Year: 2010

Solstice Lunar Eclipse

(Again, thanks to Dan G for highlighting this.)

If you want to see this solar eclipse then read the times carefully – to assist, I am publishing this Post much earlier than normal, at 18:00 US Mountain Time (UTC -7hrs) on Monday, 20th December.  Oh, and more information at Spacedex here.

SOLSTICE LUNAR ECLIPSE
by Dr. Tony Phillips
Reprinted from http://science.nasa.gov ( but this link address is better. Ed.)

Dec. 17, 2010:  Everyone knows that “the moon on the breast of new-fallen snow gives the luster of mid-day to objects below.”

That is, except during a lunar eclipse.

The luster will be a bit “off” on Dec. 21st, the first day of northern winter, when the full Moon passes almost dead-center through

A similar lunar eclipse in Nov. 2003. Credit: Jim Fakatselis.

Earth’s shadow. For 72 minutes of eerie totality, an amber light will play across the snows of North America, throwing landscapes into an unusual state of ruddy shadow.

The eclipse begins on Tuesday morning, Dec. 21st, at 1:33 am EST (Monday, Dec. 20th, at 10:33 pm PST). At that time, Earth’s shadow will appear as a dark-red bite at the edge of the lunar disk. It takes about an hour for the “bite” to expand and swallow the entire Moon. Totality commences at 02:41 am EST (11:41 pm PST) and lasts for 72 minutes.

If you’re planning to dash out for only one quick look — it is December, after all — choose this moment: 03:17 am EST (17 minutes past midnight PST). That’s when the Moon will be in deepest shadow, displaying the most fantastic shades of coppery red.

Credit: F. Espenak, NASA/GSFC.

From first to last bite, the eclipse favors observers in North America. The entire event can be seen from all points on the continent. Click to view a world map of visibility circumstances. Credit: F. Espenak, NASA/GSFC.

Why red?

A quick trip to the Moon provides the answer: Imagine yourself standing on a dusty lunar plain looking up at the sky. Overhead hangs Earth, nightside down, completely hiding the sun behind it. The eclipse is underway. You might expect Earth seen in this way to be utterly dark, but it’s not. The rim of the planet is on fire! As you scan your eye around Earth’s circumference, you’re seeing every sunrise and every sunset in the world, all of them, all at once. This incredible light beams into the heart of Earth’s shadow, filling it with a coppery glow and transforming the Moon into a great red orb.

Back on Earth, the shadowed Moon paints newly fallen snow with unfamiliar colors–not much luster, but lots of beauty.

Enjoy the show.

Coincidences (UPDATED): This lunar eclipse falls on the date of the northern winter solstice. How rare is that? Total lunar eclipses in northern winter are fairly common. There have been three of them in the past ten years alone. A lunar eclipse smack-dab on the date of the solstice, however, is unusual. Geoff Chester of the US Naval Observatory inspected a list of eclipses going back 2000 years. “Since Year 1, I can only find one previous instance of an eclipse matching the same calendar date as the solstice, and that is 1638 DEC 21,” says Chester. “Fortunately we won’t have to wait 372 years for the next one…that will be on 2094 DEC 21.“

Dogs and People Two

If you missed the start, see here.

 

Happy Days

One reason a dog can be such a comfort when you’re feeling blue is that he doesn’t try to find out why. ~Author Unknown

Exactly!

Quiet Blog day

So here’s a nice distraction- thanks to Sherry Jarrell who sent them to me.

Learning from dogs!

There are about 23 or 24 pictures on the theme of what dogs mean to humans and every odd day or two over the Christmas period, you can enjoy one of them.

Here’s the first:

Continue reading “Quiet Blog day” →

A ‘steady’ relationship with Planet Earth

Perpetual economic growth is neither possible nor desirable. Growth, especially in wealthy nations, is already causing more problems than it solves.

Recession isn’t sustainable or healthy either. The positive, sustainable alternative is a steady state economy.

These are the opening sentences that one sees when going to the CASSE website.  CASSE is an acronym for Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.  More on this organisation as I spend more time getting to know the background.  But my instinct is to support it, hence the reason it is the subject of a Post on Learning from Dogs.

With the permission of CASSE I am re-publishing something that was on the CASSE Blogsite recently. Well worth signing up to, in my humble opinion.

Anyway, the article is called From Black Friday to a Better Way and is written by Brent Blackwelder who, among other things, was recent President of Friends of the Earth.

From Black Friday to a Better Way

Rethinking Consumer Spending and Enjoying the Holidays

by Brent Blackwelder

The day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States is called Black Friday. For retailers the day marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. While the origin of the term is debated, it is today associated with special sales and extraordinary promotions that retailers use to induce shoppers into spending the holiday weekend on a shopping spree.

Our modern economy is structured such that its stability depends upon ever increasing consumer spending. In my first economics course in college in 1961, the professor told the class to go out and shop because it is good for the gross national product (GNP). Then and now, mainstream economics continues to treat the Earth as if it were a business in a liquidation sale.

At a time of high unemployment in the United States, it may seem like an act of madness to question the growth economy, but relentless pursuit of growth has failed to deliver again and again on the promise of economic stability and security. Its recipes are not making people any happier, and it is undermining the ecological life support systems of our planet. It has failed about one third of the world’s population who live on less than $2 per day, while simultaneously producing an exclusive club of gratuitously wealthy individuals. Those of us advocating a steady state economy seek a new way to maintain full employment that does not incentivize employers to seek dirt-cheap labor or to replace people with machines.

Professor Tim Jackson’s 2009 report to the UK Sustainable Development Commission entitled Prosperity without Growth provides an outstanding foundation for any discussion of consumerism and the growth economy. For those interested in a steady state economy, it is worthwhile to think in this holiday season about the nature of shopping in such an economy.

Throughout history religious leaders have expressed concerns about the accumulation of stuff. Two thousand years ago Jesus cautioned about excessive attention to material possessions, saying: “Lay not up for yourself treasures on earth where moth and rust doth corrupt and where thieves break through and steal.”

Over 100 years ago the economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill recognized that eventually humanity would have to move toward a stationary state of capital and wealth, but that condition need not entail a stagnation of human improvement.

Two centuries ago the poet William Wordsworth expressed alarm at the consumerism he witnessed in England: “The world is too much with us, late and soon. Getting and spending we lay waste our powers. Little we see in nature that is ours. We have given our hearts away…”

Today’s economy is five times bigger than in the 1950s, and at current growth rates stimulated by commercial promotions, it is headed to a global economy 80 times as large.

The consumer rampage is in part fueled by slick advertising for novel consumer products, and much of this advertising is targeted at youth. Ralph Nader questions who is watching what young people worldwide are being enticed to buy? He writes: “Undermining parental authority with penetrating marketing schemes and temptations, companies deceptively excite youngsters to buy massive amounts of products that are bad for their safety, health and minds.”

Excessive packaging accompanying today’s products attracts ecological criticism, but it is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of waste. The volume of raw resource extraction required in the manufacture of products dwarfs the packaging waste. For example, many mining operations for valuable metals leave behind as waste over 90% of the material excavated, and such rocky rubble often releases a mass of toxicity onto the land and into the water.

Has happiness been improved by having all these products? Studies over the past two decades have suggested that a certain amount of material comfort and ease provided by various products increases one’s happiness, but beyond a certain point – one study suggested $75,000 income – more stuff doesn’t produce more happiness. In fact, it can yield the perverse result of adding stress, worry and depression.

It is amazing that times of holiday celebration in the United States are frequently the very times of peak stress. What should be a fun and cheerful experience becomes a week or even a month of worry.

The holiday season is a good time to reexamine the kinds of purchases we make to see whether they are reducing the use of natural resources and encouraging more sustainable ways of growing food and conducting commercial business.

Many religious congregations are looking toward a different approach to reclaim the holidays from preoccupation with material gifts. Some offer ways to reduce the volume of purchasing and to make different kinds of purchases that reduce throughput and pollution.

For example, Interfaith Power and Light seeks to get religious congregations to purchase renewable energy and to reduce energy use in their homes and their places of worship. Through Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light, our family now purchases all our electricity, sourced from wind farms, at a surcharge of about $130 a year.

By voting with their food dollars many Americans have already sent powerful signals in favor of local farm markets and organic food. With some due diligence, people can determine whether their purchases lend further support to child labor and slave conditions, whether the purchases harm women or empower women, and whether the product came from an animal-slum factory farm operation. The Fair Trade label allows consumers to identify imported products that avoid harmful labor and environmental degradation in their manufacture.

We have options.  We can do better than liquidating our natural bounty for consumer novelty, we can refrain from pitching unnecessary products to our children, and we can stop pursuing growth for growth’s sake.  The steady state economy is a better choice than continuous pursuit of economic growth, but the transition starts with better choices about what and how we consume.

If you didn’t read yesterday’s Post touching on the second bitterly cold winter in Europe, then you may care to read it and ponder.

By Paul Handover

Basic geometry

North-West Europe’s Winter weather.

As I write this article, the temperature in London (it’s 5pm on Tuesday 14th.) is 4 deg C/ 38 F heading down to a forecast -2 deg C/28 F overnight.  Similarly cold temperatures are forecast during the rest of the week.

Here’s something that was published in October:

Coldest winter in 1,000 years on its way

04 October, 2010, 22:20

After the record heat wave this summer, Russia’s weather seems to have acquired a taste for the extreme.

Forecasters say this winter could be the coldest Europe has seen in the last 1,000 years.

The change is reportedly connected with the speed of the Gulf Stream, which has shrunk in half in just the last couple of years. Polish scientists say that it means the stream will not be able to compensate for the cold from the Arctic winds. According to them, when the stream is completely stopped, a new Ice Age will begin in Europe.

So far, the results have been lower temperatures: for example, in Central Russia, they are a couple of degrees below the norm.

“Although the forecast for the next month is only 70 percent accurate, I find the cold winter scenario quite likely,” Vadim Zavodchenkov, a leading specialist at the Fobos weather center, told RT. “We will be able to judge with more certainty come November. As for last summer’s heat, the statistical models that meteorologists use to draw up long-term forecasts aren’t able to predict an anomaly like that.”

In order to meet the harsh winter head on, Moscow authorities are drawing up measures to help Muscovites survive the extreme cold.

Read the rest of the article here.

So why the heading for this Post, as in Basic Geometry?

Because places on the Globe are measured using Latitude and Longitude.  Let’s look at the Latitude of some places:

London 51°30′N

Calgary, Alberta 51°03′N

Kiev, Ukraine 50°27′N

Krakow, Poland 50°03′N

Now let’s look at those Cities again with the current temperatures (you have to accept the local time differences):

London 51°30′N +4 deg C

Calgary, Alberta 51°03′N -9 deg C

Kiev, Ukraine 50°27′N -6 deg C

Krakow, Poland 50°03′N -12 deg C

In other words, Britain enjoys, or should enjoy, a much warmer Winter than most other places of the same or similar latitudes because of the effect of the Gulf Stream.

Just a muse!

By Paul Handover

 

 


The good old flying days!

Lovely story courtesy of Capt. Robert Derham

The scene is sometime in the old era when cockpits had round dials plus flight engineers and navigators.

 

Douglas DC3 Cockpit (Image by © Underwood)

 

 

The crusty old-timer captain is breaking in a brand new navigator.

The captain opens his briefcase, pulls out a .38 and rests it on the glare panel.  He asks the navigator, “Know what this is for?”

“No, sir,” replies the newbie.

“I use it on navigators that get us lost,” explains the captain, winking at his first officer.

The navigator then opens his briefcase, pulls out a .45 an sets it on his chart table. “What’s THAT for?” queries the surprised captain.

“Well, sir,” replies the navigator, “I’ll know that we’re lost before you will.“

Essence Of The Civilizational Crisis.

A guest Post from Patrice Ayme.

(Well I say ‘guest’ in the sense that Patrice has very kindly allowed me to publish a post he recently published on his own Blog. It’s very much appreciated. I should add that the minor changes that I have made, in my editorial role, are gently to improve the clarity of this fine piece of work, not in any way to amend meaning. Ed.)

THE PRIVATIZATION OF MONEY CREATION IS THE ENGINE OF PLUTOCRACY.

To understand the present financial and economic crisis, we need the clarity of deep philosophy.

The situation is actually simple, in its grossest outline. To create public money, the money everybody uses (be it cash, electronic transfers, swaps, whatever) we use a private system, with proprietary money creating devices inside (say subprime, or derivatives). Civilization has never worked this way before, as the state previously was careful to stay the one and only money creator.

Now society, worldwide, uses a privately-managed public-money ‘system’ creating what is known as a fractional reserve system. [Wikipedia explanation of fractional reserve system, Ed]

That puts huge power in the hands of underground private individuals we don’t even know the names of. Those cloaked powers in turn corrupt the visible political socio-economy, from below. The whole metastasis is not even described, because intellectuals would have to do so, but most are paid by institutions subservient to the present global corruption.

We saw a similar situation in the Roman empire, when the intellectual class was at its richest, but its critical ability had been corrupted.

The modern banking system is a Faustian bargain (as in a deal with the Devil) with the bankers; in exchange for the immense powers the private bankers were given with money creation, they were supposed to loan it back to society for its development.

This worked reasonably well in the Nineteenth Century. But in the Twentieth Century, bankers observed they could support fascism regimes, and get away with it (only Dr. Schacht, one of the “Lords of Finance”, sat in Nuremberg tribunal, and he was exonerated). Now bankers think they can engineer a depression, and get even richer from it: just keep the profits, and make taxpayers pay for the losses.

By Patrice Ayme

Note 1: Paul Krugman observes, with many others, that the crisis of the West needs “intellectual clarity” to be resolved, and, meanwhile we are “overmatched“. I made preceding comment in answer to Krugman’s cogent remarks. (The New York Times had the kindness to publish what I wrote within two minutes! )

Note 2: HOW THE FINANCIAL CRISIS IS TURNING CIVILIZATIONAL:

China just established another train speed record for “unmodified’ train sets (481 km/h). OK, some will claim China stole a lot of Japanese and European technology. And some French engineers have sneered that the very high speed system in China is not as high performing as it looks (France has much higher average speeds, the highest in the world). However, this is not the point. The point is that China is trying very hard to progress and improve. Meanwhile some of the colossal technological edge of the West is eroding away quickly. The result will be world war, or global plutocratic peace (as plutocracy furthers its deal with China).

How does China improve so much and so fast? Because Chinese banks, the largest in the world, operate according to the fiduciary duty, the Faustian bargain, that the fractional reserve system ought to impose, and used to impose in the West.

Top Chinese bankers know all too well that if they cheated, they may end up with a bullet in their skull. China is led by scientists and engineers who turned to politics, but know that they cannot make mistakes in their calculations. Mao made many mistakes, and dozens of millions died.

The history of China, in the 26 centuries before that, was spoiled by a well meaning, but meek philosophy, which left too small a place to deliver progress of the material, and intellectual kinds.

Civilization is not about “leaving it at that”, the way Confucius mostly had it. Civilization is also about the dream, and implementing it. Indeed, civilization cannot stand still, anymore than a biker can stand still, because resources run out always (as Rome and the Mayas found out). Thus moving on is the price of sustainability. Progress is the price of sustainability.

Note 3: It may seem a curious thing that Karl Marx did not make a strident version of the preceding critique (instead he modestly accused tangentially bankers of “monopoly” powers).

But this Marxist discretion proves the point I alluded to above, namely that bankers were better behaved in the 19C. So Marx talked about other things.

Ironically, early American presidents had perfectly well seen the danger bankers posed, and worried more about them than Marx himself! And let no one call Andrew Jackson a communist: that would be serious mistake…

In the 21st Century, by capturing the states (USA, EU), and various institutions above them (IMF, World Bank, BIS), the bankers have established a monopoly of power early American presidents rightly feared (and Jackson, wounded at 13 by an English sword, later a proud carrier of several bullets, and a general in the field, feared very little). The wise know what to fear. The mentally simple just smile, thinking only about themselves, as they can’t think much further than that.

*********************************

From the Ed.

Dear Readers, I really hope that you read Patrice’s post in full and in a quiet place where you could reflect on the meaning and underlying implications of what Patrice is saying.  Those in the UK may have been able to watch a typically fabulous BBC Television series, Ancient Worlds.  It’s still available on BBC iPlayer.

What comes out from the message of mankind over the centuries is that wonderful French expression plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – the more that changes, the more it stays the same thing.  But where we are as we approach the New Year of 2011 A.D. is possibly at a cross-roads – and I intend to write a little more on this idea over the coming days.

Political leanings!

A rather funny interpretation of political leanings as in the UK.

[Sent to me by John Lewis]

I asked my friend’s little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up.

She said she wanted to be Prime Minister some day.

Both her parents – staunch Labour supporters – were standing there, so I asked her, ‘If you were Prime Minister what would be the first thing you would do?’

She replied, ‘I would give food and houses to all the homeless people.’

Her parents beamed and said, ‘Welcome to the Labour Party!’

‘Wow!  What a worthy goal’  I told her.

I continued, ‘But you don’t have to wait until you are Prime Minister to do that. You can come over to my house, mow the lawn, pull the weeds, sweep my drive and I’ll pay you £25.  Then I can take you over to the shop where the homeless man sits outside, and you can give him the £25 to use towards food.’

She thought over this proposition for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, ‘Why doesn’t the homeless man come over and do the work and you can just pay him the £25?’

I smiled and said, ‘Welcome to the Conservative Party.’

Her parents were dumbstruck.

The Madoff Link?

Anyone see any connection?

From the UK Newspaper The Independent:

Bernie Madoff was able to con thousands of extra investors by using a British bank which “looked the other way” and ignored repeated warnings that he was engaged in a sophisticated fraud, according to the man charged with recovering their losses.

HSBC and its staff were accused of receiving “kickbacks for looking the otherway while legitimising BLMIS (Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities) through their name and brand, making it attractive to investors”.

SNIP

“Had HSBC and the defendants reacted appropriately to such warnings and other obvious badges of fraud … the Madoff Ponzi scheme would have collapsed years, billions of dollars, and countless victims sooner,” said Mr Picard. “The defendants were wilfully and deliberately blind to the fraud, even after learning about numerous red flags surrounding Madoff.”

Mr Picard wants to recover the $9bn from HSBC and a network of international funds that acted as “feeders”, enticing investors to place money with Madoff’s investment company. It makes the bank the biggest defendant so far, eclipsing lawsuits already filed against the Swiss bank UBS and America’s JP Morgan. Other defendants named in the HSBC suit include the Italian bank UniCredit and Austria’s Bank Medici.

The accusations levelled against HSBC will come as a huge embarrassment to a company which has become increasingly controversial, having threatened to quit London for Hong Kong should the Government seek to impose too heavy a levy against banks or attempt to break it up after the Independent Commission on Banking, set up by the Chancellor, reports next year.

However, suits against more European banks are likely to follow. The lawsuit, filed in the US Federal Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, is the latest move by Mr Picard who has filed more than 100 lawsuits over the last few days in a bid to recover funds from those institutions which he claims enabled the fraud or those who received “false profits” by getting their money out of the scheme before it collapsed. Mr Picard faces a deadline of Friday – the two-year anniversary of Madoff’s arrest – to file everything.

and from the BBC News:

Questions have been raised about police handling of tuition fee protests after a car carrying the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall was attacked.

A window was smashed and paint thrown at the vehicle as the royal couple made their way to a central London theatre.

Violent demonstrations spread after MPs voted to increase university tuition fees in England.

SNIP

The National Union of Students (NUS), meanwhile, said the violence had overshadowed the story it wanted to see in the newspapers.

Shane Chowen, vice-president of further education, said: “Not the headlines I wanted. I wanted to see the fact that the coalition government have just trebled tuition fees, sentencing a generation of students to record student debt.”

A more peaceful version from March 2010

By Paul Handover