Anthony Aylomamitis created this stunning image that records of the sun’s position, viewed from the Parthenon, on a total of 41 occasions between January 12 and December 21, 2002. The top position is the Summer Solstice in the northern hemisphere, the bottom the Winter Solstice. Pretty freakin’ awesome.
It’s not East Coast / West Coast. It’s not Down South vs. Up Top. No. It’s Earth-walkers vs. Moon-walkers!
Can I just say: I fucking love Talib Kweli?
In case you don’t have time to watch it now, here’s a quick excerpt from the video:
Talib Kweli: “The song ‘Whitey on the Moon,’ Gil Scott Heron – what, you thought he was talkin’ about LBJ or Nixon? Naw, he was talking about Buzz Aldrin!”
[Clip from Gil Scott Heron: “I can’t pay no doctor bills / but whitey’s on the moon”]
Buzz Aldrin: “Gil and I are cool now. I explained to him that, we came in peace for all mankind, and… he backed off.”
Talib Kweli: “People think of hip hop, and they think of beefs: we had east coast / west coast beefs, down south / up top beefs… but, it doesn’t compare to the beef between Earth-walkers and Moon-walkers, which I think is a way more dangerous beef.”
Buzz Aldrin: “I don’t have any beef with the Earth-walkers.
By now most of you have probably realized how overblown the hype is about “Swine Flu”/”Mexican Flu”/”H1N1 Flu.” It’s a media frenzy.
I don’t mean to downplay the seriousness of any infectious disease, and for those who actually catch this form of flu, it’s a serious matter indeed. But, come on. As of May 5, 2009, the CDC and the WHO are reporting ONE confirmed death from H1N1 in the United States, and 26 confirmed deaths worldwide.
Now, you can argue that cases are being under-reported, that laboratory results lag actual infections and deaths, and that national health authorities may have a misguided interest in hiding the true extent of the illness. But again, I insist – there is absolutely NO need to panic!
Has your family urged you not to travel because of fears of Swine Flu? They would better advise you not to travel by car at all, since motor vehicle accidents killed 43,000 people in the U.S. in the year 2000 alone.
Have friends insisted that you visit the doctor because of that cough you’ve developed? You might be better off staying away from medical care, since nearly 200,000 people die due to in-hospital preventable medical errors every year!
Are you feeling so stressed out by worries about the Swine Flu that you’re going to have a glass of wine before bed? You might want to think twice – alcohol is responsible for 85,000 deaths per year in the U.S.!
And don’t forget…nobody was panicking back in 2005, when influenza and pneumonia killed 63,000 Americans!
Guess which of these two papers (below) is owned by Rupert Murdoch!
As an added bonus, Agent B points us to a useful online resource that answers the question Do I Have Swine Flu? in a particularly Murdochian fashion.
Found on NYT, some nice Radiology Art. The movies are particularly satisfying.
[Update: I downsized and recompressed the movie, exported it as an FLV, and implemented an open-source video player on the blog to play it back! –Steve.]
This Time magazine article from late 2007 sets the scene:
Geoengineering has long been the province of kooks, but as the difficulty of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions has become harder to ignore, it is slowly emerging as an option of last resort. The tipping point came in 2006, when the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen published an editorial examining the possibility of releasing vast amounts of sulfurous debris into the atmosphere to create a haze that would keep the planet cool. “Over the past couple of years, it’s gone from an outsider thing to something that is increasingly discussed,” says Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University.
Wired’s Danger Room blog has the details:
One scheme calls for adding iron to the ocean, to stimulate the growth of greenhouse gas-absorbing algae. Another for “loading the skies” with sulfate particles that “act as mini-reflectors, shading out sunlight and cooling the Earth.” A third, “covering the Arctic with dust.”
Yes, yes – spread tiny reflectors throughout the stratosphere to reflect away all that dangerous sunlight! What could possibly go wrong? And, who better to explore this topic than… the U. S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency?
Science magazine’s Science Insider blog tells us that
An official advisory group to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is convening an unclassified meeting next week to discuss geoengineering… DARPA is the latest in a number of official science funding agencies or top scientific societies that are exploring the controversial idea. But one leading advocate of the work opposes the military developing geoengineering techniques.
I think I’ll let Mr. Burns, that paragon of virtue and human compassion, have the last word:
“Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun. I will do the next best thing…block it out!”
Boston.com offers these easy instructions to help you hallucinate with common household items.
ping pong hallucination
h/t Watson
Dec. 2, 1942: The first man-made controlled nuclear reaction takes place, underneath the grandstand of the University of Chicago’s football grandstand.
Dec. 2, 1957: The first commercial nuclear power plant goes online, in Shippingport, PA.
Wired has an article, here: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/12/dayintech_1202
One interesting piece of historical nomenclature is that, at the Chicago experiment, there was a staffer prepared to cut a rope with an axe, to drop graphite rods into the reactor and stop the reaction. This acronym, SCRAM, for Safety Control Rod Ax-Man, is still used for the emergency shutdown systems in modern reactors.
Seriously. We’ve been hearing for years that Americans need to curb their excessive consumption habits. We’ve been told that we drive too many cars, we use too much electricity, we throw away too much plastic, we import too much oil, and on and on and on.
Suddenly, we’re using less oil; we’re driving fewer miles; we’re buying fewer cars; we’re buying fewer goods; and we’re using less electricity. But this is all being reported as “bad” news!
We obviously are in desperate need of new ways to measure economic and social well-being. It shouldn’t be a headline crisis when U.S. auto sales drop 50%, it should be a sign of much-needed progress!
Spending and growth are not the measures of a healthy and satisfying life. I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot since I read Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy. I’ll do a “dogeared” post on it soon…
Food writer Michael Pollan has a terrific article in last week’s New York Times Magazine, where he outlines the food-related policy challenges facing the incoming U.S. president. In his opening, he notes a startling fact about the energy consumed in the industrial agriculture process:
chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.
I think his point would be clearer if he kept his numbers in the same order, though, like this: in 1940, the system produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy used; today, it produces 0.1 calorie of supermarket food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy used.
