SPRING begins at 5:37am EDT
From the Farmer's Almanac:
The current seasonal lengths for the Northern Hemisphere are (approximately):
- Summer — 93.641 days
- Autumn — 89.834 days
- Winter — 88.994 days
- Spring — 92.771 days
[This is because of the Earth's elliptical orbit.]
As you can see, the warm seasons, spring and summer, combined are 7.584 days longer than the colder seasons, fall and winter (good news for warm weather admirers!).
However, spring is currently being reduced by approximately one minute per year and winter by about one-half a minute per year. Summer is gaining the minute lost from spring, and autumn is gaining the half a minute lost from winter.
Winter is the shortest astronomical season, and with its seasonal duration continuing to decrease, it is expected to attain its minimum value — 88.71 days — by about the year 3500.
"Winter is the shortest astronomical season, and with its seasonal duration continuing to decrease, it is expected to attain its minimum value — 88.71 days — by about the year 3500."
ReplyDeleteI shall mark my calendar.
A very hopeful story:
ReplyDelete‘Our biggest challenge? Lack of imagination’: the scientists turning the Sinai desert green [Click]
Includes a link to stories of regreening including China’s Loess Plateau. [Click]
What a pretty photo!
ReplyDeleteMom had a good night last night. Dad is usually the first one down in the morning. He was today. He said she seemed normal and was fairly friendly when he greeted her. Phew! She had orange juice, though nothing to eat. Juice is better than nothing I suppose.
She's usually asleep again by the time I make it downstairs, lazy bones that I am. She's snoozing now.
Juice is for sure better than nothing. It has calories and vitamins. I'm currently having apple juice while I wait for Marcus to get the meal ready.
DeleteI love apple juice. It's what I usually have while waiting for breakfast.
DeleteI very much like cider and applesauce made of Gravenstein apples, which were a local speciality of an area near where I spent part of my young adulthood. Their flavor was said to be enhanced by the lack of artificial irrigation. Alas, the profit was considerably less than that offered by wine grapes.
DeleteMy preference is for White Grape Juice. It tastes like the Concord Grapes that grew in our yard when I was 3 years old and allowed to eat them as I wished. I dilute it by half with water because it has such a naturally high sugar content. In fact, I'm not drinking it at all at the moment as I'm off overt sugar.
Delete'Democracy Is Having a Hard Time Functioning': Biden Endorses Return to Talking Filibuster - Click
ReplyDeleteHere's Neil Sedaka's mini concert from Thursday. It's a particularly good one that folks here will appreciate, especially the second and third songs. The first one is lovely too, but my point in posting it is the second and third.
ReplyDeleteToday's Mini Concert: March 18
50 House Democrats Demand Biden Slash Pentagon Budget to Invest in Public Health, Common Good - Click
ReplyDeleteMedicare for All Would Have Prevented Hundreds of Thousands of Covid Deaths: New Report - Click
ReplyDelete<a href="https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/03/20/all-health-public-health</a> - Click
ReplyDeleteClickified:
DeleteAll Health Is Public Health [Click] “Our personal health cannot be separated from the health of our neighbors or our planet.”
Animal Testing Is Useless for Determining COVID Vaccine Effectiveness in Humans - Click
ReplyDeleteAnimal testing provides a great deal of information about safety and tells us whether it's likely to work at all. But it's no substitute for human testing.
DeleteCapitol attack: more than 60 Proud Boys used encrypted channel to plan, indictment says. [Click] The feds can decrypt encrypted messages? Why, whoever could have anticipated that?
ReplyDeleteNYT: Where Europe Went Wrong in Its Vaccine Rollout, and Why [Click]
ReplyDeleteFrom today's Quartz Daily Brief:
ReplyDeleteGood morning Quartz readers!
Earlier this week, the acting chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Allison Lee, gave a barnburner of a speech. The Donald Trump appointee laid out a sweeping agenda promising to make ESG (environmental, social, and governance) issues central to the SEC’s mission, and potentially part of almost every financial transaction.
“That supposed distinction—between what’s ‘good’ and what’s profitable, between what’s sustainable environmentally and what’s sustainable economically, between acting in pursuit of the public interest and acting to maximize the bottom line—is increasingly diminished,” Lee told the audience at the liberal think tank Center for American Progress. “[There’s] no historical precedent for the magnitude of the shift in investor focus that we’ve witnessed over the last decade”
If Lee’s vision succeeds—the SEC now opens a 90-day comment period—get ready for standardized reporting and mandatory climate disclosures, more risk reporting by private companies, detailed political spending disclosures related to ESG commitments, and a coordinated effort within the US government and internationally to integrate these initiatives into the world’s financial systems. It would mark a sharp acceleration of trends and a major break from the past: The SEC’s 2010 guidelines (pdf) on climate disclosure were loosely, if ever, followed.
Recasting ESG issues as a “core risk” to investors sets the stage to force companies to track, account, and disclose them. But of course, the private sector is already there. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, put Wall Street on notice last year, saying it plans to base all of its investment decisions on ESG criteria. “Climate risk is investment risk,” BlackRock chief Larry Fink wrote in his letter to CEOs. With more than half of all recent shareholder proposals focused on environmental and social issues, executives can’t escape it.
There are now two essential tracks: the central banks and the corporate sector. Both are moving relatively quickly in the same direction, toward a day when standardized ESG reporting will become mandatory and private-sector pressure will make ESG screens, especially climate change, part of every major investor’s financial calculus.
“This is no longer a shouting match between divestment campaigners and banks that don’t want to do anything,” says Ilmi Granoff, director of sustainable finance at the ClimateWorks Foundation. “It’s now the federal regulator conducting serious oversight of a serious set of risks.” —Michael J. Coren
Things go in cycles, and it looks like the Reaganomics cycle is almost over.
Egads!
DeleteOkay. This feels, is manifesting, something very like a miracle. A friend assisted/created, rainbow infused, pocket prayer induced, love filled, bloody dang miracle. Timeline: last September, my third go round with the piriformis syndrome arrived, with nobs on. For perspective, when your pharmacist, informed of the diagnosis, mentions how awful, how much pain, you know you are in some deep doo doo. Lidocaine in all delivery forms, roll on, ointment, cream is assembled. OTC painkillers, sorted to the most effective, ritualized by memorized max daily doses, time between taking. Single exercise that works conducted religiously. Others experimented with, discarded. Life for six months becomes one thing--pain avoidance. Your history with this is surpassed. Previous two were about a month. Seven years between.
ReplyDeleteThe political side of pain management in a rural setting manifests. The preznit appoints a new post master to destroy the mail delivery system, so he can claim vote fraud when he loses. Destruction works so well that your pharmacy refuses to mail your prescriptions. What used to be a two day in and out, becomes a week or more, and dependent on the schedule of a blessed, but busy, neighbor.
Nevertheless, at about the six month mark, it's working, pain is abating, or controlled. The end feels in sight. Hope reigns on the horizon. Joy becomes a sensation that can be contemplated. And. BADDABING, it's back, day one enhanced by several orders of magnitude of miserable. Sleep becomes a memory. Even with the newly learned ability to sleep sitting up, am managing about an hour a night. On the new day four, legs begin to swell. Turns out that if your feet are on the ground for four days, you get airplane legs. Been managing ankle swelling for several months with the keto diet, and it's been working. Now it's not. Doc authorizes three days of double diuretic. Which dents it, but no more. Terror sets in with the enhanced pain and lack of sleep. Beginning to worry about hallucinations.
Unplanned miracle--clinic acquires a delivery of J&J vaccine, and shots begin for their homebound clients. Your NP actually *sees* the legs, is galvanized, and action level moves up exponentially. New prescription for prednisone, apt with physical therapist. I tell my prayer group (you all) what's happening, you respond with not only very effective prayer/etc, but your own battles with the devil. On the basis of which I acquire a heating pad and a hemp oil cream. ALL of which I used yesterday. TODAY: I went to bed. I lay down. Fell asleep. Woke up, eight hours later. THIS HAS *NOT* HAPPENED IN MORE THAN SIX AND A HALF MONTHS. If you cannot imagine what a bloody damn miracle that feels like, I'm very glad for you. For me? JOY UPON JOY UPON JOY.
So thank you, thank you, thank you for every thought, wish, suggestion, infusion of light and love, all of it.
Now, are you sure the hallucinations have not begun? [grin] I am sure the present state of affairs is in spite of anything I might have done rather than because of it; do not underestimate the power of your own determination. No matter what the cause, it is WONDERFUL. Sounds like it calls for an extra scoop of ice cream! Your NP should be pleased as punch.
Delete{(♥Puddle♥)}
DeleteGreat news! May it continue.
DeleteAbsolutely stellar, puddle! Cosmic! Energy lines aligned in the Universe. Rainbows abounding.
DeleteSleep the reality and Pain the memory! May it ever be so!!
🌈🤩🦋❤️👍
Not getting off that easy, Alan. I *trust* your soul. You are one of us who cares. Can't hide that. Your pocket prayers are way more powerful than you allow. ♥
DeleteWaPo: ‘It’s not a local issue anymore’: D.C. statehood moves from political fringe to the center of the national Democratic agenda [Click]
ReplyDeleteVTcases: 17,555-17,393 = 162
ReplyDelete2559 active cases
219 deaths(+2)
Recovered 14,777(84.2%)
Hospital:21(-1) ICU:5(0)
Tests 346,499 (+911)
Positivity Rate up to 1.4%
DeleteDeath Rate holding at 1.2%
Vaccine Efficacies Are Not Very Meaningful or Important [Click] How to understand the comparisons. Bottom Line: all of them will prevent serious illness or death.
ReplyDeleteThree medical specialties which need to know, or do in fact know more, than your average doc, are veterinarians, pharmacists, and physical therapists. When Josh left in 92, I’d been looking for and not five finding a job for two years looked into going back to school. Specifically, physical therapy. After significant research discovered they were not going to allow me to do that. I was fifty years late deciding. This is one where you need to know and start planning when you are in second grade. . . .
ReplyDeleteSo. Upshots of our appointment. Discussed why after six months of improvement it returned on that specific day. What happened? Yep, that was the weekend Cooter set up the new high def 24 inch monitor. No. It’s as low as it can be set. To see/read the upper four inches must turn up eyes. To read the top two, have to raise my chin. No. Then she paused and mimicked the motion exactly, and you could see her tracing the ripples mentally. Then nodded. Neck, shoulders, spine, hip. Since the right one was already compromised, then. . . .
Step two. Lie on back on bed, and she observes that my right leg is longer than my left.
See Outlander, episode where daughter has been kidnapped by pirate.
anisomelia
***Unequal leg length is where the legs are either different lengths or appear to be different lengths because of misalignment. The condition has been estimated to affect between 40% and 70% of the population, with at least 0.1% having a difference greater than 20 mm. ... the pelvis or upper leg, one leg or hip is held higher and tighter than the other ...***
GET THAT? the pelvis or upper leg, one leg or hip is held higher and tighter than the other
THAT is why they have to start in second grade.
She gave me three exercises. My old one, and two new, designed to realign my right hip and make it let go of my leg bone so as to stop stressing the dang piriformis muscle. Is I impressed? Damn betcha. With luck, sucka is never coming back, once done here.