The Sun - The Moon

On one special day, sunrise and moonrise were shot marking the end of winter. Enjoy.

Winter's End

Winter's End depicts the end of a mild 4th season in CT both inland and on the LI Sound with melting ice and the raucous sounds of seabirds and hawks calling for their mates. Enjoy.

It's all about profit, right?

It's all about profit, right? The question to ask here, as the world shuts down,
where is said profit? Something to think about don't you think?

It's different now ...

Gee, I didn't know that :)

Italian astronomer and scientist Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642) performs his legendary experiment.

Everybody "knows" that when one throws a ball, the path it takes is a parabola but that's not the case in a detailed and entertaining Forbs piece titled We All Learned Physics' Biggest Myth: That Projectiles Make A Parabola.

To whit.

Anyone who's ever taken a physics course has learned the same myth for centuries now: that any object thrown, shot, or fired in the gravitational field of Earth will trace out a parabola before striking the ground. If you neglect external forces like wind, air resistance, or any other terrestrial objects, this parabolic shape describes how the center-of-mass of your object moves extremely accurately, no matter what it is or what else is at play.

But under the laws of gravity, a parabola is an impossible shape for an object that's gravitationally bound to the Earth. The math simply doesn't work out. If we could design a precise enough experiment, we'd measure that projectiles on Earth make tiny deviations from the predicted parabolic path we all derived in class: microscopic on the scale of a human, but still significant. Instead, objects thrown on Earth trace out an elliptical orbit similar to the Moon. Here's the unexpected reason why.

If you wanted to model the gravitational field at Earth's surface, there are two simplifying assumptions you could make:

1. The Earth, at least in your vicinity, is flat rather than curved,
2. That Earth's gravitational field points straight down relative to your current location
3. The earth is a sphere.

Ergo, because the earth is round, any object traveling below escape velocity will gravitationally point directly toward the earth's center while following the curvature of the planet as per the diagram seen below, which means ... ellipses rule, not parabolas. :)

Galileo was right. :)

Gee, I didn't know that. :)

It's different now ...

It's different now. ...

No links, no quotes, just a quick blurb commenting on how the world's shutting down, thanks to CORVID-19, nature's wake up call to us humans telling us, as stated before in BRT, that we are not in control, something we should have known about since the beginning of time but forgot thanks to incessant hubris as the temporary dominant species on planet earth.

Where do we go from here while the environment unravels thanks to our foolish ways of continuing to pollute our home in ways that boggle the mind.

A wake-up call is in order and maybe the coronavirus is nature's way in telling us to shape up or Gaia will take of the problem without question. 

Just a thought as the world shuts down thanks to nature's wake-call to us rubes.

Winter's End/The Worm Moon 2020

Blue Light

Vaper Trail

On the Beach

Cloud Scape

The Worm Moon

Fragility/rev 2

The pix above is of an tiny ice droplet, something fragile to the max, something akin to modern civilization, a system prone to breaking to pieces if any significant black swan comes around to muck things up, something akin to the coronavirus outbreak and the impact said disease is beginning to have on society as we move further into 2020. With that being said, consider some of the following bon bons that may ensue thanks to mother nature telling man in no uncertain terms that he's not in control and never will be in any way, shape or fashion.

Wicked Problem No. 1: China needs its workers back to work pronto or its debt ridden economy vapor locks but there's a small problem. What is the possibility of the virus exploding to biblical proportions when millions of said workers come in close contact with unknown carriers of said disease as unknown carries in the work force will be returning to work like all the others.

Wicked Problem No 2: All things related to financial as the negative impact to the world's economy by the virus is beginning to take hold with a possible end result of a planet wide depression of biblical proportions if the outbreak goes into overdrive. See WP No. 1

Wicked Problem No. 3: Supply chains of all kinds jam up with the most important being food, clothing, medical & energy. If that happens, man becomes tribal without question and ...., the 2020 elections don't happen due to the black swan known as the coronavirus.

Wicket Problem No. 4 : As per Charles Hugh Smith ... we face a binary situation: either the science is correct and all the complacent are wrong, or the science is false and all the complacent are correct that the virus is no big deal and nothing to fret about. 

Something to think about don't you think?

Scrollability ...

In the movie Red Planet, a scrollable map/imaging device was used to show the astronauts's location on Mars. Seems this may be the way to go regarding compact but large screen displays that have numerous advantages over folding phone tech created by Motorola and Samsung.

To whit ...

Much of the attention around foldables has been focused on the hinge and getting the display to fold down completely. That's why the Mate X folds outward, and why the Galaxy Fold has an unsightly gap in the middle. The clamshell Galaxy Z Flip and Motorola Razr use different hinges to minimize the actual turn radius, but they don't actually fold flat.

A scrollable phone would avoid that issue. Because it would roll out, there'd be no need for it to fold completely shut or for a fancy hinge to get around the crease issue. There wouldn't be creases.

It would also scroll down to a phone that's a normal size.

Works for me.

Where the scrollable concept originally came from circa 2000.

Mama comes thru :)

Mama comes thru. :) Thanks Jill for this gem.

These 8 baby hedgehogs sadly lost their mother in an accident and were left on their own. Luckily, though, some humans found them and brought them to the Russian Seaside zoo in Vladivostok.

The staff-members at the zoo were trying their best to take care of the orphaned hedgehogs. Unfortunately they simply couldn’t bottle-feed them round the clock. For some reason the little babies simply refused eating from bottles or syringes.

This was precisely when a lovely kitty Musya stepped in and helped with nursing the hedgehogs. In the end, her new foster babies got an amazing mommy who was prepared to feed them every two hours. Musya didn’t only provide food for the baby hedgehogs. She also gave them a lot of affection and took care of them during the night.

If she never did step in to help out, there was no way that these hoglets would have survived.

Now, they are all growing up and when they are ready, will be released in the wild!

Stellar to the max.

1.8 billion ... pixels :)

As stated many times before, science, done right, never disappoints. :)

This panorama showcases "Glen Torridon," a region on the side of Mount Sharp that Curiosity is exploring. The panorama was taken between Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 2019, when the Curiosity team was out for the Thanksgiving holiday. Since the rover would be sitting still with few other tasks to do while it waited for the team to return and provide its next commands, the rover had a rare chance to image its surroundings several days in a row without moving. 

Composed of more than 1,000 images and carefully assembled over the ensuing months, the larger version of this composite contains nearly 1.8 billion pixels of Martian landscape.

1.8 billion indeed.

Click on Curiosity's image below to navabate this bad boy in realtime. :)

How cool is that?