Leonid meteor shower tonight: Don’t wait up in Dallas

November 16, 2009

Space.com’s story on tonight’s Leonid meteor shower doesn’t encourage me to stay up, or get up to watch (tomorrow morning’s meteor shower, really).  A “strong show,” but not spectacular numbers, and our living so close to Dallas will help obscure much of what would be visible normally.

The first cloud of comet dust was released from the nucleus of Tempel-Tuttle back in the year 1567. North America will be turned toward the constellation Leo when these particles begin pelting the upper layers of our atmosphere, some 80 to 100 miles (130 to 160 km.) above us. Earth’s encounter with the comet dust is going to be brief – possibly no more than several hours long.

Unfortunately, we won’t be going directly through the center of cloud, but rather skim through its outer edge on Nov. 17, chiefly between about 4:30 and 10:30 GMT. As a consequence, the meteor rate is not expected to get much higher than 20 or 30 per hour (on average about one meteor sighting every two or three minutes). Still, this is about two to three times the normal Leonid rate.

At the beginning of this window, it will still be dark across Europe and western Africa with Leo high up in the southeast sky, but within an hour the sky will be brightening as sunrise approaches, soon putting an end to meteor watching.

North Americans – especially those living near and along the Atlantic Seaboard – will be able to watch for Leonids from after 1 a.m. local time right on until the first light of dawn, which comes soon after 5 a.m. local time.

I’ll wager more people will be up watching the new movie 2012 about a wholly fictional collision with Earth than will watch the real collisions from parts of an old comet (Tempel-Tuttle).

More data

2008 Leonids, Chris Peterson at Cloudbait

A composite, all-sky image of the 2008 Leonid outburst over Colorado. Credit: Chris Peterson, Cloudbait Observatory. (NASA) This is a composite image of 141 meteors collected over four evenings, November 16-19 UT. Because the images were collected over many hours, the radiant of the shower is spread out. The Moon was present during the peak activity period each night, so only bright meteors have been recorded. The Moon has been removed from the composite image. (Cloudbait)

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Posted by Ed Darrell

Quote of the moment: Victor Hugo, telescope vs. microscope

September 23, 2009

Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo

Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has a grander view?

— Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, St. Denis, bk. III, ch. 3

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Peter Sinclair update: Mars still doesn’t deny Earth’s warming

September 21, 2009

Cleverly avoiding real discussion of greenhouse gases and their effects on Venus, climate change denialists often claim warming to be a solar system-wide event, caused by the Sun — evidenced, they say, by warming on all the other planets in the solar system.

Peter Sinclair’s “Climate Denial Crock of the Week” dealt with the issue several months ago, but he’s redone the piece, with improvements in sound especially.

Spread the word:

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Hubble Deep Field , 3-D animation

August 28, 2009

Here’s something that will make the Texas State Board of Education cringe and cower under their desks; watch it in good health:

Tip of the old scrub brush to DVice.

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Posted by Ed Darrell

Happy Big Bang Day!

April 1, 2009

Discovery of the Day reminds us of the importance of April 1 — no, not April Fools:

Let’s Start With a Bang

April 1, 1948: A paper published in the Physical Review proposes that the universe was created through a massive event that caused it to expand rapidly. This idea, developed by physicist George Gamow and his graduate student, Ralph Alpher, was later ridiculed as the “Big Bang” theory, although it never mentioned an explosion. Follow the debate between “Big Bang” and the competing “Steady State” theory of the universe. And check out the inside joke included in the Physical Review paper.

And when you click on that last link to see the joke, be sure to scroll down to Dr. Victor Alpher’s response, in which he suggests the joke may not have been exactly as I described it earlier.

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Posted by Ed Darrell

Olla podrida, end of spring break 2009

March 23, 2009

A lot of stuff to catch up on, and no time to do it.

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Tonight! Comet Lulin!

February 23, 2009

Earth and Sky reminds us that tonight is a good chance to see Comet Lulin, if you can see it at all from where you are.

Earth and Sky shows where to see Comet Lulin on February 23, 2009

Earth and Sky shows where to see Comet Lulin on February 23, 2009

Comet Lulin probably won’t be high enough in the east for decent viewing until 8:30 or 9:00 p.m. Later at night is even better. At mid-evening, two respectively bright starlike points of light bedeck the eastern sky. The higher of these two lights is the star Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation Leo the Lion. Saturn is to the lower left of Regulus, its golden color contrasting to that of sparkling blue-white Regulus. If you can’t distinguish their colors with the unaided eye, try looking at Saturn and Regulus with binoculars.

Comet Lulin and Saturn will remain within each other’s vicinity all night long, until morning dawn finally washes them from the sky. Look for Comet Lulin and Saturn to swing highest up for the night around 1 a.m. on February 24, at which time they’ll be due south. If you’re up before dawn on February 24, look for Comet Lulin and Saturn in your western sky.

Astronomers believe this is Comet Lulin’s first trip into the inner solar system. There’s always an element of unpredictability associated with comets, especially a pristine comet like Comet Lulin. Comet Lulin may match, exceed or fall short of expectations, but there is no way to know for sure unless you look!

If you miss Comet Lulin by Saturn on February 23-24, try again on the night of February 27-28, when Comet Lulin will cozy up with Regulus!

I understand t The comet’s discoverer is a school boy 19-year-old university student in China, who found the comet in photos taken at Taiwan’s Lulin Observatory (usually comets are named after their discoverer, but not this time).  Way to go, amateur astronomers!  Way to go, cooperation between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China.

And, if you have really great telescope, here’s what you can see:

NASAs APOD caption: Explanation: Sweeping through the inner solar system, Comet Lulin is easily visible in both northern and southern hemispheres with binoculars or a small telescope. Recent changes in Lulins lovely greenish coma and tails are featured in this two panel comparison of images taken on January 31st (top) and February 4th. Taken from dark New Mexico Skies, the images span over 2 degrees. In both views the comet sports an apparent antitail at the left -- the comets dust tail appearing almost edge on from an earth-based perspective as it trails behind in Lulins orbit. Extending to the right of the coma, away from the Sun, is the beautiful ion tail. Remarkably, as captured in the bottom panel, Comet Lulins ion tail became disconnected on February 4, likely buffeted and torn away by magnetic fields in the solar wind. In 2007 NASA satellites recorded a similar disconnection event for Comet Encke. Dont worry, though. Comet tails can grow back. Photos copyright by Joseph Brimacombe

NASA's APOD caption: "Explanation: Sweeping through the inner solar system, Comet Lulin is easily visible in both northern and southern hemispheres with binoculars or a small telescope. Recent changes in Lulin's lovely greenish coma and tails are featured in this two panel comparison of images taken on January 31st (top) and February 4th. Taken from dark New Mexico Skies, the images span over 2 degrees. In both views the comet sports an apparent antitail at the left -- the comet's dust tail appearing almost edge on from an earth-based perspective as it trails behind in Lulin's orbit. Extending to the right of the coma, away from the Sun, is the beautiful ion tail. Remarkably, as captured in the bottom panel, Comet Lulin's ion tail became disconnected on February 4, likely buffeted and torn away by magnetic fields in the solar wind. In 2007 NASA satellites recorded a similar disconnection event for Comet Encke. Don't worry, though. Comet tails can grow back." Photos copyright by Joseph Brimacombe

Resources:

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Posted by Ed Darrell

Happy Hubble Day! Look up

December 30, 2008

Ultraviolet image of the Andromeda Galaxy, first known to be a galaxy by Edwin Hubble on December 30, 1924 - Galaxy Evolution Explorer image courtesy NASA

Ultraviolet image of the Andromeda Galaxy, first known to be a galaxy by Edwin Hubble on December 30, 1924 - Galaxy Evolution Explorer image courtesy NASA

Today is a good day to celebrate the universe in all it’s glory – December 30. Below, mostly an encore post.

This year for Hubble Day, Wired picked up on the story (with a gracious link to last year’s post here at the Bathtub).  Wired includes several links to even more information, a good source of information.

Hubble was the guy who showed us the universe is not only bigger than we imagined, it’s probably much bigger and much more fantastic than we can imagine. Hubble is the guy who opened our imaginations to the vastness of all creation.

How does one celebrate Hubble Day?  Here are some suggestions:

  • Easier than Christmas cards:  Send a thank-you note to your junior high school science teacher, or whoever it was who inspired your interest in science.  Mrs. Hedburg, Mrs. Andrews, Elizabeth K. Driggs, Herbert Gilbert, Mr. Willis, and Stephen McNeal, thank you.
  • Rearrange your Christmas/Hanukkah/KWANZAA lights in the shape of the Andromeda Galaxy — or in the shape of any of the great photos from the Hubble Telescope (Andromeda Galaxy pictured above; Hubble images here)

    A few of the images from the Hubble Telescope

    A few of the images from the Hubble Telescope

  • Go visit your local science museum; take your kids along – borrow somebody else’s kids if you have to (take them along, too)
  • Spend two hours in your local library, just looking through the books on astronomy and the universe
  • Anybody got a good recipe for a cocktail called “The Hubble?”  “The Andromeda?”  Put it in the comments, please

The encore post, from last year:

December 30, 1924, Edwin Hubble announced the results of his observations of distant objects in space.

PBS

Edwin Hubble - source: PBS

In 1924, he announced the discovery of a Cepheid, or variable star, in the Andromeda Nebulae. Since the work of Henrietta Leavitt had made it possible to calculate the distance to Cepheids, he calculated that this Cepheid was much further away than anyone had thought and that therefore the nebulae was not a gaseous cloud inside our galaxy, like so many nebulae, but in fact, a galaxy of stars just like the Milky Way. Only much further away. Until now, people believed that the only thing existing ouside the Milky Way were the Magellanic Clouds. The Universe was much bigger than had been previously presumed.

Later Hubble noted that the universe demonstrates a “red-shift phenomenon.” The universe is expanding. This led to the idea of an initial expansion event, and the theory eventually known as Big Bang.

Hubble’s life offered several surprises, and firsts:

Hubble was a tall, elegant, athletic, man who at age 30 had an undergraduate degree in astronomy and mathematics, a legal degree as a Rhodes scholar, followed by a PhD in astronomy. He was an attorney in Kentucky (joined its bar in 1913), and had served in WWI, rising to the rank of major. He was bored with law and decided to go back to his studies in astronomy.

In 1919 he began to work at Mt. Wilson Observatory in California, where he would work for the rest of his life. . . .
Hubble wanted to classify the galaxies according to their content, distance, shape, and brightness patterns, and in his observations he made another momentous discovery: By observing redshifts in the light wavelengths emitted by the galaxies, he saw that galaxies were moving away from each other at a rate constant to the distance between them (Hubble’s Law). The further away they were, the faster they receded. This led to the calculation of the point where the expansion began, and confirmation of the big bang theory. Hubble calculated it to be about 2 billion years ago, but more recent estimates have revised that to 20 billion years ago.

An active anti-fascist, Hubble wanted to joined the armed forces again during World War II, but was convinced he could contribute more as a scientist on the homefront. When the 200-inch telescope was completed on Mt. Palomar, Hubble was given the honor of first use. He died in 1953.

“Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.”

That news on December 30, 1924, didn’t make the first page of the New York Times. The Times carried a small note on February 25, 1925, that Hubble won a $1,000 prize from the American Academy for the Advancement of Science.

(Does anyone have a suitable citation for that video?  Where did it come from?  Who produced it?  Is there more somewhere?)

Happy Hubble Day!  Look up!

Resources:

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Posted by Ed Darrell

Live blogging conferences: Physics!

May 23, 2008

Our Italian friend at A Quantum Diaries Survivor is in Albuquerque for PPC08 — don’t ask me what that stands for, but it’s a physics conference.  More, he found another physicist blogging away:  World o Science.

If you’re interested in science research, check it out.  Some of the posts are terribly technical — I don’t understand them, so I’ll have to get one of our sons to explain it to me — but you can catch the drift of what’s going on.  Tommaso also offers a few photos of the Albuquerque area and Sandia Peak, worth the click alone.

It’s a good model of what some of us should do more of (yeah, this is self-flagellation).

Some samples:

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Posted by Ed Darrell

NASA needs eyewitnesses: Were you at the intersection of Milky Way and Bootës on the evening of March 19?

March 21, 2008

No kidding. Our Italian physicist friend Dorigo passed along the note on his blog, Quantum Diaries Survivor. George Gliba at NASA (gliba@milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov) hopes someone was watching Bootës at about 6:10 UT (which would be about 1:10 a.m. Central Daylight Time (CDT), if I’m calculating that correctly).

Gliba said:

Last night the NASA SWIFT spacecraft saw the most extrinsically luminous Gamma-ray Burst ever known. Some ground based telescopes recorded the visual optical afterglow to be 5th magnitude!

Here’s your chance to make science history: If you may have seen the thing, or better, if you have a videotape of the incident (which may have lasted a few minutes), scientists would sure love to see it.

Here’s what the Swift telescope captured:

Gamma Ray burst in Bootes, GRB 080319B
The extremely luminous afterglow of GRB 080319B was imaged by Swift’s X-ray Telescope (left) and Optical/Ultraviolet Telescope (right). This was by far the brightest gamma-ray burst afterglow ever seen. Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler, et al.

So, did you see it? Call George Gliba; details, Gliba’s note to physicists and astronomers below the fold.

What is a gamma ray burst?

Most gamma ray bursts occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. Their cores collapse to form black holes or neutron stars, releasing an intense burst of high-energy gamma rays and ejecting particle jets that rip through space at nearly the speed of light like turbocharged cosmic blowtorches. When the jets plow into surrounding interstellar clouds, they heat the gas, often generating bright afterglows. Gamma ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the universe since the big bang.

“This burst was a whopper,” said Swift principal investigator Neil Gehrels of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “It blows away every gamma ray burst we’ve seen so far.”

Calculations show this one was 7 billion light years away. Cool!

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Posted by Ed Darrell

Astronomy Day, May 10: Sponsors needed!

March 15, 2008

In all of Texas, only residents of El Paso have a sponsor for Astronomy Day activities (participating astronomy groups are the Gene Roddenberry Planetarium, El Paso Astronomy Club, and Junior League of El Paso, meeting at El Paso Desert Botanical Gardens at Keystone Heritage Park). Celebrate Astronomy Day on Saturday, May 10, 2008.

Why is this a big deal?

National Astronomy Day 2008 poster

Chiefly because I know there are students in Lubbock, Odessa, Killeen, Houston, Galveston, Victoria, Beaumont, Tyler, Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, Austin, and San Antonio — plus starry spots in between — who should have a chance to see some stars on National Astronomy Day.

Plus, Astronomy Magazine has a deal with Meade Instruments 4M to give away a telescope at each sponsored site.

We need a sponsor here in Dallas!

“The Meade Instruments 4M Community will donate an ETX-80 telescope for each venue to give away and also provide a 8-inch LX 90 for the grand prize — Astronomy will pick the grand-prize winner from names collected at each venue.”

Where can you view? Check Meade’s site for a list of physical sites participating on May 10. Check Astronomy Magazine for an interactive map of sites.

Astronomy Day is a grass roots movement to share the joy of astronomy with the general population – “Bringing Astronomy to the People.” On Astronomy Day, thousands of people who have never looked through a telescope will have an opportunity to see first hand what has so many amateur and professional astronomers all excited. Astronomy clubs, science museums, observatories, universities, planetariums, laboratories, libraries, and nature centers host special events and activities to acquaint their population with local astronomical resources and facilities. It is an astronomical PR event that helps highlight ways the general public can get involved with astronomy – or at least get some of their questions about astronomy answered. Astronomy Week is the same concept as Astronomy Day except seven times long.

Novices get a chance to look at the stars, and one person at each site wins a telescope; one person in the nation gets a very nice 8-inch telescope. What are your chances? Last year 28 telescopes were given away; there were 3,700 people who registered to win the things.

Just for looking at the stars! What a deal.

Who will sponsor more sites? Where is the Texas Astronomical Society? The Fort Worth Astronomical Society? How about the Olympus Mons Astronomical Society (at UT-Arlington)? The Lockheed-Martin Astronomy Club?

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Posted by Ed Darrell

Robert Jastrow

March 8, 2008

I learned today that Robert Jastrow died last month. Jastrow was the founder and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which he headed until 1981. After leaving GISS he taught at Dartmouth and the Marshall Institute in Washington, D.C., and he headed the retrofit of the 100-inch telescope at the Mt. Wilson Observatory.

Robert Jastrow, in color

Jastrow captured a lot of young minds with his book, Red Giants and White Dwarfs, which put a lot of cosmology into everyday English.

But as a careful scientist dedicated to explaining complex things in simple terms, he often was misunderstood, or seen as cranky and reactionary. To his death he remained skeptical that human action could change climate. And his few paragraphs attempting to reconcile rapidly-advancing science with religious thought are often abused by creationists to claim Jastrow as one of them, and not a scientist who supports evolution (his writings are rather clear on his support of the theory of evolution and the science behind it; most creationists don’t bother to read all of the book).

Jastrow was an alumnus of Camp Rising Sun, a project of the Louis August Jonas Foundation, in upstate New York. And while a lot of us affiliated with the foundation are cautious about pre-selection bias, we’d like to think that the unique experiences developing leadership that the campers get in some small way contributed to Jastrow’s leadership in space exploration.

GISS Director James Hansen’s eulogy is below the fold.

Resources:

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Why real science is better in school than faux science

March 1, 2008

P. Z. Myers notes the silliness that anti-science types get involved in, especially when they attempt to make scientists look bad over something complex enough that it just can’t be worked out — leap years!

The two most amusing explanations for why we have leap years that I’ve heard came from creationists:

  1. Those scientists can’t even measure the length of the year accurately! They have to keep fudging their numbers every few years to make everything add up, so why should I trust them?
  2. We have leap years because the earth is slowing down in its orbit, which proves that the earth can’t be old — a million years ago the earth would have been whirling around the sun so fast it would have flown out of orbit!

Phil Plait at the misnamed (for this post) Bad Astronomy explains in glorious mathematical detail how leap year calculations work, and why we need wait around for more than three millennia to lobby for another calendar correction. Phil is really a remarkable story teller, for an astronomer:

We have two basic units of time: the day and the year. Of all the everyday measurements we use, these are the only two based on concrete physical events: the time it takes for the Earth to spin once on its axis, and the time it takes to go around the Sun. Every other unit of time we use (second, hour, week, month) is rather arbitrary. Convenient, but they are not based on independent, non-arbitrary events.

It takes roughly 365 days for the Earth to orbit the Sun once. If it were exactly 365 days, we’d be all set! Our calendars would be the same every year, and there’d be no worries.

But that’s not the way things are. There are not an exactly even number of days in a year; there are about 365.25 days in a year. That means every year, our calendar is off by about a quarter of a day, an extra 6 or so hours just sitting there, left over. After four years, then, the yearly calendar is off by roughly one day:

4 years at 365 (calendar) days/year = 1460 days, but4 years at 365.25 (physical) days/year = 1461 days.

These are mysteries that beg for explanations in social studies classes. For example, the differences in George Washington’s birth date, as recorded in the year he was born, and as listed today, are due to England’s and the English-speaking world’s late adoption of the Gregorian Calendar, switching from the Julian (England made the switch in 1752, about a half century after almost everyone else in the west, 170 years after Pope Gregory XIII proposed it).

Pope Gregory, who ordered new calendars, better to calculate religious feast days, like Easter. The Gregorian Calendar was introduced about 1583, with leap years. The actual time between two yearly solar events isn't 365 days exactly. It's actually 365.2422 days — so every four years there's approximately one extra day left over. (NPR image and information)

Pope Gregory, who ordered new calendars, better to calculate religious feast days, like Easter. The Gregorian Calendar was introduced about 1583, with leap years. The actual time between two yearly solar events isn’t 365 days exactly. It’s actually 365.2422 days — so every four years there’s approximately one extra day left over. (NPR image and information)

If nothing else, social studies should be good for providing cocktail party trivia, shouldn’t it? And it won’t really matter to you unless one is a scientist launching rockets at a distant planet, or a churchman trying to fix the date of Easter, or a farmer trying to be certain the planting calendar is accurate to the season, or a commodities futures trader trying to figure out when agricultural goods come to market, or a mortgage banker working to make sure mortgages are calculated correctly for the next 30 years and that notices go out to homeowners as required by law, or a homeowner checking up on your mortgage bank, or an average investor checking up on your commodities futures traders and REIT investment advisor, or just a kid interested in the minutiae of how science really affects us in our every day lives.

Now we wonder: In comments, will some creationist bring up the old canard about Harold Hill and NASA’s calculations being off by the one day Joshua stopped the sun?

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Posted by Ed Darrell

Getting the story straight: Galileo and the church

January 31, 2008

Galileo observes the stars

One of the great joys of history, to me, is the diving into a story and finding that the details of the true story do not correspond well with the popular myths. For example, most sailors of the late 15th century were aware the Earth is a globe, when Columbus sailed — his crew did not fear falling off the edge of the Earth. This fact raises questions about why the great European powers were not more enthusiastic about exploring to the west, and that question is probably more difficult to answer. That means more work for the historian.

Here’s an essay from Peter Klein at the economics blog Organizations and Markets, on details of the story of Galileo, setting the record straight, but raising a lot more issues about what actually happened in this story from the history of science.

The problem is that the leaders of Galileo’s day didn’t think the sun revolves around the earth. My former colleague Thomas Lessl is an expert on Galileo, and from him I learned that virtually every aspect of the Galileo legend is false.

Consider these facts:

1. Neither Galileo, nor any other scientist, was put to death by the medieval Church. Giordano Bruno, a 17th-century Dominican, was indeed condemned by the Inquisition, not for his scientific views, but for preaching a quirky, New Age-ish view called hermeticism, which was only incidentally connected to heliocentrism.

2. The Catholic authorities of Galileo’s day had little trouble with heliocentrism per se. Many of the leading Catholic scientists were actually Copernicans. Copernicus’s treatise on heliocentrism had been in print for seventy years prior to Galileo’s conflict with the Church.

3. Galileo remained a devout and loyal Catholic until the end of his life. He held no animosity toward the Church over his conflict with Church authorities.

4. Most important, the conflict between Galileo and the Church took place in the context of the Protestant Reformation, a context that is almost always omitted from popular accounts of Galileo’s trial. The key issue in this conflict was not heliocentrism per se, but the authority of the individual Believer to interpret Scripture. Galileo’s argument that scientists should interpret the Bible to conform to their scientific views was close to Luther’s view that the Believer should be his own interpreter of Scripture. It was Lutheranism, not heliocentrism, that alarmed the Church leaders.

Galileo, in other words, was caught up in a larger, theological and ecclesiastical controversy. He was not simply a truth-seeking scientists going up against a bigoted Establishment.

Klein urges that we should be distrustful of scientists who invoke the old myths about the Galileo story. He fails to assert the more powerful point, to me: Christianity traditionally supported good science, and therefore creationism is the odd duck — the Bible, and Christianity, are not opposed to good science.

Preachers should be preaching for the truth, not for creationism. Of course, one should ponder when, if ever, preachers have paid attention to economists.

11 Comments | Accuracy, Astronomy, Creationism, History, Mythology, Natural history, Religion, Science | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Carnivals!

January 28, 2008

Bloggers are out there looking for the good posts, the real meat of Bloggovia, to serve it up to you in a tight bundle. Here’s where you find such purveyors:

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Posted by Ed Darrell

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