Tea at Trianon: Mars is Spinning Faster

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, September 10, 2023

Mars is Spinning Faster

From Live Science:

Like an ice skater tucking their arms for an elegant spin, the planet Mars appears to be rotating slightly faster with each passing year. In a paper published June 14 in the journal Nature, astronomers used data from NASA's InSight mission to show that the Red Planet's spin is accelerating at a rate of 4 milliarcseconds — one one-thousandth of an arcsecond, a unit of angularity — per year. As a result, the length of a Martian day is getting shorter by fractions of a millisecond annually.
Such changes in rotation can be difficult to detect. Luckily, InSight was able to collect over four years of data before it ran out of power in December 2022. The new study examined measurements taken from the mission's first 900 days on Mars — enough time to pick up on even subtle changes in planetary spin. (Read more.)