I was hoping the ratio of botany to geology would be reversed. But this is Arizona-Trail gold-standard for botany.

 

This book is what happens when someone gets quarantined in a studio apartment with two kittens and a big bag of weed. This is one example of first-person-pet genera (FPP). Which I'm pretty sure I mostly, didn't just make up. Other FPP will emulate some of this. The chapters are short, layout is charming. It's perfect for stalling out till the Ambien kicks in.

 "And there was some other data that suggested they were weathered or very young"-Robert Herrick

When the headlines went around yesterday, I thought this was a followup on the old Venus Express stuff. A second observation of what Grinspoon called hotspots. Sudden thermal spikes, best explained as dragging the thermometer over lava as Venus Express flew over. But no. New flows. Flooowwwwsss. Do you know what you can do with VERITAS and repeat pass radar interferometry of brand new surface flows? A lot. The problem is that we can't be totally certain it's not just a viewing error.

• Slide we've been seeing for the last two days at 4:20 (giggles). Remember with radar smooth means pale and rougher is darker.
• Because the time gap is 9 months apart we have a flow rate!
• Slide at 12:15 comes with a history of why old Magellan data is able to pay off even though it's data from the Beverly Hills 90210 era.
• At 16:40 the slide is showing Maat Mons. We'll be hearing more about Venus' largest mountain. But there are some features that are suspected to be flows coming down, so that's literally what the NASA Venus crew is obsessing over right now.
• Slide at 20:20. Emphasis on how easy it is to screw up radar interpretations to the point specialist debate is mandatory.
• Slide at 25:25 is the computer simulation test. Announcement worthy proof.

As far as I know VERITAS does not carry any special spectrometer. That's DAVINCI's thing, but won't help much on this topic. What VERITAS can do is is get geographical details good enough to imagine field geology a bit. That's what's sinking in to me. There will be a lot of cool modeling, at best. At worst, they might now show their modeling as much as I want to see. For the next decade there will be an uptick in modeling regardless.

 This book is shit. Merde.

You know how clickbaity titles will do a "Mars__water__" for easy clicks? This is the book version of that. It's exactly what you would expect a clickbait book would be, and little current 2022 planetary science. It has no pictures, so it already failed, like cutting the other 999 words out was how you were supposed to interpret that phrase. It has no pictures because pictures are expensive. "Saturns moon Titan Owners Workshop Manual" is an example of a planetary science non-fic that gives a shit. This has lovely layout, and typesetting. Chapters no more than four pages long. It was probably the raw from the author horribly mangled into a Mars-Flags Waterpark corporate-approves. Like the Simpsons episode.

 "There are two little planets that I call weenie beans here; Mercury and Mars."-Vicki Hanson

Skip ahead to 7:45.

It's always a good sign when a speaker opens up with something very very basic. That usually means something eschewed is about to get called into question! In this case the spoiler is the premise that the lithosphere is not an atmospheric layer of a convecting planet. From Convections point of view, it is.

This is more of a panel than a lecture, it involves a lot... of corny humor. They might be stoned, but are probably nerds doing public speaking in a room full of people they know. There aren't a lot of slides, but there are a fair number of quotes to timestamp by. It's a very good proof of what the actual Venus scientists are thinking and doing. These are they.

•  Hansen actually says a lot of noteworthy bits. Like she's been teaching undergrads via short blurbs for years and years. "What was Earth like before plate tectonics? We would like to know." At 15:00. That sums up her talk nicely.
• Slide at 16:58, this slide illustrates the point of view shift, Venus crust is just a conductor between two convective forces therefore its just like an air-filter, collecting chemistry between the two convective forces. A very ergonomic point of view within the limitations of what actual probes can actually do.
• At 18:00, "Most of the planet sits at the same elevation." A sound bite that is more on point than the slide it comes with. Her style is a very interesting, very auditory way to teach. I'm personally bad at auditory learning.
• 22:10 "A lot of the Soviet missions to Venus were great successes while the missions to Mars were failures, and the converse was true for the US,[so from early on we were building on...'the history']." From a different panelist.
• 29:14 "If you cooked off everything on the Earth, everything on the surface gets put into that atmosphere."
• 31:50"[Venus had a resurfacing event] and when it did this it churned up a lot of materiel into the atmosphere."
• 32:50. Note that the new term "Tessera" meaning the continent-like highlands of Venus, has now entered the vernacular. "We think those are the ancient rocks on Venus, that will help us tell about climate." He's talking about granite. It's buoyant among basalt, and we do not know how so much of it appeared so quickly in the crust of Earth. Any granite detection will be a huge deal. Better than Aliens.
• 36:16 "Right now there is some debate as to whether Venus is in a stagnant-lid, or mobile lid regime."
• 50:33 "What is the actual chemistry of a lava on the surface?" Note that this question is disclaimed, as in the coming probes can't help much. But this is what they are fighting over behind the scenes.

The Phosphine thing isn't in this video at all and there are reasons for that. SOFIA didn't see any, so the topic is in a state of 'it must be episodic, or localized or not at all.' which is directly related to the "actual chemistry of lava." You see why that is going to be the long-term Venus conundrum. The big TLDR of this video is that the word "Tessera" is going to be used a lot more from now on.

 "If you look at this sort of picture that I drew."-Nick Borsato

Skip ahead to 4:50.

I like this guy; he speaks to my level. Belt'n out facts that might be obvious if I could be bothered to infer things.

I have to admit I don't have near the same interest in exoplanets as in planetary science, but I would be interested in any planetary science of exoplanets. That's what this video delivers. It's quite a bit more satisfying than it looks.

• I feel like the slide at 8:50 should be a meme.
• At 10:58, he's really good at selling his samples.
• The theme of the remaining talk is to categorically list all the measurable information that can conclude something. So it's a good reference. 
• Summary at 43:25.

This talk seems to have ulterior motives, homeboy may be applying for a grant. Nobody ad-libs this much salesmanship; but they do talk extemporaneous this way. Best wishes if he is, good talk regardless. 

In American history, the nineteen hundreds, when life was moving so fast no one had anything in common with their parents or their children; this is what East Coast defunked-urban life was.