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Post by afriendlychicken on Jun 18, 2013 21:23:23 GMT -5
Hi, and welcome to my new blog "The Esoteric Chicken" aka: The completely useless information blog. Here you will find the unwanted and mundane thoughts of yours truly on non-earth shattering minutiae, with the exception of a few pieces of astronomy news I may want to share, which will probably still be mundane to the most of you. So I'll be able to go off on tangents of my choosing, sometimes in the same post. Like now. Hope you enjoy it. (A big thank you to Asano for giving me the title for this blog.)
I first came upon the word esoteric back in the late 1980's through a song by Peter Hammill called "Invisible Ink." Considered his worst album ever, it still had some good lyrics. It's just the god-awful '80's sound' & production that ruined the album.
The esoteric is also lost on me. But it's so much fun to talk about!
Now on to the "Super Moon" of June 23rd. It isn't super but it is the moon. I've been having a bunch of memes about this on my FB page and I think I've done a good job of explaining it to my friends because no one has become mad at me, yet. The term "Super Moon" came from a **&%%$*!! astrologer and was picked up by, who else, the media to describe the full moon on it's closest perigee of the year. You might notice it being a tad bit bigger or you might not. Looking at the moon on the horizon is the only way you may notice the difference. But the one thing it ain't is super. It's just a big, cold ball of rock with a regolith covering smiling down at you. "Did you see that? It winked at me!"
And so another fun thing is ruined by us skeptical/scientific types...muhahahaha!!!
Gee, this might be fun and it keeps my Hawai'i blog about the beautiful place I live.
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Post by nondescript spice on Jun 18, 2013 22:08:28 GMT -5
well, the first thing that happened when i opened your new blog, chicken, was my computer completely froze. had to reboot and everything. THAT'S how cool your new blog is. okay, so if it isn't a super moon, what is the correct term for it? i am VERY into the moon. that was my first tattoo. one time i almost drove off the road because i couldn't take my eyes off this enormous red, harvest moon rising. i honestly pulled over to the side of the road so i could drink it in. i remember the "super" moon of last year - it was in may, wasn't it? it was am impressive sight. i already had it on my calendar; i heard it on the news last week. so it isn't going to be as big as it was last year? where do i get a refund?
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Post by Ijon the Asano on Jun 18, 2013 22:30:22 GMT -5
It's just a big, cold ball of rock with a regolith covering smiling down at you. " Don't let Paul Spudis hear ya' dissin' Luna like dat dere. Remember the polar water. Read a bit just today about his trying to get a Lunar surface mission back into NASA's agenda. These days, though, I mostly just watch the Moon. There was a really nice crescent a few nights back, but I can't wait for it to get back into the morning sky. Lately I start every day with an early walk, and back when it was out there so nice and bright and nearly full, it was more than once the high point of the day. So, where's the complimentary coffee? I thought there was gonna be complimentary coffee.
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Post by nondescript spice on Jun 18, 2013 22:33:06 GMT -5
it was delicious!next to a big, fat, full bossy moon, i dig a good cheshire cat moon.
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Post by afriendlychicken on Jun 18, 2013 23:10:26 GMT -5
Kitty! Sorry Asano, I didn't realize Spice could drink THAT much coffee. No wonder she can't sleep...(winky eye face thingy that has abandoned my reply section) I don't think there's any term for it except the moon does this apogee/perigee thing like it's playing chicken with us. Here's a link for this years wobbly motion around the Earth: www.basicastro.com/apogee-perigee-2013.htmlAnd it'll look about 13% bigger than the moon at it's farthest apogee. Asano, finding water at the the south pole was great, but still, it is mostly a big ball of rock. I do hope we go back there soon. I loved the images that the Selene sent back a few years ago. My favorite moon phase is the 10 day old moon, when the terminator line is just pass Sinus Iridum, Bay of Rainbows, and the sunlight is shining on the tops of the Jura Mountains. It's really the only part of the moon I know well enough. Sadly a lot of us amateur astronomers neglect the moon, and I'm one of them. Bring on those open star clusters!
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Post by Ijon the Asano on Jun 19, 2013 0:03:14 GMT -5
@spice: That is way cool. I'd wax more eloquently with a few fewer beers in me. I want a spacesuit for my cat . . .
@friendly: Rock, yeah, but reachable rock. My employer just signed up for "Aviation Week" (not that he remembers) and from what they're saying, the asteroid retrieval thing just doesn't work, and if they'd asked the asteroid dynamicists first they'd have known that. Mars is way cool, but it's also wayyy harder to reach. "Been there, done that," was a really numskullion thing to say about Luna, and if that water is retrievable it totally changes the game for going further.
By the way, I spent a few days last winter with a guy who works with Elon Musk and insists they're going to start terraforming Mars on the sly, essentially to make it the coolest gated community ever. He was amazed I had an issue with that, even when he opened with, "We'll scoop up the native life and put it in a jar somewhere."
So, any radio amongst your esoterica? I was just listening to the copy of "Pebble in the Sky" I got from you. Only one day off the original air date!
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Post by Crowfan on Jun 19, 2013 6:24:20 GMT -5
Oooohhh!!! Shiny new blog. Way cool!!!
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Post by Triple_sSs on Jun 19, 2013 13:58:02 GMT -5
I'm gonna jump on the new blog while drinking a carton of grape juice! Wheeeeee!
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Post by afriendlychicken on Jun 19, 2013 16:52:15 GMT -5
Anyone see my carton of grape juice? Everyone is welcome here, except for those who want a gated community on Mars. You've got to be kidding me. When I'm living in the dome near Clavius crater I'm going to send them a very rude letter. Ganymede on the other hand would make a great gated community! Ijon the Asano: I like that radio idea. I never thought about sharing my old-time radio listening habits. "Is that you Mr. Benny?"
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Post by Ijon the Asano on Jun 19, 2013 16:58:31 GMT -5
Yeah, there's huge amounts of it on YouTube. I even found an adaptation of Bradbury's There Shall Come Soft Rains recently.
I have to admit that listening on the computer is problematic, though. Having a screen to look at and keys that call out to be pressed distract me from engaging with the programs as much as when sitting there with a CD.
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Post by spackle on Jun 19, 2013 22:00:52 GMT -5
Hey, it's a chicken blog! And it's esoteric! And stuff! Yay!
I remember the hype a while back about a so-called Super Mars... when it was passing closer to our fine planet than it had in a long time, and the circulating emails were saying it was going to appear as big as the full moon (which is of course impossible, or at least if it did happen it wouldn't just be a passing news item, it would be the end of us all). Ah, good times..... it's like people want reality to cross over into fiction. It's the zombie apocalypse!
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Post by afriendlychicken on Jun 19, 2013 22:37:01 GMT -5
"Dude, I remember that. It was like all...huge and stuff...and it went in front of, like , the moon. It was awesome!" Yeah, every time Mars has it's closest approach to us that story comes back. I wonder why people think that could really happen? Then again, I was watching "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader" once and a lady missed a simple, simple astronomy question. It was 'Which of these is not in the solar system: comets, the constellations or meteors?" The lady diagnosed the constellations as being in our solar system and my brain want to sponge. We are now being burned alive by all those wonderful suns. I don't even want to live in that ladies universe! Another meme I always get is "this months meteor shower is very rare and will have between 100-500 meteors an hour." Since there's a meteor shower happening on just about every night of the year I don't think they're rare, even this months one. And the 100-500 meteors can happen if the peak is near a new moon and if the shower becomes a meteor storm, which really can't be predicted all that well. I was lucky enough to view the 2001 Perseids shower that came very close to a meteor storm..."it was awesome!" And so the chicken becomes didactic. Cluck cluck...
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Post by spackle on Jun 19, 2013 23:16:38 GMT -5
You got your smilies back!
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Post by afriendlychicken on Jun 19, 2013 23:21:26 GMT -5
Yea! All those beautiful links and smileys came back today. I'm wondering if the board suffered some minor new growth seizure, or my troublesome broadband getting fixed cured the 'add attachment' only dis-order.
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Post by afriendlychicken on Jun 20, 2013 4:35:42 GMT -5
Okay, I've been sitting here watching the news with a book in my lap. This book I received as a Christmas gift from my brother is called Cataclysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9,500 B. C. I guess my brother bought it for me because it's categorized as astronomy/geology, but just seeing that title set my skepticism on high and I have not really wanted to touch it until now. The first thing I did was to see if I could find a science book review of it online...nothing. It's there on Amazon, of course, and the name of Velikovsky kept coming up. Oh-oh, this can't be good. I check the index in back and yep, Velikovsky is mentioned a number of times in it.
I then decide to check on the author who wrote the forward, one Rand Flem-Ath. Aha! An author of a book on...Atlantis! And it's superior civilization! Oh dear, my heart is sinking now. I then open the book to the forward and find out it's a postulation that the Vela Supernova from about 11,000-12,300 years ago cast out a planetary sized body that went through our solar system and caused the cataclysmic catastrophe described by the ancients in their myths and in the bible. Now, I certainly believe that large cataclysmic disasters can and do happen, but this idea is starting to sound really goofy.
I start browsing. The authors seem to believe that almost all the rocks in the world that show wear from glaciation during the last ice age were not caused by glaciation but by something larger, a world wide CATACLYSM!. Looking at all the references they have, and these type of books have a gajillion of them, most of them come from the 40's, 50's & 60's, when geology was a young, awkward science finding it's way. So almost all the references were largely out of date.
Ah, look at this nice graph. So, the planet that was destroyed between Mars and Jupiter is called Taimat. Amazing! And this planetary body of theirs called Phaeton/Marduk, because they use a whole lot of myths, hieroglyphics and ancient drawings along with the Noah flood story as proof, seems to have had played chicken with every body in the system. It's thrown Pluto away from Neptune and turned it on it's side, changed the equatorial alignment on Uranus, shook hands with Chiron (Hi, Glad to meet you) and threw it away from Saturn, skipped Jupiter; because you know how moody Jupiter can be; destroyed poor Taimat and captured Kingo, changed the orbit of Mars and may have helped it to grab two moons, came to Earth and detached Kingo, reversed the rotational spin of Venus and skipped Mercury to dash itself into the flames of the sun and be one with Helios like a good son should.
Now don't get me wrong, something obviously did happen on the Earth at about this time in history, take a few hundreds years here or there, but this book...yikes!
And yes, it was written by two Englishmen who have degrees in science. One is a geologist and one is a science historian specializing in paleogeography. I'm not sure what their intent was but this book, published in 1997, seems to have very little support except from the pseudo-science crowd. I almost couldn't bear to read the Amazon reviews.
Next stop Nibiru, the lonely planet!
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