Filed under: Art, Astronomy, Heinlein, Jefferson Starship, Music, Robert A. Heinlein
Lovely:
Simply lovely.
Jim Downey
*And yes, that would have made a great soundtrack for the vid.
I’ve mentioned previously my Paint the Moon conceptual art project, and how it got started. Recently I noted to a friend that sometime in May was the 10th anniversary of the initial idea for the whole thing. His reaction was that I should do it again, or at least hold a ‘virtual party’ to celebrate the whole thing.
I demurred, for a couple of reasons. One, I have a lot of other irons in the fire currently. Two, part of the charm of the whole thing was the freshness of the idea – trying to recapture that naive moment would likely fall flat. And three, this is a different world we live in these days from the one pre-9/11. On that last point, this news item is relevant:
People who point powerful lasers at planes and helicopters — which can temporarily blind pilots — could face fines as high as $11,000 per violation, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday.
* * *
Pilots have reported over 1,100 such incidents in the U.S. so far this year, and officials said they are concerned that eventually there will be an air crash.
The incidents have increased rapidly around the world over the past six years as online sales of new, powerful handheld lasers have soared. In 2005, there were fewer than 300 such incidents reported in the U.S. Last year, there were 2,836 incidents. In some cases pilots have had to relinquish control of an aircraft to a co-pilot because of vision loss.
Yeah, it’s a different world now – one where an effort to create such a work of art would likely get me branded as some kind of terrorist.
More’s the pity.
Jim Downey
No, not this:
But rather, this:
They’re starting to crawl up your trees now, and in the coming weeks, there are going to be billions — that’s with a “b” — of cicadas across the Midwest, mating and laying eggs on limbs.
And when the choir of 13-year cycle cicadas starts singing its mating song in unison, it might seem a little annoying, Bruce Barrett said. Rather than covering your ears and running for cover, though, Barrett encourages Columbians to sit back and enjoy the show.
“It’s one of those magical moments in nature,” said Barrett, a professor of entomology at the University of Missouri. “If you stop and think about it, this is really neat. Nature is elegant and sophisticatedly beautiful.”
* * * * * * *
It’s still early, but they’re already starting to sing. As I was working in the garden yesterday, you’d hear it start, building from the background buzz. Not the full chorus yet, just some warming up.
It’s interesting – the background buzz is very much like the slight ringing I have from tinnitus. So it is easy to ignore. But when they start to sing in unison, I notice.
* * * * * * *
The dog notices, too. He’s been distracted on our morning walks through the neighborhood. Not so much by the sound, as by the movement. For him, the cicadas are snacks-on-the-wing.
* * * * * * *
He’s not alone:
Just as Bubba Blue told Forrest Gump about shrimp in the classic movie, you can do just about anything with cicadas in the kitchen. You can boil ’em, fry ’em, bake ’em, saute ’em. You can make cicada pie, cicada wontons or cicada soup. Sprinkle some minced cicadas into your cereal. Or break out the blender, and you can quickly create a cicada smoothie or a fresh batch of cicada salsa.
Jenna Jadin of the University of Maryland Cicadamaniacs offers a Cicadalicious recipe for Emergence Cookies. “These should look like cicadas emerging out of a little pile of chunky mud!”
How about cicada-portobella quiche? Or “El Chirper” tacos?
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With apologies to His Majesty:
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for stars thou art, and unto stars shalt thou return.
Pizza, anyone?
Jim Downey
Clever:
From April, 2003 until August, 2006, the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope watched four parts of the sky as often as possible. Armed with the largest digital camera in the known universe, CFHT monitored these four fields for a special type of supernova (called Type Ia) which are created by the thermonuclear detonation of one or more white-dwarf stars. These explosions are extremely energetic, and can be seen across vast distances in space.
The resulting 241 Type 1a supernova which were documented were then assigned a musical note, according to distance, duration, and intensity. A delightful little ‘sonata’ was the result:
It may seem a bit silly to do this, assigning an arbitrary note to such data. But I think it helps non-scientists appreciate some aspect of the research and what it means. No, don’t take the whole thing literally, or even very seriously – but rejoice in this artistic interpretation of the wonder of the universe.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Carl Sagan, Nuclear weapons, Science, Science Fiction, Survival, Violence, YouTube
My wife and I decided to revisit the Cosmos series recently. It holds up surprisingly well for a pop-science program from 30 years ago.
Tonight’s episode was the finale. And I was struck by what it was like back then, to contemplate the possibility of nuclear war. I think a lot of people today who weren’t aware during that time have difficulty in understanding just how palpable that threat was. Here’s a good bit from the episode that explains it better than I could:
Is it any wonder that a post-apocalyptic world was the setting for so much science fiction generated during that time? Any wonder at all?
We may or may not have threaded the needle and survived the time of peak technological vulnerability. Not only are there other threats out there to our long term survival, but even the threat of nuclear war is not passed – not hardly. I still fully expect that there will be another war in which nuclear weapons will be a factor, and such use could easily spin out of control and engulf the entire planet.
But the hair trigger we lived with for some 30 years is no more. Things certainly are not perfect now, but they *are* better. We did indeed decide to survive, at least through that time. And that was an important step.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, NPR, Predictions, Science Fiction, Space, Titan, UFO
Lights in the sky. Strange lights. Lights that don’t move . . . right.
Must be aliens, stopping off for a visit, right?
Highbeams Of The Gods: Do UFOs Need Headlights?
Over at the Two-Way a UFO sighting over Colorado has been generating discussion and heat. In looking over the comments a question has come up which really strikes at the heart of the UFO issue. Someone astutely asked something along the lines of “Why do UFOs need headlights?”
Yeah. Good point. Are the aliens scared of running into a deer?
Exactly.
Pretty much the most crucial plot point in Communion of Dreams is that the alien artifact discovered on Titan is using some kind of stealth technology. (I’m not giving anything away by saying this, for those who haven’t yet read the book.) How and more importantly why this is the case is what drives the story.
I agree with the author of the blog post cited: “…any civilization with technology capable of spanning light-years ought to be able to hide themselves well enough to avoid detection from hairy apes with jet-planes like us.”
Bingo.
And that’s all I’ll say, or I will give away some spoilers for those who haven’t yet read the book. (And why haven’t you?? C’mon – it’s brilliant!)
Jim Downey
3.5 million square miles of desert: a meteorite-hunter’s dream. Here’s an excerpt from this fascinating account:
Dar al Gani
Small in size at 80 x 50 km (50 x 30 mi), Dar al Gani is the most important Saharan strewnfield, with nearly a thousand itemized meteorites, Lunar and Martian rocks, various achondrites, etc. At least 150 different falls are represented. When you approach Dar al Gani from the west, the first thing to strike you is its whiteness, as if you were looking out over mountain-tops covered in snow: a mirage in the desert. First comes a succession of terraces which then open on to a smooth, rolling expanse of white, without rocks or vegetation. Meteorites have been falling here for thousands of years, and it goes without saying that strewnfields like this one are of scientific interest. Unlike Antarctica, where ice shifts concentrate meteorites and wind scatters the fragments, things here stay in the same place from one millennium to the next. I often think of Dar al Gani as a photographic plate recording all falls over a significant time-scale of 20,000 years or more. The terrain is gentle and preserving, so that thousands of years worth of data are at present accessible.
The author and his brother make one of the most important finds ever. Very cool, and with some great pictures.
Jim Downey
Just had to share this image, via Phil Plait:
Link to a huge version of the image, along with a nice explanation about the galaxy, in the Bad Astronomy piece.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, BoingBoing, Fermi's Paradox, Music, NASA, Science, Science Fiction, Space, tech
Lee Billings, a science writer I was not previously aware of, has a really nice little introduction over at BoingBoing on the topic of searching for exoplanets capable of supporting life. Here’s a bit:
I’m admittedly biased (just look at my Twitter feed—it’s clear what my interests are), but my argument rests on facts: The research architectures and observational capabilities required to find Earth-like planets in our region of the galaxy, and determine whether or not some of them harbor life, are already reasonably well-defined. Public interest in (if not knowledge of) the search for alien life is high, and nearly universal. And, in comparison to tasks like finding the Higgs boson, establishing the precise nature of dark energy, or experimentally validating string theory, completing much (though not all!) of this “planetary census” simply isn’t that expensive.
* * *
What if we are cosmically alone, on a planet as anomalously unlikely and fertile as a fruit tree flourishing in an arid wasteland, or a flower blooming in a desert? What if worlds like ours are common as grains of sand? Does the universe hum and throb with life, or does eternal silence and sterility reign outside of our small planet? The truth is, no one really knows. But that will soon change. And when it does, this knowledge can only fill our lives, our world, and our future with more excitement, mystery, and awe.
Interesting metaphor – the flower blooming in a desert. And exactly the same one I use in the beginning of Communion of Dreams for exactly the same reason. Obviously, the man is brilliant.
OK, to be a little more serious here, I just thought people might want to know about this fellow, since he is going to be reporting on the results of the Kepler mission over the next couple of weeks.
Jim Downey
*Gratuitous Pink Floyd reference.
Filed under: Apollo program, Arthur C. Clarke, Astronomy, Humor, movies, Neil Armstrong, NPR, Science, Science Fiction, Space, Writing stuff
What topic could possibly warrant being the subject of post #1,000?
None.
I have no big announcements to share, no news, not even a scrap of intelligent musing on something obscure. Things are pretty much just what passes for routine here currently: getting conservation work done, waiting to hear from the publishers/agents, going through the day-to-day of life.
So, I’ll just break the tension (well, *I’ve* been feeling tension over it) and share this amusing item:
Neil Armstrong Talks About The First Moon Walk
Well, this doesn’t happen every day.
In yesterday’s post, I talked about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s walk across the lunar surface back in 1969 and wondered, how come they walked such a modest distance? Less than a hundred yards from their lander?
Today Neil Armstrong wrote in to say, here are the reasons:
He also posts the entirety of Armstrong’s email. It’s not often that you get to read history from one of the men who actually made it – it’s worth a look.
So, on to 1,001: A Blog Odyssey.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 