Watts Up With That?

Suppose a commenter posts a libelous comment here at NorCalBlogs. It’s been known to happen. Can the blogger, Enterprise Record, and its corporate owners be sued for defamation? A federal appeals court just held that no, they cannot. The court noted that a federal law was designed to ensure that ‘within broad limits’, message board operators would not be held responsible for the postings made by others on that board,’ adding that, were the law otherwise, it would have an ‘obvious chilling effect’ on blogger free speech.

You know you’ve reached critical mass in an argument when you start having editorial cartoons drawn about you.

In this weeks Chico Beat, the editorial cartoon above appeared. While editor Tom Gascoyne would not admit to it being my caricature that was used, a call to artist Steve Ferchaud in Paradise confirmed he used me at Tom’s suggestion of my name.

I consider it high praise to be drawn by Ferchaud, but not so high to be in the Chico Beat.

In any event, by the end of the year 2017, ten plus years from now, we’ll know for sure who’s right. I think it will start to be cooler due to the solar cycle starting to dampen.

What do the numbers 923, 930, 935, 941 and 944 have in common? Answer: They’re different names for the same sunspot, this one shown above.

Greg Piepol of Rockville, Maryland, took the picture yesterday using a Solar Max Solar telescope/camera. It shows sunspot 944 coming around the sun’s eastern limb–for the fifth time! Usually sunspots form and dissolve in a matter of weeks, but this spot has endured for more than five 27-day solar rotations. By long and idiosyncratic tradition, a sunspot receives a new number each time it reappears and is visible to earth.

Sunspot 944 may not seem impressive now, but one month ago as “941″ it was a lovely spiral. Three months ago as “930″ it produced one of the strongest solar flares of the past 25 years and Northern Lights as far south as Arizona. What will it do this time?

Even though we are in between peaks in our 11 year sunspot cycle, we still seem to have quite an active sun. The trend over the last century has been that our solar cycle has had more activity than centuries before.

Of course, that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with global warming.