Today, June 20th, is the longest day of the year, the summer solstice. (Vice versa in the southern hemisphere.) Today, the interval between sunrise and sunset is at its maximum: 15 hours 7 minutes. (Sunrise in Eureka today: 5.45 am, sunset: 8.52 pm.) It’s downhill from here.

In 2020, a penny costs 1.76 cents to make; a nickel costs 7.42 cents. (Can’t we just drop pennies???)

Between the Spanish flu (1918) and Covid (2020), global life expectancy doubled. Currently at birth, females can expect to live to 75.6; males = 70.8.

The State of Jefferson was named as a result of a tongue-in-cheek competition sponsored by a Siskiyou County newspaper in 1941. Jefferson beat out “Discontent” and “Bonanza.”

The density of the air on Mars is about one-hundredth that on Earth, so the blades of the little helicopter Ingenuity have to rotate a lot faster than a chopper back here: about 2400 rpm vs 500 rpm.

Speaking of which, the land surface areas of Earth and Mars are about equal (Mars being 100% dry).

Graphic: NASA.

The full name of the guy for whom our county is named is Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt, 1769-1859. The closest he got to Eureka is 1,195 miles away, Guanajuato City, Mexico. (Where I live part-time.)

Humboldt at age 74. Oil painting by Joseph Karl Stieler (Public domain)

A piano is never pitch-perfect, each note of the 12-note scale having the frequency of the 12th root of 2 times the one below it. So it’s exactly double going from one octave to the next, e.g. A4 (440 beats per second) to A5 (880 beats per second).

The most common password is “123456”, second is “password”. Check if you’re using one of the top 10,000 used by hackers here.

Missed the total lunar eclipse early on May 26? The next one visible here will be on May 15, 2022. (Hah! In theory. The last one wasn’t visible in Eureka, thanks to overcast.)

Total lunar eclipse, as seen from Brindisi, Italy, January 21, 2019. Photo: Giuseppe Donatiello, via Wikimedia. Creative Commons public domain license.

Worldwide, over three million emails are sent every second. (That’s a month’s worth of heartbeats.)

Humanoids have been bipedal for four million years. (Why? So that chiropractors can send their kids to college.)

You see Humboldt’s a potential offshore wind turbine site? A typical offshore wind turbine generates up to about 8 megawatts with today’s technology, with 10-12 MW coming soon. For comparison, the four Klamath dams slated for decommissioning in 2023 together generate 163 MW at full power, about the same as PG&E’s King Salmon station.