Monthly Archives: March 2017

Cyclical Old Sol

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We all know about our sun’s eleven year cycle of spottiness, how it gets spottier and less spotty over an eleven year period. Well, not really an eleven year cycle. The cycle ranges between nine and twelve years, eleven being the average of nine and twelve, approximately. The actual average is ten and a half, so you could round it up to eleven or down to ten. I haven’t a clue why eleven is official. The sunspot cycle was discovered in 1843 by Samuel Heinrich Schwabe. It’s official name is therefore the Schwabe cycle.

I can’t figure out why no one talks about the sun’s other cycles. There’s at least four more.

There’s the Wolf-Gleissberg cycle of about eighty years. The number of sunspots in each eleven year cycle goes up and down in an eighty year cycle.

Then there’s the deVries-Suess cycle of about two hundred years. It is based on increasing and decreasing concentrations of carbon 14 in ice cores and tree rings. Carbon 14 is created from regular old carbon 10 when an atom of carbon 10 gets whacked by a cosmic ray. When the sunspot cycle cycles down really low, and there are very few sunspots, the sun’s magnetic field gets weaker and starts letting more cosmic rays hit the earth. Cosmic rays, by definition, come from the cosmos. You know, way out there somewheres.

The Bray-Hallstatt cycle is about 2,300 years long. It’s existence is inferred by not only carbon 14 measurements, but also by beryllium 10 measurements.

There is a proposed solar cycle that hasn’t been named yet. It’s around 6,000 years long.

So what’s it all mean, you may well ask? Well, when you take all these sunspot cycles, and the implied variations in the sun’s energy output, you get things like the Maunder minimum. What’s the Maunder minimum, you may well ask? It was the last time the cycles ganged up and sunspot activity nearly vanished for 70 years, from 1645 to 1715, about the coldest period in the Little Ice Age.

What’s the Little Ice Age, you might well ask? That’s for me to know and you to find out next week.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:

 

 

 

 

 

Get out Your Ice Skates ‘Cuz We’re in an Ice Age

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It might not look like it when you look out the window, but we’re in the middle of an ice age. Just because the upper half of North America isn’t covered by a mile and a half to two and a half miles of cruising glaciers doesn’t mean they won’t come back.

Our current ice age started about two and a half million years ago, give or take a couple three tens of millennia. The last glaciation started about a hundred and ten thousand years ago and ended about twelve thousand years ago. It hit a maximum of ice coverage of North America about twenty six thousand years ago. Glaciations last about a hundred thousand years and inter-glacial periods between ten thousand and fifty thousand years, depending. We’re past the ten thousand year mark. The ice sheets could start cruising back anytime now.

What does the timing of ice ages depend on, you might well ask? Depending, mainly, on where we are in a Milankovitch cycle. What the hell’s a Milankovitch cycle, you might well ask?

Ah, good old Mulutin Milankovitch, the well known Serbian geophysicist and astronomer. Back in the 1920’s, he took all the known data about the earth’s orbit, how it varies from nearly a circle to slightly elliptical, how that orbit also wobbles up and down like a spinning coin at the end of its spin, and the fact that, as the earth spins about its axis, that axis also wobbles about a bit. He took all that and figured out that, since all this affects how much sunlight hits the continents during the changing seasons, that the effect was that, when the axial tilt was steepest, and the earth’s orbit was most elliptical, we got colder. Earth is known to have had 5 serious ices ages in its four billion plus year history. A couple of them made earth resemble the ice planet Hoth, except for some areas around the equator. No fossil tauntauns have been discovered as of yet.

Milankovitch’s theory matched what was known about ice ages back in the 1920’s, more or less. These days it has been modified by throwing in continental drift, which was merely an unproven hypothesis back when he was hypothesizing away. Where the continents are affects ocean currents, which affects the distribution of heat around the planet, etc, etc, etc.

There’s a moving image for you: continents scooting around, the planet wobbling on its axis while whipping around the sun, orbit stretching back and forth while wobbling up and down. Throw in the fact that the whole solar system bobs up and down across our galaxy’s equator while orbiting around the galaxy. Makes you wonder why we aren’t all nauseated.

Maybe that’s why there are volcanoes. Our mother earth, good old Gaia, gets spin dizzy and just needs to barf occasionally.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:

‘Tis the Season to be Sneezin’

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I have a cold. A rather annoying cold. My wife gave it to me. She got it when she went to the doctor’s office. It’s been a week since it started on me. It’s the first I’ve had in several years, despite my wife trying to give me hers a couple of times a year.

Here’s where I do the required quote from Wikipedia:

“They usually resolve in seven to ten days, but some can last for up to three weeks. The average duration of cough(ing) is eighteen days and in some cases people develop a post-viral cough which can linger after the infection is gone.” I had to modify that quote a bit because the author apparently didn’t understand common English usage.

Great. They might as well have said,”You’ll feel like crap for a couple three weeks. Get used to it.”

The most annoying thing about a cold, to me anyways, is when you sneeze or cough and somebody says, “God bless you.”

If you believe that God will somehow cure someone because you declared that God should bless you, aren’t you trying to countermand God’s will? Didn’t God give that cold to that special someone to begin with? Isn’t everything God’s will? And which God? I find it difficult to believe that the presumed creator of the heavens, earth, and hell, well, hell, let’s throw in all the possible other universes and alternate timelines and sub-dimensions and all things quantum… where was I? Damn sneezing attack made me lose my train of thought. I edited it out of the audio. No need to splatter my audience with it. Bad enough it splooshed my monitor and keyboard.

Oh, yeah, God. That’s where I was. Okay, so if you insist that God cure someone’s cold, and you want God to then cure that cold, aren’t you, basically, trying to order God around? Sounds like you’re treading on dangerous grounds there, my friend. Time for some Our Fathers, Hail Marys, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishnas, and maybe an Om Nama Shivaya or two.

What if you’re a pantheist with a whole pantheon of gods? Which god, or goddess, is the god, or goddess, of the common cold? What do you offer that god, or goddess, as a sacrifice to bribe him, or her, into curing a cold? Burnt Kleenex? Light up a lamp filled with high octane, high alcohol content cough syrup? Gallons of orange juice spiked with vitamin C?

No best leave God, and/or Gods out if it.

You could say, like the Germans, “Gesundheit!”, which literally means, “Be in a state of wellness!”. But that’s essentially an order, and we all know what can happen when Germans start issuing orders.

Now, I’ve gotta go blow my nose and hawk up a lung.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:

Why We Don’t See the Squatch in Front of Our Nose or Ya Can’t See the Trees with All That Forest in the Way

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The Reverend Jeff suggested I do a quasi on why we can’t see things that are physically there, like, maybe, a Sasquatch hiding behind a bush that is too small for it to hide behind. I quote him, “How about a quasi on what the mind sees it doesn’t really see. It only sees what it wants to and why many Bigfoot go unnoticed as the brain can’t acknowledge what it sees.”

I Googled about for a good half an hour and found no evidence to support his theory, at least not in terms of actually not visually seeing an object because you don’t believe that type of object exists. Humans are pretty good at not recognizing social conditions they think don’t exist, as in, not recognizing that people born poor simply don’t have the same opportunities as people born middle class. But physical objects are not blocked by disbelief.

You might interpret something you see to be something else, like the mommy who sees her beautiful baby, while onlookers wonder where she got the ugly little ape from.

No, you don’t see the Squatch squatting behind the too small shrubbery for the same reason you got hit by a car while texting while crossing the street. Your attention was elsewhere.

Your attention is rather like your eyesight. The only thing in clear focus is in the central part of your total field of view. The stuff off to the side gets fuzzier and, when you get to the edges, it’s almost not visible.

Or think about hearing things. If you are watching TV, and the action has really got your attention, and your significant other is asking you to let the dog out, do hear them right away? Not until they yell at you and get right up in your face does your attention turn to what they are saying.

So, you’re strolling through the forest and it’s cold, or it’s hot, or the bugs are biting, or the trail is rough, or you’re listening for wood knocks and whoops, or prints, or oddly stacked broken branches, just when you pass that almost obvious Sasquatch. If it doesn’t jump up and go “Oogah-boogah”, you’ll probably just waltz right on by. You weren’t paying attention.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:

Valentine’s Day, Shmalentine’s Day

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February 14th is St. Valentine’s day. Exactly who was this bugger and why do we care?

Officially, his full moniker is St. Valentine of Terni. Officially, he was the bishop of said town, although some sources say he was also the bishop of Narnia. No kidding. Really. Narnia. It’s now the Italian city of Narni, but back in old Rome it was Narnia. Also, officially, he was buried at a cemetery on the Via Flaminia close to the Ponte Milvio to the north of Rome on the day he was martyred. But he didn’t stay there long. He got dug up by some of his disciples a day or two later and hauled back to Terni to be buried again, for awhile.

I say for awhile, because, as Wikipedia says:

“St. Valentine’s remains are also believed to be in Dublin. In 1836, some relics that were exhumed from the catacombs of Saint Hippolytus on the Via Tiburtina… were identified with St Valentine; placed in a casket, and transported in a procession to the high altar for a special Mass dedicated to young people and all those in love.

“Also in 1836, Fr. John Spratt, an Irish priest and famous preacher, was given many tokens of esteem following a sermon in Rome. One gift from Pope Gregory XVI were the remains of St. Valentine and “a small vessel tinged with his blood.” The Reliquary was placed in Whitefriar Street Church in Dublin, Ireland, and has remained there until this day. This was accompanied by a letter claiming the relics were those of St. Valentine.”

How he got from Terni to the catacombs in Rome is anybody’s guess, along with how anybody could tell the body was his. Maybe he was bitten by a zombie rat and became a zombie saint. Zombies have great strength. A zombie saint should have amazing holy powers.  Maybe he used his new zombie rat saint powers and tunneled, burrowed his way. All roads lead to Rome, as the saying goes.

He was supposedly beaten and beheaded on the 14th of February in the year 269CE, or maybe 270, or 273, opinions vary. The day remains consistent, despite the conflict of years; therefrom we get Valentine’s day.

I say supposedly beaten and beheaded because he is not in the earliest list of Roman martyrs, the Chronography of 354, and only pops up in the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, which was compiled between 460 and 544. He must have gotten on the list before the final version, because he got his official feast day declared in 496 by Pope Gelasius I, who included Valentine among all those “… whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God.” I take this to mean that Pope Gelasius I hadn’t a clue as to who Valentine was or why he was put in that list of martyrs. The feast date is our modern St. Valentine’s day, of course.

St. Valentine is the patron saint of epilepsy, fainting, plague, bee keepers, betrothed couples and other lovers, chocolatiers, and greeting card companies. I threw the last two in for obvious reasons.

Nobody associated him with the last three until Chaucer showed up and wrote his Parliament of Fools, written sometime in the 14th century.

Now here’s where I go quasi on the whole St. Valentine thing, the man, the day, the whole shebang.

No one knew he existed until that list from the late 5th century, around two hundred years after he became a wandering corpse.

The Roman church was big on absconding with pagan stuff and re-branding it. Christmas, Easter, plopping cathedrals down on old pagan temple sites, swiping pagan gods and renaming them as Christian saints and martyrs, the list is near endless.

The old Roman pagans had a holiday they celebrated on the ides of February, the 15th of February. It was the Lupercalia and it honored the goddess Februata Juno, one of the many goddesses of sex and fertility.

There’s your start of it all: goddesses, sex, and fertility. ‘Nuff said. I rest my case.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here: