Good morning.

It’s a snowy day in Whitewater.  This small city is lovely, surrounded by abundant natural beauty, but never lovelier than when covered in snow.  Whitewater will have a high temperature of twenty.  In Phoenix, sunny with a high near seventy.  I’ll take the snow.

The Wisconsin Historical Society recalls that on this day in 1922,

WHA Radio Founded

On this date the call letters of experimental station 9XM in Madison were replaced by WHA. This station dates back to 1917, making it “The oldest station in the nation.” [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers, edited by Sarah Davis McBride]

That’s 970 AM in Madison, part of Wisconsin’s Public Radio Network.

So the theory of hot hands in sports may be true, after all: Big score for the hot hand.

Bruce Bower reports in ScienceNews that

Not only do top volleyball strikers go on scoring runs that can’t be chalked up to chance, but players and coaches notice when a player is on a hot streak and funnel the ball his or her way, say psychologist Markus Raab of German Sport University Cologne and his colleagues, who studied the hot-hand phenomenon by analyzing playoff game data from a German volleyball league.

That strategy usually works, because players who on average score on a high percentage of shots tend to get hot hands. So getting them the ball during a scoring streak boosts a team’s score, the researchers will report in an upcoming Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. This tactic backfires if a player with a low scoring average develops a hot hand and draws shots away from better scorers, the scientists hold.

Go with what’s working.

Amazing, but true: you can Get Photos Sent Directly From Mars to Your Phone.

Why not use your smartphone to get pictures from the surface of another planet?

The Mars Images app fetches images from the NASA Opportunity rover’s latest downlink as soon as they’re available. On Mars since 2004, Opportunity has far exceeded its planned mission life and is still making groundbreaking discoveries, such as the recent unambiguous evidence that water once flowed on Mars.

Developed by computer scientist Mark Powell of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the app also allows you to browse older photos from the rover’s archive. It is free and available for both iPhone/iPad and Android phones.

I’ve downloaded the app for the iPhone, and it’s astonishing.  The photos are black and white, and come with identifying information.

Here’s one of the millions-of-miles-away photos:

Good morning.

It’s snow for Whitewater today, with several inches expected, and a high temperature in the mid-twenties. For Atlanta, showers and windy, with a high of fifty-nine.

On this day in 1915, the U.S. House of Representatives rejected a proposal to give women the right to vote,  174-204.

Whalers kill more whales than ever before, despite the efforts of conservationists and animal right activists, but there’s a solution: A Market Proposal for Saving Whales. Here’s the idea:

The proposed market would be patterned after a system known best known from fisheries management as catch shares: Sustainable harvest levels are quantified, a maximum quota established, and catch allotments put up for sale by the International Whaling Commission. Costello’s proposal would add the crucial wrinkle of allowing activists to buy shares, too. If they did, a corresponding number of whales would be removed from the quota. (Indigenous groups would receive a set number of shares to be owned in perpetuity, apart from the market — though those could conceivably be sold, too.)

According to Costello’s estimates, global whaling profits amount to $31 million, and likely less when government subsidies are removed. Mainstream anti-whaling groups — Greenpeace, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, and the World Wildlife Fund — spend about $25 million to fight the hunts.

“This money could be used to purchase whales, arguably with the same or better effect,” write the researchers in Nature.

Conservationists may not want to put a price on a whale, but they’d save more of them this way than are saved now.

Google has a particularly interesting puzzle for today: “Which would be bigger: the offspring of a female lion and a male tiger, or the offspring of a male lion and a female tiger?”

Good morning.

For Whitewater: a sunny day, with a high temperature of forty-nine.  For Charlestown, SC: showers, a high of sixty-eight, and televised political ads non-stop until their presidential primary.

There’s a meeting of the Tech Park Board this morning at 8 AM. Even mentioning the meeting gives the board more attention than it should ever receive.

On this day in 1935, “aviator Amelia Earhart began a trip from Honolulu to Oakland, Calif., becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean.”

There’s a disparity among different deep-sea ecosystems, as it’s Crabs hither, shrimp thither:

Like the boroughs of New York City or the arrondissements of Paris, deep-sea communities are turning out to have a strong local flavor.

In the waters off Antarctica at the southernmost seafloor vents where hot water percolates from below, piles of hairy crabs swarm in the thousands. In the middle of the Indian Ocean lives a motley collection of creatures never before seen together. And south of Cuba, at the world’s deepest vents, shrimp rule.

Google’s puzzle for 1.11 asks about flowers: “In Texas they’re called Tarragon, in South America they’re turned into perfume, and in England you put them on to wash dishes. What is the more common name for these flowers?”