The HangOut at the SF Zoo with Livia Edwords was a big success, with 23 people attending. We got a number of fresh faces, which is always good. Some folk responded from affiliate MeetUp groups.
Livia Edwords did a great job telling us about the animals, zoos, and her experiences as a zoo keeper there. We got a special treat when she ran into one of her old zoo keeper friends on his way to take care of the koalas. We got a truly up close and personal visit with one of his charges. Yeah, they're just as cute as the pictures suggest and with incredibly soft and thick fur.
Have you ever heard of Eunice Foote? No? She’s someone we all should know more about, and she was the subject of the Google Doodle on July 17th (pictured above), on what would have been her 204th birthday!
Eunice was a women’s rights activist. She was the first woman to be published in a physics journal. In 1856 she wrote “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of Sun’s Rays”, a paper that laid out the basics of climate science. Three years after the publication, scientist John Tyndall would be credited for laying this groundwork, not Foote. It wasn’t until the 2010s that her work began to be recognized.
I do have to admit that it is easy to accept claims when the evidence is plentiful yet still anecdotal and usually has no evidence to support it. I suggest that this may not be the best way to collect data and arrive at conclusions though. This is how many “misperceptions” gain traction and become, shall we sa
I hope you are looking forward to the longest day of the year this week. This Tuesday June 21 at 7:57 AM marks the spot where the sun will be a its northernmost point for the year. It will rise about 5:47 AM and set at 8:34 PM. This marks the end of spring, and the beginning of summer with the longest day of the year. It will be 14 hours 47 minutes between sunrise and sunset or 5 hours 14 minutes longer than it was at its' shortest just 6 months ago. I often wonder how things were figured out before we had the benefits of so many great scientists and equipment.
While we were Earth-bound this last week, 17 out of Earth’s 8 billion people were in orbit - a new (if soon-to-be-exceeded) record. ¿How high an orbit? Consider the standard (in the U.S.) 12-inch globe. They were orbiting 4 tenths of an inch above its surface. The thickness of a piece of standard copy paper represents the thickness of our atmosphere in which humans can populate - 14,000 feet.
Able, a seven-pound rhesus monkey, and Baker, a one-pound squirrel monkey, both females. Photo credit: Life Magazine
Hello again Science Fans!
First off, thanks to Herb for filling in for me last month while I was traveling. Today we have a lot of catching up to do!
Happy anniversary to The Sierra Club which was founded on this date in 1892 in San Francisco!
Some of you are old enough to remember the beginnings of the “space race”, with the US pitted against the Soviet Union to see which one would be the first to create the technology to get man to the Moon. In 1959, we still didn’t know if humans could survive in space, so on this date Able and Baker, two monkeys, were laun
