Tuesday, 21 January 2025

syzygy (12. 167)

Given sufficiently clear and dark skies, one can avail oneself of a rare treat in the heavens tonight when six planets will appear to be in alignment. Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, Venus and Saturn all visible, mostly to the unaided eye or with the help of a good pair of binoculars, not actually queued up but along the elliptical disk of the Solar System and happen to be on the same same side of the Sun as us, not in a straight line as in the case of opposition or eclipse but as a great arc as their orbits are only inclined by a few degrees. Time and Date had been a go-to source for me for calculating duration and day-count in between two dates but failed to appreciate that it also features a real-time planetarium based on one’s location as a tool to anticipate the rise of the worlds. If you can’t make this one, you get a second chance on the last day of February with Mercury joining in. Coming from the title from the Greek ฯƒฯ…ฮถฯ…ฮณฮฏฮฑ or yoking together, this apparent astronomical union poses no threat to the Earth with a supposed collective gravitational tug (actual oppositions of the inner planets occur about every forty years and have no deleterious effects), as rumoured now and back in March of 1982 when an invisible Pluto made the count that would cause greater incidents of seismic activity or increase pressure on the Sun and result in sunspots and solar flares, with (for those counting) the next such grand lineup, albeit staggered, scheduled for 19 May 2161.
 
synchronoptica


one year ago: Saturday Night Fever (with synchronoptica), a stochastic parrot plus assorted links to revisit

seven years ago: a minister of loneliness plus Project Crested Ice (1968)

eight years ago: Trump’s inaugural speech was not lifted from the Bee-Movie though it seemed plausible, more on the Europe right-wing plus speculation about a 2020 Zuckerberg candidacy

nine years ago: telephone booths as private raves plus more rogue exoplanets discovered

ten years ago: threat-com levels raised plus artist Rob Gonsalves

Monday, 20 January 2025

coming attractions (12. 197)

As a little preview for Tuesday’s apparent planetary alignment in case the weather isn’t cooperating tomorrow, in the predawn western skies of Germany, one can see, so far, Venus (♀—the Morning and the Evening Star due to its proximity to the Sun but at its most elongated orbit currently), Mars (♂—on the wane and appearing dimmer than the gas giant), Jupiter (♃), Uranus (⛢) and Saturn (♄) staggered along the great arc of the elliptical. 

Ideal views are expected to peak on the twenty-first of this month but can be seen for a few preceding days and for a few days afterwards. Consult local guides for the rise and setting of the planets and share what you see of our solar system.

Saturday, 18 January 2025

12x12 (12. 191)

dyson trees: lesser known than his eponymous sphere, a hypothetical genetically engineered plant could be grown inside a comet and provide a self-sustaining habitat for space-faring 

cold case: US retailer regrets installing advertising screens in its frozen food section and is struggling to get out of the contract—see also 

fourth-wall: a filmmakers’ dilemma about the unseen camera’s point-of-view  

decipherment: a solicitation for cursive users to transcribe and classify two centuries of undigitised documents—check the comments section—see previously  

why this is hell, nor am i out of it: Trump, like Satan, doesn’t get away with it 

drawing board: the Nokia Design Archive of prototypes never put in production

twentytwentyfive: George Orwell is to be honoured with a commemorative £2 coin for the seventy-ftfth anniversary of his death

erythrosine: US federal drug administration bans Red Dye 3 as food colouring and other business news—see previously  

onite clam discrepancy: personal AI-chatbots yield more problematic advice—see previously 

a stone only rolls downhill: a new music video from OK Go shot on sixty-four phones for sixty-four one take pieces  

the toasters are flying: a history of screen-savers—see previously  

☄️: meteorite strike caught on a doorbell camera in Prince Edward Island

Thursday, 16 January 2025

identified aerial phenomenon (12. 185)

Trying to take a photo of the full Moon the other night that didn’t turn out so well (Moon says “don’t blame me for not looking good in pictures, I’m just too brilliant”), I zoomed in later and saw that I had accidentally captured a passing constellation of Starlink satellites* seen to the right of the lunar body (the other mysterious objects, those green globs at the bottom are the bokeh’d Christmas lights on the neighbours’ house through the hedges). 

Had I not known about the the low orbiting communications satellites and the flare and related effects that they can produce, I would have mistaken them for UFOs and can completely empathise with those who get a little hysterical witnessing the like. *Correction—I think those might be the planets starting to line up, check back on Tuesday.

Tuesday, 14 January 2025

keogram (12. 179)

Via the always data-driven Quantum of Sollazzo newsletter, we are referred to another incredible bit of astronomical imagery from star-gazer Cees Bassa, a professional astronomer working for ASTRON, the Dutch institute for radio astronomy, presenting their all-sky image above the Netherlands, a composition of nighttime photos taken at fifteen second intervals that illustrates the lengthening and shortening of the days, weather and phases of the Moon. Their fourth annual almanac, the title term, from the Inuit word keoeeit (แ‘ญแ…แฑแ‘ฆ) for aurora, originally applied to a method for graphing the intensity of the Northern Lights and is in broader use as a way of documenting the changing night sky in narrow bands for the entire hemisphere. Much more at the links above.

earthstreak (12. 178)

Though the crew of the Apollo missions who captured Pale Blue Marble and Earthrise might take exception to the accolade of best photo ever, we do think that this image of cities whizzing by taken by veteran astronaut Donald Pettit, on his third tour aboard the International Space Station having spent over five hundred days in orbit, is pretty spectacular. The dazzling nature of the foreground in motion belies other details, like the galactic core on the horizon and the streaks of other satellites and the transition from night to day on the world’s edge. A gifted science communicator making the most of his stints onboard the ISS, Pettit is well equipped with cameras and lenses and has conducted numerous experiments and demonstrations for the curious and enquiring as well as his regiment of assigned tasks and holds the first patent for an object invented in space, the Zero G Cup, a coffee mug that uses the wetting angle, the incline where a liquid and solid meet, to avoid the need of using a straw.

Saturday, 11 January 2025

8x8 (12. 165)

all the things that we’ve amassed sit before us, shattered to ash: interviews from celebrities who lost their homes in the Los Angeles megafire, which is still burning out of control  

facechan: some words of advice for disillusioned social media employees  

bepicolombo: final flyby of the space mission beams back extraordinary photos of Mercury’s polar region

obit.: Bob Canada’s two volume tribute to celebrity deaths of last year we may have overlooked  

erfolgreich abgemeldet: German and Austrian government and academic institutions leave X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, following the summit between Musk and Weidel  

chip off the old block: apparently in some families, it’s customary to nickname a son named after his father the former, a son named after his grandfather Skip and one named after all three Trip  

you’re so woke—diet coke: corporate America abandoning DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion) programs ahead of Trump’s return, hoping to curry favour with the new administration 

delta smelt: fact-checking the fallout over water shortage for emergency responders in California

synchronoptica

one year ago: David Lynch’s 1984 unfinished Dune sequel (with synchronoptica) plus assorted links with revisiting

seven years ago: John Wayne as Genghis Khan (1965), time and dark energy plus more links to enjoy

eight years ago: even more links, misinformation about the refugee situation in Germany plus an anti cow bell campaigner denied Swiss citizenship

nine years ago: the elegance of heliocentrism, RIP David Bowie plus the performer as internet pioneer

ten years ago: a slow news day (1922) 

Sunday, 5 January 2025

smaismrmil­mepoeta­leumibu­nenugt­tauiras (12. 146)

Although only privileging our very limited point of view, changes in the skies, even though expected and with rational explanations, like the phases of the Moon, eclipses and occultations, can still inspire strike with awe and reverence and drive us to herald, especially in the waning and vanishing, their return. Clive Thompson directs our attention to one upcoming astronomical event, beginning in March and lasting through November, when the rings of Saturn will disappear.  This temporary loss of the gas giant’s main feature, a constellation of debris, failed moons, captured comets and asteroids, occurs for earthly watchers twice every twenty-nine and a half years as the planet makes its revolution around the sun and its inclination puts our world in the ring plane, too thin to be seen head on. 

Galileo who began making careful observations of the planet in 1610 one day noticed that the “handles” or “ears” had gone away and was deeply unsettled by this sudden change in the eternal heavens, thinking perhaps the Titan had actually devoured his offspring as in myth. Named after the Roman god of wealth and agriculture who sired Jupiter (Zeus)—Saturn’s patronage did not only extend the harvest but also its cyclical nature, identified with Cronos, whom after overthrowing his own father, Uranus, to become king of the gods was prophesied to be unseated himself by his own children and so gobbled them all up to prevent this from coming to pass. His mother Rhea substituted a boulder for her sixth child, Zeus, and hid him away in Crete to stop the madness. The somewhat more benign Father Time is sometimes portrayed with a sickle or scythe, rising from these same mythopoeic origins, but is nonetheless an equally unmoving standard bearer for the unrelenting march of time and witnessing such an exception, especially for the first time and to see them return months later as Galileo did—the title, as was the practise among astronomers at the time, refers to an anagram that he recorded to document a finding before it was ready for publication, Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi (I have observed the most distant planet and it has a triple form) and Huygens in the 1650s, correctly identifying the nature of the unusual tripartite form wrote in a letter to his father “aaaaaaa­ccccc­deeeeeg­hiiiiiii­llllmm­nnnnnnnnn­oooopp­qrrs­tttttuuuu,” deciphered as Annulo cingitur, tenui, plano, nusquam coherente, ad eclipticam inclinato or Saturn “is surrounded by a thin, flat ring nowhere touching and inclined toward the ecliptic plane”—is a reflection not only on aging and dissolution but also on recurrence and renewal. Much more at the links above.

Saturday, 4 January 2025

pomega (12. 142)

Via Clive Thompson’s latest Link Fest, we are introduced to another chaotic twin of ฯ€ called ฯ–—from the above script variant of pi, also called varpi—that represents the transcendental mathematical constant ratio of the perimeter to the diameter of Bernoulli’s lemniscate, analogous to the way pi defines a circle. The foci of the elliptical plane are equidistant in this figure which has applications in orbital mechanics (see previously). The curve having a shape similar to a figure 8 or the infinity symbol, ♾️, is from the Latin for something bedecked with hanging ribbons and occur in nature as often as the perfect circle. Much more from John Carlos Baez at Mathsodon at the link above.

Wednesday, 1 January 2025

⚳ (12. 130)

Discovered on this day in 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi at the Palermo observatory that the priest and mathematician founded, Ceres—originally classified as the hidden or missing planet that astronomers, in the period between the general consensus and acceptance of heliocentrism and the discovery of Neptune beyond the worlds known since Antiquity, believed was necessary to balance out Solar System (see also here and here)—was the first known (see previously) and largest asteroid. Reclassified several times from a planet-proper, to dwarf planet, to asteroid and presently with a dual designation combining the last two—the only one of the latter catalogued not beyond the orbit of outer planets, it is about a quarter of the size of the Earth’s Moon and is cryovolcanically active with an extremely rarefied atmosphere of water vapour. Piazzi’s original proposal was to name his discovery after the Roman goddess of agriculture (hence the sickle and whose main temple and earthly home was in Sicily), Ceres Ferdinandea—the latter in honour of his patron and king Ferdinand III was roundly rejected (see Neptune above) by the international community. Ceres was visited in 2015 and studied closely by NASA’s Dawn mission in 2015 and return trips are planned by the European and Chinese Space Agencies.

synchronoptica

one year ago: celebrating those we lost in 2023 (with synchronoptica) plus sci-fi movies set in 2024

eight years ago: welcoming 2017, time zones, Public Domain Day, saving seed stock, early adopters plus the art of not sleeping

nine years ago: welcoming 2016, assorted links worth revisiting plus the mental worlds of animals

ten years ago: a year’s worth of trivia, the Eurasian Economic Union plus a philosophy of contradictions

eleven years ago: Schweinehunden plus St Ursula and companions

Friday, 27 December 2024

starquake (12. 115)

On this day in 2004, forty-two thousand years after a powerful explosion occurred on the surface of the magnetar, a class of neutron star with a powerful magnetic field, located in the constellation of Sagittarius, the resultant gamma ray reached Earth, the brightest event known to have been experienced on the planet with an origin outside the universe, the incredibly dense and compact star (only fifteen kilometres in diameter) designated as SGR 1806-20 and discovered in 1979 as a gamma-repeater (see previously) releasing as much energy in a tenth of a second as the Sun will in one hundred and fifty thousand years. The expanding cloud, shock wave of radiation briefly enlarged the ionosphere and it is estimated that a comparable blast within ten light years of Earth would ravage the atmosphere and destroy the ozone layer.

synchronoptica

one year ago: solfรจge in other languages (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: messianic complexes, one of small character, memories of y2k plus an inverted skyscraper

eight years ago: assorted links worth revisiting plus telegraphing kisses

nine years ago: banana supply chains plus more links to enjoy

ten years ago: tiny houses, Russian metro stations plus stress and motivation

Thursday, 26 December 2024

8x8 (12. 112)

carnian pluvial event: that time it rained for two million years  

acme corporation: eight technological failures of 2024  

double-harvest: Christmas tree farmers exploring mycoforestry to raise timber and mushrooms on the same plot of land 

 ๐Ÿœ: how the world of ant geopolitics mirrors that of human colonisation and globalisation  

9.3 mw: the Boxing Day Tsunami that cost a quarter of a million lives twenty years on

royal warrant: chocolatier to British crown Cadbury is delisted after generations for continued business operations in Russia  

woty: the Fritinancy edition—via Kottke 

wax wings: researchers awaiting telemetry back from the Parker Solar probe (previously) after historic approach to the Sun

synchronoptica

one year ago: DJ Earworm’s annual (with synchronoptica), The Glass Menagerie (1944) plus assorted links worth revisiting

seven years ago: a banger to time for New Year’s

eight years ago: a charging stretch of road, outer space vodka plus 2016 in review

nine years ago: 3D printing as a cottage industry, Quentin Crisp shares their favourite gangster films, Jesus in Japan, lions and lionesses plus Aleister Crowley’s manor

eleven years ago: Second Christmas plus a tuxedo vest

Thursday, 19 December 2024

bittersweet symphonie (12. 095)

The culmination of a formal joint West German-French collaboration, the first constellation of European communications satellites (see previously) was launched into orbit on this day in 1974 from Cape Canaveral atop a Delta rocket, with the stipulation that this would only be a demonstration project and not be fully operational in order for the US to protect its monopoly. The triad of retractable solar cell booms and thrusters to stabilise orbit and repositioning were the first time such innovations, now standards, were put to use. The impositions restricted commercial use but satellites could beam educational programming, primarily from Deutsche Welle to India and Africa as well as news concern Red Cross relief missions. Considered unacceptable, the embargo led to the development of Europe’s domestic Ariane rocket for future enterprises. Symphonie I and Symphonie II, launched the following August, we decommissioned and deorbited on this anniversary in 1984, exceeding their original mission by five years.

Wednesday, 18 December 2024

project score (12. 093)

The first purpose-built communications satellite, abbreviation fore Signal Communications by Orbiting Relay Equipment) was launched on this day in 1958 atop an Atlas rocket and provided a follow up demonstration to broadcasts from space. Regarded as an advancement that brought the American space programme on par with the Soviet accomplishments of Sputnik I and Sputnik II, showing that messages could be transmitted through the upper atmosphere across multiple round stations. Albeit pre-recorded, Project SCOPE also delivered a Christmas greeting from US president Eisenhower (see previously), the first voice from space, capturing global attention. Like the signal from Sputnik, it could be picked up by sufficiently sensitive radios worldwide but most heard the message on news re-broadcasts.  After circling the Earth twelve times, the orbit degraded and the satellite burned up on re-entry.

Thursday, 5 December 2024

9x9 (12. 057)

globetrotter—more like globetriggered: a wrap of 2024 in therapy  

new doge, old tricks: Musk and Ramaswamy present their plan to rapture three-quarters of the government workforce but it’s going to be a challenge to achieve real cost-cutting or improved efficiency  

vote de censure: French government collapses after legislature moves to eject controversial prime minister Michel Barnier—see previously 

field of vision: the challenges of bringing the Vera Ruben perched high in the Andes on online includes unidentified intelligence agencies screening images before they are released to the public  

my empathy is out of network: Americas respond to the assassination of a major medical insurance CEO  

ekistical portrait: Rob Stephenson is documenting all the three hundred and fifty neighbourhoods of New York City’s five boroughs—via Kottke  

what just happened: South Korea’s declaration of marshal law, parliament’s rejection and the ongoing political crisis  

stonks: Bitcoin just hit $100 000 a piece  

hot topic: the year in Wikipedia, recent celebrity deaths topped the list again

 synchronoptica

one year ago: the Michelob Music Hour (with synchronoptica) plus modern art presented as a fun-fair

seven years ago: noisy GIFs, assorted links worth the revisit plus 52 more things

eight years ago: the origins of Play-Doh

nine years ago: red cup controversy, a trip to Rosenau plus our faithful chronicler

ten years ago: troublesome ideas in the marketplace plus an A-ha! reunion concert

Saturday, 30 November 2024

catch a falling star and put it your pocket (12. 044)

On this day in 1954, in the Oak Grove neighbourhood of Sylacauga, Alabama, Elizabeth Fowler Hodge was jolted awake from an early afternoon nap after being struck from a fragment of a meteorite, about the size of a grapefruit. Though sustaining only the physical injury of a large bruise to her thigh (later suffering trauma however from the singular incident and the intense albeit short-lived fame garnered because of it), Hodges’ case was the only well documented individual to be hit by an object from space and survive it. The rock came hurtling through the roof of her house she shared with her mother and husband, ricocheting off the family radio (destroying it) and bounced into Hodges. There was somewhat of a custody battle after scientists from a nearby airforce base confirmed the rock’s origins between the mayor of the town who promised it to a museum and the Hodges’ landlords but ultimately Elizabeth was allowed to keep the meteorite. By the time it was settled, however, Ms Hodges’ celebrity had died down and no buyer could be found and eventually it ended up in the state’s natural history museum. Likely sourced from asteroid 1685 Toro, similar but unverified incidents include a 1677 strike on a friar in Milan and the 1908 Tunguska Event, reported to have caused at least three casualties.

Thursday, 28 November 2024

cp 1919 (12. 037)

Discovered by post-graduate astrophysics student Jocelyn Bell Burnell using the Interplanetary Scintillation Array of Cambridge Observatory on this day in 1967 whilst searching for radio signals in space, because of its precise regularity, it was dismissed by colleagues as terrestrial interference initially,but combing through reams of data, Bell Burnell correctly pinpointed its origins to celestial coordinates of nineteen′ nineteen′′ right ascension, twenty-one° declination, coming from the constellation Vulpecula—for which it was given the designation LGM-1, little green men, supposing it might be an alien beacon of some kind. The discoverer, however, correctly posited that the source was a rapidly rotating neutron star. Fellow researchers received a Nobel prize in 1974 for their work in radioastronomy but Bell Burnell’s contributions were overlooked (for her part, she maintained that she did not believe that the committee should be in the business of honouring research assistants), and the novel class of star is now recognised as a pulsar, emitting beams of radiation from its poles and have proven to be an indispensable lighthouse in the cosmos for detection and triangulation, a throughline for detecting the first exoplanents and the phenomena of gravitational waves among others. In 1979, for their debut studio album, Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division adapted a ridgeline plot of the stars’s radio emissions’ pulses for the cover art.

Sunday, 17 November 2024

julian day zero (12. 009)

Introduced by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in 1957 to track the orbit of Sputnik with a thirty-six-bit mainframe, to save on memory and compute resources by expressing time-coordinates in just eighteen-bits through 7 August 2576, the Modified Julian Date system simply dispatched with the proceeding two-million four-hundred-thousand days of history from the dawn of the calendar, counting backwards and resetting the number at noon on this day in 1858, often further truncated. This was also the reference epoch (see previously) for the earliest operating systems, chosen in part as it predated most modern record keeping. Because of the continual count, it is easier for software to process the intervening time elapsed between two events for applications like calculating interest, sell-by-dates for perishable inventories, etc, in the same was computers can’t really perform mathematical operations except by matrices. The Julian Period was proposed by sixteenth century academic Joseph Justus Scaliger (a year after the unrelated calendar was replaced in most of Europe by the Gregorian one) as the sum product of three calendrical cycles that comprise the system, twenty-eight solar cycles, nineteen lunar cycles and fifteen indiction cycles (the periodic census and tax reassessment of the Roman Empire that occurred every fifteen years)—or a span of seven thousand nine hundred and eighty years, reaching back in time under the assumption that all were synchronised at the beginning of time. Scaliger calculated this to be 4713 BC, well before any events in recorded history known to him.

Saturday, 9 November 2024

cr2291 (11. 985)

Entering the above synodic solar rotation period on the thirteenth of this month, the count (necessarily arbitrary as the Sun is not a solid body but rather a gaseous plasma with it spinning at significantly different rates at different latitudes, the equator rotating some eight days faster than polar climes), the Carrington count began on this day in 1853 as a method to track solar topology over short to moderate periods of time by tracking the movement of sunspots and eruptions. For the purposes of calculation, each diurnal cycle is a shade over twenty-seven terrestrial days and since its inception by Robert Christopher Carrington has been assigned a unique number. The meticulously recorded observations by this amateur astronomer from Chelsea further demonstrated the phenomena of solar flares and their influence on the Earth’s aurorae. Likely the result of a coronal mass ejection, the powerful geomagnetic storm of September 1859 which disabled telegraph systems worldwide and would be catastrophic for global connectivity were it to happen today is named the Carrington Event in his honour.

Friday, 1 November 2024

9x9 (11. 950)

hotwired: an oral history of Wired! magazine and the choices made with its 1994 launch—via Kottke 

enjoy it while you can: duo forms political action committee to appeal to inconsistent voters through ads on porn sites

affaire des poisons: a murder scandal with accusations of witchcraft in the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV  

nutty narrows: a catenary suspension bridge built over a busy road in Washington state to give squirrels safe passage 

oh brave new world with so many goodly creatures: Uranus’ moon Miranda may harbour a subsurface ocean 

la jetรฉe: an influential time-travel movie made of still images  

scope of practise: a new museum dedicated to the paranormal and Victorian spiritualism opens in Carmarthen’s Penuel chapel 

if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed: a terrifying theory on the truth behind Trump and Johnson’s ‘little secret’ that defers the election to 11 December  

ghost jobs: banking resumes for vacancies that don’t really exist are haunting already demoralised tech workers

synchronoptica

one year ago: Three Wishes for Cinderella (with synchronoptica), McDonald theogony plus assorted links to revisit

seven years ago: books and things, art entrรชpots plus assorted links worth revisiting

eight years ago: US sending troops to Norway to counter Russian aggression, mobile office space, high-fives plus synthehol

nine years ago: esotericism in the Third Reich plus advances in fusion power

ten years ago: Rome abandons the West