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Sky at a Glance | Recent Astronomy News & Night Sky Events – Sky & Telescope
In a world of constant new products, we must be educated just to choose. These posts help you to be an educated consumer.
Sky at a Glance | Recent Astronomy News & Night Sky Events – Sky & Telescope
Understand Celestial Movement by Knowing Less
Every movement of this clock is related to a naturally-occurring phenomenon. The sun, moon, and constellations are actually physically overhead the longitude physically shown on the clock. The only man-made concept is the unit of time: hours/minutes/seconds.
Within the constraints of being two-dimensional and using only concentric circle movement, the clock graphically displays celestial movement as accurately and with as much detail as possible in a way that promotes a practical mental model for the observer.
The horizons move to show the correct day and night length. They move in the correct direction to match the idea that the sun follows a longer path in the sky on longer days and shorter path on shorter days. In post-industrial time, noon is when the sun is directly overhead. This clock shows noon at the various world locations by being directly overhead the longitude. “Solar noon” is an industrial time concept.
The angle of the horizons does not directly correspond to the azimuth of the sunrise and sunset itself. For example, the sun being overhead a longitude location on Earth 100 degrees from your longitude when it rises does not mean the sun will rise 10 degrees north from east.
Two-dimensional is convenient for hanging on a wall, inexpensive to construct, can be displayed on a screen, and in reality people prefer 2D. 3D TVs never caught on. The outdoors is 3D enough.
Concentric circle movement is practical to construct and control. In addition, almost all the movement of the objects in the sky is due to the rotation of Earth.
Nature presents us with an infinity of detail that the clock could depict. Computers enable us to easily do this and most products show maximum detail. This clock selectively provides the user with just the basis required to comprehend celestial movement in order to inspire the user to abandon the technology for the outdoors and more fully appreciate natural reality.
On this clock, all objects are referenced to the observer as though the observer is standing aligned to the rotational axis of Earth. “Aligned to the rotational axis of Earth” sounds like an unnecessary complication, but it means all the objects move (almost) continuously and you can tell time of day, day length, night length, moon phase, moon rise and set, seasons, constellation and star positions, and even approximate world times, all using an intuitive mental model.
The observer is at the center of the post-industrial clock.
Notice, the gnomon of a sundial is aligned to the rotational axis of Earth. The ancients knew how to think about this. If you want to be familiar with the movement of the Earth and the relative motion of the sky, you must align with the Earth. If you accept the one complication of aligning with Earth, all else naturally falls into place.
You might say gravity is the biggest obstacle to aligning yourself to Earth’s rotational axis. True. To eliminate the gravity problem, just imagine you are on the north pole. If you were sitting on the north pole during an equinox, you would see all the objects on the clock rotating around your horizon just like they do on the clock.
Notice “rotate” means an individual object rotates, and “orbit” means an object moves in a path around another object. Objects can rotate and orbit in different planes, but because of the way the solar system was formed, rotation is mostly closely aligned with orbit. One notable example of misalignment is the tilt of Earth’s rotation relative to its orbit around the sun.
The position of the sun determines all time-related items.
The rotational position of Earth is shown by the sun appearing to move relative to the observer. The position of the sun in relation to the eastern horizon and western horizon tells the time of day.
Day length is determined by the distance the sun must travel through the sky from the eastern horizon to the western horizon. Day length is shown by the position of the two horizons. Night length is the remainder of the 24-hour period as the sun returns to the eastern horizon. The horizons move because of the tilt of Earth and its orbit around the sun.
The sun points to the season on the backdrop of the stars. The 12 Zodiac constellations are used because they are aligned with Earth’s equator and are visible from most positions on Earth. The Zodiac seasonal periods are named based on when the constellation is aligned with the sun. Ironically, it is exactly during a particular Zodiac constellation’s season that the constellation is not visible in the night sky because it is directly behind the sun.
The stars move around the observer because of the rotation of Earth, like the sun. Because of the orbit of Earth around the sun, the stars actually appear to move slightly faster than the sun. In a way, the stars “chase” the sun across the sky. Because of this, the constellation that is low on the western horizon immediately after sunset indicates the next season. The constellation will “chase” the sun down, setting because of Earth’s rotation and then each successive night set four minutes earlier until it sets with the sun.
Moon phase is determined by the position of the moon relative to the sun. The position of the moon relative to the sun is immediately apparent on the clock giving the user an intuitive mental model of moon phase. The moon rises and sets independently of the sun, so there are separate horizons for the moon.
The stars do not move relative to each other, so you can relate your favorite constellations to the Zodiac constellations to quickly know where they are if desired. The position of the Zodiac constellations on the clock are accurate relative to the observer. The observer need only adjust for latitude. If a constellation is directly overhead on the clock, it is directly south in the northern hemisphere or north in the southern hemisphere, or overhead on the equator.
Approximate world time is asking the question, “What time is it to other observers?” or “Where is the sun relative to other observers?” The user can look at the other cities on the clock and see where the sun is relative to them. If the sun is directly over another location on the clock, it is noon in that location. The sun is moving relative to other observers just like it is moving on the clock. If the sun appears directly to the side of another observer, it is near rising or near setting. If directly below, it is midnight to that observer.
Progress is a cycle.
Pre-history: humans evolved with celestial objects ruling our lives and became familiar with them. The sun and moon are encoded into our genes in our circadian rhythm.
Thousands of years: humans quantified the movement of the sun with sundials, and used charts for the phases of the moon and seasons.
Industrial Revolution: humans used rudimentary machines to club our minds to submit to rigid schedules.
Post-Industrial Clocks: humans use advanced machines to conform technology to nature and re-connect with our natural selves.
Like this clock, the gnomon of a sundial is oriented parallel to the rotational axis of the Earth. If you called this clock an “indoor sundial” you are not too far off. However, “indoor solar, lunar, and celestial fully-automated schedule” would be more accurate. Therefore, is this new? No, but is anything new? Not according to the Bible,
9 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us.
Life is a cycle and it is time to revisit some of our past. We now have the time and resources to do it.
Knowing what the sky looks like can certainly be done with charts, phone apps, websites, maps, but to develop a useful mental model, you need to periodically and quickly see something that is practically relatable to practical day-to-day events. This is our natural ability that was erased by industrial time. Industrial time is great for rigid old obsolete machines to cheaply give us rigid schedules, but computers enable machines to imitate nature and can enable us to re-connect with nature rather than brutally beating nature out of our minds with the incessant ticking of pendulums and gears. Computers can be better, let’s use them.
history, manufacturing, time, astronomy,
On 2 November 2020 I decided to depart the corporate career path (energy engineer) for the rest of my life. My knee-jerk solution was to learn to sail and make sailing my occupation somehow. Regardless of what I do, I made the decision because of a fundamental idea: I am convinced that true progress in the next several decades will not be in new technologies, but in learning to use the existing technologies in a more wholesome way. As I went down the list of categories on my blog, I realized my decision affects almost every category.
Brazil Now What Migration Series: I once again do not know where I will go.
English Lessons: language is basic. Will I teach English from a sailboat?
Industrial Change Surfing: Industrial Change Surfing is about decisions – this was an enormous decision based on industrial changes.
Rage and Frenzy Politics: I believe the current polarized divisive politics partly arise from frustration with the diminishing returns of tech. (A pause for sailing is in order!)
Real Estate: boats are floating real estate. (the tax is maintenance!)
Travel: Sailing is the oldest form of long-distance water travel!
Ventures Quarterly: I have not been faithful to quarterly updates lately, but this obviously represents a ventures update.
I provide this rating system as an end user. Businesses always asking my feedback, here it is systematically. This is what I look for. This applies to everything from brick and mortar stores to websites. This is largely technology driven.
Technology can enable efficiency, but it often does the opposite. I am an engineer. I can figure out your technology – but I do not want to. Do not give me a job when I’m trying to spend money with you. Do not explain your tech to me. If your tech is not self-evident, you have already failed.
Misinformation is worse than no information. One calendar, one web page, a web page instead of an e-mail. We do not need more information. We need the right information, concisely, current, dated, clear, verified.
I do not want another number, account, password, etc. You know this. My name is unique. Use that. My e-mail is more unique, use it. E-mail is better than using my phone number, which is better than using a tracking number, which is better than a QR code, which is better than having me sign up for an account, which is better than having me sign up for an account with ridiculous password requirements. Use the ID that exists already. Start with my name!
One that works is better than two or three or however many failures.
UPS, 1 star. You have to go out of your way to get 1 star. UPS goes out of its way
How can you succeed? My package enters your system and you e-mail me the tracking number and the address / hours of the UPS Access Point where my package will arrive. No home delivery. No “InfoNotice” bar code. No message saying, “Shocker! You weren’t home today at noon!” No QR code scavenger hunt. No running down a brown truck. No “out for delivery.” Get it close at a stationary target, tell me where it is, give me a deadline, and I’ll do the rest.
When people attend an in-person conference, they want to know the address, possibly where to park, where the sign in desk is, and a calendar of events with locations perhaps room numbers. They want to know the following for the conference and each sub-event:
I don’t make this list because the information is usually lacking. The information is usually available somewhere. I provide this list because there is usually so much extra information that attendees can’t find these basic requirements!
The online / virtual version of this is currently Zoom meetings. Attendees need the following information and no more! For each presentation:
If the event can be conducted without attendees registering that is best. If the attendees must register, let them use their e-mail addresses for a username.
Do a run-through the day prior with a friend or colleague who is not in on the planning. If he / she cannot attend withing 5 minutes then your system is a failure and you probably need to delete extraneous instructions and eliminate steps.
Pretty much all information falls into categories. Each item within a category has the same questions associated with it. For example, if you are a university and you list degree programs along with the number of years of study for the degree program and even just one of those degree programs is part-time instead of full-time, you absolutely must list “full-time / part-time” for all the degree programs – or you have left doubt and failed to communicate.
Therefore, for all categories, you list the possible questions for each category and your site is not complete until all the answers are available for each item within the category. Example:
This is one list for one category for one type of site. This type of list applies to all sites that present information at all, which is almost all sites. Do not start your Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page until you have created your list and systematically answered all the questions for each item within each category. Especially do not e-mail me for feedback. This is my feedback right here. Do your job. Anticipate your users’ questions and provide the appropriate information no matter how obvious you believe the information to be.
Units of payment must always conform to the following rules or you have failed to communicate:
Example:
The tuition is 10,000 dollars per year and is paid in monthly installments during the time you are studying. The academic year being 9 months, you make 9 equal monthly payments per year that lead the month of study and total to the annual tuition. Other taxes and fees apply, see the list at this link for taxes and fees.
I don’t care how smart you think your website is. I don’t care if your website thinks it knows where your visitor is and therefore “conveniently” tells the user in his personal time zone. No matter how smart your website is, the internet is still global. You could be using my IP address for location and I could be using a VPN. My GPS location could be erroneous. There is one simple rule for posting times:
Post the time with its associated time zone, including whether it is daylight savings time, and including the +/- relative to Zulu.
This especially applies to sporting events. I see times given properly less than 10% of the time for sporting events. If pilots suddenly became this bad at global time communication, the world would come to an instant standstill with aviation accidents, delays, missed flights, etc. Follow this rule and you have properly posted a time. Do it not, and you have failed to communicate.
This feedback assumes you want your visitors to leave your site informed. If your goal is that your visitors click around your site looking for information you purposely hid or omitted, then this does not apply. If you are trying to force users to contact you if they really want to know something, then by all means ignore this and keep playing your games. I am not a marketer and I know some counter-intuitive strategies work when it comes to selling to people. This feedback applies to those whose goal is to honestly inform site visitors.
Unfair as this may be I am picking one site that finally drove me to write this post. Their site was actually pretty good but as usual lacked basic information that I am fairly certain was omitted or hidden inadvertently. I clicked around London Business School’s site for probably an hour trying to confirm which courses were full-time and which were part-time. I never found it. I sent them feedback but I am tired of submitting basic feedback like this. I feel like I work for free giving feedback while companies constantly spend money to change and update complicated sites that fail at the basics – and then spend more time and money requesting my feedback. Here it is! Here’s my feedback!
When LBS, a top business school, clearly does not follow the basics outlined in this post, the post needs to be written because they, if anybody, should be good at this. Now it is written.
I pick $1000 for an arbitrary cut-off. The point is, this feedback always applies to sites for products that could be considered an investment like, for example, real estate or education. Investments are life decisions and clients need solid info to make a decision.
You aren’t selling a pack of gum. Answer all questions. Is the course full-time or part-time? Maybe it’s obvious to you. Maybe I should know and be able to assume. Maybe I should have contacts within your school who can tell me and if I am not resourceful enough to find the info then you don’t want me anyway. Fine, but if you wanted me informed to make a decision and consider your school, you failed. I left confused, alienated, and ultimately decided against business school (OK I was leaning against biz school anyway not trying to be too dramatic). Now my last memory is the frustration of your website that could have been avoided if you had heeded the basic advice on my humble individual blog here.
U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found.
The current US war in Afghanistan is now the longest single military conflict in the history of the United States. It has been going on so long that it hardly requires justification to the American public anymore. We are accustomed to it. I was in high school when we first invaded.
The British fought in Afghanistan three times, for 1-3 years each time.
The Soviets fought in Afghanistan for 9 years from 1979-1989. It was a Cold War proxy war against forces backed by the United States.
The article above claims that falsified reports by military generals are a major factor that keep us in Afghanistan. The article goes so far as to say the reports have been deliberately falsified over the years to justify remaining at war.
We as a country continue to fight a nearly 20 year conflict in Afghanistan. The Washington Post article above will be soon forgotten.
We fail see how wrong some decisions are ironically because they are so wrong on such a large scale that we simply can’t comprehend it. The magnitude is so much bigger than us we assume we must be mistaken somehow.
The main-stream media controls the majority of information people receive. They sling mud at each other for entertainment. An article like the one above catches peoples’ interest because it implies evil treachery by a select group, in this case military generals.
The article appears anti-war. However, notice the article does not actually say we should leave Afghanistan now. It provides no suggestion for how we should cut our losses and depart. It also does not reference the historical failures in Afghanistan of the British and the Soviets.
The article criticizes former President Obama. Did The Washington Post criticize President Obama from 2009 – 2017, when he could actually make decisions? I will be honest, I am not going to go search Washington Post articles for an 8-year period, but let’s all be honest, Obama is a Democrat and The Post let him go while he was in office.
The Washington Post article describes one small portion / symptom of the military industrial complex as though it is a new thing. Really it is a very old phenomenon. It was well-known in 1935.
The article focuses on one select group of people, military generals. I believe that the scope of people responsible for our military industrial complex – which includes fighting a 2 decade war in Afghanistan – is so wide that pointing at one set of actions by one group is ridiculous. Generals operate near the political level. When the overall political climate wants to remain at war, it selects generals who will fight war.
Why is the Washington Post so excited to report the evil treachery of the military generals right now? I do now know but I will speculate. I heard recently noted that military generals are enjoying more political success now than ever before here in the US. Maybe this article is designed to curb that trend.
We need to acknowledge all the factors that go into the United States fighting wars. This includes military generals who want to fight wars of course. However, it also includes our consumer culture that gobbles up resources made cheap by war and perpetuated by our two-party democracy that gives us only two choices, selected by the dollars of the MIC, both war-fighting.
We need to educate ourselves about ourselves and it starts by not consuming any information owned by large corporations close to Washington DC. The main-stream media is so ubiquitous that forcing oneself to learn is insufficient. We must first cut the propaganda from our busy lives and free our minds.
The gap between our nation as a whole and the wars we fight with 2% of the population needs to close. Is this possible? I really do not know.
Lawrence Yun is the chief economist for the National Association of Realtors®. He is very straightforward and he applies numbers to what everybody is feeling in the real estate market. This 10 minute interview covers what most people are talking about: a “slow-down” in real estate, rising interest rates, new home building, consumer preferences, etc.
The year-over-year increase in price for July 2018 compared with the YoY increase in July 2017 is less, so the increase has slowed. The YoY increase in July 2017 was 6.4%. From the MLS chart, the last time that the price increase was this slow was late 2014, so it appears by that measure the market has cooled off a bit, or is just a bit less hot. The price still increased don’t forget. That is good. The last time there was an overall YoY price decrease was 2011.
Source: http://www.columbusrealtors.com/stats/
We are still in a historical seller’s market.
Source: http://www.columbusrealtors.com/stats/archives.aspx
How much has the 30-year fixed rate gone up? It increased above 4% in January this year, reached 4.46% by March, and has held steady since then. The five year low was 3.41% in July 2016. Check out this interactive chart from Freddie Mac:
http://www.freddiemac.com/pmms/
Hold tight. The demand is still there.