A few Fridays ago, I went to a presentation about solar eclipses, given by a lady who works at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. She talked about the history of eclipses, and about the total solar eclipse later this summer. She had several really good tips for people going to see it, some of which I hadn't considered. Things like:
- Expect hurricane evacuation level traffic
- Bring toilet paper (and food and water and medicine)
- Don't expect the internet to work
Those three things really drove home how crazy it might get in the path of totality, and made me very glad I went to the presentation. Forewarned is forearmed!
When talking about the history of eclipses, she mentioned how Edmund Halley (of Halley's Comet fame) started one of the earliest "citizen science" programs that we know of. Prior to a total solar eclipse in 1715, which passed over England, he asked the public to record the exact time totality began and ended, and send him the results. He used the data to better calculate the moon's exact position, which made future eclipse predictions much more accurate. Cool stuff.
That was on a Friday night. The next morning I took Wendy's car in for an oil change, and for what turned out to be fairly expensive repairs. To pass the time, I brought along a gigantic book on data analysis that I've (very) slowly been working my way through the past few months. I got to a chapter on survival analysis, which I learned predates statistics by nearly 2 centuries. The topic originated in a paper published by the Royal Society of London in 1693. It was written by, of all people, Edmund Halley! And it had a most excellent title:
An Estimate of the Degrees of the Mortality of Mankind, drawn from curious Tables of the Births and Funerals at the City of Breslaw, with an Attempt to ascertain the Price of Annuities upon Lives
If you're interested, the paper is available online.
The only reason I knew Edmund Halley's name in the first place is because of Halley's Comet. And yet, in the span of just over 12 hours, I encountered 2 references to him that had nothing to do with the comet!