Good morning. This website is a demonstration of smart content rendering. The content updates continuously without the help of Internet monkeys. All the information was current at the time you arrived here. Today is Monday, the 22nd day of June and the 172nd day of 2026. Most of the United States is under Daylight Saving Time (DST) at the moment. It will end on November 1st at 2:00 AM when clocks "fall back" one hour. While many countries observe DST, the beginning and ending times vary, as with the Sun as we see it, of course.
On the Jewish calendar, today is the 7th day of Tammuz in the year 5786.
We are under a first quarter moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 7 days, 8 hours, and 47 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Tuesday, July 14th at 8:27 AM. The next full moon will occur on Monday, June 29th at 2:05 PM. 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 Lunar and Solar System neighbors, we see that We are under the constellation of Cancer
For today, our sunrise and sunset times (at -96.852/32.847) are
6:14 AM
and
8:26 PM,
giving us 14 hours and 12 minutes of daylight.
After heated controversy, on this day in 1633, the Holy Office in Rome forced Galileo Galilei to recant his view that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of the Universe.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of George Vancouver (1757), Paul Morphy (1837), John Dillinger (1903), Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906), Billy Wilder (1906), Joseph Papp (1921), Bill Blass (1922), Dianne Feinstein (1933), Kris Kristofferson (1936), Michael Lerner (1941), Ed Bradley (1941), Brit Hume (1943), Todd Rundgren (1948), Meryl Streep (1949), Lindsay Wagner (1949), Cyndi Lauper (1953), Freddie Prinze (1954), Bruce Campbell (1958), Dan Brown (1964), Kurt Warner (1971), Carson Daly (1973), and Donald Faison (1974).
Today in History: John Howe's Pin Machine
It was on this day in 1832 that John Howe of South Carolina received a patent for his pin making machine. Prior to that, simple pins used for textiles had to be fabricated by hand in a number of steps, requiring several instruments. Howe's patent describes in detail "an improved machine for manufacturing common Pins in which the wire is straightened, cut into lengths, headed and pointed, and the pin delivered in a state ready for whitening." That's pretty much the whole thing in a nutshell. Howe's machine took a spool of wire and performed all the necessary operations, then dropped finished pins into a receiving container at a rate of several thousand per hour. The machine was incredibly complex, but could be operated by only one operator. Coming about in an age when operating energy was not readily available, the machine was powered by a hand crank attached to a massive flywheel.
Howe received his patent in the days before the US Patent Office began printing patent documents, and it was before the invention of the typewriter, so the patent is written in script. In those days, patents were indexed by the inventor's name, date of issue, and patent title. Patent numbers didn't come into use until several years later. With the introduction of the numbering system, all existing patents were issued numbers with an "X" as a suffix. The pin making machine was assigned US Patent No. 7123X.
Howe's machines were rugged and built to operate without failure for many years, which was certainly a requirement for pricey commercial production equipment. (Modern manufactures make that claim, but they are often short on delivery.) An original perfect specimen of a Howe pin machine is on display at the Smithsonian.
Today's quick response:
You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.
Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) when asked to use the word horticulture
during a game of Can-You-Give-Me-A-Sentence?
The Technology
This site is a working demonstration of on-demand PHP scripting. The code tightly integrates computed and imported data with text, spewing forth natural-sounding narrative output with flawless grammar and syntax. The birthdays, history section and the text below--which all change daily--are from an in-house database. Raw data used in the financial and weather sections is imported at page generation time. All the other data, particularly the celestial stuff, is derived and rendered by several hundred lines of code at the time the page is generated at the Linux/Apache server.
Contact Information
Email: tony@tonysartain.com
Cell: 903-360-0002
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