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Happy Birthday, Mamasita!

Not a plate guy.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28908079/

Snow Inspired

This is Bjork performing "Aurora" live at the Royal Opera House. I saw this whole cancert a few years back on Ovation, I think. It's really great. I love her creative use of sound effects (for another song, "Hidden Place," a guy shuffles cards next to a microphone)

Goodbye.

hello.

musiconnection

jefferson airplane today surrealistic pillow black sheep similak child a wolf in sheep's clothing


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4D5_QC5GB7I



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvz0tELNH4w

Squirrel Reel

Wednesday Distraction

Claudio's Bad Ass Hair

Signed, Sealed, Delivered!

Curious Clam

Geoducks, pronounced "gooeyducks," are the largest burrowing clams in the world. Native to the Pacific Northwest, they are one of the longest living organisms in the animal kingdom. They have a life expectancy averaging 146 years with the oldest recorded at 160 years old. These clams are found on shore at extremely low tide. Foragers for this animal have to dig very deep and wrestle with the strength of this behemoth bivalve. I couldn't post some of the more up-close photographs of these geoducks, I hate to be so prudish, but their appearance is almost obscene. The protruding appendage is called a neck. I do encourage a browse of these character clams on Google Images. Alas, another curiosity to you...

Entertain them.

Otto Dix (1891-1969)

Here's another artist that doesn't get much press--well, you might think that's a good thing--I couldn't find my favorite painting of his....I wonder why? Again, I like the weirdness--it's pleasing to me.

Odilon Redon (1840-1916)

I like this dude--especially because of the time frame that he was painting these strange subjects. I tend to gravitate towards odd things and this artist manages portray what seems to be some surrealistic dreams. I hope you enjoy this curiosity.

WWWD?

We huffed the sky into our mouths.

We saw the ocean and drank it down

because we were giants or maybe birds,

we slept with lions, tucked into their fur.

The world may seem cruel.

The worldly may hate us.

In time we will show the world why the world made us

(The good we must savor.

The bad we must slough.

Sooner or later the focus gets soft.)

Slip into epiphany.

Oversee oversight.

A good stumble's a symphony.

A good drift takes drive.

Quartz doesn't burn.

Rust doesn't hum.

Maybe we should blame it on the structures of the sun.

Every machine

we've made must bow

to what the wolf and cub have found.

Lyrics from What Would Wolves Do? by: Les Savy Fav

Farewell, Ricardo Montalban.

1920-2009

Basically, Meat.

Salty Ham

Fine Ham Abounds

Happiness Pie

From Brain Candy; one of my favorite movies.

A few of my favorite quotes:

"Red Socks!"
"My Empire is...Crumbling!"
"Head scratch, Chris?"

Electromagnetic Static Hiss: Are Galaxies rubbing against Dark Matter or Dark Energy? What causes this friction?

This article from msnbc has cool info in it about space (ex. radio waves are not sound waves--they are electromagnetic waves--my favorite!). Also, I found elements of humor in this piece too--Enjoy!:

LONG BEACH, Calif. - Space is typically thought of as a very quiet place.
But one team of astronomers has found a strange cosmic noise that booms six times louder than expected.

The roar is from the distant cosmos. Nobody knows what causes it.

Of course, sound waves can't travel in a vacuum (which is what most of space is), or at least they can't very efficiently. But radio waves can.

Radio waves are not sound waves; they are electromagnetic waves, situated on the low-frequency end of the light spectrum. Many objects in the universe, including stars and quasars, emit radio waves. Even our home galaxy, the Milky Way, emits a static hiss (first detected in 1931 by physicist Karl Jansky). Other galaxies send out a background radio hiss as well.

But the newly detected signal, described here at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Wednesday, is far louder than astronomers expected.

There is "something new and interesting going on in the universe," said Alan Kogut of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

A team led by Kogut detected the signal with a balloon-borne instrument named ARCADE (Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics and Diffuse Emission).

In July 2006, the instrument was launched from NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, and reached an altitude of about 120,000 feet (36,500 meters), where the atmosphere thins into the vacuum of space.

ARCADE's mission was to search the sky for faint signs of heat from the first generation of stars, but instead they heard a roar from the distant reaches of the universe.

"The universe really threw us a curve," Kogut said. "Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming noise six times louder than anyone had predicted."

Detailed analysis of the signal ruled out primordial stars or any known radio sources, including gas in the outermost halo of our own galaxy.

Other radio galaxies also can't account for the noise — there just aren't enough of them.

"You'd have to pack them into the universe like sardines," said study team member Dale Fixsen of the University of Maryland. "There wouldn't be any space left between one galaxy and the next."

The signal is measured to be six times brighter than the combined emission of all known radio sources in the universe.

For now, the origin of the signal remains a mystery.

"We really don't know what it is," said team member Michael Seiffert of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Not only has it presented astronomers with a new puzzle, it is obscuring the sought-for signal from the earliest stars. But the cosmic static may itself provide important clues to the development of galaxies when the universe was much younger, less than half its present age. Because the radio waves come from far away, traveling at the speed of light, they therefore represent an earlier time in the universe.

"This is what makes science so exciting," Seiffert said. "You start out on a path to measure something — in this case, the heat from the very first stars — but run into something else entirely, some unexplained."

Celestial Juggler

Humanism Considered

Some relaxing snippits from Wikipedia on Humanism:

The ultimate goal is human flourishing [I like this]; making life better for all humans, and as the most conscious species, also promoting concern for the welfare of other sentient beings. The focus is on doing good and living well in the here and now, and leaving the world a better place for those who come after.

...emphasis upon art and the senses...

...recognize humans as born not with a burden of inherited sin due to their ancestry but with potential for both good and evil which will develop in this life as their characters are formed.

...approve of self, human worth and individual dignity.

The Happy Human is the official symbol of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU).


Small list of notable Humanists:

Isaac Asimov
Arthur C. Clarke
Francis Crick
Albert Einstein
Stephen Jay Gould
Linus Pauling
Gene Roddenberry
Salman Rushdie
Carl Sagan
Rod Serling
Bjorn Ulvaeus
Peter Ustinov
Kurt Vonnegut
E. O. Wilson

Quotes on Humanism:

"The Humanist rarely loses the feeling of at-homeness in the universe. The Humanist is conscious of being an earth-child. There is a mystic glow in this sense of belonging. Memories of one's long ancestry still linger in muscle and nerve, in brain and germ cell. On moonlit nights, in the renewal of life in the springtime, before the glory of a sunset, in moments of swift insight, people feel the community of their own physical being with the body of mother earth. Rooted in millions of years of planetary history, the earthling has a secure feeling of being at home, and a consciousness of pride and dignity as a bearer of the heritage of the ages."
--A. Eustace Haydon

Energy conveys to us the idea of motion and activity. Inside a living organism we see a source of power, which by some manner is released in terms of movement.... Life is energy... it is the creator or initiator of movement change, development. We are different from moment to moment because the life principle is at work with us.... The spirit of humanity, like the forces of nature, and like the physical life, is at bottom energy.... Spiritual life, therefore, is just as much a development out of what has gone before in the evolutionary process as physical life is; which means that the origin of spiritual life is from within.
--John Dietrich

The human condition is that we are individuals in relationship, and there are tensions between individuality and relatedness. A humanist spirituality is not one of complete dependence, nor of complete independence -- neither condition can be defended as primary. Rather, a humanist spirituality is one of interdependence.
--Jone Johnson Lewis

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.
--Pearl S. Buck

Naked Eye Space Calendar

 From msnbc:

Feb. 22-26: Planet Trio. Early risers will have a chance to see a gathering of Jupiter (magnitude –2.0), Mercury (-0.1) and Mars (+1.2) within a 5-degree circle. Perhaps about a half-hour or so before sunrise you can catch a glimpse of Jupiter and Mercury hovering just above the horizon. Mars, however, likely will be much more difficult to spot against the twilight glow unless you use binoculars. The imaginary circle containing the three planets is smallest (3.7-degrees wide) on Feb. 24. On the mornings of Feb. 22 and 23, a very slender crescent moon will interact with these three planets in a most interesting manner.

March 25: Venus is both an Evening and Morning Star. Venus goes through an eight-year cycle of apparitions, meaning its behavior this year closely duplicates that in 2001, 1993, 1985, and on back. And only once per cycle do we in the Northern Hemisphere get a brief window of opportunity to glimpse Venus both at dusk and dawn on the same day. This will happen for several days, centered on March 25.

April 22: Occultation of the planet Venus. Along the West Coast of the US, a very thin ( 8-percent illuminated) waning crescent moon will cross in front of Venus before sunrise. Farther east, this event occurs after sunrise.

June 6: Occultation of the star Antares. Late this evening, a waxing gibbous moon, only about 15 hours from full and 99 percent illuminated will occult the first-magnitude red supergiant star Antares. This occultation will be visible across much of the central and eastern US and parts of central Canada.

July 22: "Eclipse of the Century." The longest total solar eclipse in the 21st century will take place, as the moon's dark umbral shadow first touches down on the Arabian Sea then sweeps across sweeping northeast across central India, the southeast portion of Nepal, most of Bhutan, northern Bangladesh, extreme eastern India and southern and central Tibet. The umbra will then cut across the middle of China, then it moves out over the East China Sea and over some of the Ryukyu (or Nansei) Islands. About 200 mi (325 km) east-southeast of Iwo Jima is the point of greatest eclipse. For some, this may be the best eclipse of the 21st century, as it is the longest-lasting one to occur between 1991 and 2132.

Aug. 10 through Sept. 4: Saturn without rings. In contrast to 2003, when Saturn's ring system was tilted toward Earth at their maximum of nearly 27-degrees, the rings will be oriented more-or-less "edge-on" as viewed from Earth. This reason for this is due to the relative positions of Saturn, Earth, and sun. The rapid motion of Earth traveling in its orbit changes our viewing angle from a position of observing the southern face of the rings to the northern face and for an interval of more than three weeks, the famous rings will be virtually impossible to see.

Sept. 2-3: Jupiter without satellites. Anyone who points a small telescope toward the planet Jupiter will nearly always see some or all of the four famous Galilean satellites. Usually at least two or three of these moons are immediately evident; sometimes all four. It is very rare when only one moon is in view and rarer still when no moons at all are visible. Late on this night, for much of the Western Hemisphere, Jupiter will appear moonless for almost two hours.

Oct. 8: Very close conjunction of Mercury and Saturn. When they rise above the eastern horizon on this morning over North America, Mercury will appear only 0.3-degree below and to the right of Saturn. At magnitude –0.7, Mercury will appear nearly five times brighter than Saturn (magnitude +1.0). Actually, this very close pairing-off between Mercury and Saturn is only part of an ever-changing array that will also include Venus (magnitude –3.9). And on the morning of October 16, a very slender crescent moon, less than two days from new, slides well off to the south of the three planets.

Nov. 17: Leonid Meteors. A brief outburst of perhaps up to 500 meteors per hour is forecast to occur based on a joint prediction by astronomers from Caltech and NASA. The potential spectacle is expected sometime between 21:34 and 21:44 UT, which favors Asia.

Dec. 13-14: Geminid Meteors. A great year for these pre-Christmas celestial fireworks, with the moon only a couple of days from New phase and the prospects of up to sighting up to 120 meteors per hour.