A New Push to Turn Off the Lights in 2009
Astronomers are fed up. One fifth of the world’s population cannot see the Milky Way because street lamps and building lights are too bright. So scientists are mounting a new campaign, called Dark Skies Awareness, aiming to reduce light pollution as part of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy.
Milky Way 50 Percent Larger, Astronomers Discover
[N]ew measurements of how quickly our galaxy is rotating have led a team of Harvard astrophysicists to conclude that our galaxy is 50 percent more massive than previously thought, and likely does have four arms.
“We should certainly think of the Milky Way no longer as the little sister of the local group,” said Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “We should think of the Milky Way and Andromeda as more like fraternal twins.”
Calvin’s dad is not a scientist, and the cartoon gets it almost exactly wrong.
He says it’s colder because the earth’s orbit is taking us farther from the sun.
The perihelion was Jan 4th, meaning we were closest to the sun then.
The seasons, of course, are caused by the axial tilt.
Where was this a year ago, when all I could think of was last-name-phonetic-translation-of-first-initial?
William bleeping Safire explains the blanking difference between profanities, obscenities, expletives, and vulgarities, and more, in Bleeping Expletives. Just in case anyone wants to become qualified to become the bleeping Governer of blanking Illinois.
Today we are going to deal with the media coverage of profanities, expletives, vulgarisms, obscenities, execrations, epithets and imprecations, nouns often lumped together by the Bluenose Generation as coarseness, crudeness, bawdiness, scatology or swearing. But roundheeled readers should stop smacking their lips and rubbing their hands because the deliberately shocking subject can be treated with decorum, in plain words, without the titillating examples of “dirty words.” (Titillating, from the Latin titillare, “to tickle,” is clean.)
If you want to fulminate about such prissiness about prurience in print, feel free to rattle your jowls, blow your stack and otherwise express your outrage with the typographical device to which cartoonists have resorted for generations: !#*&%@%!!!
(The last example being grawlix)
On New Year’s Eve at 6:59:59 p.m. ET, an “international consortium of timekeepers” will add one second to the world’s clock. How do you get to be an official timekeeper?
Earn a Ph.D. in astronomy and move to France. Tweaks to the official clock are announced by the Earth Orientation Center, a Paris-based subunit of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service.
Well, no. That’s how you get to make the decision of when to add a leap second. But the IERS is not the official timekeeper, that’s the BIPM, who calculate the atomic time scale TAI and the coordinated universal time scale UTC. Countries that contribute to the international standard realize their own versions of these time scales.
In the US, there aren’t a lot of places where you can learn to be a timekeeper. Contrary to the article’s suggestion, your best bet is probably a degree in atomic physics or math, depending on whether you want to work on hardware or on the timescale algorithms, and then apply for a job at USNO or NIST.