Astronomy

December 21, 2010	Rise:	Solar Noon:	Set:
Actual Time	7:23 AM EST	12:06 PM EST	4:49 PM EST
Civil Twilight	6:53 AM EST		5:19 PM EST
Nautical Twilight	6:19 AM EST		5:52 PM EST
Astronomical Twilight	5:47 AM EST		6:25 PM EST
Altitude	-0.8°	27.6°	-0.8°
Azimuth	120.0°	180.0°	240.0°
Hour Angle of the Sun	70.7°	70.7°	-70.7°
Mean Anomaly of the Sun	346.85°	347.04°	347.23°
Obliquity	23.44°	23.44°	23.44°
Right Ascension of the Sun	-90.52°	-90.30°	-90.08°
Sun Declination	-23.44°	-23.44°	-23.44°
Moon	5:19 PM EST		7:37 AM EST
Length Of Visible Light:	10h 26m
Length of Day	9h 26m Tomorrow will be 0m 1s longer.

What a great 1 second it will be. And the eclipse last night wasn’t bad either.

Happy winter, everyone!

I attended one of the Fall “Learn to Curl” classes held by the fabulous folks at the Potomac Curling Club today. Here’s what I learned in both the lessons and our 3 end game.

Ice is hard
You find this out when you start to sweep because the fact is that most of us aren’t used to keeping upright on ice and sweeping requires that you not only pace the stone but that you work your hands while you’re doing it. Our instructor told us flat out that we would fall while we were sweeping. And I did…four times. While I was the first to go down, I feel better about the fact that I wasn’t the only one going home with bruises in embarrassing places.

Curling is exercise
It may not look like it on TV but sometimes those 44 pound stones move fast even when they aren’t moving all that fast so there were times when I and my fellow sweeper were practically running down the sheet. Not only were we moving fast, we had to put pressure on the broom and move it in a tight little space to be at all effective. And all that takes not only lung stamina but muscle power.

Flexibility matters
But it isn’t everything. Spending 18 years squatting down behind the plate to catch a softball probably put me ahead of some of the people my age who were in my beginning class. Since curling is billed as a sport you can enjoy at any age, accommodations were made for the people in my group who had bad knees, and for the 68 year-old ladies who drove down from Harrisburg, PA. Oh, and that whole squat and push the stone thing…a lot harder than it looks.

Sportsmanship counts
So does fun. Many of us were just in this for fun and, much like chess, you are playing against yourself as much as you’re playing against the other team. If your sweepers did well, tell them. Even if they weren’t perfect, tell them it’s OK. Oh, and at Potomac the winner buys the first round.

Communication counts almost as much
OK, so for winning the game purposes communication probably counts more than sportsmanship but without the sportsmanship would it really be as much fun? As skip you have to make sure the person throwing knows what you’re calling, and when you’re sweeping you have to make sure you’re coordinating with your fellow sweeper so you aren’t knocking brooms instead of helping the stone move along.

The other thing I learned as we played a game to try to solidify the concepts from the lesson portion of our class: I’ve got the skip’s yell. I doubt I’ll ever be as loud as Eve Muirhead, and I’ll certainly never be able to do that thing she does to the R, but if I ever get good enough to skip at least my sweepers will be able to hear me.

America has a split personality. I say this with confidence as the evidence is all around us.

• We want less government involvement in our lives yet we happily whiz down roads paid with Federal highway money.
• We think “entitlement programs” should be slashed, slashed, slashed, yet 40 million people are receiving food stamps, 50 million are on Medicaid, and 4.4 million are on welfare.
• A vocal number of us are increasingly so concerned about “illegal immigrants,” ostensibly because they take away jobs that could be going to “real Americans,” that some of us are calling for building a huge wall between us and Mexico and we’re even willing to flirt with fascism by allowing police to detain people who can not prove on the spot they are in the U.S. legally yet when the United Farm Workers issued a challenge to Americans to “take our jobs” only 16 people showed up (video) out of the 4,000+ applications they received.

The other, more insidious, indicator doesn’t really appear on the news. In fact, all of the more visible indicators are evidence of an underlying attitude dissonance in American philosophical thought.

Here’s the thing: shit happens. And when I say “shit” I don’t mean just any stuff. I mean bad things, things that are scary, discomfitting, and enraging, and often have a direct, negative impact on the quality of your life. There are two basic philosophical approaches to a series of these occurrences in your life: take them personally or don’t.

Take them personally manifests itself in two ways, the most obvious being the victim mentality that is also so prevalent in American society today – this is happening to me because I’m poor/a different religion/a minority and has nothing to do with my heroin addiction or the fact that I didn’t work in school so I now am not qualified for any job at all.

The other less obvious but in some ways more detrimental outgrowth of the idea that the bad things that affect your life are personal is the idea that everything that happens to you is a direct outgrowth of your choices.

The idea that everything that happens to you is influenced or able to be influenced by you is a meme brought to us by the positivity movement, exemplified by the bestseller The Secret, and it is seductive. Right thought leads to right consequences. Concentrate on money and the universe will give it to you. Project a good attitude and you will attract happy people. But the dark side of this is that all the bad things that happen to you are an outgrowth of wrong thought.

If your job sucks it’s not because Management are being total assholes and giving you no support whatsoever, or better still outright abusing you; your job sucks because you choose to work for a bad employer and the consequences of Management’s misbehavior are under your control. If you don’t get a raise it’s because you didn’t work hard enough or “sell yourself” enough. If you get cancer it’s because you didn’t focus on being healthy.

Despite its seductive nature and the ultimate appeal of the lure of control, and despite the small grain of truth inherent in its philosophy because after all actions do indeed have consequences, the idea that we can control or influence the bulk of what happens to us is utterly false. It places the onus of others’ behavior on the person being affected by that behavior which in and of itself is contrary to its own philosophy.

Yes, your life is affected by the choices you make and bearing the consequences, both good and bad, of those choices would in a perfect world be your responsibility alone. We don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world with other people and we are affected by the choices they make not only with no malice toward us but often with no idea of our very existence.

The woman who decides to have a second cup of coffee Tuesday morning which means she leaves the house 15 minutes later than normal which puts her on the freeway at a time when she might not normally be there so she is in the path of the tractor trailer driven by the guy who has been up 40 straight hours to just happens to fall asleep and lose control drifting into her lane and pinning her car against the concrete barrier crushing her to death is affected not only by her choice to have a second cup of coffee but also by the choices of the truck driver, and the person in the lane ahead of her, and by the shipper who put the driver’s load on the truck and set the delivery schedule.

And in the world of The Secret she, and she alone, is responsible for her own death because she chose to have that second cup of coffee.

The simple fact of the matter is that life is chaos. We can control what we can control, which is no where near as much as we think or we would like. But just because life is chaos doesn’t mean that we don’t have a right to bitch about it a little when bad things happen to us. It means that we have to recognize when complaining has taken the place of working to change your circumstances.

I’m undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I’m in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform.
- Rachel Maddow, May 6, 2010, “Wonk and Circumstance”, The Valley Advocate.

I miss my bed. I really do. For the past four days it has been near or over 100degF here and I’ve been sleeping on the sofa bed in my living room. Why? Simple: the air conditioner in my bedroom sounds like a jet engine spooling up for takeoff, and that’s from downstairs in the living room.

My house is 85 years old and doesn’t have central AC. When I moved in I priced a retrofit central air conditioning system, the kind with the circular flexible ductwork, and the sales guy took a look around my empty house and told me that because I had “lots of room in the closets” it was going to be a low cost job, only $15,000.

Do you know how many window units you can buy for $15,000?

In the 14 years I’ve lived in this house, I don’t think I’ve spent even a quarter of that on air conditioners. But lately I’ve been looking into a replacement for the one in my bedroom even though it’s only 2 years old and even though I paid way too much for it in the middle of a heat wave.

I’ve delved into Consumer Reports’ reviews of window units, which aren’t dated by the way, so I have no idea if we’re talking about a review of a model year that was manufactured here or somewhere else. Not that it especially matters where something was manufactured, but ac units, particularly window units, have gotten more cheaply made and with shoddier workmanship over the past decade.

I’ve looked at customer reviews on a dozen rating sites and vendor sites calculating number of stars on top of a rating base balanced against the age of the reviews (4.5 stars out of 5 on a base of 20 reviews isn’t worth much if the most recent review is two years old). I’ve considered my pocket book and my comfort, and I have, in theory, found the perfect air conditioner.

The Friedrich Kuhl line is not only pretty but it’s highly ranked for energy efficiency, capacity, and, most importantly, quietness. Unfortunately, the Kuhl line is not cheap, as in $958 from the nearest authorized dealer which I found out when I called them this afternoon. And while I don’t normally balk at paying for quality merchandise, especially quality merchandise that helps me get a good night’s sleep, what I do balk at is vendor policies that seem like a blatant rip-off.

If I’m paying $958 for an air conditioner which you don’t have a floor model of that I can test in your store, don’t you think a 20% restocking fee is a bit unreasonable? And more to the point, does it really cost you more money to restock a $958 air conditioner than it does to restock a $375 dishwasher?

So, the next best thing: a trip to Home Depot this weekend to look at and, hopefully, buy a $350 LG window unit which, if it sounds like a jet engine taking off when I get it installed and turn it on, I can return for no fee with no questions asked.

On June 22, 2009 I was in Rome Italy. I had a good day. I woke up early, wandered down to the garden behind the hotel, and wrote some morning pages while I had a cup of tea.  Then there was breakfast and a wander over to the Vittorio Emanuele monument. Then there was some lunch at a fabulous restaurant, you know the kind hidden up an alley, which had been recommened to me by a friend.  In the afternoon, a little wander around and stumbling on a random, 1000+ year-old ruin just right in the middle of the sidewalk.

On June 22, 2009 in Washington, DC nine people died in the worst crash in Metro rail’s history not five minutes outside “my” Metro stop.

Some things have changed in the past year, most notably that Metro has gone to full manual control on the trains which means that instead of a smooth ride with predictable motion I’m often forced to wonder “Does the person driving this train drive his car like that too?” and “Did we just run over something or is one of the wheels on this car square?”

One of the things that I’ve noticed change in the past year is boarding patterns. Right after I got home from my vacation I noticed something odd in the morning commute: virtually no one was getting on the first or the last car of the train. During the evening commute, mostly those two cars were filled with tourists, and trust me they are easy to spot. Given the way the two trains involved in the June 2009 crash smashed together, and given where the fatalities were, this boarding pattern did not surprise. But gradually over the last year it has subsided out of necessity; even the most fearful commuter would rather have a seat than sway in the aisle every single day in both directions on the off chance a train might crash. Take a careful look at photo number 41 in this gallery and then read the caption to get a better picture of just how overloaded Metro really is.

So I found myself on the 22nd of June 2010 staring out the back door of the last car on the train as we made our way along the tracks to “my” Metro station wondering what I would do if I saw another train come up behind us looking like it wasn’t going to stop.  And all I could think about was how to balance being prepared to exit life at a moment’s notice with the reality of having to live life on a daily basis.

Maybe it’s because I’m sitting smack in the middle of my life and I realize that every day, every single minute even, is a gift that shouldn’t be taken for granted. Maybe it’s because I am a student of human nature and I realize that it isn’t in us inherently to look around, pay attention, and understand that you can’t rely on your future self to do what your current self is to lazy, preoccupied, or just unwilling to do no matter how much you say whatever it is you aren’t doing is something you value. Or maybe it’s just that my priorities are shifting again and so I think about these things, about what’s important and what’s not.

The only thing I know for sure is that the bulk of us are totally unprepared for the one absolute certainty about life.

I don’t care what the chart says about sunrise time; we had enough light at 05:36 to read comfortably outside…and given the fact that these days I need a lot of light to read comfortably, that’s saying something.

June 21, 2010	Rise:	Solar Noon:	Set:
Actual Time	5:42 AM EDT	1:09 PM EDT	8:36 PM EDT
Civil Twilight	5:10 AM EDT		9:08 PM EDT
Nautical Twilight	4:30 AM EDT		9:49 PM EDT
Astronomical Twilight	3:43 AM EDT		10:36 PM EDT
Altitude	-0.8°	74.5°	-0.8°
Azimuth	58.5°	180.0°	301.5°
Hour Angle of the Sun	111.8°	111.8°	-111.8°
Mean Anomaly of the Sun	166.37°	166.68°	166.98°
Obliquity	23.44°	23.44°	23.44°
Right Ascension of the Sun	89.92°	90.25°	90.57°
Sun Declination	23.44°	23.44°	23.44°
Moon	4:10 PM EDT		1:50 AM EDT
Length Of Visible Light:	15h 58m
Length of Day	14h 54m Tomorrow will be 0m 2s shorter.

Chart courtesy Weatherunderground.com

Happy Midsummer, folks!

Not bad for a couple of  bushs I paid $11.99 for at K-mart (yes, long ago enough that they still had the dash in their logo).