Asteroid 2020 VT4 Passing by Earth
image credit: R. Paul's imaginary observatory
image credit: R. Paul's imaginary observatory
It's Wednesday, November 25, 2020, 14:56 and I have updated this page with a graphic and I've corrected some typos. I'm hoping that I'll do a bit more on it. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒. So here we are again. We're hoping that the program airs in this 5 AM time slot this week. We covered the stuff below and I plan to update this page in the near future.
Did you know that I've got a brief synopsis of some of the WBAI LSB meetings?
I have also posted a whole lot of the minutes of the Pacifica National Finance Committee on this Web site. I'm a member of that committee because I'm the WBAI LSB Treasurer.
The next WBAI LSB meeting is scheduled to be held on Wednesday, December 9, 2020, it will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the nine previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, November 11, 2020.
The meeting was pretty much the usual stuff. Some people seem to be looking to reinvent the wheel. I wonder kind of polygon they'll come up with?
Before the meeting I had put out a written Treasurer's Report for all to read.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday of every month, subject to change by the LSB, which gives us the following schedule:
All of these meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.
WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. You can take a look at it and see if I've been able to post anything on it lately. There are still some limitations, but I am assured that I can plug in the archive blurbs that were lost in the latest upgrade.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display,
and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO
and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.
For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display,
and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO
and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Yeah, it looks like they'll have some alternating program's name prominently there, but if you have the right date it'll be our program. Good luck.
Since the General Manager has banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. There is another program in the alternate week's time slot.
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Our friend, fellow WBAI producer and Saddle Pal Uncle Sidney Smith has been banned from WBAI by General Manager Berthold Reimers. The General Manager will not say why. He won't even tell Sidney why he's banned! This is grossly unfair to Sidney and constitutes abuse of Staff. Why did Berthold ban Sidney?
More to come.
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We are certainly living in historical times. Donnie Bonespur
Trump is refusing to help with the transition from his insane, illegal and totally incompetent term of office to one headed by someone who can actually get things done and who is a lot less likely to violate the Constitution on a daily basis.
We talked about the farcical former Mayor of New York City, he was mostly a lousy Mayor except for about two weeks after 9/11, and what that brown stuff might be that was streaming down his face during another comical press conference. I guess they couldn't book a parking lot for this one.
We talked about the Covid-19 pandemic. more than a quarter of a million people have died of this disease in America, and the rate is accelerating. This is the fault of the Bonespur
aka the Disease Vector In Chief.
We are glad to hear that there are now three vaccines that might help to keep the most vulnerable of us alive.
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We talked a little bit about what happened to this program last week.
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Pickles of the North talked about how New York City had handled a pandemic and the vaccine needed to stop it in 2009.
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We talked about the two asteroids that paid us a visit in the past couple of weeks. One was Asteroid 2018VP1 which was about the size of a refrigerator. Neil DeGrasse Tyson even made some jokes about it. This asteroid whipped by the Earth at more than 30,000 mph and at a distance of almost 240,000 miles, which is actually close in cosmic terms.
And then there was Asteroid 2020 VT4. This one was different. This one was about the size of a small house. It also came in at about 30,000 mph, but it came within about 250 miles of the surface of the Earth! This is about the same height as the International Space Station. More interesting is that no one saw this thing coming! It was only detected as it sped away from the Earth about 15 hours after its closest approach. If it had been 250 miles closer it would have hit and no one would have known it was coming in until about the last minute or so before impact. Yes, we do need to improve our Near Earth Asteroid detection abilities. If only the idiot politicians could understand such things.
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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.
One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI specific Goodlight
Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board,
owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people
board that was just totally out of hand.
In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.
Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board
during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
One formerly popular mailing list is the NewPacifica
mailing list. Founded October 31, 2000, this list has been moribund for a couple of years due to de facto censorship by the group owner. As of February 2019, it had 696 subscribers coast to coast, but postings on it had become very infrequent. During the WBAI Coup of 2019, traffic picked up on that board again, for a while.
Back in the day it sometimes also got a bit nasty. All sorts of things used to happen on that list and official announcements were frequently posted there.
You can look at the NewPacifica list here, and you can join the list from that Web page too. If you subscribe to the NewPacifica
mailing list you will receive, via E-mail, all of the messages which are sent to that list.
There is the option to receive a digest
version of the list, which means that a bunch of messages are bundled into one E-mail and sent to you at regular intervals, this cuts down on the number of E-mails you get from the list. You will also be able to send messages to the list.
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