20190718

Thu 18 Jul 2019 09:13:40 AM EDT Slept from ten-thirty to seven. Woke briefly a couple times in the night. High of ninety-one and mostly sunny today. Work: - Fix Bullseye email Done. - Do the support costs for Central's copier still make sense? Home: - Play with D&D stuff (Zerapis?) Done. https://nautil.us/issue/74/networks/when-the-earth-had-two-moons-rp > Luna 3’s first-ever images of the lunar far side revealed an expanse of rugged, blandly gray highlands—a vista utterly unlike the near side’s charismatic, Man-in-the-Moon markings. It didn’t take a planetary scientist to recognize the weirdness of that split personality. “I remember as a boy seeing one of the news programs showing the far side of the moon, and thinking it was incredible that a planet could be so different on each side,” Asphaug says. > “People have been biased, looking at impacts and thinking only about hypervelocity events,” he says. “People forgot that things can hit at lower velocities.” These kinds of events are constructive rather than destructive: If two objects collide slowly enough they bump and stick together, “like throwing mud at the wall of a house or throwing snowballs at each other.” Asphaug had been thinking that low-velocity impacts, what he liked to call “splats,” could explain how comets formed. Suddenly he realized he might have the solution to the moon problem sitting right in front of him. > “We went to the lab right after that seminar and Martin coded up the moon being hit by a companion moon,” Asphaug says. The result of those computations was a novel interpretation of lunar asymmetry. In Asphaug’s view, the jumbled lunar highlands are the wreckage of a second moon that once orbited the Earth, pasted onto the surface of the moon. Small wonder that the far side looks like a different world; it is a different world. Signed up for Audible. Twenty-five-minute walk at lunch on a fitness center treadmill. Started listening to The Lost City of the Monkey God. Exciting non-fiction. Seed of a LotFP adventure? https://publicdomainreview.org/2019/07/10/the-myth-of-blubber-town-an-arctic-metropolis/ > Perched on a desolate island in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard — 1,500 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle — sits the settlement of Smeerenburg. Founded by Dutch whalers in 1619, Smeerenburg — literally “Blubber Town” — was once the busiest polar site for rendering oil from blubber. As new hunting grounds and technologies rendered land-based processing obsolete, the outpost became unnecessary. Faraway Smeerenburg was abandoned by 1663. Despite its brief existence, myths of a bustling Blubber Town lived on. Sailors recounted streets lined with churches, shops, and bakeries. Other tales described the clubs and brothels forlorn whalers could visit. Respected scientists and historians, including William Scoresby and Fridtjof Nansen, repeated the stories, claiming tens of thousands of people dwelled on the icy island. In reality, no more than fifteen ships carrying four hundred men visited the site. > For the next century, the Dutch ruled the whale trade, supplying almost all of Europe with oil for lamps and whale bones for corsets and hoop-skirts. The peerless Dutch navy safeguarded sailing routes against English, German, and French interlopers as Dutch whalers asserted exclusive rights to the best hunting grounds in the Arctic. The resulting near monopoly allowed Dutch companies to keep prices artificially high and further gild their coffers > By the eighteenth century, written accounts make clear that Smeerenburg was abandoned, but the myth of its former grandeur continued. > Scoresby has no problem repeating the invention of shopkeepers, artisans, and bakers, ultimately calculating the population between 12,000 and 18,000 people. For comparison, at the time of the American Revolution, Boston had 15,000 residents. Building on Scoresby’s description, other authors add churches, fortresses, wood-paneled houses in bright colors, and even enlarge the size of buildings to 80 by 50 feet. By the end of the century, the rocky coast was thought to have been packed full and the harbor teeming with ships. Servings: grains 0/6, fruit 4/4, vegetables 4/4, dairy 1/2, meat 2/3, nuts 0/0.5 Brunch: omelet, cherries, banana, celery, carrots, coffee Lunch: cherries, orange, carrots, tomato, yogurt Afternoon snack: coffee Dinner: Thai 120/77

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