Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Bucked down

This blog's PageRank was 8/10 for a long time. Now (my Google toolbar tells me) it's 6/10. Not saying I care all that much. In fact, I haven't looked at the PageRank thingie in a long time, for any page I visit. But somebody asked a PageRank question about another site, and I noticed the drop in my own, um, status. Oh well. Whatever, I guess.

Blogging your life, a way

Being and Blogging is a soul-baring post by Chris Bower. A sample:

After two and a half years of virtually non-stop blogging, my perception of myself as a distinct individual has dramatically waned. My interior monologue has virtually disappeared. I no longer have aesthetic-based epiphanies, and I almost never concern myself with examining internal passions or emotions anymore. Blogging has not just changed the activities in which I engage--the activities in which I engage in order to be a successful blogger have profoundly altered the way my mind operates and the way I conceptualize my agency in relation to others. In effect, I do not exist in the same way I once existed.

At first I thought the piece was a bit satirical. But it's serious. He concludes,

We political bloggers have spilled a great deal of ink on analytical, meta-blogosphere commentaries, and on how we would like to se the political process be reformed. I think we can do an equally great service--both to politics and to blogging--by spilling a little more ink on ourselves. No one has ever told the story of professional blogging in detail. Before I read yet another book on how Blogger X would fix the country, that is something I would like to see change. I doubt anyone will understand what it going on in the blogosphere until at least one person, and preferably several, finally does this.

I know a shrink who says human beings are natually obsessive animals, and that many of our psychological troubles are obsessive-compulsive disorders with other names. I think some of that may be going on here.

Aurora alert

According to Spaceweather.com,

Sunspot 930 has just unleashed another big solar flare, an X3-class explosion at 0240 UT on Dec. 13th.

As a result of the blast, a radiation storm is underway. Based on the energy and number of solar protons streaming past Earth, NOAA ranks the storm as category S2: satellites may experience some glitches and reboots, but astronauts are in no danger.

The explosion probably hurled a coronal mass ejection toward Earth. (Confirmation from SOHO is still pending.) Sky watchers should be alert for auroras when it arrives on Dec. 14th or 15th.

A sidebar adds,

NOTE: A radiation storm just underway has overwhelmed solar wind sensors onboard NASA's ACE spacecraft. Solar wind readings reported above are temporarily unreliable.

Lots of links at the Aurora Page. Among them are the Real Time Auroral Oval. Since the aurora manifest as curtains of light up to a thousand miles high, they are visible up to a thousand miles and more to the south of the oval in the northern hemisphere, and to the north of the oval in the southern hemisphere.

Since we are nearing the solstice, visibility of auroras will be confined mostly to the nothern hemisphere.

At the moment, things are quiet. Although they were getting hot just a few hours ago over Iceland. Watch for more pix here and here.