Strange Astronomical Perceptions

    Our faithful star and moon seem a lot larger as they rise or set, and we have a lingering perception embedded in our memories that both are always big and bright, fostered by all the stunning telephoto shots of them looming over landmarks around our planet and by depictions of them in art and graphics.

    But the perception of them being larger near the horizon is only a mental illusion. They remain their visual sizes throughout their entire apparent motions across the sky. Apparent because of course it’s the earth that provides that 24-hour motion deception by rotating on its axis. The sun appears to move its own diameter every two minutes as the earth is rotating to the east. Depending on how close you happen to be to the equator, you’re moving at up to 1,100 miles per hour just because of that rotation. We don’t sense it because we only feel acceleration or deceleration, not constant velocity. (Think about sitting in a car on a smooth road doing a constant seventy; you don’t feel it, and you only know you’re moving by the scenery rushing by. Close your eyes and you could be sitting still.)

    We also have the idea that the sun appears much larger than the moon. In truth, they appear the same size. The sun is indeed 400 times larger than the moon, but it’s also 400 times father away from us. That’s the reason the moon can sometimes completely eclipse the sun briefly.

    Believe it or not, the moon (or the sun) is only the same perceived size as a quarter as viewed from nine feet away. Yet if you have 20/20 vision you can pick out amazing detail on the moon including some cratering and the darker maria (so named because they resembled seas to early observers). The moon seems so bright, yet it really is the color of asphalt. It only appears to be bright against the utter blackness of space.

     To me the most mind-bending astronomical perception of all is the apparent static state of our Milky Way stars and the many other galaxies strewn across the universe. In truth, nothing is static out there. Everything is in motion, rotating or orbiting or rushing through space, as our entire solar system is doing collectively. As our entire Milky Way galaxy is doing as well.

     We’re speeding sixty-seven thousand miles an hour right now just in our annual journey around our own star yet, again, we feel it not at all because that velocity is constant.

    

     The dazzling collection of starlight that enters our eyes tonight is not the universe we perceive it to be. It can only ever be an ancient rendition. It is starlight that’s just now arriving from tens and dozens and hundreds and thousands and millions of our years in the past.

     At 186,000 miles per second, it takes four and a half years for just the light from the nearest star other than our sun to make that incredible journey of twenty-six thousand billion miles.

Phil

www.philbowie.com

Check out the North Carolina suspense series Guns, Diamondback, Kllrs, and Deathsman in print or Kindle on Amazon or through my website for some distracting pandemic reading that will take you away from our current troubles into the fascinating universe of fiction

Unusual American words and phrases

    Last post, I talked about language learning during the pandemic and how difficult learning English must be.

    Yet another confusing aspect to English, even for Americans, is regional slang.

    I grew up in New England, where we had our own jargon. Some examples:

    Grinder is Yankee for a sub sandwich. (It’s ‘hoagie’ in Pennsylvania.)

    Jimmies are called sprinkles most everywhere else.

    A tag sale in New England is a yard sale in NC where I live now.

    A rotary is Yankee for a highway roundabout.

    A milkshake in Massachusetts is just that, milk and syrup blended into a frothy confection. If you add ice cream it becomes a frappe (pronounced frap). And around Boston, soda is pop.

    When the ground thaws in Yankee land it creates a mud season, and many a farmhouse has a mud room to keep entrants from tracking up the whole house.

     In the fall, roads like the Mohawk Trail and Route Nine through the Western Massachusetts hill towns are filled with leaf peepers, folks who come from afar to view the traditionally spectacular foliage displays.

     Wicked is an adjective used as an intensifier for anything. Powder snow makes for wicked good skiing and snowmobiling. Cheeseburgers in the old-fashioned diners that remain are wicked delicious.

     When I moved south, I had to learn a whole new regional phraseology.

     Y’all, and hankerin’, and down yonder, and pitch a hissy fit, and bless your heart, and well, I’ll be.

     And you don’t just say could in Dixie because that’s too committal. Better to say might could to hedge it a bit. Then you’re covered if'n you can’t.

     Y’all be safe and well now, hear?

Phil

www.philbowie.com

No matter where you’re from, check out the North Carolina suspense series Guns, Diamondback, Kllrs, and Deathsman in print or Kindle on Amazon or through my website for some distracting pandemic reading that will take you away from our current troubles. People seem to like the yarns.

Language Learning in the Pandemic

    To get something positive out of virus hibernation, I decided to learn a second language. But which one? Of the world’s roughly 6,500 languages, the most common by far throughout the Western Hemisphere is Spanish. I figure it’s the most likely to prove useful, especially considering our many immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and South America. It’s also the fourth most common language on the planet behind English, Mandarin, and Hindi in that order. I also like the sound of Spanish and I love the music and food.

   

    I’m learning on the Duolingo site. It’s going well, except the sentence examples are spoken so fast it’s hard to sort out words. Spanish is second only to Japanese as the fastest spoken tongue. French is third, then Italian, and English is fifth fastest, though as a pilot I think busy air traffic controllers near our big cities ought to get the Blue Streak Award. English, by the way, is the universal ATC language, so pilots the world over must learn it, although a limited aviation vocabulary is all that’s necessary (no pilot needs to order food or dicker for a new car or make a date or engage in a political debate in English to do the job). In my pilot training I had a young Norwegian instructor, and because he was still learning clear pronunciation of English he had me do most of the radio conversing with ATC.

    I find it odd so many Spanish words are genderized. The Politically Correct reformers have not yet tackled that issue as sexist, I guess.

    So far, Spanish seems fairly easy to assimilate, but it strikes me that English must be exceedingly difficult to learn as a second language. Think of all those words that are spelled the same but have different meanings, for example. There are at least 150 of these homographs, including club, bay, drill, file, tap, date, season, and kid. Then there’s a subcategory of homographs called heteronyms, at least 75 common words that have the same spelling but more than one meaning and different pronunciations, like lead, bow, bass, wind, row, and present. Many can be used as nouns or verbs or even adjectives. Then you have hundreds of slang words scattered throughout English. It gets complicated.

    There are roughly 100,000 words in common Spanish use, compared to 200,000 commonly used English words. This is not to say Spanish is any less expressive, because they have ways to be quite passionate and persuasive and erudite in communicating.

    For rudimentary use of either English or Spanish, 800 to 1,000 necessary core words lets you understand up to 75% of the language as it’s commonly spoken, which would serve at least minimally in travels to a foreign land. But to understand movies or TV would require some 3,000 words, and to read a novel in either language you’d need 8,000 or more.

    Which means true fluency in a foreign tongue—up to the level of the native users—is difficult to ever achieve without having been raised in that language from infancy.

    I’ll be happy just to impress Naomi by ordering in Spanish at a Mexican restaurant.

    If we ever go out to one again.

  

    Hasta luego.

Phil

www.philbowie.com

For some good pandemic reading, check out my seven published books on Amazon, or order easily through my website. Money back if you don’t like your choice.

Please mask up and social distance. Together we can beat this virus.

A Presidential Do

Hey, I can relate.

I haven’t had my usual cut since early March.

I look like Einstein in the morning although, sadly, don’t feel any smarter.

But I do feel somewhat presidential. Especially in a breeze.

I’ve decided that to protest females getting all the hairdo attention over the generations, I won’t shave or get a haircut until at least spring.

There are benefits. Soon I’ll be able to weave it into an effective mask. It’s already long enough to serve as a soup strainer. Half a can of hair spray and it can become a nifty cycling helmet. I’ll have Naomi braid it for those special ceremonies, and when I want to read a book, I’ll simply part my bangs. I can maybe even get a job as a Neanderthal model for National Geographic.

Yes, showering is becoming an issue, as we’ve seen with Mister T, but a dab of liquid car wash and the garden hose will make me shine.

Only problem is mother birds have been eyeing me.

I suspect that’s why they seem to hang around the Rose Garden tweeting, as well.

It takes me an hour each day to get every hair in place just so until I can consider my do done, which puts a dent in my time on the links, but whenever I look in a mirror it’s quite gratifying.

A real Trumpian tonsorial triumph.

Phil Bowie

New Bern, NC

www.philbowie.com

Please, people, let’s mask up in public, avoid gatherings, and keep our distance. Together we can beat this virus.

For some distracting pandemic reading, try the North Carolina suspense series Guns, Diamondback, Kllrs, and Deathsman in print or Kindle on Amazon or through my website. People seem to like the stories.

     

The (female) Brave Ones who fight for the elephants

    Wednesday, 12 August 2020 is World Elephant Day, established in 2011 and observed by 65 world wildlife conservation organizations to raise awareness of threatened elephants, the largest creatures that walk this planet. Despite bans on ivory trade in most countries, a persistent lucrative black-market demand for it goads poachers to kill 20,000 African elephants each year. An elephant dies under poachers’ guns—often in great agony—every 21 minutes on average, a much faster rate than they can possibly sustain with their long-gestation single-baby births. Herds have declined 70 percent over the past 40 years. The World Wildlife Fund for Nature projects that without aggressive action they could go extinct by 2040. There are several organizations fighting for the noble beasts in their dwindling habitat, but the cumulative effort is sadly still not enough to stop the decline.

    There are two African cadres that are especially interesting—and successful. And they’re exclusively female. The Akashinga (“The Brave Ones” in Shona) are often from impoverished backgrounds, some orphaned by AIDS or violence. They undergo rigorous special-forces-type training and are charged with protecting an area where thousands of elephants have been killed over the past 20 years in the Zambezi River Valley of Zimbabwe. Founder of the nonprofit organization, Damien Mander, an anti-poaching trainer, says women are protective by nature and are far less likely to take bribes than male rangers. The Akashinga are fiercely proud, well-armed, and unafraid to fight it out with poachers. They’re fast gaining wide respect.

    The other group is the Black Mambas, three dozen unarmed women who patrol South Africa’s Limpopo Province in their neat camouflage uniforms by foot and Jeep, reporting poaching activity to trained special forces rangers who then deal with it. They’ve been credited with cutting poaching in the areas they patrol by 76 percent.

    The world is of course preoccupied with the continuing virus threat, but let’s not forget we share this planet with a wonderful variety of wildlife that needs our concern and protection to survive. You can help with a donation to any of the legitimate organizations or by simply spreading the word among friends. (By sharing this message, for example.)

    I researched and wrote the novel Killing Ground to help raise awareness of vicious ongoing African ivory poaching. Proceeds go to elephant protection. Check it out on Amazon in print or Kindle, or you can order easily through my website.

Phil

www.philbowie.com

Please mask up and keep at least six feet from others in public. These simple measures can save thousands of American lives over the coming months if enough of us can just be persuaded to do it.   

The secret storm namers

   

     The secretive people whose job it is to assign such commonplace names to hurricanes as Fran, Bertha, Charlie, Irene, Floyd, Florence, and Dorian, all of which (and more) I’ve experienced to greater or lesser degrees of expense and chagrin, living in the Hurricane Hook of eastern North Carolina as I do, must have gotten bored this season. They apparently decided to assign some names that will be a challenge to pronounce, Isaias being one they likely giggled over. “Let’s see those pompous, spotlight-hogging TV weather guessers try to pronounce this one.”

     I have some suggestions of other potential names that should send the namers into happy tearful paroxysms.

     How about Andrze (Polish). Or Zariyah or Aksiniya or Fimochka or Kotyusha, all of which are Russian? Or Eiichi (Japanese)? Or Xiaoice (Chinese)?

     The Irish have some especially good ones that the namers could use. Saoirse, for example, or Seanán, Líadain, or Aoibheann.

     The ultimate in names that could tie square knots in a newscaster’s tongue, though, are African. Examples: Achieng (not a Tanzanian sneeze), Tafadzwa, Sithembile, Nosizwe, Onyekachukwu, or better yet Oluwafunmilayo.

     If they do a perplexing enough job, some of the storm namers might even graduate to the ranks of those charged with assigning creative names to thousands of new drugs.

     Then there are those anonymous six-year-olds who are given different colored chalks and cut loose on a big floor map to scrawl those various predicted hurricane spaghetti tracks . . .

Phil

www.philbowie.com

Please mask up in public and keep a six-foot distance from other people in public. Together we can beat this virus that’s sickening and killing way too many of our fellow Americans.

UFO’s again, really?

    It’s long been a favorite subject of those less principled supermarket tabloids. Spine-tingling and ultra-mysterious sightings of Unidentified (and possibly nefarious) Flying Objects. Usually such sighting are associated with some secret government agency site near Roswell, New Mexico, reputed to be hiding and studying an alien space ship that crashed in 1947. A Roswell UFO museum and research center draws flocks of tourists.

    Without doubt both civilian and military pilots and crews have sighted strange phenomena over the decades. Many sightings can be explained as the bright planet Venus or unusual cloud formations, or even high-flying birds. During years of piloting my Cessna I occasionally spotted a bird as high as 3,500 feet. The bald eagle can soar at 10,000 feet. The Andean condor with its ten-foot wingspan can glide at 20,000 feet, and the endangered Ruppell’s griffon vulture has been spotted at an astonishing 37,000 feet, which is also the frigid realm of airliners. So, birds might easily become mysterious UFOs in marginal meteorological conditions like fog or haze or twilight. But there are always a few sightings that have remained inexplicable by any known natural causes, keeping the UFO story alive.

    But the leap to objects of possible extraterrestrial origin is one so giant as to be nearly impossible for several reasons. The nearest star other than our own sun is over four light years away, meaning it takes that long for light zipping along at 186,000 miles per second to reach us across those almost unimaginable 26 trillion miles. That’s 26 thousand billion miles. At some significant fraction of lightspeed, it could take alien vehicles hundreds of years to make that journey. For what? It’s illogical on several levels.

    Our government has been investigating UFOs for many years within agencies limping along on annual budgets of only ten or 20 million dollars, relatively insignificant line items in our budgeted multiple billions.

    Recently a secretive Navy program buried within the Office of Naval Intelligence has come to light in the news. They’ve been studying these phenomena they’ve renamed Unexplained Flying Objects. They don’t quite believe it could be aliens. More like the Chinese or North Koreans or Russians up to insidious shenanigans.

    I suppose that could be possible, although it also seems an absurd stretch, considering that most anything they’d want to observe can be done quite well with satellites these days.

    But it’s yet something else our government can spend money on, so I guess that’s good news.

Phil

www.philbowie.com

Please, people, let’s mask up in public and keep our distance. Together we can beat this virus. Japan is a great example. Nearly the entire population has been politely masking and distancing and their resultant per capita case counts and deaths are a small fraction of ours, which are by far the worst on the planet among developed nations.

Check out the North Carolina suspense novel series Guns, Diamondback, Kllrs, and Deathsman in print or Kindle on Amazon for some distracting pandemic reading. People seem to like the yarns.