Moghetak

16/05/2022

Earth Day

Many countries around the world celebrate Earth Day. It is a day that is meant to raise awareness and appreciation about the Earth’s natural environment.

The first Earth Day was held in the USA. It was founded by United States Senator Ga***rd Nelson as an environmental teach-in – a sort of general educational forum or seminar. That was on April 22, 1970. While this first Earth Day was focused on the United States, an organization launched by Denis Hayes, who was the original national coordinator in 1970, took it international in 1990 and organized events in 141 nations.

Earth Day is now coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network, and is celebrated in more than 175 countries every year. Numerous communities celebrate Earth Week, an entire week of activities focused on environmental issues. In 2009, the United Nations designated April 22 International Mother Earth Day.

14/05/2022

Climate change and global warming

Climate change

Wikipedia defines climate as follows:

Climate encompasses the statistics of temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, rainfall, atmospheric particle count and other meteorological elements in a given region over a long period of time. Climate can be contrasted to weather, which is the present condition of these same elements and their variations over shorter time periods.

Climate may be inherently variable as evidenced by the irregularity of the seasons from one year to another. This variability is normal and may remain partially understood. It is related to changes in ocean currents, volcanic eruptions, solar radiation and other components of the climate system. In addition, our climate also has its extremes (such as floods, droughts, hail, tornadoes and hurricanes), which can be devastating. However, in recent decades, a number of indicators and studies show more and more evidence of climate warming across the globe. A disturbing phenomenon that challenges human habits and activities which are responsible for greenhouse gas emissions.

The green house effect

The greenhouse effect is the process by which absorption and emission of infrared radiation by gases in the atmosphere warm a planet’s lower atmosphere and surface. It was proposed by Joseph Fourier in 1824 and was first investigated quantitatively by Svante Arrhenius in 1896.

Naturally occurring greenhouse gases have a mean warming effect of about 33 °C (59 °F). But Human activity since the Industrial Revolution has increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, leading to increased radiative forcing from CO2, methane, tropospheric ozone, CFCs (chlorofluorocarbon) and nitrous oxide. The concentrations of CO2 and methane have increased by 36% and 148% respectively since 1750. These levels are much higher than at any time during the last 650,000 years, the period for which reliable data has been extracted from ice cores. Over the last three decades of the 20th century, GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita and population growth were the main drivers of increases in greenhouse gas emissions. CO2 emissions are continuing to rise due to the burning of fossil fuels and land-use change.

Consequences of global warming

There are two major effects of global warming: the increase of temperature on the Earth by about 3° to 5° C (5.4° to 9° Fahrenheit) by the year 2100 and rise of sea levels by at least 25 meters (82 feet) by the year 2100. Other consequences are listed below:

Sea levels are rising due to thermal expansion of the ocean, in addition to melting of land ice.
Amounts and patterns of precipitation are changing.
The total annual power of hurricanes has already increased markedly since 1975 because their average intensity and average duration have increased.
Changes in temperature and precipitation patterns increase the frequency, duration, and intensity of other extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts, heat waves, and tornadoes.
Higher or lower agricultural yields, further glacial retreat, reduced summer stream flows, species extinctions.
Diseases like malaria are returning into areas where they have been extinguished earlier.

13/05/2022

Dolphins’ Social Behavior

Dolphins are often regarded as one of Earth’s most intelligent animals. They are social creatures, living in pods of up to a dozen individuals. In places with a high abundance of food, pods can merge temporarily, forming a superpod; such groupings may exceed 1,000 dolphins. They communicate using a variety of clicks, whistle-like sounds and other vocalizations.

Membership in pods is not rigid; interchange is common. Dolphins can, however, establish strong social bonds; they will stay with injured or ill individuals, even helping them to breathe by bringing them to the surface if needed. This altruism does not appear to be limited to their own species. The dolphin Moko in New Zealand has been observed guiding a female Pygmy S***m Whale together with her calf out of shallow water where they had stranded several times. They have also been seen protecting swimmers from sharks by swimming circles around the swimmers or charging the sharks to make them go away.

Dolphins also display culture, something long believed to be unique to humans. In May 2005, a discovery in Australia found Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins teaching their young to use tools. They cover their snouts with sponges to protect them while foraging (looking or searching for food or provisions.) Using sponges as mouth protection as well as other transmitted behavior proves dolphins’ intelligence. This knowledge is mostly transferred by mothers to daughters.

13/05/2022

24/04/2022

24/04/2022

24/04/2022

24/04/2022

Who Wrote "Happy Birthday to You" (and Who's Collecting the Millions in Royalties)?

The birthday staple “Happy Birthday to You” originated as another song, "Good Morning to All,” written and composed by sisters Patty and Mildred Hill in 1893.
Patty was an early childhood educator who worked as a kindergarten teacher and principal in Kentucky. Her older sister, Mildred, was an accomplished pianist.
Patty often complained that the songs available for her students to sing in class were either too musically difficult for children or too mismatched in their musical style, lyrical content, and emotional tone. So, in 1889, she and Mildred started to collaborate on a number of songs for children, specifically ones tailored to the limited musical abilities of Patty’s young students.
One of their first efforts was called "Good Morning to All”. Patty’s students instantly took to the song and sang it every morning. In 1893, the Hill sisters published it, and the rest of their songs, in the book Song Stories for the Kindergarten.
It’s not clear how the lyrics changed from “good morning” to “happy birthday." The new version was published in songbooks, played on the radio, featured in the new “talkie” movies.
In almost every one of these instances, the use of the music was uncredited and uncompensated. This went on for decades, with the Hill sisters none the wiser, until another of their sisters, Jessica, recognized the GMTA melody in a 1934 production of Irving Berlin's As Thousands Cheer. Patty and Jessica (Mildred had since passed away) filed a lawsuit alleging infringement of GMTA, but the case was eventually dismissed.
That same year, Jessica and Patty granted permission to the Clayton F. Summy Co., a Chicago-based music publisher, to use the GMTA melody.
In 1988, the Summy Company was bought, along with its 50,000 songs, by Warner/Chappell Music, Inc. for a reported $25 million. Since then, the ownership of HBTY has changed pretty regularly.
All of HBTY’s various owners have kept a tight grip on the song, insisting that any use of the melody and/or lyrics in public or for profit must result in a royalty check for them. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the song generated $15,000 to $20,000 per year. Through the 1960s, it made closer to $50,000 annually, and over $75,000 during the 1970s. By the 1990s, the song was generating well over $1 million per year. In the last few years, WMG (= Warner Music Group) has pulled in over $2 million a year in royalties. It will continue to do so until the year 2030.
The original copyright was supposed to have expired long ago, but copyright extension legislation passed in the 1970s and the 1990s extended the copyright by almost a century, giving the song a whopping 137 years of protection after the melody was first written.
Neither Patty nor Mildred ever married or had children, so they established the Hill Foundation to receive income from royalties for the song. Under Time Warner ownership, two thirds of the revenue went to the company and the remaining third went to the foundation, which then passed it to the Hill sisters’ nephew, Archibald Hill. Archibald was a linguistics professor. When he died in 1992, control of the foundation was given to the nonprofit Association for Childhood Education International, which spent years fighting in court to get its share of the royalties.
In the last few years, some legal minds have questioned the validity of the HBTY copyright. They say the Hill sisters’ melody, which is a work subject to its own copyright, bears a strong resemblance to several works that came before it, including some traditional folk songs.
The words “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear (celebrant name), happy birthday to you” is another work subject to its own copyright, and its author is unknown. In her testimony in the suit against the Broadway show, Patty never claimed that she or her sister wrote the “happy birthday” lyrics or combined them with the tune of GMTA.
The combination of the music and lyrics as HBTY is a derivative work and, again, subject to its own copyright. Anyone claiming rights to the song can only make that claim if they can trace the work back to the author. No one can trace the song back any further than the Hills, who admittedly didn’t write the “Happy Birthday” lyrics, and who might have even copped the melody from another song.