From the Narrow Desert

In a comment posted on November 6, Debbie linked a video of a CBS news bulletin announcing the shooting of John F. Kennedy, followed by a coffee commercial.

Yesterday, I posted about how Google only returns a few hundred results for any search, even though it claims to have millions. In connection with that, I ended up watching a video called "Where Did the Rest of the Internet Go?" from a channel called Truthstream Media, by Aaron and Melissa Dykes.

This led me to check out other things on their channel, and today I began watching their 3-hour documentary "The Minds of Men."

The JFK/coffee clip came in the middle of footage of someone typing a letter dated June 25, 1964. I had a nagging feeling that June 25, or the number 625, had some synchronistic relevance, but so far I can't figure out what it might be. Searching my own blog for that number turns up only my mathematical posts (on beta diversity and figurate numbers), where it appears as just another number.

Now, having typed that, suddenly I know: June 25, 1964, was the date of a total lunar eclipse, or "blood moon." For my November 9 post "Once in a red moon," I had counted all the total lunar eclipses since June 1946, and while I can't consciously remember any of the eclipse dates I looked at, I suddenly feel absolutely certain that there was an eclipse on June 25, 1964. Well, let's check.

Well, how about that? It was a lunar eclipse, but a partial one -- so it wasn't on the list I looked at, which only listed total lunar eclipses. So how did I know about it?

But now I realize that I typed in the wrong year: 1945. and I know why: Earlier in the video, at the 0:29 mark, the year 1945 is displayed, as the date of the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco. I accidentally got the two dates mixed up. How weird that it still ended up being the date of a lunar eclipse!

So I put in the correct date, and -- lightning proceeds to strike twice in the same place:

I have no explanation for this. What are the chances that I would spontaneously remember the exact date of a lunar eclipse in 1964, then mistype the date into Google and have the mistyped date also be the date of a lunar eclipse?

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Incidentally, why did the number 1945 stick in my mind enough to make me google the wrong date? Because I had just listened to the Jay-Z track "Encore," where he says, "When I come back like Jordan, wearin' the 4-5, it ain't to play games witchoo"; elsewhere on the same track he raps "I came, I saw, I conquered," and just as I listened to that line a girl walked past wearing a black T-shirt with "Veni Vidi Vici" in white letters." Of course, 45 is also the number of Trump, who was born on a Blood Moon.

Actually, it wasn't the original "Encore"; it was the mashed-up-with-Linkin-Park version. When I'm in a certain frame of mind, I really dig this stuff.

Last night Jupiter was even closer to the Moon, and again an even cover of cirrostratus made them the only visible heavenly bodies. This time I saw the faintest halo imaginable -- certainly nothing I could pick up on my phone's camera -- but it was enormous. It looked to have about the same radius as a rainbow, which would be 42 degrees. Actually, it must have been 46, since 46-degree halos are a recognized phenomenon. 

According to Wikipedia, 22-degree halos occur around either the Sun or the Moon and are quite common. The article on 46-degree halos says they are rare and only mentions them occurring around the Sun -- so I guess 46-degree lunar halos must be quite rare indeed. Certainly I had never seen one before.

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That night, I dreamed that the appearance of the sky had suddenly and permanently changed. There was a rainbow in the sky now all the time, even at night, but it was not really arc-shaped, nor was it a smooth continuum of hues. It had more the shape and texture of a rainbow-colored spectrogram of human speech, made up of many lines of bright color separated by dark spaces.

I was the only one who was not surprised by this change. I told a few people, "I read a book that said this was going to happen. The author predicted it years ago and said that it would be a sign of the Second Coming. Later scientists will discover that it's caused by the fact that there are now two Suns, a red one and a green one, though we can only ever see one of them at a time and it always looks white."

It wasn't long before the entire world had discovered the book I mentioned, and it was all over TV and the Internet. It had a plain yellow-beige cover, with the title and author's name printed in black and a very simple rosette design, also black, between the two. The name and title were not well-defined in the dream, but it was clear that the author was a French Catholic philosopher -- not Jacques Maritain, but someone of that general breed. The title, which was English (presumably a translation), included the word Rosary, and one of the things the book implied was that people praying the Rosary would be a contributing factor in causing this pre-apocalyptic transformation of the sky.

I was standing outside with a few family members, looking at the new sky. Someone pointed out to the horizon, where an enormous dark figure was looming, and said, "Look at that! Isn't that -- Godzilla?" It wasn't Godzilla exactly -- more mammal-like or even Permian-looking, I think, with a face vaguely reminiscent of Dimetrodon -- but it was a gigantic monster of that general type. "Yes," I said, "the author predicted that as well."

Earlier today I posted about meteorites at The Magician’s Table.

A few hours later, a student happened to ask me how to say “shooting star” in Chinese.

Then, at about half past midnight, I stepped outside for a few minutes and saw an extremely large meteor streak by overhead. It was a good six or seven arcminutes across at the wide end, and the strangest thing was that the path it traced was not a straight line but a squiggle, almost as if it were swimming like a fish rather than falling. I’m pretty sure it’s physically impossible for a meteor to do that, but that’s what I very clearly saw. I remember some years ago reading a description of a comet with its tail “luffing like a sail in the wind” and thinking that was completely ridiculous, but it would be an excellent way of describing what this meteor was doing. No idea what to make of it, and the timing only adds to the weirdness.

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Update: I've found the luffing comet reference. It's from The Secret School by Whitley Strieber, p. 100.

A little boy is taken out of his life and made to confront a strange machine. Maybe he resists, maybe he even screams, but he looks in it, he cannot resist, first once and then many times.

He sees a glowing mass of material, pure white. Above it there is a comet, and the comet is moving. I recall the tail, which was very different from that of an ordinary comet. You could see its movement, you could see it luffing like a winded sail.

I've seen comets -- Halley's in 1986 and Hale-Bopp in 1997 -- and they don't do that. Strieber says as much when he says the luffing tail was "very different from that of an ordinary comet." Meteors don't do it, either. Strieber saw this luffing comet while wearing a VR helmet -- it wasn't real -- but I saw my squiggly meteor with my own eyes in a perfectly normal state of consciousness. It was in every other way an ordinary meteor; nothing even remotely UFO-like about it,

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Update 2: Apparently meteors do sometimes squiggle. This article quotes a planetarium director saying, "I’ve seen some fireballs corkscrew before during some meteor showers." This thread also addresses the question.

I saw a zig zag meteorite in Bukuru, Northern Nigeria, when I was about 13 in 1959. That started from small to increasing swings, then went out near the horizon. For many years I puzzled about this, but rarely mentioned it, because no one would believe it. Years later I attended an astronomy lecture at college in London. I cornered the astronomer with this sighting and he said we know what this is. A flat dish shaped meteorite enters the atmosphere shallowly & flies in a circular motion that gets wider as it approaches the earth then extinguishes. Seeing this from the horizon, it appears to zigzag down. He told me that I was very very lucky to witness this meteor show, and I am glad that others have seen it too.

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Update 3: When I was searching for Strieber's luffing comment reference, I found this just three pages later, describing a childhood phobia: "Many a night, my mother would carry me naked to the bathroom mirror to prove to me that I was not covered with scorpions."

Just after reading that, I checked the Secret Sun blog, and found this in one of Knowles's goofy everything-is-a-star-map posts.

In my Magician's Table post, I had referred to "the vision-inducing meteorite which served as Jacob's pillow."

The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

As everyone knows, the Moon is sometimes visible during the day, while the Sun is also in the sky. Suppose you look up sometime during the day and see a half-moon in the sky. The Sun is also in the sky, separated from the Moon by 45 degrees of arc. What can you conclude from this?

In the above diagram, the vertical ray (using that word in the geometric, not the optical, sense) represents all possible locations of the Moon. (Since we are supposing we do not know how far the Moon is from the Earth, it could in principle be at any point along the ray.) The diagonal ray represents all possible locations of the Sun when it appears from Earth to be 45 degrees distant from the Moon. The horizontal ray extending out from the Moon represents all possible locations of the Sun which would cause a half-moon to be visible from Earth. Therefore, if you see a half-moon 45 degrees from the Sun, you can conclude that the Sun is 1.414 (the square root of two) times as far from the Earth as the Moon is -- and that therefore everything you know about astronomy is wrong, since astronomers tells us the Sun is approximately 395.5 times as far from Earth as the Moon is.

If that figure is correct, what should be the angular distance between the Sun and a half-moon? Well, it must be less than 90 degrees, since the red ray (representing the Sun at 90 degrees from the Moon) is parallel to, and thus never intersects, the half-moon ray. But, since 395.5 is a very large number, it must be only a little less than 90 degrees. I've forgotten all my trigonometry, so I'll leave the exact figure as an exercise for the reader.

Update: I've just realized the flaw in this reasoning -- that it applies only when the Moon is directly overhead. The angular elevation of the Moon must be included in the equation, not only its angular distance from the Sun.

Update 2: No, on second thought, I think I was right the first time.

From a Physics Today article by Tom Stockman, Gabriel Monroe, and Samuel Cordner, published on March 12, 2019:

As best we can tell, no one has come up with a concept like PCM [point-circle method] to compare orbits. With the right assumptions, PCM could possibly be used to get a quick estimate of the average distance between any set of orbiting bodies. Perhaps it can be useful for quickly estimating satellite communication relays, for which signal strength falls off with the square of distance. In any case, at least we know now that Venus is not our closest neighbor—and that Mercury is everybody’s.

It's hard to believe that three professional researchers somehow missed out From the Narrow Desert in their literature review, but I'm claiming priority on this. I independently used the same method in my post "The geocentric order of the planets," published November 9, 2018. At the time I had no idea that I was doing anything other than slapping together a kludge to avoid having to do any math above my pay grade, but apparently I was making an Original Contribution to Physics.

Thanks to reader Kevin McCall for bringing the Physics Today article to my attention.

An asteroid hitting Jupiter

The planet is shielded from strikes from cosmic debris by the gravity fields of the gas giants in the outer solar system and by the closeness of the moon. Jupiter and Saturn will take the first hits and if anything gets closer, the moon will work as a shield. The result of this is that large asteroid strikes are much rarer on Earth than they are on the other planets. Earth isn't pockmarked with craters because the moon is.

The researchers found that, with giant planets around, the remaining small solar system bodies were either ejected out of the system more quickly — because of the angular momentum the gas giants add to the system, Barclay said — or became a part of the existing planets sooner.

Without the influence of giant planets, the fragments formed a large, dangerous cloud orbiting close within the system that took much longer to disperse.

"If you have giant planets, your last giant impact happens somewhere between 10 and 100 million years [after planet formation], which is pretty fine — it's like what happened on Earth," Barclay said. "If you don't have giant planets, the last giant impact can happen hundreds [of millions] to billions of years in. This really is a risk to habitability."