Earth-Day Currents

No commentary needed.  Just watch.

Beginning anew (orbitally speaking)

Where are we as we begin the new year?

Even though it may not feel like it in the northern hemisphere, yesterday (January 3) the Earth passed through perihelion, the point in our elliptical orbit that is closest to the Sun (3.4% closer than at aphelion in July). Demonstrating again that on Earth the seasons have more to do with the tilt of our axis than with our distance from the Sun.

For those of us living near latitude 40° North (e.g., Quincy, CA and Philadelphia, PA), tomorrow (January 5) is the latest sunrise of the year. Yes, I know that the shortest daylight in the northern hemisphere was back in December on the solstice; nevertheless, the Sun's actual position in the sky is not the same as its average position which is what clocks measure. The difference from day to day is due to the fact that the Earth goes faster along its orbit when it is closer to the Sun and slower when it is farther away. Combining this effect with the tilt of the Earth's axis gives the equation of time which can be plotted as the analemma (the figure-8 thing on your globe).

Coincidentally and completely unrelated to the above facts or each other, both Venus and Mercury happen to be at their greatest elongation this week, Venus on Jan. 8 and Mercury on Jan. 9. "Greatest elongation" means that they appear in the sky as far from the Sun as is possible. Remember that both Mercury and Venus orbit closer to the Sun than Earth, so if you drew a triangle with the Earth, the Sun, and Venus (or Mercury) as vertices, then at greatest elongation the angle at Venus (or Mercury) will be a right angle, 90°. This week the angle between the Sun and Venus seen from Earth will be 47°, and 23° for Mercury.

If you look at Venus this week with good binoculars or a telescope, you would see it is half. Like the moon, Venus has phases. It is these phases of Venus that Galileo observed about four centuries ago, convincing him and others that the Earth and the planets orbited the Sun and that the Earth was not the center of the universe.

Have a happy new year!

Fratricide

Here we go again: The Kyrgyz are killing the Uzbeks. (and/or vice versa this time or next)

Get over it, grow up, use your brain, open your eyes, talk; you are the same. You are all descended from the same set of nomads, invaders, traders, missionaries, colonialists, etc. One group does not have feathers and fingers and the other fins and fangs; you are literally brothers.

You are not the first and sadly probably not the last: Hutu - Tutsi, Serb - Croat, Israeli - Palestinian, ...; all brothers, all identical.

The other day in the UK, the Bloody Sunday Inquiry report findings were presented to Parliament by the Prime Minister. In my opinion it was an extraordinary speech. (Admittedly it may be somewhat less extraordinary in the UK Parliament than a similar one would be in the US Congress, but I digress.) Besides the fact that it was clear, succinct, unequivocal, and uninterrupted, I thought that one of the more interesting aspects was the perspective. I was an adult on Jan 30, 1972, but most who may read this were not. David Cameron was five, Bono was eleven (the U2 was a spy-plane); to them this happened on the ragged edge of history. Perspective shows clearly how stupid it was.

Watch the video.

Overall these conflicts are not not right against wrong, only wrong and wrong. They are about mine vs. yours, not about ours and ours. My version of god, not yours. Whatever. Intellectually we know that anything that is not win-win is in fact lose-lose. It is not a zero-sum game. We get so blinded by prejudice, ignorance, pride, hate, faith or history that we cannot see how our victory could be our loss. Nothing is really black-and-white. Be careful what you wish for. Imagine walking in your opponent's shoes. And always make it a rule never to say always or never!

U2 - Bloody Sunday.

I hope that the message is not lost in the din of other news. Doing wrong in the name of right is never right, it is always wrong.

Spinning [or Why vs. How]

Jacob, now 4, wrote me an email asking "Why does the world spin?" Then he went on to suggest his own answer, "I think maybe the world spins because that's how the sun turns out the lights so we can go to bed and the universe can make a new day for Earth." Wow, such a good answer! I can't top that; even though the spinning turns out the light rather than the Sun, he has the correct idea. But, ...

There is a problem embedded in what I will call "big WHY" questions, and Jacob's question is in some ways one of those big WHY questions. Some would respond with words like "God made it that way", or some other platitude that provides no practical or usable information. It is exactly these WHY questions that science carefully avoids. The problem is that science can only answer questions such as:

• "How did the world start to spin?"
• "How does the world's spinning affect things?"
• "How does the world keep spinning?"
• "How ... etc. ?" You get the idea.

Science and scientists can figure out HOW stuff works and HOW it is made and HOW it changes over time, and HOW it does this, and HOW it does that, and HOW, and HOW, and HOW ... Science isn't so good at WHY. Not so good at:

• "WHY is there stuff at all?"
• "WHY does stuff follow these exact rules?"
• "WHY are we here to observe all this?"

Sure, science can answer "why" questions, but they are "little why" questions. Like "Why does it make a splash when I drop a rock in the pond?" If you think about it for a minute, you will realize that this is really a "how" question in disguise. Our language often makes it convenient to ask "why" when we really mean "how" -- "How does the rock cause the water to splash when I drop it in; and how is it that the rock drops when I let go; and how ..."

Those big WHY questions are the questions that religion "answers". Some [most, all, maybe every] big "R" religion has had a problem with science at one time or other. Their problem is that sometimes the WHYs that they have "answered" don't line up well with the HOWs that science discovers. And since they believed and had faith in their "answer", the truth is hard to swallow. It turns out that they had answered a "how" question with an explanation that seemed OK at the time, but was shown to be wrong when tested. They could believe it without proof, but when contradicted by reality they can only deny reality - argue that the facts are in fact not the facts, or explain that there is [must be] a higher law at work that we human mortals cannot [ever] understand.

Don't get me wrong, we need beliefs. There is a lot we don't understand, and even though we may not understand everything around us, we still have to get by from minute to minute; so we have to make assumptions about stuff. And we have to take it "on faith" that what we are doing will work out OK. BUT when we learn that our best guess was wrong, the smart ones will adjust quickly to the new old reality, and move on all the wiser - ready for the next "revelation".

So, "Why does the world spin?" As Jacob said, its spinning is how we have night and day.

The way it began spinning (i.e., how) is for the same reason that all the planets do, and on a grander scale the same way that all the planets go around the Sun in the same direction, and the way that the whole Milky Way galaxy spins too.

We and everything on Earth, and the Earth itself and the Sun and the Solar System are all made of the same stuff - stardust. When you take stardust and it gets all mixed up into the cosmic soup, after a while instead of going every which way, it settles down and begins to slowly spin all in the same direction. And the spinning makes it flatten out. Then after another long time, gravity pulls the dust closer and closer together into bigger and bigger lumps. Since the dust was spinning, the lumps spin too; and as the dust lumps get pulled tighter and tighter together by gravity they gather up more dust faster and they spin faster until they have gathered in all the nearby dust and they have become a big spinning ball - like the Earth or the Sun.

You can do this experiment to see how it starts:
(Mom should try this on her own first to perfect her lab technique.)
Sprinkle some pepper into a bowl of water and then stir it quickly in random mixed-up directions every which way. After a little while the water molecules will bump into each other enough times so that the motion will average out into a slow rotation one way or the other. The pepper will let you see the water's rotation. Try it several times stirring the water differently each time.

Of course this does not answer WHY. Jacob did not answer WHY either - smart boy. He answered a little "why" - a how. Every time we answer HOW, we push back the boundaries of WHY and we learn more, and we find evermore questions that beg to be answered. Why? I don't know; but I can explain how.

If everything we know is inside a big balloon, and everything we don't yet know is the air outside the balloon, then the rubber skin of the balloon represents all the questions we have and are trying to answer. Now every time we figure out an answer to one of our questions it is like putting another puff of air inside the balloon. This makes the rubber skin of the balloon stretch bigger; but the skin is all the questions we have, so every question we answer gives us more new questions that we didn't have before.

This is really why the world spins.

Perspective

In case you didn't read the book, here's the movie that shows everyplace else we know about in the universe. It seems that we ought to be able to figure out that either (a) we need to keep this place tidy or, if we want to use it as a dump, then (b) get busy finding other places to infest.

Video by the American Museum of Natural History.

Lessons Learned

• Pirates:
  • If the ship has an American flag, find another.
• Ship owners:
  • You get what you pay for:
    Discount registrations (from Liberia, Guatemala, etc.) don't include Navy Seals.

ixnay igpay atinlay

If your Latin is rusty (or pig), Sagittarum is the genitive plural form of the Latin word sagitta. Sagitta means arrow, so the English translation of sagittarum would be of the arrows or the arrows' (possessive). Sagitta is also the name of a small constellation that can be seen in late summer in the Northern Hemisphere (as well as in the image in the header of this blog). Follow this link to download a printable version of the simplified star map show below.