I don’t write screenplays, but perhaps you do? If so, consider this new grant from The Black List, the NRDC’s (Natural Resources Defense Council) Rewrite the Future program, The Redford Center, The CAA Foundation, and NBCUniversal.
That’s a lot of organizations getting behind climate storytelling. If you want in, here’s how!
We need it all–the bleak and the inspirational, the fantasies, dramas, comedies, and rom-coms. It is the power and privilege of writers to show us how climate change is transforming our world, and to help us find a path to salvation. This program aims to support well told stories with climate themes that entertain viewers and allow them to engage with the range of emotions caused by the climate crisis.
Application deadline is December 05, 2024.
Even if you aren’t into screenplays or don’t want to navigate The Black List sign up/apply for a fee waiver process, you may want to check out the list of Writer’s Resources at the bottom of the description page.
If my brain had been working yesterday I would have mentioned the fact that many of us have an unusual opportunity to see the Aurora Borealis right now.
“The word Aurora was first used by Galileo and comes from Latin and is the name of the goddess of dawn.” — NOAA
This light show in space is typically reserved for latitudes close to the Earth’s poles, but we happen to be experiencing a G3 solar storm right now. This happens when solar storms drive coronal mass ejections, solar flares, solar particle events and solar winds at us. And by us, I mean Earth.
First, some pretty pictures from as far south as Florida:
Our sun is the main reason for an aurora display. Particles energized by the sun race toward Earth, colliding with our upper atmosphere. Earth’s magnetic field divert this energy towards the north and south poles. As these energized particles enter Earth’s atmosphere, they excite gas atoms and molecules. The colors observed depend on which gas atoms they interact with.
In addition to colorful light bands, sometimes an aurora has black bands that block starlight. The dark regions likely come from electric fields in the upper atmosphere that block electrons from interacting with gases.
I won’t be hurt if you want to stop here and go search for more pictures, but if you’d like to know more about the how and why, read on!
When and where can you see the northern and southern lights also known as the aurora? This page provides a prediction of the aurora’s visibility tonight and tomorrow night in the charts below. The animations further down show what the aurora’s been up to over the last 24 hours and estimates what the next 30 minutes will be like. The aurora’s colorful green, red, and purple light shifts gently and often changes shape like softly blowing curtains.
The figure below shows the magnetosphere and the locations where electrons are accelerated (in red). The red region on the right of the figure is where the electrons that produce night-time aurora are accelerated and the source of the processes that generate geomagnetic storms.
Pretty colors are pretty, of course, but why should we care about space weather?
Space weather is a global issue. Unlike terrestrial weather events, like a hurricane, space weather has the potential to impact not only the United States, but wider geographic regions. These complex events can have significant economic consequences and have the potential to negatively affect numerous sectors, including communications, satellite and airline operations, manned space flights, navigation and surveying systems, as well as the electric power grid.
Aaaand in case you haven’t had enough about auroras in particular and space weather in general, NOAA has a fun dashboard for you!
Brain is not really braining today, and the book I read at lunch actually dragged me deeper into existential day jobiness, so yeah. Bad book, bad!
Time for something simple, like a game of What Came First? Compare cultural moments in time
Which is older, the Mona Lisa or the Taj Mahal? Van Gogh’s The Harvest or London Bridge? Braille or the Empire State Building? I was surprised by quite a few of these.
You don’t have to sign in, just click through the Play Game button.
Today, one from the archives. Because I love the story at the heart of this piece, and as yet another hurricane threatens large swaths of America, it doesn’t hurt to remember our shared humanity.
Is there a word like interregnum (“between two reigns”) that means “between two storms”?
If there is, I don’t know it, so for now I’m going with “intertempestas.” I’m also hoping that as Hurricane Helene recedes into the past and Milton looms in the future, the good people of Florida stay safe and recovery across the Southeast goes well.
One of the great and terrible things they don’t always tell you about becoming an adult is that after a certain point, there are no more excuses. You may have reasons for behaving badly, but they are no longer sufficient to justify bad behavior. Your life is no longer predominantly a reflection of your family or your school or your past, it is yours. And while you will not always control your circumstances, you are now responsible for your own character in the face of those circumstances.
This is a burden and a gift. We must each decide who want to be, and then do our best to live up to it.
“It’s not the honors and prizes of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It’s the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is good stuff.”
In ancient times the Japanese divided their year into 24 periods based on classical Chinese sources. The natural world comes to life in the even more vividly named 72 subdivisions of the traditional Japanese calendar.
I thought of that fact this morning when I woke to what felt like a sea change in the weather. The overnight temperatures have been dropping, of course, but there is something else.
Along with a new chill in the air, the morning started with fog that wound between houses, draping the neighborhood in a layer of mystery. The cries of geese echoed down from above as they arrowed south.
I found a pickup tag in the mailbox. What could this be, I wondered, I hadn’t ordered anything. After a day or so of speculation it was off to the post office. I was given a cute little box covered in international signage (expected, I am in Canada), from Germany (unexpected, I have ordered nothing from Germany!). What could it be?
I put the box in the center of the kitchen table so that I could walk past it all day, wondering what was inside. Finally, I broke down and opened the package.
A puzzle box. You may remember that I wrote a recent post about puzzle boxes. A friend did, and she sent me this.
How incredibly, unbelievably, extremely cool.
I wouldn’t have guessed that in a million years, and yet it is absolutely perfect.
J.R. Johnson 
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