Darren Straight's Blog

Snow surrounded the Aral Sea in early January 2010. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this true-color image on January 8, 2010. A band of snow extends from southwest to northeast, crossing over the Aral Sea. The band of snow thins along its southeastern edge, so snow barely covers the southeastern shore of the water body.

January 2010 also brought the heaviest snowfall in decades to the Beijing region and Seoul, and unusually heavy snow to Western Europe, including Great Britain. Unusually cold temperatures throughout the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere in December 2009 likely resulted from a negative plunge of the Arctic Oscillation. Land surface temperature anomalies in the region of the Aral Sea, however, were mixed, both above and below the 2000–2008 average.

By the time MODIS acquired this image of the Aral Sea, the water body was a small remnant of its former self. Once the world’s fourth-largest lake, the sea was dramatically reduced by irrigation projects.

Snow around the Aral Sea

Snow this January is pretty bad everywhere around the UK, and I’m sure you’ve seen enough snow to last you a while but here’s some Photos I’ve took of Snow at Darland Banks countryside walk in Chatham, Medway, Kent.

Snow blanketed Great Britain on January 7, 2010, as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite passed overhead and captured this image. Snow covers most of England, from the east to the west coast. (The large image shows snow cover over the entire island of Great Britain.) The cities of Manchester, Birmingham, and London form ghostly gray shapes against the white land surface. Immediately east of London, clouds swirl over the island, casting blue-gray shadows toward the north.

Frigid temperatures followed snowfall, leaving roads and sidewalks treacherously icy, according to news reports. As of January 7, overnight temperatures had plunged to -18 degrees Celsius (-0.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in isolated spots, with more widespread temperatures of -10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit). The heavy snowfall downed power lines, leaving several thousand homes in southern England without electricity.

According to the Federation of Small Businesses, transportation difficulties kept an estimated 10 percent of the workforce home on January 5 and 6, and thousands of schools were closed. Forecasters warned that frigid temperatures could linger for up to a week. Eurostar was operating at a reduced capacity and airports remained open although passengers could expect delays.

A contributor to the persistent cold and snow across much of the Northern Hemisphere’s mid-latitudes in December 2009 and January 2010 could be the fact that the atmosphere was in an extreme negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation (AO). The AO is a seesawing strengthening and weakening of semi-permanent areas of low and high atmospheric pressure in the Arctic and the mid-latitudes. One consequence of the oscillation’s negative phase is cold, snowy weather in Eurasia and North America during the winter months. The extreme negative dip of the Arctic Oscillation Index in December 2009 was the lowest monthly value observed for the past six decades.

Snow across Great Britain

Raising the initiative of a sustainable, environmentally sensitive, green community to new heights, Babcock Ranch (The City of Tomorrow) is planned to be the first city to be 100% powered by the sun, with the majority of its electric needs generated from the largest on-site solar photovoltaic energy facility powering any city on earth.  By consuming less KW hours than the solar facilities located on the property will produce, Babcock Ranch will become the first city in the world powered by clean, renewable solar energy.

Located near Fort Myers, in beautiful Charlotte County, USA, just minutes from I-75 and the Southwest Florida International Airport, Babcock Ranch is destined to become America’s most talked-about new city.  A place where neighbors of all backgrounds, ages and incomes can come together to work, to learn, to shop, to play – and to savor life.  It’s a new city where innovation will abound – with planned state-of-the-art infrastructure to assure businesses and residents full access to emerging technologies for communications, energy, education and transportation.  

Anyone catch last night’s Total Lunar Eclipse?

I went into the countryside late last night/early morning to see if I could catch a glimpse of the eclipse, but unfortunately due too heavy cloud cover and heavy fog I didn’t get to see much.

Not to worry though, I had a nice drive in the foggy countryside and found some great places which were away from the lights of the surrounding towns which gave great views of the night sky, great for the next UK Total Lunar Eclipse on the 28th of September 2015, if I’m still in the area!

Also had some fun testing out the new O2 XDA Orbit 2 I’m testing out (thanks to Steve Cater from VCCP a marketing agency for O2), but more on that later in a full review, which will surely be giving it the thumbs up, so far it’s been coming in very handy.

The Large Hadron Collider – the most powerful atom-smasher ever built – will be switched on in May 2008, and particle physics will hit pay-dirt. However a pair of Russian mathematicians (Irina Aref’eva and Igor Volovich) have are stating that the LHC might just turn out to be the world’s first time machine.

It is a highly speculative claim, that’s for sure. But if Aref’eva and Volovich are correct, the LHC’s debut at CERN, the European particle physics centre near Geneva in Switzerland, could provide a landmark in history. That’s because travelling into the past is only possible – if it is possible at all – as far back as the creation of the first time machine, and that means 2008 could become Year Zero for future time travellers, since it would only be possible to travel back as far as the first doorway in time.

• 2008: Does time travel start here? [New Scientist]
• Time Machine at the LHC [arXiv.org]
• Time Travel Russia’s In [The Sun]
• The world’s first time machine? [ The Daily Mail]
• Time Machine To Be Created Underground? [Wired Science]

Just a heads up that a total eclipse of the Moon will be occuring during the night of Wednesday/Thrusday the 20th/21st February 2008. The entire event will be visible from South America and most of North America (on February 20th) as well as Western Europe, Africa, and western Asia (on February 21st). During a total lunar eclipse, the Moon’s disk can take on a dramatically colorful appearance from bright orange to blood red to dark brown and (rarely) very dark gray.

An eclipse of the Moon can only take place at Full Moon, and only if the Moon passes through some portion of Earth’s shadow. The shadow is actually composed of two cone-shaped parts, one nested inside the other. The outer shadow or penumbra is a zone where Earth blocks some (but not all) of the Sun’s rays. In contrast, the inner shadow or umbra is a region where Earth blocks all direct sunlight from reaching the Moon.

If only part of the Moon passes through the umbra, a partial eclipse is seen. However, if the entire Moon passes through the umbral shadow, then a total eclipse of the Moon occurs. For more information on how, what, why, where and when of lunar eclipses, see the special web page lunar eclipses for beginners.

The following diagrams show the Moon’s path through Earth’s shadows (higher resolution versions of the above figure). The times of major stages of the eclipse are given for a number of time zones in North America. Please choose the diagram for your own time zone. Each diagram is a GIF file with a size of about 100k.

• Eclipse Diagram for AST (Atlantic Standard Time)
• Eclipse Diagram for EST (Eastern Standard Time)
• Eclipse Diagram for CST (Central Standard Time)
• Eclipse Diagram for MST (Mountain Standard Time)
• Eclipse Diagram for PST (Pacific Standard Time)
• Eclipse Diagram for AST (Alaska Standard Time)
• Eclipse Diagram for HST (Hawaiian Standard Time)
• Eclipse Diagram for GMT (Greenwich Mean Time)
• Eclipse Diagram for GMT +1 (Greenwich Mean Time + 1 Hour)
• Eclipse Diagram for GMT +2 (Greenwich Mean Time + 2 Hours)

Some people may be puzzled that the Moon’s motion is from west to east (right to left) in these diagrams, instead of its daily east to west (left to right) motion in the sky. However, the Moon actually moves WEST to EAST (right to left in the Northern Hemisphere) with respect to the Earth’s shadow and the stars.

For full details of this Total Lunar Eclipse check out this NASA Page.

The structure covers 538 square feet and travels 26 feet into the earth. In it’s construction, the colony moved 40 tons of soil. Billions of ant loads of soil were brought to the surface. Each load weighed four times as much as the worker ant, and in human terms, was carried over 1/2 mile to the surface. It is the equivalent of building the great wall of china. It is truly a wonder of the world…

You can watch the full documentary “Ants – Natures Secret Power” over at openflv.com, it’s worth downloading to watch!

Labour-saving machines save us labour, that’s the point. They transport us from the ground floor to the fifth floor. They take us from A to B. They wash and dry and cook and clean for us.

But these machines use energy which produces CO2. It would help if we could use them less or use them more efficiently.

Take lifts. Or rather don’t. If you work on the 25th floor of a skyscraper, fair enough. But lifts are like vertical taxis – you wouldn’t hail a cab to go 100 feet down the road so why summon one to take you a few floors up?

So use less machine power and more of your own steam power. And if you take the stairs or find a way to resist other labour-saving machines, please come back and click DONE IT so we can count how much CO2 we’ve all saved.

Touching the stairs
Stair-climbers James, Jo and Pete risk their lives by trying to reach the third floor. It’s a story of guts and sacrifice; a story of genuine heroes who don’t know the meaning of the word ‘lift’ – or do they?

Lifts Are Not F.A.B
By Michael Wright To illustrate the considerable dangers of lifts, Michael Wright not only reused some old bits of polyboard and silver spray to make a skyscraper, lift shaft and lift, he reused some old bits of airfix for the props, two old marionettes to be the lift victims and one of those victims to be the evil lift-cord cutter. The result: a tremendous piece of psychological insight about lifts and why you should doubt them big time. Music by the very talented Aaron Paul Low of Sacred noise, produced by the very kind London Partizan.

December’s green thing is all about buying an old thing, not a new
thing.  New things are the fanciest and most specced-up things and
have the almost irresistible appeal of being the latest things. But
manufacturing a new thing uses resources and energy, all of which
creates CO2.  So instead of buying a new thing, buy an old thing. Old
things save us CO2 and come with less megapixels, for sure, but do
come with character, romance, mystery and history all included as
standard.