Good morning.

Whitewater will have a forty percent chance of drizzle and rain today, with a high of forty-four.

Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.

Koalas are small and benign-looking animals that are sometimes ornery and that are capable of making sounds far deeper than tiny animals should be able to make. Mary Bates writes about their vocalization at National Geographic, in a story entitled, Puzzle of Koalas’ Unusually Deep Voices Solved:

Koala bellows have a pitch about 20 times lower than they should be given the animals’ size—it’s actually more typical of an elephant-size animal. Male koala bellows, for instance, are so fearsome that sound designers used recordings of them to create the T. rex roars in the movie Jurassic Park.

For male koalas, this adaptation is essential to their love lives: A deep voice is attractive to female koalas choosing a mate.

So, how do they make such deep sounds? Bates continues:

When scientists looked at the voice boxes of male koalas, they found their vocal cords weren’t large enough to create the animals’ extremely low-pitched mating bellows. But further examination revealed a second, much larger pair of vocal folds located outside of the larynx, where the oral and nasal cavities connect.

Charlton and his colleagues used a combination of physical, video, and acoustic analyses to demonstrate that the newly discovered vocal folds outside of the larynx are capable of producing extremely low-pitched sound as the koala inhales air through its nostrils.

Wisconsin has a first in 1947:

1947 – First TV Station in Wisconsin Established
On this date the first TV station in Wisconsin, WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee, was established. The seventeenth television station in the country, WTMJ-TV was the first in the Midwest. [Source: University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Libraries]

Here’s Puzzability‘s Tuesday puzzle:

This Week’s Game — December 2-6

Festival of Lights

Here’s a bright idea for Hanukkah. The answer to each day’s trivia question this week is a two-word phrase, name, or title in which each word can be followed by the word “light” to make a compound word or phrase.

Example:

What was achieved for the first time by the Soviet Union in 1959 with an unmanned craft and by the U.S. 10 years later with a manned craft?

Answer:

Moon landing (moonlight, landing light)

What to Submit:

Submit the two-word trivia answer (as “Moon landing” in the example) for your answer.

Tuesday, December 3

What football position has been notably played by Jim Brown, Walter Payton, and O.J. Simpson?

Good morning.

Monday begins with freezing fog in the morning, later to become cloudy with a high of thirty-nine.

On this day in 1804, Napoleon crowns himself emperor of France. Waterloo comes later.

On 12.2.1954, the United States Senate censures a Wisconsinite:

1954 – McCarthy Censured by Senate
On December 2, 1954, the United States Senate voted to censure Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. Declaring his behavior “contrary to senatorial traditions,” the 1954 Senate resolution officially condemned McCarthy.

Puzzability begins a new series, around a theme of light:

This Week’s Game — December 2-6

Festival of Lights

Here’s a bright idea for Hanukkah. The answer to each day’s trivia question this week is a two-word phrase, name, or title in which each word can be followed by the word “light” to make a compound word or phrase.

Example:

What was achieved for the first time by the Soviet Union in 1959 with an unmanned craft and by the U.S. 10 years later with a manned craft?

Answer:

Moon landing (moonlight, landing light)

What to Submit:

Submit the two-word trivia answer (as “Moon landing” in the example) for your answer.

Monday, December 2

What punk rock band turned their rock opera album American Idiot into a Broadway musical?

Good morning.

The month ends with mostly sunny skies and a high of thirty-nine. Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 4:22 PM. The moon is a waning crescent with only 7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1874, Winston Churchill is born. He passed away ninety years later.

November 30, 3340 BC may hold a record in stone of the earliest written observation of an eclipse:

The possibility of an eclipse was first discovered in 1999 by Mr. Griffin and posted to his web site in 2000. Subsequent improvements in astronomical software has indicated that this eclipse obscured nearly 100% of the solar disc and was visible in the late afternoon just before sunset.

The Irish Neolithics used a 4044.5 day lunar eclipse cycle which is broken up into 365 days x 11 years + 29.5 days (synodic lunar month). This is also similar to a Tritos/Nova Lunation combination of one Tritos cycle of 3986.63 days and two nova lunations of 29.53 days each, yielding a total of 4045.69 days.

The Irish Neolithic astronomer priests at this site recorded events on 3 stones relating to the eclipse as seen from that location. This is the only eclipse that fits these petroglyphs out of 92 solar eclipses tracked by the discoverer.

Good morning.

We’ll have a mostly sunny Friday with a high of thirty.

As it has for so many years, Whitewater’s Christmas Parade will travel along Main Street toward the downtown of the city beginning at 6 PM.

NASA recently released a video of Comet ISON traveling toward the sun, using images recorded from 11.20 to 11.25.13:

Did Comet ISON survive its orbit around the sun? At first, it didn’t seem so:

The comet, known as ISON, was discovered last year when it was still far beyond Jupiter, raising the prospect of a spectacular naked-eye object by the time it graced Earth’s skies in December.

Comet ISON passed just 730,000 miles (1.2 million km) from the surface of the sun at 1:37 p.m. EST/1837 GMT on Thursday. Astronomers used a fleet of solar telescopes to look for the comet after its slingshot around the sun, but to no avail.

“I’m not seeing anything that emerged from the behind the solar disk. That could be the nail in the coffin,” astrophysicist Karl Battams, with the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, said during a live broadcast on NASA TV.”

But the icy object’s obituary may have been a premature one:

“Now, in the latest LASCO C3 images, we are seeing something beginning to gradually brighten up again,” said astrophysicist Karl Battams, of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, in a NASA Comet ISON Observing Campaign (CIOC) blog update. “One could almost be forgiven for thinking that there’s a comet in the images!”

Has Comet ISON succumbed to its fiery encounter, breaking up, leaving only a few pieces of ex-comet behind? Or has it really risen from the dead, re-brightening and set to dazzle our night skies as it swings back out into deep space? It’s too early to tell, but it’s also too early to write ISON off.

“We have a whole new set of unknowns, and this ridiculous, crazy, dynamic and unpredictable object continues to amaze, astound and confuse us to no end,” said Battems.

The more optimistic view comes in video from NASA and the ESA, in which a part of the comet appears to be brightening again after its closest approach to the sun:

Puzzability‘s Thanksgiving-week series concludes today:

This Week’s Game — November 25-29

With Thanks

It’s all about the stuffing this week. For each day, we started with a word or phrase, added the six letters in the word THANKS, and rearranged all the letters to get a new word or phrase. Both pieces are described in each day’s clue, with the shorter one first.

Example:

Rosary component; what you might go to hell in

Answer:

Bead; handbasket

What to Submit:

Submit both pieces, with the shorter one first (as “Bead; handbasket” in the example), for your answer.

Friday, November 29

Maneuver that a sign on the back of a truck warns you of; authors of The Elements of Style