Tag: science holidays
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Happy Summer Solstice! Yay! (Northern Solstice)
Today, June 20th at 23:59 (one minute to midnight UTC (18:59 EST)), the sun will shine at its highest northern latitude for the year, appearing directly overhead for anyone standing at latitude 23.44° north, also known as the tropic of Cancer. Summer Solstice Credit: GI This is the longest day of the year, and from…
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Happy Near Miss Day!
Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico Image by NASA 19 years ago, March 23, 1989, Apollo asteroid 4581 Asclepius passed within 700,000 km (400,000 miles) of Earth, passing through the exact position the Earth was only six hours before. Had it impacted, it would have generated an explosion thousands of times more powerful than the most…
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Happy Darwin Day
Darwin Day Check out the official Darwin Day Website here.
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The Problem with Inventors’ Day
A Happy American Inventor Day to everyone, which occurs on Thomas Alva Edison’s birthday. The same Edison who’s DC power was finally turned off in November after 125 years of inferiority and who swindled Nicholas Tesla out of $50,000. That’s right, today is in honor of Thomas Edison the hypocrite who bootlegged the film Voyage…
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50th Anniversary of America Entering the Space Race
“At the time, we didn’t know a great deal, but we felt comfortable that we could put something up. And we liked the difference between our satellite and Sputnik. Ours flew science, the Van Allen experiment.” – Carl Raggio, a mechanical engineer on the Explorer team Explorer I Image by NASA 50 years ago, at…
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There’s Only One Human Race
Nobel Laureate, James Watson, recently made the claim that blacks were ‘less intelligent,’ than whites, which just goes to show, being smart in one area doesn’t prevent you from being foolish in other realms. The following message is from the American Anthropological Association: “race” has no scientific justification in human biology. Tiger Woods coined the…
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Happy Kid Inventor Day!
Benjamin Franklin age 12 Courtesy NPS Benjamin Franklin was 15 when he started writing notable letters to the Editor of his local paper. Thomas Edison was 15 when he began printing his own newspaper. Louis Braille was 15 when he invented the raised dots that served as a gateway to the blind reading on their…
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Happy Winter Solstice! Yay!!!
Image by The Slumbering Lungfish (flyingsirkus) Happy Winter Solstice (in the Northern Hemisphere) to all my fellow Secular Humanists out there! At 6:08 this morning the Sun reached its greatest distance opposite the Earth’s equatorial plane relative to the Northern polar hemisphere, making it the longest night of the year and our days will only…
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Happy Evolution Day!
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) Photo by J. Cameron, 1869 On this day, 148 years ago, Charles Darwin first published The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (wikipedia). Although the book and specifics of Darwin’s orginal theory have been improved upon, as the evolving body of scientific knowledge perpetually works out the myriad details of…
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Happy Birthday Kurt Vonnegut!
Kurt Vonnegut Photo by Ryan Somma He would be 85 today. This great writer survived the firebombing of Dresden, wrote dozens of books and short stories, and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association. Although he objected to the description, Vonnegut wrote many science fiction stories. In his book Cat’s Cradle, he came up…
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Happy Birthday Carl Sagan!
Carl Sagan He would be 73 today. As Sagan was dying, he stressed the fact that his quasi-atheism did not make him fear death at all, but rather he was always overjoyed for having the opportunity to even briefly exist and experience at all. The world is a much happier place for his having existed.…
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50th Anniversary of Kudryavka (Laika)
“Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.” ” – Oleg Gazenko, leading…