Global Wobbling?

As if global warming by greenhouse gases (human or volcanic) isn't enough, throw in some not-quite-periodic ice ages, a slightly variable sun, and now ... global wobbling. You just can't trust the climate anymore.

The Earth doesn't spin with perfect precision. The pole is known to wobble in a variety of ways. Most of these changes are a few meters or less, but we now have the tools to measure them precisely. As for the exact cause, well ...

A Mystery Of Earth's Wobble Solved: It's The Ocean (LINK - ScienceDaily, 18 Jul 2000)

Changes In The Earth's Rotation Are In The Wind (LINK - ScienceDaily, 6 Mar 2003)

To be fair, the first article says it's 2/3 ocean and 1/3 atmosphere, and is talking specifically about the Chandler wobble which has a period of 433 days. The second is not clear which wobble it's talking about. Here's a fascinating piece ... the Chandler wobble and an annual wobble cancel out every 6.4 years, allowing a team to track and even smaller wobble at the centimeter scale:

Tracking Earth's Wobbles Down To The Size Of A Cell Phone (LINK - ScienceDaily, 26 Jun 2006)

Some scientists are seriously studying whether there is a larger wobble on a scale of hundreds of miles (a few degrees), which might affect the global climate.

Study Links Extinction Cycles to Changes in Earth’s Orbit and Tilt (LINK - NYTimes, 12 Oct 2006)

And here's a parody that's good for a grin:

Global Wobbling: An Inconvenient Truth (LINK - ConservativeVoice, 15 Oct 2006)

Onwards & outwards

This blog was going in a few directions, and while I still like the title, I have spun off a few more focused projects.

One is The Unlikely Times -- "A journal of the hard-to-believe and the not quite believable."

Another is Dark Windows -- an email newsletter of dark fiction, poetry and odd clips from old factual and fictional sources. Plus some dreams, to completely muddy the line between reality and the imagination.

I'm working on another project, dealing with short clips on the history of words. But, ssh ... it's secret.

This blog, as it goes forward, will focus on unusual science news. Think of it as things that sound like sci-fi but are actually happening. It's not the future, it's the UnFuture.

Enjoy.

decoding Cinnamon the Cat

A recent article on ScienceNow says that the cat genome has been about 80% deciphered. Interesting result: cats are more closely related to humans than any of our other common pets are (dogs, hamsters, etc).

Of course, "cat people" would not be surprised by this. Cats are like weird little children, with or without a genetic reason. Of course, I have one looking over my shoulder (sleeping on the chair behind me with one eye open) and one ready to claw my leg (wants to walk back & forth in front of my face as I try to type), so I have to say nice things about them, or else.

Funny how we think we domesticated all our pets and livestock, when they more likely domesticated themselves around us. We act like we're in control -- we train them and give the orders, right? In fact, they quietly train us to put up with their quirks and schedules and needs along the way. And this is never more obvious than with cats.

Of our three cats, one stares right into my eyes when I talk to her, like she's looking for answers. Oddly, wearing sunglasses doesn't seem to bother her one bit. She still looks right into my eyes.

My favorite cat mystery is why they seem completely oblivious to reflections -- shouldn't seeing themselves in a mirror be completely bizarre? Combine this with their notorious curiosity, and I expect SOME kind of reaction. I recall that as kittens they paid were startled a bit by seeing motion in mirrors, but now they can somehow be obsessed with the slightest scrap of string and ignore their own image completely. I'm guessing that reflections have no scent component, but still ...

... random reflections on cats.

link to the article:
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/1031/2

jinxed the spider, try this comet instead

Well, 2 days after I said the spider was doing fine, it vanished completely. Probably starved. I sifted through the leaves beneath its lair, hoping for a closer look (I do have a cheap USB microscope), but it was gone.

On the fun side, there's a bright comet in Perseus now. About 2 weeks ago it was a faint 17th-magnitude thing, far off and easily forgotten. But then it got a million times brighter for no obvious reason, now it's easy to spot, even without binoculars. Just look for the fuzzy thing near Alpha Persei that doesn't belong there. Because it's fairly distant, it's not moving much from night to night. It's probably going to fade away soon, so check it out while you can.

Here's a finder chart & more info:
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/home/10862521.html

freaky spider for Halloween

We got smoked out by the firestorm, and evacuated for a day. But rather than focus on that, here's a bizarre naturalist note:

We have a big spider living in a classic circular web just outside my office window. It only eats bees, sometimes two a day. When it doesn't catch anything, its abdomen shrinks back down to where it looks like a huge tick. After eating a few bees, it balloons up again. Because of the smoke, the bees wouldn't come out, and the spider's web was destroyed by wind. It clung to one of our hanging baskets for a few days to weather out the storm, giving me a chance to finally get a good photo of its top side (which was previously facing the wall):



Oddly, its underside is black with yellow streaks:


After the fire, it had shrunk down to almost nothing and flapped around listlessly for a day or two, and I thought it had starved. But now it seems okay again -- the bees have come out and it caught one already.

Also strange: there were two different types of smaller spiders (both with the same weird habit of holding their legs together in pairs) which tried to mate with it about a month ago, but it hasn't had any eggs that we know of. One photo shows both intruders in the web, plus a closeup of each one. The big female let the tiny spider stay close to her for about two days (obviously a male), but the larger intruder was kept away (and a bit of a mystery).







According to a local spider collector, it's a Mexican orb weaver. Leg spread about 2 inches. Really a spectacular critter. We're glad she survived the fires. Makes me wonder about all the other creatures, great and small, that were wiped out.

Happy Halloween!

finding a plane in a haystack

Here's a "real life sci-fi" story worth sharing. You might have heard on the news that Steve Fossett (aviator, adventurer) is missing. His plane went down somewhere near Powell Canyon, Nevada and hasn't be found, after over a week of searching.

Well, you can actually help look for him online. A fresh satellite image of the area is available, and they set up a very easy-to-use site on Amazon where you can scan little areas of the image, looking for the plane.

Start here: http://www.stevefossett.com/

It's a fascinating demonstration of just how big the wilderness can be. Feel free to grab their Google Earth KML file of the area and zoom around. Millions of trees, thousands of ridges and hills, an endless stretch of wasteland.

And there was a weird estimate in a CNN article that there may be over 100 older crashed planes in this area, never found. So it's an area well worth exploring. We're used to being in safe homes and familiar streets -- but when a person gets lost the world is effectively infinite.

= scott

all paths diverge in the woods

If you noticed a gap in entries, it came from pondering things. One night I zoomed through and tried to update every site, and a few projects wove themselves together.

I launched an email newsletter called "Dark Windows." It is taking a book-length collection of dark poetry and stories and serializing it in 2,000-word chunks. With some extra features. You can find it here:
http://archives.zinester.com/38141

So, darker works and dreams will be moving over there. The new feature that entered the stream was a huge collection of quotes from old books, what I call "odd clips". There are so many great lines and strange moments and arguments, both silly and strange, scattered through a million volumes ... I've had fun finding them, and they add some spice and humor to these "streams of thought" of mine. Things to ponder. Fun to guess where they came from before checking the credits. Anyway, odd clips are going to start appearing, here, there and everywhere.

"Unfuture Chronicle" will continue as the venue for my sci-fi and futuristic works and ponderings.

Along the way, I have been forced to look at how the various genres interact and how I fit into them, while reading more genre history and classic works. Some fascinating stuff. My new, streamlined rationale is "order vs chaos." The darker genres are rooted in the chaos and unknowns of the world, mostly channeled from the distant past. Sci-fi and futurism are rooted in the order and knowns of the world, and look toward the future. The present day is caught in the middle, and that's why it makes no sense at all.

And now, a quick wrap up of my recent creative sales. Thanks for visiting.

=====> NEW SALES:

"swirling eyes" (poem) accepted at Not One of Us (Jan 08)

"what the spirits taught us" (poem) accepted at Tales of the Talisman (Jun 08)


=====> COMING SOON:

"Quake Man" (flash fiction) accepted at Swimming Kangaroo Press

"At Ripley's" (poem: ode to the Ripley's Museum) accepted for Helix #6.

"Unusual Vampire Lore" (article) accepted at Hungur.

"Blue sky tentacles" (cover art) accepted by Beyond Centauri.

Poems accepted by Expressions newsletter, Sword Review, and the Verb.

"Harrod Runs his Mouth" (flash fiction) in Burst magazine.

A gruesome illustration has been accepted for the Hungur 2 anthology.

"Jane Doe Discovered" (Poetry chapbook) coming in late 2007 from SamsDotPublishing.com