Cut And Paste

good eatin'!

2009-11-25T10:51:00.000-08:00

(from an email to my daughter)

I'm making progress :) I finally went looking for an explanation of carbs and weight gain, and I found this info:

50 grams a day - good for short-term intense weight loss
50-100 grams a day - healthy long-term weight loss
100-150 grams a day - maintain your present weight
150+ grams a day - incremental weight gain

I got around to cooking up lentils (w/o rice) and I keep a covered tub in the fridge. 8oz has 29 carbs, about as much as a glass of juice, but it's more filling than a bowl of cereal b/c it's one amino acid shy of being a complete protein and it's packed w' fiber. I have a couple of servings a day w' a drizzle of olive oil and some Indian seasoning and I'm not bored of it yet :)

I'm avoiding saturated fats but freely add safflower oil to my green salad b/c strangely enough it's been proved conclusively to help the body get rid of the dangerous (stroke risk) belly fat. For the most part I don't use commercial dressings, just that and a tablespoon of fig infused white vinegar (5 grams carb) for taste.

Our scale is still out of commission, but there's a distinct gap in the front of my pants and my neck looks thinner (a real sore point for me!) so I know I'm on the right track.

Planet Viewing in 2009

2009-02-06T03:54:00.000-08:00

Ahh, I've been waiting for this! :)

Mercury
The solar system's smallest planet flits back and forth from morning sky to evening sky several times a year. It never strays far from the Sun in our sky, so it's tough to find in the glare. From the northern hemisphere, it is visible in the morning sky this year in February and early March, June, and October. The late-year appearance is the best, because the planet will stand highest above the horizon. In the evening, Mercury is best seen in April and early May, August and early September, and December. The spring appearance is best.

Venus
Venus, the dazzling morning or evening star, outshines all the other stars and planets in the night sky. It begins the year in the evening sky, well up in the west as darkness begins to fall. It will disappear from view in late March as it passes between Earth and the Sun. It will return to view as a “morning star” by early April, and remain in the morning sky until December.

Mars
Mars climbs into view as a modest orange “star” quite low in the east or southeast at sunrise in late February. As the year progresses, it will pull farther away from the Sun and be visible for more of the night. By late in the year, it will in view for more than half of the night, and will outshine all but two planets and one star. Mars will stage beautiful encounters with Venus in mid-April and again in mid-July.

Jupiter
The largest planet in our solar system is a commanding presence for much of the year. It looks like an intensely bright cream-colored star, shining brighter than anything else in the night sky except the Moon and Venus. It climbs into view in the pre-dawn sky in February. It rises earlier as the months go by, and moves into the evening sky in late spring. Jupiter is at opposition in mid-August, when it appears brightest for the year and remains visible all night. Late in the year it is visible only in the evening sky, dropping lower each night.

Saturn
Saturn looks like a bright golden star. It spends the first eight months of the year in Leo, the lion, then moves into the neighboring constellation Virgo, the virgin. Saturn is at its best in early March, when it's closest to Earth. It disappears behind the Sun in late August, then returns to view in the morning sky in October.

Uranus
Although it's the third-largest planet in the solar system, it's so far from the Sun that you need binoculars to see it. It begins the year in the constellation Aquarius, then slides into Pisces in spring. It stages its best appearance in September.

Neptune
The fourth-largest planet in the solar system is so far away that you need a telescope to find it. Neptune is in the constellation Capricornus, and stages its best appearance in August.

Planet Viewing In January

2009-01-01T09:07:00.000-08:00

Happy Birthday to me! 46 today :)

January 2009

Skywatchers willing to brave the cold air on January nights will be rewarded with such memorable sights as majestic Orion climbing high across the south, trailed by Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. Orion's shoulder, orange Betelgeuse, is the hub of the Winter Circle, a great loop of bright stars. These astronomical luminaries twinkle fiercely through the nippy night air.

The Bard of Maplewood

2008-11-04T17:43:00.000-08:00

I wondered what had happened to Daniel Smythe, my grandmother's poetry teacher, who was kind enough to give some of my juvenile efforts a going over. It turns out that he died 3 years before she did:

Saturday, June 2, 2007

The Bard of Maplewood

I remember standing alone in front of my house after a deep, winter snow. The world evoked Robert Frost’s poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

Along came a man, walking down the middle of the street where the snow was packed. He was wearing a trench coat, and a fedora capped his head, above his ruddy face.

It was Daniel Webster Smythe, a poet.

I knew this because my parents had told me, and, like my father, Mr. Smythe worked at Bradley University. I don’t think I ever spoke a word to Mr. Smythe in my whole life, though his friendly wife Ruth, with the sound of Cape Cod still in her voice, occasionally visited my mother. She would take mom to their book crammed house, five places down from ours, looking for some thing or another. The Smythe’s had two children, a boy and a girl, who were grown by the time we came along.

So, all I really know of Daniel Smythe is what I learned reading his poems and bits of public information about him. He was a widely published poet with poems in more than 100 publications, including the New Yorker and Harper’s. He won the Annual Award of the Poetry Society of America in 1940 and many other prizes during his life.

Before his academic career, Mr. Smythe worked on a farm in New Hampshire and on a wildlife sanctuary in New York, which perhaps explains why so many of his poems have nature as their theme. He served in the armed forces during World War II, and he came to Bradley in about 1949 to teach American literature and creative writing.

Daniel Smythe was praised by many influential poets, including Robert Frost, about whom he wrote a book, Robert Frost Speaks.

The book of poems on my shelf entitled, The Best Poems of Daniel Smythe, is inscribed, “For Ed & Mary King With best wishes, Daniel Smythe Thanksgiving 1974” He died seven years later.

I didn’t know when I saw him walking down the street that I would one day take classes in creative writing—poetry no less—as a graduate student at Bradley. Poetry—it’s a word that makes a lot of people, including me, a little nervous. There’s a kind of mystery about it. I think poetry has something to do with trying to see the world with fresh eyes and translating the observations into fresh language, though this is a stale way of putting it.

Well, as the saying goes, “I know what I like.” Here is a poem from Daniel Smythe’s anthology. It’s not one of his many award winners, but I like it.

THE BEACH

Landscape,
sea-bird,
shell shape,
sea heard.

Fog snug,
beach rose,
rockweed rug
grows and grows.

The snail hut,
word-lost shore –
this is what
I am looking for.

Posted by Maria Carroll at 5:53 AM

Planet Viewing in November

2008-11-02T03:57:00.000-08:00

November 2008

The dazzling constellations of winter begin to creep into prime evening viewing time during the longer, cooler nights of November. Beautiful Orion rises in mid-evening early in the month, but by early evening at month's end. Taurus, the bull, charges into view ahead of Orion, with Gemini, the twins, rising about the same time as Orion, but farther north. The Dog Star, Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, follows the hunter in late evening. A special late-month treat is the pairing of Venus and Jupiter in the southwest at sunset. The crescent Moon closes in on them on the 30th, creating an especially striking tableau.

Treasure Hunt

2008-10-23T09:56:00.000-07:00

My mother (79) passed away suddenly at the end of September. I feel very close to her now when I sort through her junk drawers. This is what I've found so far, neatly packed into an impenetrable mass:

30 plastic coffee can lids

40 metal caps to vitamin bottles from the 70's

20 packets of powdered silica from same bottles (kept out moisture)

25 plastic coffee scoops

10 nested plastic Robitussin medicine cups

10 keys from old style of sardine tins (which were discontinued sometime in the 80's or 90's)

1 miniature replica Swiss battle-axe (God knows why!)

a sheaf of junk mail dating from 1972

my 2nd quarter 4th grade report card from Mrs. Reis ("needs to finish assignments in a timely fashion")

a Ziplock bag w' about 50 plastic bread tags in a variety of colors, all neatly collated

12 mesh onion bags

50 matchbooks

25 boxes of birthday cake candles, some put back used (washed first, but still...eww!)

her 1957 Red Cross swim instructor membership card

ancient packets of soy sauce and ketchup from restaurants that went out of business 30 years ago

and enough Howard Johnson's sugar packs to stop an army of diabetics in its tracks.

I dreamt that she baked blueberry brownies (never had any like that) and left them in the refrigerator for me. I went to bed completely exhausted, but woke up feeling better after that.

Clam Cakes

2008-08-27T05:53:00.000-07:00

The other day I got this tasty recipe for clam cakes from a lady who grew up just south of here in Rhode Island. She now lives to the north in New Hampshire.

Hi Shelley,

I noticed your blog regarding New England Clam Chowdah. I live in NH but lived originally in RI for 30 years. I grew up on RI Clam Chowdah and Clamcakes. There used to be a Chowdah House at an old amusement park that was always full in the summer time and all they sold was Clam Cakes and Chowdah. I don't remember ever having been served Manhattan Clam Chowder (tomato broth not cream) as the New Clam Chowdah was so much better and being from Southern New England, why would we grow up with anything else?? I noticed that people in Northern New England however are not familiar with Clam Cakes, they think they are like Crab Cakes (which I don't know what they are)! In RI, Clam Cakes are huge and people would always buy them by the dozen with their chowder. They are the size of golfballs and are addicting. Being in my mid-forties, I try to stay away from deep fried anything but if you want to add something a lot tastier than cornbread as an accompaniment to your Clam Chowder, try these! In RI we also call them Quahogs.

RI Clam Cakes

½ cp clams or quahogs, chopped

½ c. clam juice

1 egg

1 ¼ cp flour

½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

1/3 cp milk

Mix dry ingredients; add milk and egg. Fold in clams and clam juice. Heat 2 or 3 inches of oil in pan or fryolator. (Oil is hot when a drop of clam cake mix floats immediately to the top). When brown, turn cake once. Remove and dry on paper towel. Eat warm! Happy eating! (This recipe I took from a cookbook made by my elementary school close to 20 years ago). I personally would drop much bigger than teaspoons, although they do puff up. The ones I am used to eating puff up to the size of golf balls and would be dropped by rounded tablespoons.

Sincerely,

Terry Gadoury

Planet Viewing in August

2008-08-02T16:39:00.000-07:00

August 2008

The long, warm nights of August provide some dazzling sights. The Milky Way arcs high overhead, adding a soft glow to the dark sky -- but only if you are away from pesky city lights. The constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius are at their best, anchoring the southern end of the Milky Way. Jupiter points the way to Sagittarius. Mars and Saturn drop from sight in the glare of sunset, where Venus and Mercury already lurk. That leaves Jupiter as the only naked-eye planet easily visible for most of the month.

W.B.Yeats 'Lake Isle of Innisfree'

2008-07-11T03:31:00.000-07:00

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Planet Viewing in July

2008-07-01T16:05:00.000-07:00

July 2008

A passel of planets highlights the sky this month. Mars and Saturn huddle close together for most of the month, low in the west in early evening. Jupiter, putting in its best showing of the year, shines brightly all night. Even elusive little Mercury puts in a brief appearance, in the dawn sky. Only Venus is missing from the festivities, lurking too close to the Sun to view. The Moon teams up with all four worlds during the month; by locating them when the Moon is near, you can easily follow the planets for the rest of the month.

Planet Viewing in June

2008-06-02T14:11:00.000-07:00

June 2008

The start of summer brings the latest sunsets and shortest nights of the year, so although more people spend more time outdoors, they may not get to see more of the night sky. Even so, there’s lots to look at this month, with Mars and Saturn congregating around Leo and Jupiter highlighting the early morning. The dense inner regions of the Milky Way start wheeling into view, too. So it’s a good time to turn off the porch light and take in the view of the heavens.

3 In A Row!!!!!

2008-05-23T05:40:00.000-07:00

(from celticfc.net)

CELTIC made history tonight by clinching a third successive SPL title after a dramatic final day of the season.

Gordon Strachan’s champions beat Dundee United 1-0 at Tannadice with a Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink goal to finish top on 89 points. Second-placed Rangers finished on 86 points after losing 2-0 to Aberdeen at Pittodrie.

There were incredible scenes inside Tannadice at the end of the match, as Celtic players, management and supporters began the celebrations.

During the 90 minutes, the Hoops fans had constantly paid tribute to Tommy Burns on an emotional occasion for Celtic Football Club.

After winning the title in his first two seasons, Gordon Strachan becomes the first Celtic manager since the late Jock Stein to lead the club to three consecutive championships.

In early April, Celtic trailed Rangers by seven points but stormed back into contention with seven successive wins to clinch one of the sweetest title triumphs in the club’s history.

Over half of Tannadice was awash with green and white as thousands of Celtic fans converged on the City of Discovery with hope in their hearts. They weren’t to be disappointed.

The early exchanges were understandably tense and it was United who created the first chance in six minutes when Noel Hunt ran on to Mark De Vries’ flick and forced Artur Boruc into a save.

Celtic started to settle and Aiden McGeady almost grabbed the opener. Scott McDonald fed Shunsuke Nakamura who crossed for the Irish winger. His first-time shot was parried over by Lukas Zaluska.

Moments later, United’s Polish goalkeeper pulled off another incredible save – diving to his right to tip over Barry Robson’s looping header. Paul Hartley then had a low drive blocked on the line.

Danny Swanson fired over the bar for United on a breakaway, but it was Celtic who had the bulk of the pressure, with McGeady and Nakamura seeing a lot of the ball. United, however, were standing firm.

Hartley fired a drive over the bar as Celtic kept piling on the pressure. Yet, United were always a threat and De Vries fired wide from eight yards as the first half ended with no scoring.

Only 30 seconds of the second period had elapsed when Vennegoor of Hesselink was sent through by McGeady. The Dutchman kept his shot low but Zaluska blocked with his legs.

Celtic looked bright and McDonald threatened, before Nakamura had a shot blocked. The Japanese midfielder was then booked for a dive in the box.

The Hoops were committing bodies forward and were almost caught out when De Vries broke free on the right and fired a shot wide in 59 minutes. Boruc then pulled off a superb save to deny Swanson.

Vennegoor of Hesselink almost fired Celtic ahead after beating Zaluska to a bouncing ball. Celtic then introduced Scott Brown for Nakamura in 62 minutes.

News of Aberdeen’s first goal sent shockwaves round Tannadice, yet Celtic still had some work to do of their own and Vennegoor of Hesselink delivered in 71 minutes.

McDonald won a corner and Hartley’s corner was powered home by the Dutch striker from six yards as the stadium erupted.

As news of a second Aberdeen goal spread, the title celebrations started in earnest for the champions.

The sight of the helicopter carrying the SPL trophy flying overhead put the seal on a magical night as captain Stephen McManus held aloft the gleaming silverware and the entire first-team squad paid homage to Tommy Burns with special t-shirts.

The passing of Tommy Burns, CFC Legend

2008-05-16T08:24:00.000-07:00

From TalkCeltic Forums:

Husband, father, friend & brother,
a man the likes of not another.
His life being steeped in green & white,
the Celtic way, the way that's right.

With courage, passion, determination,
a leader from a strong, proud nation.
With love for us, his fellow man,
giving it the best he can.

True to all who he touched in life,
and brave through troubles and through strife.
A caring bhoy and so much more,
who faced what his life had in store.

We loved him for the man he was,
and some still thought of him as 'Boss.'
True to the end as Celtic mourns
a true man's passing, Tommy Burns.

Henke67

Mercury

2008-05-08T20:31:00.000-07:00

Iron 'Snow' Helps Maintain Mercury's Magnetic Field, Scientists Say

Mosaic of Mercury. (Credit: NASA)

ScienceDaily (May 8, 2008) — New scientific evidence suggests that deep inside the planet Mercury, iron "snow" forms and falls toward the center of the planet, much like snowflakes form in Earth's atmosphere and fall to the ground.

The movement of this iron snow could be responsible for Mercury's mysterious magnetic field, say researchers from the University of Illinois and Case Western Reserve University. In a paper published in the April issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists describe laboratory measurements and models that mimic conditions believed to exist within Mercury's core.

"Mercury's snowing core opens up new scenarios where convection may originate and generate global magnetic fields," said U. of I. geology professor Jie (Jackie) Li. "Our findings have direct implications for understanding the nature and evolution of Mercury's core, and those of other planets and moons."

Mercury is the innermost planet in our solar system and, other than Earth, the only terrestrial planet that possesses a global magnetic field. Discovered in the 1970s by NASA's Mariner 10 spacecraft, Mercury's magnetic field is about 100 times weaker than Earth's. Most models cannot account for such a weak magnetic field.

Made mostly of iron, Mercury's core is also thought to contain sulfur, which lowers the melting point of iron and plays an important role in producing the planet's magnetic field.

"Recent Earth-based radar measurements of Mercury's rotation revealed a slight rocking motion that implied the planet's core is at least partially molten," said Illinois graduate student Bin Chen, the paper's lead author. "But, in the absence of seismological data from the planet, we know very little about its core."

To better understand the physical state of Mercury's core, the researchers used a multi-anvil apparatus to study the melting behavior of an iron-sulfur mixture at high pressures and high temperatures.

In each experiment, an iron-sulfur sample was compressed to a specific pressure and heated to a specific temperature. The sample was then quenched, cut in two, and analyzed with a scanning electron microscope and an electron probe microanalyzer.

"Rapid quenching preserves the sample's texture, which reveals the separation of the solid and liquid phases, and the sulfur content in each phase," Chen said. "Based on our experimental results, we can infer what is going on in Mercury's core."

As the molten, iron-sulfur mixture in the outer core slowly cools, iron atoms condense into cubic "flakes" that fall toward the planet's center, Chen said. As the iron snow sinks and the lighter, sulfur-rich liquid rises, convection currents are created that power the dynamo and produce the planet's weak magnetic field.

Mercury's core is most likely precipitating iron snow in two distinct zones, the researchers report. This double-snow state may be unique among the terrestrial planets and terrestrial-like moons in our solar system.

"Our findings provide a new context into which forthcoming observational data from NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft can be placed," Li said. "We can now connect the physical state of our innermost planet with the formation and evolution of terrestrial planets in general."

With Li and Chen, Case Western Reserve University planetary geodynamics professor Steven A. Hauck II was a co-author of the paper.

The work was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Journal reference: Chen, B., J. Li, and S. A. Hauck II (2008), Non-ideal liquidus curve in the Fe-S system and Mercury's snowing core, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L07201, doi: 10.1029/2008GL033311.

Celtic vs Rangers

2008-05-07T17:43:00.000-07:00


7 May		Motherwell, home
11/10 May	Hibs, home	Dundee U, home
14 May		Zenit, Manchester
17 May		Motherwell, away
19 May		St Mirren, away
22 May	Dundee U, away	Aberdeen, away

Solar Images Show Green And Blue Flashes

2008-05-04T19:52:00.000-07:00

Green flash at top of solar image. (Credit: Copyright Stéphane Guisard (ESO))

ScienceDaily (May 5, 2008) — Cerro Paranal, home of ESO's Very Large Telescope, is certainly one of the best astronomical sites on the planet. Stunning images, obtained by ESO staff at Paranal, of the green and blue flashes, as well as of the so-called 'Gegenschein', are real cases in point.

The Earth's atmosphere is a gigantic prism that disperses sunlight. In the most ideal atmospheric conditions, such as those found regularly above Cerro Paranal, this will lead to the appearance of so-called green and blue flashes at sunset. The phenomenon is so popular on the site that it is now the tradition for the Paranal staff to gather daily on the telescope platform to observe the sunset and its possible green flash before starting their long night of observations.

The green and blue flashes are fleeting events that require an unobstructed view of the setting Sun, and a very stable atmosphere. These conditions are very often met at Paranal, a 2635m high mountain in the Chilean Atacama Desert, where the sky is cloudless more than 300 days a year. Paranal is home of ESO's Very Large Telescope, an ensemble of four 8.2-m telescopes and four 1.8-m Auxiliary Telescopes that together form the world's most advanced optical telescope.

ESO staff Stéphane Guisard has been chasing green flashes for many years and has been able to capture them on many occasions. "The most challenging is to capture the green flash while still seeing the rest of the Sun with all its colours," says Guisard.

His colleague Guillaume Blanchard was even luckier. On Christmas Eve, as he was one of the few to follow the tradition of looking at the sunset, he had the chance to immortalise a blue flash using his hobby telescope.

ESO astronomer Yuri Beletsky also likes to take photographs from Paranal, but he prefers the night views. This allows him to make use of the unique conditions above the site to make stunning images. On some of these, he has captured other extremely interesting effects related to the Sun: the so-called Zodiacal light and the 'Gegenschein'.

Both the Zodiacal light and the Gegenschein (which is German for "counter shine") are due to reflected sunlight by interplanetary dust. These are so faint that they are only visible in places free from light pollution.

Most of the interplanetary dust in the Solar System lies in the ecliptic, the plane close to which the planets are moving around the Sun, and the Zodiacal light and Gegenschein are thus seen in the region centred around the ecliptic. While the Zodiacal light is seen in the vicinity of the Sun, the Gegenschein is seen in the direction opposite to the Sun.

Each of the small particles of dust, left over from comets and asteroids, acts as a small Moon reflecting the light coming from our host star. "If you could see the individual dust particles then you would see the ones in the middle of the Gegenschein looking like very tiny full moons, while the ones hidden in the faint part of the dust band would look like tiny crescent moons," explains ESO astronomer Colin Snodgrass. "But even the VLT cannot see such tiny individual dust particles out in space. Instead we see the combined effect, in photos like these, of millions of tiny dust particles reflecting light back to us from the Sun."

Musical Math

2008-04-24T21:37:00.000-07:00

Music Has Its Own Geometry, Researchers Find

The figure shows how geometrical music theory represents four-note chord-types -- the collections of notes form a tetrahedron, with the colors indicating the spacing between the individual notes in a sequence. In the blue spheres, the notes are clustered, in the warmer colors, they are farther apart. The red ball at the top of the pyramid is the diminished seventh chord, a popular 19th-century chord. Near it are all the most familiar chords of Western music. (Credit: Dmitri Tymoczko, Princeton University)

ScienceDaily (Apr. 17, 2008) — The connection between music and mathematics has fascinated scholars for centuries. More than 200 years ago Pythagoras reportedly discovered that pleasing musical intervals could be described using simple ratios.

And the so-called musica universalis or "music of the spheres" emerged in the Middle Ages as the philosophical idea that the proportions in the movements of the celestial bodies -- the sun, moon and planets -- could be viewed as a form of music, inaudible but perfectly harmonious.

Now, three music professors -- Clifton Callender at Florida State University, Ian Quinn at Yale University and Dmitri Tymoczko at Princeton University -- have devised a new way of analyzing and categorizing music that takes advantage of the deep, complex mathematics they see enmeshed in its very fabric.

Writing in the April 18 issue of Science, the trio has outlined a method called "geometrical music theory" that translates the language of musical theory into that of contemporary geometry. They take sequences of notes, like chords, rhythms and scales, and categorize them so they can be grouped into "families." They have found a way to assign mathematical structure to these families, so they can then be represented by points in complex geometrical spaces, much the way "x" and "y" coordinates, in the simpler system of high school algebra, correspond to points on a two-dimensional plane.

Different types of categorization produce different geometrical spaces, and reflect the different ways in which musicians over the centuries have understood music. This achievement, they expect, will allow researchers to analyze and understand music in much deeper and more satisfying ways.

The work represents a significant departure from other attempts to quantify music, according to Rachel Wells Hall of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. In an accompanying essay, she writes that their effort, "stands out both for the breadth of its musical implications and the depth of its mathematical content."

The method, according to its authors, allows them to analyze and compare many kinds of Western (and perhaps some non-Western) music. (The method focuses on Western-style music because concepts like "chord" are not universal in all styles.) It also incorporates many past schemes by music theorists to render music into mathematical form.

"The music of the spheres isn't really a metaphor -- some musical spaces really are spheres," said Tymoczko, an assistant professor of music at Princeton. "The whole point of making these geometric spaces is that, at the end of the day, it helps you understand music better. Having a powerful set of tools for conceptualizing music allows you to do all sorts of things you hadn't done before."

Like what?

"You could create new kinds of musical instruments or new kinds of toys," he said. "You could create new kinds of visualization tools -- imagine going to a classical music concert where the music was being translated visually. We could change the way we educate musicians. There are lots of practical consequences that could follow from these ideas."

"But to me," Tymoczko added, "the most satisfying aspect of this research is that we can now see that there is a logical structure linking many, many different musical concepts. To some extent, we can represent the history of music as a long process of exploring different symmetries and different geometries."

Understanding music, the authors write, is a process of discarding information. For instance, suppose a musician plays middle "C" on a piano, followed by the note "E" above that and the note "G" above that. Musicians have many different terms to describe this sequence of events, such as "an ascending C major arpeggio," "a C major chord," or "a major chord." The authors provide a unified mathematical framework for relating these different descriptions of the same musical event.

The trio describes five different ways of categorizing collections of notes that are similar, but not identical. They refer to these musical resemblances as the "OPTIC symmetries," with each letter of the word "OPTIC" representing a different way of ignoring musical information -- for instance, what octave the notes are in, their order, or how many times each note is repeated. The authors show that five symmetries can be combined with each other to produce a cornucopia of different musical concepts, some of which are familiar and some of which are novel.

In this way, the musicians are able to reduce musical works to their mathematical essence.

Once notes are translated into numbers and then translated again into the language of geometry the result is a rich menagerie of geometrical spaces, each inhabited by a different species of geometrical object. After all the mathematics is done, three-note chords end up on a triangular donut while chord types perch on the surface of a cone.

The broad effort follows upon earlier work by Tymoczko in which he developed geometric models for selected musical objects.

The method could help answer whether there are new scales and chords that exist but have yet to be discovered.

"Have Western composers already discovered the essential and most important musical objects?" Tymoczko asked. "If so, then Western music is more than just an arbitrary set of conventions. It may be that the basic objects of Western music are fantastically special, in which case it would be quite difficult to find alternatives to broadly traditional methods of musical organization."

The tools for analysis also offer the exciting possibility of investigating the differences between musical styles.

"Our methods are not so great at distinguishing Aerosmith from the Rolling Stones," Tymoczko said. "But they might allow you to visualize some of the differences between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. And they certainly help you understand more deeply how classical music relates to rock or is different from atonal music."

Hmmmmmm...

2008-04-11T00:22:00.000-07:00

Simple Tools Would Enhance Experience Of Bloggers, Blog Readers

ScienceDaily (Apr. 10, 2008) — In a first-of-its-kind study, UC Irvine researchers have provided new insight into blog readers' online habits and experiences, as well as how they perceive their roles in blog-based communities.

The research, led by Eric Baumer, doctoral candidate at UCI's Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences; Mark Sueyoshi, international studies and East Asian cultures undergraduate student; and Bill Tomlinson, informatics professor, is the first to focus primarily on blog reading. Previous studies about weblogs, or blogs, typically have centered on blog writers, largely overlooking those who go online to read, comment and participate.

A better understanding of the reader-blogger connection could lead to new, advanced features that would enable richer interactions between the two groups. For readers, an installed add-on could enrich their experience by tracking blog habits of which they might not be aware. For bloggers, a logging tool could help them easily distinguish between different types of readers and allow them to better connect with audiences.

The UCI study examined in-depth the blog-reading habits of 15 participants of various ages to determine how they consume content and interact with blogs and blog writers. The research found that some readers frequently post comments, while in others "lurk," or visit without commenting. Among the findings:

Readers have diverse opinions of what makes a blog a blog. Academic definitions generally refer to blogs as frequently modified Web pages with dated entries listed in reverse chronological order. But study participants identified a wide variety of characteristics in what they considered to be blogs. These included both technical aspects like RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and trackback links, as well as social aspects, including the presence of conversation or personal content.
Regular blog reading often becomes more habitual and less content oriented. Similar to e-mail checking, blog reading can become ingrained into users' online routine. Sometimes, even the usefulness of the blog content itself can be less vital than the activity of reading or skimming the blog to fulfill a person's particular routine.
The timing of a blog post is not nearly as relevant to readers as its position among the other entries. Readers are more likely to read the most recent posts at the top of the screen, and are generally less concerned with the exact age of a post. A vast majority of participants said they were not bothered when they were not able to read each and every blog post, challenging a common theory that users tend to feel overwhelmed by the need to remain constantly up to date.
Blog readers feel a responsibility to make insightful contributions. While past research noted readers expect bloggers to deliver frequent, high-quality posts, the UCI study found readers also place pressure on themselves to produce coherent, worthwhile comments in response to good blog posts.

"With the increased popularity of blogs, various tools like Blogger and Movable Type have made writing a blog easy for a wide audience," said Baumer, who studies informatics -- a discipline that focuses on the use of information technology in real-world settings. "But, until the technology embraces the role of the audience, the full social potential of blogging remains untapped.

"One of the goals of this research is to stimulate the development of tools to foster that social potential in terms of both readers and bloggers."

The researchers hope their work will prompt further studies about the roles of blog readers and how features such as commenting and linking create new ways to interact with authors and text.

This potential change in research approach would be similar to a shift that occurred in literary theory in the 1960s and 1970s, when scholars began taking into account readers' responses when studying literature.

"This study is really just the beginning," said Tomlinson, an ICS professor and affiliate of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. "With the rapid expansion of online social media such as Flickr and YouTube, understanding how people consume these media will be vital to understanding their broader social impacts."

April (meteor) Showers

2008-04-07T05:20:00.000-07:00

Star Gazing? The Moon Meets The Pleiades, And Saturn Will Be Beautiful In April

Saturn will be high in the southeast as darkness falls on April evenings, one of the first "stars" to appear and a fine sight in any telescope. (Credit: Voyager 2, NASA)

ScienceDaily (Apr. 1, 2008) — The Pleiades star cluster will have a beautiful encounter with the slender moon in the western sky after sunset on April 8. Usually the moon's brightness overpowers nearby stars, but not when it's such a thin crescent. Binoculars will reveal the spectacle as the moon passes just below the famous Seven Sisters.

The Pleiades (pronounced PLEE-ah-deez) are lovely by themselves, and on a clear night they can be seen with the unaided eye in the constellation Taurus the Bull. Known prehistorically, the cluster is identified as a group of women in many cultures around the world, from Australian Aborigine to Native American.

Saturn will be high in the southeast as darkness falls on April evenings, one of the first "stars" to appear and a fine sight in any telescope. It will be visible much of the night in the constellation Leo the Lion, near Leo's brightest star, Regulus. Saturn's rings will open slightly during April, but they will be nearly edge-on and invisible to us by the end of the year. Titan, Saturn's largest moon, will be due south of the planet on April 2 and 18 and due north on April 10 and 26.

Jupiter will rise around 3 a.m. local daylight time at the beginning of April and two hours earlier by month's end. Wait until the brilliant white object is high in the southern sky and then use binoculars to see its four largest moons, which Galileo discovered with one of the first telescopes. These tiny bits of white light are strung out in a straight line on both sides of Jupiter, and they seem to slide back and forth along the line from one night to the next as they orbit the planet. You may need to steady your binoculars by resting your elbows on a surface to keep the image from wobbling. The only times you won't see all four moons are when one or more are crossing in front of the planet or behind it.

Mars will be conspicuous during April, glowing bright orange high in the west after dark as it passes through the stars of the constellation Gemini the Twins. This will be a good chance to compare the similar colors of Mars and the bright star Pollux as they draw closer. Binoculars will make the colors stand out.

Mercury will be lost in the sun's glare during most of April for observers in the Northern Hemisphere. By month's end, it will appear below the Pleiades star cluster low in the west-northwest half an hour after sunset. Those in the Southern Hemisphere will be able to see the small planet in early morning twilight for the first half of the month.

Starting in April, Venus will be hidden in the glare of the sun for an unusually long time for observers in the Northern Hemisphere. The brilliant planet will be on the far side of the sun from us as it moves from morning to evening twilight. Not until July will Venus again be visible near the western horizon. Seen from the Southern Hemisphere, Venus will rise 90 minutes before the sun and be conspicuous in the morning sky.

Light pollution

A great deal of energy and money is wasted on inefficient, improperly directed outdoor lighting. To help call attention to this problem of light pollution, the International Dark-Sky Association is encouraging people in the United States to turn off unnecessary outside lighting during National Dark-Sky Week, which lasts until April 4.

Meteor shower

The Lyrid meteor shower will peak on the night of April 21-22. About 20 Lyrids per hour are normally visible after midnight, but this year the full moon's glare will hide the fainter ones. To minimize this effect, try watching from a place where the moon is blocked by a building or trees. The meteors can appear anywhere in the sky, but they will seem to come from a point called the radiant in the constellation Lyra the Harp, which gives the shower its name. Lyra's bright white star Vega will be almost at the radiant, and the meteor count should be highest when Vega is well above the eastern horizon, beginning around midnight local time in the Northern Hemisphere and lasting the rest of the night. The later the hour, the more meteors there will be.

Summer Triangle

Spring weather can be fickle, but a reliable sign that the seasons are changing is the appearance of a trio of bright white stars called the Summer Triangle. Vega will be the first to rise each night in the east, leading the way high across the sky. The other stars are Altair in the constellation Aquila the Eagle to the south and Deneb in the constellation Cygnus the Swan to the north. When you are looking from Deneb to Altair, you are also looking at the Milky Way, though it's usually obscured by city lights. If you find a place dark enough for you to see the Milky Way, keep the location in mind -- you'll also see a lot more meteors and other celestial objects from there.

Moon phases

The moon will be new on April 5, at first quarter on April 12, full on April 20 and at third quarter on April 28.

Planet Viewing in April

2008-03-31T15:26:00.000-07:00

April 2008

April showers may bring May flowers, but they also bring clear nights for skywatching. Rain showers clear the air of pollution, pollen, and other particles that can make the sky look murky. And at this time of year, the showers often are generated by cold fronts that keep the air clear and stable. With the combination of moderate temperatures, that makes April nights some of the best of the year for skywatching. Take advantage of them to look for such spring stalwarts as Leo and Virgo. The planet Saturn is in view most of the night, while Jupiter and Venus highlight the pre-dawn hours.

Huge Meteorite Impact Found In UK

2008-03-31T06:30:00.000-07:00

Huge Meteorite Impact Found In UK -- Britain's Largest

If there had been human observers in Scotland 1.2 billion years ago they would have seen quite a show. (Credit: Image courtesy of University Of Oxford)

ScienceDaily (Mar. 31, 2008) — Evidence of the biggest meteorite ever to hit the British Isles has been found by scientists from the University of Oxford and the University of Aberdeen. The scientists believe that a large meteorite hit northwest Scotland about 1.2 billion years ago near the Scottish town of Ullapool.

Previously it was thought that unusual rock formations in the area had been formed by volcanic activity. But the team report in the journal Geology that they found evidence buried in a layer of rock which they now believe is the ejected material thrown out during the formation of a meteorite crater. Ejected material from the huge meteorite strike is scattered over an area about 50 kilometres across, roughly centred on the northern Scottish town of Ullapool.

Ken Amor of Oxford University’s Department of Earth Sciences, co-author on the Geology paper, said: ‘Chemical testing of the rocks found the characteristic signature of meteoritic material, which has high levels of the key element iridium, normally only found in low concentrations in surface rocks on Earth. We found more evidence when we examined the rocks under a microscope; tell-tale microscopic parallel fractures that also imply a meteorite strike.’

The proposed volcanic origin for the rock formations has always been a puzzle as there are no volcanic vents or other volcanic sediments nearby. Scientists took samples from the formations during fieldwork in 2006 and have just had their findings published.

Professor John Parnell, Head of Geology & Petroleum Geology at the University of Aberdeen, also a co-author on the paper, said: ‘These rocks are superbly displayed on the west coast of Scotland, and visited by numerous student parties each year. We’re very lucky to have them available for study, as they can tell us much about how planetary surfaces, including Mars, become modified by large meteorite strikes. Building up the evidence has been painstaking, but has resulted in proof of the largest meteorite strike known in the British Isles.’

‘If there had been human observers in Scotland 1.2 billion years ago they would have seen quite a show,’ commented Oxford University’s Ken Amor. ‘The massive impact would have melted rocks and thrown up an enormous cloud of vapour that scattered material over a large part of the region around Ullapool. The crater was rapidly buried by sandstone which helped to preserve the evidence.’

Scott Thackrey, a PhD student at the University of Aberdeen, and also co-author of the paper, said: ‘The type of ejected deposit discovered in North West Scotland is only observed on planets and satellites that possess a volatile rich subsurface, for example, Venus, Mars and Earth. Due to the rare nature of these deposits, each new discovery provides revelations in terms of the atmospheric and surface processes that occur round craters just after impact.’

Since the formation of the solar system leftover space material has collided regularly with the Earth and other planets. Some of these impacts are large enough to leave craters, and there are about 174 known craters or their remnants on Earth.

Oxford’s Ken Amor said: ‘This is the most spectacular evidence for a meteorite impact within the British Isles found to date, and what we have discovered about this meteorite strike could help us to understand the ancient impacts that shaped the surface of other planets, such as Mars.’

Adapted from materials provided by University Of Oxford.

StarDate March 26, 2008

2008-03-25T16:31:00.000-07:00

Antares, the brightest star of the constellation Scorpius, the scorpion, rises after midnight tonight, just a whisker away from the Moon. At their closest, they will be separated by about one degree, which is less than the width of a finger at arm’s length. The two remain huddled together as they scoot low across the south later on.

The Who

2008-03-21T18:12:00.000-07:00

Last night I watched the dvd of 'The Kids Are Alright' plus bonus disc which I'd rented from Netflix. The best special feature has to be the isolated track of John Entwhistle playing on 'Won't Get Fooled Again'. You really get to see his genius at work.

In a Q&A with Daltrey, he reveals that Keith Moon bribed the piro guy on the Smothers Brothers show so that the bomb inside the bass drum wasn't some decorative little pop, but instead went off with the force of a hand grenade, knocking Roger off his feet, embedding shrapnel in Keith's arm, setting Pete's hair on fire, scaring Bette Davis waiting in the wings so that she passed out cold while Mickey Rooney jumped up and down screaming for more!

Fury at BBC's English history of Scotland

2008-03-11T10:25:00.000-07:00

http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/Fury-at-BBC39s-English-history.3862893.jp

Fury at BBC's English history of Scotland

Scotland’s crown jewels are the oldest sovereign regalia in the United Kingdom

By Tim Cornwell
Arts Correspondent

IT WAS hailed by BBC Scotland as one of its most ambitious projects ever. But already the ten-part series A History of Scotland has run into controversy, with a second senior Scottish historian publicly attacking the programme.
Professor Allan Macinnes told The Scotsman that he had resigned from the series' advisory board after its first meeting in November.

"I thought the whole production was dreadful," he said.

"The first provisional script I got was so Anglo-centric I couldn't believe it," Prof Macinnes said. "It was written on the basis as if Scotland was a divided country until the Union (with England] came along and civilised it. I felt it was just nonsense."

A History of Scotland's advisory board, which includes leading historians, agencies such as Historic Scotland and a history teachers' representative, meets for a second time this week.

But last week Professor Tom Devine, perhaps Scotland's best-known historian, revealed he had turned down the offer of a place on the board. While saying he "warmly welcomed" the show, he complained of an "old-fashioned" approach to Scottish history and the choice of archeologist Neil Oliver as presenter.

The programme is due on screen next November, with the first five parts ending with the Act of Union in 1707. It is the keystone of a "multi-platform" project from BBC Scotland, called Scotland's History. It includes linked live concerts from historic locations, and radio and website programming aimed at "bringing the country's history to life".

But the first script, Prof Macinnes said, was "very traditionalist", full of kings and queens. "Everything was written from the point of view of England and Scotland, as if Scotland didn't have any relations with any other country."

Mr Macinnes is a professor of early modern history at Strathclyde University, a published author and expert on the period up to and including the Union of the Crowns. He said another reason he resigned was the programme makers expected his time for free. "They seem to regard working for the BBC as an unpaid honour."

He conceded that the programme's second script might have changed,

but complained of an "awful phrase": "Scotland was a divided nation". He said: "At the time, England was divided, France was divided, Germany didn't even exist. I would like to see it put Scotland in its wider European context. You don't need to look at England all the time."

BBC Scotland said: "The whole point of the advisory group is to look at the bigger picture, and we have been very much working with them and taking on board their suggestions.

"No scripts as such have been issued. Early drafts are always open to discussion and differing interpretations."

Another top Scottish historian, Jenny Wormald, remains on the panel. She said: "I had my own worries: for example, I didn't want too much made of Robert the Bruce, because I wanted Scottish history to be made of more than our great heroes. I didn't win on that one."

EXPERT WITH AN INDIVIDUAL VIEW OF NATION'S PAST

PROFESSOR Allan Macinnes worked at the universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen before his appointment as professor of early modern history at Strathclyde University.

He has written on the history of the Highlands, including Scottish Jacobitism and the Highland clans. His book, Union and Empire: the Making of the United Kingdom in 1707, was published last year by Cambridge University Press, which called it a "major new interpretation" of the Act of Union in a "broad European and colonial context". Professor Macinnes was among a group of historians who lobbied the Scottish Parliament to commemorate officially the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union last January. He argues that Scottish politicians who negotiated the Treaty of Union were not "a parcel of rogues bought for English gold", but politically inept negotiators.

The full article contains 644 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
Last Updated: 10 March 2008 9:54 PM

I'm a VERY naughty Dalek :(

2008-03-06T07:01:00.000-08:00

Have you ever been put in your place by an angry Scot? It's a memorable experience believe me. Suffice it to say, something that was supposed to be a secret, which I didn't realize was a secret, is not so secret anymore.

Nothing death defying or life threatening, or even particularly revealing, unless you're a Scottish Dalek builder amongst equally obsessed British Dalek builders, and then it becomes a faux pas of Biblical proportions.

"So, they have returned to their creator. Like an errant child, they have come home once more. But this time, they shall not abuse me. This time, I shall take my rightful place as their supreme being! And, under my control, the Daleks shall once more become triumphant!"

Once again, apologies to Daddy Davros from your Little Orphan Android!

StarDate March 5, 2008

2008-03-04T19:04:00.000-08:00

The stars shine with all the hues of a rainbow: blue, white, yellow, orange, and red. The hotter the star, the bluer its surface. For some examples, look for blue-white Spica in the east in early evening, and orange Aldebaran in the west.

StarDate March 2, 2008

2008-03-02T10:31:00.000-08:00

If you’re out early tomorrow, look toward the southeast for a beautiful pairing: the crescent Moon and the planet Jupiter. They are low in the sky at first light. Jupiter looks like a brilliant ivory-colored star just above or to the upper right of the Moon.

StarDate February 29, 2008

2008-02-28T19:33:00.000-08:00

Today is Leap Day, an extra day added every four years to keep the calendar in sync with the seasons. It was created when Julius Caesar ordered an overhaul of the calendar more than two millennia ago. Later, the calendar was fine tuned by omitting three leap days every 400 years.

Antares, the "heart" of Scorpius, stands above the Moon as they rise in the early morning. They are in the south at first light.

Jupiter is low in the southeast early tomorrow. The planet looks like a brilliant star to the upper right of the Moon. Through binoculars, four of its big moons look like tiny stars flanking the planet, aligned roughly along the line between Jupiter and the Moon.

Welcome tae the Scuil Wab

http://www.scuilwab.org.uk/index.htm

Parliamo Scots?

http://www.rampantscotland.com/parliamo/blparliamo_index.htm

follow-up

2008-02-25T02:59:00.000-08:00

Well found ! As I see it, there is a language called Scots, and within it, there are the dialects of Doric, and Lallans. Now, I was brought up with Lallans, but I also understand Doric, and they are very different dialects, and in the "old" days, one was unintelligible to the other. In amongst all this, there was the language I call Scots, I am not in any way an expert, I only know what I've heard, and all 3 are different. There is a problem with people who don't seem to know this. All the dialects and language are mainly lowland, the Highlander spoke Gaelic, and English only came in after the Clearances, when the Gaelic was banned, and it was said that the Highlander spoke the "best" English, as they were taught by the occupying English, and many people think that even the Highlander spoke "Broad Scots" but they didn't, and still don't, and they don't understand Doric, anymore than a Borderer does! by the same token, they don't understand Lallans either, they do however understand Scots, but they often got the grammar wrong There is a story told in Newtonmore, of an old woman who lived at Strathmashie, who kept her cow across the road from her croft, the Prince of Wales was visiting at the time ( Victoria's son !!! ) and when she was asked if she had been moving her cow when he passed, said she was, and on being asked if she had spoken to him, answered "Yes, said I to he, is you the Prince ? Said he to me, I is " and she thought that she was speaking "good" English, she wasn't a stupid woman, but English was her second language, and she was inclined to translate, in her mind, before speaking. Now I don't know who has set up this site, but I hope he has it right, and understands the differences.

- Luna (Scottish History Forum)

A Scots-language version of Wikipedia

2008-02-24T12:30:00.000-08:00

http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/Scots-finds-home-on-gey.3809981.jp

Scots finds home on gey muckle website
By Marc Horne

AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA in the language of Rabbie Burns is now available at the click o' a moose.
A Scots-language version of Wikipedia has already attracted more than 2,200 entries on subjects as diverse as "airchaeology" and "sodgerin".

The English-language edition of the free online encyclopaedia has become one of the great success stories of the internet age with more than two million contributions.

Scots enthusiasts, already buoyed by the SNP's decision to add the "mither tongue" to the school curriculum, have hailed the site as another shot in the arm for the long-neglected language.

But the Scots Wikipedia has also been ridiculed as an embarrassing parody of the language used by Sir Walter Scott and Hugh MacDiarmid.

The site – which claims to be the first encyclopaedia in the Scots leid, or language – has already attracted more articles than longer-established sites in the Maori and Kashmiri languages.

But the site's "leet o' weel kent Scots fowk" features just 13 individuals and there is no room yet for icons such as Robert the Bruce, John Logie Baird, Alexander Graham Bell, Alexander Fleming, Robert Louis Stevenson, David Hume and Adam Smith. Modern-day names such as Sir Sean Connery, Alex Salmond, Gordon Brown and Ewan McGregor are also absent.

Instead, alongside Burns and William Wallace, there are entries for GMTV presenter Jenni Falconer: "She haes forbye presentit the ITV traivel shaw How to Holiday"; Gail Porter, who shot to fame because of a "gey muckle FHM photie on the Hooses o Pairlament wi aa her claes aff"; and Oor Wullie, "a loun that sits on a bucket wi a moose cried Jeemy".

One of biggest entries is for Glasgow Airport attack hero John Smeaton who gets more than 200 words compared with just 70 for Wallace. Smeaton's entry states: "He became inrowed in coonterin a failt terrorist bellum on the airport."

Other subjects covered in the Scots Wikipedia include "airchitectur". "the airts", "eddication", "releegion", "ingineerin" and "pheesics".

Dr Chris Robinson, director of the Dictionary of the Scots Language, was delighted by the increasing numbers of people visiting the site. "What is particularly encouraging is that it gets people accustomed to reading a huge range of different things in Scots and not just literature," she said.

"The fact it is doing well gives a lie to all those people who decry Scots and try to do it down."

But Robinson conceded that attempting to create universal spellings for Scots words could be a "minefield". "It is a very difficult job to come up with one spelling that doesn't alienate half of the country," she said.

Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday's literary editor, felt the site failed to do justice to the rich heritage of Scots.

He said: "I don't think anyone nowadays considers Scots as slang or 'incorrect English'. However, this seems convoluted at best, and an absolute parody at worst.

"The great tradition of Douglas, Burns, Scott and MacDiarmid means more than just altering the vowels and dropping the g from present participles."

Ted Brocklebank, culture spokesman for the Scottish Tories, felt attempts to create a universal Scots language were contrived and doomed to failure.

He said: "There are a number of rich variations of the English language spoken in Scotland, from Doric in the north-east, to Lallans in the Borders and the Nordic Scots of Orkney and Shetland. But none of them qualify as languages in their own right.

"This website appears to be a cheap attempt at creating a language. Simply taking an English word and giving it a Scots phonetic does not make it into a Scots word."

Language or dialect?

The use and status of Scots has caused numerous stooshies – or rows – over the centuries.

Originating in Denmark, Scots is related to the language of the Angles who invaded the no
rth of England in the fifth century and used words like hoose, coo and stane.

Scots is also influenced by the culture of the Vikings, whose language, Norse, contained words like greet, muckle and midden.

Scots was brought to Scotland in the 12th century by the English servants of Norman lords. In 1603, the accession of James VI of Scotland to the throne of England signalled the end of Scots' official status in favour of its southern sister language, English.

Critics have long argued that Scots is at best a dialect and at worst a poor version of English.

Ted Brocklebank, of the Scottish Conservatives, said: "We have dialects of English such as Doric and Lallans, which are very rich, but they are not separate languages."

But Rob Gibson, an SNP MSP, disagreed, saying: "It produces internationally recognised literature and inspires our understanding of past literature."

The full article contains 790 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.

Last Updated: 23 February 2008 7:16 PM

Lunar Eclipse

2008-02-21T02:41:00.000-08:00

A ghealach lan
Rothar ban
Geal, airgid, agus glan
Eirigh suas annsa speur
Dearg, or, ban, is gearr

Oh Moon full
Wheel white
Bright, silver, and clean
Rise up in the sky
Scarlet, golden, fair and sharp

Brian (Scottish History Forum)

StarDate Februaury 20, 2008

2008-02-20T02:37:00.000-08:00

The Moon, Sun, and Earth will create a total lunar eclipse tonight. It begins at 7:43 p.m. CST, when the Moon first touches the dark inner portion of the shadow. The Moon will be completely immersed in the shadow, starting the total eclipse, by around 9 p.m. Regulus, the "heart" of Leo, the lion, is to the upper right of the Moon during the evening, with golden Saturn to the lower left.

StarDate February 19, 2008

2008-02-19T04:43:00.000-08:00

The full Moon will put on quite a show tomorrow night as it passes through Earth's shadow, creating a total lunar eclipse. The full Moon occurs in the middle of the eclipse. The full Moon of February is known as the Snow Moon, Hunger Moon, or Wolf Moon.

StarDate February 14, 2008

2008-02-14T08:29:00.000-08:00

Symbols of love and war highlight tonight's sky: the Moon and Mars. They are high overhead at nightfall. Mars looks like a bright orange star east of the Moon. In Greek mythology, the Moon represented a goddess who figured into many love stories, while Mars was the war god.

"...give birth to a dancing star."

2008-02-13T12:29:00.000-08:00

Young Stars In Their Baby Blanket Of Dust

(gorgeous pic!) http://www.sciencedaily.com/images/2008/02/080212142525.jpg

Newborn stars peek out from beneath their natal blanket of dust in this dynamic image of the Rho Ophiuchi dark cloud from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA)

ScienceDaily (Feb. 12, 2008) — Newborn stars peek out from beneath their natal blanket of dust in a new dynamic image of the Rho Ophiuchi dark cloud from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Called "Rho Oph" by astronomers, it's one of the closest star-forming regions to our own solar system. Located near the constellations Scorpius and Ophiuchus, the nebula is about 407 light years away from Earth.

Rho Oph is a complex made up of a large main cloud of molecular hydrogen, a key molecule allowing new stars to form from cold cosmic gas, with two long streamers trailing off in different directions. Recent studies using the latest X-ray and infrared observations reveal more than 300 young stellar objects within the large central cloud. Their median age is only 300,000 years, very young compared to some of the universe's oldest stars, which are more than 12 billion years old.

This false-color image of Rho Oph's main cloud, Lynds 1688, was created with data from Spitzer's infrared array camera, which has the highest spatial resolution of Spitzer's three imaging instruments, and its multiband imaging photometer, best for detecting cooler materials. Blue represents 3.6-micron light; green shows light of 8 microns; and red is 24-micron light. The multiple wavelengths reveal different aspects of the dust surrounding and between the embedded stars, yielding information about the stars and their birthplace.

The colors in this image reflect the relative temperatures and evolutionary states of the various stars. The youngest stars are surrounded by dusty disks of gas from which they, and their potential planetary systems, are forming. These young disk systems show up as red in this image. Some of these young stellar objects are surrounded by their own compact nebulae. More evolved stars, which have shed their natal material, are blue.

The extended white nebula in the center right of the image is a region of the cloud which is glowing in infrared light due to the heating of dust by bright young stars near the right edge of the cloud. Fainter multi-hued diffuse emission fills the image. The color of the nebulosity depends on the temperature, composition and size of the dust grains. Most of the stars forming now are concentrated in a filament of cold, dense gas that shows up as a dark cloud in the lower center and left side of the image against the bright background of the warm dust. Although infrared radiation at 24 microns pierces through dust easily, this dark filament is incredibly opaque, appearing dark even at the longest wavelengths in the image.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

Spitzer's infrared array camera was built by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The instrument's principal investigator is Giovanni Fazio of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The multiband imaging photometer for Spitzer was built by Ball Aerospace Corporation, Boulder, Colo.; the University of Arizona; and Boeing North American, Canoga Park, Calif. Its principal investigator is George Rieke of the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Adapted from materials provided by National Aeronautics And Space Administration.

song to The White Stag

2008-02-12T17:08:00.000-08:00

De'n Ghaidhealtachd
(Highland Stag)

Th' am fiadh geal
Caol ged trean
Ag ruith tharais
Beann is gleann.

A bheist uasal!
A bheil cuimhn' agad
an aois sean fada
De Ghaidhealtachd?

The bright deer
Is running,
Sleek yet strong
Over mountain and glen

Oh! noble beast!
Do you remember,
The long ancient age
Of the Highlands?

- Brian (Scottish History Forums)

StarDate February 11, 2008

2008-02-11T13:37:00.000-08:00

Capella, the brightest star in Auriga, the charioteer, stands low in the northwest late this evening. At the same time, Arcturus, in Bootes, the herdsman, is climbing into view in the east. Arcturus is the fourth-brightest star system in the night sky, while Capella ranks sixth. Both look yellow-orange.

http://stardate.org/nightsky/weekly.php

out of the mist

2008-02-11T13:35:00.000-08:00

White stag like a ghost among the heather

IT IS like a ghost fleeting among the heather, a beast of myth whose precise location must be protected from those who would do him harm.

The white stag, an animal of such rarity that it was revered by the ancient Celts as a messenger from the afterlife, has been seen on the west coast of Scotland.

These exclusive pictures show the rare beast grazing quietly among young red stags, unaware of his celebrity status as the only known example in Britain.

The animal was spotted during a recent field trip by Fran Lockhard, the partnership manager with the John Muir Trust, who photographed and filmed the white stag.

"It was amazing to crawl up so close to such a magnificent looking animal," she said. "He looked almost ghost-like next to the group of young red stags that he was mixing with. I am thrilled to know that there is a white stag roaming free out there in the Scottish Highlands. We will be watching this animal with interest, particularly as he will be reaching his full potential in the next couple of years."

The exact location of the sighting is being kept a secret for fear of putting the animal at risk from bounty hunters. The last-recorded wild white stag in Britain was shot by poachers in October last year on the border between Devon and Cornwall.

It was decapitated and its 300lb carcase found hanging from a tree. It is thought the stag's head, along with its antlers, had been claimed as a trophy and could be mounted and possibly sold for thousands of pounds.

White deer are often mistakenly thought to be albinos, but their unusual condition is caused by leucism, a rare genetic pattern that causes a reduction in the pigment in the animal's hair and skin. Unlike albinos who have characteristically red eyes, deer with leucism have normal colouring in their eyes.

A spokesman for the Deer Commission for Scotland said: "White red deer are rare, but not unheard of."

IT'LL BE ALL WHITE ON THE NIGHT

WHITE deer are potent figures in the mythology of many cultures and it is said to be very bad luck to kill one.

The Celts considered them to be messengers from the other world. They are closely identified with unicorns and their appearance is said to herald some profound change in the lives of those who encounter them.

In the Chronicles of Narnia, the White Stag is fabled to grant wishes to whoever catches him. There is a Scottish dance called The White Stag of Arran and, according to local tradition, a white stag is said to appear near Brodick Castle when one of the Hamilton chiefs dies to herald him to the other side.

Video at http://news.scotsman.com/video.aspx?VideoPath=SCOT/whitestag.wmv&VideoID=13033&ArticleID=3763034

StarDate February 10, 2008

2008-02-10T09:58:00.001-08:00

Hydra, the water snake, slithers across the south tonight. It is so big that it takes more than seven hours for the whole snake to rise. The stars that mark its head rise in late afternoon, while its tail won't clear the southeastern horizon until after midnight.

Free Will

2008-02-09T14:03:00.000-08:00

Destined To Cheat? New Research Finds Free Will Can Keep Us Honest

ScienceDaily (Feb. 1, 2008) — With the start of the New Year millions of Americans have resolved to lie less, cheat less, put the holiday hangovers behind them, or otherwise better their lives. Some will moderate their bad habits; others may make significant changes and become shining examples of integrity. But most of those well-intended New Year’s resolutions are destined to fail. In an age where cheating scandals plague elite universities and major corporations are brought down by unethical actions, the debate about the origins and nature of our decisions play into a larger debate about genetic determinism and free will.

It is well established that changing people’s sense of responsibility can change their behavior. But what would happen if people came to believe that their behavior was the inevitable product of a causal chain beyond their control -- a predetermined fate beyond the reach of free will?

Surprisingly, the link between fatalistic beliefs and unethical behavior has never been examined scientifically -- until now. In two recent experiments, psychologists Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler of the University of British Columbia decided to explore this knotty philosophical issue in the lab, and they figured out an innovative way to do it.

Vohs and Schooler set out to see if otherwise honest people would cheat and lie if their beliefs in free will were manipulated.

The psychologists gave college students a mathematics exam. The math problems appeared on a computer screen, and the subjects were told that a computer glitch would cause the answers to appear on the screen as well. To prevent the answers from showing up, the students had to hit the space bar as soon as the problems appeared.

In fact, the scientists were observing to see if the participants surreptitiously used the answers instead of solving the problems honestly on their own. Prior to the math test, Vohs and Schooler used a well-established method to prime the subjects' beliefs regarding free will: some of the students were taught that science disproves the notion of free will and that the illusion of free will was a mere artifact of the brain's biochemistry whereas others got no such indoctrination.

The results were clear: those with weaker convictions about their power to control their own destiny were more apt to cheat when given the opportunity as compared to those whose beliefs about controlling their own lives were left untouched.

Vohs and Schooler then went a step further to see if they could get people to cheat with unmistakable intention and effort. In a second study, the experimenters set up a different deception: they had the subjects take a very difficult cognitive test. Then, the subjects solved a series of problems without supervision and scored themselves. They also "rewarded" themselves $1 for each correct answer; in order to collect, they had to walk across the room and help themselves to money in a manila envelope.

The psychologists had previously primed the participants to have their beliefs in free will bolstered or reduced by having them read statements supporting a deterministic stance of human behavior. And the results were just as robust. As reported in the January issue of Psychological Science, this study shows that those with a stronger belief in their own free will were less apt to steal money than were those with a weakened belief.

Although the results of this study point to a significant value in believing that free will exists, it clearly raises some significant societal questions about personal beliefs and personal behavior.

Adapted from materials provided by Association for Psychological Science.

U2

2008-02-09T11:46:00.000-08:00

I had the following email exchange with a friend:

Dear Cindy,

It's a bit late in the game, but I have recently discovered the wonders of U2!

My brother gave me a $15 gift card to Barnes & Noble for Christmas. Is there a 'Best Of' album that I should get first?

I bow to your expertise.

:)Shelley

As well you should!!!

First things first...you MUST get Joshua Tree. If you do not have it, stop reading now and go buy it!! It's a "what would you take to a desser island" type of thing. There are two Best of CD's. The first is the one you should start with...Best of 1980 - 1990...the other is Best of 1990 - 2000. Rattle and Hum is excellent, as is All that You Can't Leave Behind. One word of warning...DO NOT BUY "POP"!!! It was the mistake album! :o)

TTFN...Cindy

.......

Anyone want to add to that?

quote

2008-02-09T10:47:00.001-08:00

"There are no unnatural or supernatural phenomena, only very large gaps in our knowledge of what is natural... We should strive to fill those gaps of ignorance."

-Astronaut, Edgar Mitchell

tip-toeing through Jung

2008-02-09T10:46:00.001-08:00

Books by or about Carl Jung, the chief promoter of psychological alchemy, can be very heavy going because there's so much theory involved. To cut to the chase for practical, useful, and illuminating application, I heartily endorse the three that I own by Robert A. Johnson:

'WE: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love'

- Very Celtic. Examines the saga of Tristan & Iseult as a harbinger of our Western culture's ongoing confusion about what makes a lasting love relationship.

'SHE: Understanding Feminine Psychology'

- Examines a woman's inner growth through the allegory of Eros & Psyche. A real eye opener for me!

'Owning Your Own Shadow'

- How to come to terms with the bits of you that you don't want to admit are there

He has more besides. The readers' reviews at Amazon were very helpful.

a poem

2008-02-09T10:44:00.000-08:00

Art & Alchemy

Art;
Intention made manifest through alchemy,
By unifying the higher and lower self,
Marrying seen and unseen worlds,
The impossible yielding to infinite possibilities

- Ray Lucero

A Dabbler's Alchemy

2008-02-09T10:43:00.001-08:00

I first encountered the word 'alchemy' in the big "How and Why Wonderbook of Chemistry" that my father gave me for Christmas when I was 5. It typified all alchemists as charlatons and/or fools who left behind a lot of useful symbols and not much else.

In the last few years, having encountered the word again in its
symbolic usage by Carl Jung, I was surprised to discover that there are still practicing alchemists, replicating the detailed and often tediously complicated experiments out of pre-chemistry's deep dark
past.

Most seem to be focused on creating synthesized color suspensions that neither fade nor separate. Other's have tried another tact, investigating etheric flower remedies or aromatherapy with an eye toward the alchemical principles of balance and harmony.

For fun, and I mean STRICTLY for fun (no claims here) I came up with a schedule of herbal tea infusions that complement the color that is assigned to each day by the alchemists:

Sunday, Golden-Yellow, Lemon

Monday, White, Apple-Chamomile

Tuesday, Red, Strawberry or Celestial Seasonings Moroccan Pomegranate Red Rooibos Tea

Wednesday, Orange, Peach

Thursday, Blue, Blueberry

Friday, Green, Mint

Saturday, Purple, Blackberry

I put a teabag in a cold glass of water, wait 20 minutes, and then sip my sugar-free beverage, certain of ingesting a few anti-oxidants, and contemplating the mystery of nature, which I hope will never be completely unraveled.

StarDate February 9, 2008

2008-02-09T05:11:00.000-08:00

The Rosette Nebula, a large cloud of interstellar gas and dust, stands almost due east of Betelgeuse, the bright orange star at the northeastern corner of Orion. Good binoculars or a telescope reveal a score of stars in a cluster at the nebula's center.

Clam 'Chowdah'

2008-02-06T11:47:00.000-08:00

History of Manhattan Clam Chowder

http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/Chowder/ManhattanChowder.htm

New Yorker's insist on tomatoes in their chowder and call it Manhattan clam chowder. Cookbook writer and chef James Beard (1903-1985) described Manhattan clam chowder as: ". . . that rather horrendous soup called Manhattan clam chowder. . . resembles a vegetable soup soup that accidentally had some clams dumped into it."

Tomato-based clam chowders came about with the new-found popularity of the tomato in the mid-1800s and the large population of Italians in New York and the Portuguese fishing communities of Rhode Island. By the 1930s, this tomato version had come to be called Manhattan clam chowder.

In February 1939, a bill was introduced by Assemblyman Seeder to the Maine legislature to make it a statutory and culinary offense to put tomatoes into chowder.

(recipes for a tomato based chowder are found at the above link)

...but for the Real Thang -

Recipe: The Cliff House Clam Chowder from The Cliff House in Ogunquit, Maine

http://gonewengland.about.com/od/morerecipes/r/recclfhschowder.htm

The Cliff House Clam Chowder has been on the menu since 1872. From The Cliff House in Ogunquit, Maine. Reprinted with permission.

Serves six.
INGREDIENTS:

* 1 slice hickory-smoked bacon, minced
* 1/2 teaspoon butter
* 1 cup onion, minced
* 1 medium garlic clove, minced
* 1 teaspoon The Cliff House Spice Blend (see below)
* 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
* 1 can clams (6-1/2 ounces)
* 1 cup bottled clam juice
* 1-1/2 cups Half and Half
* 1/4 teaspoon white pepper
* 2 medium potatoes, boiled, peeled and diced

PREPARATION:
To Create The Cliff House Spice Blend, blend 4 tsps oregano, 4 tsps dried parsley, 2 tsps marjoram, 2 tsps dill, 4 tsps thyme, 4 tsps basil, 1 tsp sage, 4 tsps rosemary, 2 tsps tarragon, 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour, crushing in a mortar if possible. Store in a resealable plastic bag to refrigerate.

In a heavy-bottomed, 4-pint soup kettle, sauté bacon, butter, onion, garlic and The Cliff House Spice Blend over low heat. Do not allow to brown. Drain clams and set aside, reserving the juice. Slowly stir the flour and clam juices in the sauté mixture. Bring to a boil; reduce heat. Add Half and Half and simmer 20 minutes. Add white pepper, potatoes and clams. Heat to serving temperature. Do not allow to boil, as this toughens the clams. Serve at once with crackers and warm cornbread.

Sting Writes (4th excerpt)...

2008-02-06T05:58:00.000-08:00

(heard this song on the way home, so thought I'd add the story too...)

"In England our house is surrounded by barley fields, and in the summer it's fascinating to watch the wind moving over the shimmering surface, like waves on an ocean of gold.
There's something sexy about this sight, something primal, as if the wind were making love to the barley. Lovers have made promises here, I'm sure, their bonds strengthened by the comforting cycle of the seasons."

Fields of Gold

You'll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You'll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we walk in the fields of gold

So she took her love
For to gaze awhile
Upon the fields of barley
In his arms she fell as her hair came down
Among the fields of gold

Will you stay with me, will you be my love
Among the fields of barley
We'll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we lie in the fields of gold

See the west wind move like a lover so
Upon the fields of barley
Feel her body rise when you kiss her mouth
Among the fields of gold
I never made promises lightly
And there have been some that I've broken
But I swear in the days still left
We'll walk in the fields of gold
We'll walk in the fields of gold

Many years have passed since those summer days
Among the fields of barley
See the children run as the sun goes down
Among the fields of gold
You'll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You can tell the sun in his jealous sky
When we walked in the fields of gold
When we walked in the fields of gold
When we walked in the fields of gold

Sting Writes (3rd excerpt)...

2008-02-06T05:57:00.000-08:00

"I was sitting moping under a tree in the garden, and as the sun was sinking toward the western horizon, I noticed that there was a lot of sunspot activity.
I turned to Trudie. "There's a little black spot on the sun today."
She waited expectantly, not really indulging my mood, but tolerant.
"That's my soul up there," I added gratuitously.
Trudie discreetly raised her eyes to the heavens. "There he goes again, the king of pain."

There's a little black spot on the sun today
It's the same old thing as yesterday
There's a black hat caught in a high tree top
There's a flag-pole rag and the wind won't stop

I have stood here before inside the pouring rain
With the world turning circles running 'round my brain
I guess I'm always hoping that you'll end this reign
But it's my destiny to be the king of pain

There's a little black spot on the sun today
(That`s my soul up there)
It's the same old thing as yesterday
(That`s my soul up there)
That's a black hat caught in a high tree top
(There`s my soul up there)
There's a flag-pole rag and the wind won't stop
(That`s my soul up there)

I have stood here before inside the pouring rain
With the world turning circles running 'round my brain
I guess I'm always hoping that you'll end this reign
But it's my destiny to be the king of pain

There's a fossil that's trapped in a high cliff wall
(That`s my soul up there)
There's a dead salmon frozen in a waterfall
(That`s my soul up there)
There's a blue whale beached by a spring tide's ebb
(That`s my soul up there)
There's a butterfly trapped in a spider's web
(That`s my soul up there)

I have stood here before inside the pouring rain
With the world turning circles running 'round my brain
I guess I'm always hoping that you'll end this reign
But it's my destiny to be the king of pain

There's a king on a throne with his eyes torn out
There's a blind man looking for a shadow of doubt
There's a rich man sleeping on a golden bed
There's a skeleton choking on a crust of bread

King of pain

There's a red fox torn by a huntsman's pack
(That`s my soul up there)
There's a black-winged gull with a broken back
(That`s my soul up there)
There's a little black spot on the sun today
It's the same old thing as yesterday

I have stood here before inside the pouring rain
With the world turning circles running 'round my brain
I guess I'm always hoping that you'll end this reign
But it's my destiny to be the king of pain

king of pain
king of pain
king of pain
I'll always be king of pain
I'll always be king of pain
I'll always be king of pain
I'll always be king of pain
I'll always be king of pain . . .

Sting Writes (2nd excerpt)...

2008-02-06T05:56:00.001-08:00

"The early '80's was an uncomfortable time to be an Englishman in the west of Ireland. The IRA hunger strikes were taking place across the border, in the north, and feelings were running high. I'd spent some time in Belfast in the mid-'70's, and whenever we took a cab into town, I was told to keep my mouth shut. I looked too much like a "squadie" and my English accent sealed it.

"Invisible Sun" is a dark, brooding song about the lurking violence of those streets, patrolled by armored cars, haunted by fear and suspicion, and wounds that would take generations to heal. I'm happy that the glimmer of hope in the song's title was somewhat prophetic and pray that the sectarian violence that destroyed so many lives is well and truly over."

I dont want to spend the rest of my life
Looking at the barrel of an armalite
I dont want to spend the rest of my days
Keeping out of trouble like the soldiers say
I dont want to spend my time in hell
Looking at the walls of a prison cell
I dont ever want to play the part
Of a statistic on a government chart

There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole days done

Its dark all day and it glows all night
Factory smoke and acetylene light
I face the day with me head caved in
Looking like something that the cat brought in

There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole days done

And theyre only going to change this place
By killing everybody in the human race
They would kill me for a cigarette
But I dont even wanna die just yet

There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole days done

Sting Writes (1st excerpt)...

2008-02-05T18:55:00.000-08:00

"I was accosted late one night on Highgate Hill by a staggering drunk. He grabbed me by the lapels and, after tranquilizing me with his foul breath, pointed to the moon, which had swollen to its fullness, and demanded of me threateningly, "How beautiful is the moon?...How beautiful is the moon?" He repeated it as if he would kill me if I were to give the wrong answer.

"Thinking quickly and not wishing for an early toxic death, I fixed him with my eye and declaimed, "My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun." Shakespeare is always useful, I've found, for calming down violent drunks, if only because it gives them the impression that you're crazier than they are.

"A goodly answer..." he said, "a goodly answer," as he set off on a tack for Kentish Town like a listing galleon.

"Sister Moon" is a song for lunatics everywhere, for all those whose sanity is dependent on the phases of the moon."

Sister moon will be my guide
In your blue blue shadows I would hide
All good people asleep tonight
Im all by myself in your silver light
I would gaze at your face the whole night through
Id go out of my mind, but for you

Lying in a mothers arms
The primal root of a womans charms
Im a stranger to the sun
My eyes are too weak
How cold is a heart
When its warmth that he seeks?
You watch every night, you dont care what I do
Id go out of my mind, but for you
Id go out of my mind, but for you

My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun
My hunger for her explains everything Ive done
To howl at the moon the whole night through
And they really dont care if I do
Id go out of my mind, but for you

Sister Moon

Sting's book

2008-02-05T18:52:00.000-08:00

Back in October, I got the following email notice from Barnes & Noble:

Lyrics
by Sting

Lyrics is a career-spanning collection of songs penned by the world-renowned musician and human rights activist, Sting. Featuring more than 100 songs, the book includes original commentary from Sting about his writing process, the inspiration behind the albums, and the evolution of his career as a songwriter.

List Price: $28.00 |
Member Price with
Coupon: $15.12

Before he joined The Police, he was an English teacher (about highschool level I think), and very much into Carl Jung, so his songs are literate and a probing of the inner world.

And I have the book! Yay!!

So after I'm done grazing here, I'll go explore Sting's mind until I'm too cross-eyed to stay awake.

Sting: The Police

2008-02-05T18:44:00.000-08:00

I can't get Sting's voice out of my head!

Here are some videos by The Police...

Don't Stand So Close To Me -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXU8kCrRHJY

Roxanne -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-xsXlwYBus

Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5W2Vr6HU7s

Wrapped Around Your Finger -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRoUpDON0_0

Every Breath You Take -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnejNGprm3I

Every breath you take
And every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
Ill be watching you

Every single day
And every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
Ill be watching you

Oh, cant you see
You belong to me
Now my poor heart aches
With every step you take

Every move you make
Every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
Ill be watching you

Since youve gone, Ive been lost without a trace
I dream at night, I can only see your face
I look around but its you I cant replace
I feel so cold and I long for your embrace
I keep crying baby, baby please

Oh, cant you see
You belong to me
Now my poor heart aches
Every step you take

Every move you make
Every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
Ill be watching you

Every move you make
Every step you take
Ill be watching you
Ill be watching you

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
(Ill be watching you)

Every single day
Every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
(Ill be watching you)

Every move you make
Every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
(Ill be watching you)

Every single day
Every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
(Ill be watching you)

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
(Ill be watching you)

Every single day
Every word you say
Every game you play
Every night...

Cosmic Collision

2008-02-05T12:43:00.000-08:00

Gas 'Finger' Points To Galaxies' Future

ScienceDaily (Feb. 4, 2008) — Like a fork piercing a fried egg, a giant finger of hydrogen gas is poking through our Milky Way Galaxy from outside, astronomers using CSIRO radio telescopes at Parkes and Narrabri have found.

The location of the intrusion may give a crucial clue to the fate of the little galaxies the gas flows from, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.

"We're thrilled because we can determine exactly where this gas is ploughing into the Milky Way -- it's usually extremely hard to get distances to such gas features," said the research team leader, Dr Naomi McClure-Griffiths of CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility.

The gas finger, called HVC306-2+230, is running into the starry disk of our Galaxy about 70 thousand light-years (21kpc) away from us. On the sky, the point of contact is near the Southern Cross.

The finger is the pointy end of the so-called Leading Arm of gas that streams ahead of the Magellanic Clouds towards the Milky Way.

Until last year, astronomers generally thought that the Magellanic Clouds had orbited our Galaxy many times, and were doomed to be ripped apart and swallowed by their gravitational overlord.

But then new Hubble Space Telescope measurements showed the Clouds were moving much faster than previously thought. In turn, this implied that the Clouds are paying our Galaxy a one-time visit rather than being its long-term companions.

Knowing where the Leading Arm is crossing the Galactic Disk may help astronomers to predict where the Clouds themselves will go in future.

"We think the Leading Arm is a tidal feature, gas pulled out of the Magellanic Clouds by the Milky Way's gravity," said Dr McClure-Griffiths.

"Where this gas goes, we'd expect the Clouds to follow, at least approximately."

The team's measurement of where the Leading Arm intrudes into the Milky Way is more in line with the models that assume the Magellanic Clouds have been orbiting our Galaxy than with the models that have the Clouds just passing by.

Dr McClure-Griffiths cautions that this is not the final word on the subject, saying that the latter models were far from ruled out.

But the new result suggests that the Magellanic Clouds will eventually merge with the Milky Way, rather than zooming past.

StarDate February 5, 2008

2008-02-05T06:21:00.000-08:00

Monoceros, the unicorn, gallops high across the south in mid-evening. It is a faint constellation that resembles the letter W, with the western side of the W stretched out a bit. Monoceros is east of Orion, between the bright "dog" stars, Sirius and Procyon.

an excerpt

2008-02-04T14:14:00.000-08:00

the last 8 lines from Walt Whitman's, 'Passage To India'

Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only,
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou
....with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared
....to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

O my brave soul!
O farther farther sail!
O daring joy, but safe! are they not all
....the seas of God?
O farther, farther, farther sail!

by Robert Louis Stevenson

2008-02-04T14:11:00.000-08:00

Escape at Bedtime

The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out
Through the blinds and the windows and bars;
And high overhead and all moving about,
There were thousands of millions of stars.
There ne'er were such thousands of leaves on a tree,
Nor of people in church or the Park,
As the crowds of the stars that looked down upon me,
And that glittered and winked in the dark.

The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all,
And the star of the sailor, and Mars,
These shown in the sky, and the pail by the wall
Would be half full of water and stars.
They saw me at last, and they chased me with cries,
And they soon had me packed into bed;
But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,
And the stars going round in my head.

StarDate February 4, 2008

2008-02-04T11:05:00.000-08:00

Bright orange Mars is high in the east at nightfall, near El Nath, a star that represents the tip of one of the horns of Taurus, the bull. This region of the sky is opposite the center of the Milky Way galaxy, so it provides a view toward intergalactic space.

Babes With Blades

2008-02-03T12:16:00.000-08:00

I remember Dawn Alden when she was a gangly 14-year-old singing 'The Hills Are Alive' in a nun's kerchief in Jr. High. I also remember the former boyfriend who nicknamed her Samson (good riddance). The years have been good to her, no question about it.

http://stage-directions.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=632&Itemid=39

Women Warriors
Written by John Bliss
Jan 31, 2008

Babes With Blades KICK BUTT and take names

It’s a frosty Sunday morning in December. But inside the Chase Park field house in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, the air is charged. A handful of women in their 20s and 30s, dressed in everything from workout garb to sweats, are swinging rapiers and thrusting daggers. “Never cheat on the duck!” a young blonde, her hair tied back, calls out to one of the others. What’s going on here? It’s just a normal workout session for Babes With Blades.

Babes With Blades is Chicago’s — and probably the nation’s — premier all-female stage combat theatre company. Sam Alden — “Sam” is short for Samson, a nickname bestowed upon her by a former boyfriend — founded the company in 1997, in response to the lack of opportunities for women trained in stage combat. She moved to Chicago after receiving her MFA because she heard it was a great fight town. What she discovered was that while she had plenty of chances to choreograph, the roles for women fighters were slim. She explains, “I had the wrong equipment.”

Alden met other women actors who had the same experience. The group decided to stage a two-day showcase production, to show local casting directors and artistic directors what they were missing. Notices went out to the papers, and the two shows quickly sold out. After an additional two performances also sold out, the women realized, “Hey, we may have something here.”
That fall, the group staged its first show titled “Babes With Blades.” As with the showcase, the show was a series of fights connected by a common theme. “It was a way to provide the maximum number of women the most opportunities to both perform and choreograph,” says Alden. The show ran for 10 weeks and was a hit. The company, also called Babes With Blades, was born.

Subversive Weaponry
In a sense, the very name of the company is subversive. It conjures up the only situations in which female actors once were allowed to come to blows: “fur bikinis and barmaids get angry.” Artistic Director Stephanie Repin says that when she first heard the name, “I thought it was beneath me. I thought, ‘I’m very serious, and I want to be taken seriously.’ Now, I realize we can be serious about our work without taking ourselves too seriously.” Amy Harmon, the company’s managing director, adds, “The humor with which we work is part of our success.” While there is a political aspect to the work, it never has to be overt because the company is political by its nature. “What we do is the statement,” says Alden. “We don’t need to make a statement.”

In a greater sense, the company is just a group of women actors working with tools their male counterparts have had at their disposal for years. Alden speaks of how working with stage combat has helped her unleash her “inner badass.”

“Growing up as a woman, I was not taught how to handle anger or conflict. In doing stage combat, you learn to wear those feelings comfortably. You’re not scared of them — you know how to work when they are upon you. Now, I can use that in my acting — I have more colors in my palette. When you only play passive roles, you don’t get to experience all of the emotions and all of the actions and all of the choices that are in you. Having been a warrior, I make different choices in my acting. They’re more interesting, they’re more exciting, and they’re definitely more active.”

Repin agrees. “Once you start doing stage combat, you build a confidence in yourself as a person. I walk differently now. I couldn’t throw a punch to hurt someone, but I look like I could. It’s an amazing tool to increase your confidence.”

Despite their experience, the Babes still find they struggle to be accepted by male fighters. Repin speaks of being treated at stage combat workshops as a “little sister.” Or worse. “Men will look at me — literally look me up and down — and then find another partner.” Alden blames it on “misguided chivalry.” “I’ve been in workshops where my male partner didn’t want to do moves with me because he didn’t want to hurt me. Or a man with far less experience than I will try to show me how to do things. They assume that because I’m a woman, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Full-length Battle Royale
In recent years, Babes With Blades has moved away from the showcase style of their earlier pro-ductions, and toward more fully scripted plays. As Alden observes, “You care about the outcome of a fight in direct relation to how much you care about the characters who are fighting.” And as the Babes are actors first and warriors second, the progression to full-length productions was natural.

Since scripts with fighting roles for women are scarce, the company decided to develop their own. In 2005, they launched an international playwriting competition called Joining Sword & Pen. Writers are asked to create a script based on a piece of art. The only requirements are that the work must feature women in lead roles and that the fight scene pictured in the painting must appear in the play. The first competition, based on Emile Bayard’s “An Affair of Honor,” netted two one-act winners, one drama and one comedy. This spring, the company will produce Los Desaparecidos, inspired by “Duelo de Mujeres” (The Duel of Women), a painting by José Ribera.

The company has begun a new play development program as well. Each year, two scripts go through a nine-month gestation process, which includes three workshop productions. Last sea-son’s Girl in the Iron Mask — a reworking of the Dumas novel — was written by a graduate of this program.

Over the past 10 years, the company has single handedly created close to 100 new scripts with fighting roles for women. They are now working to make these plays available to women around the world, so that their mission of expanding opportunities for women in stage combat is not limited to Chicago.

Repin says, “If I wasn’t still geeked about it after 20 years, I wouldn’t be doing it. The bones creak, I’ve got carpal tunnel in both of my wrists and arthritis in my knees. I take care of it as best I can so I can keep doing it. I plan to be the 80-year-old sword-fighting woman.”

“When we did the first showcases,” adds Alden, “we would walk down the sidewalk feeling like gods. We were doing this amazing thing we always wanted to do. It made us feel like there was nothing we couldn’t do. I want women to leave our performance with that feeling — with that sense of ‘I can.’ And I want men to leave with that same sense — that women can.”

http://www.babeswithblades.org/DawnAlden.htm

StarDate February 3, 2008

2008-02-02T18:19:00.000-08:00

Venus, Jupiter, and the crescent Moon line up low in the southeast at dawn. The Moon is to the right of the bright planets on the 3rd and below them on the 4th.

The Moon stages a beautiful encounter with Venus and Jupiter at dawn tomorrow. They are quite low in the southeast at first light. Both planets are just above the Moon. Venus is the brighter of the two and is a little closer to the Moon.

StarDate February 2, 2008

2008-02-02T05:21:00.000-08:00

The planets Venus and Jupiter blaze quite low in the dawn sky tomorrow. They are side by side, just a few degrees apart, with the crescent Moon close by. Venus and Jupiter are the brightest pinpoints of light in the night sky, with Venus a good bit brighter.

http://stardate.org/nightsky/weekly.php

Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury

2008-02-01T06:15:00.000-08:00

February 1, 2008
Some of the brightest stars in the night sky form the Winter Circle, which fills much of the southern sky this evening. The circle's hub is bright orange Betelgeuse in Orion, the hunter. Seven other bright stars encircle Betelgeuse. Venus and Jupiter, the brightest objects in the night sky after the Moon, are low in the southeast at first light. Venus is brighter, with Jupiter to its lower right. The star Antares stands to the left of the Moon.

Mystery of Mercury: The Shrinking Planet

(Mercury image) http://www.dailygalaxy.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/01/31/mercury.jpg

Images from the never-before-seen side of Mercury reveal that Mercury is a lot more exciting that we ever knew. Mercury has always been a bit of an oddball as the only planet in the Solar System that does not follow a basically circular orbit. Although, it does have one other oddball to commiserate with. Earth and Mercury are the only two planets in the Solar System to have a magnetosphere.

Now new images revealed that the planet is shrinking, covered in volcanic scars and sporting an unusual "birthmark". A huge spider shape is fascinating scientists and causing speculation and some debate.

The spider shape captured is "unlike anything we've seen anywhere in the solar system," said mission chief scientist Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The image reveals what appears to be some kind of large crater with "legs" radiating out from it.

It is as if "something is pushed up," said MIT planetary scientist Maria Zuber.

The new photos also reveal that Mercury is more colorful then we knew. NASA high-tech enhancement techniques revealed delicate colors. Mercury also had a firey past in the form of heavy volcanic activity. We used to think that Mercury was just a bigger version of our Moon, until these photos revealed more intimate details of the planet's past.

"It has very subtle red and blue areas," said instrument scientist Louise Prockter of Johns Hopkins University, which runs the Messenger mission for NASA. "Mercury doesn't look like the moon."

Planetary scientist Robert Strom, who was part of both the Mariner 10 and Messenger teams, said, "This is a whole new planet we're looking at."

And Prockter noted "there are some features we haven't been able to explain yet."

Mercury is shrinking. As the planet contracts, bits of crust are pushed over another, forming what Prockter calls "wrinkle ridges." As the core of Mercury cools, it contracts and the whole planet becomes smaller. It was once believed that this could also be why Earth has mountains, but the idea was later proven to be wrong in regards to Earth. However, the theory does appear to hold true for Mercury, Solomon said.

Remnants of past volcanoes are scattered across the landscape, and at least one crater seems to be filled with Mercury own version of lava, Prockter said.

NASA launched Messenger on the 5 billion-mile mission in 2004. It will now fly by Mercury two more times this coming October and September 2009. Messenger will take more pictures, measure the planet's atmosphere, and its unusual magnetic field.

Strom, a retired University of Arizona scientist who worked on Mariner 10, said that as he awaited Messenger's flyby earlier this month, "I couldn't sleep at all. I was like a kid on Christmas Eve."

Only he had to wait 30 years for his presents. It was worth it, he said: "What I saw was astounding to me."

Posted by Rebecca Sato

Source:
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080131/D8UGKM000.html

Dark Matter and Dark Energy

2008-01-31T13:25:00.001-08:00

Dark Fluid: Dark Matter And Dark Energy May Be Two Faces Of Same Coin

(picture) http://www.sciencedaily.com/images/2008/01/080131094056.jpg

The magnificent spiral arms of the nearby galaxy Messier 81. Astronomers believe that both the universe and galaxies are held together by the gravitational attraction of a huge amount of unseen material, now commonly referred to as dark matter. (Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

ScienceDaily (Jan. 31, 2008) — Astronomers at the University of St Andrews believe they can "simplify the dark side of the universe" by shedding new light on two of its mysterious constituents.

Dr HongSheng Zhao, of the University's School of Physics and Astronomy, has shown that the puzzling dark matter and its counterpart dark energy may be more closely linked than was previously thought.

Only 4% of the universe is made of known material - the other 96% is traditionally labelled into two sectors, dark matter and dark energy.

A British astrophysicist and Advanced Fellow of the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council, Dr Zhao points out, "Both dark matter and dark energy could be two faces of the same coin.

"As astronomers gain understanding of the subtle effects of dark energy in galaxies in the future, we will solve the mystery of astronomical dark matter at the same time. "

Astronomers believe that both the universe and galaxies are held together by the gravitational attraction of a huge amount of unseen material, first noted by the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in 1933, and now commonly referred to as dark matter.

Dr Zhao reports that, "Dark energy has already revealed its presence by masking as dark matter 60 years ago if we accept that dark matter and dark energy are linked phenomena that share a common origin."

In Dr Zhao's model, dark energy and dark matter are simply different manifestations of the same thing, which he has considered as a 'dark fluid'. On the scale of galaxies, this dark fluid behaves like matter and on the scale of the Universe overall as dark energy, driving the expansion of the Universe. Importantly, his model, unlike some similar work, is detailed enough to produce the same 3:1 ratio of dark energy to dark matter as is predicted by cosmologists.

Efforts are currently underway to hunt for very massive dark-matter particles with a variety of experiments. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva is a particle accelerator that amongst other objectives, could potentially detect dark matter particles.

According to Dr Zhao, these efforts could turn out to be fruitless. He said, "In this simpler picture of universe, the dark matter would be at a surprisingly low energy scale, too low to be probed by upcoming Large Hadron Collider.

"The search for dark-matter particles so far has concentrated on highly-energetic particles. If dark matter however is a twin phenomenon of dark energy, it will not show up at instruments like the LHC, but has been seen over and over again in galaxies by astronomers."

However, the Universe might be absent of dark-matter particles at all. The findings of Dr Zhao are also compatible with an interpretation of the dark component as a modification of the law of gravity rather than particles or energy.

Dr Zhao concluded. "No matter what dark matter and dark energy are, these two phenomena are likely not independent of each other."

Background

Theories of the physics of gravity were first developed by Isaac Newton in 1687 and refined by Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity in 1905 which stated that the speed of gravity is equal to the speed of light. However, Einstein was never fully decided on whether his equation should add an omnipresent constant source, now called dark energy in general.

Astronomers following Fred Zwicky have also speculated additional sources to Einstein's equation in the form of non-light emitting material, called dark matter in general. Apart from very light neutrinos neither dark sources have been confirmed experimentally.

Dr Zhao and his collaborators' findings have recently been published by Astrophysical Journal Letters in December 2007, and Physics Review D. 2007.

Adapted from materials provided by Science and Technology Facilities Council.

Mercury more Earth-like than Moon-like

2008-01-31T05:27:00.000-08:00

Mercury: Far different than Earth's moon

WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 (UPI) -- The U.S. space agency said its Messenger spacecraft showed that the planet Mercury appears to be surprisingly different from Earth's moon.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said that after a journey of more than 2 billion miles and 3 1/2 years, the Jan. 14 flyby of Mercury produced an entirely new look at the planet once thought to have characteristics similar to those of Earth's moon.

The spacecraft collected more than 1,200 images of the planet and made other scientific observations, including the first up-close measurements of Mercury since the Mariner 10 spacecraft's third flyby March 16, 1975.

Scientists said the images obtained by Messenger show Mercury has huge cliffs with structures snaking hundreds of miles across the planet's face. The images also revealed impact craters that appear very different from lunar craters.

"We should keep this treasure trove of data in perspective," cautioned project scientist Ralph McNutt. "With two flybys to come and an intensive orbital mission to follow, we are just getting started to go where no one has been before."

More information on the flyby is available at www.nasa.gov/messenger

Copyright 2008 by United Press International. All Rights Reserved.

Mercury's Magnetosphere Fends Off Solar Wind

(picture) http://www.sciencedaily.com/images/2008/01/080130140130.jpg

Departing shots: The top left image was taken when MESSENGER was about 34,000 kilometers (21,000 miles) from Mercury, and the bottom right image was snapped from a distance of about 400,000 kilometers (250,000 miles). Mercury and Earth are the only two terrestrial planets in the solar system with magnetospheres produced by an intrinsic magnetic field. (Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington)

ScienceDaily (Jan. 31, 2008) — The planet Mercury's magnetic field appears to be strong enough to fend off the harsh solar wind from most of its surface, according to data gathered in part by a University of Michigan instrument onboard NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft.

U-M's Fast Imaging Plasma Spectrometer (FIPS) on Jan. 14 took the first direct measurements of Mercury's magnetosphere to determine how the planet interacts with the space environment and the Sun.

The solar wind, a stream of charged particles, fills the entire solar system. It interacts with all planets, but bears down on Mercury, 2/3 closer than the Earth to the Sun.

Earth's magnetosphere is strong enough to protect us from the solar wind's radiation, but Mercury's magnetic field is comparatively weaker.

"From our magnetic measurements, we can tell that Mercury is managing to stand up to a lot of the solar wind and protect the surface of the planet, at least in some spots. Even though the magnetic field was weak, it was enough," said Thomas Zurbuchen, FIPS instrument project leader and a professor in the U-M Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Science.

Zurbuchen said scientists can tell Mercury is putting up a good fight because instruments detected a layer of much slower-moving magentospheric plasma around the planet.

It's possible that the magnetosphere shield has holes. Scientists found ions in the magnetosphere that may have been knocked off the surface by the solar wind at the poles, for example. The source and chemical composition of the ions is still unclear, Zurbuchen said. The particles could also be from the planet's thin atmosphere.

"Mercury's magnetosphere is more similar to Earth's than we might have thought," Zurbuchen said.

The spacecraft did find one major difference. Mercury has no Van Allen Belts, wing-shaped regions of energetic particles trapped by Earth's magnetic field.

"We flew through the region they would be in and they just weren't there," Zurbuchen said. "It could be that they're intermittent, but when we were there, they weren't."

Mercury and Earth are the only two terrestrial planets in the solar system with magnetospheres produced by an intrinsic magnetic field.

This was the first of three planned flybys of Mercury. MESSENGER is scheduled to enter orbit in 2011.

Adapted from materials provided by University of Michigan.

A Blessing

2008-01-30T14:24:00.000-08:00

May you yourself, O God of life,
Be at my breast, be at my back,
You to me as a star, you to me as a guide,
From my life's beginning to my life's closing.

- From a Celtic prayer

something from last November

2008-01-30T14:22:00.000-08:00

Into The Mirror

We put our clocks back a few weeks ago, which means the US and the UK are now 5 hours apart again instead of 4. What a concept: Space, time, and the mind. Where are we really? Our we where our bodies are, or are we where we choose to direct our thoughts?

It's been an interesting year. Since my birthday is on the 1st day of the New Year, I feel an undercurrent of time shifting from January to January. It's been a philosophical year, with more questions than answers.

And it's not always easy to form the questions either! If I have a picture in my head and not just a list of vocabulary words mashed together in a sentence, than I can grasp a new concept, but so often this year I've only managed a quick glimpse now and then before the mist descends, and I'm left groping along with outstretched hands.

There's one phrase that keeps coming back to me: Walk away from the mirror. As a child, did you ever play a game with the 'You-in-the-mirror', pretending that this was a friend or a twin behind the window, but when you try to touch them your hands can't meet, but are kept apart no matter how hard you press against the glass? And the mirror world looks so much more interesting than this one; familiar, but with the potential of holding unseen treasures.

I realized one day that there's only one way to get into the mirror, and that's to walk away FROM the mirror. In your mind's eye keep a video camera trained on the mirror as you do. What does your mind-camera see? It sees you turn, and then it sees your image...WALK INTO THE MIRROR.

Well, what of it? It's a metaphor for something else, and for me what I've learned this year is I have to stop finding my sense of self through people. To really know myself, and to know anyone else for that matter, I have to lift the burden I've place on others of making me a complete person. To have what I need, I have to give up what I want. I have to walk away from the mirror to get into the mirror.

When I put it in words like that, all my clear thinking seems to go to pieces! I know the difference inside of me though. I'm not thrown off balance as easily by what people do, because my center of support is more on my own feet and less on the shoulders of others.

'Quest' seems too lofty a word, but it's certainly been a year of exploration.

Welcome to Shelley!

2008-01-30T07:41:00.000-08:00

Who knew??

http://www.ci.shelley.id.us/

Welcome to the City of Shelley Homepage

Home of Spud Day!

Shelley, Idaho is located in Bingham County just 10 miles south of Idaho Falls. Residents of Shelley enjoy a relaxed lifestyle in a hometown atmosphere. Shelley has been the home of the Idaho Annual Spud Day since 1927. This event commemorates the harvest of Idaho's most famous export.

My name is permanently linked with TATTIES??

Oh well, why not

more on 'Tristan and Iseult'

2008-01-30T07:39:00.000-08:00

'WE: Understanding The Psychology of Romantic Love', by Robert A. Johnson, HarperCollins 1983.

This book analyzes the Celtic saga of Tristan and Iseult and it's effect on our Western psychology.

The book's author, Robert Johnson, has been looking at the symbolism of the love potion that causes Tristan and Iseult to go from being mortal enemies to lovers:

When we are in love we feel completed, as though a missing part of ourselves had been returned to us; we feel uplifted, as though we were suddenly raised above the level of the ordinary world. Life has an intensity, a transcendence.

We seek in romantic love to be possessed by our love, to soar to heights, to find ultimate meaning and fulfillment in our beloved. We seek the feeling of wholeness.

If we ask where else we have looked for these things, there is a startling and troubling answer: religious experience. When we look for something greater than ourselves, when we seek a sense of inner unity, when we strive to rise above the smallness of personal life to something limitless, this is spiritual aspiration.

Here is the symbolism of the love potion: There is another world that is outside the vision of our ego-minds. It is the realm of psyche, the realm of the unconscious, and it is there that our souls and our spirits live. Unknown to our conscious Western minds, our souls and spirits are psychological realities, and they live on in our psyches without our knowledge. And it is there in the unconscious that God lives.

This is the beginning of Chapter 16:

At its best, romantic love is the high road to a double revelation: It leads past the literalism and materialism of the Western mind and brings us face to face with the symbolic life; it opens our eyes to the meaning of human love. But at its worst, romantic love becomes a cycle of illusion that wastes our lives and distorts our loves instead of aiding them.

This two-edgedness of romantic love, which serves us if we live it correctly but destroys us if we don't, reflects the two-sided nature of the anima: She can be Iseult, Queen of the Inner World, who leads us to our deeper inner selves, or she can be Maya, the Goddess of Illusion. In one role she serves life and gives it meaning; but her other face is terrible - she rips to shreds the fabric of ordinary life, she beguiles us away from all reality and turns our attempts at love into a perpetual dance of illusion. We have just seen Tristan and Iseult in that dance of anima, dancing steps we all know well.

Two pages later Johnson says:

The physical world is true and real; the inner world is also true and real. It is when we muddle them, when we fail to live the inner world as symbol, when we try to locate it in literal people, that the illusory world is created. The illusory world is the projected world, which so distorts both inner and outer that we can see neither as it is.

.......

It's not everybody's cup of the tea (my daleky Scottish pal cheerfully called it 'utter rubbish'), but if you like getting inside of things, and are willing to go on intuition instead of cut and dried facts, you might enjoy it too.

A Jungian 'Tristan & Iseult'

2008-01-30T07:33:00.000-08:00

I'm reading a wonderful book which tells, and makes extensive commentary on, that most Celtic of all stories, 'Tristan & Iseult'.

I've gotten this far:

Two things are required for a hero: a sword and a harp. With the sword a hero approaches the world aggressively, takes control of the situation, takes a strong position, defeats the adversary. It symbolizes the mind, the discriminating intellect that divides and analyzes. It figuratively "cuts through" problems and ideas to understand them; it represents our logical, critical faculty.

There are times we need to be assertive and strong, but there are also times when neither logic nor force will avail; then we need to turn to the harp.

The harp represents the power to develop a sense of values, to affirm what its good and true, to appreciate the beautiful; the harp enables the hero to put the sword in the service of the noble ideal. To be complete, the hero must have both. Without the sword, the harp becomes ineffectual, but without the harp, the sword is reduced to self-focused brute force. People confuse these two powers more in relationship than in any other area of human life. We often hear a man and woman trying to "settle things" by arguing, criticizing, poking holes in each other's arguments, splitting hairs. Then they wonder why all the spontaneous feeling of warmth and love has gone from their time together! These kind of negotiations are always "sword" activities.

The sword cannot build relationships, settle anything, or bind together. It can only rip apart. To heal and build relationship, we must use the language of the harp, giving respect, expressing love, feeling, and devotion. The harp heals and binds together, the sword wounds and cuts asunder.

There comes a time in life when wielding the sword, or rather, operating on the strengths of the intellect alone, doesn't provide all the answers. We don't know enough, we don't have enough resources to resolve an impossible situation. At that point we need to let go, stop trying to force things to happen, or control others, or even ourselves, and step back and wait on the natural flow of the universe.

To enter a boat without oar or sail, taking only the harp, means to wait patiently, listen to a soft voice within for wisdom that comes not from logic or action, but from intuition, the lyrical inner poet who writes from a heart full of feeling and not from the head.

We see Tristan cast upon the sea. We hear the sound of the harp floating above the waves. Drawn by a power that is high above his understanding, Tristan comes at last to Ireland. And there Iseult awaits him.

I took a class in Medieval History in highschool, and it was then that I read Tristan & Iseult. I think it was a bit wasted on me, and probably on most of us there, because in spite of being a love story, it isn't a young person's story. Tristan and Iseult are in their 40's when the events take place, and generations of teenagers have scratched their heads over that one. What would someone in their 40's know about love?? The recent movie with Sophia Myles made the mistake of departing from the centuries-old story by casting youthful leads, which turned it into another "teen" romance, and ultimately a flop at the box office.

It's about love to be sure, but even more so it's about discovering what we lack in ourselves, as well as rediscovering the strengths that we have. I think it was Picasso who stated that we have to grow old before we can be young.

At any rate, I'm getting a lot more from the story this time around then I did close to 30 years ago.

Grandmother's Ashes

2008-01-29T19:22:00.000-08:00

Back in September, I got a call from Mom who'd been to a funeral (3rd one in a month!), and Bill Duckett the funeral director ("Kick the bucket? Call Duckett!"), mentioned to her that he still had her mother's ashes in his office. That might not seem so strange on the face of it, except that Grandma died in 1984 at the age of 90, and Mom was absolutely convinced that he'd already brought the ashes over in an oatmeal container (?), and that she'd put Grandma up in the attic until she got around to getting her interred next to Grandpa (??).

Well in the intervening 20+ years, the attic got very cluttered, and we understood that she was up there 'somewhere' (how heavenly!), but no clue as to where to find her. After Mom's stroke in March of '06, my brother Geoff and I decided that we had to take care of the attic, basement, and garage, and that it was either do it now or wait until she died, with us in our mid 50's or older by then, and the kids grown and gone and not around to help.

We started before the beginning of April, and finished sometime in October. We cleared the attic right down to the bare studs, with no sign of an oatmeal box, spilled ashes, or anything remotely funeral-like. Mom was convinced that mice had eaten her (ewww!), but certainly not box and all.

Now that Bill has revealed that Grandma has been peacefully ensconced on some forgotten back shelf all these years, Mom is wondering just whose ashes she was given, and what happened to them. I'm inclined to think that she created the whole memory. The director probably came over to the house with the guestbook sometime after the service, and over the years Mom filled in the gaps with her imagination. I know my uncle told me that he understood that the ashes will still at the funeral home, and was annoyed at my mother for putting it off for so long. He'd get a kick out of this, unfortunately he died 2 years ago at the age of 82.

My Dad died in 2001 and Mom still hasn't purchased a memorial stone. I've told her now is the time, and please let's not go through this bizarre business all over again. We'll get all of our family's affairs in order. It's downright unseemly not to!!

Planet Viewing in 2008

2008-01-29T19:15:00.000-08:00

Mercury, the solar system's smallest planet flits back and forth from morning sky to evening sky several times a year. It never strays far from the Sun in our sky, so it's tough to find in the glare. From the northern hemisphere, it is visible in the morning sky this year in March and April, July, and early November. The late-year appearance is the best, because the planet will stand highest above the horizon. In the evening, Mercury is best seen in January, May, late August through September, and mid-December. The May appearance is best.

Venus, the dazzling morning or evening star, outshines all the other stars and planets in the night sky. It begins the year in the morning sky, low in the east shortly before sunrise. It will disappear from view in early May. In mid-July Venus will reappear in the evening sky, where it stay for the rest of the year.

Mars begins the year as a brilliant orange star high in the east at sunset. As the year progresses, it will grow fainter, shining only about five percent as bright in late summer as in January. It will disappear in the Sun's glare by around mid-October.

Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system is a commanding presence in the night sky for much of the year. It looks like an intensely bright cream-colored star, shining brighter than anything else in the night sky except the Moon and Venus. It climbs into view in the pre-dawn sky in January. It rises earlier as the months go by, and moves into the evening sky in spring. Jupiter is at opposition in early July, when it appears brightest for the year and remains visible all night. Late in the year it is visible only in the evening sky, dropping lower each night.

Saturn looks like a bright golden star. It spends the year in Leo, the lion, and for much of the year is close to Leo's "heart," the bright star Regulus. Saturn is at its best in late February, when it's closest to Earth. It disappears behind the Sun in July and August, then returns to view in the morning sky.

Although it's the third-largest planet in the solar system, Uranus is so far from the Sun that you need binoculars to see it. It spends the year in the constellation Aquarius. It stages its best appearance in September.

Neptune, the fourth-largest planet in the solar system is so far away that you need a telescope to find it. Neptune is in the constellation Capricornus, and stages its best appearance in August.

Source:

http://stardate.org/nightsky/planets/

(they don't count Pluto anymore, but as it's staying in one spot for about 16 years, it isn't doing much that we can see anyways)

Mon Ra Hoops

2008-01-29T19:12:00.000-08:00

My daleky Scottish friend is drawing me into the vortex of all things Celtic FC.

From TimesOnline...

The other day, monitoring the football scores on the internet, I came across a fabulous riposte to a journalist by footballer manager Gordon Strachan:

Reporter: "Gordon, can we have a quick word please?" Strachan: "Velocity" [walks off]

Then, searching for a link to the Strachan comment, I discovered he makes a habit of it.

Here are my ten favourite:

1. On Wayne Rooney : It's an incredible rise to stardom, at 17 you're more likely to get a call from Michael Jackson than Sven Goran Eriksson.

2. Reporter: Can I ask you about Augustin Delgado [an underperforming player Strachan had purchased for Southampton] Strachan: I've got more important things to think about. I've got a yogurt to finish by today, the expiry date is today. That can be my priority rather than Augstin Delgado.

3. Reporter: Welcome to Southampton Football Club. Do you think you are the right man to turn things around? Strachan: No. I was asked if I thought I was the right man for the job and I said, "No, I think they should have got George Graham because I'm useless."

4. Reporter: Gordon, you must be delighted with that result? Strachan: You're spot on! You can read me like a book.

5. Reporter: This might sound like a daft question, but you'll be happy to get your first win under your belt, won't you? Strachan: You're right. It is a daft question. I'm not even going to bother answering that one. It is a daft question, you're spot on there.

6. Reporter: Bang, there goes your unbeaten run. Can you take it? Strachan: No, I'm just going to crumble like a wreck. I'll go home, become an alcoholic and maybe jump off a bridge. Umm, I think I can take it, yeah.

7. Reporter: where will Marion Pahars fit into the team line-up? Strachan: Not telling you! It's a secret.

8. Reporter: Gordon, Do you think James Beattie [one of Strachan's players] deserves to be in the England squad? Strachan: I dont care, I'm Scottish

9. Reporter: You don't take losing lightly, do you Gordon? Strachan: I don't take stupid comments lightly either.

10. Reporter: So, Gordon, in what areas do you think Middlesbrough were better than you today? Strachan: What areas? Mainly that big green one out there….

Posted by Daniel Finkelstein on January 23, 2008

(and one extra...)

Reporter: There's no negative vibes or negative feelings here?
Strachan: Apart from yourself, we're all quite positive round here. I'm going to whack you over the head with a big stick. Down negative man, down!

Venus and Jupiter at dawn

2008-01-29T18:55:00.000-08:00

January 31, 2008

Venus and Jupiter, the brightest "nightlights" other than the Moon, are so close together the next couple of mornings that they almost appear to touch. They are in the southeast at dawn. Venus is brighter, with Jupiter barely to its lower right tomorrow.

http://stardate.org/nightsky/weekly.php

squashed white dwarf

2008-01-29T18:45:00.000-08:00

Unusual Supernovae May Reveal Intermediate-mass Black Holes In Globular Clusters

www.sciencedaily.com/images/2008/01/080129125350.jpg

This series of images shows the interaction of a white dwarf star with a black hole. As it passes the black hole, the white dwarf becomes strongly compressed and heated (top left), triggering an explosion. Most of the stellar mass is ejected into space (the "bubble" in the upper right part of the debris in the top right image), while the rest (the cusp-like part of the image) falls toward the black hole. While the ejected matter expands rapidly, the infalling matter builds a violent, thick accretion disk around the black hole. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - Santa Cruz)

ScienceDaily (Jan. 29, 2008) — A strange and violent fate awaits a white dwarf star that wanders too close to a moderately massive black hole. According to a new study, the black hole's gravitational pull on the white dwarf would cause tidal forces sufficient to disrupt the stellar remnant and reignite nuclear burning in it, giving rise to a supernova explosion with an unusual appearance. Observations of such supernovae could confirm the existence of intermediate-mass black holes, currently the subject of much debate among astronomers.

"Our supercomputer simulations show a peculiar supernova that would be a unique signature of an intermediate-mass black hole," said Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Ramirez-Ruiz and his collaborators--Stephan Rosswog of Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany, and William Hix of Oak Ridge National Laboratory--used detailed computer simulations to follow the entire process of tidal disruption of a white dwarf by a black hole. Their simulations included gas dynamics, gravity, and nuclear physics, requiring weeks of computer time to simulate events that would take place in a fraction of a second.

"Every star that is not too massive ends up as a white dwarf, so they are very common. We were interested in whether tidal disruption can bring this stellar corpse to life again," said Rosswog, the first author of the paper.

A white dwarf can explode as a "type Ia" supernova if it accumulates enough mass by siphoning matter away from a companion star. When it reaches a critical mass (about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun), the white dwarf collapses and explodes. Astronomers use these type Ia supernovae as "standard candles" for cosmic distance measurements because their brightness evolves over time in a predictable manner.

The new paper* describes a distinctly different mechanism for igniting a white dwarf, in which tidal disruption by a black hole causes drastic compression of the stellar material. The white dwarf is flattened into a pancake shape aligned in the plane of its orbit around the black hole. As each section of the star is squeezed through a point of maximum compression, the extreme pressure causes a sharp increase in temperatures, which triggers explosive burning.

The explosion ejects more than half of the debris from the disrupted star, while the rest of the stellar material falls into the black hole. The infalling material forms a luminous accretion disk that emits x-rays and should be detectable by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the researchers said.

"This is a new mechanism for ignition of a white dwarf that results in a very different type of supernova than the standard type Ia, and it is followed by an x-ray source," Ramirez-Ruiz said.

He estimated that this type of event would occur about 100 times less frequently than the standard type Ia supernovae, but should be detectable by future surveys designed to observe large numbers of supernovae. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), planned for completion in 2013, is expected to discover hundreds of thousands of type Ia supernovae per year.

"These exotic creatures will start showing up in the data from the LSST," Ramirez-Ruiz said. "We want to predict the light curves so we can look for them in the survey data."

The mechanism described in the paper requires a black hole that is neither too small nor too big. Such intermediate-mass black holes (500 to 1,000 times the mass of the Sun) may reside in some globular star clusters, but there is much less evidence for their existence than there is for the relatively small stellar black holes (tens of times the mass of the Sun) or for supermassive black holes (a few million times the mass of the Sun), found at the centers of galaxies.

The new paper describes in detail the disruption of a white dwarf with two-tenths the mass of the Sun by a black hole 1,000 times the mass of the Sun. The researchers also found that they can vary the mass of the white dwarf and still get the same outcome--tidal disruption and ignition of the white dwarf.

"We can ignite the whole mass range of white dwarfs if they get close enough to the black hole," Rosswog said.

*A paper describing their results has been accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters, and a preprint is currently available online.

This research was supported by the Department of Energy's Program for Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing.

Adapted from materials provided by University of California - Santa Cruz.

StarDate

2008-01-29T14:44:00.000-08:00

Worth getting up for! :)

January 30, 2008
Look for the brilliant planets Venus and Jupiter quite low in the southeast at dawn. Venus is the brighter of the two. It is a little higher in the sky tomorrow, but Jupiter will move past it the following couple of mornings.

Mars is stationary against the background of stars.

http://stardate.org/nightsky/weekly.php

Hello.

2008-01-29T14:04:00.000-08:00

In Which I Take The Plunge And Regret It Not, One Hopes.

I have a few original ideas, or it could even be said that I have FEW original ideas, but I know what I like, and so long as I footnote, credit, and link appropriately, my conscience is clear when it comes to posting other people's stuff.

If I like it, it goes here.

For starters, here's a couple of mine:

A Pocket Full Of Thistle Down

This morning I went for a walk in Puddingstone Park, a landscaped hill that's close by my house. I enjoy the respite from concrete and pavement, though to be accurate, Boston is one of the greener, prettier cities around.

Today I saw something I'd never seen before. As I followed the winding path up and over the hill, around the bend I came upon a high plant with prickly bulging green buds, topped by bright purple tufts: a Scottish Thistle. I've seen pictures of it, but I can't recall ever seeing one growing in my state, though I'm more than familiar with prickle-burrs and other thorny plants like it.

A few of the buds had already turned to down, and I was surprised how truly soft, and sensuously warm from the sun, the cozy seedbed felt under my fingers. I pulled out a few, and for no particularly sane reason, suddenly cast them in the the breeze declaring, "To a free and independent Scotland!"

Well that came out of nowhere! I grabbed three more seedy tufts of down and put them in my pocket. Then I made the mistake of brushing one of the leaves with my finger. It drew blood. I meant no harm and yet inattention doesn't excuse you, at least not around a Scottish Thistle.

I walked back home, through the gate, and around the side of the house. My stroll had jostled most of the seeds loose from their parachutes, so I fished them out from the folds of my pocket, and going around to the bare, overlooked, out of harms way spots around the foundation, I dropped them one by one.

Tomorrow I'll do it again, and after that again, and cherish hopes through the long winter ahead, that this time next year, I'll have proud flags of Scottish Thistle ringing my house.

...and here is info about Puddingstone Park - http://www.missionhillnhs.org/open_space.htm

The Fog

A salted mist wafts through the streets
The tang, the bite, it almost speaks,
And stirs within a memory fine
Of mountainside and lowing kine.

It is not mine, I have not known
The mountain roots or heather blown,
But like a child unquiet in sleep
It is not still and will not keep.

The ache is there, the longing true
These unshed tears: What shall I do?
Pluck the strings and make a song
As my heart beats for days long gone.

(a bit of rhyme that came to me after reading up on Keith family history, the Jacobite Rebellion, and the Highland Clearances)

Sinn an dòchas còrd e ribh agus gun till sibh a-rithist.
(Hope you enjoy and that you will come back again!)

Cut And Paste

good eatin'!

Planet Viewing in 2009

Planet Viewing In January

The Bard of Maplewood

Saturday, June 2, 2007

The Bard of Maplewood

Planet Viewing in November

Treasure Hunt

Clam Cakes

Planet Viewing in August

W.B.Yeats 'Lake Isle of Innisfree'

Planet Viewing in July

Planet Viewing in June

3 In A Row!!!!!

The passing of Tommy Burns, CFC Legend

Mercury

Celtic vs Rangers

Solar Images Show Green And Blue Flashes

Musical Math

Hmmmmmm...

Simple Tools Would Enhance Experience Of Bloggers, Blog Readers

April (meteor) Showers

Planet Viewing in April

Huge Meteorite Impact Found In UK

StarDate March 26, 2008

The Who

Fury at BBC's English history of Scotland

I'm a VERY naughty Dalek :(

StarDate March 5, 2008

StarDate March 2, 2008

StarDate February 29, 2008

More fun links for speaking Scots

Welcome tae the Scuil Wab

follow-up

A Scots-language version of Wikipedia

Lunar Eclipse

StarDate Februaury 20, 2008

StarDate February 19, 2008

StarDate February 14, 2008

"...give birth to a dancing star."

Young Stars In Their Baby Blanket Of Dust

song to The White Stag

StarDate February 11, 2008

out of the mist

StarDate February 10, 2008

Free Will

Destined To Cheat? New Research Finds Free Will Can Keep Us Honest

U2

quote

tip-toeing through Jung

a poem

A Dabbler's Alchemy

StarDate February 9, 2008

Clam 'Chowdah'

Sting Writes (4th excerpt)...

Sting Writes (3rd excerpt)...

Sting Writes (2nd excerpt)...

Sting Writes (1st excerpt)...

Sting's book

Sting: The Police

Cosmic Collision

Gas 'Finger' Points To Galaxies' Future

StarDate February 5, 2008

an excerpt

by Robert Louis Stevenson

StarDate February 4, 2008

Babes With Blades

StarDate February 3, 2008

StarDate February 2, 2008

Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury

Mystery of Mercury: The Shrinking Planet

Dark Matter and Dark Energy

Dark Fluid: Dark Matter And Dark Energy May Be Two Faces Of Same Coin

Mercury more Earth-like than Moon-like

Mercury's Magnetosphere Fends Off Solar Wind

A Blessing

something from last November

Welcome to Shelley!

more on 'Tristan and Iseult'