Good afternoon, and welcome to this smart website. The content updates continuously without the help of Internet monkeys. All the information was current at the time you arrived here. Absolutely everything you're seeing is generated by many lines of code that were developed TOTALLY inhouse. No commercial software has been used to generate anything at all. None.
About the fruitfly: Whether the fruitfly entertains or annoys, it serves a very real and useful purpose. Using recently developed sentinelware, the image is generated by the output of many, many active server monitoring processes. When abnormal server activity is detected by the "fly controller" 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. And now you know the fly story. If the fruitfly annoys you, click in the center of the lens flare to swat it.
Today is Saturday, the 25th day of July and the 205th 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 11th day of Av in the year 5786.
We are under a waxing crescent moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 11 days, 6 hours, and 59 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Wednesday, August 12th at 9:11 PM. The next full moon will occur on Wednesday, July 29th at 2:49 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 Lunar and 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
6:31 AM
and
8:19 PM,
giving us 13 hours and 48 minutes of daylight.
There are 59 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 1969, Edward Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident a week after the Chappaquiddick car accident that killed Mary Jo Kopechne.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Maxfield Parrish (1870), Walter Brennan (1894), Eric Hoffer (1898), Jack Gilford (1908), Estelle Getty (1923), Barbara Harris (1935), Roy Acuff, Jr. (1943), Walter Payton (1954), Roger Clinton (1957), Geoffrey Zakarian (1959), Matt LeBlanc (1967), Louise Brown (1978), and Brad Renfro (1982).
Today in History: Sir Frederick Banting
It was on this day in 1934 that George V knighted Canadian physician and researcher Frederick Banting for developing a technique to extract usable insulin from the pancreas.
Diabetes had long been a recognized condition, but little was known about its cause. Most early theories cited the liver as the culprit. Eventually, a paper published the findings of four researchers. Their research concluded that an enzyme they called insulin was responsible for the regulation of blood sugar and further stated that insulin was produced by the Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas.
Many attempts were made to extract insulin from the pancreas, but trypsin, a proteolytic enzyme of the pancreas, broke down the insulin. After reading an article by Moses Barron in which he described a method of closing the pancreatic duct by ligature, Banting tried the technique and discovered that the procedure caused the deterioration of the trypsin producing cells, but left the Isles of Langerhans intact. With the trypsin out of the equation, usable insulin could be extracted. Diabetes research and treatment progressed rapidly after Banting's discovery.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1923 was awarded to Banting and JJR Macleod, a physiology professor whom Banting consulted with and who also provided an assistant, Dr. Charles Best. In 1994 Banting was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. In 2004, he was nominated as one of the top 10 "Greatest Canadians" by viewers of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. When the final votes were counted, Banting finished fourth behind Tommy Douglas, Terry Fox and Pierre Trudeau.
Rudeness is a weak imitation of strength.
Eric Hoffer, born on this day 128 years ago in New York City
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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