Tides Revisited

I plucked another Hugo off my shelf and found the following passage and I quote

 "He stood up from his desk and walked over to the sleekly streamlined, room-long tide-predicting machine. Inside the machine a wire ran through many movable precision pulleys, each pulley representing a factor influencing the tide at the Earth's hydrosphere, for which the machine was set; at the end of the wire a pen drew on a graph papered drum, a curve giving exact tides at that point hour by hour.

This is a reasonable description and Fritz Leiber must have seen a tide machine some where to be able to put this into his book. However in the next passage he starts giving credit to a German. Well I never!  Let's emphasize again the English invention of this machine particularly with Edward Roberts involvement.  There was a German machine listed in 1916 but the Roberts one was built in 1908 and had the largest number of factored component wheels at 40 where as the German one only had half that number at 20.  So There.

After traipsing the back blocks of Liverpool we uncovered the Tide Predictor 2013

Photo taken previously in 1999

I suspect that the machine was put back onto a different shelf after the Coast TV show visited Liverpool. Nicolas Crane has a lot more clout than us and had them get it off the shelf and put back together for a demonstration on that episode. In our case they unwrapped it so we could see it.

Solar Power

The SolarMan arrived at 7:00am. I didn't think he would but he lives round the corner and is doing our quick job on the way to his main job.  It was an exact like for like swap of the old for the new unit.  With some effort the new inverter was placed on the wall and connected up with no visible sign it had turned on.  After some fiddling he goes 'I wonder if it needs the sun!'  Derr it was still dark. About an hour later all seems to be working with readings up to 600 W and it is a completely cloudy day.  

Triple Moon

We had a good view of this and it makes me think what we could have had from our north facing new balcony.  We will be trying to marry a camera with a telescope on that balcony.  In the mean time I got some photos with the hand held.  We got the blood and the blue and a good one of the eclipse as it was passing across.

Eclipse that

Blood Moon

Planets Revisited

Got up at 5:00am this morning. Those Taylors have got a lot to answer! The planets are still in a line but stretched out from the horizon to overhead. I have fiddled the exposure time to 4 seconds and got some better shots. The Huddle telescope is on the horizon. The SkyView app labels most things in the night sky, very handy for stargazing.

SkyView App

Venus & Mercury

Sunrise

Astaxanthin

Red is meant to be a good colour when it comes to eating stuff.  I have been swallowing the daily Red Krill pill for years. My fingers are still pointing in the wrong directions so this pill has not been able to straighten the arthritis in them yet.  I can still remember things so maybe it is helping with the memory glands.  Salmon is good eating even red raw but I wonder if Fricassee of Flamingo has ever been tried.

Tasty Red Astaxanthin

 

Flamingos near La Grande Motte

Blood Moon

The travel digital camera does a good job in most situations. Sometimes you can't see the screen because of sun glare but that is not the case when pointing at an eclipse. I took this photo whilst dealing with easter eggs, daylight saving clock changes and interpreting the film Interstellar. Those time bending 5th dimension films always do my head in.

Followed by a Moon Shadow

Summer's End

I would rate the summer just gone as mild in terms of lack of really hot days. There may have been one day over 40 but overall no bushfire emergencies and maybe a couple of total fire bans.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/

This is a graph from NASA showing temperatures since they started recording them in 1880.  It throws a lot of doubt onto the whole global warming thing. If you can trust this graph there are 4 time frames of around 30 yar each. Two show temperature going down and two going up and no increase in temperature this century.  You would think the last 15 years would be the most accurately measured and no sign of global warming there.

Gondwana Tax

The Gondwana United Faction (GUF) have been stirring the cavemen again.  They've passed a motion (no shit) to start a tax collection to shore up the cracks that are appearing in the ground.  All the flint coins that have been collected are being thrown into the chasms opening up between the new continents.  The GUFers are urging the throwing of more money into the maw.  This will result in climate change if we don't fill the trench, they say! Our cold chunk will move north and we will be sitting on the beach in 10 million yar!  Can't be all bad I say. The GUFers are duffers.

Ratification

Lord Howe Island is having a ratification and I don't mean some form of officialdom saying the island is now legit, although this ratification has involved much planning and paperwork. It was 1918 when the SS Makambo ran aground at Ned's beach.  That was the day that rats made it onto Lord Howe island and they have been paying for it ever since. The ratification is the complete eradication of all the rats and the 9$ million cost will be for nought if just one pair survives.

The process has been tested on a nearby uninhabited island and was completely successful.  There are over 50,000 rats infesting LHI and one of the more famous victims as previously mentioned on ROBOT is the Phasmid. The rats take out flora as well even on top of Mt Gower where the rarer palms fruit, the seeds do not reach the ground as the rats will climb the palms and strip the new seeds.

Pairings of wildlife have been collected over the last few years and poison as been introduced to their diet to build up a resistance.  2015 will see an air drop of poisoned rat baits that will completely cover the island. Even when the rats are gone the Phasmid cannot be reintroduced as its natural predator the BooBook Owl has also been wiped out. Phasmids would explode over the island and remove its foliage. So one of the steps is to remove the previously introduced Masked Owl which would allow the less aggressive BooBook Owl to survive. If its not one thing its something else.

The old rat baits

Alignment of the Planets caused Follow Through Incident

Went to a show called Elemental. Can't remember the last time I went to a planetarium. This was more show than science.  A lot of poetic license was used to illustrate the lastest thinking on weighty matters like the cosmos and bikini design.  All the theories were mentioned Big Bang, Dark Matter, String Theory.  Sometimes a big bang is known to produce dark matter.  Whoever introduced strings into the design of a bikini is to be commended. This also was known as string theory with the final conclusion being tied into knots. Quite a juxtaposing revelation when most problems require unravelling the knotty part. 
All in all the show was worth a look. The use of live music whilst gazing at the night sky brought back memories of walking across an outback plain in South Australia some yar ago. The night sky was so big it seemed heavy with the stars.  Trying to navigate a straight line that night was harder because we just kept star gazing.