Autumn Equinox

[This post is revised and updated from 2015]

Wrap this around your mental astronomy phenomena spindle and see if you can make of it more skein than snarl!

The Autumnal Equinox in 2026 occurs at 5:05 PM PDT on Tuesday, 22 September 2026. (Please don't call it the first day of autumn or I will have to hit you with my Summer Solstice Is Midsummer bat.)

"Equinox"  means that, on that day, the time from sunrise to sunset should be equal to the time from sunset to sunrise, right?

Hah! Doesn't work that way.

Wednesday actually has about 5 more minutes of daylight than Friday. On Friday 25 September we actually get a length of day that is 12 hours 1 minute and 22 seconds. And Saturday 26 September has a time between sunrise and sunset that is 11 hours 58 minutes -- so Saturday the 26th is actually this year's winner in the Autumn "Day = Night"  contest.

Why?

First, the astronomical definition of equinox refers to the moment the earth, in its orbit around the sun, crosses a particular point in reference to what astronomers call the fixed stars. Plus, we must remember that "Day Equals Night" day wanders because of the earth's axis-wobble with respect to the earth's elliptical orbit. This wobble is known as the precession of the equinox. The precession happens ve-e-e-r-r-y s-slo-o-o-owly (!) but it it make a difference. At this point, a difference of some days. 

You're welcome.

Where You Were and When

Some years ago I started noticing the ads from the grocery store seemed to know when I went to the grocery store. Figures: grocery store "rewards card" pins it down, plus more recently I tend to connect to the store wi-fi. My choice. Creepy, but whatevs. 

A story on Slashdot opens up a bit of how creepy things are getting. Vandals tore down and stole a Flock camera, hacked the data it contained, and shared it with a cutout organization that in turn shared it with 404 Media and Wired. (Slashdot gives all the links, so go there for the details.)

From Slashdot: "...Flock has described its system as protected by on-device encryption, 'The hackers were able to copy the camera's storage and recover an encryption key stored on the device, which unlocked videos of thousands of vehicle detections.' "  More: "...software running on the camera explicitly detects people... When it spots a person, it records where they appear in the image and how confident it is in the detection." (emphasis mine)

Looks like somebody's making a jump from google ads toward Skynet.

Hundred Mile an Hour Tape?

Driving over one of our local bridges recently, a horrible noise started. Sounded like a demon had landed on top of my car and was vigorously whipping the car. 

It might have been demonic attack, but the proximate cause he used involved the disintegration of the aerodynamic rubber dingus connecting my radio antenna to the car top sheet metal. In certain conditions (65 plus or minus MPH ground speed plus a stiff head- or cross-wind) created a vortex in which the now-too-flexible antenna would rapidly smack smack smack smack smack the top. 

Quick solution: bamboo skewers and Gorilla Tape. In the old days the Air Force used a bullet-hole patching tape that was, I think, a self-adhesive aluminum foil. The metal tape was commonly called Hundred Mile an Hour Tape (actually used far in excess of 100 MPH). Will the Gorilla Tape fix hold up? I hope so?  And it ought to -- we're only talking about going freeway speeds plus maybe a 40 mile an hour cross-wind off the port bow. 

We'll see!

Circumlocution Office Language (re-post from 12/2018)

I have a small sampling of circumlocutions, collected haphazardly over the last twenty years or so, since I decided a sampler of 21st Century gibberish might be valuable. Today is the day I stuff and mount these husks for display in the Crowndot Circumlocution Museum.

The phrase that started all this is "knowledge amid general understanding." In 1998 the Republic Powdered Metals company, manufacturer of a waterproofing material for the interior rain gutters in metal buildings, included this documentation:

Part 1 General

1.01 Applicator's Qualifications

  1. Applicator shall have knowledge amid general understanding of building design as well as Republic's products specified for the project.

I imagine a committee trying to write a "Gutter Liner Specification" document. I imagine some overly honest member of the committee saying something to himself, only he actually said it out loud: "Well, they ought to know what the fuck they're doing in the first place..." Instead of being kicked out of the meeting, the chairperson agrees, and puts the question of how to say that without actually saying that. 

Another phrase that came into use around the turn of the millennium is "compatibility issues." In fact, the "Y2K" era was the beginning of describing a problem as an issue. If there's a problem, there's a possibility of blame. If there's an issue, gee, well, everybody's got "issues" and nobody's to blame, right? So if The End Of The World As We Know It happened one second after midnight on the First of January, 2000 -- well, there were some compatibility issues. That's all. 

In fact, here is a real quote from a British credit card company spokesman when 20,000 of their card-swipers failed during a "Pre-Y2K" test on 27 December 1999:

It is a software time and date related issue, which will be resolved and we're entirely confident that terminals will revert to full functionality.

On 20 March 2002 I first encountered the term "Open Issue" (meaning unresolved problem" in the readme.txt file distributed with UPS Online WorldShip software. "We still have some open issues..." means "Shit keeps happening and we have no idea what the hell we're going to do or when or if the problems are going to be addressed!"

A story on Slashdot.com posted by Zonk on 6 January 2006 and titled "Microsoft Censors Chinese Bloggers" quotes a Ziff-Davis article saying "Occasionally, as in China, local laws and practices require consideration of unique elements..." Unique Elements. Which means, Microsoft never did hold any values above $ale$ Dollar$.

Product descriptions, formerly in print, and now online, receive ever less editorial scrutiny. A listing from CDI in January 2006 for the Ultra ATX 600-Watt SATA-Ready power supply lists among specifications, "Low Acoustic Noise." As opposed to electomagnetic "noise" I guess? It also boasted "Thermal Overload Cutoff Protection" which sounds like it means that it protects the circuit breaker from cutting off in the event it overheats. 

Circumlocution is nothing new. Read Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens (Really -- it's a great book!). Dickens invented the term. One of the great practitioners of the past was "journalist" Will Duranty, who sang thus about the Holodomor while telling his readers that there had indeed been "serious food shortages" in the Ukraine: there was "no actual starvation" and furthermore "no deaths from starvation" -- merely "widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition." Oh. All right then. 

In 2011 I was told by a customer at the Valero refinery in Benicia, "We are rapidly becoming critical path on our coker!" Me no know what that mean. But I assume he means that if the repair schedule isn't shortened to IMMEDIATELY!, bad shit is gonna happen -- and when it hits the fan, there will be plenty to spread around to everybody.

In 2012 the Obama economy got worse and worse. A spokesperson for the president insisted the economy was not in a recession or depression; it was not contracting, in his view, it merely showed numbers "consistent with a weakening growth backdrop."

In August 2016 it came to light that Defense Department intelligence assessments about ISIS had been skewed to downplay the threat and the White House (remember the "Junior Varsity" comment?) incompetence. "The facts on the ground didn't match what the intelligence was saying out of the United States Central Command," said then-Representative Mike Pompeo (R-Kansas), adding that the intel had clearly been "manipulated." In response, one Lieutenant Commander Patrick L. Evans spoke from the Pentagon to say that the intelligence community assessments were "based on multifaceted data related to the security environment." Whatever that means.

I got an email from FedEx on 13 May 2017:

FedEx experienced interference with some of our systems which caused disruptions to the FedEx Express Memphis Hub sort operations. We immediately implemented contingency plans to minimize the impact to our customers. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.

The email concluded by reminding us that, "consistent with the provisions of the FedEx Service Guide, the money-back guarantee is not in effect for FedEx Express packages due for delivery on May 13, 2017." Great money-back guarantee, that.

Democratic Socialists

REVOLUTION 

RevOluTion

RevOlTin

R O T .

The Funnel

This picture is a common representation of the gravity field of a black hole. I think the intention is to show that if you try to walk from east to west straight across the x-y "plane" at the top, you're going to fall into one of the biggest ant lion traps in the cosmos. 

If we cut the tip off the sharp end of the hyperboloid, we get a cool funnel. You may have fed coins into one of those mesmerizing funnels where the coin rolls around and around faster and faster, in smaller and smaller orbits, until it plunks into a collection box at the bottom (ideally for charitable purposes).

I have recently decided that life is like the coin's trip down the hyperboloid funnel.

When I was not many years old, a year seemed just shy of infinitely long. Personal potential was so much greater than actualized personality. Birthdays and holidays took a long, long time to arrive.

As we age, the decisions we make and the roads we go down mean an infinite (that is, indefinite) number of choices and directions have been left behind. We become more and more Who We Are, and our orbits down the funnel become smaller and smaller.

Also faster and faster. Seems that way at least. "Age and age's evils" that Hopkins wrote about in his Leaden Echo suddenly surround and overwhelm us. There seems to be less and less time between Christmases. Church on Sunday keeps feeling like didn't we just do this a moment ago?

At my age I'm heading into those dizzying narrows.

Is there any way to focus, hold on, slow down? "Is there any, any, any...?," I ask with Hopkins. There's gratitude, for one. There's the kind of prayer that notices and memorializes moments of beauty. There is the calm that comes from making peace with the fact that some day we must surely die. And until that day, there's leaning on the everlasting arms of Jesus.

From the Mighty Oak...

...The tiny acorns grow. 

It's that time of year. 

To me the scent of autumn has more to do with the tannin smell of oak and other leaves, and not so much to do with industrial grade "pumpkin spice".