Is this mad?

[Ginger Yellow]

Is this mad?

I was at a dinner party with my parents many years back which Malcolm Gluck was also a guest at. After a while he started expounding the glories of biodynamics. It was really hard to suppress the urge to rant about evidence, but it's not like I knew anything about wine myself.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Is this mad?

You know me, Hobbes, I'm all about the full-on glare and superficial effect; no time for subtle details.

[Wyatt Earp]

Is this mad?

Ginger Yellow wrote: I was at a dinner party with my parents many years back which Malcolm Gluck was also a guest at. After a while he started expounding the glories of biodynamics.

Jesus, what a twat.

[WOM]

Is this mad?

Wyatt Earp wrote: ... for reasons it would be otiose to rehearse.

What the fu....

[MsD]

Is this mad?

Sam Kelly wrote: As for the animals thing... stop keeping them locked up every other night of the month. I'm not surprised the poor things go nuts when they're let out for the evening.

My cat is allowed out to come and go. I just prefer him to come in around 4 am so I can settle, and as he's got older and mostly retired from hunting he's easier to entice in. But on full moon nights he definitely has somewhere to be.

[MsD]

Is this mad?

Lucia Lanigan wrote: They're fucking cool, though, full moons, and that's the main thing.

They are very beautiful. Especially over the sea, but anywhere.

[alyxandr]

Is this mad?

Whatever time biodynamic wineries are spending burying manure in cow horns at midnight is time they're not spending spraying poison, or supporting "The" Arsenal, or [REDACTED]. So just STFU and enjoy the goddamn wine already. Or don't, more for me, no worries.

[Wyatt Earp]

Is this mad?

You can enjoy wine and not talk out your arse.

[ian.64]

Is this mad?

I had a bad wine once. It wasn't words that came out my arse.

I must admit though, when at full glow, unencumbered by cloud cover, the moon is a compelling sight. There's an unlit path that connects the estate I live in with another, and has only the one lamp at the end to illuminate it, and if I need to get anything from the shop in the evening in the other estate I take it. Dark as fuck. On full moon nights, though, it's as if a television production unit has supervised the lighting for a night scene. Everything is illuminated.

Not sure about the moon's glow having a beneficial effect on the hard-of-sleeping, although, if that's the case, if Neil Armstrong was an insomniac he'd have had twice the cause to celebrate when landing on the moon. 'One small step for man...one giant leap for mankind...IN YOUR FACE, OVALTINE!'

[hobbes]

Is this mad?

You should try it through a small (or indeed large) telescope.

[ian.64]

Is this mad?

I did not too long ago, and a rewarding sight it was, too. Froze my bollocks off, but worth it.

[hobbes]

Is this mad?

that's what happens if you join a naked astronomy group.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Is this mad?

Wyatt Earp wrote: You can enjoy wine and not talk out your arse.

Speak for yourself.

[Bored Of Education]

Is this mad?

I know that OTF is very good at challenging orthodoxies and questioning everything and very bad at finding people no-one here hates but I sense we are taking it too far. Last week, I was questioned about relief at that schoolgirl not coming to physical harm and now the phrase

They're fucking cool, though, full moons

is questioned

[MsD]

Is this mad?

ian.64 wrote: IOn full moon nights, though, it's as if a television production unit has supervised the lighting for a night scene. Everything is illuminated.

Yes. Some refer to this as "moonlight".

[Wyatt Earp]

Is this mad?

Lucia Lanigan wrote:

You can enjoy wine and not talk out your arse.

Speak for yourself.

Nah, obviously I can't. One can.

[ian.64]

Is this mad?

that's what happens if you join a naked astronomy group.


I want those photographs back.

MsD: Snarky beggar, you know what I mean. The kind of nighttime scene-setting photography in which the characters could read novels in the dark, such is the overdone lighting.

[hobbes]

Is this mad?

Although technically, there's no such thing as moonlight given it's not a light source itself.
Interestingly, because of the angle we see the Moon at (the phase angle) a full moon has an albedo of approximately 0.12 (12% light reflected) but a half Moon reflects less than 10% of the light the full moon does.

[Bored Of Education]

Is this mad?

You're all about sucking the romance out of full moons today, aren't you?

[hobbes]

Is this mad?

I find knowing how it works makes it better, not worse.
For example are blue skies cooler when they're just the colour of a summer sky, or when you know they're the result of Rayleigh Scattering which also explains amongst other things, red skies at night?

[Beatle Simon]

Is this mad?

MsD wrote:

The people in my and my bf's acquaintance (including our stalkers) who suffer from known mental health issues tend to act up. I've said jokingly after getting a phone call or poison pen email "is it a full moon?" and ... yep.

Stalkers, phone and email pests? Does this happen a lot to you, MsD?

[MsD]

Is this mad?

Are you new here? Doesn't as much lately.

PS before I get accused of smearing the mentally ill. I was very specific in talking about our personal experiences with people we either know or who have latched onto us via the Internet. Some of our friends suffer from mh issues, I only have problems with those who are aggressive or a pain in the arse.

I have no idea whether the full moon truly affects them physically or whatever. A couple are a bit "mystical" so maybe stir themselves up around that time. One suffers from all sorts of weird "cyclical" shit.

[Bored Of Education]

Is this mad?

Actually, that's true. I've got mental health issues and I act up in a full moon as well. Sake.

[jason voorhees]

Is this mad?

Is there any evidence linking sleep patterns to the phase of the moon? I know it sounds like the worst kind of new-age nonsensical bollocks, but in our family we seem to sleep terribly when it's a full moon.

Like Rogin said about the curtains, there's a definite link with melatonin being produced when you sleep in the dark, and sleeping in darkness actually helping in fighting cancer.

I sleep horribly when it's a very still night, like one of those nights when it feels like the earth stopped spinning. I imagine it has something to do with pressure systems, and how those pressure systems affect the circulatory/skeletal/nervous systems of animals.

I'm saying I wouldn't be surprised at all if the moon had something to do with shit. If it controls the tides of the oceans, and oceans cover so much of planet Earth, it certainly can have an effect on a blob of blood and muscle.

[Wyatt Earp]

Is this mad?

No, it can't possibly be a tidal effect. Oceans are affected by tides precisely because they're such large-scale things. Tides result from the fact that the gravitational pull of the Moon weakens as you get further away from it, and in particular is significantly weaker on the side of the Earth furthest from the Moon than it is on the side nearest. The effect of this non-uniform field strength on anything small is negligible.

It could be a light thing, but then it ought to work with things like streetlighting as well, and the effect should disappear if you get a good thick set of curtains.

The only other candidate I can see is that in some way our bodies have evolved to respond to the observed phase of the moon, but that seems far-fetched as well, to be honest. A lot of the time my mind is unaware of the phase of the moon, so how does my body get the info? And what's the evolutionary advantage?

I must admit, my money's on this being a false positive.