#FOWC Archives – Page 83 of 102

December 26, 2019December 30, 2019

Let’s Evolve the Decade

red dice changing year to 2020 — Yes, it is time to close this decade. Photo at military.com

I am absolutely positive that on January 1, 2000 I made a point of explaining to everyone how it was not the new millennium. The correct way to count the beginning of decades and millenniums is on year one, you see, so everyone was confused. The New York Times and The Farmer’s Almanac backed me up on this, and, while common knowledge was throwing ticker tape and blaring trumpets and partying like it was the end of 1999, common knowledge couldn’t hold a candle to fact and correctness. Only one problem.

I was wrong.

So was/is the Times and the Farmer’s Almanac and the US Naval Station and what will be the tsunami of nitpickers and fact porn purveyors who are about to begin that drumbeat again. I’ve already seen a few Facebook posts that begin with “Look, people…” It’s seductive, almost irresistible, but you can hold fast. Facts are more flexible than we might think.

This is absolutely the end of the 2010s, as I will literally explain below.

Anno Domini Was a Figment of Denis’ Imagination

Here’s the issue at hand. When the calendar was created–and it was created, it’s an artificial construct rather than being a natural phenomenon like atoms which had to be discovered–when the calendar was created, assumptions were made. As the many articles being written this week will tell you, the monk Dionysius Exiguus in 525 created a labeling system of years because people were using all different dates for their own purposes. (Dionysius stands for Little Denis, by the way, which is why a monk would be named after the Greek god of drunkenness and debauchery).

December 11, 2019December 21, 2019

Fa-la-la-la-la Is No Accident

Christmas is the one holiday that has its own music. In fact, music is so much at the core of Christmas celebrations that three of the top fifteen best-selling singles of all time are Christmas-themed, and public venues start playing carols right after Halloween, two months early. Think about it; no other American/western European holiday involves theme music.

I realized this fact last night while attending the second holiday concert of this season, listening to a stream of sublime medieval motets and “Marian polyphony” by Chanticleer. As they sang dozens of songs about mangers and Magi, I tried to think of songs for Halloween or Thanksgiving, and they are rare, ancillary, afterthoughts. In the religious elementary school I attended as a child, Easter and Christmas were considered equally worth of pageantry, and we performed songs for parents in both. But few people would now sing “Go to Dark Gethsemane” or “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” while shopping for chocolate bunnies in March.

Music is a fundamental part of the Christmas experience, as old as wassailing and gift-giving, almost as old as snow and the change of the seasons.

December 5, 2019December 11, 2019

Icarus Reborn

The Parker Solar Probe, photo simulation by JHUAPL in Nature.com.

In the decade that I grew up, Americans went to the moon. Then, we flew reusable planes into space, a couple of which turned into spectacular disasters. Since then, most of NASA’s activity has been relegated to the back sections of newspapers or museums. Astronauts dying have a tendency to turn off people’s appetite towards science. Add in the politics of government financing, and when you can’t even agree to spend money on providing food or medicine to people, then funding decade-long programs to shoot a few people off towards a distant planet seems pretty impossible.

But a couple of stories this week in those science sections caught my eye, and I am pleased to report that NASA, as well as international space exploration, is alive and well. Humans have been going into space, one small research grant at a time. Well-played, NASA.

Barbecue Spacecraft

What’s the fastest human-made object that’s ever traveled? The Parker Solar Probe zipped near the sun in September of this year at 213,000 miles per hour. In comparison, the escape velocity of rockets leaving earth is only about 30,000 mph, which is still hundreds of times faster than we’d experience in a plane. Parker, which was named for University of Chicago (my alma mater) scientist Eugene Parker, who first hypothesized about solar winds, was launched two years ago to explore the sun. Apparently, it’s finding out some really cool things.

Of course, the probe has to get very close to the sun to do this, and in its third dive around Sol, Parker was about 15 million miles out—halfway between Mercury and the sun. Plans are for it to make another couple dozen circuits, which should generate speeds nearly twice as fast and bring it twice as close. On the surface of the sun, the temperature runs around 10,000 ^oF, although at the corona, the thin covering around the sun, the temperatures can be millions of degrees, up to 300 times hotter. Parker won’t get quite that close, but it’s built to withstand up to 1400 ^oC, which is steel-melting territory.