May vote for one or more

First word of that title is grossly ambiguous!

The Young Moon emerges into the evening sky as if peering jealously about at a bevy of her rivals in brightness

– as shown in this scene from one of the six May pages in Astronomical Calendar 2024.

The light the Moon is sending to us at this time, expressed in the astronomical magnitude scale as -4, adds up to more than these stars put together. Yet, spread along the slender crescent, it makes for a lower surface brightness than the point sources of the stars.

So which do you notice first as our own Sun’s light drains from the sky: Capella (magnitude 0.1), Procyon (0.4), Betelgeuse (0.5 and, being variable, sometimes brighter), or the wispy Moon?

Or is it possible with a sudden opening of eyes to become simultaneously aware of all seven of these candidates for attention? A use of peripheral vision; it might be called a “wide noticing” trick.

Approval Voting

– which might be called our home planet’s best electoral magnitude system.

At every election of the countries of which I’m a citizen, US and UK, I acutely experience the need for it, and I’ve just experienced it again.

In this May election, there were three ballot sheets, on pink, yellow, and orange paper, listing 13 candidates for mayor of London, 6 for assembly member for South West London, and 15 for London Assembly Member. And on each: vote for “only one candidate.”

I should have had the right to vote, if I so approved, for Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green, Rejoin EU, and the Animal Welfare Party (“People, Animals, Environment”).

A single vote for any one of the options I approved other than the one with the greatest chance of winning increased the chance that one I did not approve would win.

And Animal Welfare won’t know of those who approve it, and won’t grow.

__________

This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.