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 14th day of August and the 225th 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 1st day of Elul in the year 5786.
We are under a new moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 1 day, 14 hours, and 54 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 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
6:44 AM
and
8:02 PM,
giving us 13 hours and 18 minutes of daylight.
There are 39 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 August 14, 1936 a crowd variously estimated at 10,000 to 20,000 gathered at Owensboro, Kentucky to watch the last ever public hanging in the United States.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of H.C. Ørsted (1777), Doc Holliday (1851), Russell Baker (1925), Lynne Cheney (1941), David Crosby (1941), Steve Martin (1945), Susan Saint James (1946), Danielle Steel (1947), Gary Larson (1950), Earvin "Magic" Johnson (1959), Sarah Brightman (1960), Susan Olsen (1961), Halle Berry (1966), Kevin Cadogan (1970), and Nick Grimshaw (1984).
Today in History: Calculating the Current Consumed
It was on this day in 1888 that Oliver B. Shallenberger of Rochester, Pennsylvania was issued US Patent No. 388,004 for the first practical electric meter.
As soon as electricity was recognized as a useful resource, the early pioneers were quick to develop a means of measuring its use. The earliest applications were in commercial settings where electricity suppliers could personally monitor the working of the meters, but residential use soon followed, so a precise, standardized method was needed. Hence, the Shallenberger meter was a significant breakthrough in the electrifying of the world.
After telegraphy, the earliest use of electricity for power was to operate strings of arc lamps connected in series. Since the current was constant and the voltage required for each lamp was known, and all of the lamps were controlled by one switch, it was adequate to measure only the time current flowed in the circuit (lamp-hours). The earliest patent for a meter did just that. In 1872, Samuel Gardiner patented an electric meter that was a DC lamp-hour meter that used a clock with an electromagnet that started and stopped the mechanism when the current flowed and stopped. By multiplying the current by the time, a fee could be easily calculated. However, electrical applications grew at a tremendous rate, so it was necessary to record usage, whether constant or fluctuating. Prior to the Shallenberger meter, several others had developed meters to measure actual current usage, but none of the techniques proved accurate enough to be practical. Much like previous designers, Shallenberger employed a revolving disk which turned at a rate directly proportional to the current being consumed. His patent sets the fundamental principals, but includes the specifics for the arrangement of the coiling to drive the disk, and even provides for seven specific modifications to cover various uses.
The vast majority of meters in use today draw from the principals developed in the 1888 patent. And for whatever it's worth, in the diagram from the original patent document, you'll see paddles extending from the shaft of the driving mechanism of the counting wheels. The paddles provide air resistance as a stabilizing force to give the meter a governing capacity. In plain English, the paddles keep the mechanism from spinning out of control.
Today's vocabulary word is hypocrisy.
Well, Aimee Semple McPherson has written a book. And were you to call it a little peach, you would not be so much as scratching its surface. It is the story of her life, and it is called In the Service of the King, which title is perhaps a bit dangerously suggestive of a romantic novel. It may be that this autobiography is set down in sincerity, frankness and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.
Dorothy Parker
"Our Lady of the Loudspeaker"
The New Yorker, February 25, 1928
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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