“I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.”
Walt Whitman “Song of Myself’
“The new type of particle is so rare that it cannot occur anywhere else on Earth outside of the accelerator, and only occasionally in outer space.”
The Band’s Levon Helm has passed away after a battle with throat cancer. He was 71. Photo by Elliott Landy.
Damn. What a voice. What a musician.
The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Killed Reading Books, Show Them This Chart
“Remember the good old days when everyone read really good books, like, maybe in the post-war years when everyone appreciated a good use of the semi-colon? Everyone’s favorite book was by Faulkner or Woolf or Roth. We were a civilized civilization. This was before the Internet and cable television, and so people had these, like, wholly different desires and attention spans. They just craved, craved, craved the erudition and cultivation of our literary kings and queens.
Well, that time never existed. Check out these stats from Gallup surveys. In 1957, not even a quarter of Americans were reading a book or novel. By 2005, that number had shot up to 47 percent. I couldn’t find a more recent number, but I think it’s fair to say that reading probably hasn’t declined to the horrific levels of the 1950s.”
Full Story: Atlantic
Whoa
Why Anonymous Is Not a Threat to National Security
Paul Higgins - a thoughtful piece in Foreign Affairs
Over the past year, the U.S. government has begun to think of Anonymous, the online network phenomenon, as a threat to national security. According to The Wall Street Journal, Keith Alexander, the general in charge of the U.S. Cyber Command and the director of the National Security Agency, warned earlier this year that “the hacking group Anonymous could have the ability within the next year or two to bring about a limited power outage through a cyberattack.” ……………This is the wrong approach. Seeing Anonymous primarily as a cybersecurity threat is like analyzing the breadth of the antiwar movement and 1960s counterculture by focusing only on the Weathermen. Anonymous is not an organization. It is an idea, a zeitgeist, coupled with a set of social and technical practices. Diffuse and leaderless, its driving force is “lulz” — irreverence, playfulness, and spectacle. It is also a protest movement, inspiring action both on and off the Internet, that seeks to contest the abuse of power by governments and corporations and promote transparency in politics and business. Just as the antiwar movement had its bomb-throwing radicals, online hacktivists organizing under the banner of Anonymous sometimes cross the boundaries of legitimate protest. But a fearful overreaction to Anonymous poses a greater threat to freedom of expression, creativity, and innovation than any threat posed by the disruptions themselves.
Full Story: Foreign Affairs
Tornadogenesis—the formation of tornadoes—remains a topic of active research as there is relatively little direct experimental data, owing to the difficulty of prediction as well as measurement. Initially, a variation of wind speed at different altitudes in the atmosphere causes shearing, which can lead to the formation of a horizontal column of rotating air—a vortex line similar to a roll cloud. Beneath a developing storm, the updraft of warm local air can pull this vortex line upwards, creating vertical rotation in the cloud, thereby birthing a supercell. Supercells do not always spawn tornadoes, and the exact causes that result in tornadic or nontornadic supercells are not fully understood. However, the formation of tornadoes within the supercell seems dependent on the downdraft of cool air within the storm as well as stretching of the vortex line, which increases its rate of rotation. For more information, check out this explanatory video and some of the talks by Paul Markowski. (Thanks to mindscrib, aggieastronaut and others for their submissions related to this topic! Photo credits: P. Markowski and D. Zaras)
My dashboard has a whole new flavor now that I got my astrophysicist friend to join Tumblr.
This doesn’t explain how they got to Oz, but it’s still pretty great.
(via npr)
Royal Colors is now available for download and streaming on Sound Cloud!!
Done with tour (and my fair share of carbon output) and am having coffee on a Sunday at home. It’s late March but you wouldn’t know it from all the trees and flowers and frogs and birds that are saying we’re in late April.
I know I shouldn’t base too much on annual weather patterns so I’ll just cite this article and continue drinking my coffee and get ready to head back out on the road in the US. At least I offset some carbon with my gardens…
