Good afternoon, and welcome. All the information on this site was current at the moment you arrived. The content updates continuously 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. None.
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.
Today is Friday, the 21st day of August and the 232nd 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 dates and times vary so as to add another layer of confusion to the scheme.
On the Jewish calendar, today is the 8th day of Elul in the year 5786.
We are under a first quarter moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 8 days, 19 hours, and 17 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Friday, September 11th at 9:55 AM. The next full moon will occur on Thursday, August 27th at 3:33 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 Solar System neighbors, we see that we are under the constellation of Leo.
For today, our sunrise and sunset times (at -96.852/32.847) are
6:48 AM
and
7:54 PM,
giving us 13 hours and 6 minutes of daylight.
There are 32 days until the end of summer, marked by the Vernal, or Autumnal, Equinox. On the day of the Equinox, the sun can be observed to be directly above the equator, and the night and day are 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. This year, the exact crossing time will be 9:51 am Greenwich Mean Time on Sunday, September 23rd.
On this day in 1961, Motown released what would be its first Number One hit, "Please Mr. Postman" by The Marvelettes.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Afonso VI of Portugal (1643), William IV (1765), Aubrey Beardsley (1872), Count Basie (1904), Chris Schenkel (1923), Jack Weston (1924), Thomas Monson (1927), X.J. Kennedy (1929), Margaret Rose, Countess of Snowdon (1930), Melvin Van Peebles (1932), Wilt Chamberlain (1936), Kenny Rogers (1938), Loretta Devine (1949), Harry Smith (1951), Kim Cattrall (1956), Stephen Hillenburg (1961), Sergey Brin (1973), and Carly Steel (1987).
Today in History: Homo sapiens Sends a Bottle into Space
On this date in 1977, NASA launched the Voyager 2 spacecraft. The timing of the launch coincided with a rare planetary alignment that allowed the craft to make use of each planet's gravity to boost it on its way. The original purpose of the mission was to explore Jupiter and Saturn; it's since passed Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, and is now considered an "interstellar mission" because it still has enough velocity to leave the solar system. It's currently flying through the heliopause--the area where the solar wind is opposed by hydrogen and helium gases from interstellar space, forming a kind of bubble around the solar system. Scientists believe it will be able to continue sending back signals until at least 2025. Voyager 2 was launched as the second phase of the Voyager project, which which started with the launch of Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977, just a few days before the launch of Voyager 2, but with enough time between the launches to determine that the first craft was far exceeding it's expected set of specifications.
Voyager 1 and 2 carry golden records (gold plated disks that resemble LP albums from a few decades back) with pictographic instructions on how to play them. The records contain sounds familiar to us--including music--images, and welcome messages from Earth, as well as a map to our location. Carl Sagan chaired the committee that decided what should go on the record. He said, "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about life on this planet." President Jimmy Carter included his own message on the record saying, "This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours." (Source: The Writer's Almanac)
Editor's note: The image in the illustration is Jupiter and its four moons, called the Galilean satellites. The individual shots of each were photographed in early March of 1978 by Voyager 1 and assembled into a collage. They are not to scale but are in their relative positions.
Etchings on the face of the golden records provide details for retrieving the data from the disks, including both audio and video. Without a universal visual language, it is a given imperative that the instructions include a large set of images that logically lead to the decoding process, which begins with fundamentals--the first being a representation of a hydrogen atom. President Carter was only one of many to record a greeting from our planet. There are short greetings in numerous languages. Perhaps the most logical to include was in Latin, which for many centuries has been a dead language. However, it's the most universally recognized, so it's unlikely that it will ever become extinct in technical usage--at least on this planet. For many years many have shared the idea that the voice on the recording is that of Pope Paul VI. There is no reference to such in The Da Vinci Code, so that notion is probably not accurate. Outside our solar system, it's a virual guarantee that Latin is not recognized as "universal," but none the less, you can hear the Latin greeting from the golden disk if you click the play button below.
You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away,
know when to run.
Kenny Rogers, born on this day 88 years ago in Houston, Texas
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.
Contact Information
Email: tony@tonysartain.com
Cell: 903-360-0002
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