Night before dawn is 5 hours and 25 minutes,
Dawn starts at 5:25 am and runs for 30 minutes,
Sunrise is at 5:56 am which is 6 hours and 3 minutes before noon,
High noon, the transit of the sun, is at 1:00 pm,
From twelve noon to the sunset at 8:05 pm is 8 hours and 5 minutes,
Dusk lasts for 29 minutes concluding at 8:36 pm,
Leaving 3 hours and 23 minutes until midnight.
“Arctic fires—the combination of these two words is still an unusual term in my field of fire science,” says Guillermo Rein of Imperial College London. “Arctic fires are rare, but they’re not unprecedented. What is unprecedented is the number of fires that are happening. Never before have satellites around the planet seen this level of activity.”
Unprecedented, yes, but not unexplained. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, leading to the desiccation of vegetation, which fuels huge blazes. Fortunately for us, these wildfires typically threaten remote, sparsely populated areas. But unfortunately for the whole of humanity, so far this year Arctic fires have released some 121 megatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, more than what Belgium emits annually. That beats the previous Arctic record of 110 megatonnes of carbon dioxide, set in 2004—and we’re only in July.
You won't see a citizenship question on the 2020 census. After a more than year-long legal fight, three federal judges are making sure of that by permanently blocking the Trump administration from using next year's head count to ask about the U.S. citizenship status of every person living in every household in the country.
But the Census Bureau, which conducts more than 100 surveys for the federal government, is continuing to ask about citizenship on other forms, which have sparked plenty of confusion around the country.
Unlike the census, these surveys collect responses from only a sample of households, and their results produce anonymized citizenship data that the government has relied on for years to, for example, protect the voting rights of racial minorities. Controversy over the question the Trump administration failed to add to the 2020 census, however, has drawn extra attention to these other citizenship questions.
In 1722, a pet squirrel named Mungo passed away. It was a tragedy: Mungo escaped its confines and met its fate at the teeth of a dog. Benjamin Franklin, friend of the owner, immortalized the squirrel with a tribute.
“Few squirrels were better accomplished, for he had a good education, had traveled far, and seen much of the world.” Franklin wrote, adding, “Thou art fallen by the fangs of wanton, cruel Ranger!”
Mourning a squirrel’s death wasn’t as uncommon as you might think when Franklin wrote Mungo’s eulogy; in the 18th- and 19th centuries, squirrels were fixtures in American homes, especially for children. While colonial Americans kept many types of wild animals as pets, squirrels “were the most popular,” according to Katherine Grier’s Pets in America, being relatively easy to keep.
Heading down to Big Bend on US 20 in LaFayette.
Smokey Bear, the U.S. Forest Service's symbol of fire prevention, turns 75 on Friday. Smokey is the longest-running public service ad campaign, first appearing on a poster on Aug. 9, 1944. While his look has changed quite a bit, his message has shifted only slightly.
They have a lot of Smokey Bear stuff at the Pennsylvania State Forests. But then again, in Pennsylvania people are always burning stuff, because fire is just a way of life, whether on the farm or at the rural homestead.
