Here and There

Beyond description.

From Wired.com.

Exactly what Google’s founders did, announced today.

* How are SPF levels determined? From listening to the Slate Explainer podcast, which I do from time to time: So what they do is get a little study group together, made up entirely of people who burn easily. There’s a scale for skin type, a spectrum ranging from blondes and redheads all the way to dark brown skin. The ones they use for the tests are on the light end, naturally. They simulate UV rays on a small patch of subjects’ skin, and see how long it takes to burn. Then they repeat the experiment with the product being tested and record the time it takes to burn. After a simple bit of math, they derive the SPF.

* The origin of the word “galaxy.” From a photo caption in the latest New Yorker. It comes from the Greek word for “milk,” or “galakt,” according to wikipedia.

* Not learned as much as reminded: “Your Love” (”I Don’t Want to Lose Your Love Tonight”) was written and performed by a band called The Outfield (who, amazingly, are still together). Heard the song at a bar the night before, and couldn’t for the life of me remember who it was.

Floating space apartments? It doesn’t get better than this. And all it costs is $14.9 million.

I’m sure it’s the kind of thing that was determined, say, in ancient Greece …

But as I was attempting to get back to sleep around 5 a.m., I wondered for the first time really, Just how fast is the earth moving in its annual trips around the sun?

I set myself to the task of determining this on my own. Here’s my estimate:

Based upon three sources (1, 2, 3), I came up with an average for the length of the earth’s orbit of 580,705,545 miles. I then calculated the amount of hours per year (a simple 365 x 24 will do for an estimate, thank you), and got 8,760 hours. I divided the length by the number of hours and got 66,290.587 mph. I decided to take it a couple steps deeper: next was speed per minute (1,104.431 miles) followed by miles per second (18.414052 miles).

So there you have it. Since I started writing this post, the planet we’re all on has hurled about 5,522 miles through space. Thank you, sun, for keeping us in your orbit.