The moon passes in front of Mars

There was an occultation of Mars — which means the moon passed in front of it — on the evening of January 13, around 9:06 to 10:08 p.m. EST as seen from Athens, Georgia. The weather was iffy, with air predicted to be unsteady and the view blocked by passing high clouds, but I managed to see both the beginning of the occultation (visually) and the end (making a video).

Both were taken with my oldest telescope (1980 Celestron 5) and newest camera (ToupTek 678), using the telescope pier that Melody's grandfather built for me in the early 1990s. The still picture is much sharper than the video because hundreds of frames were stacked and combined.

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A simple point about Facebook fact-checking

Do you want Facebook to fact-check everything you see on it?

All right, then. When you post something, will you give them about a week to research it before your friends can see it?

And do you also expect the telephone company to fact-check the things you hear on the telephone?

Facebook is not an edited magazine; it is a means of instant communication.

The fact-checking that Facebook attempted was so incomplete and imperfect that I don't miss it. I do think they have a problem with impostors and false names, and they should verify the identity of every user, or at least those who reach more than a small audience.

The burden is on the readers, not on Facebook, to understand that it really is open communication, not something edited and produced by Meta or anyone else. It's not a magazine or TV show.

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What etiquette is and is not

My daughter Sharon and I have been philosophizing about the subject of etiquette (politeness), and she's probably going to be doing some writing. Here are a few thoughts of my own that came up in the conversation.

Etiquette is a set of standard practices to make cooperative human activities go more smoothly, and to enable people to express their good will and desire to cooperate.

Etiquette is not snobbery. It is not an excuse to look down on others. Failure to know a set of standard procedures is not a moral failing. A person who eats with the wrong fork is not on the level of a thief.

Etiquette is not imposture. It is not a way to pass yourself off as something you’re not. The goal is not to be mistaken for someone richer or more important than you are.

Etiquette is not forced conformity. In fact, etiquette compels people to respect your values and strong tastes. You are not required to drink, smoke, take drugs, make political or religious gestures you don’t believe in, dance, or eat broccoli "just to be polite" if you don’t want to. If people pressure you to do things against your will, they are being impolite.

Etiquette is not people-pleasing. See previous point. Politeness does not require you to pretend you are just like the people around you, or that you have no actual tastes of your own. Most of us find it hard to like a vacuous people-pleaser — it is hard to get to know someone who agrees with everyone and claims to have no distinctive attributes — and etiquette does not expect you to be like that. You are allowed, even expected, to continue to be yourself.

Etiquette is not intuition or guessing people's feelings. It is about how to do things smoothly even when you don’t know other people’s feelings. That is the most basic point – if you knew exactly what everybody else wanted all the time, you might not need etiquette. That means the autism spectrum or neurodivergence has basically nothing to do with it. Not knowing most people's feelings is the normal human condition.

Admittedly, some etiquette books err in the direction of snobbery or imposture. I don't want to know what the rich people of New York in 1935 considered "correct" — I want to know the widely accepted standard practices and why they make things go more smoothly. Author Judith Martin did a lot to break through this barrier. She was also the first etiquette authority after WWII to say that it is wrong to smoke in the presence of nonsmokers — thus dethroning a standard practice that went against basic respect for people's comfort and health.

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Meteor-oddity

As the storm ends, the NOAA weather satellite image looks as if Paul Bunyan has ridden a motorcycle right across Georgia!

The storm is moving east, and other images (as well as a look at the sky) make it clear that the clouds on the two sides of the boundary are quite different — thick and stormy to the southeast, thinner to the northwest. But the "ditch" is something I've never seen before, and I regret I wasn't outside when it passed over me.

[Update:] This is now being discussed by professional meteorologists. Other images show that it was not a trench, but the shadow of a cliff, lit by the sun, which was low in the southeast. That is, the tall clouds to the southeast were casting a shadow on the ground and the lower clouds to the north. Still, it is a very dramatic boundary; this may make it into the textbooks!

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The "snow event"

We are in our second day of a snow and ice storm. We didn't leave the house yesterday, and we probably won't get out until late afternoon today. The hazard is not snow but ice; the temperature has hovered near freezing, creating many layers of melted and refrozen glaze.

Atlanta was much harder hit than Athens and still has large areas without electric power. We had a two-and-a-half-hour power outage last night (which could have been much longer), during which we deployed candles and several lights connected to battery packs that I keep around for astronomy in the field. The biggest battery pack, a Jackery 1000, was connected to Melody's power lift chair so she could continue to get in and out of it.

There may be more power outages today as the wind picks up (to 30 mph) and blows down trees that may still be encrusted with ice.

I keep wondering whether to sink $8000 into a whole-house backup generator that would be used only a few hours a year — but when it's needed, it really needed. We have a number of medical things that are hard to do without, not to mention the heating system!

I understand there are also whole-house backup batteries, often used with solar power systems. I would be glad to hear from friends who have whole-house electrical backups of various kinds and are satisfied with them (or can tell me what to stay away from). I don't want a small manually operated generator that runs on gasoline and sounds like a lawnmower; it wouldn't do the job for us.

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Why have I never seen a 6-pointed snowflake?

Snowflakes are supposedly 6-sided or 6-pointed things. Why have I never seen any like that? All the snow I've ever seen has been small and granular, like what you see below, captured during this morning's heavy snowfall in Athens, Georgia.

The answer is twofold. According to Wikipedia, only 0.1% of snowflakes are actually 6-sided or 6-pointed. And according to the "snowflake scientist" Kenneth Libbrecht of Cal Tech (where it never snows), six-pointed snowflakes form at temperatures of about 5 to 10 F, which is colder than any of the places I've regularly seen snow (even coastal Connecticut).

We had snow this morning; now the rain is melting it, but the temperature is close enough to freezing that we are probably going to have freezing rain later. I know enough about microclimates to know that when the thermometer reads 32, there are places within a few feet of it that are 29, or 35, or anything in between.

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An old friend forced to retire

While getting ready for the ice storm, I checked my trusty old (1988) Kenwood TH-215A, which is the only ham radio transmitter I now own, and found that it apparently does not transmit. It may be beyond economic repair because of the need for obsolete ICs and a difficult troubleshooting task. For now, it's still a fine receiver, and that's how I will use it.

(Well, technically I own another transmitter but don't know if it still works. It's an awkwardly channelized 10-meter AM/SSB transmitter that I made out of the Mauldins' old mobile CB radio, back when I had time to do things like that. Not very useful in an ice storm.)

I'm trying to decide whether to buy another 2-meter transmitter in order to reach the local repeaters in an emergency. Right now, I don't have much inclination to talk on the radio as a hobbyist — actually, I never did; I am in ham radio for the technology. That is all the more the case now that I'm deluged all day with e-mail and online forums. But it's also a pity for both Melody and me to have licenses and not have a transmitter to use in emergencies.

I think of the Kenwood TH-215A as a new, modern radio, but it's 37 years old. At the time (1988), a 37-year-old (1951) radio would have been a quaint antique. Yet my early-1950s Hallicrafters shortwave receiver is fully repairable because it doesn't contain any custom silicon.

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Jimmy Carter, Christian but not right-wing

Russell Moore has shared a very interesting commentary titled "Jimmy Carter at the Judgment Seat." (That link is partly paywalled, but I'll summarize the whole thing.) Dr. Moore means not the judgment of God but the judgment of evangelical Christians. And he thinks some of them are judging quite erroneously.

The point is, Carter is the most outspokenly Christian president we have ever had. Early in his campaign, he got strange looks for using the term "born again" to describe what putting your faith in Christ is like — but it's completely biblical. He was visibly active in his church. He clearly affirmed all key Christian doctrines. His faithfulness to his wife was positively saintly.

What he didn't do was hold a number of political positions that have now become identified with doctrinally conservative Christianity. Though privately against abortion, he didn't think it should be illegal. He was flatly against capital punishment, a position that is too liberal for many conservative Christians today (not me). And although Moore doesn't mention it, my recollection is that late in life, Carter also supported same-sex marriage in some way.

Moore disagrees with Carter on points like those, but this doesn't mean Carter wasn't a Christian, or even that he wasn't an exemplary Christian. In the 1970s, many doctrinally conservative Christians were unsure about abortion, and about the more general issue of how much the law of the land should encode Christian morality.

Moore's big point is that error on these sociopolitical issues is not apostasy from Christ. Other Christian leaders held similar positions in the 1970s, became more conservative later, and as Moore points out, nobody says they should have asked for baptism after changing their minds as if they had not been Christians until then. Clearly they were our brothers in Christ before they reached the currently widely held positions.

What I see here calls for a loud warning: Do not mistake political or moral conservatism for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Moore says that American evangelicals have invented a new form of "works righteousness" — salvation by works, not faith — in which people think they achieve salvation by taking political positions. He's right.

I would point out also that Carter's great humanitarian acts of compassion (such as eradicating the guinea worm) don't seem to be matched by the present-day Christian right wing. If anything, the Christian right wing seems to be entirely too tolerant of the secular right wing's mean-spiritedness. Some people think they are Christians when they are merely angry reactionaries. Flags and gun stickers on your car won't get you into Heaven.

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Snow and rumors of snow

The grandchildren in Louisville have been snowed in for several days. (They don't have an urgent need to leave the house at the moment, so they're not pushing it.) Much of the central United States has been snowed in.

Meanwhile, Athens, Georgia, is supposed to have an ice storm tomorrow and the next day (as Louisville thaws out). I'm at pains to explain to northerners that we don't have powdery snow down here — we have stuff that melts and refreezes repeatedly, making roads slippery.

And fools on Facebook are already sharing pictures of past storms and saying they are pictures of today's conditions in places where in fact it has not snowed yet!

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Los Angeles is on fire!

Wildfires in the mountains above Los Angeles are sadly common, but right now they are extending into the suburbs, and the destruction dwarfs the Great Chicago Fire. Pacific Palisades and Altadena have been incinerated, and it is very sad to see familiar-looking territory in flames. So far, the fires haven't consumed any areas that Melody and I actually frequented when we lived there, so we haven't actually seen any familiar landmarks destroyed, but they're close. I hope the L. A. Times won't mind my quoting a snippet of this evening's fire map:

The green dot is where we lived as newlyweds (1982-84), on Rosemead Boulevard just south of a creek called Eaton Wash, which turns out to be the water that comes out of Eaton Canyon, where one of the fires started. As you can see, the fires are now within five miles of where we lived.

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Porting cell phones

For the first time since 1964, I and my household are no longer customers of AT&T or its precursors.

I say 1964 because that is when my parents, sister, and I moved from Moultrie (GTE territory) to Valdosta (Southern Bell). Athens was also on Southern Bell when we moved here in 1973. While at Cambridge, I had no telephone of my own; the first time I had a telephone of my own was at Yale (Southern New England Telephone), and then, as newlyweds, Melody and I were customers of Pacific Bell. All those became AT&T. Back in Athens in 1984, we were again on AT&T.

A few years ago we moved our land line to Spectrum, using their Internet cable, but kept three cell phones on AT&T. Until now. Spectrum made me an offer I couldn't refuse, cutting the price by more than half, and we moved the cell phones.

We didn't have to take them to the store. Here's what the process was like.

(1) Confirm with Spectrum that each of the existing phones can be ported. Melody's older LG phone could not, so we got her a refurbished iPhone SE and moved the SIM card from the LG phone into it. It worked fine on AT&T.

(2) Placed the order with Spectrum. They sent us a new SIM card for Sharon's Android phone. On iPhones, Spectrum uses the eSim feature (electronic identifier built in).

(3) When given the go-ahead by Spectrum, proceeded as follows with each phone:

(a) While each phone is still on AT&T, dial *7678 to get a transfer PIN. This requires entering the passcode (4 digits) for the AT&T account.

(b) Also while still on AT&T (although this might well have worked via Wi-Fi), obtain the My Spectrum app from the App Store or Google Play respectively. Probably a misguided step; see (f) below.

(c) Power down the phone and remove the AT&T SIM card. In the Android phone, install the SIM card that Spectrum provided.

(d) Power the phone back up and get it on our house Wi-Fi.

(e) Sign into My Spectrum using the username and password for our Spectrum account.

(f) (Moment of whimsy:) My Spectrum immediately tells us to use Spectrum Business (because we have a business account) and gives a link. Click on the link and sign in again, almost identically. (I checked; there is no Spectrum Business app.)

Explanation: For Spectrum Business customers, the My Spectrum app doesn't seem to be appropriate. Instead, simply go to spectrumbusiness.net in the browser. It does everything the My Spectrum app does. I bookmarked it in the browser.

(g) It tells us which phones are ready to be set up; choose the right one and tell it to start the transfer (not activation but transfer).

(h) Give the AT&T account number, passcode, and ZIP code.

(i) Spectrum's computer now asks AT&T's computer to perform the transfer. This normally takes 15 minutes and is done while you wait. On one of our phones, though, it took 5 hours. I got e-mail messages from both companies telling me of the progress.

(j) Whether you waited for it or simply let your phone shut down, go back to your phone after the process is complete, and follow the prompts to finish setting up cellular service. One option is to scan (with the phone while on Wi-Fi) the QR code sent in the final e-mail message.

The thing I had been unsure about is how the phone would communicate to perform the setup process after being taken off AT&T's network. The answer: it has to be on Wi-Fi.

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Jimmy Carter, 1924-2024, versus the guinea worms

Jimmy Carter was preceded in death by all, or almost all, the guinea worms on earth.

The guinea worm is a parasite that has caused people a lot of pain from ancient times until just recently. The Carters led an international program to exterminate it. It is hard to imagine the amount of suffering that this stopped — as recently as 50 years ago, millions of people in Africa and the Middle East had this painful parasite under their skin; now it's gone.

I heard him speak about this in 2012. One of the points of his talk was that it's remarkable what you can get done if you don't mind other people getting the credit. His tactic was to organize and coordinate efforts by the national government in each afflicted country — so that they saw it as their own ministry of health exterminating the guinea worms with a bit of help from the Carter Center.

The extermination was accomplished by filtering drinking water, not by using pesticides.

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Short notes

I am now regularly writing for the AskWoody online newsletter, which as I understand it was originally for Windows system administrators, but I'm branching out and writing about artificial intelligence. Click here for one of my articles. Some are for subscribers only, and some are free to all.

So far, 2025 is off to a somewhat quiet start, notable for many businesses being slightly slow in starting up the new year, and many people apparently having forgotten how to drive, at least in parking lots (and with shopping carts inside stores). Costco today was remarkably crowded with a comparatively small number of people somehow making their presence bulky. Anyhow, I tell people that I suspect "Costco" is Basque or something for "buy too much"...

A pun from the standing collection: "We hear a lot of odd songs. But only Anglicans have Evensong."

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