Sunday/SOLSTICE

"Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad, because I'm capping greenhouse gases.  Coal power plants, natural gas, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money onto consumers."--Obama

At Costco yesterday I got a delicious hotdog and was engaged by the guy who sold it to me in a conversation over the Oxford Comma. Full employment.

The search for unbiased truth-seeking apolitical justice continues. From The Daily Mail: "House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff has declared war on Vice President Mike Pence, barely a week after his panel finished its hearings on the impeachment of President Donald Trump.

As an impeachment vote loomed Wednesday, Schiff demanded Pence’s office declassify documents that he claims could show the vice president knee-deep in the Ukraine scandal that has brought Trump to the brink."

Like rust, the Left never rests.

In a recent survey conducted by the Danish Ministry of Foreigners and Integration (Udlændinge- og Integrationsministeriet), 48% of descendants of non-Western immigrants in Denmark said that they think it should be forbidden to criticize religion, according to Kristeligt Dagblad. Forty-two percent of immigrants who had lived in Denmark for three years agreed with the statement, while only 20% of ethnic Danes agreed with it.

From the Economist in 2014:

Throughout recorded history, humans have reigned unchallenged as Earth’s dominant species. Might that soon change? Turkeys, heretofore harmless creatures, have been exploding in size, swelling from an average 13.2lb (6kg) in 1929 to over 30lb today. On the rock-solid scientific assumption that present trends will persist, The Economist calculates that turkeys will be as big as humans in just 150 years. Within 6,000 years, turkeys will dwarf the entire planet. Scientists claim that the rapid growth of turkeys is the result of innovations in poultry farming, such as selective breeding and artificial insemination. The artificial nature of their growth, and the fact that most have lost the ability to fly, suggest that not all is lost. Still, with nearly 250m turkeys gobbling and parading in America alone, there is cause for concern. This Thanksgiving, there is but one prudent course of action: eat them before they eat you.

Boeing Co’s Starliner astronaut spacecraft landed in the New Mexico desert on Sunday, the company said, after faulty software forced officials to cut short an unmanned mission aimed at taking it to the International Space Station. 

The 7:58 a.m. ET (1258 GMT) landing in New Mexico’s White Sands desert capped a turbulent 48 hours for Boeing’s botched milestone test of an astronaut capsule that is designed to help NASA regain its human spaceflight capabilities.

The landing will yield the mission’s most valuable test data after failing to meet its core objective of docking to the space station. 

On December 22, 1849 writer Fyodor Dostoevsky was led before a firing squad and prepared for execution. He had been convicted and sentenced to death on November 16 for allegedly taking part in anti-government activities. However, at the last moment, he was reprieved and sent into exile. 
The government can be such a kidder.

                                     SOLSTICE

SOLSTICE: either of the two times during the year when the sun is farthest from the equator, about June 21st when the sun is farthest north of the equator and about December 22nd when it is farthest south: The summer solstice has the longest days, and the winter solstice has the shortest.

Saturn is the Roman Chronos, an early Titan in the history of the evolution of the gods and man, the son of the Earth and Sky. He defeats his siblings and, in fear of a prophecy that he will be overthrown by a son, eats his children. One child, Zeus, is hidden by his mother and grows to rescue his siblings and overthrow his father.

Saturn is the original fertility symbol in mythology, preceding Persephone in chronology and hierarchy. He does not quite fit the popular notion of a historical evolutionary progression away from female fertility goddesses to the more combative male deities. As the second layer of the gods, supplanted by Zeus and his siblings, he is much less active but had a significant old mythological following.

Saturnalia originated as a farmer's festival to mark the end of the autumn planting season  (satus means sowing). It started as a two-day celebration but grew longer and later; it was seven days around the winter solstice in the third century A.D., when numerous archaeological sites demonstrate that the cult of Saturn still survived. The poet Lucian of Samosata (AD 120-180) has the god Cronos (Saturn) say in his poem, Saturnalia:

"During my week the serious is barred: no business is allowed. Drinking and being drunk, noise and games of dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping...an occasional dunking of corked faces in icy water--such are the functions over which I preside."

A public holiday with gifts, masters and slaves swapping clothes, the strange election of a temporary house "monarch." A time for feasting, goodwill, generosity to the poor, the exchange of gifts and the decoration of trees.

By that time, with Christianity well established, it is difficult to determine which gave and took. 

And...a little on solstice:

The seasons have nothing to do with how far the Earth is from the Sun.  If this were the case, it would be hotter in the northern hemisphere during January as opposed to July.  Instead, the seasons are caused by the Earth being tilted on its axis by an average of 23.5 degrees (Earth's tilt on its axis actually varies from near 22 degrees to 24.5 degrees).  Here's how it works:

The Earth has an elliptical orbit around our Sun.  This being said, the Earth is at its closest point distance wise to the Sun in January (called the Perihelion) and the furthest in July (the Aphelion).  But this distance change is not great enough to cause any substantial difference in our climate.  This is why the Earth's 23.5 degree tilt is all important in changing our seasons.  Near June 21st, the summer solstice, the Earth is tilted such that the Sun is positioned directly over the Tropic of Cancer at 23.5 degrees north latitude.  This situates the northern hemisphere in a more direct path of the Sun's energy.  What this means is less sunlight gets scattered before reaching the ground because it has less distance to travel through the atmosphere.  In addition, the high sun angle produces long days.  The opposite is true in the southern hemisphere, where the low sun angle produces short days.  Furthermore, a large amount of the Sun's energy is scattered before reaching the ground because the energy has to travel through more of the atmosphere.  Therefore near June 21st, the southern hemisphere is having its winter solstice because it "leans" away from the Sun.

Advancing 90 days, the Earth is at the autumnal equinox on or about September 21st.  As the Earth revolves around the Sun, it gets positioned such that the Sun is directly over the equator.   Basically, the Sun's energy is in balance between the northern and southern hemispheres.  The same holds true on the spring equinox near March 21st, as the Sun is once again directly over the equator. 

Lastly, on the winter solstice near December 21st, the Sun is positioned directly over the Tropic of Capricorn at 23.5 degrees south latitude.  The southern hemisphere is therefore receiving the direct sunlight, with little scattering of the sun's rays and a high sun angle producing long days.  The northern hemisphere is tipped away from the Sun, producing short days and a low sun angle.

What kind of effect does the earth's tilt and subsequent seasons have on our length of daylight (defined as sunrise to sunset).  Over the equator, the answer is not much.  If you live on or very close to the equator, your daylight would be basically within a few minutes of 12 hours the year around.  Using the northern hemisphere as a reference, the daylight would  lengthen/shorten during the summer/winter moving northward from the equator.  The daylight difference is subtle in the tropics, but becomes extremely large in the northern latitudes.  Where we live in the mid latitudes, daylight ranges from about 15 hours around the summer solstice to near nine hours close to the winter solstice.   Moving to the arctic circle at 66.5 degrees north latitude, the Sun never sets from early June to early July.  But around the winter solstice, the daylight only lasts slightly more than two hours.  There becomes a profound difference in the length of daylight heading north of the arctic circle.  Barrow, Alaska at slightly more than 71 degrees north latitude, lies just less than 300 nautical miles north of the arctic circle.  Barrow sees two months of total darkness, as the Sun never rises for about a month on each side of the winter solstice.  On the other hand, Barrow also has total light from mid May to early August.  And what about the north pole, or 90 degrees north latitude?  The Sun rises in the early evening near the spring equinox and never sets again until just after the autumnal equinox, or six months of light.  Conversely, after the Sun sets in the mid morning just after the autumnal equinox, it will not be seen again until the following spring equinox, equating to six months of darkness.  

(NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE)