This is a superhero movie I would watch

People say superhero movies are dead. I say they're just not choosing the right comics for inspiration. I would definitely watch a movie based on this storyline.

PZ: The Technical Adult

That's a headline I saw on Synlogos and, trying to process it quickly, I figured it must be a reference to PZ Myers, one of the lesser lights of early-2000s Nu-Atheism, who wasn't quite cool enough to be considered one of the "four horsemen" but was still somewhat prominent back when debating evolution on the Internet was a thing. "Technical adult," then, would be a reference to his perpetual adolescence despite having technically been an adult for some decades. (He was a dick even by Internet atheist standards. I was firmly on team fedora at the time and read lots of Dawkins and Dennett, but even I couldn't stand PZ Myers.)

Thinking a retrospective evisceration of old PZ might be mildly amusing, I clicked.

I had misread the headline. The final word was actually audit, not adult. PZ refers not to Myers but to Probability Zero, an anti-Darwinian book Vox Day wrote together with a fake intelligence, and the "audit" is a dumpster fire consisting of other fake intelligences rating it in comparison to other evolution books, including one by Dawkins. Slop feeding on slop.

So the coincidence is that, even though I had completely misinterpreted the headline, the article still ended up involving the evolution debate and a Nu-Atheist author, and Vox is certainly giving PZ a run for his money in the cringe department.

The Sun and full Moon sharing the sky in Canadian rock songs

I was just thinking this morning that it had been a few days since I'd experienced any syncs and that maybe the sync fairies were going to give me a little breather.

Kek, famous last words.

I've been reading Tuned In: The Paranormal World of Music (2018) by Grant Cameron and Desta Barnabe. I don't recommend this book -- it's poorly written and extremely repetitive, and the "research" underlying it seems to have been limited to running Google searches -- but once I've started a book, I almost always finish it, even if it's bad. Around noon today, I read this:

As mentioned earlier, one of the many songs identified as a song that may have been influenced by aliens is the 1970 Neil Young song, "After the Gold Rush."

The lyrics talk about Young lying in a burned-out basement and having a dream where the sun bursts out during the full moon. . . .

The Sun and a full Moon being visible at the same time ought to be an astronomical impossibility. Following the logic of my 2021 post "Using daylight phases of the Moon to calculate the relative distance of the Sun and the Moon," the angular distance between the Sun and a full Moon is always 180 degrees, meaning that if one of the two is above the horizon, the other must be below it. However, atmospheric refraction (averaging 34 arcminutes at the horizon) does make it possible. We perceive the Sun as "rising" when its center is still, geometrically speaking, 50 arcminutes below the horizon, meaning the center of the full Moon would be well above the horizon -- 50 arcminutes plus whatever the refraction would be at that angular elevation. Depending on weather conditions, refraction at the horizon can be considerably greater than the usual 34 arcminutes. So what Neil Young is describing is optically possible.

I wouldn't normally be analyzing rock lyrics for astronomical plausibility, but as it happens, just last night I had read a post by Francis Berger, "There Are Times You Can See Both the Bulb and the Mirror," in which he reports that "in the past three days" (centered on January 3, the date of the full Moon), the Moon "remains visible well into the morning before finally sinking from view in the west." My first reaction was incredulity, but then I remembered atmospheric refraction and looked up the relevant figures. Apparently astronomers have occasionally recorded refractions of a full 4 degrees -- eight times the perceived diameter of the Moon -- at the horizon. Under such conditions, the full Moon could indeed be visible "well into the morning."

Frank was reporting his own observations, not just quoting rock lyrics -- but he was doing that, too. He ends the post by quoting the song that provided the title of his post, "Morning Moon" (2009) by the Tragically Hip:

The sun’s a light bulb,
And the moon is a mirror,
There are times when you can see,
Both the bulb and the mirror.
See the bulb and the mirror.

The Tragically Hip are from Kingston, Ontario. Neil Young is also from Ontario. Although Grant Cameron focuses on the fact that Young grew up in his own hometown of Winnipeg, in fact he was born in Toronto and lived there until he was 12.

I remember Bill Wright had some posts about "Sun-Moon time" on one of his deleted blogs, but I don't recall the details. I thought he might have left a comment about it on "The world was fair in Durin's Day," but no dice.

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Note added: The Sun as a light bulb reflected in a mirror reminds me of this, which I posted in "Syncfest: Drowned boy, aliens, ceiling lights, finger of God, Michelangelo, Brother of Jared, Moria, and more" (2023):