Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for May 19, 2010

Certainly not the education system to the rescue!

That is the way most research is funded though.

Don’t be silly………. (laughter)

Baslim (from Sunday - sorry it took me so long!) Yep, I still live in China and, yes, it is a VERY dirty place. To an uneducated Chinese man, the whole world is a bathroom (college tends to housebreak people over here), people spit everywhere, and a lot of people think that storm drains are appropriate places for their children to relieve themselves. I have seen grandmothers have their grand kids pee in the corner of a restaurant dining area!

I am forever telling my daughter “don’t touch the bushes, you never know who’s been past!” I carry hand sanitizer and antibacterial wipes with me everywhere and I wash all my vegetables in bleach. Needless to say, I’m terrified to touch any surface in a public area.

@ejcapulet Offtopic discussion: I just returned from a Hong Kong vacation. I don’t like going there often, it’s dirty and crowded and noisy and air pollution is really bad. But the food and shopping bargains can’t be beat. If the Chinese govt put as much money into public sanitation and education as they do for showing off, they’d make some real progress.

Just run while you can Joe.

To any brainiacs out there: Are there any planets in this solar system that has the sun setting in the east? Or all have the sun set in west like our homeworld? And yes, Danae does NEED to pay more attention in school!

Love how she thinks that paying attention in school is silly… lol

If China is so dirty, why isn’t disease rampant over there? Hmm, perhaps a US government grant may permit me to delve into this.

Danae’s got her own (inaccurate) theories about a lot things. I’m just surprised she doesn’t want to prove that all boys have got booger brains.

I thought the premise was government funding to document the obvious.

The planet Mercury is tidal-locked with the Sun and only presents one face to it: the Sun never sets.

The same relationship may be seen with the Moon, which is tidal-locked with the Earth; there is a slight wobble so we see more than 50% of the Moon over time. Cool picture of this (called lunar libration):

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lunarlibrationwith_phase2.gif

No Child Left Behind…results may vary in your district.

Hunh. Munged the URL. Try this: http://tinyurl.com/2ftws3r

Plus, Danae, it is Earth’s rotation that leads to the Sun apparently setting in the West. Solar rotation has nothing to do with it.

ejcapulet and off topic-ers: This is why Jesus made such a deal out of washing the feet of his disciples. Imagine walking IN Sandals in an ancient land where that was the usual practice. Lowest servant got the job.

On topic: I know the sun never sets on what used to be the British empire. Countries do seem to be in other orbits or spheres of influence now, though. I believe my 1968 HS diploma would match Danae’s eventual elementary school graduation level though.

Danae, just send your request for funding to the White House I am sure that president Obama would jump at the chance to waste more of the taxpayers money on yet another stupid program!

Heretic! Tie her to the stake with Galileo and Copernicus. Our holy books show the sun’s rotation around the Earth result in its setting in the North. Government funding is required under the First Amendment.

We got a grant Every body’s got a grant

Democrat admins fund pointless research.Republican admins fund valid research that they then reject as too biased towards truth.

steverino said: “The planet Mercury is tidal-locked with the Sun and only presents one face to it: the Sun never sets.”

Well, no. That was believed to be the case for many years, because observing Mercury from Earth (or even from Earth orbit) is very difficult, but space probes have corrected the matter.

“Until 1962 it was thought that Mercury’s “day” was the same length as its “year” so as to keep that same face to the Sun much as the Moon does to the Earth. But this was shown to be false in 1965 by doppler radar observations. It is now known that Mercury rotates three times in two of its years. Mercury is the only body in the solar system known to have an orbital/rotational resonance with a ratio other than 1:1 (though many have no resonances at all).” – (http://nineplanets.org/mercury.html)

Yeah, I’m an astronomy geek…have been ever since I was a little kid. I would have been a professional astronomer, but when I got to college I found I couldn’t handle the advanced math…so I became an economist instead. The math is much easier, and it pays a lot better anyway! :)

@steverino

Hate to burst your bubble, but Mercury does rotate on its axis with respect to the Sun. It has a rotational period of 176 earth-days. This combined with it’s orbital period causes it to have an unusual day!?! From a person’s aspect standing on Mercury’s surface, the Sun would in the ‘east’ then briefly set in the ‘east’. The Sun would then cross the sky and set in the ‘west’, it would then rise briefly in the ‘west’ and finally set again in the ‘west’.

There are reasons why it was thought that the planet was tidally locked to the Sun, but with radar observations and such it was soon discovered that it does indeed rotate with respect to the Sun.

@everybody else

Scientific funding is NOT as slipshod or ‘silly’ as everyone here seems to think!

Initially, I thought Danae was offering her “Solar Rotation Theory” as an alternative to the Heliocentric modle of the Solar System and Newton’s Theory of Gravity that should be given “equal time” in school. Each is, after all, “just a theory.” ;-)

Then it was revealed, yet again, that Danae exists on a different planet.

Ahem! Excuse me! You the readers talk about the solar system?

The Sun is as a mother with very, very HOTTEST that has a lot of gas to burn eternity. And the planets such as Venus, Mercury, Earth and so on as the Sun’s children. The planets already locked and rotated around with it’s own speeds. Of course each of the planets have the moons except the Earth has only one moon. Others don’t have the moon to control the gravity. First planet is Mercury that rotates very fast and too close to the Sun. The last planet is Plato that rotates longest way with slow speed and too cold away from the Sun. The Earth is number fourth planet with perfect speed and temperatures of hot and cold that we live with. Too much information on solar system to explain continually. I learned a lot about the solar system when I was in third grade at the deaf school. It was very interesting! Oh by the way, the sun stays in one place and other planets rotates around the sun in clockwise; therefore, the sun rises up from East and sets down to West, not opposite of sun rise/set in West to East. That didn’t make any sense. Makes sense that the sun rises up from East and sets down to the West.

Have a g’day, mates!

Grog said, about 3 hours ago … I’m just surprised she doesn’t want to prove that all boys have got booger brains.

Me: to her mind, even the govt wouldn’t waste money on that study… back to Sunday’s wishing well, wasn’t Canton, OH, named after Canton, (Guangzhou), China, because it was on the other side of the world?

Why does everybody assume it is government funding. She could get wingnut welfare and become a climate change denier because the sun keeps setting at a different point on the horizon from one day to the next.

I think that, for most planets, East and West would be defined by the rising and setting of the sun. The only problem would be a planet like Uranus, with a 98° axial tilt, so that every planetary year the sun (1) rises and sets normally, (2) goes over the North Pole, with either permanent day or night , (3) rises and sets, but in the other direction, (4) goes over the South Pole, and again permanent night or day. All this in an 84 (Earth) year cycle. How long each “season” would last would depend on where you were on the planet.

How much funding would it take to prove that the Sun rises in the West?

Danae can make the sun set anywhere she wants to. It is a comic, where all of those physical rules apply.

More gummint funding for scientific research that is intended to validate a predetermined conclusion… global warming?

depends on how you define “west”…

Actually, she just watched John Wayne’s “The Green Berets” where at the end, supposedly at Da Nang, the sun sets into the ocean, which would be to the EAST-

Technically, the sun doesn’t set–the Earth revolves around the sun, as do the other 8 planets, so it never sets whatever planet you’re on.

Yes! PLUTO… IS… A… PLANET!!!!!!!

Danae is very intelligent in most ways, but she thinks she already knows it all.

The question was if any planets do have a retrograde rotation, and somebodyshort correctly identified Venus as the one that does. Both Uranus and Pluto (planet or not) have an extreme axial tilt, but Venus is the only one that has a reverse rotation.

SCAATY_423 and fjordanrr :

Hunh. Time to update my reading. You can learn new things anywhere, from anything. I still recall my Miss Pickerel books teaching me the planets when a kid: “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pumpkins.”

This is why Pluto should be a planet: I don’t want to learn a new mnemonic.

And I amazed my neighbor, doing her accounting studying while home from college: she had jotted “TANSTAAFL” in the margin of her text, and I knew what it meant: RAH and “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress”, thanks!