A New World
My ramblings about science….

Well, I’d rather like to post a blog here about numerology.

But I do not have the time, so instead I provide you with the following link:

http://distphy.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/patterns-are-not-enough-numerology/

I’m sorry I cannot write one myself.  But this person seems to have covered most of what I would have, plus a bit more.  And looks very much as if they’ve met “I think outside the box”

Again, sorry.

Seems I forgot one or two… Well read more to find out what they were…

Possible spoiler alert again…

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Those who know me might be a little surprised by the following blog post.  I’m intending to discus, albeit briefly, several Christmas films.

I’m not a big fan of happy films for the most part.  And certainly anything where I predicting the future isn’t magic, it’s simple is something that I hate in films.

But the following is a few of my favourite Christmas films and why I like them… kinda…

A spoiler warning first of all, they’re all a bit old and I’ll try and keep the details to a minimum but I can promise no more.

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If you can’t beat them, join them…

The two best Christmas decorations I’ve come across this year…  (I might edit this later with some extras if anything interesting stands out).

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It’s 10:30pm, I’ve had a little over 2h sleep since 7.30am yesterday.  I’m still awake and for some reason now unable to sleep!

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It’s currently 10pm.  I’ve spent 30mins of the last 14hours not in the physics building, and the end is far off…

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First off, allow me to warn you, this is long.  It’s so long it stretches to the beginning of time.  But I do feel it’s worth it.

So if you have a few mins to spare, and you want a quick laugh, take a look at this link:

The history of the world.

I used to be quite good at using linux system, running a couple of servers and fixing machines quit often.  This has died off over the last 3 or 4 years with the advent of reliable desktop linux distos and having very limited time.  This has changed over the last few weeks with trying to run some electromagnetic modeling code on multiple cores using mpi on a linux box for which I had no space on, under or around my desk, so ssh was the best option, this caused a few issues so I had to try and remember everything I’d forgotten.

Also, the subject of this blog post…

I’ve recently installed ubuntu 11.10 onto a laptop for someone.  A Lenovo z570, a great laptop, I’m really very impressed for the £600 or so price tag.  It’s quick, well spec’d and feels great.  The install went great, there’s been a few post-install issues though, which I’ve now resolved.  This is how I did it…

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I’ve decided that I’m going to introduce a new slot kinda thing… What I’m Reading.  Here I’m going to write some nice short reviews of what I’m currently reading.

This one is going to be about war of the worlds…

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Well it’s quite a simple question isn’t it? But can we actually work out the answer from what everyone knows about the moon, let’s have a quick look at the facts we all observe about the moon.

1. The part in the sun changes.
2. It’s always the same face that faces us.
3. It’s maximum height above the horizon changes.

And what do we need to know to decide whether the moon has seasons?

What is a season?

A reproducible change in weather patterns, or something more fundamental, my normal port of call in answering this type of question tends to be wikipedia, so let’s see what it says:

A season is a division of the year, marked by changes in weather.

Seasons result from the yearly revolution of the Earth around the Sun and the tilt of the Earth’s axis relative to the plane of revolution. In temperate and polar regions, the seasons are marked by changes in the intensity of sunlight that reaches the Earth’s surface, variations of which may cause animals to go into hibernation or to migrate, and plants to be dormant.

I think this leaves us nicely open to interpret a season as not requiring weather but being something more general in just requiring an off axis rotation of some form from the plane of orbit around the sun.  Before we all get too confused about what we’re talking about here, I think it’s time for a couple of diagrams and definitions.

The orbit of the Earth around the sun showing the rotation of the Earth.

The Moon orbits the Earth at around 5degrees to the Earth's orbit around the Sun.

We can see here where the Earth seasons come from. The tilt of the Earth means that different parts of the Earth are closer to the Sun at different times increasing the flux of light hitting the Earth.

The moon is tidely locked to the Earth.  This is important as it induces a rotation that is orthogonal to its rotation around the Earth.  As the Moons orbit around the Earth is at around 5degrees to the ecliptic (the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun), so it’s axis of rotation is off axis to its orbit around the sun.  — [Edit]  Please see the comments below, the Moons orbit is not orthogonal to its orbit.

From this quite simple analysis it can be said that yes the Moon does have seasons…

Before I move on to another post a quick note that moons orbit might be on the other side of the ecliptic, but the sentiment remains the same…