We engaged in some good natured ribbing of Sam and my mother this evening when they were briefly psychologically unable to differentiate a holiday season depicted in a sitcom and our real world’s actual timetable. Driving home, Sam and I listened to “Some People Don’t Even Know If It’s Christmastime.” I wanted to link it as a punchline to that life vignette but somehow a cursory glance for “Daniel Johnston Christmas” yielded the Battle of Kruger:
.. something I think of as an early example of how omnipresent viral videos can get now. I remember seeing it at my cousin’s home in San Diego and my neighboring cubicle inside a week of eachother back when it was catching fire. Now if only it was the singer-songwriter I wanted. The Internet is a many-splendored thing but it’s also damned fickle.
Go team Human Rights. Sam and I got to pump our fists for a rally downtown. Now everybody cross your fingers for the next two courts…
Here’s another cool movie of the recent complex solar eruption.
For the post I put up the other day about it, I uploaded a video from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory that I couldn’t find on YouTube yet. This morning, I got this email from everyones’ friends in Mountain View:
Your video August 1 Coronal Mass Ejection might be eligible for the YouTube Partnership Program, which allows you to make money from playbacks of your video.
Making money from your video is easy. Here’s how it works: First sign into your YouTube account. Then, review and complete the steps outlined here…
…If your video is approved, we’ll start placing ads next to the video and pay you a share of the revenue as long as you meet the program requirements.
We look forward to adding your video to the YouTube Partnership Program.
Thanks and good luck!
The YouTube Team
First time I’ve had something get enough hits to trigger their automatic moneygrubber— it’s an odd feeling. Kind of makes me feel like I need a shower. Video’s ineligible anyway, I think, since it’s publicly (i.e., government) produced footage.
Keep your eyes peeled tonight and tomorrow for more aurora! The second, slower coronal mass ejection is still arriving and I noticed earlier tonight that the Space Weather Prediction Center has extended its geomagnetic storm watch through Friday. I’m heading to Eastern Washington this weekend and am hoping against hope the ionosphere is still willing to put on a show that far out.
Oh and, here’s what Monetitizing looks like, if you were wondering:
Devin and I often talk about what our band will be like when the idea finally comes to fruition. Here’s some inspiration I found today:
Ideas I want to steal from this band for our future ensemble include:
Orange costumes
Xylophones
Go-go boots
Cute haircuts
Accordions
Attitude
Here’s a graph of 5-minute averaged gross X-ray flux for the past couple days from the GOES satellite. Basically, it’s a graph of energy in certain wavelength bands being emitted by the Sun :
It’s logarithmic, but don’t worry about that if you don’t understand it. The letters on the right are the weight classes for coronal mass ejections, or solar flares. As and Bs are your intercontinental phone line static and X is your transformers-exploding geomagnetic superstorm.
The other day, there was a C3 class flare from Earth-facing sunspot 1092. It’s a pretty moderate size as these things go, but probably just enough to touch off the Northern Lights. But here’s the cool part. The coronal mass ejection triggered a larger solar event, ripping a huge magnetic filament off with it. I think that’s the filament across the top in the image below from SOHO.
The filament is around half a million miles long— twice the distance between Earth and the Moon— and the whole damn thing took off with the flare and heaved straight for Earth.
Fingers crossed for dark clear skies— there oughta be one hell of an aurora at the least.
And if you are wondering what is going on at our house when I am home alone:
Sam and Devin dot com 