December 23, 2020 04 PM Update
Length Of Day On December 21
Today is the shortest day of the year. But in some parts of the state -- the most northernly latitudes in the state -- the day is particularly short. Massena gets only 8 hours, 46 minutes and 25 second of daylight between sunrise and sunset. The opposite is true the farthest south you get. The most southerly municipality in New York State is Staten Island, with 9 hours, 16 minutes and 17 seconds between sunrise and sunset. On the first day of winter, Massena has a full half hour less of daylight then Staten Island. Who would have ever thought there would be such a great difference between the most southern and most northern parts of New York State? Don't feel too bad for Massena, because people on the first day of summer at Robert Moses State Park north of the 45 parallel enjoy the most daylight of any part of our state.
Data Source: Center point of each town, fed into PHP's date_suninfo function to calculate sunset time.
How Crisco Toppled Lard β and Made Americans Believers in Industrial Food
Crisco’s main ingredient, cottonseed oil, had a bad rap. So marketers focused on the ‘purity’ of factory food processing – a successful strategy that other brands would mimic.
Snow Depth – Wednesday December 23
Mathematicians Measure Infinities and Find Theyβre Equal
In a breakthrough that disproves decades of conventional wisdom, two mathematicians have shown that two different variants of infinity are actually the same size. The advance touches on one of the most famous and intractable problems in mathematics: whether there exist infinities between the infinite size of the natural numbers and the larger infinite size of the real numbers.
The problem was first identified over a century ago. At the time, mathematicians knew that “the real numbers are bigger than the natural numbers, but not how much bigger. Is it the next biggest size, or is there a size in between?Θ said Maryanthe Malliaris of the University of Chicago, co-author of the new work along with Saharon Shelah of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Rutgers University.