Full Moon names date back to Native Americans, of what is now the northern and eastern United States.

Those tribes of a few hundred years ago kept track of the seasons by giving distinctive names to each recurring full moon. Their names were applied to the entire month in which each occurred.

There were some variations in the moon names, but in general the same ones were current throughout the Algonquin tribes from New England on west to Lake Superior.

Here is a listing of all of the full moon names, as well as the dates and times for 2010. Unless otherwise noted, all times are for the Eastern Time Zone.

Jan. 30, 1:18 a.m. EST – Full Wolf Moon. Amid the zero cold and deep snows of midwinter, the wolf packs howled hungrily outside Indian villages.  It was also known as the Old Moon or the Moon after Yule.  In some tribes this was the Full Snow Moon; most applied that name to the next moon.

Feb. 28, 11:38 a.m. EST – Full Snow Moon. Usually the heaviest snows fall in this month.  Hunting becomes very difficult, and hence to some tribes this was the Full Hunger Moon. .

Mar. 29, 10:25 p.m. EDT – Full Worm Moon. In this month the ground softens and the earthworm casts reappear, inviting the return of the robins.  The more northern tribes knew this as the Full Crow Moon, when the cawing of crows signals the end of winter, or the Full Crust Moon because the snow cover becomes crusted from thawing by day and freezing at night.  The Full Sap Moon, marking the time of tapping maple trees, is another variation.

Apr. 28, 8:18 a.m. EDT – Full Pink Moon. The grass pink or wild ground phlox is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring.  Other names were the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, the Egg Moon, and — among coastal tribes — the Full Fish Moon, when the shad come upstream to spawn.

May 27, 7:07 p.m. EDT – Full Flower Moon. Flowers are now abundant everywhere.  It was also known as the Full Corn Planting Moon or the Milk Moon.

Jun. 26, 7:30 a.m. EDT – Full Strawberry Moon. Strawberry picking season peaks during this month.  Europeans called this the Rose Moon.

Jul. 25, 9:37 p.m. EDT – Full Buck Moon, when the new antlers of buck deer push out from their foreheads in coatings of velvety fur.  It was also often called the Full Thunder Moon, thunderstorms being now most frequent.  Sometimes it’s also called the Full Hay Moon.

Aug. 24, 1:05 p.m. EDT – Full Sturgeon Moon, when this large fish of the Great Lakes and other major bodies of water like Lake Champlain is most readily caught.  A few tribes knew it as the Full Red Moon because when the moon rises it looks reddish through sultry haze, or the Green Corn Moon or Grain Moon.

Sep. 23, 5:17 a.m. EDT – Full Harvest Moon. Traditionally, this designation goes to the full moon that occurs closest to the Autumnal (fall) Equinox.  The Harvest Moon usually comes in September, but (on average) once or twice a decade it will fall in early October.  At the peak of the harvest, farmers can work into the night by the light of this moon.

Oct. 22, 9:36 p.m. EDT – Full Hunters’ Moon. With the leaves falling and the deer fattened, it’s now time to hunt.  Since the fields have been reaped, hunters can ride over the stubble, and can more easily see the fox, as well as other animals, which can be caught for a thanksgiving banquet after the harvest.

Nov. 21, 12:27 p.m. EST – Full Beaver Moon. At this point of the year, it’s time to set beaver traps before the swamps freeze to ensure a supply of warm winter furs.  Another interpretation suggests that the name Beaver Full Moon come from the fact that the beavers are now active in their preparation for winter.  It’s also called the Frosty Moon.

Dec. 21, 3:13 a.m. EST – Full Cold Moon. On occasion, this moon was also called the Moon before Yule. December is also the month the winter cold fastens its grip.  Sometimes this moon is referred to as the Full Long Nights Moon and the term “Long Night” Moon is a very appropriate name because the nights are now indeed long and the Moon is above the horizon a long time.

SOURCE: Space.com

People take part in the 9th Annual No Pants Subway Ride in New York City January 10, 2010. The event organized by Improv Everywhere involves participants who strip down to their underwear as they go about their normal routine.

SOURCE: Reuters

Party planners take note. For the first time in almost twenty years, there’s going to be a Blue Moon on New Year’s Eve.

“I remember the last time this happened,” says professor Philip Hiscock of the Dept. of Folklore at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. “December 1990 ended with a Blue Moon, and many New Year’s Eve parties were themed by the event. It was a lot of fun.”

Don’t expect the Moon to actually turn blue, though. “The ‘Blue Moon’ is a creature of folklore,” he explains. “It’s the second full Moon in a calendar month.”

Right: The full moon of Dec. 2, 2009, over Turan, Italy. Photographer Stefano De Rosa notes that the blue colors are cast by Christmas lights surrounding the pictured church.

Most months have only one full Moon. The 29.5-day cadence of the lunar cycle matches up almost perfectly with the 28- to 31-day length of calendar months. Indeed, the word “month” comes from “Moon.” Occasionally, however, the one-to-one correspondence breaks down when two full Moons squeeze into a single month. Dec. 2009 is such a month. The first full Moon appeared on Dec. 2nd; the second, a “Blue Moon,” will come on Dec. 31st.

This definition of Blue Moon is relatively new.

If you told a person in Shakespeare’s day that something happens “once in a Blue Moon” they would attach no astronomical meaning to the statement. Blue Moon simply meant rare or absurd, like making a date for the Twelfth of Never. “But meaning is a slippery substance,” says Hiscock. “The phrase ‘Blue Moon’ has been around for more than 400 years, and during that time its meaning has shifted.”

The modern definition sprang up in the 1940s. In those days, the Farmer’s Almanac of Maine offered a definition of Blue Moon so convoluted that even professional astronomers struggled to understand it. It involved factors such as the ecclesiastical dates of Easter and Lent, and the timing of seasons according to the dynamical mean sun. Aiming to explain blue moons to the layman, Sky & Telescope published an article in 1946 entitled “Once in a Blue Moon.” The author James Hugh Pruett cited the 1937 Maine almanac and opined that the “second [full moon] in a month, so I interpret it, is called Blue Moon.

That was not correct, but at least it could be understood. And thus the modern Blue Moon was born.

Blue Moon has other connotations, too. In music, it’s often a symbol of melancholy. According to one Elvis tune, it means “without a love of my own.” On the bright side, he croons in another song, a simple kiss can turn a Blue Moon pure gold.

The modern astronomical Blue Moon occurs in some month every 2.5 years, on average. A Blue Moon falling precisely on Dec. 31st, however, is much more unusual. The last time it happened was in 1990, and the next time won’t be until 2028.

So cue up that old Elvis record and “enjoy the extra moonlight on New Year’s Eve,” says Hiscock. “It only happens once in a Blue Moon.”

SOURCE: NASA

Pet ownership is booming in a nation where dogs and cats are featured as part of meals and animal abuse remains widespread. But none carries the cachet of the Tibetan Mastiff, one of the largest dog breeds, which can weigh 180 pounds.

Last month, a Nanjing breeder paid $234,000 for his purebred pooch, reported the Yangtze Evening Times. In September, a young woman in Xian paid $600,000 for her pet, according to the Xian Evening News. Both led airport welcomes with long convoys of pricey automobiles.

“It’s like gambling, as people think they can earn large sums from expensive dogs, but the reality is that it’s very hard to breed a top quality purebred Tibetan Mastiff,” Beijing breeder Zhao Yanjun says.

Others buy to show off their status. “Like men around the world, Chinese like to own big dogs as it shows ‘I am successful, I want to dominate more women and big dogs,’ ” Zhao says.

In the USA, $5,000 is the upper limit for a show quality puppy, says Martha Feltenstein, president of the American Tibetan Mastiff Association. In China, prices have leapt this year amid a nationwide “Tibetan Mastiff fever” that shows little sign of cooling.

The dog has changed breeder Zhao’s fortunes.

The former chicken farmer, 48, bought his first Tibetan Mastiff in 1990 and earns up to $440,000 a year at his Oriental Treasure breeding center near Beijing.

“They are beautiful, loyal, fierce and run like a lion,” he says of the breed, which has a bear-like head and shaggy mane.

Despite enticing offers, Zhao promises never to sell Son of Bush, out of loyalty to his favorite, Bush, who died last year at 11.

“I will never be a high official, but I had fun shouting ‘Bush, over here!’ ” jokes Zhao, who also named and raised Putin, Sharon and several others named for world leaders.

Obama, worth almost $300,000, was born to a dog Zhao sold to Chinese actor Wang Fei. Zhao says Wang charges up to $30,000 per breeding session with Obama.

SOURCE: USA Today

Lunch with a colleague from work should be a time to unwind – the most taxing task being to decide what to eat, drink, and choose for dessert. For Rick Mabry and Paul Deiermann it has never been that simple. They can’t think about sharing a pizza, for example, without falling headlong into the mathematics of how to slice it up.

“We went to lunch together at least once a week,” says Mabry, recalling the early 1990s when they were both at Louisiana State University, Shreveport. “One of us would bring a notebook, and we’d draw pictures while our food was getting cold.”

The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-centre, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-centre cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighbouring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza – and if not, who will get more?

Of course you could estimate the area of each slice, tot them all up and work out each person’s total from that. But these guys are mathematicians, and so that wouldn’t quite do. They wanted to be able to distil the problem down to a few general, provable rules that avoid exact calculations, and that work every time for any circular pizza.

As with many mathematical conundrums, the answer has arrived in stages – each looking at different possible cases of the problem. The easiest example to consider is when at least one cut passes plumb through the centre of the pizza. A quick sketch shows that the pieces then pair up on either side of the cut through the centre, and so can be divided evenly between the two diners, no matter how many cuts there are.

So far so good, but what if none of the cuts passes through the centre? For a pizza cut once, the answer is obvious by inspection: whoever eats the centre eats more. The case of a pizza cut twice, yielding four slices, shows the same result: the person who eats the slice that contains the centre gets the bigger portion. That turns out to be an anomaly to the three general rules that deal with greater numbers of cuts, which would emerge over subsequent years to form the complete pizza theorem.

The first proposes that if you cut a pizza through the chosen point with an even number of cuts more than 2, the pizza will be divided evenly between two diners who each take alternate slices.

With an odd number of cuts, things start to get more complicated. Here the pizza theorem says that if you cut the pizza with 3, 7, 11, 15… cuts, and no cut goes through the centre, then the person who gets the slice that includes the centre of the pizza eats more in total. If you use 5, 9, 13, 17… cuts, the person who gets the centre ends up with less.

Rigorously proving this to be true, however, has been a tough nut to crack. So difficult, in fact, that Mabry and Deiermann have only just finalised a proof that covers all possible cases.

Their quest started in 1994, when Deiermann showed Mabry a revised version of the pizza problem, again published in Mathematics Magazine (vol 67, p 304). Readers were invited to prove two specific cases of the pizza theorem. First, that if a pizza is cut three times (into six slices), the person who eats the slice containing the pizza’s centre eats more. Second, that if the pizza is cut five times (making 10 slices), the opposite is true and the person who eats the centre eats less.

The first statement was posed as a teaser: it had already been proved by the authors. The second statement, however, was preceded by an asterisk – a tiny symbol which, in Mathematics Magazine, can mean big trouble. It indicates that the proposers haven’t yet proved the proposition themselves. “Perhaps most mathematicians would have thought, ‘If those guys can’t solve it, I’m not going to look at it.’” Mabry says. “We were stupid enough to look at it.”

Deiermann quickly sketched a solution to the three-cut problem – “one of the most clever things I’ve ever seen,” as Mabry recalls. The pair went on to prove the statement for five cuts – even though new tangles emerged in the process – and then proved that if you cut the pizza seven times, you get the same result as for three cuts: the person who eats the centre of the pizza ends up with more.

Boosted by their success, they thought they might have stumbled across a technique that could prove the entire pizza theorem once and for all. For an odd number of cuts, opposing slices inevitably go to different diners, so an intuitive solution is to simply compare the sizes of opposing slices and figure out who gets more, and by how much, before moving on to the next pair. Working your way around the pizza pan, you tot up the differences and there’s your answer.

Simple enough in principle, but it turned out to be horribly difficult in practice to come up with a solution that covered all the possible numbers of odd cuts. Mabry and Deiermann hoped they might be able to deploy a deft geometrical trick to simplify the problem. The key was the area of the rectangular strips lying between each cut and a parallel line passing through the centre of the pizza (see diagram). That’s because the difference in area between two opposing slices can be easily expressed in terms of the areas of the rectangular strips defined by the cuts. “The formula for [the area of] strips is easier than for slices,” Mabry says. “And the strips give some very nice visual proofs of certain aspects of the problem.”

Unfortunately, the solution still included a complicated set of sums of algebraic series involving tricky powers of trigonometric functions. The expression was ugly, and even though Mabry and Deiermann didn’t have to calculate the total exactly, they still had to prove it was positive or negative to find out who gets the bigger portion. It turned out to be a massive hurdle. “It ultimately took 11 years to figure that out,” says Mabry.

Over the following years, the pair returned occasionally to the pizza problem, but with only limited success. The breakthrough came in 2006, when Mabry was on a vacation in the south of Germany. Mabry and Deiermann had been using computer programs to test their results, but it wasn’t until Mabry put the technology aside that he saw the problem clearly. He managed to refashion the algebra into a manageable, more elegant form.

Back home, he put computer technology to work again. He suspected that someone, somewhere must already have worked out the simple-looking sums at the heart of the new expression, so he trawled the online world for theorems that might provide the key result he was looking for.

Eventually he found what he was after: a 1999 paper that referenced a mathematical statement from 1979. There, Mabry found the tools he and Deiermann needed to show whether the complex algebra of the rectangular strips came out positive or negative. The rest of the proof then fell into place.

Mabry and Deiermann have gone on to examine a host of other pizza-related problems. Who gets more crust, for example, and who will eat the most cheese? And what happens if the pizza is square?

SOURCE: New Scientist

FRIERSON, LA. – Flushed evidence doesn’t go far if your toilet’s on a septic system. DeSoto Parish sheriff’s Lt. Toni Joe Morris said Tuesday that deputies brought in a backhoe when drug agents raided a home and business and met the owner coming out of a bathroom.

He said a bag of methamphetamine and needles was floating on the sewage.

Deputies booked a 49-year-old man on Friday with possessing methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia, as well as possessing a firearm with drugs present.

Morris told The Times of Shreveport that a 27-year-old man was at the house and was booked with possessing methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia, and with parole violation.

SOURCE: Yahoo! News

Thomas E. Mahany, a 62-year-old Vietnam veteran, is staging a hunger strike in Lafayette Square across from the White House to raise awareness about post-traumatic stress disorder and protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nothing weird about that. I applaud his efforts.

The weird part comes from not being able to find any media coverage about it. Google it and the closest you get to mainstream media is T R U T H O U T, and if you are at all familiar with T R U T H O U T, you know this online news source does not consider themselves to be mainstream whatsoever (about T R U T H O U T).

Mahany recently wrote a letter to President Obama calling on him to “withdraw our military men and women from the Middle East now.”

He said he plans to only drink water “until specific action is taken by your administration and our military to stem the tragic and ever-increasing rise in the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)” that has seen a meteoric rise over the years among those serving in the military.

Mahany has been without food since Veterans Day. Why hasn’t the media given any coverage to this?

If sniffing the scent of the ocean while booking a vacation online or the smell of whisky and cigars while digitally listening to jazz sounds appealing to you, the British cable company Telewest has a new device that adds a whole new dimension to the internet: Smell!

The technology makes it possible to send and receive a large number of odors through e-mail. The user has to attach a special scent device to his computer. This device contains 20 aromas that, while mixed properly, can produce about sixty scents.

The sender will have to send a code along with the e-mail to attach a special odor to it. The scent divice translates this code into a special smell that will be spread all around the computer.

Think about it! The scent of fresh bread while doing your online shopping or a relaxing aromatherapy.

The scent device can easily be connected through one of your serial ports on your computer. The hardware can be bought for the price of 250 British pounds ($400 USD).

SOURCE: Stunning Stuff.com

NEW YORK — What word sums up 2009? How about “unfriend?”

That’s the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2009 Word of the Year. It means to remove someone as a friend on a social networking Web site such as Facebook.

Each year Oxford University Press tracks how the English language is changing and chooses a word that best reflects the mood of the year.

Oxford lexicographer Christine Lindberg says unfriend has “real lex appeal.”

Finalists for 2009 also included netbook, which is a small laptop, and sexting, which is sending sexually explicit texts and pictures by cell phone.

SOURCE: KOMO News

PHOENIX — A high school librarian in Phoenix says a former student at the school returned two overdue books checked out 51 years ago, along with a $1,000 money order to cover the fines.

Camelback High School librarian Georgette Bordine says the two Audubon Society books checked out in 1959 and the money order were sent by someone who wanted to remain anonymous.

Bordine says the letter explained that the borrower’s family moved to another state and the books were mistakenly packed.

The letter said the money order was to cover fines of 2 cents per day for each book. That would total about $745. The letter says the extra money was added in case the rates had changed.

Bordine says the money will buy more books, and the overdue books will be returned to the shelves.

SOURCE: KOMO TV