Good morning, Whitewater.

We’ve a mild Sunday ahead, with cloudy skies but a high temperature of forty-six. Sunrise is 7:18 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 03m 11s of daytime.The moon is a waning gibbous with 49.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

Friday’s FW poll asked if The Bold Bakery, a shop that offers cakes with insulting inscriptions, had a clever idea or was off the mark. A majority of respondents (55.56%) thought that it was a clever idea.

On this day in 1911, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team reach the South Pole, becoming the first men to do so:

The first expedition to reach the geographic South Pole was led by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. He and four others arrived at the pole on 14 December 1911,[n 1] five weeks ahead of a British party led by Robert Falcon Scott as part of the Terra Nova Expedition. Amundsen and his team returned safely to their base, and later learned that Scott and his four companions had died on their return journey.

Amundsen’s plans had focused on the Arctic and the conquest of the North Pole by means of an extended drift in an icebound ship. He obtained the use of Fridtjof Nansen’s polar exploration ship Fram, and undertook extensive fundraising. Preparations for this expedition were disrupted when, in 1909, the rival American explorers Frederick Cook and Robert E. Peary each claimed to have reached the North Pole. Amundsen then changed his plan and began to prepare for a conquest of the South Pole; uncertain of the extent to which the public and his backers would support him, he kept this revised objective secret. When he set out in June 1910, even most of his crew believed they were embarking on an Arctic drift.

Amundsen made his Antarctic base, “Framheim”, in the Bay of Whales on the Great Ice Barrier. After months of preparation, depot-laying and a false start that ended in near-disaster, he and his party set out for the pole in October 1911. In the course of their journey they discovered the Axel Heiberg Glacier, which provided their route to the polar plateau and ultimately to the South Pole. The party’s mastery of the use of skis and their expertise with sledge dogs ensured rapid and relatively trouble-free travel. Other achievements of the expedition included the first exploration of King Edward VII Land and an extensive oceanographic cruise.

The expedition’s success was widely applauded. The story of Scott’s heroic failure overshadowed its achievement in the United Kingdom, unable to accept that a Norwegian had been the first person to set foot in the South Pole, but not in the rest of the world. Amundsen’s decision to keep his true plans secret until the last moment was criticised by some. Recent polar historians have more fully recognised the skill and courage of Amundsen’s party; the permanent scientific base at the pole bears his name, together with that of Scott.

On this day in 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivers an address on the American West:

1893 – Frederick Jackson Turner Delivers Frontier Address
On this date Frederick Jackson Turner delivered the “Significance of the Frontier in American History” address at the forty-first annual meeting of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. [Source: SHSW Proceedings, 1893, pg. 79-112]

See, at the National Humanities Center, The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893.

Good morning, Whitewater.

This Saturday, we’ll have fog in the morning with cloudy skies thereafter. The high today will be forty-one. Sunrise is 7:17 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 03m 41s of daytime.

It’s 12.13.14, and as a close friend told me yesterday, one won’t again have the chance to write the day’s date as three sequential numbers until 2103.

There are some other interesting dates yet ahead, before then, if not sequential ones:

Although 12-13-14 will be the last sequential MM-DD-YY date for 89 years, we won’t have to wait until 2103 for similarly interesting dates to pop up. On Google+, John Judy points out a few: “Jan. 2, 2034 gives you something similar [1-2-34], while Jan. 23, 2045 lets you use all double-digit listing [1-23-45]. Feb. 2, 2022 is going to be the next one to get headlines, though [2-22-22].” I would argue that April 3, 2021 — 4-3-21 — might be worthy of note as well.

Fun stuff.

On this day in 2000, Al Gore concedes the presidential election to George W. Bush.

In our state’s history on this date, in 1864, Wisconsinites defending the Union push farther into Georgia:

1864 – (Civil War) 3rd Wisconsin Light Artillery Reaches Savannah, Georgia
The 3rd Wisconsin Light Artillery arrived at the front lines for the Battle of Savannah, Georgia.

Good morning, Whitewater.

Friday will be foggy in the morning, giving way too afternoon sun and a high of thirty-six. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 4:21 PM for 9h 04m 16s of daytime. The mooning is a waning gibbous with 68.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1901, a communications triumph —

Italian physicist and radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi succeeds in sending the first radio transmission across the Atlantic Ocean, disproving detractors who told him that the curvature of the earth would limit transmission to 200 miles or less. The message–simply the Morse-code signal for the letter “s”–traveled more than 2,000 miles from Poldhu in Cornwall, England, to Newfoundland, Canada….

In 1909, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physics with the German radio innovator Ferdinand Braun. After successfully sending radio transmissions from points as far away as England and Australia, Marconi turned his energy to experimenting with shorter, more powerful radio waves. He died in 1937, and on the day of his funeral all British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) stations were silent for two minutes in tribute to his contributions to the development of radio.

Google-a-Day has a question about literature:

What city is the setting of the first of two Pulitzer Prize-winning plays by the man who introduced us to Blanche and Brick?

Good morning, Whitewater.

Thursday in town will be sunny with a high of thirty-three. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 04m 56s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 77% of its visible disk illuminated.

If you’re not yet sure about what you’ll have for lunch today, PES Films helpfully shows the proper technique for making a submarine sandwich —

Google has a doodle today to commemorate the birthday of pioneering American astronomer Annie Jump Cannon:

In 1896, Cannon became a member of “Pickering’s Women”,[10] the women hired by Harvard Observatory director Edward C. Pickering to complete the Henry Draper Catalogue, mapping and defining every star in the sky to photographic magnitude of about 9. Cannon started her work right away, and discovered SS Cygni, a “dwarf nova” that repeats its outbursts about every 60 days.[11]

Anna Draper, the widow of wealthy physician and amateur astronomer Henry Draper, set up a fund to support the work. Men at the laboratory did the labor of operating the telescopes and taking photographs while the women examined the data, carried out astronomical calculations, and cataloged those photographs during the day.[8] Pickering made the Catalogue a long-term project to obtain the optical spectra of as many stars as possible and to index and classify stars by spectra. If making measurements was hard, the development of a reasonable classification was at least as difficult.

Not long after work began on the Draper Catalogue, a disagreement developed as to how to classify the stars. The analysis was first started by Nettie Farrar, who left a few months later to be married. This left the problem to the ideas of Antonia Maury, Henry Draper’s niece, who insisted on a complex classification system and Williamina Fleming, who was overseeing the project for Pickering,[10] and wanted a much more simple, straightforward approach.[6] Cannon negotiated a compromise: she started by examining the bright southern hemisphere stars. To these stars she applied a third system, a division of stars into the spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K, M. Her scheme was based on the strength of the Balmer absorption lines. After absorption lines were understood in terms of stellar temperatures, her initial classification system was rearranged to avoid having to update star catalogues. Cannon published her first catalog of stellar spectra in 1901.

Cannon and the other women at the Observatory were criticized at first for being “out of their place” and not being housewives. In fact, women could only get as high as assistants in this line of work and were only paid 25 cents an hour for seven hours a day, six days a week.[4] Cannon dominated this field because of her “tidiness” and patience for the tedious work, and even helped the men in the observatory gain popularity. Cannon helped broker partnerships and exchanges of equipment between men in the international community and assumed an ambassador-like role outside of it. She wrote books and articles to increase astronomy’s status, and in 1933, she represented professional women at the Worlds Fair in Chicago.[12]

Cannon’s determination and hard work paid off. She classified more stars in a lifetime than anyone else, with a total of around 500,000 stars. She also discovered 300 variable stars, five novas, and one spectroscopic binary, creating a bibliography that included about 200,000 references.[11] Cannon could classify three stars a minute just by looking at their spectral patterns and, if using a magnifying glass, could classify stars down to the ninth magnitude, around 16 times fainter than the human eye can see.[4]

On May 9, 1922, the International Astronomical Union passed the resolution to formally adopt Cannon’s stellar classification system, and with only minor changes, it is still being used for classification today.[8]

Google-a-Day also poses a geography question:

Due to its vast territory, in 2009 a bill was proposed in Russia to reduce “what,” down from eleven?

Good morning, Whitewater.

Midweek in Whitewater brings a high of thirty-one, with clouds in the morning giving way to sunshine this afternoon. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset is 4:20 PM, for 9h 05m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 84.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority Seed Capital Committee meets at 4 PM today, and the CDA Board at 5 PM.

On this day in 1967, Otis Redding and members of his band die in a Madison plane crash:

A plane crash in Madison, Wisconsin, kills soul singer Otis Redding and members of the Bar-Kays band on this day in 1967. The plane crashed into Lake Monona, several miles from the Madison airport.

One survivor, Ben Cauley of the Bar-Kays, later reported that he had been asleep until just before the crash. He saw his friend in the band, Phalon Jones, look out the window of the small plane and exclaim “Oh no!” and, before he knew it, he was in a frigid lake holding onto a seat cushion. The following day, the lake was dragged and the bodies of the victims were recovered. A storm in Madison that day was a factor in the crash but the exact cause was never determined.

Redding was not the only well-known singer to die in a plane crash. In 1959, Buddy Holly, along with the lesser known J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson and Ritchie Valens, were killed in a crash that is thought to have inspired Don McLean’s well-known song “American Pie.” Country singer Patsy Cline died in a 1963 crash. Ten years later, Jim Croce perished in one in Louisiana. Key members of the band Lynyrd Skynyrd died in an accident 1977. Singer John Denver was killed piloting his own plane in 1997.

Four months after his death at the age of 26, Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on the) Dock of the Bay,” the last song he ever recorded, reached the top spot on the pop music charts. It was his first No. 1 hit.

Google-a-Day asks a question about geography:

Of the Maya ruins on Mexico’s Caribbean coast, which is the most remote and best known for its series of huge stucco masks?