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.

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.

I've previously made kenspeckle my recent and aggravating affliction with chronic dry eye syndrome, likely due to a rather nasty habit of reading too much, both on- and off-screen.

After well over a decade of nearly hassle-free contact lens use, I've suddenly descended into the troublesome and confusing world of care for ocular pain, featuring dozens of brands of artificial tears, each of which use different lubricants with no explanation of the differences among them; Bausch & Lomb's cash cow, Muro 128 5% Ointment, which forces otherwise sane consumers to pay $26 for 1/8 of an ounce of what's essentially salty ointment; and distressing assumptions about the age of dry eye sufferers.

But my most shocking ophthalmic experience thus far has to my first encounter with Restasis, a prescription eye drop for chronic dry eye manufactured by Allergan. When I went to pick up my first month's worth of Restasis, I almost fell over as the pharmacist handed me a large brown paper bag instead of the typical little prescription pouch.

I was so appalled by the complete environmental disregard shown in the packaging of Restasis that I just had to document it in the slideshow below—well, that and I wanted a chance to play around with JonDesign's Smooth Gallery, because I have a hunch that its CSS layout will degrade beautifully in RSS readers. Hopefully I'm right!

what is this supposed to be for anyway???

To be fair to the folks at Allergan, I know that Restasis is packaged in single-use vials because it doesn't contain a preservative like the over-the-counter drops I've compared its packaging to. Although I'm normally not a fan of preservatives in anything, this seems like a reasonable time to make an exception—Allergan could at least offer a version with preservatives for those of us who hate seeing wasteful packaging and don't have adverse reactions to the preservatives in over-the-counter drops.

Even if the drug developers have been through this quandry and decided that a preservative was out of the question for Restasis for a reason beyond my biochemcially challenged comprehension, I've no doubt you could make a single-use vial with less plastic by eliminating the completely useless tab beneath each little container.

The only reasonable conclusion seems to be that the ophthalmic industrial complex is trying to ruin the environment, one chronic dry eye patient at a time.

My lolcat version of Oscar the "psychic" nursing home cat. Image from the Daily Mail article.

Yeah, so i can has cheezburger and hobotopia beat me to the LOLcat-ifying punch. I have a day job people! This might shock you, but kenspeckle here isn't raking in $4,000 per week per ad like your favorite LOLcat fix is.

Anyway, by now we've all heard of Oscar, the nursing home cat featured in The New England Journal of Medicine for his tendency to curl up with patients a few hours before their death with an uncanny consistency [via drudge, boing boing].

The scientific explanation is that cats and other animals are more in tune than humans with the chemical and hormonal ebbs and flows of life through their sense of smell. Which explains *how* Oscar might know of patients' imminent death, but "what the cat might get out of it" still puzzles the veterinarian interviewed in the Daily Mail article (quoted right above the "official witch" of Salem, MA).

I like to think that some cats just have an instinct to comfort at these mysterious biochemical signs of distress, and I have a hilarious, albeit highly personally embarassing story, behind that belief.

Sometime in middle school, my best friend (proud owner of two cats) had a slumber party for her birthday at which we watched a handful of movies rented by her mother for the occasion. At this point I still wasn't really allowed to watch television in my own home, so I was pretty unaccustomed to the pretend violence and special effects most kids are completely inured to at that age. Knowing this, my friend and her mother had purposefully chosen movies from the comedy section.

Among them was License to Drive, which is officially supposed to be a "teen comedy/adventure," but for some reason a few of the chase scenes evoked pure terror in my ultra-innocent psyche. Right before I (*cringe*) started crying, one of my friend's cats, usually aloof like Oscar, jumped directly into my lap and started purring his little heart out.

It's one of the few things I remember from middle school at all.

I couldn't tell you why, but I can't stop loving this meme. Even more appropriate for kenspeckling than lolcode, I give you the loltheorists community on livejournal [via masters of media], featuring lol-riffic literary theorists, psychologists, computer scientists, media theorists, and moar!

It doesn't seem very moderated—the quality varies a lot and the better ones tend to have been posted earlier, so you have to dig for 'em. My favorites are below.

lolbarthes

lolfreud

lol p.k.dick

loleinstein

lolnietzhe

lolschrödinger

lollovelace

lolmcluhan

lolfoucault

The BBC's brain gender quiz tells me that my brain is skewed somewhat toward male-ness because:

• I'm good at matching angles, a task at which men outperform women.
• I'm mediocre at spotting which objects have moved, a task at which women outperform men. I usually blame this on the gnomes who steal my keys and hide them.
• I'm "very empathic and would be an ideal person to comfort people in a time of crisis"—usually a female trait.
• I'm mediocre "at analysing or building systems," which men are usually better at. However, this portion of the test was administered as personal opinions on questions, not through an actual task, so I take issue with it. I'm great at assembling furniture!
• I'm mediocre at judging someone's emotions based on their eyes, which women are usually better at.
• I prefer more "masculine" faces.
• I'm so good at rotating 3D objects that the BBC quiz results wondered, "Are you an engineer or do you have a science background?" Ha! That's a good one.
• I can produce a lot of words to match certain criteria, which women are usually better at.
• I would demand less than 60% of an amount of money to be split between two people. Most men would apparently drive a harder bargain than that.

I just took the ecological footprint quiz, and it says that if everyone lived like I do, we'd need 2.1 planets.

Hm. On one hand, this is comforting in comparison to the 2700 planets needed for everyone to live like Tom Cruise. On the other, I'm probably one of the most tree-hugging people I know, so I have to wonder: How many planets do we need for everyone to continue to live as they're accustomed?

As much as I love to hope that zillions of people will suddenly realize the personal financial benefit of re-using things (in addition to the less appealing ecological benefit), I'm not holding my breath. We'd better get to work on making the moon farmable.

In case one self-congratulatory screenshot wasn't enough for you, I'd also like everyone to know that I use less energy than most of Manhattan's concerned Personal Kyoto-using citizens. Which is kind of terrifying considering how pricey my ConEd bill has been this summer.

[via kottke (x2)]