Today we honor the men and women who died in the attacks on Hawaii late in 1941. In the photograph below, the Officers and Crew line the flight deck of the USS Ronald Reagan, CVN-76, as they salute the war memorial at the resting place of the USS Arizona.
Over the weekend, we got out some of the Christmas decorations. I took a picture of some blue ornaments in a box and managed to get a self-portrait as a bonus.
If you tried to comment here and got a weird message about “Your Internet Protocol address is listed on a blacklist of addresses involved in malicious or illegal activity,” please disregard the message.
We were using a plug-in called “Bad Behavior” which was supposed to protect us from spam bots and the like. Well, apparently the plug-in was compromised and started living up to it’s name by sending that message whenever any management functions were invoked, including comments and even posting blogs or managing the links list.
Quite frustrating until I found out what was causing it. The plug-in has been removed and all should be OK now. We also upgraded to the latest WordPress version.
Thanks for your patience and understanding.
Update: John A. reported more about the problem on Steve McIntyre’s Climate Report Blog:
All users should update to Bad Behavior 2.0.11 immediately to prevent being blocked from your own site.
Within the past two days users have found themselves blocked from their own sites while using recent versions of Bad Behavior. A third party blacklist which Bad Behavior queries recently began sending false positives for any IP address queried, causing everyone using Bad Behavior to be blocked. This issue is fixed in Bad Behavior 2.0.11.
I took this photo of a poinsettia we brought home from the flower shop. Pretty enough to be a Christmas card, right? Click on the image for a very large view.
NASA’s SOHO Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) scientific instrument has captured a complete solar cycle in the ultraviolet (extremely short wavelength light waves) spectrum. This remarkable collage demonstrates the extent to which the Sun changes over its cycle. Solar cycles have been documented for several hundred years, but never with so much detailed information as over this past cycle.
Every eleven years, our Sun goes through a solar cycle. A complete solar cycle has now been imaged by the sun-orbiting SOHO spacecraft, celebrating the 12th anniversary of its launch yesterday. A solar cycle is caused by the changing magnetic field of the Sun, and varies from solar maximum, when sunspot, coronal mass ejection, and flare phenomena are most frequent, to solar minimum, when such activity is relatively infrequent. Solar minimums occurred in 1996 and 2007, while the last solar maximum occurred in 2001 Pictured above is a SOHO image of the Sun in extreme ultraviolet light for each year of the last solar cycle, with images picked to illustrate the relative activity of the Sun.
Image, story courtesy SOHO – EIT Consortium, ESA, NASA & Astronomy Picture of the Day.
Please read our previous post about what the Sun is and what it does. Also read about how Solar activity can be correlated with global climate fluctuations. Then please refer to our Global Warming Resources page.
Educate yourselves – don’t trust good-intentioned but misinformed sources, and be wary of political opportunists whose goal is not to save mankind, but to cripple free enterprise and democracy.
All of those elements and more contributed to this photo that I took yesterday at Cabrillo Beach. I just love the green glow of sunlight through the waves and the spray dancing on top of them.
After a rainy day yesterday, we drove to San Pedro to seek out any photo ops. We got plenty. It was difficult picking one of over two hundred images, but this one had plenty of action. The surf was up a little and was crashing against the Los Angeles Harbor breakwater, occasionally sending waves over the top. This shot taken from Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro. Click on the image for a bigger view.
