NASA Photo of the Day

Well, a video, from the day of the solstice:



Traces of the Sun
Video Credit & Copyright: György Bajmóczy Explanation: This year the December Solstice is today, December 21, at 10:44 UT, the first day of winter in the north and summer in the south. To celebrate, watch this amazing timelapse video tracing the Sun's apparent movement over an entire year from Hungary. During the year, a fixed video camera captured an image every minute. In total, 116,000 exposures follow the Sun's position across the field of view, starting from the 2015 June 21 solstice through the 2016 June 20 solstice. The intervening 2015 December 22 solstice is at the bottom of the frame. The timelapse sequences constructed show the Sun's movement over one day to begin with, followed by traces of the Sun's position during the days of one year, solstice to solstice. Gaps in the daily curves are due to cloud cover. The video ends with stunning animation sequences of analemmas, those figure-8 curves you get by photographing the Sun at the same time each day throughout a year, stepping across planet Earth's sky.

Start of 2017 Links

Here are some stories to start the year out on:

Jack Johnson, still unforgivable? - The Undefeated

Big Battles Over Farm And Food Policies May Be Brewing As Trump Era Begins - The Salt

Where the Beers Are:A Regional Guide to U.S. Craft Beers - Wall Street Journal

Rogue One: an 'Engineering Ethics' Story - SciFi Policy and Architects and Engineers Shove a Light Saber Through the Death Star's Bad Design - Wired, along with a speculation on real-life ethics and scientific research, The Private Heisenberg and the Absent Bomb - New York Review of Books
A Bigger Problem Than ISIS? - The New Yorker. On the potentially imminent failure of the Mosul Dam.

The Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion and the O-Ring - Priceonomics

Meet Henry Orenstein, The Man Who Changed How The World Plays - Newsweek (h/t my former boss).  Unbelievable life story.

Fuck Work - Aeon. 

Holy Wars - Boston Review

The Ad That Moved People the Most: Bernie Sanders's 'America' - The Upshot

What History Has to Say About the Economy Trump Will Inherit - Bloomberg

America's electoral college and the popular vote - The Economist.