Åiken

http://www.newsisfree.com/iclick/i,293331799,1440,f/

http://www.newsisfree.com/iclick/i,293329770,1440,f/

• I guess it’s Independence Day over the pond tomorrow. I trust you’ll all be doing your “solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.” Right? #
• 12 people reply with exactly the same thing:”No, we’re going to blow shit up!” Ah, Americans, the world’s little helpers. With explosives. #
• @tikistitch : Guy Fawkes Night is where we burn an effigy of Fawkes to annually humiliate his name for failing to blow up Parliament. #
• FREAKANGELS 0019: http://www.freakangels.com/?p=44 #
• Also, happy 21st birthday to my cowgirl, @laurennmcc #
• @laurennmcc that’s because you look and work better at 40 than most people do at 21. July 4 is always Laurenn McCubbin Day to me. #
• @laurennmcc : also, I promise to stop telling people that you’re @mckelvie ’s mother, Soon. #
• July 4 - I now have 5111 silent stalkers — I mean “followers” — on Twitter. Soon I will issue the Secret Command Signal. Be patient. #
• @kellysue - in 1997, the only person I saw dress up for the Eisner Awards was George Perez, resplendent in tuxedo and vivid cummerbund. #
• Dear old George did, of course, stand out like a Maharajah at a convention for people who drink paint stripper recreationally. #

http://www.newsisfree.com/iclick/i,293314080,1440,f/

http://www.overcompensating.com/posts/20080704.html

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/07/04/bad-astronomy-review-hancock/

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/07/04/does-the-sun-look-smaller-to-you/

Criminy, I almost forgot: today, July 4th, at roughly 08:00 UT, the Earth was at aphelion.

Uh, what? I hear you ask. OK, brief astrolesson for ya, then back to the grill!

The Earth does not orbit the Sun in a perfect circle. The orbit is slightly elliptical. If you were to draw the Earth’s orbit on a piece of paper, you’d need a sharp eye to detect its non-circularity, but deviant it is. What this means in real terms is that the Earth ranges from about 148 to about 152 million kilometers from the Sun over the course of six months (which is how long it takes to get from one side of the orbit to the other, of course).

When the Earth is closest to the Sun it’s at perihelion, and when it’s farthest it’s called aphelion (I usually pronounce that app-helion, if you care, though I’ve heard others say aff-helion). So today we passed aphelion, and slowly but inexorably, over the next six months we’ll draw slightly closer to the Sun, and then the whole thing repeats.

That 4 million km difference sounds like a lot. But over the 150 million average radius of the orbit it’s only a slight difference by eye. The Sun will look about 3% larger at perihelion versus aphelion, and you’d never notice that, especially since the change is slow and takes six months. The amount of sunlight hitting the Earth does increase at perihelion, being about 5% greater than at aphelion. That’s quite a bit! But the effect isn’t as bad as you’d think. Why not?

For us northern hemisphere folks, we are farthest from the Sun in summer, and closest in winter, so that mitigates the temperature extreme. On average, winters are a bit warmer and summers a bit cooler. But wait! In the southern hemisphere, the seasons are reversed! So they should have extra hot summers and extra cold winters.

But they don’t. Why not? Because the southern hemisphere is mostly water. Go ahead, find a globe and take a look; it’s incredible how much of that half the Earth is water bound. Water absorbs and releases heat slowly, so all summer the oceans suck down that extra solar energy, and release it all winter. That helps balance out the temperature extremes.

Oh, one more thing: the Earth precesses, that is, the axis of rotation moves like a wobbling top. It takes a long time for the wobble to make one cycle, well over 20,000 years. But this changes the timing of the seasons compared to the orbit. In a few millennia, we’ll have perihelion at the same time as northern summer, and aphelion at northern winter. It’s hard to say what effect this will have on the environment, since it brings extra-hot summers and extra-cold winters. However, the last time this happened was around the same time the Sahara forest went away and was replaced by, well, guess.

But for today, don’t fret too much about wandering poles and aphelion… except to say, if you’re out sweltering in the Sun today celebrating the holiday in the U.S., you might want to take just a moment and be glad our orbit isn’t more elliptical, or that it isn’t 15,000 AD.

Babe, Terror is a band (or maybe a single guy?) out of Sao Paulo who appear to be fashioning their recordings in a tumbledown Portuguese church somewhere off the ninth circle of Hell. It has the same feel as the earliest Sigur Ros, but significantly more lo-fi, Satanic and loveless.

Their demo is up on PureVolume — I’m listening to "Nasa Goodbye" right now.

http://www.newsisfree.com/iclick/i,293233020,1440,f/

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/07/04/declare-2/

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Take a moment from the watermelon and chicken salad and hot dogs and frisbee, and remember why we celebrate this day.

http://www.asofterworld.com

http://www.newsisfree.com/iclick/i,293217409,1440,f/

http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001255.html

Project Wonderful - Your ad here, right now, for as low as $0.00

July 3rd, 2008: Minus ended today, which makes me sad because it is a kick-ass comic that I really loved, but Ryan always warned us it would stop suddenly. I recommend reading from the start! I also recommend this particular installment. Ryan I look forward to your next project!

http://www.newsisfree.com/iclick/i,293193656,1440,f/

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/07/04/banner-yet-wave/

The folks at Hubble just released this picture, in time for the Fourth of July:

That is a seriously cool image. It shows a ribbon of gas, compressed and glowing due to a shock wave that slammed into it. The shock came from Supernova 1006, a star that detonated 7000 light years away from us. This was not a massive star that exploded, but a low-mass white dwarf, the dense core left over when a star like the Sun runs out of fuel. Still, the forces are roughly the same, with a titanic explosion ripping the star apart and creating eerie, unearthly beauty even in death.

White dwarfs don’t have much if any hydrogen in them. The gas in the image is mostly hydrogen (that’s what gives it that red hue), meaning this material must be just random gas floating in the galaxy that got in the way of the expanding blast wave. The remnant itself, the expanding debris from the supernova, is now so spread out — it’s 60 light years across! — that it’s mostly invisible to telescopes. But the wave is still moving outward at about 10 million kph, so when it hits gas like this the matter compresses and glows.

I enhanced the color and contrast of the image a bit here to show off the incredibly narrow filaments in the ribbon, as well as letting you see faint background stars and even a galaxy or ten way off in the background. Too bad there aren’t any obviously blue stars or galaxies in the image, given the holiday. Oh well, the universe doesn’t care much for our mundane lives or freedoms. But it’s those very things that allow us to observe the universe — and it’s the explosive fireworks of supernovae events like SN 1006 that created the calcium in our bones and the iron in our blood, scattering them throughout the galaxy, where they could gather in gas clouds, which formed stars, planets, and eventually, us.

Remeber: when we look out, we look in. That’s one of the many reasons science is so cool.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wondermark/~3/326636493/422-in-which-queue-is-about-to-get.html