glory photo from wikipedia

No, I'm not about to get all socio-philosophical on you. I actually saw an optical illusion called a glory about a month ago and didn't even realize it until today!

Earlier this afternoon I was reading up on the science behind rainbows and wound up at the wikipedia article for glory—a tiny circular rainbow, which wikipedia explains is "most commonly observed while airborne, with the glory surrounding the airplane's shadow on clouds."

Sounded like an awesome sight, but I didn't think much of it until a few hours later as I was going to add a soundtrack to some silly airplane-window footage I shot about a month ago on a plane ride back to New York after visiting my folks in Florida. And would you guess what I saw reflected on the clouds for about 8 seconds of my video? A glory!

Check it out: Very faintly expressed, but decidedly visible just to the right of the center of this screenshot. If you can't see it, lean back from the monitor and try to look for the plane shadow first, then the rainbowy aura around it.

Much harder to see in the video, but take a look anyway. It helps to view full screen and lean back from the monitor a bit. The rainbowy awesomeness is most obvious around 0:05 and 0:06.

glory in the clouds from Lauren Sperber on Vimeo.

Embedded video doesn't work in some RSS readers, so you may have to visit the actual post to see the video

So much for my brush with glory. Here are a few spectacular glory photos from Atmosphere Optics, a site devoted to the pretty illusions created from water and light:

by Franz Kerschbaum

by Jonathan Lansey

But even the best pictures of glories shot from planes pale in comparison to the utterly religious spookiness of those taken by lucky hikers, such as these:

by Menno Boermans

by Dave Newton

Atmospheric Optics has even more glory photos and some hilarious glory videos. The people who shot the first video were totally psyched!

Those of you so inclined should also check out this in-depth explanation of how glories are formed.

In honor of Bloomsday (which is today, if you haven't been at an all-day reading of Ulysses like some people), one of the two daily definition/etymology e-newsletters I subscribe to, wordsmith.org's A.Word.A.Day, sent out five words from the Irish last week. They were:

shebeen (shuh-BEEN): An unlicensed drinking establishment.

A.Word.A.Day's brief etymology: From Irish sibin, diminutive of seibe (mug/mugful). The word
is popular in the south of Africa and in Scotland and Ireland.

The Compact Oxford English Dictionary respectfully disagrees:

Origin Anglo-Irish; of obscure origin. The ending is Irish -in as in caubeen, colleen, etc.; an improbably conjecture is that the word is founded on Irish seapa, adaption of English shop.

dornick (DOR-nik): 1) A piece of rock small enough to throw. 2) Stout linen.

A.Word.A.Day's brief etymologies: 1) From Irish dornog (small stone, literally fistful). 2) After Doornik, the name of a Flemish town where the cloth was first manufactured.

The OED notes the name of the Flemish town for the second definition (which is the first definition in its own listing) and provides no etymology for the first definition (its second).

hubbub (HUB-ub): Excited fuss or tumult of a crowd.

A.Word.A.Day's brief etymology: Perhaps from Irish ubub (an interjection of contempt).

The OED's definition is more certain:

In the 16th century hooboube, -boobe, often referred to as an Irish outcry, and probably representing some Irish expression. Cf. Gaelic ub! ub! ubub! an interjection of aversion or contempt; abu! the war-cry of the ancient Irish.

cosher (KOSH-uhr): To pamper.

A.Word.A.Day's brief etymology: From Irish cosair (feast).

OED etymology: Phonetic representation of Irish coisir feast, feasting, entertainment. Also notable is The OED's different definition of cosher:

1) To feast, to live at free quarters upon dependants or kinsmen. 2) To treat with indulgent fondness, pamper; to cocker or coddle.

smithereens (smith-uh-REENZ): Tiny fragments.

A.Word.A.Day's brief etymology: Probably from Irish smidirin, diminutive of smiodar (fragment).

OED sez:

Variation of smithers [which it lists as "of obscure origin"], with Irish diminutive ending, and either adopted from, or the source of modified Irish smidirín.

The disagreement between Wordsmith and The OED on a few of these reminded me of the controversy over Daniel Cassidy's How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads. I heard Cassidy present the book at the Irish Arts Center (the actual website for which seems to be down) and will begrudgingly admit to being pretty impressed (hey, I don't know Gaelic for shit!) until Grant Barrett's excellent blog post schooled me on the matter.

Anyway, happy Bloomsday everyone. Time to read a chapter of Ulysses—I dare you!

Sean Flannagan and I have finally finished initial development and obsessive content compilation for Datamob, a directory that highlights the connection between public datasets and awesome interfaces that people have created to make public data more accessible—including amazing tools like OpenCongress, EveryBlock, and Oakland Crimespotting.

You're intrigued, I can tell. Well, it is, admittedly, a g2g website—that's my this guy's neologism for geek-to-geek, like b2b. We hope it'll be a useful and compelling way for data geeks and developers to find new data sources and inspiration for their projects. And why should the non-geek care? Our mission statement puts it best:

Widely accessible public data enables informed civic engagement, and we believe that providing restriction-free data to developers is the best way to promote the technological innovations that will spread knowledge.

For those of you who do better with visualizations than words, Datamob is a lot like the Google chart API pie chart below: 61% datasets, 28% interfaces, 11% resources, 100% informative, empowering geeky goodness [breakdown as of post time].

My language nerds, I haven't forsaken you. Wondering about the etymology of Datamob's name? Well, the folks at Freebase coined the term "data mob" to describe a group of data-lovers working together to perfect a small portion of Freebase's ambitiously all-encompassing database. As for our Datamob, we hope it'll inspire more institutions with vast reserves of information to put their data out there in accessible formats—and bring together more data mobbers to bring that information to life.

And to ensure I've covered all my geek demographics with this post, a few words on the development of Datamob: For the past two months I've had my head entirely buried in enlightening railscasts, the amazing heroku (a web-based rails development platform), and the somewhat befuddling rails framework documentation. Weren't you wondering where I'd been? This was my first-ever Rails project, and it was an amazing learning process.

For all the buzz about RoR making things so easy even an orangutan could build a slick web app, your average geeky front-end web girl who tools around a bit with the PHP in her WordPress template (that would be me) still had a lot to learn about actual programming work. But figuring it all out was totally exhilarating.

For anyone thinking of taking their first venture into the big, bad world of programming, A List Apart just published two super-introductory articles to Ruby on Rails—they don't include code, but have a great general introduction to the concepts you'll need to know. If you're ready to get coding, I quite liked Agile Web Development With Rails, although Rails 2.0 has outdated some of it.

Happy Datamobbing!

Elizabeth Blair and Cookie Monster

Because NPR's In Character series has impeccable taste in fictional characters, they recently interviewed my favorite: Cookie Monster!

Elizabeth Blair starts the inteview like so: "We at NPR News have high journalistic standards. So I sat down with Cookie Monster for an exclusive interview."

The original Wheel Stealer, from the Muppet Wiki

She sounds like my kind of girl!

Anyway, first she covers Cookie's direct ancestor, the Wheel Stealer, who first arrived on the muppet scene in some unaired commercials for General Mills in which, of course, he devoured snacks. Wheel Stealer then went on to star in this hilarious training video for IBM, called "Coffee Break Machine":

Embedded video doesn't work in all RSS readers. You may have to visit the actual post.

You may be wondering, "Training for what?!?!?!" So am I, dear reader. So am I.

If you want to buff up on Cookie Monster's complete lineage, there's a page devoted to just that at the Muppet Wiki.

The highlight of the NPR segment, though, was hearing Frank Oz, the puppeteer who originated Cookie Monster—and, along with Jim Henson, invented him—validating my reasons for loving Cookie so, so much. Frank said:

He's a very sensuous monster, very tactile. As opposed to many of us, who need many things to make us happy, he only needs one thing. And that's a cookie. And he's insatiable. He's not intellectual, he's not that smart…

And the highlight of the b-roll video (which is actually more entertaining than the complete segment) would have to be Cookie's answers to a few questions from The Proust Questionnaire such as:

Elizabeth: What is your favorite word?
Cookie: COOKIE! Hahaha. What you expect?

Elizabeth: What is your least favorite word?
Cookie: Outtacookies! That one word: Outtacookies! Outtacookies! Yeah. That count? Not count, huh?
Elizabeth: For you, we'll make it count.
Cookie: How 'bout pusillanimous? Me not sure what that means, but me heard it once and it sound pretty icky.

Elizabeth: What sound or noise do you love?
Cookie: Oh me love uh, um-num-num-num. That me favorite sound.

Elizabeth: What sound or noise do you hate?
Cookie: Snoring. Me do not like snoring.
Elizabeth: Do you have friends who snore?
Cookie: Yeah. Pretty much all me friends snore. It a thing on Sesame Street. Everybody who sleeps, they snore. It drive me crazy.
Elizabeth: But you don't snore?
Cookie: Me not sure. Me sleeping. Me probably do, but me not hear it.

Elizabeth's full Cookie Monster segment and accompanying video are both available here.

Wow! Castro resigned!

It's an historic event of almost impossible weirdness. Castro's 49-year reign as the seemingly eternal president of Cuba means that a) pretty much no one under the age of 60 can remember him not ruling Cuba and b) he's become this mythical, timeless, ageless figure, who must, in our collective imagination, must be 153 if he's a day over 30—more fictional than real and more legend than person. Castro also never seemed to look any different until he suddenly showed up on Drudge last night finally looking his age and, somewhat humorously, sporting an Adidas track suit.

Castro in a track suit. Photo from Drudge and this New York Times slideshow, which credits it thusly: "Tv Cubana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images." Unclear how the photo relates to his resignation, but it seems to have been taken recently.

Anyway, I wanted to take this opportunity to share with you a little poorly drawn cartoon I made while bored to tears in my high school Latin American history class. The only thing I recall from our section on Cuba was learning about the methods used by the Castro regime to maintain his cult of personality.

Apparently—or so our teacher told us—children's books that were ubiquitous enough to be equivalent to Dick and Jane in the cultural consciousness of Cubans were filled with stories of Castro's heroism, including his single-handed invasion of a small village, and an incident of mythic proportions in which Castro was somehow tossed into the sea by enemy forces but refused to let go of his guns, even though he was in danger of drowning. During the revolution, see, resources were scarce, and Castro was so committed that he was willing to risk his life to conserve weaponry. Somehow, this story was supposed to be touching reading material for small children.

Unable to imagine how incidents involving mass slaughter and firearms could be appropriate material for children's literature, I had to attempt to sketch out part of such a book for myself. Here it is for your horror and enjoyment.

More importantly, though, you now know why the art world mourns my failure to become a visual artist on an almost-daily basis.

The Library of Congress has a flickr account! [via metafilter] With awesome photos from their archives! And no copyright restrictions!

I'm their new biggest fan.

From your favorite federal institution's flickr profile:

Yes. We really are THE Library of Congress.
We invite your tags and comments! Identifying information is also appreciated–many of our old photos came to us with very little description.

How sweet!

Some notable NYC photos:

The New York Public Library on opening day.

The original Penn Station.

And, unbelievably enough, a photo of orphans being driven to Coney Island. "In Autos," the photo caption notes. Autos!!!

Library of Congress, accept my love. You're my newest flickr contact.

Personal note: My family began celebrating (if only through cheeky verbal acknowledgement) the winter solstice around the time I became old enough to protest the vague attempts my parents briefly and occasionally made at actual religious observance.

But in 2004, my mother thoughtfully sent me a bouquet of flowers from a Brooklyn florist to amp up the holiday spirit a notch. The card said:

Dear Laurin,
Enjoy the beuty of the winners solstice.
Love, Mom, Dad, and Mickel

Since then, every December 21st has been an opportunity to bask in the beutiful glow of the winners solstice instead.

Last year on the 21st I brought you a wikipedia-summarizing description of lesser-known winter festivals, from HumanLight to Soyal to Karachun.

This year, enjoy the above-provided peak into my family's endless capacity to derive humor from an unintentionally hilarious florist's card, and a brief explanation of the movement of the "official" date to celebrate this fine holiday.

This graph, courtesy of, well, you know, apparently shows how the Gregorian calendar gradually falls behind the seasons, despite making a notable correction (the frequent spikes on the chart) each leap year. But biggest corrections (marking the beginning and end of each chunk of the chart) happen on the centennial years, which are never leap years unless they're divisible by 400—like the year 2000, in which there was no realignment between the Gregorian calendar and the seasons.

Why these seismic shifts happen in years that aren't correcting for the disparity between our 24 hour day and the variable amount of time the planet actually takes to rotate on its axis 365-day calendar and the 365.2424 days over which we experience the change in seasons [thanks, Michael!] has now joined the fact that the universe is expanding (despite being infinite! how is that possible?), in the ranks astronomical/physical/mathematical facts that just hurt to think about. Hopefully my brother will offer up some help in the comments.

Happy winners solstice!

update: Michael sez:

It takes the Earth about 365.26 days to revolve around the Sun, but […] Earth's rotational axis is not perpendicular with the radius of Earth's orbit, […] which is why we have seasons in the first place. This axis, however, does not stay still. Polaris, a well-known nautical guide, is currently directly above the Earth's northern axis, but in a few thousand years this will not be so. This wobble accounts for the difference between a sidereal year [the time it takes for the sun to return to the same position (as viewed from earth) of alignment with the stars of the celestial sphere] and a tropical year [the time it takes to pass through a full year's worth of seasons], but in this case it subtracts from the time because the axis is wobbling in a clockwise direction. Finally, we arrive with the fact that a tropical year is about 365.2424 days.


Because the tropical year is longer than the calendar year, the Earth will be 0.9696 days behind the calendar every four years. That means that once the leap year comes, the Earth will actually be 0.0304 days ahead of the calendar. Multiply this number by 25 to arrive [at] 0.76, the number of days ahead that this error will [accumulate] to every 100 years. (There are 25 sets of 4 years in 100 years.) To account for THIS error, we have common years on centurial years, but, oops, now the Earth is 0.24 days behind. Multiply this number by 4 to arrive with 0.96, the number of days behind that this error will [accumulate] to every 400 years. To account for THIS error, we have a leap year on centurial years divisible by 400 (remember that normally centurial years WOULDN'T be leap years), reducing the error down to 0.04 days every 400 years. You'll recall that we had a leap year in 2000 despite the fact that it was a centurial year. We still have some error, but at this point it's so small that we'll let the people deal with it 10,000 years from now when the equinoxes are finally off by a whole day.