Vernal/Autumnal Equinoxes; Daylight Hours; Hemisphere Info

Doesn’t that sound impressive?  Well, anyhow, here is the days until Spring (the Vernal Equinox), and the percentage of days with daylight hours less than today’s number of daylight hours (for the hemisphere having summer time).


There will be a full solar eclipse of the Sun by the Moon, on Monday, April 8th, 2024.  The path of eclipse totality begins in Dallas at 2:42PM (adjust scroll bar of link for time and path of totality), and continues through Eastern Canada around 3:38PM.

I remember the last solar eclipse, in August of 2017.  The air cooled off temporarily — with the sun’s rays blocked, that can be expected; and birds suddenly flyed around, as if confused.

Please do not view this solar eclipse without glasses specifically manufactured to view solar eclipses (like astronomy company, Celestron, sells — I do not get paid for any Other Letter recommendations).  3/12/24.


A saros is the periodicity of a solar eclipse (an eclipse cycle), or when a full solar eclipse returns to a single location.  The Sun, Moon, and Earth, return to the same location after one saros.  This duration is eighteen years, and ten, eleven, or twelve days.  3/15/24.


2024 is a leap year.  This February has 29 days, not the usual 28.  Every four years is a leap year, every hundred years is not a leap year, and every four hundred years is a leap year.  Got that?  Good.


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Selling Bitcoin Short (Versus Buying and Holding Long)

[The following is an op-ed.  I write op-eds, letters to the editor, for the Other Letter; and I do have an MBA, a Master of Business Administration.]

Everyone understands the bitcoin market for digital assets?  Sure, a company becomes a bookkeeper, a registrar, for bit (zeros and ones) coin, without the underlying faith and credit of any principality.  Bitcoin is money, or more realistically, a hopefully liquid substitute for money.

Most know by now that a bitcoin marketmaker is not much different than a casino in Monte Carlo, glamorous, yet only about the money.  Bitcoin is speculative “fun,” if gambling is your fun.

If you ask for the opinion on bitcoin of a market maker on the NYSE trading floor, people who live and die capital exchange, I would bet they have a negative view of bitcoin.  Paper currency used to be backed by silver, Silver Certificate issues.  That was abandoned in favor of backing money by your confidence in the full faith and credit of the U.S. Treasury.

I would take silver, but I’ll accept a U.S. government voucher, you won’t see me putting money into bitcoin.  Trump has stayed on the sidelines, even though he goes where the money is (if he could be brutally honest, and he cannot, I bet he would say the entire enterprise is frothy).  Senator Elizabeth Warren said today that laissez faire bitcoin markets need to be regulated just as any other financial market.

The acid test for a currency is, is it a store of value.  Hopefully, bitcoin is exchangeable for green bank script by the market maker specialist, or an investing, bit player.  Well, if I had a million dollars of bitcoin, I still could not buy an ice cream cone with it.  By the same token, if the dollar bill were to fail, we have reached the end times.  Bitcoin buyer beware: Too much paper profits, too much Monopoly money, and not legal tender.  Just saying.


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An Other View of the Cosmos and Nuclear Power...  “Huh?”

[This is a reprise of an article I wrote several years ago.]  The stars comprising the Winter constellation, Orion’s Belt are Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka.  These stars are 825.7, 1,359.0, and 918.8 light years from Earth, respectively.  A light year is the distance light travels in one year at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second).

In other words, when you see Orion in the night sky, the photons that your retina senses, left the Constellation of Orion in Medieval times, in the years 1,199AD, 665AD, and 1,106AD, respectively.  In a sense, you’re seeing history, cosmic history, before your eyes.

This is not really refutable — the extrapolation is simply based on well-established numerical constants — although almost impossible to believe.  If those three stars were much closer, say 50ly away, then the light photons would have left in 1974, which sounds much more plausible.  As a light source emanates from a point, it spreads wider, eventually dissipating in lumninosity.  Radial light diminishes in intensity (to darkness) over distance traveled, doesn’t it, yes?

The point being, these stars might be much closer than the 4,839,199,200,000,000 miles of the nearest one, when Alnitak distance from Earth is computed to be:

825 light years X 365 days per year X 24 hours per day X 60 minutes per hour X 60 seconds per minute X 186,000 miles per second = 4,839,199,200,000,000 miles
as determined by a light year of 186,000 miles per second.  This makes space travel to distant civilizations much more possible.

Of course, I might be wrong about the stars being closer than thought before, but I don’t see how.  The Inquisition tried to prohibit Copernicus’ conclusion that the Sun did not revolve around the Earth, but vice versa.  I just hope there isn’t an auto-da-fé in my future for judging a conclusion about the Heavens as heresy.

This is a seperate conjecture: How did Einstein arrive at 186,000 miles per second as the speed of light, before there were even refrigerators, let alone sophisticated astronomical equipment.  I turn on the light to a room, and I can sense that the light from the light bulb cannot travel anyhwere near that fast.

I am probably wrong, but his estimate for the speed of light sounds far, far too fast.  If Einstein’s determination of the speed of light is overestimated, and the light year determinations are held constant, than the constellations are much closer than originally perceived to be.


Speaking of a new, scientific possibility judged heresy, is nuclear energy even possible?  Can the most fundamental unit of solid matter like uranium be split in two?  Are there vast amounts of energy in small amounts of matter as the mass-energy equivalence maxim would dictate?

Yet only uranium could be used to harness the potential of this property, not potatoes?  Potatoes also have atoms.  At room temperature, you’d think that they possess similar kinetic energy.  A hot potato maybe hotter than uranium, yet I digress.

When Einstein wrote his Generalized Theory of Relativity, WWI, the war of the trenches, was well under way.  The casualties were catastrophic.  If a petrifying, super-weapon existed, there would be no more war.  Annihilation would be certain.  This mass-energy equivalence implied the existence of this horrifying super-weapon.  Otherwise, Hiroshima and Nagasaki amounted to Dresden fire-bombing.

Regardless, if atom-splitting is possible, then Long Island’s Shoreham nuclear power plant should have easily been built.  My theory, is that if you connect a light bulb at the output line of a nuclear plant, it will stay dim.  Nuclear energy projects are boondoggles.  One more point, Russia has the nuclear bomb, what is stopping them from leveling the Ukraine.  All’s fair in war, or are there gradations of war?  But what do I know, I just write a blog that gets ten readers a day...

One more aside, before the men in white coats (or navy blue jackets) arrive, endeavor today is predicated on money, making a buck.  Could Einstein have created wild theories, in part, to publicize his findings, and thus buttress his career in academia?  This may sound so disingenuous, and heartless, but hey, ultimatley, aren’t we all in it for a buck?  Economics is called the dismal science, see why?  Guess what I majored in at the Brook?


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This Webzine Probably Deserves a MPAA PG Rating

If you don’t want your Junior to read this, there are parental control apps to block websites.

Some of the articles in this web log of personal experience are G-rated, some would be R-rated by certain cohorts, but mostly this is PG, without parental guidance, the site may be too adult for teenagers.  There is never any porn, although I have posted pictutes of cleavage in the currently out-of-commission Panthoen of Hollywood Women.  I do not approve of substance abuse, I am a child of the Sixties, I have seen the damage done.

I will say from the outset, Republicans may not like this site at all, because I am a registered Democrat, and I want my party’s candidates to be elected to office.  I have complimented Republicans, but not nearly as often as Repulbicans reading would hope.

Christians may not like this website as well, because I have a literal interpretation of the Bible.  I have discussed this in detail before: The Gospel According to Saint Luke, Chapter 24:39,41, states that Christ is “of flesh and blood,” and asking, “have you here any meat,” post-Crucifixion.  Jesus the Christ is not a spirit.  This does not sit well with many Christians, even though this is straight from the Holy Bible.  In my estimation, Christ is a good philiosopher, but not an immortal.  That’s my belief, you have your belief.

Anyhow, read something else, if this is not your interest.  You can block your teenagers from reading any website with parental controls.  Parents should have parental controls anyhow to block pornography, which is far worse than reading about Trump’s Muslim ban.


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Madge and Dougie Review Steely Dan’s Aja

Madge and Douglas are sitting in a somewhat spare kitchen, with a video camera in front of them.  They’re wearing matching “Madonna, Madonna, Madonna,” t-shirts, his in red, hers in green.

“I’m Madge—”

“And I’m Douglas—”

“And we’re here to discuss the secret meanings behind Steely Dan’s Aja—”

“For all our Youtube friends—”

“Followers—”

“Yes, followers.  You complete my sentences.”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll come right out and say it—”

“We lost our jobs at a big tech company.”

“We tried to unionize.”

“C’mon, Dougie, our last day, we tried to set the employee cafeteria ablaze.”

“After our unionization efforts failed.”

“With our unemployment running out, we have branched into music appreciation Youtubes.”

“That’s right, Madge.  Okay, got my notes.  Let’s begin.  Aja was Steely Dan’s best album.  Can I say that, Madge?”

“You just did.”

“The Dan begins: ‘Up on the hill.’  Which hill is this?  The hill of Damocles?  Edinburgh has seven hills, maybe the Dan means one of those.”

“Dougie, it’s the Sword of Damocles, not the hill.  Peril at every turn?  I keep forgetting, you’re coding, not Engligh lit.”

“Peril at what?  Do you remember we worked on the Milkgate Proposal?  I brought over the spec, but we both had trouble with the nutritional labeling.  Remember that?”

“Yeah, I do.  And what was the gate in Milkgate?  Sure it was a dairy, but it was about linear programming cheese.  That’s the notes I got from you, linear programming cheese.”

“Madge, Mayhock Industries—”

“I remember them, we worked there twenty years—”

“They needed us to maximize Milkgate’s cheese recipe for flavor and, and, price.”

“That’s right, it was over priced, it was skim milk, and the profits were skimmed by local farmers, mind you.  Not a popular target, local farmers.”

“We opened the floodgates to Milkgate’s Milkgate, Dougie.”

“Wasn’t it like Watergate, kinda, wasn’t it?”

“It was.  It was, Dougie.”

“Too bad, all this we thought was under the table, was legal.”

“The local farmers were all legit.  So we got fired for scandalizing the cheese at Milkgate.”

“Hmm.  [Looks at notes.]  Angular banjoes, do you get this?  You read Ulysses.”

“Angular banjoes, no.  Give me another one.”

“Why do the people on the hill just don’t care, Madge?”

“They are on the hill, they are the chosen ones.  Got anything else?”

“Why Aja, and not the continent?”

“You mean, why not Asia?”

“Yeah.”

“Aja is a woman.”

“Quit while we’re ahead?”

“Yes, I got some food stamps left.  Can dinner be just soup broth?”

“Sure.  Youtube followers, see you next week for—”

“I think we said we’d do Stairway, talk about Stairway to Heaven.”

“Is that Beatles?”

“No, I think that’s Bread, Bread, the group, not the appetizer.”

“Bread is an appetizer?”

“Sure, c’mon, Dougie, before a meal?...”


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The Royal Cambridges Handling the Sprocketeers

Katherine, Princess of Wales, and William (Bill to his friends), often mingle with the townies far afield from Kensington Palace.  One recent Royal parade, this time to low-tech center Sprocket Shire, brought up a conflict they have faced.

There is a pocket or two of poverty (as there is anywhere else) in the far, far, North of Wales, near the Shire of Mopsweep.  The Royal parades are not always so happily greeted by the locals.  At Sprockets (its nickname, they drop the Shire), a few parade-goers did not embrace the spirit of Windsor greatness, that Kate and Bill evidence.  They pelted the Royal second-in-line to the throne with tomatoes (think Spain’s Tomatino Festival at harvest).

Said the ever so diplomatic Kate: “They did this to us last year, we enjoy Sprockets, but a few Sprocketeers don’t quite enjoy the celebration as much as others.  Before we returned to Sprockets, we set out pamphlets outlining proper appreciation of the Royal motorcade.  At Sprockets, we don’t leave the motorcade, we stay inside the limousine, and wave.”

Said Prince William, always the gentleman: “Most cities, we’re greeted warmly, but I don’t know, the Sprocketeers really don’t like these British pride events.  I’m saddened, we try to bring good will, and commerce, we’re ambassadors, but it’ll be good to get back to home base in London.”


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Just Saying

Attribution: Although I am trilingual (actually quadrilingual, I speak Navajo),
the four translations here, are provided by translate.google.com.

Si no quiere que su hijo lea esto, existen aplicaciones de control parental para bloquear sitios web.
Si vous ne souhaitez pas que votre Junior lise ceci, il existe des applications de contrôle parental pour bloquer les sites Web..
If you don’t want your Junior to read this, there are parental control apps to block websites.
Plu noot gruw den ulda tak den noot eur grav pic, noot prud, noot nakt cee est de wist.

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