Is it just my imagination, or do some of the students look like they are nauseous?
John Bannister, Lecture with Dissection , England, 16th century. Click to enlarge.
Autopsy
Author Archives: Reinhard Kargl
Earth As Seen From Saturn
This picture shows us. All of us on planet Earth. All 7 billion human beings contained one tiny dot of light.
(Click to enlarge)
In this rare image taken on July 19, 2013, the wide-angle camera on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has captured Saturn’s rings and our planet Earth and its moon in the same frame. It is only one footprint in a mosaic of 33 footprints covering the entire Saturn ring system (including Saturn itself). At each footprint, images were taken in different spectral filters for a total of 323 images: some were taken for scientific purposes and some to produce a natural color mosaic. This is the only wide-angle footprint that has the Earth-moon system in it.
The dark side of Saturn, its bright limb, the main rings, the F ring, and the G and E rings are clearly seen; the limb of Saturn and the F ring are overexposed. The “breaks” in the brightness of Saturn’s limb are due to the shadows of the rings on the globe of Saturn, preventing sunlight from shining through the atmosphere in those regions. The E and G rings have been brightened for better visibility.
Earth, which is 898 million miles (1.44 billion kilometers) away in this image, appears as a blue dot at center right; the moon can be seen as a fainter protrusion off its right side. An arrow indicates their location in the annotated version. (The two are clearly seen as separate objects in the accompanying narrow angle frame: PIA14949.) The other bright dots nearby are stars.
This is only the third time ever that Earth has been imaged from the outer solar system. Continue reading
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Fascinating. George Orwell‘s novel, “Nineteen eighty-four” (sometimes spelled as “1984”) has been catapulted back into the US bestseller lists!
Practically overnight, sales have risen almost 5800%.
There are several editions of the original works published in 1949, so it is not quite clear how the numbers are compiled. I wonder what Mr. Orwell would have to say. (Unfortunately he died in 1950).
Don’t forget, Prols:
WAR IS PEACE!
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY!
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH!
The Nine Principles Of Miyamoto Musashi
1. Think of what is right and true.
2. Practice and cultivate the sciences.
3. Become acquainted with the arts.
4. Know the principles of the crafts.
5. Understand the harm and benefit in everything.
6. Learn to see everything accurately.
7. Become aware of what is not obvious.
8. Be careful even in small matters.
9. Do not do anything useless.
Miyamoto Musashi (宮本 武蔵), Bushi, Master Swordsman, Japan, c. 1584 – June 13, 1645)
Miyamoto Musashi wielding two bokken. Woodblock print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.
Color Footage of London, 1927
This is archive footage based on images captured by Claude Frisse-Greene, an early British pioneer of film. Nearly 90 years ago, he created a series of travelogues using a color process developed by his father William Frisse-Greene, a British portrait photographer and a well known inventor. His experiments in the field of motion pictures led him to be known as one of the fathers of cinematography.
One of William’s inventions was an additive color film process known as “Biocolour”, a rather cumbersome early color process. It works by exposing every other frame of standard black-and-white film through a different-colored filter, and then staining the resulting monochrome prints either red or green. In a motion picture projection, the combined frames create an illusion of real color.
Using computer enhancement, the British Film Institute reduced the flickering seen in the original footage.
Roger Ebert Dead
Roger Ebert, my favorite film critic passed away from complications of cancer today. Given today’s fragmented media market, he will never be outdone. There’s much that could be said about his career and influence, but I will gladly leave this to others who are more knowledgeable.
But I wanted to post this letter Ebert sent to an student who was about 11 or 13 at the time.
Dana Stevens went on to study comparative literature at UC Berkeley, started a blog and is now a professional film critic. She has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic and the Washington Book World, among others.
Proof that real letters are more inspiring than e-mail!
Flying Over the Earth at Night
This video is so amazing that I had to repost it as it came. This was originally posted on “Astronomy Picture of the Day“, a daily blog site highly recommended for everyone with an interest in astronomy.
Video Credit: Gateway to Astronaut Photography, NASA ; Compilation: David Peterson (YouTube);
Music: Freedom Fighters (Two Steps from Hell)
Explanation: Many wonders are visible when flying over the Earth at night. A compilation of such visual spectacles was captured recently from the International Space Station (ISS) and set to rousing music. Passing below are white clouds, orange city lights, lightning flashes in thunderstorms, and dark blue seas. On the horizon is the golden haze of Earth’s thin atmosphere, frequently decorated by dancing auroras as the video progresses. The green parts of auroras typically remain below the space station, but the station flies right through the red and purple auroral peaks. Solar panels of the ISS are seen around the frame edges. The ominous wave of approaching brightness at the end of each sequence is just the dawn of the sunlit half of Earth, a dawn that occurs every 90 minutes.
Easter
by Tim Tompson*
Easter Sunday will soon be upon us.
In the year 325 A.D. the First Council of Nicaea defined the date for Easter as the first Sunday following the first Full moon after the Vernal equinox. But astronomically selected dates can move around; e.g., the vernal equinox can happen on 20 March as well as 21 March, and the phases of the moon are not tied either to the civil calendar nor to the equinoxes. So, for the purposes of calculating the date for Easter, the Roman Catholic church defines its own equinox as always happening on 21 March, and they use their own “ecclesiastical full moon”, which by definition always occurs on the 14th day of the ecclesiastical lunar month on the ecclesiastical lunar calendar (which assumes by definition that 19 tropical years equals 235 synodic months exactly [the correct number is 234.997]). In this way, Roman Catholic Easter always falls in the window of 22 March to 25 April.
Roman Catholics use the Gregorian calendar, which was finalized in 1582 for the explicit purpose of returning the date of Easter to the same date it had when the First Council of Nicaea met. In the time between 325 and 1582, the vernal equinox had slipped backwards through the civil calendar to 11 March instead of 21 March, which it was in 325. So when the Gregorian calendar replaced the Julian calendar in 1582, ten days were skipped over, which moved Easter back to 21 March. And by the trick of skipping leap days in years ending in 00, unless they are evenly divisible by 400, the length of the average civil calendar year is shortened from 365.25 days (that is one “tropical year”) to 365.2425 days, the end result of which is that the civil calendar will fall behind the seasons by about one day come the year 3200 (a problem easily solved by skipping the leap day in 3200).
The actual time it takes to go from one vernal equinox to the next is 365.24219878125 days, which should result in an accumulated difference between the seasons and the civil calendar of 3 days, 17 minutes, 33 seconds over 10,000 years. But the mean tropical year is decreasing by 0.53 seconds per 100 years (a slow tidal transfer of energy from sun to Earth), and the mean length of day is decreasing by 0.0015 seconds per 100 years (a slow tidal transfer of energy from Earth to moon). That’s why the calendar can lose a whole day in only about 1200 years. One could cleanup the next few thousand years by skipping the leap day in the year 3200, keep the leap day in 3600 and 4000, and skipping the leap day in 4500 & 5000.
Eastern Christians (mostly the Eastern and Greek Orthodox churches, Eastern Catholic and Coptics) use the old Julian calendar, so they celebrate Easter basically a month later than do the Romans, in the window between 4 April to 8 May.
There are various good reasons for having a civil calendar that is locked to the seasons. But the one that has been most important has proven to be the need to have Easter fall on a fixed time of the civil calendar year.
* The writer is a physicist retired from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Among his main personal interests are astronomy, chess, languages and linguistics, and military history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_full_moon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computus
Book: Those Angry Days
Here’s a most fascinating new book by journalist Lynne Olson. As I have outlined in my previous post about Charles Lindbergh, America’s entry into World War II was by no means a given, nor was it popular among average Americans before the Pearl Harbor attack.
Olson’s book goes into great detail describing the political division between the non-interventionist faction (of which Charles Lindbergh was a major proponent and figurehead) and those who wanted to support Britain — if not with an all-out war against Nazi-Germany, at least with arms shipments.
Olson shines a light on many little known facts, for instance, a huge clandestine British operation to infiltrate US media, spy and discredit leading non-interventionist Americans, spread propaganda materials and even disseminate forged documents designed to draw America into the war. Roosevelt not only knew about these activities, but he also issued a loose directive to the FBI to conduct massive surveillance on non-interventionists from the popular “America First” movement.
Terry Gross (All Things Considered) recorded this fine radio interview with the author.
Those Angry Days
Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight over World War II, 1939-1941
by Lynne Olson
Random House, Hardcover, 576 pages; List Price $18.
ISBN-13: 978-1400069743
Lowell Observatory: Fundraising To Save Clark Telescope
Percival Lowell observing Venus from the observer’s chair of Clark telescope at the Lowell Observatory in 1910.
Percival Lowell was convinced that there had to be life on Mars, and he spent much of his life trying to prove it. (I often wonder how excited he would be about our Mars rovers).Of course Lowell had no such help. In 1895, the astronomer commissioned a telescope he thought suitable for the visual examination of the surface of Mars. The refracting telescope was made by Alvin Clark & Sons (leading telescope makers of the time) and is housed at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. It is among the most important, historical science landmarks.
Today, the 117-year-old “Clark telescope” is in need of major restoration, and the Lowell Observatory is holding a crowdsourcing campaign to raise funds.