u/jpgoldberg

This is a history of cosmology/astronomy question.

I am curious about how recently the cosmological view that the stars are fixed in some sort of firmament persisted.

My uninformed guess is that the firmament view held sway until either parallax measurements were capable of telling us that different stars were at different distances (so mid to late 19th century?), or parallax was at least capable of telling us the minimum distance to stars was so great that they had to be objects as bright as our sun (early 19th century?). But I am just guessing. Perhaps there were reasonably persuasive arguments against a celestial sphere or firmament that didn't depend on fine parallax measurements.

I believe the idea that the stars are objects like our sun has been around much longer, but I'm asking when the, if not consensus view changed, but when the generally accepted view among astronomers shifted way from a celestial sphere or firmament.

If there are any books or papers describing this history, I would welcome pointers to it.

One of the doors on carriage 5546. It is the door on the south west side of the carriage. It was fine until about Wilson, but stopped opening shortly north of there.

I am extremely impressed with how a passenger managed a very difficult situation, and I apologize for my failure to do more to help. I only had a backpack, as I had just dropped my wife off at the airport and was traveling back home.

It is extremely unlikely that you will be reading this, but I will address it to you anyway. You had luggage, a baby a small child (3 or 4 year old), and a somewhat older child. You managed to exit at Western.

This was Blue Line from O'Hare at around 14:15 yesterday (July 30). By the time you left the carriage was packed with people heading to the Lolla Palooza music festival. When you got on, people did give up seats so that you could set with the baby across from the other children. But we failed to anticipate that the aisles would be packed with people standing and so you would be separated from your children. Later I thought about trying to orchestrate a different seating arrangement, but did nothing. And that is what I apologize for. I think that many of us wanted to help but did not know how.

I was sitting behind the children. The little one was excited to be on a train and was pointing out things from the window and wanted to ask and talk to you about those, even though you were not all that close by. So I tried engaging with her, which worked for a bit, while you were dealing with the baby. But once the older sibling left to hang out with you, and the crowd increased, the little one was correctly not going to hang out alone in a crowd with you out of sight and earshot.

When the little one ran out the door at Western those of us who saw that didn't know that that was your intended stop. So thanks to those who brought her back inside and held the door until everything was sorted out.

Anyway, I would have not been able to conceal my stress and worry during all of that, but you made your children feel comfortable by concealing it.

So here is wishing you and your family well.

A recent, now removed, post got me thinking about what sorts of science projects could be done which can help students discover for themselves that the Earth is round and perhaps the size of it. Some of these could involve collaboration with students at different latitudes.

Direction of apparent rotation of the night sky

People in the Northern Hemisphere see the stars each night rotate counter-clockwise around Polaris. Those in the Southern Hemisphere see the stars spin clockwise around different point in the sky. Pair up with a classroom in a different part of the world, so students can hear the observations of their counter parts.

Angle to Polaris

In each set of collaborating schools include at least two that are at substantially different northern hemisphere latitudes. For each location you will need to know approximate distance to North Pole. Measure the angle above the horizon of Polaris. Know that it is 90 degrees at the North Pole. Use the sine function to compute the distance between the North Pole and Polaris under the assumption that the distance from school to North Pole is a straight line. Compare the computations from different latitudes. Southern hemisphere version of this will have to use the center point of rotation of the night sky or a telescope, as there is no visible to the naked eye “South Star”.

Working through more geometry, use the discrepancy to estimate the size of the Earth.

Sunrise, sunset

This will depend on your local topography. But if you live in a relatively flat place with a tall structure (water tower, steeple, minaret, sky scraper), get the height of the object and measure the time it takes for sunlight to reach (sunrise) or disappear from (sunset) different altitudes.

Work through geometry to approximate size of the Earth.

T

The decision to keep Venera 7 secret was idiotic, and it reminded me of a joke from the old days.

> A man is shouting in Red Square, "Brezhnev is an idiot! Brezhnev is an idiot!" over and over again. He is quickly arrested, and is tried and sentenced the next day. The sentence is for 1 day in jail (already served) and seven years labor in Siberia. > > The one day is for spreading anti-Soviet propaganda. The seven years is for revealing state secrets.

After the season 1 finale, it should be clear that western intelligence would have learned of Venera 7 via Lakshmi and almost certainly from other sources. The reentry of two vehicles near the Soviet/Finish border along with just regular human intelligence out of Star City and Moscow would have confirmed what Lakshmi reported.

Tanya may not have known about Venera 7, but she knew that Valya was spending a lot of time on a secret project. She may have thought that his secrecy was due to him being a CIA asset, but the CIA would have known otherwise. And a price for her extraction would be for a detailed account of everything she did know. (This also means that Western intelligence has some awareness of Irina, but that is a different story.)

The fact that the West choose to keep Venera 7 secret is testament to how bad a decision doing so way to the Soviet Union.

My limited understanding is that the most recent Missoula flood would have occurred a few centuries after the peopling of the Americas, and that the Columbia River valley would have been settled relatively early. So my guess is that the answer to my question is “almost certainly”.

But I am hoping that anthropologists can shed more light on what evidence there might be or could be expected or tell me what I’ve got wrong if I’ve got this wrong.

Update:

I’d like,to thank everyone who answered. The answers were in line with what I had expected. The broader region was populated and that the nature of the flooding would have made it much harder to find evidence of inundated settlements, so there is no surprise that there are no such finds. Someone also pointed out that the floods were frequent enough that people may have known to avoid settling in valley.

I do encourage anyone coming across this question to read the responses, which offer great information about the region.

Under the assumption that the some of the crew survived the events of Awl in a Sack, I do not believe it will be possible for too much longer without support from Earth. Several burns needed to be computed to successfully swing around Venus and head for home. I also wonder whether the venting will have disrupted their course in a way that will make those maneuvers even more challenging.

Assuming that the writers do have them survive, then we have a very interesting season ahead both on earth and aboard Venera 7 keeping them alive.

This will also include spoilers for Star Trek Deep Space Nine, as I compare to a character there. And it contains spoilers through Episode 6.

I’m hoping that people with some experience of living under Soviet rules will comment on what I say below. I have has more experience with this than the vast majority of Americans watching the series, but my experience is still peripheral. I saw the tail end of Soviet rule in Hungary, and I talked to many people who lived through its darker days, as well as with people who did live in the Soviet Union.

I am watching Rostova and wondering to what extent she believes in “the Marxist-Leninist way of life”, “the Fatherland”, or just survival, Everything she has actually done since her screw-up with Yana Akhmatova can be explained by trying to survive. In S1:E6 she knew she was doing more damage to the Soviet space program than Valya Mironov ever could aboard aboard the Venera 6, but she needs to make him disappear particular
after she lied to the commissars about the state of her hunt for him. A true believer might have admitted her failure and faced the consequences. Instead she chose to destroy what would have been an astonishingly great achievement for the Soviet Union to save her neck.

But her over-all demeanor is very much along the lines of a certain kind of “true believer” that I met. During my years in Hungary, I met very few Hungarians that genuinely believed in the Marxist-Leninist way of life, but some that I did meet a few were as rigid and humorless as Comrade Colonel Roskova. (They became humorless nationalistic Christians after 1990, and did so so without a flicker of recognizing the irony.) A sexist term Hungarians used for women who fit that pattern could be translated as “she-comrade.” The whole whole “apologize to your comrade” scene in an early episode is something that would send chills down the spines of anyone with experience of the system.

I’m going to describe another kind of true believer I encountered in my slow effort to work about to my point.

In my Hungarian class, there were some wives of high rank Soviet officers who were supposed to join them in Budapest once their deployment was finished (presumably in Afghanistan, but my classmates did not volunteer such information.) They certainly seemed to genuinely buy into the Soviet system. And I know that they struggled to think outside of the labor theory of value. One day in class they asked the westerners how the very same product could be sold for different prices in different stores. They were genuinely flabbergasted when they had encountered that, and they seemed to feel,that it was chaos.

Beyond those who joined the Communists merely as opportunists seeking to benefit from the rampant corruption were a few who had joined the party because they had genuinely cared about social justice. Once they discovered that the Party was made up of deeply conservative people and was a force of oppression instead of justice, they went in one of two directions. One was to call the party out for this, perhaps spend some time in jail, lose their jobs, and end up with the opposition. The other was to seek to reform the Party from within, and often still advocate for Party’s monopoly on power. I should say that I friends and colleagues on both sides of this. The latter group argued that multi-party democracy would bring chaos.

For those of you who have read this far, you will see common motive of a fear of chaos is the ruling party were to lose its grip.

So with that, I would like those with some knowledge and experience of Soviet style systems to let me know whether I am on target in my discussion of motivations and personality types that get drawn to the party and what you think underlies Rostova’s actions. I feel like it is more than just self-preservation.

In Star Trek DS9 we see Kai Winn work to convince herself that the terrible things she does is really in the best interest of those she is supposed to serve. We don’t see Rostova doing that, though it could be off-camera. Still, I don’t think she would be able to fool herself as easily as Kai Winn does.

Although I am not big on holiday celebrations in general, and I don't like big crowds, I want to celebrate the greatest single advance of freedom in America.

I mention that I am White only because I don't want to intrude on others' spaces.

Update: Thank you all for your excellent suggestions with a great deal of consensus. There are some places I've been checking out in Bronzeville and down near 77th that look great, but I will save those for another day, as I don't want to leave the dog alone too long with the fireworks.

Maybe I will just dose the dog, put in my air pods, and join the people setting of fireworks across the street. Dog will take that as a huge betrayal, though.

I suspect that this has been discussed before, but thirty seconds of half-assed searching didn’t point me to it.

I ride the #60 between west of UIC and the Loop. And during the UIC terms, it is packed between UIC and the Ogilvie Metra station, with a fair number of people also boarding or getting off at Union station.

So naturally I, who knows nothing about how transit networks work beyond being a passenger, thought it would make sense that at least during UIC semesters, a shuttle making all the UIC stops on Harrison, stopping at Union Station amd at Ogilvie would both help the people going to and from UIC and would allow the #60 get through that stretch more quickly and more comfortably for passengers going to points beyond.

I am guessing that there is a reason that this isn’t already done, but I don’t know what it is.