GLOBE at Night
GLOBE at Night is an annual 2-week campaign in March. People all over the world record the brightness of their night sky by matching its appearance toward the constellation Orion with star maps of progressively fainter stars. They submit their measurements on-line and a few weeks later, organizers release a map of light-pollution levels worldwide. Over the last four GLOBE at Night campaigns, volunteers from over 100 nations have contributed 35,000 measurements. A record number of nearly 45% of these measurements came from last year’s campaign as part of the celebration of the International Year of Astronomy.
The reporting period is March 3 to March 16 so it’s not too late to participate.
In: blog · Tagged with: astronomy
Springing Ahead
Spring is coming and despite the promise of improving weather, I doubt too many of us will be celebrating the loss of an hour of sleep this weekend when we spring our clocks ahead. The charade that time can be changed twice each year by governmental decree has yet to be rejected by silly humans who seem to like this sort of time travel.
I was looking at the calendar today to find out when Easter weekend will be this year (April 4th). You have to do that because Easter is one of those moveable feast holidays and, excuse me, but the precise calculation is a little difficult to commit to memory.
According to the Wikipedia:
Easter is determined on the basis of lunisolar cycles. The lunar year consists of 30-day and 29-day lunar months, generally alternating, with anembolismic month added periodically to bring the lunar cycle into line with the solar cycle. In each solar year (January 1 to December 31), the lunar month beginning with an ecclesiastical new moon falling in the 29-day period from March 8 to April 5 inclusive is designated as the Paschal lunar month for that year. Easter is the 3rd Sunday in the Paschal lunar month, or, in other words, the Sunday after the Paschal lunar month’s 14th day. The 14th of the Paschal lunar month is designated by convention as the Paschal full moon, although the 14th of the lunar month may differ from the date of the astronomical full moon by up to two days. Since the ecclesiastical new moon falls on a date from March 8 to April 5 inclusive, the Paschal full moon (the 14th of that lunar month) must fall on a date from March 21 to April 18 inclusive.
Accordingly, Gregorian Easter can fall on 35 possible dates – between March 22 and April 25 inclusive. It last fell on March 22 in 1818, and will not do so again until 2285. It fell on March 23 in 2008, but will not do so again until 2160. Easter last fell on the latest possible date, April 25, in 1943 and will next fall on that date in 2038. However, it will fall on April 24, just one day before this latest possible date, in 2011. The cycle of Easter dates repeats after exactly 5,700,000 years, with April 19 being the most common date, happening 220,400 times or 3.9%, compared to the median for all dates of 189,525 times or 3.3%.
Yikes! And tough as that seems to deduce, just wait until one of your grandchildren ask you to explain how the Easter bunny and chocolate eggs are related to the crucifixion of Christ. I’d like to be a bug on the wall to hear you explain that one, but hey, I can at least share with you a little background…
The English word “Easter” and the German word, “Ostern”, come from the same root for “Eastre”. The ancient word for spring was “eastre” and this was the name given to Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring. A festival was held in her honor every year at the vernal equinox.
The Easter Bunny and Egg myths begin with the Goddess Eastre feeling guilty about arriving late one spring and finding a poor bird whose wings had been frozen by the snow.
Eastre saved the life of bird and made him her pet. Filled with compassion for him since he could no longer fly, Eastre turned him into a snow hare, named him Lepus, and gave him the gift of being able to run with incredible speed so he could protect himself from hunters.
In remembrance of his earlier form as a bird, she also gave him the ability to lay eggs in all the colors of the rainbow, but only on one day out of each year.
But we all know that’s just a silly fable taken from a book written so long ago that those who penned it were completely clueless about the physical world and prone to just making stuff up in order to try and make some sense of it all.
Right?
In: blog · Tagged with: holiday, myths, religion
Life in the Milky Way
Time-lapsed photo collage shot on Mauna Kea, Hawai’i provides an amazing view of our place in the galaxy…
Direct link to the video provides more information on the technique and camera used.
In: blog · Tagged with: astronomy, video
Catching the Buzz
Several years ago I was suffering through a two-hour daily commute that left me plenty of time to enjoy various podcasts while driving through the countryside. These days my commute is considerably longer, but I make it very infrequently and so not surprisingly, my iPod doesn’t get anywhere near the same workout.
In fact, there are only a few programs that I continue to follow.
One of them, Buzz Out Loud, with Molly Wood and Tom Merritt, is the very best technology podcast that’s currently being produced. By anyone, anywhere. The “podcast of indeterminate length” usually runs around 40-45 minutes daily and it covers a wide range of tech topics. Molly and Tom compliment each other perfectly and they’ve crafted a program that is as enjoyable to listen to as it is informative.
The guy responsible for that Rube Goldberg Machine video that I posted yesterday was interviewed on BOL #1179; you can catch that one to find out how they set that all up, it’s quite interesting.
There are only a couple of other programs that I update regularly on my iPod:
- SETI’s Are We Alone – Science radio for thinking species (weekly)
- The KunstlerCast – the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl with James Kunstler (weekly)
I don’t do video because it demands attention and defies multitasking. You really have to sit down and watch a video program, committing to it your undivided attention. I can’t drive and watch a video and I can’t work on something else while watching a video, so I don’t devote much time to online video productions.
Notable exceptions to that are K7AGE’s amazingly good video offerings along with Steve “the Goat Hiker”, WG0AT’s adventures, but these are produced on an infrequent schedule and I make time to stay up to date with them – if these were offered on a daily basis, I wouldn’t have the time to watch them either.
You might have noticed that I didn’t list any amateur radio related podcasts – I don’t listen to them.
This Week in Amateur Radio, Amateur Radio Newsline, and the currently out of production ARRL Audio News all do a fine job of reporting the news, in a 1980’s sort of way.
These are weekly reports that recap the previous week’s amateur radio news. But for those who read blogs, visit a few Web sites, and subscribe to a few newsletters, it’s all old news. These programs were forged in an era where not everyone had Internet access, and the audio from these were typically played on Sunday nights over the local two-meter repeater – they’re not really timely sources of amateur radio news, in my opinion.
And that’s it – quite the departure from a few years ago when you might have found as many as twenty different podcasts on my iPod. There’s no doubt that the fad has worn off podcasting for me, and I devote much less time to them so now I filter by interest, quality, and value and that has narrowed the field by a considerable margin.
What about you – what podcasts do you value?
In: blog · Tagged with: podcasts
Rube Goldberg Machine
Given that this video has had well over four million views, you probably have already seen it. But if not, you’re in for a special treat. It’s a massive Rube Goldberg machine set to the music of ‘OK Go’ who are featured in the video. More about how they pulled all this off later…
Here’s the direct link to the video in case you can’t see the embed above.
In: blog · Tagged with: video
Epiphany
I understand the interest and development of software defined radio. And I understand that at some level or another, for good or for bad, it’s quite likely the future of HF radio.
But in your heart of hearts, there is a moment of doubt; of reminiscing, where you just have to admit that there’s absolutely nothing like a big old dial on the front of your radio. And in that very moment, a bright light flashes in your head and you suddenly know that you know the truth…
…Real Radios Have Knobs…
In: blog · Tagged with: photos
Time for a Single Class License Redux
Sometimes I write something and when I look at it 24 hours later, I can’t help but cringe. Being unable to clearly communicate a concept or idea is frustrating. Time For a Single Class License didn’t come out the way I intended and I want to revisit that topic and try to do a better job this time around…
The point that I was trying to make was this: we only need one class of amateur license in the United States because we need every new licensee to meet the same criteria.
Once again, let’s break this down. Do you suppose that having passed a certain exam that gives you the privilege of operating CW on 14.026Mhz, but not on 14.024Mhz makes even a little bit of sense? Is it okay to have the knowledge necessary to operate within the law on one frequency and not another?
This is my point exactly … the entire system is upside down at best, and myopic at worst. Very clearly, and without any question, there is more emergency traffic handled on VHF and UHF (FM repeaters) than on all the HF bands combined a hundred times over.
So what does our incentive licensing system really do?
It places those who have passed only the most meager of exams precisely where they can do the most damage. If emergency communication is our forte, why do we do this, and what are we really protecting by keeping lower class operators out of the 14.000Mhz to 14.025Mhz band segment – DXers?
Chasing DX may be fun, and an art form, and taken drop-dead seriously by those who have invested tens of thousands of dollars in it, but it’s still just one trivial facet of this hobby.
I would like to see a single class of license that requires a written examination that thoroughly covers the rules and regulations and general operating practices. In exchange for successfully passing that exam, the licensee would obtain all amateur privileges. Simple as that. It would no doubt be a little tougher than the present Technician exam, and perhaps a little easier than the current Extra exam.
No amount of difficult testing will make a person a better radio amateur, and no amount of study will transform a jerk into a delightful human being. History reveals a multitude of poor ham radio operators who managed to obtain an Extra Class ticket – even when it was much more difficult to obtain than it is today.
We don’t require or expect that a newlywed, twenty year-old couple become ‘experts’ at marriage and relationships prior to their wedding day. The marriage license places them squarely in the endeavor, and then years of experience forges the relationship and everything they learn about it comes after the marriage license.
Ham radio is precisely the same. New operators should have to prove that they know and understand the rules and understand enough about how we communicate to prevent inadvertent interference.
Everything beyond that is simply part of the lifelong adventure that is amateur radio…
Now there is one other thing. In my original post I took a backhanded swipe at the market that has grown up around amateur testing. Let me be less obscure – I see no reason why the licensing system should remain as convoluted as it is simply because it provides an income for various sources of those who publish new “how to get your Technician license” manuals and audio CDs every time the question pool is updated – and sometimes those updates are made at the behest of this same group.
Now, are we clear?