John Burridge

I like to keep track of when the Equinoxes, Solstices, and "Seasonal Ides" (some folks call these the cross-quarter days) are. I went to the US Naval Astronomy site and got the Equinox and Solstice dates, then took the average between the them to compute the Ides. All times are in Universal Time (UT), which is the time at Greenwich.

Spring Equinox 3/20/2011 23:21:00
Spring Ides 5/6/2011 8:18:30
Summer Solstice 6/21/2011 17:16:00
Summer Ides 8/7/2011 13:10:30
Fall Equinox 9/23/2011 9:05:00


It turns out the Ides dates are not as exact as the Solstice and Equinox dates. I'm guessing that since the Earth moves in an ellipse, taking an average between two dates does not jive with the sun's apparent position in the sky.

Technically, the Ides should be when the meridian sun is at a height of 44.06 (Eugene's latitude) plus or minus 11°43' (half the distance in degrees between a solstice and an equinox). Going back to http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/AltAz.php plugging in the date 5/6/2011 for Eugene, the computed table says that when the sun is near the azimuth of 180, it's altitude is ... 62.6 (higher than the mid-point, 55.-uh-75, by about seven degrees). Fiddling with dates, around April 20, 2011, the sun will pass through 55.6 at noon. (April 21, it overshoots slightly.)

Oh well; so much for using The Gregorian Calendar to calculate solar events.

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On a completely different topic, I looked in the mirror this morning and there's no denying it: my current hair arrangement makes me look like the Thunderbird Mail icon. I think it's time for a trim.

Today I replaced a 300 watt, 120 volt halogen bulb in a torchiere. Oh. My. Goodness. Words cannot express the exuberance that flooded through me this morning when I transformed our dingy gray morning kitchen nook into a Shrine of Brightness. I probably frightened a half-dozen Twitter and Facebook followers with my manic hymns of thanksgiving (and video).

All I can say is that last Winter's "creative slump" is very definitely connected with the light levels. So don't take away my electric Summer unless you want a reenactment of Psycho, directed by Ingmar Bergman.



In other news, Amanda on Facebook asked: "At what point does society decide we've collectively stored enough information about ourselves? We worry about losing any scrap of information, but, how much information has been lost to the sands of time already? Will what we save now really matter? Would it have helped us to know how many times a day Beethoven picked his nose or how he drank his tea?"


And my light-induced reply:

"Our storage habits are cheap right now; if they became more expensive they'd slow down. Yes; we're building a gigantic data Ozymandias -- but! Marketers take the information and use it to sell stuff. Google and FB make the storage cheap because they've tricked us into becoming data miners for our friends and family.

So sure: if you pick your nose at the same rate and in the same style as Beethoven, then Have I Got A Deal For You! And if you drink Lipton black tea an double strength, steeped for 5 minutes in boiling water, then may I suggest this Sri Lankan Assam tea pack and electric kettle? And we all know that the tea-drinking constituency is an important voting bloc.

Now add to that how Picasa and Google Pics can help you use facial recognition software to help you "organize" your pictures and we've all got a little virtual piece of the Panopticon right in our living rooms, dens, offices, and bedrooms.

So yes, electronic information hoarding is about vanity; it's also about money and power. Er, Yes; I love the freedom of a Net Neutral internet. Why do you ask?

So -- to apply a short essay I read about Wikileaks and how conspiracies manage information -- to stop the endless data collection, we need to make it harder for the conspiracies (Google, FB) to trade information with each other so they are unable to pursue their goal (selling stuff).

The essay posited that Wikileaks does this by forcing the conspiracies to tighten communication between cells in an attempt to control information, thus stifling themselves into ineffectiveness.

I don't know if this leads to a consumer (us) strategy of posting more Cat Videos (and porn) to fill up the networks' bandwidth, or of adapting a strategy of mis-information about ourselves, or of creating fake web surfing applications to use our accounts to surf random sites and make web browser cookies unreliable or what.

But here's where the vanity part of it comes in -- we want our friends and family (and potential readers for those of us who are writers) to be able to find us and see what's up with us. So there is little chance a Bayesian content generator FB app being written or widely adapted soon.

And of course, once Google and FB no longer can use our accounts to build marketable profiles of our consumer and voting habits, there goes "I can haz free InterNets Now."

Today I started to think about our holiday card. This year there's a lunar eclipse within hours of the winter solstice, and I wanted our card to be about that.

I folded blue construction paper into quarters. I used a ruler to find the center of the quartered paper, and then used a compass to figure out where to cut a circle out of the paper and some circular slits. Then I got out a white piece of construction paper and cut out a white disk. I colored part of the white disk black and fit it into the slits in the blue paper. I cut an arc-shape out of the blue paper so I could write legends on the white paper disk.

Viola! Instant move the disk and see when the eclipse takes place (in universal time). I moved the white disk through the eclipse cycle and wrote the time of the beginning, total and end of the eclipse in the arc-shaped window.

I showed Mark.

Me (holding up eclipse dial holiday card): "See?!" (moves white disk)

Mark (mixing pie crust dough): "Hmmm. It looks geometric - it needs to look festive."

Thank goodness for reindeer punches!

Me (two white paper reindeer leaping over the moon window later): "See?!" (moving the disk to the full eclipse position)

Mark (cleaning pots and pans): "That's more festive, but you're going to have to include an instruction manual with that card or no one is going to get it."

Me: "But. But... (points) I put little arrows around the rim of the dial..."

Mark: "I thought were were just going to send pictures this year because you didn't want to do craft project cards."

John: "Well. Yeah... I was thinking of that when I was using a craft knife to make all those little slits... which is why there aren't too many...."

Mark: "See; why don't you make a few for the folks you know will like them?"

Me: "But it's the eclipse!"


Sigh. Maybe I can just print out a link to NASA's Eclipse Web Page.

What's better than Spirograph ?














Lego gears, an LED, and long-exposure photography!













I think it may be time to make a photo harmoniograph.