







Infotainment - Racine, Wisconsin, USA








On Valentine's Day, we will have a nice grouping in the west RIGHT after sunset. It will be challenging to see since the sky will still be brightly lit, but worth giving it a try if you have a clear western horizon. We will have a close grouping of Venus (Godess of love and beauty...appropriate for the day), Jupiter and a very slender crescent Moon. A chart is shown below.

Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through its greatest internal crisis, the American Civil War, preserving the Union and ending slavery. Before his election in 1860 as the first Republican president, Lincoln had been a country lawyer, an Illinois state legislator, a member of the United States House of Representatives, and twice an unsuccessful candidate for election to the U.S. Senate. As an outspoken opponent of the expansion of slavery in the United States,[1][2] Lincoln won the Republican Party nomination in 1860 and was elected president later that year. His tenure in office was occupied primarily with the defeat of the secessionist Confederate States of America in the American Civil War. He introduced measures that resulted in the abolition of slavery, issuing his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and promoting the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Six days after the large-scale surrender of Confederate forces under General Robert E. Lee, Lincoln became the first American president to be assassinated.


I will let you in on a dirty little secret: I played football in high school. In our games, the coin flip took place about 45 minutes or so before kickoff. Now right before kickoff, the refs and team captains would go to the center of the field, the ref would throw a coin up in the air, look at it and everyone would pretend that was the real coin flip. Yep, it was all theater. I don't know if they still do it this way, but I participated in that farce many years ago.
Our coin was just a quarter or something and didn't fly on a space shuttle!
My hat off to the investigators from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
I took the iChill challenge last night and these are my findings:








Now here's my favorite part...the solid diamond floated! Usually, solids are more dense the the liquid form of a substance. Water is a notable exception (ice floats because it is less dense). Turns out diamonds have the same property. It makes sense when I thought about it...the crystal structure of diamond holds the carbon atoms fairly far apart, so the density is lower. The trick is it is hard to liquify carbon and measure its properties which they finally did.
This experiment simulated the conditions deep under the cloud tops of Uranus and Neptune. The idea put forth in this paper is that there is a possibility that there is liquid carbon which diamond "icebergs" floating in it. Now that is hard to imagine...I am still trying to wrap my head around that one!
This is all very preliminary and a lot more work needs to be done. This work is a nice example of how we can study distant planets by combining computer simulations and laboratory experiments here on Earth...and I so going to use diamond as another example of a substance that has a lower density in its solid state.
Aren't you glad I didn't use the name of the "other" planet in this blog title?








Everyone loves a good sunset. Go to a west facing beach and you will see lots of people out there watching sunset (or better yet, try Duval Street on Key West!) Most people watch sunset (sometimes seeing green flash) and then go to dinner or something.
Next time you watch a sunset, turn around after the sunsets and look east. You can sometimes see another interesting phenomena: the Earth's shadow rising! I was doing a star party a couple of weeks ago and go this picture looking east towards Tucson.
This was taken with my cell phone camera (I left my good DLSR at home that night) so the picture isn't quite the quality I would like. Even with this picture, note the dividing line between the pinks and the nice deep blue. That is Earth's shadow! You can watch this line slowly rise in the sky as the Sun sinks lower below the horizon.
Another interesting thing to note is that I am actually not facing directly east, but somewhat north of east to get this picture. Since it is winter, the Sun is setting in the southwest, so I have to face somewhat northeast to get the best view of the rising shadow.
So next time you are out watching a sunset, turn around when the Sun is gone and watch the shadow rise!
"Madison — Assembly Speaker Mike Sheridan (D-Janesville) - who this fall softened his stance on capping interest rates on payday lenders - disclosed Monday he has recently dated a lobbyist for the industry.
and the winner is...↓