Good afternoon, and welcome. All the information on this site was current at the moment you arrived. The content updates continuously (per load) without the help of Internet monkeys. Absolutely everything you're seeing is generated by code developed TOTALLY inhouse. No commercial website software is in use. NOTE: You can click on the bright spot inside the lens flair to swat the fruitfly. If it doesn't annoy you, perhaps you're weird. [ more in the Technology section... ]
Today is Friday, the 13th day of November and the 316th day of 2026. On the Jewish calendar, this is the 3rd day of Kislev in the year 5787.
We are under a waxing crescent moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 4 days, 7 hours, and 31 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Tuesday, December 8th at 11:08 PM. The next full moon will occur on Tuesday, November 24th at 4:46 AM. For now, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter are visible in the night sky. Mercury can be seen in the eastern sky just before dawn. Looking into the night sky, far beyond our Solar System neighbors, we see that we are under the sign of Scorpio.
For today, our sunrise and sunset times (at -96.852/32.847) are
6:46 AM
and
5:19 PM,
giving us 10 hours and 33 minutes of daylight.
We are in the 51th day of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere. Summer has ended, but not the hot weather. The autumnal equinox, which occurred on September 23rd, marked the end of summer. On the day of the equinox, the sun could be observed to be directly above the equator, and the night and day were the same length. The actual crossing of the sun over the equator takes approximately two and a half days. The equinox occurs halfway through the transit when the center of the sun is directly over the equator. Winter will begin on December 21st when our days begin to grow longer. It's weird, but longer periods of sunlight is when our weather becomes colder... more details as we get closer to the date.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Edward III (1312), John Dickinson (1732), Robert Louis Stevenson (1850), Louis Brandeis (1856), Nathaniel Benchley (1915), Oskar Werner (1922), Peter Arnett (1934), Garry Marshall (1934), Jean Seberg (1938), Joe Mantegna (1947), Frances Conroy (1953), Chris Noth (1954), Whoopi Goldberg (1955), Neil Flynn (1960), Jimmy Kimmel (1967), Steve Zahn (1967), Stephen Full (1969), and Michael Copon (1982).
Today in History: Early Eco Friendliness Gets Patented
On this day in 1888 Theophilus Van Kannel of Philadelphia was granted US Patent No. 387,571 for his "Storm Door Structure." Van Kannel's door quickly became known as the "revolving door," and to this day is in extensive universal use as the most practical and efficient way to allow for the quick passage of a number of people--often in opposite directions at the same time--and for the conservation of heated or cooled air inside the building it services.
The claims section of the original patent cites a number of advantages the new door has over traditional exterior swinging doors. Kannel's door was intended as a way to provide an airlock for a building, yet allowing people to enter and exit by merely walking through without the need to open and close multiple doors. The door was to be operated manually and only turn in a counter-clockwise direction. The patent drawings show a three-partition revolving door. The patent describes it as having "three radiating and equidistant wings... provided with weather-strips or equivalent means to insure a snug fit". The door "possesses numerous advantages over a hinged-door structure... it is perfectly noiseless... effectually prevents the entrance of wind, snow, rain or dust. Moreover, the door cannot be blown open by the wind... there is no possibility of collision, and yet persons can pass both in and out at the same time." The patent further lists, "the excluding of noises of the street" as another advantage of the revolving door. It goes on to describe how a partition can be hinged so as to open to allow the passage of long objects through the revolving door. Drawing upon his understanding of human behavior, Kannel anticipated that it was likely his revolving door would be rotated with greater force and speed than would be safe, especially if more than one person was passing at a given time, so he incorporated a mechanical governor to cap the maximum rotating speed.
In principal, the revolving door has changed little over the years. Early on, designers capitalized on the tremendous impacts aesthetic enhancements and electrically driven power would have on the design, so the improvements were quickly incorporated. To date, the revolving door is pretty much like Kannel's original eco friendly design.
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
Douglas Adams (1952-2001)
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The Technology
This site is a working demonstration of on-demand PHP scripting. The code tightly integrates computed data with text, spewing forth natural-sounding narrative output with flawless grammar and syntax. The narrative sections--which all change daily--are from an in-house database. The real time data is derived [and rendered] primarily by PHP code at the time the output is generated at the Linux/Apache server.
About the fruitfly: Whether the fruitfly in the margin entertains or annoys, it serves a very real and useful purpose. The fly uses recently developed sentinelware. In short, the image is generated by the output of many, many active server monitoring processes. When abnormal server activity is detected by the "fly system," the fly's appearance deviates from the default, and a system exception raises a flag that is immediately addressed by the humans who monitor the server via the fruitfly's movements and morphology. Until fairly recently, server issues weren't always obvious, and if so, isolating and mending them was an arduous exercise. The fruitfly technology has made the plight of the server technician much more bearable. If the fruitfly annoys you, click in the center of the lens flare to swat it.
Contact Information
Email: tony@tonysartain.com
Cell: 903-360-0002
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