A Different Kind Of Tide

Ok, this image may be a little deceiving. If you haven’t guessed already, I’m going to write a little about tidal heating. Tidal heating has nothing to do with making the tides on Earth catch on fire, I just thought that was a beautiful image and it made for a good pun.

Tidal heating is best seen in Jupiter’s moon Io. Scientists wondered how the moon could have such active volcanic activity given its size, and tidal heating is the explanation. Much like Earth and our moon, The Moon, interact with tidal forces, Io and Jupiter do as well. However, Jupiter is much larger than Earth, and Io’s orbit is also highly elliptical due to gravitation force interactions from Jupiter’s other moons and Io. These factors together mean that Io experiences an extremely large amount of varying tidal squeezes from Jupiter as it goes through its orbit around Jupiter.

“The Cosmic Perspective” by Jeffrey O. Bennett, Megan O. Donahue, Nicholas Schneider, and Mark Voit uses a great analogy of Silly Putty being squeezed, the more it is squeezed into different shapes it heats up and becomes more malleable. The same goes for Io, except the added heat leads to volcanism. (Good thing that doesn’t happen with Silly Putty!) The forces acting on Io cause friction in the world leading to over 200 times as much heat generated as from the radioactive heat on Earth.

You Honestly Believe We Live On A Ball?

The Earth is flat, and if you disagree you are blinded by science… In this blog post I’m going to unpack some of the most convincing arguments for a flat Earth, and provide a hopefully reasonable scientific response to these questions.

Look with your own eyes, look off into the horizon, if the earth is flat then you would no be able to see things that are far away, they would be lost from sight due to the curvature of the Earth. A simple misunderstanding of the scale of Earth relative to what an individual can perceive can lead to a real conundrum when approached with this question. Indeed from an individuals perspective, the curvature of the Earth is almost impossible to see for yourself.

Common sense will tell you that if we were really spinning on a ball at 1,000 mph while the ball itself orbits the sun traveling through space at many thousands of mph, then we would feel this incredibly fast motion, and most likely even be flung off of the earth into space. It is true that one’s common sense may lead them to this belief, but a scientific approach reminds us that what the human body really feels in regards to motion is acceleration, not velocity. So the fact of Earths orbital speed and the speed of its spin, does not mean that we should necessarily feel the motion, or be flung off the surface into space.

The 1 Shocking Discovery NASA Doesn’t Want You To Know…

: VectorStock

For most, the discoveries of NASA are taken at face value and seen as trustworthy. However, for a growing number of conspiracists, alternative facts are rising into prevalence. I would like to introduce one of these alternative facts in this blog post. Although it may seem unbelievable, hopefully after a proper explanation, you can come to see how some people may come to adopt this mindset.

Alien life on mars is alive and well, and the government knows about it. This idea stems from an interesting photo taken of Mars’ surface.

space-conspiracy-theory-face — HowStuffWorks

Even a non conspiracist can recognize that this looks a lot like a face. Possibly the face of a monkey. And if there is a face of that magnitude on the surface of Mars, then there must be a sophisticated civilization on the planet capable of creating such a monument.

If you would like to travel further into this conspiracy you will have to conquer some pretty discouraging evidence. Further Mars missions have given us a much clearer view of the surface and NASA now confirms that the face was just an illusion caused by shadows and the angle of the original photos taken from the Viking 1 and 2 missions. However this could just be the claims of NASA trying to discourage the adoption of the knowledge of alien life on Mars. They could be releasing doctored photos specifically designed to cover up the alien existence.

The tendency to see patterns in placed where they are actually not intended is commonly known as pareidolia, and is a confirmed behavior that we recognize is humans in general. This is what NASA claims is happening with the face on Mars. Although there truly is no face, many people exhibit the pattern of pareidolia and perceive there to be a face. A properly entrenched conspiracy believer however may even come to the conclusion that the concept of pareidolia was itself invented to make people doubt the security of what they are seeing with their own eyes. So the people are so easily manipulated that they will believe NASA over what they see with their own eyes.

“Current” Events on Tides

Saltstraumen videoblocks-whirlpools-of-the-maelstrom-of-saltstraumen-nordland-norway_hrqs7gkbw_thumbnail-full01.png Video Blocks

The strait at Saltstraumen is one of the most interesting straits on the planet, and it has to do with more than just its notable beauty. Saltstraumen is the location of one of the strongest tidal currents in the world. When the tides come in and out from the large bodies of water on either side of the strait, the water is confined to a much smaller space in the strait and rushes through at speeds up to 7 knots on inflow, and 8 knots on outflow. With water speeds like this, whirlpools form in the strait that can reach up to 10 meters in diameter. The water isn’t always rushing though. Since the tide comes in and then out, there is a point where the water is somewhat calm and crossable while everything is “turning around”. As the Earth spins, the sides closest and furthest from the Moon will experience high tide, and the perpendicular sides will be at low tide. So while the location is transitioning from being in a high tide orientation to a low tide orientation there is a time when the water is no longer being moved by the tidal force.

Historical Astronomers in Context

Johannes Kepler – Born: December 27; 1571, Died: November 15, 1630. Want to learn more? Click HERE.

Virginia. This was the era where the United States did not exist yet, and the English were just beginning to cross the Atlantic and settle in the territory. Jamestown’s settlement was very important to establishing the future of the land. Want to learn more? Click HERE.

In 1611 the King James Version of the Bible was published in England. This was a huge revolution for the Church because before this point only elect members of the clergy had everyday access to the scriptures. Since the time of this publication, the Bible has become the most circulated and read book of all time. According to Wikipedia there has been an estimated 5 billion copies sold and distributed worldwide. Want to learn more? Click HERE.

1564-1616; the life of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare is one of the most famous playwrights of all time. Works of his like: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and MacBeth live on to this day and are still taught in classrooms around the world. He is credited with some of the first prominent uses of prose in drama. He set a whole new standard for what a play or drama can be. Want to learn more? Click HERE.

It’s important to understand the context that someone is operating out of in order to fully appreciate the progress they made. For example, simply hearing “Alex Smith completed an Iron Man race” would not tend to bring much inspiration to anyone. But when you look at the context of his life, that he completed the Iron Man while pulling his 5-year-old son suffering from muscular dystrophy along with him the entire time, the story brings with it much more power. Likewise, in the context of the astronomers and the history of science, it’s helpful to know the context from which they made their discoveries. For Kepler, he was establishing the basis of long-lasting mathematical principles, at the same time that modern prose was first beginning to evolve through the works of Shakespeare.

The Dark Side of the Moon

Besides a popular Pink Floyd album, what is “the dark side of the Moon”? Most people have not given much though to what it means or how it got its infamous name. For me the first image I get is of the moon I know and love turning over to the dark side of the force, much like Anakin from Star Wars when he becomes Darth Vader. In reality, however, there are no red lightsabers or Sith involved, just science…

The dark side of the Moon is a somewhat misleading name because it may lead a newbie astronomer to believe that the dark side of the Moon never actually has any sunlight touch it. It’s not a stretch to assume that the dark side would always be dark. What the dark side really is though, is the side of the moon that never reflects any light towards Earth. An observer from Earth can never see the dark side of the Moon, a more accurate name for the dark side of the Moon is “the far side of the Moon”. The far side of the Moon is the side of the Moon facing away from earth. The meaning of dark in the earlier name refers to the unseen or unknown nature of the side, rather than the absence of light on that side.

“But wait,” a newbie astronomer might ask, “since the Earth is constantly rotating, and the Moon is constantly orbiting the Earth, wouldn’t an observer from Earth eventually see all sides of the Moon?”

A person with this questions asks so rightly, but they are unaware that the moon is in synchronous rotation with the Earth. That means that the Moon spins on its axis at the same rate that is orbits the Earth. As the Moon orbits the Earth, it spins at just the right rate so that the same side of the Moon is always pointing towards Earth. It may seem like a phenomenal coincidence, but many moons that orbit close to their planet like ours are locked into synchronous orbits as well.

First Post

My name is Josiah Gray, but my friends call me JD. I’m from Detroit and I came to Vanderbilt because it was too cold up there.

That photo above is the one painting I have made in my life. Objectively a poorly done painting, I’ll be the first to admit I am no artist. But it’s something that represents me, I like to do things my own way. As long as I’m sharing things about me, I’ll tell you about the video blog I made when I was a senior in high school. It’s called the Friday Fill, I made it for my high school newspaper website. Here is a link to the one video of the series that won an award.