Naturalist's Almanac

At midnight on December 31, 2000, the U.S. Naval Observatory will drop their time ball to celebrate the beginning of the new millennium. Most people did their celebrating last year when 1999 gave way to 2000, but astronomers and other purists have been holding out for 2001.

Technically, the first year of the third millennium is 2001. That’s because the first year of the first millennium was 1, making the first year of the second millennium 1001, and the first year of the third millennium 2001.

If we wanted our decades, centuries, and millennia to begin with zeros, our first millennium would have had to begin with a zero. But that was impossible because the concept of zero was still evolving among the Hindus in India when the anno Domini, or A.D., system of counting years was invented by a Christian monk in Europe.

In the year people of the time knew as 241 because it had been 241 years since the Roman Emperor Diocletian began his reign, Christians were faced with the fact that their existing cycle of Easter dates would run out in the year 247. Because Christians would be needing new Easter dates to organize their church calendars, a scholarly monk named Dionysius set himself to calculating a new cycle.

He had no trouble using existing formulas to calculate future Easters, but while he was at it, he decided he’d also like to track Easters all the way back to the year Christ was born. His computations took him back exactly 532 years. So in addition to establishing the future dates for Easter, Dionysius also decided to propose a new way for Christians to reckon time.

Christian time would henceforth be counted from the year of Christ’s birth rather than from the beginning of Diocletian’s reign. Dionysius’s new Easter dates would belong to years that would be known as anni Domini nostri Jesu Christi — years of our Lord Jesus Christ — and his first new Easter would occur not in Diocletian year 248 but in anno Domini (A.D.) 532.

If Dionysius had had the Hindus’ zero to work with, maybe he would have counted the years of Christ’s life the way we now count children’s birthdays. The year Christ was born, which marked the beginning of the Christians’ first millennium, would have belonged to the year zero, and the year A.D. 1 would have waited for the celebration of Christ’s first birthday. That way the year A.D. 1000 would have begun the second millennium and A.D. 2000 would be the beginning of the third millennium. The way things are now we are doomed to endless arguments every time we approach a new decade, century, or millennium.

Actually, only astronomers, with their need for precise and continuous time, are really bothered by Dionysius’s missing zero. And they have merely inserted it where it belongs — as the year before A.D. 1 — and work from a master chronology much longer than 532 years to keep their astronomical dates where they belong no matter what the rest of us decide to do with our all-too-human calendars.

MORE INFORMATION

U.S. Naval Observatory and the Third Millennium
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/millennium.html

The U. S. Naval Observatory says the 3rd millenium will begin with AD 2001 and explains the shortcomings of Dionysius' new timekeeping system.

British National Maritime Museum and the New Millennium
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/conWebDoc.2939/viewPage/1

This is a 5-part discussion of the new millennium prepared by the British National Maritime Museum to answer the many questions that were coming its way in 2000 and 2001.

Millennium - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennial

The Wikipedia explains the difference between ordinal and cardinal numbers and discusses ongoing debates over when millennia begin and end in considerable detail.

Dionysius Exiguus - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysius_Exiguus

The Wikipedia offers a substantial explanation of who Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis the Little) was and wasn't, what he knew and didn't know, and what he did and didn't do to Easter dates and his new system for numbering years.

Most of our celebrations are so old and have such highly evolved traditions that it's difficult to remember exactly why we do what we do. The African American celebration called Kwanzaa offers us an opportunity to observe a new tradition in the making. In the year 2000, it is only 34 years old.

Back in 1966, Maulana Karenga, a professor of Black Studies, felt the need for a distinctively African American celebration. He decided it should derive from African harvest festivals but be uniquely American. Therefore, he named it Kwanzaa — with two "a"'s. Kwanza with one "a" is the existing Swahili word for "first" as in "first fruits of the harvest," but Kwanzaa with two "a"'s would be a new word for the new celebration.

Inventing a celebration from scratch isn't the easiest thing to do, but Karenga apparently did a good job. Thirty-four years later, more than 18 million people are observing Kwanzaa. The elements are quite simple: seven days, seven symbols, and seven principles.

The seven days are strategically located between Christmas and the New Year — December 26 to January 1 — enabling African Americans to add Kwanzaa to what they already do or offering them a clear and positive alternative to what everyone else is doing.

The seven symbols include fruits and vegetables to represent the harvest, an African placemat to represent history, a communal cup to represent unity, a candle holder to represent ancestors, seven candles (one black to represent unity, three red to represent struggle, and three green to represent hope), ears of dry corn to represent children, and simple handmade or educational gifts to represent rewards for having lived according to Kwanzaa principles throughout the year.

The seven Kwanzaa principles are unity, self-determination, collective work/responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. Each evening, the family gathers to light a new candle and focus together on the day's principle. All the principles work together to strengthen both the family and the African American community.

Anyone who feels stressed by the excesses of Christmas and the New Year can learn from the values emphasized during Kwanzaa. Perhaps in inventing a new tradition, Maulana Karenga has invited all of us to rethink the old.

MORE INFORMATION

OFFICIAL KWANZAA WEB SITE

This Web site includes messages directly from the founder of Kwanzaa, Dr. Maulana Karenga. There’s his Welcome plus eight sections of history and explanations of Kwanzaa practices, answers to Frequently Asked Questions, the text of a speech he delivered when the U.S. Postal Service issued the Kwanzaa commemorative in 1997, and a bookstore/gift shop offering Kwanzaa-related items. It’s the most authoritative of the various Kwanzaa sites that have sprung up on the Web.

HISTORY CHANNEL

Brief and graphically attractive explanation of Kwanzaa, its history, the seven symbols, and the seven principles.

It's no wonder that during the Christmas season Santa Claus wants to leave home and travel around a bit. In December, the North Pole has to be one of the most inhospitable places on Earth.

For starters, it's three months into the six-month darkness that reigns from the fall equinox in September until the spring equinox in March. Just a few days before Christmas, at the winter solstice, the sun never even peeps above the horizon, making that particular day one long night.

It's also cold — as in totally frozen. Because there's no land at the North Pole, Santa had to build his workshop on ice. The polar ice pack is a jumbled mass that cracks, jams, melts a bit, and refreezes, creating a surface that's difficult to navigate.

But at least Santa doesn't have to worry about falling through. When the first submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus, traveled under the polar ice pack to reach the North Pole by water, it measured thicknesses of up to fifty feet.

In addition to being dark and cold, what Santa called the North Pole yesterday might not be the North Pole tomorrow. That's because the polar ice pack floats, moving with the currents of the Arctic Ocean.

So Santa has to keep relocating his workshop to be sure he's where he's supposed to be — at the geographic North Pole, the point where the Earth's axis would emerge if it were a metal rod as our familiar globes imply.

Furthermore, if Santa gets lost, he can't use a compass to find his way home. A compass would point him to the magnetic North Pole, which is different from the geographic North Pole. Magnetic north is not a fixed point but a shifting region that's currently about a thousand miles from where Santa wants to be.

If Santa ever became totally disoriented in the darkness on his floating ice pack, with a shifting magnetic pole trying to lure him off in the wrong direction, the best thing for him to do is probably what he already does at the end of his Christmas travels: point his trusty reindeer directly toward the North Star and count on them to find their way home.

MORE INFORMATION

Arctic Theme Page
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/education.html

When you first see the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic theme page you may think you’ve hit a dud because there are no pictures or graphics or anything else to attract your visual attention. But if you look more closely you will see what a wealth of information is available from this starting point. First, check out their own offerings by visiting their Gallery (which includes archival photos of Robert Peary in 1909), their Essays (which include Ask an Expert answers to intriguing questions) and their Frequently Asked Questions (which include answers to most of the common questions you might be asking). They also list 30-some links to other Web sites that invite further explorations of the arctic.

Magnetic North
http://geo.phys.uit.no/articl/roadto.html

One aspect of the North Pole that fascinates me is the existence of two of them: geographic and magnetic. This Web link will take you to a substantial essay on the history of magnetism, compasses, and the discovery of the magnetic north.

The winter solstice occurs around December 21-22 every year and confronts me with a night that lasts so long that some primitive part of my brain wonders if the sun is ever going to rise again. At this time of year I walk up and down my road, looking at the sun from various angles and at different times of day, trying to understand textbook explanations of what’s happening.

The best I can do is envision a simplified solar system with the sun a big ball at the center and the Earth a smaller ball orbiting around it. If I freeze-frame this simplified solar system, drive a rod through the center of the Earth, and tilt the rod away from the sun, I see exactly what happens at the winter solstice: the tilted Earth’s Northern Hemisphere points as far away from the sun as it’s going to point all year.

But why are the days so dark and the nights so long? The textbooks invite me to imagine a flat horizon with clear views both east and west. They show the sun rising later and farther south every morning, traveling lower across the daytime sky, and setting earlier at the end of a shorter arc. No wonder that primitive part of my brain worries that it’s going to disappear altogether.

Recently, one of my elderly farm neighbors, who was sitting quietly at his kitchen window watching the sun itself while I was pacing up and down the road, gave me a special gift. He loved to watch the sun come up every morning and decided to draw an extended picture of how the sunrise moves along the horizon he could see from where he sat.

Because this horizon includes a distinctive mountain called Camel’s Hump, his drawing shows clearly what the sun does between the summer and winter solstices. It rises well to the left of Camel’s Hump on June 20 and well to the right on December 21. If he had also included how high the sun travels above the horizon, it would show exactly what my textbook graphics with all their intersecting planes and arcs were trying to explain.

I am grateful to have a copy of my neighbor’s “horizon calendar,” which he gave me shortly before he died. I framed it and keep it on the wall above my desk to remind me that despite my continuing efforts to understand the whole solar system, my daily life takes place right here on Earth. My own horizon, if I attend to it, will teach me what’s important about the sun — that it will indeed rise again after the longest night, reverse direction, and start its six-month journey back toward the longest day.

MORE INFORMATION

Windows to the Universe
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/the_universe/uts/winter.html

This Web site offers about as clear an explanation of the winter solstice as I’ve found. It includes colorful graphics to illustrate the concepts I wrestle with whenever I try to think about the Earth as a planet rotating on a a tilted axis and traveling in an elliptical orbit around the sun.

U.S. Naval Observatory
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/EarthSeasons.html

If all you want to know is the date and time of the winter solstice, this link will take you to the U.S. Naval Observatory’s list for 1992-2005.

Horizon Calendar
http://www.clarkfoundation.org/astro-utah/vondel/suncalendar.html

This link takes you to a newspaper column written by an astronomer who happens to be the retired director of the Hansen Planetarium in Salt Lake City. This particular column talks about creating a horizon calendar like my neighbor's.

Winter Solstice Celebrations
http://www.clarkfoundation.org/astro-utah/vondel/solsticewin.html

In this column the same astronomer talks about how various cultures have observed or celebrated the winter solstice over the centuries. He mentions the Zoroastrians, Zuni, Hopi, Romans, and Christians.

Festivals of Light
http://www.clarkfoundation.org/astro-utah/vondel/FestivalsOfLight.html

In yet another column this same very interesting astronomer discusses why we turn on so many lights during December and why we have chosen to make the transition from one year to the next at this particular time of year.

November 11 is St. Martin’s Day, a day devoted to Martin of Tours, a popular fourth century bishop known for his humility, charity, and kindness to beggars. Because November is a time of seasonal change, numerous weather beliefs have become associated with his saint’s day.

Some of these beliefs are cast as proverbs that try to predict the quality of winter from the weather on November 11. Others are merely descriptive of weather that might occur around November 11. Of these, the most reliable is that St. Martin’s Day might bring a period of warmth.

The English call such a warm spell St. Martin’s summer. They also look for a St. Luke’s summer around October 18 and an All Hallows summer around November 1. The English colonists who settled in this country during the 17th century encountered similar warm spells but different weather beliefs.

Some of their new neighbors believed that pleasant fall weather was a gift sent by a benevolent god who lived in the Southwest. The Narragansetts, who lived in what is now Rhode island, called this god Cautantowwit and looked for good weather whenever the wind blew from the Southwest.

By the 18th century, when St. John de Crevecoeur wrote Letters from an American Farmer, Americans were no longer calling spells of warm fall weather by the names of Christian saints but rather by the new name Indian summer.

Indian summer has since been analyzed by meteorologists as a singularity, a weather pattern that tends to occur at the same time of year more frequently than chance alone would indicate. They explain that the warmth of Indian summer is caused by a high pressure system that settles over the Southeast in the fall.

Unlike hurricanes, which are low pressure systems that rotate counterclockwise and blow wet, windy weather up from the Southeast, these fall highs rotate clockwise and blow warm, dry weather up from the Southwest.

Some years the southwestern winds bring several periods of Indian summer in both October and November. Other years they bring none. The English habit of associating a warm spell around November 11 with St. Martin’s Day offers a useful way to anticipate it. But Indian summer, with its suggestion of a benevolent god sending warm fall weather on a southwest wind, actually does a better job of explaining it.

MORE INFORMATION

American Meteorological Society Glossary

The American Meteorological Society offers an official definition of St. Martin's Summer in this online version of their glossary. They include links to their definitions of Indian summer, St. Luke's summer, All-Hallown summer, and Old Wives' summer.

John Singer Sargent's St Martins Summer

This gallery site offers an image of John Singer Sargent's lovely oil painting entitled St Martins Summer. You can click on the image to get a closer view.

Martin of Tours - Wikipedia

The Wikipedia offers several nice graphics plus ample biographical information on Saint Martin of Tours plus a link to the Catholic Encyclopedia, but no mention of St. Martin's summer. If I were a better person I would figure out how to join the Wikipedia crowd and add a paragraph to their entry ....

I cross Vermont's Winooski River or drive along it almost every day and consider it a friendly river. But in 1927 it was decidedly unfriendly. That year was rainy, October was exceptionally rainy, and by early November the Winooski was ready to flood.

Vermont records show a light rain starting at about 9:00 p.m. the night of November 2 and turning into a downpour at about 4:00 a.m. the next morning. By later the morning of November 3, this rainfall was breaking records all over the state.

Two weather systems had converged to drop what one meteorologist estimated to be a cubic mile of solid water lifted from the surface of the Atlantic Ocean onto Vermont. The result was the 1927 flood — the worst natural disaster in Vermont’s history. Rivers all over the state flooded, but the one that did the most damage was the Winooski, which carries water all the way from Cabot down through communities such as Barre, Montpelier, Waterbury, and Richmond to Lake Champlain.

By the time the flooding ended on November 4, 84 Vermonters were dead, 48 of them in the Winooski River Valley. According to the Vermont State Archives, the 1927 flood caused more than $30 million in damage, including $8 million to railroads and $7 million to highways. More than 1200 bridges were damaged or destroyed, and some 690 farms lost 3,000 cows.

The 1927 flood was so devastating that both state and federal governments became involved in local clean-up and repair. Some smaller railroads were eliminated, many dirt roads were blacktopped, and flood-control projects dammed old rivers in new ways. This one natural disaster resulted in political, social, economic, and ecological changes that Vermonters are still trying to find a relationship to.

As I cross the Winooski or drive along it, I see it in many moods, but I’ve never seen it as it was on November 3, 1927. The best I can do is imagine its power, maintain a respectful distance when I see it rising, and trust it to do what it must as it transports water gathered from its many tributaries back toward the sea.

MORE INFORMATION

Historic Photographs of 1927 Flood
http://www.uvm.edu/perkins/landscape/1927_flood/flood.htm

This treasure trove of historic photographs is the creation of the University of Vermont Department of Geography’s Landscape Change Program. They include 357 photos of the Flood of 1927 among their flood photos, which also include 67 aerial photos of this historic flood.

National Weather Service Report
http://www.erh.noaa.gov/btv/html/27flood.shtml

This National Weather Service report on Vermont’s Flood of 1927 includes an overview of the flood, a chart showing early November rainfall data from 29 towns, and a summary of the flood’s effect on the entire state.

Samhain — the Celtic ancestor of today's Halloween — was both the last of the four seasonal celebrations that divided the Celtic year into quarters (see Imbolc, Beltane, and Lughnasa) and the first of their new year. The word samhain means the end of summer, but the time of year meant the beginning of winter. The Celts chose this celebrational but ominous turning point as their New Year.

Their harvest was in, their livestock were back from summer pastures, and their families were as ready as they could be for the long winter ahead. To celebrate the New Year, the Celts spent a long eerie night honoring their dead, who might be wandering around cold and lonely at this transitional time of year. They lit bonfires and prepared food for any of the dead who might come to call. Other more negative spirits might also be abroad, which added an element of fear to the occasion.

As far as today's Halloween is concerned, we have the Celts to thank for the skeletons, ghosts, goblins, and other scary or supernatural elements. We can also thank them for the the fact that we celebrate Halloween at night. Because Celtic days began at sunset, their festivals always began in the evening and lasted until well after dark.

When the Romans invaded Celtic lands, they added their own November harvest festival to Samhain. So Halloween's harvest elements — especially apples and nuts — came from the Romans. Later, when the Christians began to dominate Roman and European cultures, they added the church's celebration of dead saints and martyrs — All Hallows — to Samhain. So it was the Christians who gave us the name we now use: All Hallow's Eve modernized to Halloween. Finally, during the 1840s, the Irish fleeing their potato famine added the jack-o'-lantern to customs evolving in this country. In Ireland, children had carved rutabagas, turnips, or potatoes, but our native pumpkins made much bigger and brighter jack-o'-lanterns.

Of the Celts' four seasonal celebrations, only Samhain has persisted with some of its original power still intact. Imbolc has degenerated into a somewhat ridiculous Groundhog Day, Beltane has become an international labor day, and Lughnasa has been forgotten altogether.

But Samhain survives as our massively popular Halloween — a Celtic, Roman, Christian, Irish, and now thoroughly American celebration. It invites us, as it did the ancient Celts, to take an eerie but festive break between the ease of summer that's now behind us and the rigors of winter that loom ahead.


MORE INFORMATION

Samhain and Halloween
http://www.utah.edu/planetarium/CQHalloween.html

Not many scientists write about the Celtic cross-quarter days, but this one does. As the former director of the Hansen Planetarium in Utah, he knows his astronomy — and also his weather, his natural history, and other cultures’ practices with respect to the solar year. He writes a newspaper column called “Looking Around” from which this very readable essay is adapted.

Samhain - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain

The Wikipedia offers a substantial article on Samhain with cross-references to Halloween.

National Metric Week occurs every October during the week that includes the 10th. So look for some discussion of the metric system every year about then.

The metric system, which is based on the meter and the number 10, has a 200-year history, but it’s still a relative newcomer to the world of measurement. Long before exact measurements became culturally important, human beings just used their body parts to approximate sizes and distances.

Native Americans, for instance, used their fingers, hands, forearms, and arms. The Greeks used their feet, and the Romans subdivided a foot into 12 units called unciae, from which the English word inches is derived.

When the Romans invaded northern Europe, they brought the 12-inch foot with them, and the northern Europeans added it to their own evolving yard. The yard was originally based on the size of a king’s waist, but King Henry I redefined it as the distance from the tip of his nose to the end of his outstretched thumb.

Later King Edward I defined the foot as one-third of a yard and the inch as one-thirty-sixth of a yard. And that’s the complicated British imperial system — which is actually based on the Romans’ attachment to the number 12 — that our ancestors brought with them to this continent. We still cling to this system as if it were our own invention.

The French were actually the inventive ones. After their revolution, the new leaders wanted a completely new system of measurement that would be based on scientific principles rather than Roman inches and British body parts. They came up with the metric system as a totally simple, internally consistent set of measurements based on the size of the earth.

The original meter was to be one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the equator — by way of Paris, of course. French astronomers spent six years measuring that distance and deriving the exact length of the standard meter. Other metric units were based on the meter divided by or multiplied by the number 10.

In 1790, Thomas Jefferson proposed that we adopt a similar system, but over 200 years later we’re still clinging to the old British imperial system that even the British have now abandoned. National Metric Week might indeed be a good time to reconsider the metric system. It seems to work for everybody except us.

MORE INFORMATION

Google Calculator
http://www.google.com/

One of the simplest ways to convert U. S. measurements to metric or metric to U. S. measurements is to type the conversion you want into the Google search box. For example, if you want to know how many centimeters there are in an inch, type 1 inch in centimeters into the search box, click on search, and the answer appears like magic: 1 inch = 2.54 centimeters. 1 meter in inches produces: 1 meter = 39.3700787 inches.

Conversion Tables
http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Miscellaneous/ConversionTables/conversion_table.html

If you’d rather use math to do your conversions, this Cascades Volcano Observatory site offers a convenient table of all the formulas you’ll need.

Chronology
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/dates.htm

This U. S. Metric Association site offers a detailed chronology of the history of the metric system, starting in 1585 and ending with deadlines that will occur in 2009.

History
http://www.cftech.com/BrainBank/OTHERREFERENCE/WEIGHTSandMEASURES/MetricHistory.html

If you want to read a substantial history of measurement and how the metric system fits in, this long essay will provide you with lots of background information.

Imagine that you went to bed the night of October 4 and woke up the next morning to find that it’s October 15. That’s exactly what happened in 1582, thanks to Pope Gregory XIII’s reform of the calendar that now governs our daily lives.

Pope Gregory XIII was faced with three major problems: Julius Caesar’s faulty leap year formula, the church’s decree that March 21 would always be the date of the spring equinox, and the perpetual challenge of determining when Easter would be.

The leap year problem began back in 46 B.C., when Caesar’s astronomer, Sosigenes, told him that a solar year had 365.25 days. That figure was 11 minutes 14 seconds too long, and the regular addition of an extra leap day every four years caused Caesar's calendar to drift away from the solar seasons.

At first the extra days didn’t make much difference. But by A.D. 325, when church leaders met at Nicea, there were observable problems. The spring equinox, which occurred on March 25 in Caesar’s day, had drifted to March 21.

Instead of solving the leap year problem, the Council of Nicea merely decreed that henceforth the spring equinox would always occur on March 21. So the extra leap days kept accumulating, and by 1582, the real spring equinox had drifted all the way to March 11.

Pope Gregory decided to address himself to the leap year-equinox-Easter problem once and for all. His astronomers, Aloysius Lilius and Christopher Clavius, had estimated that a solar year actually lasts only 365.2425 days. Therefore, they decided the calendar should omit three leap years every 400 years to stay in sync with the sun.

But first Pope Gregory had to get rid of the 10 extra days that had accumulated since the Council of Nicea. He decided to drop the 10 days between October 4 and 15 because that block of days was conveniently free of church holy days.

Then he had to correct the leap year formula, which he did by omitting leap years in the century years that cannot be divided by 400. So 1600 was a leap year, 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not, and 2000 was again.

Modern astronomers have determined that Pope Gregory’s reformed calendar is still based on an imprecision of about 26 seconds a year. Taking into account the additional reality that the solar year is decreasing in length, these astronomers estimate that a new adjustment will be necessary in about A.D. 3719.

By then, maybe the world will be ready for another calendar reform — or maybe just a special day-with-no-date to keep Pope Gregory’s 1582 calendar aligned with the sun.

MORE INFORMATION

Catholic Encyclopedia
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03168a.htm

This basic article includes all the important details of what Pope Gregory was up against and what he did about it.

Calendar Reform
http://personal.ecu.edu/mccartyr/calendar-reform.html

This site offers a history of calendars and calendar reform plus current proposals for new reforms, including the World Calendar, which would have equal-length quarters and be the same every year. It offers numerous links to other information on calendars and calendar reform.

Gregorian Calendar - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar

The volunteer author of this entry seems to know about as much about calendars and calendar reform as anyone else I’ve encountered in my researches. The article is long, includes lots of internal and external links (plus a list of “See Also’s”), and offers some interesting graphics and useful charts.

Many older Vermonters still remember the Hurricane of September 21, 1938. One friend told me her grandmother gathered the family around her, assigned parts, and conducted a dramatic reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Another friend remembers trees being down on all the roads that led to his school.

According to the National Weather Service, the Hurricane of 1938 was the most powerful and destructive storm to hit New England during the 20th century. And David Ludlum, in discussing Vermont’s weather disasters, ranks this hurricane second only to the Flood of 1927.

This hurricane was even more devastating than it might have been because it arrived without warning. The National Weather Service was quite certain that it would blow out to sea before it made landfall. Only one junior forecaster predicted that it was headed straight toward Long Island and New England.

So when the hurricane made landfall on Long Island in the middle of the afternoon on September 21, it caught people enjoying a warm fall day at the beach. They noticed large whitecaps and saw what they thought was a fog bank rolling toward them, but they had no idea a hurricane was about to hit.

The “fog” turned out to be a huge wave of water — the hurricane’s storm surge. Survivors of that initial surprise thought the worst was over when the sky cleared and the sun came out, but about an hour later the storm came back. The calm within the hurricane’s huge eye had merely deceived them and then dealt a second surprise.

By 6 p.m., the hurricane had roared from Long Island to Vermont. The center blew through Marlboro and followed a track from Weston to Rutland, Brandon, Middlebury, and Vergennes. At about 9 p.m. it left, headed toward Montreal where it damaged one last city before dissipating over Canada.

The Hurricane of 1938 damaged all of New England’s forests, but according to David Ludlum, Vermont’s “suffered most severely.” Hundreds of thousands of trees went down. You can still see evidence of the wind in the remains of the trees or their root mounds. All point to the northwest, indicating a hurricane.

The Hurricane of 1938 remains one of the worst weather disasters ever to strike New England. But if a similar storm struck today, it would do even more damage because so many more people live in its track. Case studies show that a repeat could be the greatest weather disaster in U.S. history — which should keep us Vermonters respectful of the occasional hurricanes that blow our way.

MORE INFORMATION:

American Experience | The Hurricane of '38 | Maps
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/hurricane38/maps/index.html

The Hurricane of 1983 made landfall on September 21. This PBS site includes a map of the hurricane's route, historic photos, and descriptive text.

The Great Hurricane of 1938 - The Long Island Express
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/38hurricane/

A professor at the State University of New York at Suffolk produced this comprehensive history of the hurricane New Yorkers know as the Long Island Express.

THE GREAT NEW ENGLAND HURRICANE of 1938 (CAT 3 - September 21)
http://www.erh.noaa.gov/er/box/hurricane1938.htm

The National Weather Service offers this brief official history of the hurricane.

Labor Day occurs every year on the first Monday in September. It's a good time to think about the natural history of work. Having recently retired, I am exploring what work means, and I find myself wondering where something as fixed and unnatural as the standard 8-hour, 5-day, 40-hour work week came from.

For primitive hunters and gatherers, there's really no such thing as "work" that's separate from the rest of life. Men, women, and children do what they need to do to survive, and they do it when it needs to be done. Day, night, and the seasons — not the time clock and calendar — govern everyone's activities.

With agriculture came change. Subsistence agriculture still involved working as long and as hard as necessary to survive, but larger scale agriculture began to dictate new ways of doing things: work now became something that workers had to do for someone else, not just themselves, their family, or their tribe.

Individuals no longer owned what they produced, and everyone became dependent on others for the various things they needed. Workers had to stay on their assigned jobs from sunrise to sunset, performing tasks that were only indirectly connected to their personal survival.

The industrial revolution introduced yet new complexities. Sunrise to sunset was too long to expect people to work indoors at tasks that were now totally disconnected from personal survival. Factory workers became unhappy and began to push for shorter hours.

First they asked for a limit of 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. During the 1800s, they asked for 10 hours, 6 days a week. Labor Day was introduced in 1882, when most Americans were still working 60 hours a week and only dreaming of a 48-hour week, which didn't become the norm until World War I.

It wasn't until 1938 that the Fair Labor Standards Act started the final countdown: 44 hours in 1938, 42 hours in 1939, and 40 hours in 1940. So the 8-hour, 5-day, 40-hour work week has only been with us for about as long as an early retiree like myself has been alive.

Certainly I can unlearn a concept that has been around for such a brief period. I'd like to spend at least the early stages of my retirement exploring how work, once detached from clock and calendar time, might once again be more directly connected to survival — in a much altered world.

MORE INFORMATION

U.S. Department of Labor
http://www.dol.gov/opa/aboutdol/laborday.htm

This is the Department of Labor’s History of Labor Day. It tells us that the first Labor Day was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882 in New York City. In 1884, the first Monday in September was selected as the holiday, and by 1885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers. Finally, in 1894, Congress passed the legislation that made it a legal holiday everywhere.

PBS News Hour Special
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/september96/labor_day_9-2.html

This PBS Online News Hour special offers an interesting introduction to Labor Day, focusing on the Pullman (railroad sleeping car) strike in Illinois that led to the legislation that made Labor Day a legal holiday. It includes links to other News Hour materials related to labor.

USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/hurricane/history/labor-day-hurricanes.htm

Elsewhere among USA Today’s hurricane materials is this discussion of hurricanes that have hit during the Labor Day weekend since 1935. They list six hurricanes, with links to more information about some of them.

The Battle of Bennington, which occurred on August 16, 1777, isn’t celebrated by many people besides Vermonters, and many Vermonters aren’t even clear about why Vermont’s state offices are closed that day. Furthermore, it wasn’t even fought in Vermont.
But it was indeed a crucial battle, the first in a series of events that led to what historians now consider the turning point of the American Revolution. It also demonstrates how geography and weather shape history.

By the summer of 1777, British General John Burgoyne was on a roll. He was moving southward from Canada, capturing American forts as he went. He intended to continue straight down the Lake Champlain and Hudson River Valleys to Albany and cut New England off from the rest of the American colonies.

But then he encountered geography. The southern end of Lake Champlain gives way to marshes and swamps, and Burgoyne had to portage his military equipment and supplies overland to the Hudson River. It was rough going, and he realized he would need more supplies to continue his victorious trip south.

He heard about a well-stocked storehouse in Bennington and sent a detachment of raiders to take what they could. These soldiers, many of whom were German cavalry without horses, had an exasperating trip. As one of the officers later wrote: “One prodigious forest, bottomed in swamps and morasses, covered the whole face of the country.”

What geography didn’t take care of, the weather did. When the raiders, who were under the command of a German officer named Friedrich Baum, finally reached the Bennington area, they decided to build earthworks on a knoll called Walloomsac Heights in New York.

At that point, it began to rain. As David Ludlum puts it in his book, The Weather Factor, “The hard rain washed down the dirt walls, filled the trenches with water, and made the troops miserable in their exposed position on a hillside.”

The rain also gave the American volunteers who had begun gathering in Bennington an extra day to organize. The rest, as they say, is history. The untrained Americans defeated Baum’s exhausted and soaked soldiers, Burgoyne suffered his first major setback, and two months later he surrendered at Saratoga.

I would probably be stretching it to say that Burgoyne was done in by geography and weather, but at what we celebrate each year as the Battle of Bennington, a detachment of his unhappy soldiers certainly were.

MORE INFORMATION

National Park Service
http://www.nps.gov/history/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/107bennington/107bennington.htm

This National Park Services Web site starts with a brief overview followed by a Teaching With Historic Places lesson plan that includes historical context, maps, readings, illustrations, articles, and links to other resources.

Battle of Bennington - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bennington


This detailed article recounts the background and the battle and offers a chart summarizing the combatants, commanders, numbers of soldiers involved, and casualties. It includes numerous cross references to related articles and a few external links.

Bennington Battle Monument
http://www.historicvermont.org/bennington/bennington3.html

The Bennington Battle Monument is a Vermont State Historic Site and as such has its own Web page, which explains the prelude to the battle, the battle, and information about the monument. It includes some interesting photographs.

With the school year about to begin, August 10 might be a good time to think about the "increase and diffusion of knowledge." Thanks to a wealthy English scientist who died without heirs, we've had a national institution dedicated to that purpose since August 10, 1846.

James Louis Macie Smithson, whose fortune made the Smithsonian Institution possible, actually died in 1829, but the first part of his will left his estate in trust to a nephew. When that nephew died childless, the last sentence of Smithson's handwritten will suddenly became significant.

In the event that Smithson had no surviving heirs, his will, in what seems like an idealistic afterthought, bequeathed everything "to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge ... ."

Smithson's fortune, when it was shipped across the Atlantic and reminted into American coins, amounted to $508,318.46. From that nest egg, the Smithsonian has grown into sixteen museums and galleries plus a zoo in Washington, D.C., two museums in New York City, and several research stations elsewhere. One of the oldest of the Smithsonian's collections — and the one that would have been of most interest to Smithson himself — is housed in the National Museum of Natural History. This collection includes over 100 million specimens, only a small percentage of which are on display. The rest are stored behind the scenes for scientific study and reference.

Some of the natural history treasures that Smithson, who was a chemist and mineralogist, would have especially enjoyed are the world's oldest fossil, some moon rocks, and the Hope Diamond. There are also thousands of plant and animal specimens collected by some of our earliest naturalists plus several game animals shot by Theodore Roosevelt specifically for the Smithsonian.

One of of my own Smithsonian favorites is the external architecture of the original building — the Castle — which was completed in 1855. In 1977, a pair of Barn Owls — named Increase and Diffusion in honor of Smithson — nested in one of the towers. Today the Castle houses offices, including the Information Office, which I still sometimes call to ask questions.

MORE INFORMATION

The Smithsonian
http://www.si.edu

The Smithsonian’s Web site is full of interesting material. They explain their history in detail under About the Smithsonian. The two features of this state-of-the-art Web site that are most visually stimulating to explore are their Online Photo Collections and The Virtual Smithsonian. The Virtual Smithsonian showcases 340 artifacts, including great photos of a few of their butterflies and beetles.

Encyclopedia Smithsonian
http://www.si.edu/Encyclopedia_SI/

Choose a topic from Art to Zoology and explore what the Smithsonian has. This is a rich and interesting resource. I’ve been to the Smithsonian several times, and I would have never guessed that they had so much to offer.

Smithsonian - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithsonian_Institution

This substantial article offers a color photograph of the Smithsonian on the first page and another one later on. It includes a list of all the Secretaries so far plus all the museums it runs plus all its research centers. The author of the article mentions some controversial matters that sound intriguing, and at the end of the article there’s a list of external links to help with further research.

The ancient Celts, who were more closely attuned to the natural year than we are, celebrated four annual festivals. These festivals fell at times we now think of as February 1, May 1, August 1, and November 1. Each festival launched a new phase of the agricultural year. Having celebrated the beginning of the growing season around May 1, they were ready to celebrate the beginning of the harvest by August 1.

They called their early August festival Lughnasa in honor of a god named Lugh. Lughnasa rituals involved a hilltop gathering of the whole community and a feast centered on the newly ripened crop. The hilltop had to do with looking down on the landscape that provided the community with its food, and the main food at the original Lughnasa feasts was the local grain.

Interestingly, two of the Celts' four seasonal celebrations made it by way of England all the way to America. February 1's Imbolc became the English Candlemas and then our Groundhog Day, and November 1's Samhain became the English All Hallow's Eve and then our American Halloween. But Beltane, which became the English May Day, was pre-empted by the Socialists, who declared May 1 an international labor day. And Lughnasa, which became the English Lammas, got lost somewhere between our American Fourth of July and early September Labor Day.

To keep our modern American selves in touch with the seasonal rhythms that the Celtic festivals honored, maybe we should reclaim at least the main themes of Lughnasa. Early August is a great time to climb a local hill or mountain and look down on where we live. An annual appreciation of our local landscape seems like a worthwhile way to spend an early August day.

For the food component of a modern Lughnasa, why not stop at a local farm stand on your way home from your hike and buy enough newly ripened sweet corn for a corn feast? When you think about it, it seems even more important to remember the beginning of the harvest — ancestrally, the feast after the long hunger of waiting for the new crop to ripen — than to remember the end of it, which modern Americans need no help with because of our own Thanksgiving celebration in late November.

MORE INFORMATION

Crossquarter Lammas
http://www.clarkfoundation.org/astro-utah/vondel/crossquarterlam.html

Not many scientists write about the Celtic cross-quarter days, but this one does. As the former director of the Hansen Planetarium in Utah, he knows his astronomy — and also his weather, his natural history, and other cultures’ practices with respect to the solar year. He writes a newspaper column called “Looking Around” from which this very readable essay is adapted.

Lughnasadh - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lughnasadh

The Wikipedia article on Lughnasa is brief compared to its articles on the other cross-quarter days, but it does offer background information and links to related Wikipedia articles.

Sometime during the month we now call July, thanks to Julius Caesar, in the year we now know as 776 B.C., thanks to the Christian religion, a young Greek named Coroebos won a footrace in Olympia. Thus began the official history of the ancient Olympics, a quadrennial athletic competition that incidentally offered the Greeks their first timeline.

The decision to record Coroebus’s name had more to do with the Greeks’ growing respect for athletes than with any felt need to keep track of time. Four centuries later, however, when Greek historians were trying to make sense out of the different time-reckoning systems used by different city-states, the long list that began with Coroebus offered a single national timeline.

This timeline consisted of four-year units known as Olympiads. Coroebus’s victory marked the beginning of the first Olympiad, which lasted until the year we know as 772 B.C. Although 772 marked the beginning of the second Olympiad, it was also linked to the first by the way the Greeks counted.

They counted inclusively, so the years from 776 to 772 included 776, 775, 774, 773, and 772. That’s why the Olympic symbol includes five linked circles instead of four. The circles can be thought of of individual years, and five of them linked can be thought of as one segment in an unbroken chain of years that stretches for over a millennium.

The ancient era of the Olympics — and the timeline based on its Olympiads — came to an end when Greece lost its power first to the Romans and then to the Christians. The athletic competitions and attendant record-keeping faltered during the 3rd century A.D. and ceased altogether in A.D. 393. That year the Christian Emperor Theodosius I decreed the Olympics pagan distractions and abolished them.

The Olympiads persisted until the year A.D. 440, but the old timeline was no longer supported by quadrennial athletic competitions with a growing list of winners. By 1896, when the modern Olympics reinstituted the old traditions, every year had its own assigned number in the new Roman-Christian timeline that recently hit the year 2000.

MORE INFORMATION

Olympiads - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympiad

This article explains the ancient history of the Olympics and Olympiads and gives examples of what years belonged to what Olympiads. It also talks about the modern Olympics and modern uses of the word Olympiad.

Olympic Sports Added by Olympiads
http://www.nostos.com/olympics/#Chronology%20of%20athletic%20events%20added%20to%20the%20Olympic%20Games

This chart shows which sports were added to the ancient Olympics during which Olympiads. The chart is the second item in a long article on the history of th Olympics.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Olympics
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Olympics/faq11.html

This site offers detailed answers to 11 questions along with some attractive graphics.

The Islamic New Year is scheduled to begin at sundown on April 5 in the year 2000. I have to specify 2000 because in 1999 it began at sundown on April 16, and in 2001 it will begin at sundown on March 25. The Islamic New Year changes by about 11 days a year because it's based on a purely lunar calendar.

The mathematics are quite simple. If you subtract the 354+ days of a lunar year from the 365+ days of a solar year, you get approximately 11 days. Therefore a continuous series of lunar new years will begin about 11 days earlier every year on a fixed solar calendar.

Most of the ancient religions and cultures that used lunar cycles to determine the dates of their key festivals, fasts, and celebrations learned to include an extra month some years to keep their lunar calendars in sync with the solar seasons. But the early Islamic leaders wanted to break with old traditions.

They wanted to start a new calendar to mark the beginning of their new religion, and they wanted to make it purely and continuously lunar to differentiate it from the solar and lunisolar calendars that already existed.

They chose to start their new calendar on July 16, 622 A.D. — or, technically, since Islamic days begin at sunset, at sunset on the date the Gregorian calendar calls July 15 — because that was the first day of the lunar year in which the key Islamic event called the Hegira took place.

The Hegira was Mohammed’s emigration from Mecca to Medina to assert his new religion. Between July 15-16, 622 A.D. and April 5-6, 2000 A.D., the Islamic calendar worked its way through 1420 consecutive lunar years, with a few mathematical adjustments along the way.

Basically, a lunar calendar needs to alternate 29 and 30 day months to reflect the approximately 29.5 day lunar cycle. But because the moon actually takes a fraction more than 29.5 days to complete its cycle, a lunar calendar needs an occasional extra day to keep its months in sync with what the real moon is doing.

The Islamic calendar adds that day to the last month of their lunar year in 11 out of every 30 years. With these regular additions, their calendar has become as precise with respect to the moon as the Gregorian calendar is with respect to the sun.

Now all we need is a major world calendar that's precise with respect to the stars, and we modern, calendar-driven human beings might be almost as aware of the sky as our primitive, pre-calendrical ancestors were.

MORE INFORMATION

Islamic Crescents' Observation Project (ICOP)
http://www.icoproject.org

If you’re really into moon watching and want to participate in an extremely interesting global project, visit the Islamic Crescents’ Observation Project (ICOP)’s Web site. The project was organized by the Arab Union for Astronomy and Space Sciences and the Jordanian Astronomical Society. It aims to gather information about the visibility of new moons at the start of each lunar month. Anyone can participate, regardless of his/her location, nationality, or religion.

U.S. Naval Observatory
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/islamic.html

The U.S. Naval Observatory offers the most reliable information on what the moon is doing astronomically, which isn’t always visible. Their essay on “Crescent Moon Visibility and the Islamic Calendar” explains the challenges inherent in trying to actually see the first thin crescent of the new moon. At the end of the essay are three links to USNO’s information on the moon and its phases.

Web Exhibits
http://webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-islamic.html

If you’re more interested in the Islamic calendar than in moon watching, this attractive Web site offers clear explanations in an easy-to-read format.

Helmer Aslaksen
http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/calendar/islamic.shtml

The author of this Web site, Helmer Aslaksen, is a Norwegian mathematician currently teaching in Singapore. He has a special interest in Chinese, Islamic, and Indian calendars, and has done more research than anyone else I have encountered on the Web. Here he offers a detailed discussion of the Islamic calendar along with 11 links to other Web sites he has found useful, interesting, and reliable.

On July 4, 1845, just eight days shy of his twenty-eighth birthday, Henry David Thoreau moved to Walden Pond. The book he wrote about the experience became a classic, but I’ve often wondered just what Thoreau was thinking about when he moved there.

In Walden he makes bold statements as if he knew exactly what he was doing from day one, but his journal entries reveal a more tentative and exploratory human being, a person I can identify and sympathize with.

Thoreau didn’t write in his journal on July 4, so we have no record of his thoughts on the day he moved. But on July 5, he wrote, “Yesterday I came here to live. My house makes me think of some mountain houses I have seen, which seemed to have a fresher auroral atmosphere about them as I fancy the halls of Olympus.”

On July 6, he began to articulate why he had moved to Walden: “I wish to meet the facts of life — the vital facts, which were the phenomena or actuality the Gods meant to show us — face to face, and so I came down here. Life? who knows what it is, what it does? If I am not quite right here I am less wrong than before ....”

A month later, he remembered his first childhood look at Walden. He says, “Twenty-three years since, when I was five years old, I was brought from Boston to this pond, away in the country which was then but another name for the extended world for me — one of the most ancient scenes stamped on the tablets of my memory ....”

He then describes Walden as his spiritual home: “That woodland vision for a long time made the drapery of my dreams. That sweet solitude my spirit seemed so early to require that I might have room to entertain my thronging guests, and that speaking silence that my ears might distinguish the significant sounds.”

Looking back now that he was actually living at Walden, he could see that even as a child his spirit “at once gave the preference to this recess among the pines where almost sunshine & shadow were the only inhabitants that varied the scene, over that tumultuous and varied city — as if it had found its proper nursery.”

I’m glad Thoreau kept voluminous journals for those of us who want to know more about him than he chose to share in his published works. I find the particular journal entries that refer to his July 4, 1845 move to Walden among his most appealing.

MORE INFORMATION

Walden National Historic Landmark
http://tps.cr.nps.gov/nhl/detail.cfm?ResourceId=599&ResourceType=Site

On December 29, 1962 Walden Pond was designated a National Historic Landmark. In 1990, a non-profit organization called The Walden Woods Project, committed itself to preserving Walden Woods as an open space and as a tribute to Henry David Thoreau. It raised funds to buy 96 additional acres to protect the Walden Pond area from development.

Thoreau’s Cabin 1945
http://www.uky.edu/AS/Anthropology/PAR/thoreau.htm

Roland Robbins attended the Thoreau Centennial held at Walden Pond on July 4, 1945 and decided to find the exact site of the original cabin. He excavated, produced detailed drawings, took photographs, kept log books, and collected artifacts. He managed to identify and document the cabin's stone chimney foundation, stone corner piers, and root cellar. His book, Discovery at Walden, explains his project and what he learned.

Photos Past and Present
http://thoreau.eserver.org/pondpics.html

This page offers links to numerous photos of Walden Pond and Thoreau’s cabin site, including one of the stone posts marking the cabin’s exact location as determined by Roland Robbins.

Walden - The Place
http://thoreau.eserver.org/waldenplace.html

This essay explains the natural and cultural history of Walden Pond, its importance to Concord, and its current significance to admirers of Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau’s Walden Years - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau#Civil_Disobedience_and_the_Walden_Years:_1845.E2.80.931849

This long article on Thoreau includes a short overview of Thoreau’s time and achievements during his two years and two months at Walden.

On June 30 some years a leap second is added to the most precise clocks the human species has yet succeeded in devising. Why? Think of leap year, when we add an extra day to keep our human calendars aligned with the solar year. A leap second involves adding an extra second — or possibly subtracting one — to keep our human clocks aligned with the solar day.

Neither of these fine-tunings was necessary during the earliest period of our evolution when we, like the plants and animals around us, responded directly to the sun. The problems arose when our ancestors began thinking it was important to tell, measure, and keep time.

Early sundials were good at telling time, and hourglasses could measure short periods of it, but neither kept track of its continuous passage. So scientists invented clocks. While calendars required only that the number days agree with the solar year, clocks introduced smaller time units: hours, minutes, and seconds. And as the time units became smaller, precision became more important.

Clocks have been refined over the years, resulting in today's extremely precise atomic clocks. The problem now is that these atomic clocks are too precise. The Earth wobbles and fluctuates as it rotates on its axis and is in fact slowing down. So atomic time can differ from the Earth's rotation time by what can accumulate toward a second.

Because we can't adjust the Earth's rotation, we have to adjust our atomic clocks. A group of extremely attentive observers working at the International Earth Rotation Service decide exactly when we need to add — or subtract — a leap second.

Since June 30, 1972, we’ve added 22 leap seconds, nine of them to June 30 and thirteen of them to December 31. A June 30 leap second is added right after what we in Vermont experience as 7:59 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. At the Greenwich Observatory it is 23:59:59, then 23:59:60, then 00:00:00 of July 1. A December 31 leap second works the same way, only it’s a tad more exciting because it happens on New Year’s Eve.

June and December are both such busy months for me that I don’t really have time to celebrate a leap second. But I’m grateful to the Earth for making my clocks give me those extra seconds every once in a while to do with what I will.

MORE INFORMATION

National Institute of Standards and Technology
http://www.boulder.nist.gov/timefreq/pubs/bulletin/leapsecond.htm

This link will take you to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Physics Lab in Boulder, Colorado. Their Time and Frequency Division is the keeper of official time for the United States. Their explanation of the leap second is short and sweet. It includes a list of the leap seconds that have been added since 1972 as well as a notice about whether or not one is expected soon. Once you’re at this site, you might want to check out their link to CURRENT TIME, where you will learn the exact time in your time zone to within two seconds, and their FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS section just to see if they’ve answered any questions you’ve been asking.

One-Man Web Site
http://www.leapsecond.com

This is a one-man Web site full of information about time. His home page includes several interesting links: <http://www.leapsecond.com/notes/whyls.htm> takes you to his brief discussion of leap seconds. <http://www.leapsecond.com/java/nixie.htm> takes you to a clock that’s counting down to the next leap second. And <http://www.leapsecond.com/java/gpsclock.htm> takes you to a page that uses your computer’s time to generate five different kinds of time. This page also offers numerous links to other Web sites that have information about leap seconds.

U.S. Naval Observatory's Time Service
http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/leapsec.html

The U.S. Naval Observatory’s Time Service Department offers the most detailed and authoritative discussion of leap seconds.

Around June 20-21 every year we reach the point in the solar year called the summer solstice. Astronomy books explain the exact positions of the sun and Earth at that moment, but even with good graphics I find myself on overload. To understand what happens at the solstice I need to watch the sun itself.

I'm lucky enough to live near a mountain called Camel's Hump that gives me a clear point of reference on my local horizon. The mountain is to the east of me, so I can watch the sun rise behind it. On the days leading up to the June 20s, the sun rises farther and farther to the left of the mountain. But then, at the time of the solstice, it stops and starts moving back to the right.

Even if you don't have a mountain on your eastern horizon, you can simulate what I see with a TV table, a glass, and a round pizza pan. Put the glass upside down on the far side of the TV table to be the "mountain".

Kneel down, reach under the TV table, and hold the pizza pan behind the glass like a backdrop. Lower it until you have just a small arc showing above the far edge of the table. Its intersections with the table are the points at which the sun rises and sets halfway around the year at the winter solstice.

Now raise the pizza pan slowly, watching what happens to the points of sunrise and sunset with respect to the mountain. When you've raised the pizza pan far enough to see the leftward movement of the sunrise and the rightward movement of the sunset, stop. You're now ready to conceptualize the summer solstice.

The word solstice which derives from Latin words for "sun" and "stands still" refers to the time when the sunrise and sunset seem to stop before changing directions. We experience this brief "standing still" as our longest day and shortest night. Now start lowering the pizza pan toward its original position to see what happens after the summer solstice.

Our primitive ancestors didn't have to use pizza pans to observe what the sun did with respect to their local horizon. Maybe they couldn't calculate the summer solstice to the exact minute as astronomers can today, but they could certainly respond to the expansion and contraction of daylight on either side of it.

Before calendars and clocks came along to distract us, the most attentive and observant of our wise elders probably knew exactly when the sun was going to stand still.

MORE INFORMATION

Windows to the Universe
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/the_universe/uts/summer.html

The only thing unfriendly about this Web site is its address. The information is clear, easy-to-read, and linked to definitions of words that might need some explaining. The text is offered in Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced versions, with colorful graphics to illustrate exactly what the sun and Earth are doing at the summer solstice.

Astro-Utah
http://www.clarkfoundation.org/astro-utah/vondel/solsticesum.html

This link takes you to a popular interest newspaper column written by the retired director of the Hansen Planetarium in Salt Lake City. He talks about summer solstices now and in the past, mentioning New Age, Druid, and Native American celebrations. As an astronomer, he himself celebrates how much we have learned about the Earth and the sun and offers links to other Web sites that offer good scientific information on the solstice and other subjects.

U.S. Naval Observatory
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/EarthSeasons.html

If all you want to know is the date and time of the summer solstice, this link will take you to the U.S. Naval Observatory’s list.

The Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1. It builds toward a peak sometime between mid-August and late October — with the historical date of greatest hurricane activity on September 9 — and ends November 30. Hurricanes begin as tropical storms, but they don't attract much attention until they get named.

A tropical storm gets a name when its winds hit 39 mph, and it becomes a hurricane if the winds hit 74 mph. The alphabetical naming began in 1953 and at first included only women’s names. But in 1979 men’s names were added. Every letter of the alphabet— except Q, U, X, Y, and Z — has six different names because the lists repeat themselves after six years. For a complete list of hurricane names, go to: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutnames.shtml

The tropical storms that sometimes become named hurricanes originate in Africa. When hot, dry air over the Sahara desert encounters cooler, moister air over the area south of the Sahara — called the Sahel — the collision produces a low-pressure system that drifts out over the ocean.

Storm clouds form and if they cluster, the earth's rotation causes the system to spin counterclockwise. The warm, humid air above the ocean rushes upward into it and starts it spinning faster and faster. When the winds reach 20 mph, the cloud cluster becomes what's known as a tropical depression, which is the precursor of a tropical storm.

While the system is developing into whatever it's going to become, it's also moving westward and northward thanks to the easterly trade winds that predominate in the latitudes between the equator and 30 degrees north. If you look on a globe, you'll see that these storms travel right toward the southeastern United States.

When the first tropical storm gets strong enough to warrant a name, we start hearing about hurricanes in the media. It's always interesting to see which hurricanes are going to do what. A hurricane that's damaging enough might even have its name retired from the six year list.

So far we’ve lost almost fifty names. The letter C has lost the most, with eight hurricanes warranting retirement. Only the letters N, P, S, T, V, and W have survived intact. For a list of all the names that have been retired, go to: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/retirednames.shtml


These names are no longer available for current or future hurricanes, but they are not lost. They — and the storms they named — have achieved a permanent place in hurricane history.

MORE INFORMATION

USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/huricane/whhistry.htm

USA Today’s Web site offers quite a bit of its own information on hurricanes plus links to numerous other hurricane sites. Their history section has a long list of links to historical information.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
http://hurricanes.noaa.gov

The government is, of course, responsible for informing us of and protecting us from hurricanes. They take their responsibility quite seriously, offering several Web sites designed to help people learn about hurricanes. "Hurricanes" is the main site, and it offers numerous links to other government sites. The one I find most interesting is the National Hurricane Center’s Tropical Predication Center http://www.nhc.noaa.gov. I also like Christopher Landsea’s answers to Frequently Asked Questions http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/tcfaqHED.html and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s hurricane site for kids http://www.fema.gov/kids/hurr.htm

William Gray
http://typhoon.atmos.colostate.edu

This is William Gray’s Tropical Meteorology Project Web site. Gray and his team forecast the number and severity of hurricanes we will experience each season, and they’re usually pretty close to right. Their forecasts get a lot of press when they first come out. If you want to beat the newspapers, you can go directly to their forecasts at http://typhoon.atmos.colostate.edu/forecasts

Rachel Carson was born on May 27, 1907. There aren't any big annual celebrations of this date, but I think it would be a good idea for anyone who values the natural world to acknowledge her birthday every May by remembering who she was.

Thanks to her last book, Silent Spring, which was published in 1962 and led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, Rachel Carson will go down in history as the mother of the environmental movement. But that is who she became, not who she was when she began.

Long before she became an environmentalist, she was a writer. She first won a prize for her writing when she was only ten years old. She submitted a story to St. Nicholas, a children’s magazine, and won their Silver Badge. The next year she published another story and won the Gold.

She was hooked. In college she intended to major in English in hopes of becoming a professional writer, but then she discovered biology. A college friend remembers her saying, “I always wanted to write, but I know I don’t have much imagination. Biology has given me something to write about.”

And write about it she did. Around the edges of a full-time job and major family responsibilities, she wrote five books. Her best known include The Sea Around Us, which won the National Book Award and became an international bestseller, A Sense Of Wonder, which was published after her death, and, of course, Silent Spring, which changed the way we think about ourselves and the natural world.

When asked why she wrote Silent Spring, a book she didn’t really want to write, she said, “I discovered ... that everything which meant most to me as a naturalist was being threatened, and that nothing I could do would be more important.”

Rachel Carson brought both rigorous science and eloquent writing to the task. In the spring of 1963, amidst the furor that followed the publication of Silent Spring, her dual competence served her well. She was invited to appear on television with her chief adversary, and, assured of both her science and her writing, she never flinched.

Her closing remark was, “I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”

We in the generations that have followed would do well to remember Rachel Carson’s challenge — perhaps by repeating it to ourselves in her honor every May 27.

MORE INFORMATION:

Rachel Carson Biography
http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/cars-rac.htm

The Women in History Web site offers a brief biography of Rachel Carson plus several links to other good Web sites.

RachelCarson.org
www.rachelcarson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=homepage

This Web site, created by Carson biographer Linda Lear, includes lots of good information including a substantial biography, the New York Times obituary, and links to other Web sites.

Rachel Carson - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson

The long Wikipedia article on Rachel Carson is full of links to other articles in the Wikikpedia and also includes a long list of external links.

Sir Francis Beaufort, who spent much of his life sailing tall ships and charting distant bodies of water for the British Navy, was born on May 7, 1774. He’s not famous enough that anyone celebrates his birthday, but he’s worth remembering at this time of year for his close observations of the wind.

He entered the navy at age thirteen and by 1805 had risen to the rank of captain. When he became responsible for his own ship’s log, it occurred to him that a uniform reference system for classifying different winds would offer more concise and useful log entries. So he began to observe his ship’s behavior.

Beaufort distinguished thirteen different levels of wind based on how his ship with its many sails responded. Zero meant too calm to sail. One through eleven meant winds from just strong enough to sail to winds almost too strong to bear. Twelve meant a wind “no canvas could withstand.”

In Beaufort’s day there were no instruments for measuring wind speed. So his observation-based system offered sailors the best way to at least rank the winds they encountered. It was so clear and simple that in 1838 the British Navy required all ships to use it in their logs.

Then, in 1846, came the first anemometer — an instrument that could measure exact wind speeds. It didn’t take long for wind watchers to see that if the speeds of Beaufort’s observed winds could be quantified with an anemometer, his scale could be used as a shorthand for wind speeds.

But there were several problems. Not everyone knew sailing ships as well as Beaufort did, so there was a need for new descriptions based on surface features of the sea. Then, of course, there was a need for descriptions that would work on dry land.

Furthermore, because the Beaufort scale was observation-based, its numbers depended on human judgments, making exact wind speed equivalents difficult to quantify. It took until 1926 to get a uniform set of equivalents accepted.

With the high-tech wind instruments available today, the Beaufort scale doesn’t get used much anymore. But it still works. Even a child who can describe what’s happening to wood smoke and trees can use Mr. Beaufort’s scale to estimate the speed of a local wind.

MORE INFORMATION

NOAA Storm Prediction Center
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/beaufort.html

The Storm Prediction Center offers a reference chart that includes descriptions of the observable effects of Beaufort’s different winds both at sea and on land.

Stormfax Weather Almanac
http://www.stormfax.com/beaufort.htm

The Stormfax Weather Almanac offers a simplified master chart that includes the Beaufort number, the wind speed in both knots and mph, the wave height in feet, the World Meteorological Organizations’s description, the effects observed on the sea and the effects observed on land.

The Weather Doctor
http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/history/beaufort.htm

Keith C. Heidorn, a Canadian meteorologist who calls himself the Weather Doctor, has written a substantial history of Beaufort’s contributions to weather observation and record keeping. He puts the Beaufort Wind Scale in historic context, including an illustration of a British frigate, the vessel Beaufort used to describe the effects of different winds on a ship’s sails.

If you think of the solar year as a circle, the solstices and equinoxes divide it neatly into quarters. But those quarters need to be divided again to reflect seasonal and agricultural realities. That's exactly what the northern Europeans known as Celts did long before the Romans and Christians arrived with their twelve-month calendars.

The days that divided the four solar quarters became known as cross-quarter days, and they occurred at key times in the agricultural year. Samhain, which was the Celtic New Year, occurred after the harvest was in, in early November. Imbolc occurred as lambs were born in early February. Beltane occurred at the time cattle were ready to be moved to summer pastures in early May. And Lughnasa occurred after the first harvest of grain in early August.

The modern calendar's date for Beltane is May 1, and May 1 still seems worth celebrating. The Celts considered Beltane the beginning of summer, which is why they — and Shakespeare after them — thought of the summer solstice as midsummer. They also began their celebrations at night because their days began at sunset. So a modern Beltane should actually begin on April 30.

The ancient Beltane rituals included hilltop bonfires, which can be dangerous and are illegal without fire permits today. But the positive symbolism of these fires can be simulated more modestly right in your own back yard. Beltane fires were new fires ignited from scratch, and they symbolized fresh starts at the beginning of the new season. They also had the symbolic power to exorcise old ills and protect against new ones.

I like the idea of ritualized seasonal renewal, so my own modest Beltane celebration consists of cleaning my stone fire ring, picking up a few of the twigs and small branches that have fallen during the winter, and lighting my first campfire of the season with a brand new box of matches.

Others might choose to clean their grills, light them with a certain amount of ceremony — including new matches — and cook their first outdoor meal. Such modest celebrations may not seem very Celtic, but they are safe, legal, and easy ways for us modern types to greet the glories of May.

MORE INFORMATION

Crossquarter May Day
http://www.clarkfoundation.org/astro-utah/vondel/crossquartermay.html

Not many scientists write about the Celtic cross-quarter days, but this one does. As the former director of the Hansen Planetarium in Utah, he knows his astronomy — and also his weather, his natural history, and other cultures’ practices with respect to the solar year. He writes a newspaper column called “Looking Around” from which this very readable essay is adapted.

Beltane - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltane

The Wikipedia article offers background information on Beltane including etymology, orgins, neopagan practices, and links to other information including an extract from Sir James George Frazer's book The Golden Bough.