The Return of Aurora

She's coming back sooner than I thought. The Sun is cranking up pretty quick after years of relative innactivity. Not the pic below and notice the darker blotch at the upper left. That, my friends, is a hole in the Corona (no relationship to Cinco de Mayo). According to SOHO:

When that coronal hole rotates around to where it faces Earth (in early May), gusts of solar wind will likely buffet Earth a few days later and generate some aurora at higher latitudes.

Also, of note are the solar flares beginning to pop off at the megnetic conveyors.

Here's a nifty little embed of the brand new out of the box SDO found over at NASAs Solar Dynamics Observatory website.

[I tried to embed tthe video here, but the digital minions are at it again. Clilck the link above.]

I give it probably two to three years and we'll be right back to where we were four or five years ago with regard to the knuckleheaded left tree brained fools waving the AGW flags. I think the country formerly known as the Land of Ice and its Volcano Eywhateverthefuckitskulled will probably hold the temps down a smidge and offset any increase in global temps due to the increased solar activity...but then I'm no expert.

I wish I had more snark, but work is all over me today.

Side note:
I don't know if I am the only idiot on the planet watching the History Channel's America: The Story of US, but the more I watch this, the more I am able to view it as indoctrination.

The Texas Revolution was glossed over as a victory for America, by Americans. Somehow, I missed that part about the spoils going to America...at least immediately, anyway.

My biggest issue was the presentation of abolitionist John Brown being a terrorist. I thought about the use of that word for a moment and it occurred to me that they had already labeled him a Christian and acting upon his beliefs that God wanted him to stop slavery.

Now, I think the guy might have been a little over zealous, but I am not sure calling him a torrorist is exactly correct. Ok, sure. He knocked over a US military armory and died trying to defend his acquisition, but it was nothing more than the Revolutionaries did some 65 years earlier or either side in the Civil War did only a few years later. All the guy wanted to do was arm the slaves.

Edit: The whole slavery and expansion portions of the show was little more than one big bash on the white man. White women were glorified, while the white male was portrayed as heartless, murdering bastards. Even the wagon trains were from a woman's point of view. While the poor white man sat in the background fixing broken wagon axels, fighitng off bears and wrestling with oxen, the women were in the forefront giving birth with her superimposed voice telling of the hardships of being a woman on the wagon trail.

Oh, Jedidiah Smith got some props for working WITH the Native Americans and living through a brutal grizzly attack, however, since he was a trapper, they did count the number of beavers that were murdered for pelts.

There were a few other examples of indoctrinational items that I noticed and probably a few that I didn't notice. I learned that Daniel Boone was a man, a big man. Not only that, but with all his badassedness in paving the way for future exploring Americans like Lewis and Clark, Boone was a merciless Native American killer. I guess the Native Americans shouldn't have killed Boone's son, right? Killing a man's offspring has a tendency to draw some prejudice.

The Donner Party story was a little gripping, but the HC made it clear that canniblism was acceptible as long as you label the menu with names so you do not consume your own family members...wtf?

I hated that I passed on the new Stephen Hawking program on Discovery Channel for the Story of Us thing. I did record it though.