In the Event of a Water Landing

Technically, it would be a methane landing, because that substance is liquid at the temperatures on Saturn's moon Titan.

But the calmness of those lakes means that probes that might eventually be sent to Titan would have a whole other range of options about their touchdown. On the other hand, any errors in landing could lead to the strange phenomenon of a spaceship reaching its destination only to flounder because of some mistake, design flaw or unforeseen accident. It's not every day you'd lose a satellite to Davy Jones.

Not Getting It

The key factor of this story is not how Home Depot is reconsidering their dismissal of an employee who followed a kidnapper to keep an eye on his location for police.

It's not how the guy got let go because this was his second writeup in a month, meaning it was not just this particular violation of safety policy that got him canned.

Nor is it how companies create policies that mandate employees not try to thwart crimes -- which makes sense if the crime is someone in the store with a gun but not so much when they shadow the criminal from a distance at the suggestion of the police dispatcher.

No, the key factor is that someone to whom Home Depot pays money was dumb enough to fire a guy who helped stop a child abduction. Policy, shmolicy -- if I'm a manager, I'm letting this one slide because even Bashir Assad recognizes what a bad move it is, PR-wise, to fire a guy who helped stop a child abduction. Perhaps the wrong employee's status is being reviewed.

Hot Dogs and Apple Pie Included

For the last nine years, the Iowa Cubs AAA baseball team has hosted a special naturalization ceremony on July 4. This year 30 people from 19 different countries became citizens at Principal Park in Des Moines. It's hard to get more American than that.

There's Gonna Be Fireworks

Thanks to writer Lynn Ahrens and singer Grady Tate, we can celebrate our national holiday with some style. Magna Carta's cool and all, but it doesn't swing like this:

 

Location Location Location

In a few billion years, there will be no doubt about the reality of climate change or the culprit thereof: The sun will have started expanding and heating up. Sometime between 1,000,002,017 and 2,000,002,017, the Earth's mean surface temperature will be hot enough to boil water, because the sun's energy output will have increased over that time.

This is before the sun expands in a planetary nebula and pretty much cooks the planet to a cinder.

Ethan Siegel, writing at Forbes' "Starts With a Bang" science blog, considers a reader question about a way to deal with the problem. Could we move the planet out of the neighborhood, to the point where all of our water wouldn't turn into Bernie Sanders/Donald Trump exhalations and leave us with the frightening possibility that Chris Christie could decide our baked lawn was his new favorite sunning spot?

Shuffling off to a new orbit would have the advantage of requiring little maintenance, Siegel points out. Once we've moved, we've moved. Space- or atmosphere-based solutions that would reflect more of the sun's energy and keep us cooler would need to be kept up, and one failure could be catastrophic. Terraforming Mars would also require a lot of care and attention, since the same things that caused the Red Planet to lose its atmosphere and water a few billion years ago are still present. Mars is too small to hold a thick atmosphere without help.

On the other hand, as Siegel describes the engineering involved, moving something as big as a planet might be physically possible but practically impossible. Moving the Earth might cause more damage than the project was trying to prevent.

Of course, the likelihood is than in a billion years or so whatever critters we've turned into have probably become smart enough to be ready to bail off this rock when it gets unlivable. That us, unless evolutionary processes have failed to rid us of non-survival characteristics like the appendix and Congress. If we still have those we're doomed.

What a Glorious Time to be Free

An overlooked item of July First-ness: Sixty years ago, scientists from 67 countries began an 18-month cooperative venture called the International Geophysical Year. The idea was to share data and team up for experiments by allowing scientists from other countries to bring their expertise to other nations' observational sites.

I mostly remember it as the source for much of the data I read in the children's science book "All About" series. In his first solo album in 1982, former Steely Dan songwriter, pianist and singer recorded a semi-wistful remembering of what the future was supposed to look like during the years of his childhood. He titled the song "I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World)." It is perhaps the only Billboard Hot 100-charting song written about scientific research, and the post title is taken from a line in the refrain. Both the idea and the song remain pretty cool today, sixty and thirty-five years later, respectively.

July 1

-- Today in 1963, the United States Post Office began using ZIP codes. The ZIP initially stood for "Zone Improvement Plan," because the new five-digit codes were supposed to make mail easier to deliver than the older city-only Postal Codes. ZIP codes were made mandatory a few years later, and the ZIP+4 began to be used in 1983.

-- Today in 1867, Canada was created when the British Parliament enacted the British North American Act (later called the Constitution Act). It united three separate colonies into a Dominion, which gave them the status of a separate nation within the British Empire. Good day, eh?

-- Although it will technically begin on Monday, July 1 is usually marks the start of the fiscal year for most state and federal government entities. So if you live in Illinois, you're about to watch your state government become a worse investment than those offered by the famed Nigerian barrister e-mails. Rumors that Abraham Lincoln's spirit was seen wandering the halls of the Illinois capitol saying, "I'm from Kentucky, dammit!" are as yet unconfirmed.