Shallow Thoughts : : Jun

Bear in White Rock!

Bears have been in our local news lately -- along with anti-bear measures.

A few weeks ago, the County Council voted to invest a sizable chunk of money in bear-proof garbage roll carts for every home in the county.

While this is probably a good idea up in Los Alamos, down here in White Rock it's silly. We almost never see bears here. But apparently people on the hill don't believe that, or are convinced that if Los Alamos residents all have secure roll carts, the bears will migrate down the hill to White Rock and start becoming a nuisance here. (Really! -- that was the argument for buying roll carts for White Rock too.)

Anyway, I've scoffed at this ... until yesterday. I was at Overlook Park at the weekly R/C flying get-together, and as I was packing up to leave, carrying planes back to the car, I saw a bear! It was sitting on the fence at the Collection Center (that's the current euphemism for what they used to call a dump), just chilling out. Didn't seem scared of me at all.

I was able to snap a quick photo and still escape with my life. Whew.

Maybe we do need those roll carts.

Fiddling with JavaScript Astronomy: ThreeWorlds

I have another PEEC Planetarium talk coming up in a few weeks, a talk on the summer solstice co-presenting with Chick Keller on Fri, Jun 18 at 7pm MDT.

I'm letting Chick do most of the talking about archaeoastronomy since he knows a lot more about it than I do, while I'll be talking about the celestial dynamics -- what is a solstice, what is the sun doing in our sky and why would you care, and some weirdnesses relating to sunrise and sunset times and the length of the day. And of course I'll be talking about the analemma, because just try to stop me talking about analemmas whenever the topic of the sun's motion comes up.

But besides the analemma, I need a lot of graphics of the earth showing the terminator, the dividing line between day and night.

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