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:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU