Slashdot Mirror
All Hallow's Eve
It seemed like a shame to delete all the Hallowe'en submissions coming in today, so let's see if we can figure out something useful to do with them. Tonight is a full moon, which is a bad thing if you happen to be around animals. Several readers sent in Mac O' Lanterns of various types. One soul sent in a Jack O' Linux. This guy carves big pumpkins (be sure to click the arrows to see the finished versions). And if all else fails, bring out the Gimp.
Its not just a full moon, its also a blue moon (2nd full moon inside a calendar month). The first blue moon on Halloween since 1955.
From the article:
what's so unusual about a blue moon on Halloween is that it last shone over California in 1944. And there won't be another until the year 2020
And:
The blue moon was originally defined by the Maine Farmer's Almanac in 1819 as an extra full moon within any season. Later, however, the respected publication Sky and Telescope altered the almanac's definition and since then it has come to mean the second full moon within a single month.
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Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
"we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" --Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
10-31-2001 Duuude, me and my buds have a great idea -- we took our machine and put it in a pumpkin -- we call it "Jack-O-Linux" get it? Linus would be proud!
11-04-2001 JOL (Jack-O-Linux) has begun to smell. I'm beginning to regret not putting in a fan as playing Quake tends to heat it up quite a bit and makes the rotting stench almost unbearable... should've used a Crusoe.
11-06-2001 JOL caught on fire today. I think a piece of rotting pumpkin flesh fell onto the sound card and caused a spark... I'm not really sure though, as I'm afraid to look inside the pumpkin.
11-07-2001 Fabreeze doesn't work on pumkins
11-09-2001 The JOL exploded today as I was browsing slashdot. Apparently the Methane inside the pumkin built up to critical levels. Now my room smells like an odd mixture of farts, pumpkin pie, ozone, and death. Funny thing though -- JOL still boots.
11-10-2001 Drinking with my buds tonight we came up with a great idea: B-E-O-W-O-L-F..
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
I was just too stoked to see this. Those wacky kids over at sCary's carved pumpkins the other night. The best, hands down, is the middle one here. I dont ever think I've ever seen a Thundercats logo in a pumpkin. Even better: shugaMom was the one who carved it.
Shamelessly stolen from yahoo..
To make the superstitious even more jittery, a constellation associated with the some end-of-the-world beliefs will also be at the top of Wednesday night's sky.
The Seven Sisters constellation, which looks like a small cluster of grapes, has long been a signal for the time of year to honor the dead - such as All Saints Day, Nov. 1.
According to myth, the Seven Sisters constellation is at its highest point in the sky during a great calamity, possibly the biblical flood or the sinking of Atlantis. The Aztecs and Mayans believed it would be overhead at midnight on the night the world comes to an end, Horkheimer said.
The Seven Sisters and the full moon will both be directly overhead at midnight, he said.
.....
I guess its time to tick off items from my Disaster Check list...
Rapid Nirvana
My (very religious) friend told me today that it's Martin Luther day for Lutherans.
I suggested that he should go trick-or-treating; as a "trick", if people don't give him candy, he could nail the 95 theses to their door.
Just a friendly reminder!
Random Musings
This was last year but it turned out pretty nicely: Gimp-O-Lantern.
--Ben
Now days we call the 2nd full moon in a calender month a blue moon. But that was not the original definition.
Usually a season has 3 full moons, the last one often being called the harvest moon. On occasion, a season has 4 full moons. The last moon in the season is still the harvest moon. The 3rd full moon in a season with 4 full moons is the Blue Moon.
You can find this history in Sky and Telescope
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
If you take your data from the wrong couple of years and you find if your full moons occur disproportionaltely on weekends, is it that surprising that there are more hospital visits? Drunks and partiers are always doing wierd stuff on weekends. Since there are only a dozen or so full moons in a year, it is hard to get sufficient data to even out statistical effects such as this.
Cecil Adams has a couple articles on some of these things such as crazies and full moons and for a discussion of blue moons. Anyway, the study sighted took place over two years, which is about 24 months. No mention was made about the effect of day of the week which is probably only the first effect to control for. Do people go out hunting more often when the moon is full due to the better lighting? Are more people outside at night on those dates? Are people more likely to go to the hospital on these dates for some reason even if the biting rate doesn't change on these dates?
The fact that the author makes statemets like "Human behaviour is altered during the full moon period" after saying that the studies are contradictory and then goes on to say that their study adds "Animals have an increased propensity to bite humans during the full moon periods" (at best they have shown that more people come to the hospital with animal bites in these periods). These types of conclusions do not fill me with confidence in any of the other work.