Good morning, Whitewater.
Morning thunderstorms will give way to cloudy skies and a high of eighty this Wednesday. Sunrise is 6:12 AM and sunset 7:41 PM, for 13h 28m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 58.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5 PM, and the Parks & Recreation Board at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 79, Mount Vesuvius erupts:
Mount Vesuvius as seen from Pompeii.
In the year of 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted in one of the most catastrophic and famous eruptions of all time. Historians have learned about the eruption from the eyewitness account of Pliny the Younger, a Roman administrator and poet.[33]
….Mount Vesuvius spawned a deadly cloud of stones, ash and fumes to a height of 33 km (20.5 mi), spewing molten rock and pulverized pumice at the rate of 1.5 Mt/s, ultimately releasing a hundred thousand times the thermal energy released by the Hiroshima bombing.[2] The towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed by pyroclastic flows and the ruins buried under dozens of feet of tephra.[2][33]
….Reconstructions of the eruption and its effects vary considerably in the details but have the same overall features. The eruption lasted two days. The morning of the first day was perceived as normal by the only eyewitness to leave a surviving document, Pliny the Younger. In the middle of the day an explosion threw up a high-altitude column from which ash began to fall, blanketing the area. Rescues and escapes occurred during this time. At some time in the night or early the next day pyroclastic flows in the close vicinity of the volcano began. Lights were seen on the mountain interpreted as fires. People as far away as Misenum fled for their lives. The flows were rapid-moving, dense and very hot, knocking down wholly or partly all structures in their path, incinerating or suffocating all population remaining there and altering the landscape, including the coastline. These were accompanied by additional light tremors and a mild tsunami in the Bay of Naples. By evening of the second day the eruption was over, leaving only haze in the atmosphere through which the sun shone weakly.
August 24, 1970 sees a bombing on the UW-Madison campus:
1970 – Sterling Hall Bombing on UW-Madison Campus
On this date a car bomb exploded outside Sterling Hall, killing research scientist Robert Fassnacht. Sterling Hall was targeted for housing the Army Mathematics Research Center and was bombed in protest of the war in Vietnam. The homemade bomb (2,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate soaked in aviation fuel) was detonated by the New Year’s Gang, aka Vanguard of the Revolution, who demanded that a Milwaukee Black Panther official be released from police custody, ROTC be expelled from the UW campus, and “women’s hours” be abolished on campus. The entire New Year’s Gang fled to Canada the evening of the explosion. Four men were charged with this crime: Karleton Armstrong, David Fine, Dwight Armstrong, and Leo Burt. All but Burt were captured and served time for their participation. Leo Burt remains at large.[Source: On Wisconsin Summer 2005]
A Google a Day asks a sports question: “What is the common term used by the America’s Cup organization, for an object shaped like an airplane wing, designed to direct the flow of air over its surface?”