention. Basically, in the event the rocket swerves off course, the AFTS can issue a termination command to the launch vehicle.

Rocket Lab claims the addition of the new launch facility, officially the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Wallops Island, Virginia, gives them the capability to run to 130 launches a year, a rate that nobody maintains.  (Launch Complex 1, on New Zealand's North Island, is licensed for up to 120 flights/year by itself.)  The addition gives Rocket Lab two launch facilities in opposite hemispheres; Virginia and New Zealand.  There's no mention of how much overlap of orbital capabilities Virginia and New Zealand have and if one is markedly better than the other for some orbits, but it gives them more launch capability. 

Rocket Lab aims to greatly increase access to space with the 57-foot-tall (17 meters) Electron, which gives small satellites dedicated rides to Earth orbit. Those rides will soon go farther afield as well: Rocket Lab will use Electron and its new Photon satellite bus to send a cubesat to the moon for NASA next year, and the company plans to launch a private life-hunting mission to Venus in 2023.

LC-2 is designed to be a jumping-off point for U.S. government payloads. The upcoming mission, for example, will loft a microsatellite called Monolith for the United States Space Force, in partnership with the Department of Defense's Space Test Program and the Space and Missile Systems Center's Small Launch and Targets Division. 

Monolith will test how effectively small satellites can carry "large aperture" space weather payloads, military officials said late last year, during LC-2's official opening.

Rocket Lab's Electron just after the Wet Dress Rehearsal, Thursday September 17th.  

With the emergence of Rocket Lab as leader in the small sat launch sector, and SpaceX offering ride sharing for smaller payloads on its heavier lift vehicles, it's looking to me like the predicted shake out in the small launcher business may be happening by default.  I know there are other companies that are just about there, but it seems to me they'd better be pretty advanced pretty soon to get into that market.

Another Topic Sucking Up My Attention Span

While the temptation to wax eloquent over the Notorious RBG is at least as tempting as jumping headlong into a patch of poison ivy, growing in a fire ant mound, while nekkid, I have other things on my mind.  After watching or reading someone's take on the new environment we find ourselves in, I find myself trapped in the morass of looking into self defense/concealed carry insurance policies.  

You might expect there to be a spreadsheet involved, and there should be.  I just haven't progressed to that point because it's not even clear enough to me how to compare some of the plans.   

Let me give a short summary of what I've found, and if any of you have worthwhile input, please fire away in the comments!  Same goes for if you know of options I don't have here.  With any luck, this might prove to be helpful to others. 

To begin with, there seems to be a couple of approaches to the whole business.  One appears more like conventional insurance; they have a list of benefits and expense amounts that they'll cover up to like you might read in your medical insurance plan.  The example that I found first is Second Call Defense - as in the number you call after you call 911.  They plainly list out coverages, like this:

Immediate Cash for Bond up to $5,000*
Immediate Attorney Retainer up to $5,000
Aftermath Site Clean-up up to $1,000
...
Legal Protection - Criminal
Criminal Defense Protection up to $50,000
...
Legal Defense & Indemnity - Civil
Accidental Shooting Protection up to $50,000
Civil Suit Defense Protection up to $500,000
Civil Suit Damages Protection up to $50,000

That's a snippet, not everything they say.  There are different levels of protection for differing premiums.  I don't see anything about a deductible, but I see those limits as hard numbers.  Say you end up getting charged in a criminal case: they'll pay a retainer to an attorney of up to $5,000 and the most they'll pay for your defense is $50,000.  If your defense costs add up to $75,000, the other $25k is out of your pocket. 

The larger number of plans (at least, plans I've found so far) aren't insurance and don't list maximums they'll cover.  The big names are probably CCWSafe and the Armed Citizens' Legal Defense Network.  CCWSafe is endorsed by Andrew Branca of The Law of Self Defense and probably best known for his book by the same name.  CCWSafe's website includes this note in the description of their various plans:

Note that our company is a legal service subscription plan - not an insurance company - and we are therefore not bound to conflicts and issues related to insurance company products. CCW Safe is designed to indemnify the expenses arising from a covered incident, regardless of the final trial outcome.

 Their description of coverage says things like:

• Access to our 24-hour Emergency Hotline
• Critical Response Team onsite response
• Bail coverage to $500K
• Vetting of attorneys by National Trial Counsel
• Unlimited attorney fees covered upfront
• Unlimited investigation fees covered upfront
• Unlimited expert witness fees covered upfront

Again, just a snippet.  

Just as CCWSafe is associated with giant legal name, the Armed Citizens' Legal Defense Network (ACLDN) is associated with Marty Hayes.  They appear to be run by a board consisting of recognized leaders in self-defense training including Massad Ayoob, and John Farnam.   

Like CCWSafe, they say they're not an insurance company, but it's difficult to see exactly what you get for your annual membership.   Yes, they'll help with bail; yes, they'll set you up with a network attorney, and so on, but they're not relatively simple direct statements like CCWSafe's.

If you read here regularly, you've probably seen in the right column that I'm a long time member of Florida Carry, a group dedicated to lobbying and trying to influence the state legislature to do the right things.  Florida Carry recommends U.S. LawShield.  They appear to be a network of attorneys, and I find it difficult to find what their benefits are, too.  Their website simply says:

• 24/7/365 Attorney-Answered Emergency Hotline
• Unlimited civil & criminal defense litigation coverage
• Coverage for all legal weapons

They won't tell me more if I don't register on the website, and I object to that.

Finally, there is a program from the US Concealed Carry Association (USCCA), called SHIELD.  They have several levels of program for presumably increasing premiums/costs: Gold, Platinum, and Elite.  For example their lowest level lists these benefits:

• $100,000 in Self-Defense SHIELD protection for criminal defense, bail bond funding and attorney retainer
• $500,000 in Self-Defense SHIELD protection for civil defense and damages
• Retain your existing criminal defense attorney or choose one from the USCCA Attorney Network
• Protection following the self-defense use of all legal weapons of opportunity
• Up-front funding for criminal defense and bail bonds
• 24/7/365 access to the USCCA Critical Response Team hotline

While I'm not a member of USCCA and this is just a gut feel, I've always gotten the impression that this insurance is one of a couple of their reasons for being.  They regularly have gun giveaway contests to pad their mailing list and I unsubscribed to reduce the amount of SPAM I get every day.  

All of them emphasize education and training.  All of them have some training-related benefits in their coverages including books, videos, podcasts, seminars and more.    

What say?  There will be a spreadsheet, and I promise to post it.  

My summer, shorts-and-fishing shirt carry Sig P238.

Another Weekend Ketchup

I've been a bit scarce around here since Friday; yesterday, we attended a going away party for some dear friends who moved over to the far side or Orlando from here, so about 90 miles away.  In the big picture sense, not that far, but still far enough so that we won't see them every couple of weeks like we're used to.  The party took some prep time yesterday, and lasted longer/later than expected.  Today has been catching up.  So a couple of smaller post topics that are interesting but don't need a longer post.

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It's not really news, but just to confirm it, the end of solar cycle 24 was marked last December, and we're now firmly in cycle 25.  NASA and NOAA made the announcement on the 15th.  The number of cycle 24 spots has been in decline, and while the first cycle 25 spot was seen over a year ago, the cycle 24 spots seem to have stopped.

“How quickly solar activity rises is an indicator on how strong the next solar cycle will be,” says Doug Biesecker of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, co-chair of the Solar Cycle 25 Prediction Panel. “Although we’ve seen a steady increase in sunspot activity this year, it is slow.”

Unfortunately, that leading sentence is a bit of a problem.  You see, according to SpaceWeather.com, as of today, the sun has been spotless 30 days.  For the year, the sun has been spotless 186 days, or 70% of the year.  Not exactly a gangbusters start.   

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Last Thursday, the 17th, SpaceX had scheduled the launch of their next bunch of Starlink Internet satellites.  The launch was scrubbed with something like 10 minutes left in the countdown.  It was quickly rescheduled for the following day, and almost as quickly scrubbed again.  It took at least another day for us to find the reason: the booster recovery drone ship was unable to remain stationary in the ocean currents off the southeast coast.  

The major reason for the strong currents going out of range that the ship's thrusters can handle is the effects of Hurricane Teddy in the Atlantic basin, southeast of Bermuda.  A second consideration is that being close to the fall equinox, tides and tidal currents are higher than normal - even more so with the moon close to being a New Moon on the equinox as it is.  Last Thursday, the day of the mission scrub, the hurricane was quite far from Bermuda:

For reference the drone ship (in this case, Just Read The Instructions, JRTI) is deployed northeast of Cape Canaveral, about 350 to 400 miles out.  That puts it around the latitude of the Georgia/South Carolina border.  The storm is still south of that latitude; it's due east of Cape Canaveral as of the 2PM update. 

[in a tweet...] Musk revealed that SpaceX means for its drone ship “thrusters to be upgraded for future missions,” an obviously intuitive response to drone ships being overpowered by ocean currents. There’s one simple problem, though: drone ship Just Read The Instructions, the same ship currently unable to hold its position in (admittedly strong) ocean currents, completed extensive upgrades just a handful of months ago.

JRTI now has thrusters bigger than those on her sister ship, Of Course I Still Love You, so I'm assuming JRTI was sent on this flight because it can withstand higher currents than OCISLY.  Both will need to be upgraded.  

My guess is that JRTI will be able to handle the currents later in the week.  By Wednesday, Teddy will be in the Canadian Maritime Provinces headed for Greenland and the Atlantic basin will be calming back down.  We'll also be on the other side of the equinox, with the moon approaching first quarter next weekend.  All of those seem to line up for lower currents. 

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Finally, over in Boca Chica, Starship prototype serial number 7.1 is still intact. They have yet to actually test the prototype to bursting, but have gone through several other tests with cryogenic loads.   The next tests are scheduled for Monday night through Tuesday morning.  Tropical storm Beta is currently making news in the Gulf, but the southernmost portion of the Texas coast, where SpaceX is located, is not under tropical storm watches or warnings and it should be possible to do the tests.  

This is SN7.1 last Saturday.  At the moment, the camera framing is different, but 7.1 looks the same.

A Ham Radio Series 14 – The Self-Policing Aspect of Ham Radio

After my last post on radio, an anonymous comment complained that something they’d like to see available in the ham universe isn’t there, and thought it was because hams are eager to report anyone who uses illegal technology so that the offenders can be loaded onto the trains to some metaphorical Auschwitz-style camp. 

The communication security situation doesn't appear to have changed since the seven year old post. Nobody will openly build a crypto add-on gadget, because too many hams will spend too much effort snitching on them. Hams won't quite push you into the ovens with their very own hands, but they will alert the enforcers if you try to get out of the line to the ovens.

I think this is missing the point entirely, but that's easy for an outsider to do.  Could it be they don't want to send you off to the ovens, they’re just trying to protect the ham bands?  Or someone might not talk about what they’re experimenting with because they don't want to get fined or their license revoked?  Remember, we're not talking BLM or antifa here, normal hams can get fines.  Better to not talk about the crypto system than draw attention to themselves.  The ham bands aren’t full of whacked-out haters looking to get rid of everybody else, but hams are very accustomed to people using the bands without a license or not following the band plans, causing interference problems.  

For as long as I can remember, hams have been trying to keep other users out of the ham bands.   Go listen to the bottom 100 kHz of 10 meters; if propagation is open you'll hear fishing boats chatting, mostly in Spanish.  Before the fishermen, it was “sliders” that would come into the 10m band - sliders were CBers whose radios had VFOs and weren't just channelized only for the Citizen's Band.  If you hear anyone talking between 28.000 and 28.100 they’re not supposed to be there – it’s allocated for CW and narrowband data pretty much worldwide.  Having all communications unencrypted makes the jobs of both the FCC and the ARRL Volunteer Monitors (formerly the Official Observers, OO) easier, among other things.  Prohibiting encryption makes it practical to understand everyone on the bands so both the FCC and the other hams know the stations they’re monitoring aren’t using the frequencies without a license.   

If you create a voice scrambler, it’s going to sound noise-like, but in a narrowband signal (so the radio can handle it).  That will stand out like a sore thumb.  Hams will start looking for it expecting it to be some sort of Cable TV (data) leakage or some piece of equipment that’s broken.  They’ll especially go looking for the signal with direction finding equipment if it’s tying up a repeater or popular frequency.  Interference from other services or broken equipment happens all the time.  

Hams are self-policing because the spectrum auctions the FCC has held prove that spectrum is worth real money to companies and there's a widespread feeling that if we become more of a pain than we're worth, the FCC will sell the spectrum to some other entity.  Or the cities/counties/states who rely on ham radio for disaster communications will do their best to direct the FCC enforcement group to the person violating rules.  

It’s a self-consistent system that makes sense.  The FCC allocates portions of spectrum to different services, and virtually all services pay fees for that access.  If nothing else, they pay for their license.  The regulatory agency needs to know if everyone is playing nice.  More important than that, they need to know whom to contact to shut down a station when that station is is putting a transmitter spurious product on some important frequency like 121.500 MHz: the aviation emergency frequency.  By its nature, radio doesn’t respect borders, so interference between states (and across borders) is routine.

Now you can argue that the old way of allocating frequencies is outdated in the age of frequency-agile radios and should be scrapped.  Everyone with every type of license could use the entire 2 to 30 MHz HF band, for example.  I don’t see how that could work with many of the services they regulate, but let’s say the FCC does this.  The problem is the whole world uses frequency allocations by service like the US does and having services on known bands, similar all over the world, makes interoperation between countries more feasible.  Changing this worldwide would obsolete every radio on earth, from shortwave listeners, to marine radios, to aircraft to physical therapy machines.  If you want to change spectrum allocations for the entire world, remember big wheels turn slowly and there are no bigger wheels than all the governments of the world.  

It may be that your desired invention is out there, but nobody talks about it because they don't want to be targeted by FCC enforcement.

If you want to do those experiments though, I'll tell you what to do.  Go up above 1 GHz where the bands are big and spread out, and do your experiments up there.  They’re lightly used in much of the nation, so you can experiment to your heart’s desire.  Thanks to a combination of technical reasons, your chances of being monitored are minuscule.  If you want an HT to play with, they exist for the 1.2 GHz band, the most heavily used of all the microwave bands, with the possible exception of 2.4 GHz where ham allocations overlap the WiFi band.  In current production I see the Alinco DJ-G7T. There are other, older models out there in the used market.  

It goes without saying to avoid repeater channels, which make it easier to be heard over bigger areas.  You can look on one of the repeater directory websites (or buy a book) to see if there are any 1.2 GHz repeaters in your area and avoid those.

You might want to go higher than 1.2 GHz.  There are ham hacks to some WiFi routers.  While that's a crowded band, you might not attract as much attention if your spectrum and coding aren’t exactly the same as everyone else.  Up at 10 GHz there are no HTs but commercially made gear is available.

At 10 GHz, normal frequency uncertainties make finding anyone to talk with difficult.  A 1/2 part per million TCXO, those are good for ham gear but used to be rather expensive, puts two people as much as 5 kHz apart at 10 GHz.  If both are on SSB, they might never hear each other.  It's a good place to experiment because being randomly overheard isn't the issue most hams have on 10 GHz; they have a hard enough time hearing someone who they aren't working hard to set up a contact with.

Once you get the hardware and software working, you can move it to any band it fits in.  

In the early days, the ARRL monitors - the Official Observers - were advertised as our friends.  They tune the band listening for signals with problems and let you know if your signal was one.  This cartoon emphasized that if you had something wrong with your station, it would be better to get a note from your OO instead of the pink slip from an FCC monitor.

The Color Revolution

Let me lead by saying that while I said I didn't feel comfortable with the subject last night, I did several hours of reading and digging into the subject, enough that I think I can be conversant.  Not at all an expert, but maybe I can help a little.  As I said then, if you really want to come up to speed, the article on Revolver is worth the time to read.  

I find that everyone is all over this story.  That article on Revolver links to two more pieces in a three piece series (so far).  The Burning Platform has a piece, linked to three others.  A simple web search brings up many people saying we're in the battlespace prep phase of a Color Revolution here in the US, starting no later than Election Day.  Glenn Beck has devoted hours of radio air time to interviews with people who know about the tactic, and put an hour special show up on YouTube last night. 

The Revolver article talks about the originator of the concept, with this introduction:

This combination of tactics used in so-called Color Revolutions did not come from nowhere. Before Norm Eisen came Gene Sharp—originator and Godfather of the Color Revolution model that has been a staple of US Government operations externally (and now internally) for decades. Before Norm Eisen’s “Playbook” there was Gene Sharp’s classic “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” which might be justly described as the Bible of the Color Revolution. Such is the power of the strategies laid out by Sharp that a Lithuanian defense minister once said of Sharp’s preceding book (upon which Dictatorship to Democracy builds) that  “I would rather have this book than the nuclear bomb.”

It's hard to keep the characters straight because they bounce back and forth, only seemingly having worked in the Bill Clinton or Obama administrations and being Trump haters seems to unify them.  One of Gene Sharp's disciples, Michael McFaul, served as ambassador to Russia under Obama.  McFaul is now one of the group apparently organizing the Color Revolution against the US.  He put together this list of the seven pillars needed to support a Color Revolution (my notes):

1.  Need to start with semi-autocratic regime, not fully autocratic – gives them the ability to say, “he’s a fascist”
2.  Unpopular incumbent leader
3.  United and organized opposition
4.  Effective system (control of media) to convince the public voting was falsified; plants the ideas before the election
5.  Mainstream media to push falsified vote message.  Currently doing battlespace prep
6.  Political organization to flood the streets, protesting election fraud; “thousands to millions in the streets”
7.  Divisions among regime’s military and police – so that they fight each other instead of stopping the attacks in the street.

McFaul put out this tweet that's emphasizing the last pillar.  Concerned that people were seeing it that maybe shouldn't, he deleted it.  But the Internet is Forever:

If you look around, there's battlespace prep everywhere.  A group called Momentum, veterans of Occupy Wall Street - training people to do occupy tactics.  They're training communist groups like BLM and the Sunrise Movement (Green New Deal commies).  You might recall a group called Axios was in the news last week (week before?) talking about how there could be a “red wave” on election day that they overthrow with mail in ballots.  Another group is called Fight Back table.  Their role is “occupy shit, hold space, shut things down – for weeks or months” 

There's more.  You may have heard of a group called the Transition Integrity Project (as in transition after the election).  As always, the name is the exact opposite of what they want.  They feature John Podesta and Bill Kristol,  so it’s “bipartisan.”  Advisors from the Clinton/Obama/Biden teams are war gaming civil war.  In the war game, John Podesta played Team Biden.   He proposed that California, Oregon and Washington (“Cascadia”) secede from the country unless Republicans agree to reform the country: eliminate electoral college, divide California into five states so they have 10 senators, make Puerto Rico a state.   All of which will ensure a conservative will never be president again. 

The Obama administration ran the Color Revolution in other countries.  Sometimes it worked, others it didn't.  I think the highlighted portions of this text, from the Revolver article, sums it up pretty well.  

Considering the people behind the Color Revolution in the US, and the number that have worked for the US Fed.gov at various times, the whole revolution seems to be the Deep State revolting against the American people.  They are mounting a Color Revolution to ensure the American people don't interfere in the election.  As always, they know better than you what you need or want, so shut up and let them rule. 

 

 

Getting Old Rocket Upper Stages and Satellites Down

Tough choice tonight.  I find myself with two paths in front of me.  One is to go down the path of the color revolution against the US that is apparently in process right now.   Down that path, I really don't know much.  Not enough to write authoritatively.  I've been listening to people talk about it but I'm not where I could write authoritatively about it.  I'd recommend you read that linked article, but that's about it for now.

Or I could go down the path of a novel little story about space technology I ran into from Microwaves & RF magazine's website.  Since that's a decidedly techy story about space, two of my main labels, I'll go that way.

Researchers at Perdue have been working on a way to get dead satellites and rocket upper stages out of orbit.  This is a drag sail, sort of a parachute that will be deployed at the end of life.  Even as high as 400 miles, there's a minuscule amount of atmospheric drag; the drag sail uses it to bleed velocity off the satellite or upper stage, getting it to eventually re-enter the atmosphere, over “months or years.”

“High-value orbits around Earth are getting congested,” said David Spencer, a Purdue adjunct associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and the mission manager for the Mars Sample Return Campaign at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “If we don’t get satellites or other launch vehicle components out of orbit, then eventually highly utilized orbits are going to become unusable for other space systems,” he said. “Drag sail technology is designed to launch with a host spacecraft or launch vehicle and deploy at the end of the host vehicle’s mission. The drag provided by the Earth’s atmosphere will accelerate the vehicle’s deorbit.”

Dirt simple concept.  The trick is the drag sail is going to be a tightly packed until it's needed to drag the satellite down, so it needs to survive being packed tightly and work after a long time in the hostile environment we call low earth orbit.  Lots of missions, especially deep space missions to other planets, have requirements like that.  

The drag sail, called “Spinnaker 3,” is named after its 3-m-long booms. It is not the first drag sail to be launched into space, but it is the first to be large enough to deorbit the upper stage of a launch vehicle. The Alpha rocket launch for Firefly Aerospace is being planned for an orbiting altitude of about 200 miles. The Spinnaker3 drag sail is capable of deorbiting rockets and launch vehicles at altitudes of 400 miles or more above the Earth. Spinnaker3 (see the figure) employs 3-m-long carbon fiber booms that pull out a sail with an area of 194 ft.² The sail employs a fluorinated polyimide material called CP-1, produced by the company NeXolve Materials and designed to withstand any deterioration effects of monatomic oxygen in low Earth orbit.

The drag sail self deploying.  Purdue photo. 194 square feet is 13.9 feet on a side, which goes nicely with each of those four “arms” being 3m long.  As usual, more at the Purdue site linked there than the Microwaves & RF excerpt of it. 

The options for getting something down from a densely populated Low Earth Orbit are pretty much something like this or some sort of thrusters.  The idea of getting upper stages down have centered on having enough fuel left over to de-orbit the upper stage.  As the article points out, that's pounds of fuel instead of payload and rocket makers don't like that trade.  A bigger drag sail on something like the upper stages of vehicles that put satellites up higher might have its place, too.  Or a combination of some sort of thruster to bring the satellite down from its service orbit to a lower altitude where the drag sail could bring it down the rest of the way. 

As the article points out, it's getting crowded out there, especially in the “high-value orbits.”  The easy and cheap access to orbit that has been developing for the last decade will only increase that crowding.  It's getting to be past the time to pay attention to reducing the amount of stuff in orbit.

Got Past The Roadblock In The Shop

In the continuing saga of building my first internal combustion engine, I posted last week about encountering a problem with making a spring and having it come out the right dimensions.   I've managed to get past that roadblock by making yet another fixture and another spring.  

This is the third fixture and the sixth spring.  The fixture is 1/4" drill rod, turned down to .155.  Then the fixture is taken off the lathe and over to the big mill where it's drilled through in two places; on the left a 0.040" diameter through hole, and on the right, it's drilled larger (.073) and tapped for a #2-56 screw.  Back to the lathe where the wire was wound freehand (I think you'd guess that) while turning the chuck by hand and the loose end clamped under the screw on the right.  The longish loose end is clipped and into the toaster oven for heat treating.  

The end result fit the previously made parts better than anything so far.  

That's the intake valve assembly, with the spring retainer on top and a piece of temporary wire through the valve that holds it in place.  The fixture is in front of them.  I had a spring from an old project that was just about the ideal size for the exhaust valve and that one just needed to be cut to length. 

Intake on the left, exhaust on the right. 

The next puzzle was the exhaust pipe (since there's nothing in the pipe it seems wrong to call it a muffler, like I did before).  The tricky problem here was cutting off a thin-walled (about 0.015" thick) piece of bronze pipe that I made by drilling a 0.344 hole into a 0.375 bar.  Not just cutting it off; cutting it off at a 30 degree angle.  Two problems stood out: the first would be holding the work at the proper angle, and the second would be holding the pipe tightly enough to withstand cutting forces while not crushing it.  

My solution: make a fixture by drilling a 3/8" hole in a piece of 1x2 pine, 30 off vertical, slitting the piece of wood in half along the 2" dimension vertically, and then clamping the wood around the pipe.  Move the combination onto the Sherline mill, clamp it in the vise and cut it off with a thin slitting saw. Like this (at setup):

You can see a wood screw at top left, one of two screws clamping the front and back pieces of wood down around the pipe.  After lining up the edge for the cut this way, I moved the pipe to the left side of the saw blade (in this view) and made a cut.  The blade was too high, so I lowered the saw blade about half its thickness and made the cut again.  Closer, but still a bit short of the right depth.  Lowering the blade one more time, got me the right cut.  

What's left?  I don't know.  I've gone through the drawings a few times, and I think I've made everything that goes into the engine.  If there are missing parts, they would probably show up best if I go through the box of completed parts and try to put it all together.  I suspect I'll cut a handful of custom washers and spacers.  I know I need a set of ignition points, which the plans call out as: (1969 DODGE CHARGER, 383, 4BL, W/SINGLE POINT DIST.)  I have a couple of auto parts stores within a couple of miles of home.  Time to go get those.  

Chinese Launch Drops Booster Near a School

Last November 27th, I posted a piece saying among the things I'm thankful for is that the Rocket Ranch 35-ish miles north of here doesn't drop boosters with poisonous propellants on me, like the Chinese launchers do over there.  This week we get another close look, courtesy of social media coverage and citizen reporters who got the film out.  This was covered last Tuesday in Ars Technica, where Eric Berger brings the details.  

On Monday, a Long March 4B rocket launched from China's Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center carrying a remote-sensing satellite. This 50-year-old spaceport is located in north-central China, about 500km to the southwest of Beijing.

As often happens with the first stages of Chinese rockets launching from the inland Taiyuan facility, the spent Long March 4B booster fell downstream of the spaceport. In this case, it landed near a school, creating a predictably large cloud of toxic gas.

The reason this is an issue is the Long March 4B, and other rockets regularly launched from the Taiyuan site are fueled by Hydrazine (fuel) and Nitrogen Tetroxide (NTO - oxidizer).  The combination is an efficient and good fuel.  The drawback is that they're highly toxic and highly corrosive.  

Check out this image taken from an observer near the school:

I honestly don't know what a fatal dose of that gas would be, but I'd be running upwind from that.  The full video embedded at Ars shows the booster falling and some shots of the damage. Worth the 40 seconds to watch.  There was no release of a number of injuries or fatalities from the booster or the gas.

The combination of hydrazine and NTO is well known in rocketry and used in modern craft like the SpaceX dragon and crew dragon capsules where it's the fuel for the emergency abort system.  Other than small-volume, limited-use systems like that, the last US rocket to use hydrazine-NTO for an entire stage was the Delta II which used it to power the second stage.  That rocket's last launch was in 2018.  It's not widely used in the world.   

Yet the majority of China's launch fleet is powered by hydrazine fuel and nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer. This includes its human-rated Long March 2F rocket as well as the widely used Long March 4 family. All of these rockets, with their toxic first stages, launch over land and have caused numerous incidents over the years. These fuels are cheap and relatively easy to use, and it would have been natural for China to use them in the 1980s and 1990s when these boosters were developed. But their use continues unabated today.

As I noted in that post last year, China has decided to start investigating grid fins, like the Falcon 9 uses, which could give them the ability to avoid dropping rockets on schools, but that R&D project doesn't seem to be out of compassion for their citizens.  It appears to be related to a desire to master the technology to reuse rockets like SpaceX has done, not to protect citizens.  China has been launching rockets for more than 30 years, and grid fin technology has been known the entire time.  It's only now that SpaceX has made the technology useful and dependable that they're interested in it.

The Long March 5 uses kerosene and liquid oxygen, just like the Falcon 9, much less poisonous in the event a booster crashes into a populated area.  So it's not like they don't know how to use that fuel system.  

Oh, by the way, the Long March 5 is launched from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site, not the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center.  Wenchang launches out over the ocean.  The only schools it affects are fish. 

Credit: Xinhua/Liu Qiaoming via Getty Images 

This shows the launch of another Long March 4B from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in Taiyuan in north China's Shanxi Province in April, 2019.

A Ham Radio Series 13 – What Do You Do With Ham Radio?

I thought I’d switch gears here from being fairly deep into the technical side to the general side.  I see regular references to clubs putting together programs to help new hams out.  There’s a perception that “too many” new hams get a license and never get active on the air because nobody helps them get started.  I don't know how many that is, but it seems to be a shame.  

Let me start by saying I sure can’t tell you how every radio you could possibly buy will work, but I can offer some help about ham radio in general.  

So let’s begin with what do you do with ham radio?  I refer to ham radio as a thousand hobbies with the same name and only one thing in common: communications.  

By communications, I mean generally meeting and talking with other people; the really old ham term for talking is rag-chewing, which you can see if you can visualize how your jaw might move chewing on an old, tough rag.  The chats can be local or across the world.  Worldwide contacts tend to be more or less exchanging signal reports and fairly formulaic bits of information.  This is partly because of language differences, if there are any, partly because stations from “rare” countries (rare is defined as any country you personally haven’t worked (contacted) and want to) tend to attract crowds (pileups) of guys calling rudely and partly because of an international regulation that says contacts between hams in different countries should be about things so trivial that recourse to commercial communication isn’t necessary.  That law is because in many countries, the government controls the phone, telegraph and internet and doesn’t want to lose revenue.  

I’ve never heard of anyone being prosecuted for violating that but maybe it happens overseas.  
 
Basic contacts, are kind of formulaic; there’s the exchange of callsigns, so that each side is sure whom they’re talking with, signal reports of readability and strength, or for Morse code (CW) Readability, Strength and Tone (RST), then usually location (QTH) and name.  The same basic contact exchanges are used for every mode, from voice to the most exotic digital modes.  There are common abbreviations and prosigns in ham radio that are helpful to know.  You may see a long table of abbreviations beginning with a Q such as QSL, QTH, QRP and more.  Some of them are far more common than others but it's helpful to keep a list near your radio when you're getting started, to minimize confusion.  

There are many digital modes in ham radio; some are more suited to this casual conversation than others.  Some radios only require a USB connection to the computer to use any of these modes; others might require analog sound in and out of the computer so many ham shacks have a computer in them these days.  Those radios that require an analog interface generally use a small piece of hardware to connect them; things like the SignaLink USB or RigBlasters.  

Last year, during repairs of the lightning damage to my station, I wanted to be able to get my backup radio working quickly.  The main station radio would do digital modes by USB, while the backup required analog audio.  My modification involved getting one SignaLink USB and two cables for the radios, so that I could change one cable that plugs into the SignaLink and switch radios.  

The conversational modes include radioteletype (RTTY), the oldest keyboard mode in ham radio, PSK31 and other Phase Shift Keying modes, FSK (frequency shift keying) modes including Multiple Frequency Shift Keying (MFSK) modes and those mentioned in this seven year old post.  In these keyboard modes, conversation is in free form text and you can type messages as long as you want.  The modern digital modes that allow copying very far below the noise level (of the entire audio bandwidth), like WSJT FT8 are much more restrictive of the number of characters sent because they limit the times of each side of a contact. There are many programs that will decode these modes for you (other than FT8). A very popular program is called fldigi which I've used a few times in the past.  For the last several years, I've been using one called DM780 that comes with Ham Radio Deluxe, but that's not a free app.

It’s not uncommon to try to listen for these modes and not hear anyone.  Sometimes you can try to call a CQ with one of these modes – if everyone is listening for someone else, nobody is calling.  I just tried to find a current and detailed list of frequencies for all digital modes, with no luck.  I would suggest if you want to find where to listen (or call) in some mode that you search the web by the mode name.  For example, if you want to search for PSK31, don't search "digital modes", search "PSK31 frequencies", or even more specifically, such as "PSK31 40m frequency." 

A sub-branch of just plain communications is certificate chasing or “wallpaper collecting” (the certificates are on paper, after all).  There are very common and popular awards, such as working 100 recognized foreign countries (DX Century Club or DXCC with endorsements for certain bands or modes), Worked All States, VHF/UHF Century Club (100 Maidenhead grid squares) and other certificates that show some accomplishment.  The range of certificates to collect go from these "Major Awards" to very small, very limited areas, like working some number of hams in one small area of an overseas country.

The second main branch of communication is doing it for public service and disaster communications.  In addition to running out of space in this post, I’m rather ignorant of the details of this because it’s one of those aspects I’ve not done anything with.  I’d start with the American Radio Relay League’s page and start looking around.  

Screen capture of fldigi demodulating psk31 by Tony, EI2KC.