Just for the hell of it I’ve decided to switch from Movable Type to WordPress. So far I am very very impressed. Incredibly easy to install, very easy to migrate, and easy to manage.
Here’s a video of a group of kids, ages 11-15, covering UK’s “In the Dead of Night – Presto Vivace and Reprise”, a song that is amazingly difficult to perform. Very, very impressive…
Oh man, I need to buy this for my kids.
Interesting essay on LewRockell.com on the subject of South Park and Libertarian philosophy:
It’s all too easy to become fixated on the vulgar and obscene surface of South Park, rejecting out of hand a show that chose to make a Christmas icon out of a talking turd named Mr. Hankey. But if one is patient with South Park, and gives the show the benefit of the doubt, it turns out to be genuinely thought provoking, taking up one serious issue after another, from environmentalism and animal rights to assisted suicide and sexual harassment. And, as we shall see, the show approaches all these issues from a distinct philosophical position, what is known as libertarianism, the philosophy of freedom. I know of no television program that has so consistently pursued a philosophical agenda, week after week, season after season. If anything, the show can become too didactic, with episodes often culminating in a character delivering a speech that offers a surprisingly balanced and nuanced account of the issue at hand.
Plato’s Symposium is useful for showing that vulgarity and philosophical thought are not necessarily antithetical. Before dismissing South Park, we should recall that some of the greatest comic writers – Aristophanes, Chaucer, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Voltaire, Jonathan Swift – plumbed the depths of obscenity even as they rose to the heights of philosophical thought. The same intellectual courage that emboldened them to defy conventional proprieties empowered them to reject conventional ideas and break through the intellectual frontiers of their day. Without claiming that South Park deserves to rank with such distinguished predecessors, I will say that the show descends from a long tradition of comedy that ever since ancient Athens has combined obscenity with philosophy. There are almost as many fart jokes in Aristophanes’ play The Clouds as there are in a typical episode of The Terrance and Philip Show in South Park. In fact, in the earliest dramatic representation of Socrates that has come down to us, he is making fart jokes as he tries to explain to a dumb Athenian named Strepsiades that thunder is a purely natural phenomenon and not the work of the great god Zeus: “First think of the tiny fart that your intestines make. Then consider the heavens: their infinite farting is thunder. For thunder and farting are, in principle, one and the same.” Cartman couldn’t have said it better.
NASA plans for permanent base on moon:
NASA is to build a permanently occupied base on the moon, most likely at the lunar north pole.
The habitat will serve as a science outpost as well as a testbed for technologies needed for future travel to Mars, and construction will follow a series of flights to the moon scheduled to begin by 2020.
“We’re going for a base on the moon,” Scott “Doc” Horowitz, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration, told reporters in a teleconference from the Johnson Space Centre in Houston.
Plans for what the base will look like and what astronauts would do there have yet to be determined. Similarly, NASA has not projected a date when the base would go into operation.
The moon’s polar sites are preferred to equatorial regions because of more moderate temperatures and longer periods of sunlight, which is critical for the solar-powered electrical systems NASA plans to develop. Eventually, nuclear power may be used to augment or replace the solar energy systems.
Scientists also suspect the poles have resources such as hydrogen, ice and other materials that could be used for life support.
“It’s exciting,” said NASA deputy administrator Shana Dale.
There’s a damn good chance that NBC will royally mess this up, but then again they did an excellent job adapting The Office.
From TV Squad:
Finally, the Channel 4 series The IT Crowd is being re-developed by writer and executive producers David Guarascio and Moses Port (Just Shoot Me, Mad About You); and Joe Port and Joe Wiseman (Son of the Beach, Dilbert).
If you haven’t seen The IT Crowd, here’s an excellent description (from Wikipedia):
The IT Crowd is set in the offices of Reynholm Industries, a fictitious British corporation in central London. It focuses on the shenanigans of the three-strong IT support team located in a dingy, untidy and unkempt basement – a stark contrast to the shining modern architecture and stunning London views enjoyed by the rest of the organisation.
Moss and Roy, the two technicians, are portrayed as socially inept geeks. Despite the company’s utter dependence on their services, they are despised by the rest of the staff. Roy’s exasperation is reflected in his support techniques of ignoring the phone in the hope it will stop ringing, and using reel-to-reel tape recordings of stock IT suggestions (“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”, “Are you sure it’s plugged in?”). Moss’s wide and intricate knowledge of all things technical is reflected in his extremely accurate yet utterly indecipherable suggestions, while demonstrating a complete inability to deal with practical problems like extinguishing fires and removing spiders.
Jen, the newest member of the team, is hopelessly non-technical, despite claiming on her CV that she has “a lot of experience with computers”. As Denholm, the company boss, is equally tech-illiterate, he’s convinced by Jen’s interview bluffing and appoints her head of the I.T. department. Her official title is “relationship manager”, yet her attempts at bridging the gulf between the technicians and the business generally have the opposite effect, landing Jen in situations just as ludicrous as those of her team-mates.
Some of the episodes are available online.
From SpaceWeather.com:
Have you ever stepped outside after dinner to walk the dog–just in time to see a bright fireball streak across the sky? It makes you wonder, how often does that happen?
Pretty often, according to astronomer Bill Cooke of the Marshall Space Flight Center. Using a computer model of Earth’s meteoroid environment, he made this plot showing the global number of fireballs per day vs. the brightness of the fireball:
According to his calculations, fireballs as bright as Venus appear somewhere on Earth more than 100 times daily. Fireballs as bright as a quarter Moon occur once every ten days, and fireballs as bright as a full Moon once every five months.
The vast majority are never noticed. About 70% of all fireballs streak over uninhabited ocean. Half appear during the day, invisible in sunny skies. Many are missed, however, simply because no one bothers to look up. So grab a leash and a dog (optional), and head outside. The chance of a fireball is better than you think.
From Science@NASA:
Last month, Earth passed through a “minefield” of debris from Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle. This happens every year in mid-November and results in the annual Leonid meteor shower. From Nov. 17th to Nov. 19th both Earth and the Moon were peppered with meteoroids.
Meteoroids that hit Earth disintegrate harmlessly (and beautifully) in the atmosphere. But the Moon has no atmosphere to protect it, so meteoroids don’t stop in the sky. They hit the ground. The vast majority of these meteoroids are dust-sized, and their impacts are hardly felt. But bigger debris can gouge a crater in the lunar surface and explode in a flash of heat and light. Some flashes can be seen from Earth.
During the passage through Tempel-Tuttle’s debris field, Cooke’s team trained their telescopes (two 14-inch reflectors located at the Marshall Space Flight Center) on the dark surface of the Moon. On Nov. 17th, after less than four hours of watching, they video-recorded two impacts: a 9th magnitude flash in Oceanus Procellarum (the Ocean of Storms) and a brighter 8th magnitude flash in the lunar highlands near crater Gauss.
“The flashes we saw were caused by Leonid meteoroids 2 to 3 inches (5 to 8 cm) in diameter,” says Cooke. “They hit with energies between 0.3 and 0.6 Giga-Joules.” In plain language, that’s 150 to 300 pounds of TNT.
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