Mountain Views News          Saturday, June 12, 2010

8

The World Around Us

 Mountain Views News Saturday, June 12, 2010


Texas State Astronomers Solve Meteor Mystery

 In his landmark collection Leaves of Grass, famed poet Walt 
Whitman wrote of a “strange huge meteor-procession dazzling 
and clear shooting over our heads…” For decades, scholars have 
debated what astronomical event he was referring to.

 Now, a team of astronomers from Texas State University has 
applied its unique brand of forensic astronomy to the question, 
rediscovering one of the most famous celestial events of Whitman’s 
day—one that inspired both Whitman and famed landscape 
painter Frederic Church—yet became inexplicably forgotten in 
recent times.

 Texas State physics faculty members Donald Olson and Russell 
Doescher, English professor Marilynn S. Olson, and Honors 
Program student Ava G. Pope published their findings in the July 
2010 edition of Sky & Telescope magazine, available on newsstands 
now.

 Donald Olson noted that July 20 of this year is the 150th 
anniversary of the event that inspired both Whitman and Church. 
“It was an Earth-grazing meteor procession,” he said.

 Whitman, known as a keen observer of the sky, included the 
reference to this event in his poem “Year of Meteors (1859-60),” 
published in Leaves of Grass.

 “Meteor processions are so rare most people have never heard of 
them,” Olson said. “There was one in 1783 and a Canadian fireball 
procession in 1913. Those were all the meteor processions we 
knew of.”

 An Earth-grazing meteor is one where the trajectory takes 
the meteor through the Earth’s atmosphere and back out into 
interplanetary space without its ever striking the ground. A 
meteor procession occurs when a meteor breaks up upon entering 
the atmosphere, creating multiple meteors traveling in nearly 
identical paths.

 A chance clue from the 19th century artist Frederic Church 
proved key to unraveling the mystery. A decade ago, Olson saw a 
painting on the back cover of an exhibition catalog which showed 
the scene Whitman had described. Church’s painting, titled “The 
Meteor of 1860,” clearly depicted a meteor procession. Not only 
that, but the catalog gave the date of Church’s observance: July 
20, 1860, well within the timeframe of Whitman’s poem. An 
accomplished landscape painter, Church was a member of the 
Hudson River School, living beneath the same skies as Whitman.

 Armed with this intriguing new date, the Texas State researchers 
began searching through newspapers of the time for verification. 
What they found surprised even them. A large Earth-grazing 
meteor broke apart on the evening of July 20, 1860, creating a 
spectacular procession of multiple fireballs visible from the Great 
Lakes to New York State as it burned through the atmosphere and 
continued out over the Atlantic Ocean.

 “From all the observations in towns up and down the Hudson 
River Valley, we’re able to determine the meteor’s appearance 
down to the hour and minute,” Olson said. “Church observed it at 
9:49 p.m. when the meteor passed overhead, and Walt Whitman 
would’ve seen it at the same time, give or take one minute.”

 Some of the most influential publications in the United States—
including the New York Times, Smithsonian and Harper’s Weekly—
devoted major coverage to the event, and countless letters about 
it were published. Scientific American went so far as to declare it 
“the largest meteor that has ever been seen.”

 “Its appearance, right before the Civil War, at a time of growth 
and anxiety for America, made it a metaphor and portent in the 
public imagination,” Marilynn Olson said.

 For Frederic Church’s painting of the event, see:

 You can contact Bob Eklund at: b.eklund@MtnViewsNews.com.


Though spectacular, the Leonid meteor storm of 1833 
was definitely NOT the inspiration for Whitman’s “Year 
of Meteors. (1859-60.)”. (Collection of Don Olson)

 
Like many people who use a computer at 
work, I have a certain routine that I usually go 
through before start attending to the day’s tasks. 
On a typical, uneventful morning I visit a series 
of news and computer security sites while having 
“breakfast”, with little variation between the days 
of the week. After that twenty minute or so jaunt 
over the web I finally get down to the business of 
the day, which often involves a technical search 
or two for information to assist in the resolution 
of whatever the pressing issue of the moment 
may be. As far as search engines go I’m usually 
split between Google and Bing: Bing for general 
searches and Google for the 
technical and specific ones. This 
morning’s schedule called for 
a technical search and I nearly 
spewed water on my keyboard 
and monitor as my entry for 
Google returned an opening 
screen that looked remarkably 
like the Bing opening page, 
with the same photographic 
background that has come to 
mark the Bing homepage as 
unique. I was more than a little taken aback with 
what I saw as I was sure that I had typed G-o-o-
g-l-e but what was returned looked a lot like the 
result I usually get when I type B-i-n-g. Upon 
closer examination it was clear that what I had 
in front of me was no mistake and that Google 
had decided (for whatever reason) to alter its 
iconic white background with a customizable 
background, which Google decide to default 
to ‘On’ and this decision caused millions upon 
millions of Google users around the globe to get 
the same greeting that I received this morning. 
Judging from the reactions listed on tech blogs 
around the web, the move was perceived as 
overwhelmingly negative.

 It was later revealed this state of affairs was due 
to a marketing decision to launch a customizable 
Google page for a period of 24 hours to showcase 
the new functionality. A bug in the programming 
caused some users to be unable to opt-out of the 
new setup. Other users were less than satisfied 
with the “new” default white background that 
was described as “not white enough” on one blog. 
This 24-hour experiment bombed so badly that 
Google felt it necessary to call the whole thing off 
and revert back to its “normal” appearance after 
only a few hours into the venture. 

 A few factors combined to ensure the doom of 
this undertaking, but none more so than the fact 
that people are generally resistant to change in 
the absence of any real problems. Another factor 
was the abrupt departure from the normally 
clean and crisp Google interface to something 
unasked for and which actually harkened back 
to the olden days when many search engines vied 
for dominant share in the search engine market 
with many of the players sporting interfaces that 
were just plain awful. They intermittently blinked 
and flashed and offered more advertisements 
than search results on every page. There was 
little predictability about how the results would 
be presented or ranked and for every different 
search engine there was a different way of seeing 
the world. 

 Then emerged a search engine that seemed to do 
all the things a search engine should do, and do it 
better than all the others at the time. Where the 
others were loud and all over the place, Google 
was quiet and to the point. It was focused and exact 
and those qualities made the user’s search focused 
and exact as well. Google has been delivering this 
service since its inception. The jarring experience 
received by millions of Googlers this morning 
probably had many wondering if the service 
that they had come to know was a thing of the 
past. Google would do well to avoid making this 
misstep again.

What The.....???


TABLE FOR TWO 

By Peter Dills

Give Me A Break.......

WRITING SERVICES 

 Could you use help in preparing written communications for your business? I have 
extensive experience in writing and editing business documents including brochures, 
proposals, newsletters, resumes, customer success stories, press releases, and articles for 
newspapers and magazines. 

 Current work includes writing the column, “Looking Up with Bob Eklund,” in Mountain 
Views News, and writing newsletters for the Mount Wilson Observatory. I recently 
published a book, First Star I See Tonight: an Exploration of Wonder, and am finishing a 
second book, Winds Aloft. 

For writing samples and resume, see my web site: www.bobeklund.com. 

Bob Eklund beklund@sprynet.com (310) 216-5947

 Picture yourself 
in a given restaurant 
here in the San 
Gabriel Valley. Let’s 
characterize it as a 
favorite family owned 
restaurant. The time is 5 PM and the restaurant 
is beginning to experience the familiar bustle of 
hungry customers. Your server/waiter comes by 
with a couple glasses of ice water and gives you 
the day’s specials. You survey the selections and 
ask for a brief moment to discuss the options 
with your companion.

 After a lengthy consultation you make your 
selections, but no server is to be found. You wait 
and wait, and finally flag down the manager, and 
are assured someone will be right over. New 
server, Cindy comes by and starts with today’s 
specials... again. You interrupt, “We are ready to 
order, what happened to our original server?” 
Cindy advises that the other server is on their 
mandatory break. And so it goes in the State 
of California and I guess in other states as well. 
Very recently I was at my favorite Starbucks, 
located in a Vons, and noticed that there was 
only one person working the entire Kiosk. I 
knew exactly what was going on because I saw 
the other Barista outside in the parking lot 
taking a smoke break. He came back in, saw 
the line of people and replied, “Sorry guys, they 
make me take a ten minute break no matter 
what at this time each day.” 

 California’s law calling for rest and meal 
breaks is perhaps the most worker-protective in 
the nation. While the requirements are nothing 
new—they’ve been around for decades—the 
consequences for flouting them have become 
too costly to ignore. Under legislation signed by 
then governor Gray Davis in 2000, employers 
who fail to comply owe their employees one 
additional hour of pay for each violation. What’s 
more, they’re on the hook for offenses going 
back three or even four years, according to a 
ruling last year by a surprisingly unanimous 
state Supreme Court. 

 It’s not difficult to defend such a law, especially 
when you factor in an industry that employs such 
a large number of workers that earn minimum 
wage. An exhausted food server doesn’t pose the 
same potential risk, as say, a tired truck driver. 
But many people can’t even imagine working 8 
to10 hour shifts without being given breaks. 

 The restaurant association has offered 
guidelines, “….warning that a violation can 
occur if an unpaid meal break for employees 
working five hours or more is less than 30 
minutes…..When an employee sues or files 
a claim, employers also bear the burden of 
proving meal breaks were taken. (The state is 
less strict about documentation for 10 minute 
rest periods, required for roughly every four 
hours of work.)” 

 The truth is that there’s no particular way to 
tell when and at what hour a restaurant will 
be busy and stay busy, especially now with the 
economy. Many owners are cutting back on 
staffing. What happens if you get a rush of kids 
that get out of school early, or the local play that 
let out at 9 PM and the a large group of hungry, 
late night diners stroll into a restaurant that is 
down a server? 

 I have spoken to many a server about the 
break policy. Many servers would rather forgo 
their break than lose out on tips, while others 
need that hour to go on errands, talk on the 
phone or just get something to eat.

 How do you, the public, feel about all this? 
While some customers are supportive, others 
have been surprised by the notion that servers 
need to stop and eat. “One waiter told me he 
felt like saying, “It’s the law. Do you work all day 
without a break at your job?”

 Other restaurant owners have looked for 
alternatives, such as requiring workers to take 
breaks near the beginning or end of their shifts. 

 Rest periods are different, but if you tried 
to enforce dinner breaks and make a server 
working for tips leave their tables for half an 
hour, you’d probably have everybody quitting. 
However individual restaurants resolve the issue, 
it’s clear that this increased attention to workers’ 
rights is changing the restaurant industry in 
fundamental ways. The days when employers 
could rely on the, “You take care of me and I’ll 
take care of you,” approach to labor issues, and 
ignoring the letter of the law, while perhaps 
embracing its spirit, are coming to an end. 


 Flexibility is a great advantage in an ideal 
world, but it can invite exploitation in an 
imperfect one. For the time being, operators 
who fail to strike the right balance between the 
rights of workers and the peculiar demands of 
their industry run the risk of getting served 
themselves. Increasingly, their workers seem 
ready to dish it out.

 
Your thoughts? thechefknows@yahoo.com


SIERRA MADRE’S FARMERS MARKET!


Wednesday 3-7 pm Fresh vegetables and seasonal fruits from California family farms. Specialty foods, 
vegetarian and vegan dishes, ethnic foods and hot food - Everything you’ll find at the farmers market has been made or 
picked fresh, is pesticide-free and preservative-free. Free public parking on Mariposa. 


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