Weekend in Nashville/snowpocalypse redux
December 10, 2010
As always, I must shamelessly self-promote for a minute. Tonight my band POWERBRRRD is playing at The End along with Big Surr, Diarrhea Planet, Evan P. Donohue, and Casa Castille. 5 bands? Yes, 5 bands, BUT rest assured that every band on this bill has a setlist of 30 minutes or less. In fact, POWERBRRRD’s set will probably barely crack 20 minutes. This show will be a conglomeration of insanity, I promise. And it will only set you back 5 bones. Also, Joaquin Phoenix will be there. (Oh, and sorry, Michael Eades. At least we advertised all 5 bands from the get-go!)
Now for some other shows that I recommend:
FRIDAY:
Ok, if you MUST go to something else tonight, my pick would be Howlies, with Oblio and Field Days at the Basement. 9pm, 21+ $??? Also, there’s an afterparty for that show at Mercy Lounge.
SATURDAY:
Natural Child, Ex Humans, The Cannomen, Foster Care, and Cy Barkley at Glen Danzig’s House. $5, 7pm
SUNDAY:
Cold War Kids at Third Man Records. I can’t find a time anywhere but it’s probably something like 7pm.
AXWY, Shoot the Mountain, Tallest Trees at the 5 Spot. 9pm, 21+ $5. (AXWY is an bloopy, glitchy, Postal Service-esque project started by Ryan Malina about a year ago. He put out an album that was quite good, but to my knowledge hasn’t played the material live until now.)
It’s also worth noting that the Scene has posted their yearly local Rock ‘n Roll Poll. The “outtakes and extended jams” is worth a read too.
You may have heard that Nashville is supposed to get a little snow this weekend. I’ll throw my official weather nerd opinion in the hat: DON’T FREAK OUT. It’s not going to be #snowpocalypse2010redux. What they’re forecasting is maybe an inch late Saturday night into Sunday morning. I’d say Nashville itself will get a dusting at best. This is one of those systems where the low pressure is well to the north of us, and the cold front is swinging around to the south, hitting us. There will rain/warmer weather ahead of the front as it pushed west-to-east, but very little moisture behind the front. I’d say the rain will change to snow late Saturday night as they predict, but again, no more than a dusting in Nashville. I hope I’m wrong, as I’m actually a fan of snow, but history says to take official forecast amounts with grain of salt. (Haha, get it? Salt melts snow. Haha…)
Have a great weekend!
Space X successfully launches & recovers Dragon Capsule
December 8, 2010
This morning Space X launched the first full version of their Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket. The company’s rocket underwent a successful test launch back in July, and this launch successfully put their Dragon capsule into orbit. The capsule orbited earth for about 3 1/2 hours, then re-entered the atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, where it will be recovered later this afternoon. This was the first successful commercial spaceflight involving re-entry and recovery. The Dragon capsule is under contract to NASA to carry cargo to the International Space Station. Space X is in a battle to also win a contract from NASA to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS once the Space Shuttle is retired next year. A slightly different version of the Dragon capsule would be used for this, atop the same Falcon 9 rocket. This test’s success puts Elon Musk’s Space X much closer to that goal.
I am quite confident that Space X, or whatever other commercial spaceflight company that wins the NASA contract, will be able to cheaply and safely get our astronauts to and from the ISS. There is absolutely no reason NASA should devote more than basic oversight and money to this task. What NASA needs to focus its efforts on now is going beyond the ISS- to asteroids, to Mars, and even farther than that.
In other news, Mozilla has adopted two Red Pandas (aka firefoxes) and is streaming their activities live at http://firefoxlive.mozilla.org. What’s most awesome about this is that they’re being kept at the Knoxville Zoo, right here in Tennessee. I DARE you to watch the videos of them and not smile. (Via Candice Burnside)
This weekend in Nashville
December 3, 2010
Before I get to my picks for what to this weekend in Nashville, I must very briefly mention the famous Arsenic bacteria that NASA announced yesterday. It’s all over every news site in the universe, so I feel no need to say anything other than- this is totally awesome and it will force biologists and astrobiologists to rethink their theories of what type of life might exist on other worlds. It also proves that life can be much more adaptable than we ever thought. And I can’t help but post this great comic from XKCD:
Now for this weekend’s picks:
FRIDAY:
Charlie Louvin, w/ Porter Hall, TN at Foobar. This will be in the new Foobar expansion room, not the tiny stage at the main bar. And it’s fucking Charlie Louvin! Dude’s a living legend. 9pm I would assume… but I can’t find a definite time listing anywhere, so you might wanna show up early- dude’s a legend but he’s also very old, and old people tend to go to bed early.
Tim & Eric Awesome Tour Great Job! Featuring Tim & Eric, Pusswhip Banggang, and Neil Hamburger at the Cannery Ballroom. 9pm, but I hear it’s sold out. So hopefully you already have tickets…
SATURDAY:
Duh! Where else would you be besides La Paz? As I mentioned yesterday, I’m throwing a tacky sweater holiday disco party at La Paz with DJs Potamus and Vitalic Noise. La Paz is now at 2214 Elliston Pl., where Ombi used to be. It’s 21+, is FREE between 10-11pm, and $3 after 11pm. We’ve got $2.50 PBRs, $4 margaritas, and a round of $2 jello shots coming out at midnight. We’ll also have a disco ball, fog machine, and plenty of dark corner makeout sessions.
BUT if you MUST do something else tomorrow night-
Old 97’s w/ Hayes Carll at Mercy Lounge. 9pm but it’s sold out.
Black Cab Sessions day show: in-store at Grimey’s with Tristen and We Were The States (who have a new album out!)
Black Cab Sessions night show: at the Basement with PUJOL, Tristen, Cheap Time, Altered Statesmen, and more. If you don’t know what the Black Cab Sessions are, go here.
Have a great weekend!
Some science news tidbits/NASA hasn’t found aliens!
December 1, 2010
It’s been a while since I posted much of anything science-related. Honestly I’ve been veeerrrry busy. Fucking slammed is a good way to put it. But here are some important bits of news/etc… to come out of the science world recently.
- First off, there’s been rampant speculation on some news blogs in the last day or so regarding an upcoming NASA press conference (scheduled for tomorrow afternoon) that will “affect the search for extraterrestrial life.” Of course many are taking that to mean that NASA has found aliens. That almost certainly NOT the case, and I must direct you to the ever-reliable ambassador of reality, Dr. Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy, for much more reasonable speculation on what NASA will be announcing tomorrow. Also, as always, Universe Today is on top it as well. The announcement will probably involve the discovery of a new way or process by which life could exist on Saturn’s moon Titan. So chill out, and don’t believe the sensationalist news sites that are claiming NASA has discovered aliens.
- The Large Hadron Collider has been busy slamming lead ions together for the past month or so. They had been in a “recess” of sorts since their last set of collisions involving single protons. Now they’re slamming much heavier lead nuclei together in an effort to recreate the conditions that physicists think existed just milliseconds after the Big Bang. (On an atom-size scale, of course.) They got what they were looking for, though it was a bit surprising. The leading theory was that a superheated blob called a quark-muon plasma existed, and that it acted much like a gas. However, this experiment showed that the quark-muon plasma actually behaved more like a perfect liquid with no viscosity. This collision was the most energetic heavy ion collision ever achieved on earth, 13 times more powerful than the previous record set by the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven, NY, but it’s only about half of the LHC’s full capacity. Who knows what we’ll find when the LHC ramps up to full capacity over the next few years. (Via NewScientist)
- We have now officially discovered over 500 exoplanets in our galaxy. Sort of. The news was announced, but there is really no way to put a “500” label on one particular planet. The problem is that the line between “confirmed” and “unconfirmed candidate” is a bit unclear, and many times in the past previously “confirmed” planets have been retracted as new, more accurate data has been gathered to prove they were in fact something else that’s not a planet. But the number is sufficiently past 500, so we can officially be happy that just 20 years after the discovery of the first exoplanet, we’re now past the 500-mark. With NASA’s Kepler spacecraft on the hunt, and already having produced over 700 exoplanet candidates, that number will soon start to rise very quickly. I’d say the next exoplanet milestone we’ll be celebrating is 1,000, along with the discovery of a true earth-twin. (Via Universe Today)
Turkey break
November 24, 2010
It’s that time of year again where everyone eats way too much and visits their families. That’s what I’m doing today so don’t expect to see anything on this blog for a few days at least. I do have a review of the new And The Relatives record coming down the pipe, so stay tuned for that.
In the meantime, go have an eyegasm while looking at these selected photos from National Geographic’s photography contest.
California “missle launch” was likely only a jet contrail
November 10, 2010
Monday night must’ve been a slow news night in California, and everywhere really… but what most media has been calling a “mystery missle launch” was probably just a jet airliner contrail. It’s all a matter of perspective, really.
The footage came from a news helicopter that was flying off the coast of Orange County, CA, Monday night. The footage is shot looking westward and the object appears to be a rocket rising from the ocean. But if a jet airliner is flying directly toward you from over the horizon, and leaving a contrail behind it, it will look as though it is rising from the ground going straight up. If the atmospheric conditions are right, the contrail will quickly get widened by upper-level winds, and vortexes left by the plane’s wings can cause a spiral-like appearance. The bright light at the tip of the plume is only visible for a short time, which would indicate that it’s simply the glint of the setting sun reflecting off the plane’s underbelly. After some blog-reading I found that in fact, contrails have been mistaken for missles from this very same area before, and the culprits are planes traveling from Hawaii to Phoenix. There’s also a small possibility that it was a small target rocket from an island west of LA and used to test the military’s new airborne laser defense system, but the company that conducts those tests has said that it did not have any launches that day.
I think what we have here is a case of sensationalist media capitalizing on the mistake of a helicopter news team. Normal people probably see contrails from this same flight path almost every night and may think it’s interesting, but they forget about it and move on. Because it happened to be a news helicopter team who were fooled by the illusion this time, it instantly became a media blitz and got blown waaaay out of proportion. I’m saying I’m 100% sure it was a jet airliner contrail, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t. More detailed info on this particular incident’s explanation can be found at NewScientist. Also, a detailed explanation and comparison of this incident to other contrail incidents can be found at the Contrail Science blog.
Eye-gasm: virtual tour of Space Shuttle launchpad
November 2, 2010
Screenshot from NASA Tech virtual tour
So yesterday’s post was a bit of a downer… in some ways. Let me now point you in the direction of something totally awesome: a virtual tour of Space Shuttle Discovery on launch pad 39A. With the final liftoff of Discovery scheduled for tomorrow, I thought it perfect today to share this website I discovered via Universe Today. NASA’s Jim O’Connor runs the NASA Tech website and does 360 degree hi-resolution photographic virtual tours, and they’re nothing short of amazing. While virtual tours are nothing new, getting this kind of view (and from as many viewpoints) of a space shuttle is as close as most of us will ever get to actually seeing the full assembly up-close and in-person. It really helps you grasp how big the whole thing is… as much as one can without actually being there. Right now there are several different views of the space shuttle, all of which can be rotated a full 360 degrees. While the website itself is rather hideously designed, the awesome views offered by the virtual tours make up for it. I’d say my favorite is the one from under the orange external fuel tank.
In other news: GET OFF YOUR ASS AND VOTE TODAY!
Astrology=Myth
November 1, 2010
Time for some good old-fashioned debunking.
It seems like Astrology is one of those old myths that manages to pervade everyday language even with some of the most well-educated people. I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but it simply is a load of crap. The biggest reason, and the only one I will spell out in this post, (you will get links to more thorough debunking articles later) is that the 12 “houses” of the zodiac are not constant. Our earth’s axis of rotation wobbles, just like a top’s axis of rotation slowly wobbles when you spin it on a table. This phenomenon, called precession, causes the zodiac to slowly change over many years. In fact, there are now 13 constellations that fall within the zodiac, not 12. The Babylonians created the 12 sign zodiac we’re all familiar with, but that was thousands of years ago. The zodiac has shifted so that there’s a good chance that when you were born, the sun was not in the constellation that corresponds with your astrological sign based on the calendar. Said calendar is based on how the Babylonians observed the sky thousands of years ago. It is not the same today!
Modern astrologers have turned this pseudo-science into a huge moneymaking scam that is no different than that of psychics and other scam artists that use misdirection and mentalism techniques to screw people out of their money. They use vague predictions that could be applied to almost anyone or anything, and they use the fact that people always remember the few things they get right, and not the many things they got wrong. The logic people use when they claim that an astrological prediction was right is appalling. “My horoscope said I’d come into money today, and I found a dollar on the ground! It was right!” The predictions made by astrologers have never EVER stood up to actual scientific research. They get no more predictions correct than a person making random chance guesses would.
One more point- the idea that the position of the planets and sun when we were born could have any effect on our personality is totally absurd. How? There are 4 forces in nature- electromagnetism, gravity, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. None of them can affect you based on the positions of the planets/sun when you were born. This is scientifically proven fact.
I don’t have a degree in science, but I do consider myself an amateur scientist and a skeptic, and I follow the writings of extremely smart scientists who do have degrees in what they write about, and I can be damn sure that I can trust them. Go read their more thorough debunkings of astrology here, here, and here.
Mayan calendar end disputed/Big Pics of NIF
October 19, 2010
It’s been a while since I got on my soapbox of how the 2012 Mayan calendar doomsday myth is, well… a myth. Let me begin by saying that there is no reason to believe that anything exceptional will happen when the Mayan long count calendar ends. Anyone that tells you otherwise is either totally full of shit, or is very gullible to fluff and hype (generated by the former). The descendants of the Mayans themselves have even said that the doomsday myth is bullshit. So, this thing is already completely blown out of the water by real science and reason, but just in case you needed another reason not to believe the doomsday hype, now the actual date of the end of the long count calendar is in question. The methods used to convert the Mayan calendar into our own Gregorian years has been shown to be unreliable, and this could throw off the date conversion by as much as 50 to 100 years. So in reality, the Mayan calendar might have already ended (and thus simply started over again)! I’ll keep an eye out for any updates and clarifications to this story, but let’s face it- the Mayan calendar doomsday hype is nothing more than fear-mongering and utter ignorance. (Via LiveScience)
Image via Wikipedia
I know I link to this blog all the time, but the Boston Globe’s Big Picture blog continually showcases some of the most amazing imagery you’ll find anywhere, and what’s best about it is the content. This particular series involves the National Ignition Facility in California. This massive experiment could literally solve all the world’s energy problems. What they’re attempting to do here is essentially create a miniature star right here on earth. Just recently they completed a successful test in which they fired 192 lasers simultaneously into one tiny frozen target capsule containing deuterium and tritium (isotopes of hydrogen). The ultimate goal is to create a nuclear fusion reaction- the same process taking place in the center of our Sun. As you can easily deduce, this would release enormous amounts of energy that is completely clean- the only by-product is helium, which is the element formed when hydrogen atoms fuse. The only hurdle is that it already requires a massive amount of energy to power the lasers that start the reaction in the first place, so the reactor must produce significantly more energy than it consumes in order to truly be a viable solution to the energy crisis. Another issue could be safety. With a reaction as powerful as nuclear fusion, things can get dangerous very quickly. Thankfully though, if an explosion were to occur, it wouldn’t involve the radioactive fallout danger associated with current nuclear reactors which use a different process- nuclear fission. (AKA the reaction used in the atomic bomb.) Click here to learn more about the NIF.
Doubt cast on Gliese 581g planet
October 13, 2010
Credit: Lynette Cook/NSF
Planet hunting is a delicate and tedious science. A very strong emphasis is placed on multiple teams of astronomers being able to replicate the results of the first team to announce any kind of discovery. If another team is unable to replicate the findings of the first, it casts a serious shadow of doubt on the validity of the initial findings. That’s exactly what is happening with the Gliese 581g exoplanet that was announced just last week. Sadly, a team that works directly with the HARPS detector on the 3.6m telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile has been unable to confirm the existence of Gliese 581f or g. They have access to more data than the team who initially announced the discovery, and they can’t find a clear enough signal in the background “noise” of the observations to confirm this planet. As more teams run computer models and look at observations from other telescopes with radial velocity planet-finding instruments, maybe we’ll get a clearer picture of whether these two planets actually exist. (Via Universe Today via Dynamics of Cats blog)
Don’t worry though, the Kepler mission will undoubtedly start popping out earth-twin discoveries in another year or so, mark my word.
steve cross loves music and science 