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Tacbat

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Where is the True North Pole?

The United States Naval Observatory produces a document titled "Bulletin A" which gives daily information about the "wobble" of the Earth and the exact position of the Geographic North Pole. Today, Jul. 17 2013, the actual pole is offset by 0.1629 arcseconds on the "x" axis, and 0.3762 arcseconds on the "y" axis.

Did you also know that the rate of rotation of the Earth, and therefore time, is slowing down? Due to tidal, gravitational and other forces, time has slowed by a full twenty-five seconds since the introduction of TAI in 1972.

Luckily, for us, the USNO keeps track of this stuff and adjusts UTC accordingly.

[/super-geekyness] :biggrin:

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I believe I also heard that it sped back up again a second or so after some event like a volcanic eruption, probably Krakatoa, etc. and one of the hydrogen bomb explosions.

Tidal functions caused on the earth's oceans are helping to slow down the rotation of the earth. From what I've heard that the moon may eventually come to a point where it will be essentially stationary over one point on the earth's surface and it's orbit will stop increasing in about 15 billion years. But, that might not occur before our sun turns into a red giant and consumes the planet and the moon.

One theory about the moon is that it is the remainder of debris that coalesced into the present moon after two planets, one slightly smaller than the other, collided helping to form the present earth some 13-14 billion years ago.

The moon used to be very much closer to the earth than it's present day orbit somewhere in the vicinity of 19-30 thousand kilometers. It is currently 384,000 km away from the earth.

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Did you also know that the rate of rotation of the Earth, and therefore time, is slowing down?

Bollox. Anyone over 50 - i.e those with a bit of experience of life - will tell you that time is constantly speeding up and the rate of increase is also increasing. :sad2:

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MMD = MikuMikuDance

MMD is freeware. It was created to give motion to characters created for the Yamaha computer singing program. Miku Hatsune is the first and most famous character. She appeared in the 2010 Google Chrome "Tell Your World" Super Bowl tv ad.

I've tinkered with it since 2008, but haven't had the time to learn it properly. There are literally hundreds of thousands of MMD created videos out there on YouTube, Veoh, NicoNicoDouga (Japan), etc.

Here's one of the more recent ones I like. The character was rendered with extra shader files to achieve the 3D appearance.

Some creative people have made tanks, planes, ships using 3D rendering software and imported them into MMD to make short videos.

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