Month: August 2017

Enlarge / In this Maurice Leloir painting, The Sun King—King Louis XIV—and the ladies of the Court on the terrace of the Marly Castle, watch a Solar Eclipse. (credit: Christophel Fine Art/UIG via Getty Images)

The first solar eclipse to span the entire United States has lots of people justifiably excited. The midday disappearance of the Sun is a truly novel and moving experience. For many people, it's spiritual. Here's how the exceptional American author and essayist Annie Dillard described seeing an eclipse in 1979 in the Northwestern United States.

At once this disk of sky slid over the Sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the Sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world.

Ancient people didn't quite know what to make of eclipses, as they didn't fully understand the geometry of the Solar System, nor that Earth and its Moon orbited around the Sun in tandem and that sometimes the Moon passed between the Earth and Sun. Often, they believed, mythical creatures ate or captured the Sun.

So perhaps it should comes as no surprise that, in the modern era, humans would their own myths about the eclipse. And because the forthcoming eclipse will cross the most prosperous country in the world, hucksters selling these myths are coming out now to peddle their ideas. Amazingly—well, perhaps not so amazingly considering our willingness to ignore reality—some people actually believe them.

Enlarge / Catherine Bracy will be our guest at Ars Technica Live on 8/16, discussing how the tech industry can address issues of inequality in the Bay Area. (credit: Catherine Bracy)

Anyone who has been in the Bay Area in recent years knows that the tech industry plays an outsized role in our daily lives. We feel it in things like our rent and the price of our drinks—regardless of whether we work in the industry or not. That's why Catherine Bracy has created a new Oakland-based organization, the TechEquity Collaborative, which organizes the tech community to advocate for policy changes that will ensure the region's tech-driven economy works for everyone.

Join Ars Technica editors Annalee Newitz and Cyrus Farivar tonight, 8/16, in conversation with Bracy at Ars Technica Live, at Eli's Mile High Club in Oakland.

Bracy will discuss the work TechEquity is doing to enlist the tech industry to fix the region's inequality crisis, as well as her experiences at Code for America and Obama for America. There will be plenty of time for audience questions, too. Doors are at 7 PM and the event starts at 7:30. Tickets are free, but please do RSVP with Eventbrite so you're guaranteed a spot.