Jumping Bunnies!

Driving me to distraction: my cartoon app will no longer
publish a movie. It just says it has to close and shuts down.
I can, of course, run images in MMovie Maker, but the animations,
such as jumping bunnies, are lost.

Needless to say, I've reinstalled the app (a couple of times). Argh...

Le maquis

The areas in green on the map designate areas with a distinctive
family of plants, all subject to Mediterranean climate; in French, the maquis.
Wikipedia gives a list of the drought resistant plants one often finds
in a maquis and, surprisingly, many are flowers. A formation végétale has
particular plants which give the region particular appearance. We are
here dealing with the classification of ecological regions.

People have been living around the Mediterranean for a long time...

The maquis has cultural significance as well. 20% of Corsica
is a maquis, and the folks who live there are tough. Indeed, The
Resistance during World War ll was populated with maquisards.

I could be wrong here, but planting desert flowers and other water
retaining plants might be one way of reducing the severity of autumnal
brush fires...

Purple

The alarm on the current fires around Los Angeles has reached the purple
stage - highest after yellow, orange and red. That is because, winds for the day, are
expected to be too strong for fire fighting planes to take off.


https://www.msn.com/fr-ca/actualites/monde/los-angeles-menac%c3%a9e-par-des-feux-de-for%c3%aat-dune-intensit%c3%a9-sans-pr%c3%a9c%c3%a9dent/ar-BBGlSqR?li=AAgh0dy

MICROSCOPE

There was a fair amount of excitement in the French press
yesterday, as the the results form Microscope - a spaced-based
experiment (micro-satellite) to measure the speed of acceleration due
to gravity - were made public. Confirmation that everything falls at the
same speed has now been accredited to one more decimal place: 2*10^-14.
This is generally seen as an endorsement of Einstein's General Relativity.

This is an important finding for physics - indeed a disappointment for some -
because those trying to unify Astronomy physics all the way down to
Quantum physics had left a margin for a break from this regularity, within String
theory. Perhaps at a greater level of precision, still, ventured the authors...

If one reflects upon this, and in the absence of a story line on how gravity actually
works, it is a little odd that absolutely everything falls at the same speed...in point
of fact, accelerates downward the same. I could be standing on the moon, and the book
I drop will hurry down the same as one on earth, because the mass of the object is not
involved, only the fact of gravity. What will be different is the force of the impact at
it hits the ground, because things weigh less on the moon. As always, Newton's
f = ma holds!

We should probably be thankful for this. As one journalist covering the story remarked,
it would be a very dangerous world to live in if this was not the case.

Conclusion, for now: gravity is a constant, just like the speed of light. The universe Tinder
dates 😚

https://microscope.cnes.fr/fr/premiers-resultats-de-la-gravite-au-microscope

Planetary

The NASA app allows one to explore various things: Earth, or the Solar
System. Takes getting used to...

source: NASA's Eyes

For those interested in Milankovitch cycles:
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Milankovitch/milankovitch_2.php

Earth Picture

We are all conditioned to view Earth as a large blue marble;
which it is, up to a point. The NASA figures we are used to are
the result of a montage of many images. One needs to go back to Apollo missions
to the moon for a one-shot view, with the frayed surface features visible.

We also have a picture from a Russian weather satellite. It all really depends
on the information one wants.

One particularly interesting view is the ESA geoid of gravity;
because gravitational force differs greatly at different points on the globe.
It is a very dramatic image, useful for navigation, oil exploration and...
ballistics!


http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/GOCE/Earth_s_gravity_revealed_in_unprecedented_detail

I'm a Saggitarius!

It's my BDay this week and I got a new hairdryer... before everything
freezes over...

#I💖tech   #I'ma♐