Sunday, February 28, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
NYTimes: Underwater Plate Cuts 400-Mile Gash
Sent from my iPhone
Friday, February 26, 2010
Perspective. (thanks Dell & Ray!)
------ Forwarded Message
From: Ray Little
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:50:05 -0600
To: Dell Little
Subject: Perspective
Does this make you think of how big God is?
The deep field photo has always been my favorite Hubble image. It is a long (~ ten days) exposure of a random patch of sky the size of what you would see looking through an eight-foot long straw (or, the size of a tennis ball at 100 meters). In that small patch alone, one can see around 3,000 galaxies (each of those smudges in the photo is a different galaxy). Each of those galaxies has on the order of several hundred billion stars. Multiply the number of stars in that tiny tiny spot across the entire sky (it is about two-millionths of the entire sky), and you have a sense of how big the universe is and how small we are.
BEYOND our Sun, it's a BIG universe:
Antares is the 15th-brightest star in our sky. It is more than 1,000 light years away.
Now, try to wrap your mind around this...
This is a Hubble Telescope "ultra-deep-field" infrared view of countless "entire" galaxies billions of light-years away:
Below is a close-up of one of the darkest regions of the photo above:
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Field Music: A Disorienting Digression : NPR
Enlarge Ian West"Let's Write a Book" stretches Field Music's indie-pop aesthetic to its outer limits, delving into electronica and funk.
Ian West"Let's Write a Book" stretches Field Music's indie-pop aesthetic to its outer limits, delving into electronica and funk.
Monday's Pick
- Song: "Let's Write a Book"
- Artist: Field Music
- CD: Field Music (Measure)
- Genre: Rock
If Tones of Town and the past two "solo" albums from Peter and David Brewis %u2014 the principal forces behind Field Music %u2014 demonstrate anything about the band, it's that the Sunderland duo won't be content writing pristine indie-pop songs for the rest of its career. Strong doses of rhythmic and melodic experimentation permeate Tones of Town, The Week That Was and Sea From Shore, though most of the explorations err on the side of accessibility; the same can be said of Field Music's new double album, Field Music (Measure).
Still, it's hard to say whether "Let's Write a Book" is an exception to the rule or the new case in point: The song stretches the band's aesthetic to its outer limits, delving further into electronica and funk than any of its predecessors. The digression can be disorienting at first %u2014 there's no denying that the hook sounds suspiciously close to the "Underworld" theme from Super Mario Bros. %u2014 but the Brewis brothers preserve the poppy, crisp edges to their songwriting, peppering the groove with echoed percussion, wah-wah riffs, and a dizzying, staccato melody on vibes. The overall effect may be a little too busy for the dance floor, but it's an infectious tune all the same; a heady step forward for a band that continues to flex its versatility.
Listen to yesterday's Song of the Day, and subscribe to the Song of the Day newsletter.
Cool groove, funky, soulful, 70's-funk, falsetto vocals-- cool sounds!
Monday, February 22, 2010
My Neice Holly: Cheer championship : Corpus Christi Caller-Times
My neice Holly is in the back left, with the glasses. She is one little bundle of energy!
Members of the Corpus Christi All Star Mako Sharks show off their skills during Sunday's American Cheer Power South Texas Open Championship at the American Bank Center in Corpus Christi.
My Neice Holly: Cheer championship : Corpus Christi Caller-Times
My neice Holly is in the back left, with the glasses. She is one little bundle of energy!
Members of the Corpus Christi All Star Mako Sharks show off their skills during Sunday's American Cheer Power South Texas Open Championship at the American Bank Center in Corpus Christi.
Untitled
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Xray: Spondylosis 2
Here is an X-ray of my L5 vertebra/sacrum, showing the forward misalignment of the L5, which is pinching my sciatic nerve. Explains why my legs go numb and hurt after 5-10 minutes of standing/walking. This was taken Oct 10, 2009.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
NASA - Let There Be Light
Endeavour pilot Terry Virts opened the windows of the newly installed cupola one at a time early Wednesday, giving spacewalkers Robert Behnken and Nicholas Patrick an early look into the International Space Station's room with a view that they had helped install.
The cupola's fully opened windows look down on the Sahara Desert in this image that was 'tweeted' from space by JAXA astronaut and Expedition 22 flight engineer Soichi Noguchi.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Physicists Re-Create Conditions of the Big Bang - Sharon Begley
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Physicists create conditions not seen since the big bang.
Feb 16, 2010
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While the Large Hadron Collider gets all the attention (it never hurts a physics experiment's street cred when rumors spread that it might create a mini black hole and swallow up the Earth), a lesser-known particle collider has been quietly making soup%u2014quark soup. For the field of experimental particle physics, in which progress has been at a near-standstill since the glory days of the 1970s (yes, the top quark was discovered in an experiment at Fermilab in 1995, but really, everyone knew this last of the six quarks existed), this counts as the most notable achievement in years: a discovery that doesn't merely confirm what theory has long held, but points the way to new revelations about the creation and evolution of the universe.
The reason for that accolade is that quark soup was last seen when the universe was 1 microsecond old, physicists reported at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society. It was created at the 2.4-mile-around Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab on New York's Long Island, which smashes together gold ions traveling at nearly the speed of light. The result of the collisions is a tiny region of space so hot%u20144 trillion degrees Celsius%u2014that protons and neutrons melt into a plasma of their constituent quarks and gluons, as Brookhaven describes here. The soup is 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, 40 times hotter than a typical supernova, and the hottest temperature in the universe today. Right there on Long Island. (For anyone wondering what kind of thermometer is used to measure a 4-trillion-degree soup, it is color: by analyzing the energy distribution (color) of light emitted from the soup, scientists can infer its temperature much as they infer the temperatures of stars or even of a glowing andiron.) In one of the truly helpful advances since the golden age of particle physics, several cool simulations of the RHIC collisions and resulting quark soup are on YouTube.
The last time such a quark-gluon plasma existed was 13.7 billion years ago, when the universe burst into existence in the big bang. By creating it in a lab for the first time, the RHIC teams have given scientists a chance to study how the cosmos came to evolve into the riot of galaxies and nebulae that we see today. And although the quark soup created at RHIC lasts not even 1 billionth of a trillionth of a second, there are already surprises. The quarks and gluons in the soup were expected to behave independently, for instance, but instead they behave cooperatively, almost like synchronized swimmers%u2014or, in the spirit of the moment, like Olympic pairs skaters.
The behavior that has most intrigued the scientists so far is something called broken symmetry (of which there is a nice video here. Within the quark soup appear "bubbles" that violate a principle of physics called mirror symmetry, or parity. This form of symmetry means that events%u2014in this case, the collisions of particles and the spray of subatomic debris that results%u2014look the same if viewed in a mirror as they do when viewed directly. But one of the detectors monitoring the collisions inside RHIC observed an asymmetry in the electric charges of particles emerging from most of the collisions. Specifically, positively charged quarks seem to prefer to fly out of the collision parallel to the magnetic field, while negatively charged quarks prefer to emerge in the opposite direction. This behavior would appear reversed if reflected in a mirror, with negative quarks traveling parallel to the magnetic field and positive quarks traveling in the opposite direction. Hence the violation of mirror symmetry.
The quark soup also seems to contain bubbles that violate another form of symmetry, called charge-parity invariance. According to this bedrock principle of physics, when energy is converted to mass or vice versa as per Einstein's E=mc2, equal numbers of particles and antiparticles%u2014matter and antimatter%u2014are created or annihilated, respectively. That may seem like an abstruse point, but it may hold the key to how structure and form emerged from the otherwise homogeneous quark soup. Such symmetry-violating bubbles in the nascent universe, cosmologists suspect, tipped balance in the sea of otherwise equal amounts of matter and antimatter toward a preference for matter over antimatter. If the amounts of matter and antimatter had remained identical, no one would be here to notice: when a particle of matter encounters a particle of antimatter, they go poof in an annihilating burst of energy. By now, almost 14 billion years after creation, every particle of matter would have been destroyed through this process, leaving a universe awash in radiation and nothing else, an ethereally glowing world of light without substance. By re-creating conditions that last existed at the birth of the universe, says Steven Vigdor, Brookhaven's associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics, who oversees research at RHIC, "RHIC may have a unique opportunity to test in the laboratory some crucial features of symmetry-altering bubbles speculated to have played important roles in the evolution of the infant universe."
Previous experiments have found violations of charge-parity symmetry (a 1964 experiment discovering such violations brought the scientists who conducted it a Nobel Prize), but in each case the effect was too small to account for the amount of matter in the universe today. What RHIC found is "consistent with predictions of symmetry-breaking domains in hot quark matter," said Vigdor. "Confirmation of this effect and understanding how these domains of broken symmetry form at RHIC may help scientists understand some of the most fundamental puzzles of the universe." For a field that has been in the doldrums (especially in the United States) since the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider, and that seems plagued by gremlins (as when the Large Hadron Collider sprang a helium leak, particle physics really needed this one.
Sharon Begley is NEWSWEEK's science editor and author of The Plastic Mind: New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves andTrain Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves.
� 2010
While I barely understand this particle physics stuff, the stories around it are fascinating!
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Toby Hemenway—Principles
ETHICS AND PRINCIPLES OF PERMACULTURE
Ethics:
• Care for the Earth • Care for People
• Return the SurplusPrimary Principles for Functional Design:
1. Observe. Use protracted and thoughtful observation rather than prolonged and thoughtless action. Observe the site and its elements in all seasons. Design for specific sites, clients, and climates.
2. Connect. Use relative location: Place elements in ways that create useful relationships and time-saving connections among all parts. The number of connections among elements creates a healthy, diverse ecosystem, not the number of elements.
3. Catch and store energy and materials. Identify, collect, and hold the useful flows moving through the site. By saving and re-investing resources, we maintain the system and capture still more resources.
4. Each element performs multiple functions. Choose and place each element in a system to perform as many functions as possible. Increasing beneficial connections between diverse components creates a stable whole. Stack elements in both space and time.
5. Each function is supported by multiple elements. Use multiple methods to achieve important functions and to create synergies. Redundancy protects when one or more elements fail.
6. Make the least change for the greatest effect. Find the “leverage points” in the system and intervene there, where the least work accomplishes the most change.
7. Use small scale, intensive systems. Start at your doorstep with the smallest systems that will do the job, and build on your successes, with variations. Grow by chunking.
Principles for Living and Energy Systems
8. Use the edge effect. The edge—the intersection of two environments—is the most diverse place in a system, and is where energies and materials accumulate. Optimize the amount of edge.
9. Collaborate with succession. Systems will evolve over time, often toward greater diversity and productivity. Work with this tendency, and use design to jump-start succession when needed.
10. Use biological and renewable resources. Renewable resources (usually plants and animals) reproduce and build up over time, store energy, assist yield, and interact with other elements.
11. Recycle energy. Supply local and on-site needs with energy from the system, and reuse this energy as many times as possible. Every cycle is an opportunity for yield.
Attitudes
12. Turn problems into solutions. Constraints can inspire creative design. “We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities.”— Bill Mollison
13. Get a yield. Design for both immediate and long-term returns from your efforts: “You can’t work on an empty stomach.” Set up positive feedback loops to build the system and repay your investment.
14. The biggest limit to abundance is creativity. The designer’s imagination and skill limit productivity and diversity more than any physical limit.
15. Mistakes are tools for learning. Evaluate your trials. Making mistakes is a sign you’re trying to do things better.
Rules for resource use: Ranked from regenerative to degenerative, different resources can: 1) increase with use; 2) be lost when not used; 3) be unaffected by use; 4) be lost by use; 5) pollute or degrade systems with use.
Friday, February 12, 2010
natural architecture - an emerging art movement that is exploring mankind's desire to reconnect to the earth, through the built environment.
natural architecturethe natural environment still manages to fill us with a sense
of awe and amazement. despite the amount of scientific
knowledge mankind has gathered, nature still holds great
mysteries that we may never be able to unravel.
this complexity has continually daunted man. in frustration, we
try to control nature by enforcing order. as a result,
we have distanced ourselves from the earth, even though
our survival is completely dependent on it. we are now trying
to regain our close connection to nature.there is an emerging art movement that is exploring mankind's
desire to reconnect to the earth, through the built environment.
referred to as 'natural architecture', it aims to create a new,
more harmonious, relationship between man and nature by
exploring what it means to design with nature in mind.the roots of this movement can be found in earlier artistic
shifts like the 'land art' movement of the late nineteen sixties.
although this movement was focused on protesting the
austerity of the gallery and the commercialization of art,
it managed to expand the formal link between art and nature.
this has helped develop a new appreciation of nature in all
forms of art and design.the 'natural architecture' movement aims to expand on 'land art'
by acting as a form of activism rather than protest. this new
form of art aims to capture the harmonious connection we
seek with nature by merging humanity and nature through
architecture. the core concept of the movement is that
mankind can live harmoniously with nature, using it for our
needs while respecting its importance.the movement is characterized by the work of a number of
artists, designers and architects that express these principles
in their work. the pieces are simple, humble and built using the
most basic materials and skills. because of this, the results
often resemble indigenous architecture, reflecting the desire
to return to a less technological world. the forms are stripped
down to their essence, expressing the natural beauty inherent
in the materials and location. the movement has many forms of
expression that range from location-based interventions to
structures built from living materials. however all of the works
in the movement share a central ethos that demonstrates a
respect and appreciation for nature.these works are meant to comment on architecture and provide
a new framework to approach buildings and structures.
they aim to infuse new ideas into architecture by subverting
the idea that architecture should shelter nature. instead,
the structures deliberately expose the natural materials used
in the building process. we see the branches, the rocks and
all the materials for what they are. we understand that these
structures won't exist forever. the materials will evolve over
time, slowly decomposing until no evidence remains.
these features are intentional, provoking viewers to question
the conventions of architecture. the designers aren't suggesting
that architecture must conform to their vision, they are just
providing ideas that they hope will inspire us all to rethink the
relationship between nature and the built environment._____________________________________________________
natural architecture (the book)
author: alessandro rocca
publisher: princeton architectural press
year: 2007
ISBN: 1568987218
ISBN:13 9781568987217designboom rating:
a collection of works reflecting the ideas of this movement
have been compiled into a book written by alessandro rocca
(architect and architecture critic and a professor at the
milan polytechnic). the book, due out in early november 2007,
features sixty-six projects from 18 artists and architects
by way of 250 photos and illustrations. each project reconsiders
designing with nature in mind. projects by olafur eliasson,
patrick dougherty, nils-udo, ex. studio, edward ng, n architects,
and many others. more infonote:
the work featured in this book was first published
in 2006 in the book 'architettura naturale'
(italian language) by 22publishing_____________________________________________________
designboom ratings:
I found this article about a year ago, and its subject continues to bubble just beneath the surface of my consciousness, emerging unexpectedly every once in a while...