It’s Time To Skin The Brown Dog!

The Dog Days of summer have arrived. The loud stinging sound of cicadas penetrate the airwaves with vibrato. Incessant hot temperatures keep reminding us what summer is all about. And to think that just a few months ago we were begging for some kinder, warmer weather. Now we are begging for kinder, cooler temperatures.

The fluctuation of emotions brought about by the changing of the seasons. The complicated psychological makeup of the strange species of mankind. When it comes to the weather, we never seem to be satisfied. 

When temperatures are high and the humid air is thick, we refer to the time of year as Dog Days of summer. Only dogs would be mad enough to venture out into this scorching heat. Some species of fish will go for deeper water to find relief from the heat. Or could it be that bigger fish are just following the food chain heading into the depths of the water?

In our own small way of thinking, we seldom stop to realize that Dog Days are between July and September only for us Yanks in the northern hemisphere. But for the Polynesians, they will enjoy this natural element between January and March, while we Yanks will complain about the cold Arctic air.

In Ancient Rome,  Dog Days extended from July 24 through August 24 (or, alternatively July 23-August 23). In many European cultures (German, French, Italian) this period is still said to be the time of the Dog Days.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac lists the traditional timing of the Dog Days as the 40 days beginning July 3 and ending August 11, coinciding with the ancient heliacal (at sunrise) rising of the Dog Star, Sirius. These are the days of the year when rainfall is at its lowest levels.

As I plunge further into the Wiki, I detect some clues that shed light of this mystery, which has been hidden for decades, at least for some of us. Where does the origin of the phrase “Dog Days” come from? According to Wiki, the ancients blamed the nasty, unforgiveable weather on a star. That star to get all the blame – Sirius, also called you guessed it, the “Dog Star”.

Sirius ascends in the east before dawn on late summer mornings. Sirius is the brightest star in the sky. It is easier to see on winter and spring evenings. If you’re already familiar with Orion, which most of us are, just look to the left at that really bright star. That’s Sirius. Take a look at this very classy video of Orion, which also mentions the star Sirius. Nice, eh?

To those not familiar with Orion, look for three stars (Orion’s Belt) lined up in a row. Orion will show up in the eastern sky in the evenings. Winter is the best time to view.

Sirius, or the “Dog Star”, is a star that holds prominence in its constellation called Canis Major, or the “Big Dog”.

It turns out that the Romans blamed the stagnant, hot air on Sirius, the brightest star in the sky besides the sun itself. The Romans had their own little way of dealing with this problem. When dog days rolled around that time of year, the Romans would sacrifice a brown dog, hoping to appease the mighty rage of Sirius. I’m sort of curious why they chose only brown dogs?

In our wonderful age of modernity, this would sound the bells of animal rights groups throughout the world! But I can share the mentality of the Romans; some days the heat is almost unbearable. If skinning the brown dog would alleviate this condition, I’m sure many would be tempted to oblige the sacred carnage. But of course, we have since moved on from that school of thought. Right?

So, my small piece of advice to you is this… Be wary of your neighbor this time of year. The hot sultry sun could provoke him or her into total hysteria. Madness I say.

As the seas boil, your wine turns sour, and all creatures became languid, causing to man burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies, be aware of this phenomenon.

One final thought to those gasping for air in the scolding hot sunlight – if your dog is brown you might consider concealing him further in the woods. You never know, a Roman could hold the dog responsible for the heat!

The Bird That Can Fly Backwards

Russ Thompson’s Enjoyable Hummingbirds from Russ Thompson on Vimeo.

Video clips, Photos of Motion (gifs), and a slideshow are used to present hummingbirds doing what hummingbirds do. Ruby-throated, Rufous and numerous Latin America hummingbirds are included and if you enjoy this video, visit Russ’s website for more hummingbird action.

Jay Pasachoff and Williams College Astronomy team on Easter Island

Solar Eclipse 2010: Finished

Solar Eclipse 2010: Under 10 minutes remaining

Solar Eclipse 2010: 30 minutes until the solar eclipse finishes

Solar Eclipse 2010: Moon moving off the sun (Easter Island)

Solar Eclipse 2010: Just the human eye view (Easter Island)

Solar Eclipse July 11, 2010: Totality

Solar Eclipse 2010: 4 minutes until totality

Solar Eclipse 2010: 29 minutes until totality

Solar Eclipse 2010: (Easter Island) 41 min to totality

Solar Eclipse 2010: Jay Pasachoff of Williams College viewing the solar eclipse

Jay Pasachoff and the Williams College Astronomy team go to Easter Island for the Total Solar Eclipse on July 11, 2010. Thanks to Jon on Twitter for sharing these wonderful photos of the occasion.

On the Williams College Astronomy website, there is valuable information about eclipses and upcoming events.

Easter Island is widely famous for its 887 extant monumental statues called Moai. Annexed in 1888, Easter Island is a territory of Chile. Earthquakes are a common problem in Chile.

Earthquake Jolts Chile -  Sunday, July 12, 2010
Source: Xinhua : An earthquake measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale jolted north of Chile on Sunday, the US Geological Survey said.

The quake, which occurred at 20:11 local time (00:11 GMT Monday), was centered 273 km northeast of Antofagasta, and at the depth of 99 km, the USGS said.

The Early History Of Indo-European Languages

Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and V. V. Ivanov
Scientific American, March 1990, pp. 110-116*

Linguistics, the scientific study of  language, can reach more deeply into the human past than the most ancient written records. It compares related languages to reconstruct their immediate progenitors and eventually their ultimate ancestor, or protolanguage. The protolanguage in turn illuminates the lives of its speakers and locates them in time and place.

The science developed from the study of the Indo-European superfamily of languages, by far the largest in number of languages and number of speakers. Nearly half of the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language as a first language; six of the 10 languages in which Scientific American appears–English, French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish–belong to this superfamily.

Early studies of Indo-European languages focused on those most familiar to the original European researchers: the Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic families. Affinities between these and the “Aryan” languages spoken in faraway India were noticed by European travelers as early as the 16th century. That they might all share a common ancestor was first proposed in 1786 by Sir William Jones, an English jurist and student of Eastern cultures. He thus launched what came to be known as the Indo-European hypothesis, which served as the principal stimulus to the founders of historical linguistics in the 19th century.

In their reconstruction of the ancestral Indo-European language, the early linguists relied heavily on Grimm’s law of Lautverschiebung (“sound shift”), which postulated that sets of consonants displace one another over time in predictable and regular fashion. The law was posed in 1822 by Jacob Grimm, who is more widely famed for the anthology of fairy tales he wrote with his brother, Wilhelm. Grimm’s law explained, among other things, why in the Germanic languages certain hard consonants had persisted despite their universal tendency to yield to soft ones. The set of softer, “voiced” consonants “b,” “d,” “g” (followed by momentary vibration of the vocal cords), posited in the protolanguage, had apparently given way to the corresponding hard set “p,” “t,” “k.” According to Grimm’s law, this had come about by “devoicing” those consonants (“p,” for example, is unaccompanied by vocal vibration). Thus, the Sanskrit dhar is seen as an archaic form of the English “draw,” which is itself more archaic than the German tragen (all of which mean “to pull”).

More recent evidence now places the probable origin of the Indo-European language in western Asia. Three generations of archaeologists and linguists have thus far excavated and deciphered manuscripts in close to a dozen ancient languages from sites in modern Turkey and as far east as Tocharia, in modern Turkestan. Their observations, together with new ideas in pure linguistic theory, have made it necessary to revise the canons of linguistic evolutions.

The landscape described by the protolanguage as now resolved must lie somewhere in the crescent that curves around the southern shores of the Black Sea, south from the Balkan peninsula, east across ancient Anatolia (today the non-European territories of Turkey) and north to the Caucasus Mountains. Here the agricultural revolution created the food surplus that impelled the Indo-Europeans to found villages and city-states from which, about 6,000 years ago, they began their migrations over the Eurasian continent and into history. (See Also: Evolution and Locale Maps)

The diverging pathways of linguistic transformation and human migration may now be traced back to a convergence in the Indo-European protolanguage and its homeland. This has followed from the revision in the canons of phonology we mentioned above. An uncontested peculiarity of the sound system of the protolanguage, for example, is the near absence, or suppression, of one of the three consonants “p,” “b” or “v,” which are labials (consonants sounded with the lips). Traditionally, it had been thought that “b” was the suppressed consonant. Subsequent studies in phonology indicated, however, that if one of the three labial consonants is lacking in a language, it is least likely to be the one sounded as “b” in English and other living European languages.

According to classical theory, the “stop” consonants–those that are sounded by interruption of the outward flow of the breath that excites the vibration of the glottis, or vocal cords–are divided into three categories. The labial stop consonant “b” appears in the first column as a voiced consonant; the parentheses enclosing it there indicate its supposed suppression. It is associated with two other voiced stop consonants: “d” (stopped by the forward part of the tongue against the palate) and “g” (stopped by the back of the tongue against the palate).

In the scheme we have developed the corresponding consonants are sounded with a glottalized stop: a closure of the throat at the vocal cords that prevents the outward flow of breath. Here the voiceless labial stop (“p’”) appears suppressed, followed by “t’” and “k’”. As (“p’”) is to (“b”), voiceless and voiced, respectively, so “t’” is to “d” and “k’” is to “g”. Glottalized stops occur in many different language families, particularly those of northern Caucasian and southern Caucasian (Kartvelian) provenance. The glottalized stop–which hardens a consonant–tends to weaken and disappear in most languages of the world. So we surmised that–among the labial stops–it was the “p’” rather than the “b” that most likely had been suppressed in the Indo-European protolanguage.

Endeavour Is The Next Mission For ISS

The 32nd flight to the ISS is scheduled for target on Sunday, Feb. 7, 2010. This flight will use Space Shuttle Endeavour. The launch time is expected to be at 4:39 Eastern Stardard Time.

STS-130 DETAILS
1. Shuttle: Endeavour
2. Launch Target: Feb. 7, 2010, 4:39 a.m. EST
3. Duration: 13 days
4. Launch Window: 10 minutes
5. Launch Pad: 39A
6. Landing Site: KSC
7. Inclination/Altitude: 51.6 degrees/122 nautical miles

STS-130 LINKS
1. Mission Status Center – Updates and Video!
2. Countdown Timeline
3. STS-130 Flight Plan
4. NASA – Latest Space Shuttle News.
5. NASA TV – Public Channel. Now playing live events, mission coverage.

STS-130 Crew: Commander George D. Zamka, Pilot Terry W. Virts, Jr, Mission Specialist 1 Kathryn P. Hire, Mission Specialist 2 Stephen K. Robinson, Mission Specialist 3 Nicholas J. M. Patrick, and Mission Specialist 4 Robert L. Behnken. Meet the STS-130 Crew.

Scheduled Spacewalks:
EVA 1 – Flight Day 5, duration 6.5 hours
EVA 2 – Flight Day 7, duration 6.5 hours
EVA 3 – Flight Day 10, duration 6.5 hours

Mission: Deliver Node 3, named Tranquility, and the Cupola, a robotic control station with six windows around its sides and another in the center that provides a 360-degree view around the station.

Info: This will be the 32nd shuttle station assembly mission.

Commander George Zamka will lead the STS-130 mission to the International Space Station aboard space shuttle Endeavour. Terry Virts Jr. will serve as the pilot. Mission specialists are Nicholas Patrick, Robert Behnken, Stephen Robinson and Kathryn Hire. Virts will be making his first trip to space.

Endeavour will deliver a third connecting module – the Tranquility node – to the station and a seven-windowed cupola to be used as a control room for robotics. The mission will feature three spacewalks.

STS-130 will represent a major milestone mission, as it will be bringing up the last major United States addition to the space station. A Countdown of Countdowns: The Space Shuttle’s Finale. Click here for more info.

Using 3600 Seconds At A Time

Productivity is often measured on a per unit per hour basis. To determine profits and costs, a company needs to know the rate of productivity. Even though it’s not an exact science, a good estimation is very useful for business purposes.

If we’re calibrating the output of a machine or a device, we need to simplify the process and find a method for our calculations. Whether we’re measuring pounds per hour, gallons per hour, or any type of production per hour, what we need is a plan.

For example, say we want to calibrate the output of a plastic pelletizer machine. Yes, we’re now in the plastics business. We want to know the poundage of pellets the machine is producing in an hour.

Let’s break it down. Firstly, we will catch or contain our pellets in a bucket. Then we must minus the tare weight of the bucket. Naturally.

But how long do we hold our bucket to catch the pellets?

Here is the blueprint. We catch our pellets in a bucket for 15 seconds. The pounds in the bucket will tell us the production rate per hour.  But how?

There are 60 seconds in a minute. There are 3600 seconds in an hour. If we caught our material during 15 seconds, we would need to multiply that amount times 240 to get our hourly production rate. Why use 240?

Because, 3600 (seconds per hour) divided by 15 (seconds) equals 240. Whatever our quantity will be in 15 seconds, we multiply by 240 to get the hourly production rate. This could apply to virtually anything.

Break is over. Let’s get back to work!

The Longest Annular Solar Eclipse of the Millennium

 
                    Annular Solar Eclipse – 15 January 2010 (YouTube)

On January 15, 2009, millions gathered to watch the annular eclipse of the Sun. It was the longest annular solar eclipse of the millennium, and the longest until December 23, 3043.

According to The Hindu, the eclipse could be viewed in southern India for roughly eleven minutes.

“Over this southern tip, the eclipse, the like of which is expected again only in 3043, began at 11.14 a.m. and ended a little after 3 p.m. It was a spectacular sight when the photosphere of the sun was covered by the moon, forming a ring of fire in the sky for about 11 minutes and eight seconds.”

In the rest of India, only a partial eclipse was seen.

A total of 10 Rohini series indigenous sounding rockets were used Thursday and Friday to investigate the effects of the eclipse.

Comparing Solar and Lunar Eclipses

What is the difference between a solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse? Do both eclipses have anything in common? What is an eclipse?

An eclipse happens when one celestial object moves into the shadow of another.

Solar Eclipse Facts
1. Only occurs at new moon.
2. Lasts for a few minutes.
3. Occurs when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun.
4. Viewed from a certain relatively small area of the world.
5. Eye protection is necessary; viewing with the naked eye will cause damage.
6. Cycles – They occur somewhere on Earth every 18 months on average; estimated recurrence every 370 years.

Lunar Eclipse Facts
1. Only occurs at full moon.
2. Lasts for a few hours.
3. Occurs when the Earth passes between the Sun and the Moon.
4. Viewed from anywhere on the night side of the Earth.
5. Eye protection is not necessary; viewing with the naked eye will not cause damage.
6. Cycles – Every year there are usually at least two partials; total eclipses are significantly less common.

More Eclipse Facts
An eclipse does not happen at every new or full moon. An eclipse does not occur every month. A solar eclipse always occurs two weeks after or two weeks before a total lunar eclipse. The next total solar eclipse visible from the United States will be on August 21, 2017!

Most Famous Eclipses
The most famous eclipse of ancient times ended a five-year war between the Lydians and the Medes who were locked in battle. The sight of the total solar eclipse on May 28, 585 B.C. was startling enough to cause both nations to stop fighting at once.

The most famous eclipse of modern times was on May 29, 1919. This total solar eclipse, which lasted 6 minutes and 51 seconds, was one of the longest solar eclipses of the 20th century.

This famous eclipse provided the images used to verify Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. This event would make Einstein famous overnight and ultimately change the course of history.

Sources:
* WikiAnswers: What is the difference between a solar and a lunar eclipse?
* Solar Eclipse: Wikipedia.
* Lunar Eclipse: Wikipedia.
* NASA: Eclipse Web Site.

Finding Orion The Hunter

Orion, also called “The Hunter”, is a prominent constellation that is visible all over the world. How do I find Orion The Hunter, which has a total of seven stars?

Orion is one of the easiest constellations to find, if you know where and what to look for. Hint: Orion’s Belt is really what you’re going to notice. Orion’s Belt consists of three stars.

Orion’s Belt can be found in the Eastern/Southeastern sky. Grab a coat, it’s going to be cold outside, because Orion is most visible in late autumn and winter. Locating Orion is certainly worth the trouble.

Articles that I’d read instructed me to look to the Southern sky to find Orion’s Belt. But alas, I found Orion’s Belt in the Eastern sky. My location is in the Northern Hemisphere. The astronomy charts present the three stars as being very much slanted. I personally thought that the three stars were more of a vertical fashion, or maybe slightly angled. That’s just my opinion.

Once you spot Orion, look up higher in the sky. You’ll find a small cluster of blue stars. That cluster is called Pleaides, also referred to as the “Seven Sisters”. The Seven Sisters are hard to see with the naked eye, and even harder to count.

And that really bright star between Orion and Pleaides, it’s called Aldebaran. Aldebaran is in the constellation known as Taurus. Aldebaran is one of the brightest stars in the night sky.

Ancient civilizations and all cultures have their own stories to tell about Orion. Orion’s current name originates from Greek mythology. It’s intriguing to note the significance of Orion, and its prominence regarded throughout the ages of time.

Enjoy The Night Sky With The Skyquest XT4.5

Orion SkyQuest XT4.5 Classic Dobsonian Telescope
Looking for a great beginner telescope? The Orion SkyQuest XT4.5 Classic Dobsonian Telescope has very high ratings. This Dobsonian can be maneuvered effortlessly, while you view the heavens above.

Sky & Telescope Magazine
Sky & Telescope, the Essential Magazine of Astronomy, advertises Orion telescopes on their site. And if you’re not familiar, their magazine is fantastic.

The XT4.5 is actually more than a beginner scope. Even after you’re ready to upsize to a bigger Orion, you will not want to give this one up. It’s that nice. This is not a cheap department scope. But you won’t be spending a boat load of money to bag this one.

The Skyquest XT4.5 is a great scope for the hobbyist wanting to get into the world of amateur astronomy. This is a top quality piece of equipment, and probably a lot more than any beginner might imagine. The XT4.5 is a serious tool that will last for many years to come.

This is one purchase that you’ll never regret. You and the kids will be able to enjoy the night sky with great pleasure.

NightWatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe - A classic handbook for amateur astronomers. A great addition to your new telescope. Author Terence Dickinson is considered to be an expert, and is very popular with readers. NightWatch is absolutely essential to all enthusiasts!