In the last issue I wrote about the government's grants to Universities and Industry to study and develop solar energy. The tone and spirit of the work of those with grants is very much like what I imagine you would find if the Ford Motor Company were given the job of studying Chevrolet cars.
If Ford were given the job of studying Chevrolet cars and reporting to the american public the results of their study, I am sure that many men, test drivers, comfort experts, efficiency engineers, longevity experts would be assigned to this project. A large amount of money would be set aside for this serious question. If they were given the position of impartial tester I am sure they would play the role to the last serious words of their last expert. What would they discover? That the Chevrolet was a piece of junk that should be dismantled, garaged, or burned? No, of course not. The reports carefully worded by committees to strain out any nuances of individual opinion, would find great promise in many of the features of the Chevrolet. In interviews some of the members of the Ford research team would nod their heads, "Yes, in 20 years we feel that the automobile industry will definitely be ready for the chevrolet. For clearly many of its features are beneficial and much needed by the public" and, sir, can you tell us what you have chosen after your long study of the Ford and the Chevrolet. "Well, Hal, with today's options in the automobile field, I'll have to say that the car I have found to be feasible is the Ford. Though, of course, I'll grant you that some day my kids will probably be driving Chevrolets,"
For some reason, this brand of shit works quite well on the american public.
Different layers of the sun are at different temperatures, but the sun radiates heat much like a body at 10,000 degrees F. Not all of the sun's radiation reaches the earth. The short ultraviolet rays are largely absorbed by O3 — ozone — in the upper atmosphere and much of the radiation at other wave lengths is absorbed depending on one's altitude and the condition of the atmosphere. If it is heavily cloudy very little of the sun's radiation reaches the earth.
The path of the earth around the sun is an ellipse. The sun is at one end of the foci. The ellipse is almost a circle, it's not a very pronounced ellipse. The closest that we come to the sun is 91,350,000 miles and the farthest 94,455,000 miles. This small difference in distance of 3–4% makes an appreciable difference of about 7% in the intensity of the radiation since this decreases with the square of the distance.
[Additional sections in PDF: morning/evening windshield, 23½° tilt table, earth as orange/sun as grapefruit, shadow gives the date, meteorites, Uranus, etc.]
Source: The Tribal Messenger, 13 April 1973. Text from embedded PDF. Full issue: 1973-04-13-tribal-messenger.
PDF: 1973-04-13-tribal-messenger.pdf