Brownstone Retreat

The time is rapidly approaching for the upcoming Brownstown Retreat.  I gather there are still some open slots and I hope you'll consider attending.  Our host will be Joel Salatin at his Polyface Farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.  In preparation of the Retreat, Mrs. Ryan and I have been reading Joel's 2017 book, The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs.  In this book, Joel describes his Christian faith and how that applies to his views on health, the food industry, industrial farming and his own pioneering methods of regenerative farming.  It's been an eye-opener, Joel's descriptions of the revolting methods of corporate food and all the regulatory hurdles he has faced to establish and grow his farming business.  

Joel also describes his Biblical creation philosphy of farming, how his farm lets cows be cows, and pigs be pigs and chickens be chickens, allowing these animals to live lives according to their natures given them by their Creator, grazing and poking around outside rather than being imprisoned for life in cages indoors.  He also describes the blowback he's received from Christians, ridiculed as a "commie pinko" for pursuing such innovative methods.  

This book is a phenomenal read, I encourage you all to check it out.  And please, order the genuine paperback physical copy and not the fake ebook version.  And order from the above link to Barnes & Noble or some other genuine bookseller and not the "A word," that fake online ecommerce entity currently destroying American retail.  

Health Corner

In response to the positive reception of the previous newsletters, I'm adding this section to share about some of the things I've learned that have improved my health.  After six decades of stuffing my face with whatever comes out of a package off a shelf at the supermarket, I've lately taken to reading the ingredient labels and googling the items listed.  Yikes!  It's literally terrifying, what Americans like me stick in our faces.  These ingredients are GRAS -- "generally regarded as safe" -- which I've come to find out really means "not yet generally known to be toxic."     

Take cottonseed oil, for example.  I've always loved stuffing potato chips into my face and considered them a proper side dish to fave meals like burgers and hot dogs.  After all, potato is a vegetable, right?   According to the label, chips are fried in "one more oils" which "may or may not" include cottonseed oil.  Turns out this product had been used as an industrial lubricant.  It's an ugly, grey, slimy-looking sludge, like what you'd use to lube up your car.  My theory is that it was not as cheap as other industrial lubricants which is how they came to be "generally regarded as safe" for frying potato chips instead of just thrown away outright.

Cotton seeds are a leftover byproduct of the textile industry.  The companies end up with piles of these seeds so that people like me can wear 100% cotton t-shirts.  The oil of the cotton seed is poisonous, a God-given protection of the cotton plant against boll weevils.  The cotton seeds are compressed at a high pressure to squeeze out the oil, which is then processed at a high temperature to cook out all the toxins so that you can fry potato chips in it.  That way you die in 30 years from eating the chips instead of right away from the toxic version.

The more I learn about our food, the more horror stories I discover.  For years and years I laughed at Mrs. Ryan for being a "health nut" but lately she's heard from me those three special words that every wife loves to hear... "you were right."  Thank the LORD I learned the lesson early enough, unlike my father who had a quintuple bypass when he was younger than I am now.

In 2025 I've been steadily plugging along with Measuring the Heavens, the sequel to our Signs & Seasons curriculum.  This has been a boatload of work, way more than anticipated.  But it's helped clarify the focus of Classical Astronomy as being most important for natural timekeeping and navigation, as had been done down through all pre-industrial history, especially by the almanack makers of Colonial America.  

There are many reasons our homescholars and others should learn Classical Astronomy today, including the awe and beauty and wonder of the sky and the incredible mathematical order above our heads every day of our lives.  But nowadays we have fake, artificial gadgets for telling time and navigating, so we don't have an immediate need for Classical Astronomy anymore.  This is one reason why this subject is not taught today in school.  

But today's fake gadgets are perhaps the best reason why people should learn Classical Astronomy today, in preparation of a post-industrial future.  Our hi-tech culture today is very fragile.  If it should fail, how will people tell time, for farmers to know the times of planting and harvest?  This knowledge passed away with the almanack tradition.  So my proposed solution is that we revive the almanack tradition now, before this knowledge is required.  And that will be the focus of Measuring The Heavens.  

There is some really great content, friends!  The LORD illuminated my mind to create a master math equation that can be used to derive different sorts of almanack information, including the times of sunrise and sunset and their positions on the horizon, for any location.  I'll be excited to share exerpts when they are ready.  In the meantime, I plan to devote more newsletters to natural timekeeping and navigation topics like this one.  But as with all newsletter topics, the main idea is to open your eyes and notice all the interesting things going on in the sky that are generally overlooked today.    

Up and Down the Seasonal Hill

Here's what to notice in this article: starting now in late July, the days will rapidly grow shorter after being fairly constantlt long for the last two months. Here in Cleveland, the sunset time has been just after 9:00 PM for over a month, varying only by a couple minutes.  But the sunset today is now 5 minutes earlier than just last week.  By the end of July, in only a week and a half, the sunset will be 10 minutes earlier than today.  And sunset will arrive 45 minutes earlier than that by the end of August, diminishing even more quickly over September and October.  Follow the above link and find the sunset time in your area and see how your own local daylight shrink over the coming months.  

So why the rapid change now?  Well, let me tell you a story....

We all know the days are longer in the summer and shorter in the winter.  This is one of the commonplace facts of life.  But most Americans cannot give a cogent explanation to account for this fact, including some with advanced degrees in science.  Many incorrectly surmise that the summer days are longer because the Earth is closer to the Sun, and shorter in the winter because the Earth is further away, even though the opposite is actually true.  The subject is simply not included in today's educational curriculum.  And such facts that are taught in the schools rely on incomplete, inadequate explanations that do not correlate well with everyday experience.  It was for this reason that I created our Signs & Seasons curriculum, to help the reader visualize what's going on in the sky and how the celestial phenomena can be observed at ground level.  

One concept that creates hurdles in our culture is the heliocentric cosmology, that the Earth orbits around the Sun.  The modern science and educational establishment insists that students accept heliocentrism as an article of faith, not to be questioned, though proofs are not included in the coursework of most high school or college graduates.  This accounts for the recent popularity of flat earth-ism since people are not taught facts.  But without delving in, let me just say that the modern model of classical physics developed by Isaac Newton is grounded in heliocentrism, and today's physics works.  We all enjoy the technology based on Newtonian physics, and there are no credible scientific arguments against physics or its heliocentric foundation.

That being said, there's not much to see with heliocentrism.  The sky looks the same whether one holds to heliocentrism or Earth-centered geocentric cosmology.  Heliocentrism and geocentrism are "observationally equivalent," at least at the level of looking up at the sky from your backyard.   But every textbook and pop astronomy resource only shows the standard heliocentric perspective of the solar system, where the Earth is tilted on its axis as referenced to the plane of the solar system, such as this view from our Signs & Seasons curriculum. 

This perspective does not help you understand the view of the sky from your backyard.  But note that the image shows that the Earth's axis is pointed at Polaris, the North Star, which is off center from the ecliptic, the plane of the solar system.   Our backyard perspective is geocentric, centered on Polaris, where the entire sky appears to rotate every day around the North Star.  So from the geocentric perspective, referenced to the Earth's axis, it is the ecliptic, the plane of the solar system, that appears tilted, as shown in the image below also from Signs & Seasons. 

From the geocentric perspective, we are looking "upwards" along the plane of the solar system when we look toward the point of the summer solstice in the constellation Gemini.  And conversely, we are looking "downwards" along the solar system when we gaze toward the point of the winter solstice in the constellation Sagittarius.  As seen from our Earth-bound geocentric perspective here on the ground, the Sun appears to follow an inclined path along the ecliptic, alternately rising northward and falling southward in the annual cycle of the seasons.  

The northerly Sun is above the horizon for longer than 12 hours in the spring and summer while the southerly Sun is above the horizon for less than 12 hours in the fall and winter, hence the seasonally variable length of daylight.  Here in Cleveland, near latitude 40 degrees north, the Sun is above the horizon for over 15 hours while in winter the Sun is only up for 9 hours.  The daylight extremes are greater at more northerly latitudes, such as Alaska, and less extreme at southerly latitudes, toward the tropics.

If you're not really paying close attention, you might have the impression that that the days grow progressively longer in even steps day by day leading up to the summer solstice, the first day of summer, and then similarly drop off day by day afterwards.  But that's not the case.  The seasons undulate like a wave, as shown in the image below.  The northerly progression is rapid at the time of the vernal equinox around March 21, but then levels off with the approach to the summer solstice.  If you ever took a trig class, you can see from this image that the seasons literally follow a wave -- a sine wave -- a continuous periodic function, similar to other types of waves, including water waves, electrical waves, light waves and sound waves.

The wave form is very similar to an upward slope of a hill, which flattens out as you approach the top, and then slopes more steeply downhill on the other side, only to flatten out again in the valley below.  In this way, we can picture the seasonal variation of daylight as the ascent and descent up and down a hill, with the duration of daylight changing rapidly near the equinoxes, the steepest parts of the hill, and changing slowly while approaching the hill top and the valley bottom. 

In the picture below, note that the Sun is along the celestial equator on March 21, the vernal equinox.  In the equatorial system of celestial coordinates, this is a declination of zero degrees, just like the terrestrial equator is zero degrees latitude.  So when the Sun is on the equator, the length of daytime is equally 12 hours with 12 hours of nighttime, hence the name.

The ecliptic is the red curve in the images, representing the Sun's apparent seasonal path through the constellations.  Note that the slope of the ecliptic is steep from March 21 through April 21.  The Sun is at a declination of about 12 degrees on April 21.  So the Sun quickly advances 12 degrees to the north in just a single month.  In Cleveland, the length of daylight jumps from 12 hours to over 13-1/2 hours in this one month period.

From April 21 to May 21, the Sun only increases another 8 degrees in declination, from 12 degrees to about 20 degrees.  The length of daylight in late May in Cleveland is almost 14-3/4 hours, an increase in additional daylight of a bit more than an hour.  So after increasing dramatically through the month of April, the rate of increasing daylight slows during May.

As seen in the image below, the Sun's declination increases by only a tiny amount in late May into June, from 20 degrees on May 21 to 23-/12 degrees on the summer solstice, June 21.   The length of daylight in Cleveland increases by less than a half hour in that month, maxing out at a few minutes over 15 hours on the longest day.  But there's very little change to notice since this is only 10 or 15 minutes added to both the morning and the afternoon.  The Sun is near the top of the seasonal "hill" starting in late May as the rate of changing daylight levels off. 

As you can see in the pic, the Sun stays near the seasonal hilltop through June and into July, so the long days of summer persist much longer than just the single day of the solstice.  In fact, the period of long daylight lasts for the whole two months from late May through late July.  But all good things gotta come to an end and we are now approaching the end of this extended period of long summer daylight.

Starting right about now, the Sun will begin its descent toward the southerly declinations throughout the month of August.  The seasonal roller coaster ride is now sloping downward and we will soon notice the rapid shortening of daylight, with progressively earlier sunsets and later sunrises as the Sun careen down the ecliptic through September and into fall.  The rapid rate of decreasing daylight will continue through October and into November.