MARS!

Starting tonight the planet Mars comes closest to Earth in recorded history!

The next time this event will occur will be in the year 2287.

This last time Mars was this close is estimated at 5,000 and 60,000 years ago. The large range of this estimate is due to perturbations in Mars’ orbit the planet Jupiter may have caused in the past.

This closeness event begins tonight and will last for the remainder of the month. The closest together Mars and Earth will be is 34,649,589 miles.

Next to the Moon, Mars will be the brightest object in the sky.

BIRDING THE BASIN

Late Friday afternoon Nancy and I birded Township Road, some ten miles south of us. We were responding to a report of Swainson’s hawk sightings that had been posted on our local bird alert web site.

The Swainson’s migrate into the Basin area this time of year from Argentina. They are here only a few months and then return on their southward migration again.

The big deal here about them is that they have just begun to show up again after several years of absense. The cause of their disappearance turned out to be that they were being inadvertently poisoned by farmers in Argentina. About ten years ago, in the region the Swainson’s migrate to, the farms began suffering from Grasshopper plagues. The farmers started trying to control them with DDT. The Swainson’s were eating the grasshoppers and dieing there, thus not returning to the U.S. on their migration. After a couple of years of the Swainson’s failure to return, some U.S. naturalists traveled down to Argentina to access the problem. Upon discovering the use of the DDT a substitute pesticide, that was not harmful to the Swainson’s, was proposed by the U.S. naturalists and implemented by the Argentine farmers. The Swainson’s stopped dieing; the numbers of them increased back to close to normal, and now for the past couple of years they have been showing up again, in the Basin, in noticeable numbers.

This was the best birding excursion Nancy and I have had for a couple of months. The birding here in the Basin is great all year around, but it’s at its slowest in the summer. I think were now entering the transition back toward peak season.

The reports were accurate. We spotted at least twenty Swainson’s along, the approximate ten mile run of, Township Road. Additionally, we spotted at least fifty Great Egrets, six Great Blue Herons, and a pair of hunting Merlins.
The Merlins: what a treat that was! We stopped the car to watch them just a couple of yards from a large fence post from which they were feeding on their prey. They were feeding on thousands of large flying insects that resembled giant moths. They were chasing and capturing them in mid flight. We were so close that they appeared, in our binoculars, to be at arms length away. It is not often that we get to witness a site as awesome as this one.

BOOK REVIEW:

THE LIFE OF PI

A delightful novel written by, Yann Martel.

This is an adventure story, circa 1977, of a teen aged Indian boy shipwrecked in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, for 292 days, whilst in rout to Canada from India with his family.

The young boy, Pi Patel, finds himself the sole human survivor in a twenty two foot life boat, along with a Zebra, Hyena, Orangutan, Rat, and an adult Bengal tiger.

Within the first day of the ordeal the Hyena kills the Rat, the Zebra, and the Orangutan; then annoys the Tiger and gets eaten itself. Pi manages to escape the wrath of the Hyena and the Tiger by spending the first couple of days astraddle of an oar cantilevered out over the water from the gunnels of the life boat.

Early on in the ordeal, Pi manages to establish himself as the Alpha between himself and the Tiger, as they establish their respective territorial domains within the life boat.

Throughout their survival ordeal, Pi cares for the welfare of both himself and the Tiger, to assure his own survival from the Tiger’s hunger.

The ingenuity and intelligence of Pi is remarkable, his basic survival instinct, his religious faith, and acute knowledge of animal behavior brings him through the ordeal.

I’ll not reveal any more details so as not to spoil it for anyone wishing to give it a read. I rate this book as a, double thumbs up.

METEOROID HITS THE MOON

"On May 2, 2006, a meteoroid hit the Moon's Sea of Clouds (Mare Nubium) with 17 billion joules of kinetic energy—that's about the same as 4 tons of TNT,"

Check this out; NASA actually got a video of a meteoroid striking the Moon.

Go to: http://science.nasa.gov (look in the right hand column of the page and then click on, Meteoroid…)

TWiT TV

Following up on yesterday’s posting: from skepticality, I found another cool podcast site, TWiT.

TWiT is the podcast version of the Cable Television program, Tech TV. So if you enjoyed Tech TV, as I did, and were disappointed over losing it, like I was, here it is in another incarnation. I was surprised, and happy, to find that Leo Laporte is the founder of TWiT, and a regular content contributor.

You can learn all about Tech TV’s resurrection on the web site: www.twit.tv, in the “About Us’ section.

SKEPTICALITY

Hi all, sorry to not have posted sooner, but I have been lazy and uninspired.

Finally, I got some inspiration from the new web site I just discovered: skepticality; actually, it’s a podcast site. Unfortunately, it did nothing for my laziness.

The hosts of Skepticality, Derek and Swoopy, post/podcast biweekly opining on a variety of interesting scientific and philosophic topics, all of which they are skeptical of.

They are teaming up, as of today, with the Skeptic Society to podcast their, “eskeptic newsletter”.

It’s a cool site; I recommend perusing it at: www.skepticality.com.