Last Night’s Moon This Morning
18 Friday Oct 2024
Tag Archives: morning
The Obliquity of the Ecliptic in the Morning in Amsterdam
12 Monday Dec 2022
Posted in 2022, Amsterdam, self portrait
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23, Amsterdam, angle, angled, astronomy, autumn, dad, december, degrees, ecliptic, geology, herfst, horned, memory, morning, noon, obliquity, roadrunner, roadrunners, shadow, shadows, snake, toads, UTSA
It was Gattis’ British television series Sherlock with Cumberbatch and Freeman that reawakened the tongues of English speakers to the lovely swinging ringlets of the phrase, “the obliquity of the ecliptic.” Once you know, you know. It’s the phrase we use to describe the 23 degree tilt of our earth on its axis with respect to the sun. I noticed its effect today in Amsterdam.
I learned about the obliquity of the ecliptic, and about the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, when I was around twelve years old, first from my Dad and then in an astronomy class I took at the University of Texas at San Antonio, then a small, new, commuter college where my father was the Director of the Division of Earth and Physical Sciences.
I was just a kid in middle school, but Dad spoke with the professors and they allowed me to audit an astronomy class and a geology class during my summer vacation. I wasn’t taking exams or being graded like the regular students of these summer courses, who were ten years older than me, but Dad made me report the exams and class work back to him and we worked on them together, sometimes.
I’d go to campus with Dad in the morning and spend the day there, taking my two classes and hanging around the new campus that was hardly built. Dad would be in the lab and I would be running around playing. I played basketball in the gym or I’d hunt for caves in the undeveloped limestone bedrock. In the 1970’s, the place was crawling with horned toads and lizards and snakes – a veritable smörgåsbord for the school’s mascot, the roadrunners.
Most of these species, including the roadrunner, have been made locally extinct in the area by the development of the 30,000-student, fulltime University that UTSA has become. Things change. Even the obliquity of the ecliptic, which is now about 23.4° but currently decreasing 0.013 degrees (or 47 arcseconds) every hundred years.
I didn’t realize how precious that time was to me, and the nature lover I became, until just now, thinking about that summer and the Astronomy class where I learned about the tilt of the earth – which I observed today at noon in Amsterdam in the long-shadowed, exaggerated evidence of the obliquity of the ecliptic:
The Night Schwarzenegger Won
07 Tuesday Oct 2003
Posted in audio, journalism, Los Angeles, protest, public letters, reviews, social media
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I anchored news coverage for KPFK radio in Los Angeles during Governor Davis’s Recall to perhaps a quarter million listeners. Backed by solid investigative reporting and original interviews with numerous sources, my staff and I wrote what I would deliver after Schwarzenegger declared victory.
I co-authored and authorized the use of these words to introduce the new Governor. Much thought and weeks of effort went into it – listen:
I was initially suspended for my actions, but listeners protected me and I defended myself with sources and original reporting we had done into Schwarzenegger’s background for each of the adjectives we used to describe the new Governor.
In the end the phrase “sexual predator” was the issue. But I had, myself personally interviewed women for our news program who claimed it. Several others on our staff had interviewed other women complaining of it as well.
These were women who had been unheard by the State, likely because of Schwarzenegger’s power. We were the only news outlet affording them airtime. I made that call. As a journalist, I felt obliged.
I don’t know if anyone else described it like this on mass media, but I doubt it. Now years later, Arnold’s sexual problems have been revealed publicly and his marriage dissolved from it. We were right. We said it … and few people heard.
and just a few minutes later, I was asked to describe and explain it to Londoners, who were just waking up to the fact that the movie actor Arnold Schwarzenegger had just won the Governorship of California.
MTK on British morning drive time radio.
That was 12 years ago, I was 33 and a news director with the backing of a huge progressive community in Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network – we were a voice for that community. That was the last of many lonely moments in that year for myself and our listeners.
An Austrian, Arnold Schwarzenegger, stole the Governorship of California because Democrats couldn’t effectively prevent a Republican-forced Recall Election of Governor Gray Davis, nor, once the Recall was in effect, competently back the supremely qualified Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante to victory (many in the State claimed it was because he was a Latino. ouch … 2003.)
MTK The Writist 