20:53 EST: Mars is close enough to the full Moon that, despite being near inferior opposition and about as bright as it ever gets, I can't see Mars with the naked eye. With binoculars, I can see a maybe-reddish pin-prick less than half a Lunar diameter away from the Moon. At 21:21, Mars is scheduled to go behind the Moon, to emerge out the other side an hour later.

Landed at JFK a bit before noon Sunday after three weeks in Spain. Caught a cab home. House still standing; different flowers blooming in front yard than before we left.


Unpacked suitcases. Repacked suitcases. Drove 4+ hours north to friends' house. Slept a lot. With five friends and two other cars, drove north another hour or so into the path of totality, found parking place near a restaurant/resort and gas station, and sat around for a few hours waiting for an eclipse.

We were worried that there would be too much cloud cover, but as it turned out there were only a few high, thin clouds. We viewed the increasing amount of eclipse variously through eclipse glasses, in a camera obscura, by projecting through binoculars onto a white piece of foamcore, and by projecting through a kitchen colander ditto. A breeze sprang up, the air got chilly, the light got weird, and then in a matter of seconds the last sliver of sun projected on the foamcore disappeared, the sky turned midnight-blue, and a cheer went up from the crowd. We could see the eclipsed sun perfectly, with a fair amount of corona and one persistent red flare. We could also see Venus nicely, maybe ten degrees away from the sun and moon; I gather some other planets were supposed to be visible too but I didn't spot them. Anyway, after two minutes or so, several more flares or Bailly's-beads or something appeared next to the first one, then merged into a blaze of white and totality was over.

Within seconds, cars started moving, jockeying to get out of the parking lot and onto the road. We waited for the majority of them to leave before getting in the car ourselves. One of our friends had picked out a restaurant a few miles to the south where we could get dinner, gave us its name, and we all hit the road in our various cars... except that we couldn't get any cell phone service (it's a remote area, and there were suddenly thousands of cell phones trying to use one tower). So after crawling along the interstate for half an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic, shalmestere and I took the relevant exit and stopped at a gas station to ask where the restaurant was. The lady behind the counter gave clear directions, and we got back on the road. In another heavy traffic jam, presumably people trying to avoid the heavy traffic jam on the interstate. It took another half hour or so to crawl a few miles to the restaurant, where we found we couldn't get a table for seven and started looking for someplace else to eat.

Most restaurants in this part of upstate New York exist to serve weekenders and summer people, so since this was neither a weekend nor summer, they were closed. After a bunch of walking up and down the road, and continuing trouble getting cell signal, we found a place where we could at least sit near one another, and had dinner while waiting for (hopefully) the worst of the traffic to subside.

Left the restaurant just before 7 PM. Traffic was indeed less bad than before, but in the first two hours (mostly on interstate) we travelled 63 miles. Including stops for gas and driver-switching, we got home at the stroke of 1:00 AM, thoroughly fried. Fall down go boom, in own bed for the first time since March 13-14. Both have to work in the morning, but at least we don't have to physically go to our respective offices.

siderea linked to this article on the sex lives of White-Throated Sparrows, which inspired this post.

But first, consider how sexual reproduction works in our world, in our species. I'm only talking about biological/chromosomal sex here, not anatomical or social or legal, and for simplicity I'm assuming that every individual is of one unambiguous biological/chromosomal sex -- no XXY or XYY trisomies. A man and a woman can produce offspring of either sex; both sons and daughters are genetically close to both of their parents (although sons are slightly closer to their fathers because that's where they got their unpaired Y chromosome). The result is basically a single gene pool for the whole species (except for mitochondrial DNA and a few Y-linked genes).

Now imagine that each human carried only one sex chromosome, rather than a pair, and that men and women were both capable of homosexual reproduction: two women could produce a (necessarily female) child, and two men could produce a (necessarily male) child. If this happened only occasionally, it wouldn't have much effect on the population. But if homosexual reproduction were universal, there would be genetic divergence, with males and females gradually becoming two mostly-separate gene pools and then two separate species. If there were an occasional instance of heterosexual reproduction against a mostly-homosexual background, the offspring would have genetic material from both pools, and thus (if the offspring reproduced) pull the two pools back together.

So, back to the sparrows. White-throated sparrows have two genetically-determined color morphs: brown-streaked and white-streaked, each forming roughly half of the population. If brown-streaked sparrows preferred to mate with other brown-streaked sparrows, and white-streaked with white-streaked, they would diverge genetically over time and we'd eventually have two separate species: brown-streaked and white-streaked. But in fact, females (both brown- and white-streaked) prefer brown-streaked males, while males (both brown- and white-streaked) prefer white-streaked females. As a result, white-streaked females and brown-streaked males get their pick of mates, which is each other, leaving the remaining brown-streaked females and white-streaked males to make do with one another. As a further result, essentially all mated pairs are either white-streaked-female to brown-streaked-male or brown-streaked-female to white-streaked male. Both sorts of pairs can produce any combination of male, female, brown-streaked, and white-streaked, so there's no genetic isolation and no speciation event: there are effectively four "sexes", but they're all still bound together into a single genetic population.

(Another point in the article: brown-streaked sparrows of both sexes tend to be more nurturing, while white-streaked sparrows of both sexes are more aggressive. Which has interesting implications of its own, but it's peripheral to the point I'm making here.)

By amazing coincidence, the same day that I read that article, I read Ursula LeGuin's short story "The Wild Girls", about a human society with three castes named Crown (nobility), Root (merchant class), and Dirt (slaves). In our world, wherever a caste system has arisen, cross-caste marriage is strongly discouraged if not forbidden, which (given enough time, and strict enough enforcement) would be expected to produce genetic divergence and speciation. But in "The Wild Girls", cross-caste marriage is mandatory: Crown men are only allowed to marry Dirt women, Dirt men with Root women, and Root men with Crown women. It's not entirely clear in the story, but I think a child's caste is always the same as its father's. In any case, there are effectively six "sexes", and they're all bound together stably into a single genetic population by the cyclic marriage rules. And although you can tell someone's caste by clothing, there's no genetic difference among castes and thus probably no way to tell the caste of a naked person. (Which raises plot ideas....)

And then I thought about fingerloop braiding. Consider a simple two-loop "braid", as discussed here. There are two interesting operations you can do: you can pass one loop through the other, and you can twist a loop on its own axis ("taking thy bowes reversed", as the middle English source says). If you just twist each loop on its own axis, never passing one through the other, you end up with two independent two-ply twisted cords, connected only at the anchor. If you only pass one through the other, never twisting either one, you again end up with two two-ply twisted cords, connected at both ends but otherwise independent. But if you pass one through the other, then twist one, in alternation, the two operations lock one another in place and you end up with a single four-strand braid. Likewise if you have three, or four, or five loops: if you only twist each one, you get five independent two-ply cords; if you only pass them through one another, but always "taking thy bowes unreversed", you get two 3-ply, 4-ply, or 5-ply braids connected to one another only at the ends. But if you pass loops through one another and reverse them, alternating operations reasonably often, you get a single bound-together braid of 6, 8, or 10 strands. If there's an occasional reversal in a mostly-unreversed braid, you get a cord with large "eyes", holes where the two halves run parallel but independent between one linkage and the next.

Do with that what you will.

A few nights ago we walked the dogs before bed, and noticed the crescent moon, a bit above the horizon, with a distinct pinkish cast. I pointed it out to shalmestere, naturally assuming it was pink for the same reason the setting sun is red: it's just above the horizon, and therefore filtered through a lot of atmosphere, dust, and haze.

Last night we walked the dogs before bed, and the moon was now slightly gibbous, farther above the horizon, and still pink. I went "Huh."

Tonight the moon is about 3/4 full, even farther above the horizon, and still distinctly pink. And the only explanation I can think of is smoke from the fires in California and Oregon. The air here in NYC doesn't smell noticeably of smoke, but it has a certain opacity; everything is just a little fuzzy around the edges, as it hasn't been for the past fifteen months. I knew intellectually that this was a really bad fire year on the west coast, but this kind of effect 3000 miles downwind makes it much more real and visceral.

Edit: See this site for real-time Air Quality Index measurements and forecasts. The forecast for yesterday was red, today and tomorrow green, but the actual real-time measurements in most of the NYC area this morning are orange. Perhaps the forecast for today is lower because of the forecast thunderstorms this afternoon. One can also easily compare different kinds of pollution -- overall AQI, particulates under 2.5µm, ozone, sulfur dioxide, and carbon monoxide. For example, AQI, PM_2.5, and CO were all in the red yesterday, as one would expect from wildfire smoke, while ozone and SO₂ were both in the green.

There was a lunar eclipse the night of July 4. I didn't hear about it in advance, and didn't notice anything different about the moon that night except that it was remarkably full.

But last night the still-almost-full moon formed an almost equilateral triangle, maybe two degrees on a side, with Jupiter and Saturn, both of which (being in the same direction as the full moon) are near inferior opposition and thus as bright as they ever get. And the Earth happens to have been at aphelion, the farthest it ever gets from the Sun, on July 4, which means we're ever-so-slightly closer to Jupiter and Saturn than we would have otherwise been, making them (let's see...) 1.6% brighter than if this same conjunction had happened when we're at perihelion.

As the OED points out, today is Isaac Asimov's 100th birthday.

Isaac Asimov was a formative influence on me. He was a decent science fiction writer (with occasional flashes of brilliance -- The Gods Themselves springs to mind), a good mystery writer, and an AWESOME non-fiction writer. For umpty-ump years he had a monthly column in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in which he could discuss pretty much whatever topic he wished, and he used that freedom to the fullest, covering topics from biochemistry (his Ph.D. subject) to astrophysics to geography to etymology to history to myth to... pretty much anything. Periodically these columns were collected and published in book form, and throughout my pre-teen and teenage years a good fraction of my bookshelf was these books of collected free-form articles, which I read and re-read voraciously. Another good chunk of my leisure reading was his book-length non-fiction, e.g. The Roman Republic and The Roman Empire.

And of course, he was mind-bogglingly prolific. It took me several years to write a textbook; he wrote at least two books each year from 1950 to 1993, and frequently half a dozen or more in a year, a mix of textbooks, popular non-fiction, and fiction.

Back to the science fiction, for which he's probably best known. He was never a master of character or dialogue, which was fine with me because I wasn't either; his science fiction was, in the classic John Campbell mold, "here's a cool scientific idea; how would people react to it and use it?" The aforementioned The Gods Themselves, the Foundation trilogy (and prequels and sequels), The End of Eternity, the short story "Nightfall", and no doubt dozens more that I'm not thinking of right now, are all splendid examples of this.

Anyway, thank you, Isaac.

this is So Cool. Tool-using octopi, with video.