You are browsing the archive for History Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.
14 April 2010
The Stars They Saw – April 14, 1865 & April 14, 1912
Being a history and science buff, I have often wondered what the weather and the sky looked like at great moments in history. Today is one of those dates. At 13 minutes past 10 PM on Friday April 14, 1865, a gunshot rang out in Fords Theatre at Tenth and E street in Washington. Forty seven years later, almost to the minute, a lookout shouted “ice berg, dead ahead!” on …
19 March 2010
Places of Reverence – Frozen In Time
The only continent that humans did not naturally colonise is Antarctica. As I write this there are only about 250 people on the entire continent. They will be there through the long dark polar night. It will be spring before the New York Air Guard can fly a plane back in. The first person to reach the Pole at the bottom of the world did so just 99 years ago. …
14 March 2010
Texas 1 Science 0 or Why you should pull your kids out of public school in Texas.
The war on science in America shows no signs of abating. If anything, it’s gotten much worse. While I try hard to avoid politics on this journal, when people try to change science to their own beliefs or rewrite history for the same reasons, I’m going to talk about it. It doesn’t matter what political party you belong to. This case has to do with some political extremists who run …
11 March 2010
A Picture Worth a Thousand Words
Micahel Tobis, over at Only In It For The Gold, is always a worthy read. Today, he had the image below in a post: For a much more detailed answer, the go to person is Michael Pollan. Here are two article Dr. Pollan wrote for the NY Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/opinion/10pollan.html The second one is best but much longer. It will make your jaw drop. Open Letter to President Elect Obama
5 December 2009
Are We Living Through A Notable Moment In Science History??
The class that most impressed me while at university was not taught by one of my meteorology professors. Not that I didn’t have some good ones. One became a provost of the University of Oklahoma, and another has written two text books that are considered the gold standard on dynamics (read that as mean math) and makes frequent appearances on the Discovery Channel with Tornadoes bearing down on him! Instead …
25 November 2009
150 Years Ago Today- The Book That Changed Science
It was an idea that did nothing less than revolutionise Science. It all started 150 ears ago today when Charles Darwin published the famous book “On The Origin of The Species”. It’s always amazed me how few people have read it. I suspect that very few of those who still criticise it have. Almost everyone who has read it, thinks it’s genius and wonders why no one thought of it …
4 July 2009
A Picture Worth a Million Dollars (and it cost about that much too!)
To me the most fascinating part of synoptic forecasting is Satellite Meteorology. I can still remember working in Tulsa at KJRH TV where we had a GOES Unifax machine. Every 15 minutes a high resolution image would spit out. During the day the resolution was 1 km on a visible image. This was good enough to see jet contrails at times. One afternoon a large contrail was visible across Northeast …
21 May 2009
Sunset From the Saturn 5 Rocket Cam
There is only one upright model of a Saturn V Moon Rocket. It’s right here in Huntsville, and it’s next to the first Saturn V ever built. (The real one is in a building to protect it!). The rocket that took man to the Moon is 363 feet high. That’s 36 stories. It’s one of only three remaining, and is a priceless object of history. For my readers in other states, …
8 May 2009
NASA's Most Difficult and Perhaps Most Important Shuttle Mission
When I was young, if you were an Astronaut, you were famous. Everyone knew what you looked like. Not so anymore. The public fascination with space waned after the Moon landing and it has not recovered. These days, the only way an Astronaut gets famous, is if he dies or gets caught in a sordid love triangle. Astronauts are not household names anymore. Some of the reasons for this may be the …
3 May 2009
The Photo That Changed the World
What were you doing on Christmas Eve 1968? If you are younger than 40 you weren’t even alive, but I hit 50 next month, and I remember it well, and not just because I was 9 years old at the time, and Christmas morning was a few hours away. Apollo 8 was circling the Moon, and I was (and still am) a Space nut. Human beings on that Christmas Eve …
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.