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LIGO Sees First Ever Gravitational Waves as Two Black Holes Eat Each Other
Better start shining up some new Nobel Prize medals: Scientists have reported that, for the very first time in history, they have detected gravitational waves.
And oh my yes, this is a very big deal. It will open up an entirely new field of astronomy, a new way to observe the Universe. Seriously.
Gravitational waves (not to be confused with gravity waves, which are a totally different thing) are ripples in the fabric of spacetime, caused when a massive object is accelerated. By the time they get here from distant astronomical objects, the waves have incredibly low energy and are phenomenally difficult to detect, which is why it's taken a century to discover them since they were first predicted by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. Essentially every other prediction of GR has been found to be correct, but the existence of gravitational waves has been maddeningly difficult to prove directly.
Until now. And what caused the gravitational waves they detected at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory is as amazing and mind-blowing as the waves themselves: They caught the death spiral and aftermath of two huge black holes 1.3 billion light-years from Earth, merging together in a titanic and catastrophically violent event.
Mind you, we've had some good evidence such binary black holes existed before this, but this new result pretty much proves they exist and that, over time, they eventually collide and merge. That's huge.
The black holes had masses of 36 and 29 times the mass of the Sun before they merged. After they merged they created a single black hole with a mass of 62 times that of the Sun. You may notice those masses don't add up right; there's 3 solar masses missing. That mass didn't just disappear! It was converted into energy: the energy of the gravitational waves themselves. And the amount of energy is staggering: This single event released as much energy as the Sun does in 15 trillion years.
I know. There is nothing about this story that isn't incredibly cool.
So, to understand all this better you'll need a wee bit of background. This is all very mind-bendy stuff, but I promise it's worth it.
What Is a Gravitational Wave, Anyway?
One of the outcomes of Einstein's General Relativity theory is that space and time are two facets of the same thing, which we call spacetime. There are lots of analogies for it, but you can think of it as the fabric of space, a four-dimensional tapestry (three of space and one of time) in which we are all embedded. Remember, it's not literally like this; we're using an analogy. But it'll help you picture it.
We think of gravity as a force, pulling us toward an object. But Einstein revisualized it, seeing it as an outcome of the warping of spacetime. A massive object distorts the shape of space, and another object moving through that warped space gets accelerated. We see that as gravity. In other words, matter tells space how to bend, and space tells matter how to move.
Another outcome of the mathematics of GR is that if a massive object is accelerated, it will cause ripples, waves, to move away from itself as it moves. These are actually ripples in the fabric of spacetime itself! Spacetime expands and contracts in complicated ways as a wave passes, a bit like how ripples will move out from a rock dropped into a pond, distorting the surface of the water.
There are lots of ways to generate gravitational waves. The more massive and dense an object is, and the harder it accelerates, the sharper and more energetic the waves are. The Earth moves around the Sun once per year, accelerated by the Sun's gravity. But the motion is too slow and the Earth's mass too low to ever hope to detect the mushy waves emitted.
But if you have two much more massive objects—like, say, neutron stars, the über-dense cores of stars that have previously exploded—they do generate waves that we can see.
In fact, we have! Kinda. In 1974, a binary neutron star system was discovered by astronomers Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse. These two massive objects orbited each other very rapidly, once every eight hours or so. As they do, they emit a tiny bit of energy in the form of gravitational waves. That energy comes from the orbital energy of the stars themselves, so as they emit gravitational waves, they lose orbital energy. The orbit shrinks, and the time it takes the two stars to revolve around each other drops. Over time, that "orbital decay" can be very precisely measured … and it was seen! Not only that, it matched the prediction of GR perfectly.
Taylor and Hulse won the Nobel Prize for this. And they only detected gravitational waves indirectly. They saw how the loss of energy by emitting the waves affected the stars' orbits. But they didn't detect the waves themselves.
So How Did LIGO Do It?
Gravitational waves come in many shapes and forms, but what they all do is infinitesimally distort the shape of space. But how do you measure that? It's not like you can hold a ruler up between two objects and measure how their distance apart changes when a wave passes through …
… right? Oh, wait. It turns out you can.
Enter LIGO: The Laser Interferometer Gravity-Wave Observatory. LIGO is actually two facilities, one located in Washington state and the other in Louisiana (jointly operated by Caltech and MIT). Neither is what you might think of as an astronomical observatory: They each consist of very long pipes arranged in an L-shape. At the far end of each 4-kilometer-long pipe is a mirror.
A very powerful laser sits near the vertex of the L, where the pipes meet. It sends out a pulse of light into a special mirror that splits the beam, sending half of it down one pipe, and the other half down the other pipe. Each mirror reflects is beam back down the pipe, and then they're recombined inside a detector.
Here's a video (credit: NSF) describing how this works:
Let me add what'll seem like a bit of a non sequitur to help make this clear: Have you ever sat in a tub of water and sloshed your body back and forth? If you time it just right, you can amplify the wave of water coming back at you, making it splash higher. You can also time it just right so that you move in a way to negate the wave coming at you, too.
The motion of your body sets up the first wave. When you move again, you make a second wave. It the crest of the first wave hits the crest of the second wave, they amplify each other. If the trough of the second wave hits the crest of the first one, they negate each other.
This is called interference. Where the waves amplify it's constructive interference, and where they negate each other its destructive interference.
Light is a wave. If the laser and the two mirrors in LIGO are set up just right, then the two beams will interfere with each other when they reach the detector. Interference patterns, called fringes, can be seen when you do that, and the exact pattern seen depends, in part on the exact distance between the mirrors. If one mirror moves a tiny bit relative to the other, then the fringe pattern changes.
See where this is going? If a gravitational wave passes through LIGO, one mirror will move a teeny tiny amount relative to the other, and that will create a change in the fringe pattern. Fringes are sensitive to extremely small changes in mirror position, so this is a great way to look for gravitational waves.
How sensitive? A typical gravitational wave will move the mirrors by about 0.0001 times the size of an atomic nucleus! So yeah, they're sensitive.
LIGO has two such setups located thousands of kilometers apart to help distinguish real astronomical sources from things like earthquakes, trucks driving by, and so on. LIGO first went into operation in 2002. Over nearly a decade it looked but found no gravitational waves. In 2010 it shut down for a significant upgrade, making it far more sensitive. This new configuration started observing in September 2015.
Apparently, all this time they were right on the threshold of detection. Once the more sensitive rig was employed, it didn't take long before they hit paydirt: This signal was detected on Sep. 14!
What Did They See?
Now we're ready to put all this together.
Imagine two black holes in a very tight orbit around each other. Both are massive, and whipping around each other at a large fraction of the speed of light. They'll be pouring out gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime expanding away at the speed of light. It's possible LIGO could detect something like that, but there's more to this.
As the black holes whirl madly and emit gravitational waves, they lose orbital energy. Like the neutron stars that got Taylor and Hulse their Nobel, the orbit of the two black holes shrinks. They revolve around each other ever faster.
This change in their orbital rate affects the waves they emit. The frequency of the waves (how many are emitted per second) depends on how rapidly the two objects orbit each other. As the orbit of the black holes shrinks, they revolve around each other faster, and the frequency of the gravitational waves goes up. But, since the black holes are moving more rapidly, they emit even more waves, so they lose energy faster, so they emit even more waves.
This is a runaway effect. The black holes get closer and closer together, whirl around each other faster, emit more and stronger gravitational waves with a higher frequency … until the black holes eat each other! They merge, becoming one (slightly larger) black hole.
Here's an animation showing this phenomenon (using white dwarfs instead of black holes):
What LIGO sees when this happens is the signature of the gravitational waves, with the frequency going up all the time. Sound is also a wave, and the frequency of sound waves is what we interpret as its pitch. A higher frequency sound has a higher pitch; it's a higher note, if you prefer.
As the black holes get close to merging, their frequency rockets up. In the sound analogy, it's like they're singing a note, and as they get closer the note gets stronger and stronger and higher and higher. At the end, the increase in pitch is so rapid it goes way up extremely quickly: This is a chirp.
Literally, a chirp is a sound where the frequency increases rapidly (listen to one here). So the signature of two black holes (or neutrons stars, or even white dwarfs) inspiraling and merging is a chirp in the gravitational waves. If you catch that, you've witnessed the black holes at The Moment Of Truth, when two become one.
And one last bit that boosts confidence: The signal from the merging black holes was detected in the Washington state detector first, then in the Louisiana detector 7 milliseconds later. That delay was due to the waves moving at the speed of light across space!
This merger is simply astonishing. It's one of the most catastrophic events in the Universe, and until just last year we were essentially blind to it.
LIGO has opened our eyes.
What's Next?
With this detection by LIGO, a new era in astronomy begins. In many cases, the gravitational waves are emitted from objects we can't see directly, like black holes merging, or binary neutron stars. Sometimes, though, these objects do emit visible light. A supernova—an exploding star—can emit gravitational waves. Even more dramatically, when two neutron stars merge and form a black hole, they release not just gravitational waves, but also a huge flash of energy in the form of gamma rays and even visible light. These gamma-ray bursts occur in the Universe every day, and we see them all the time. If we can also detect the emitted gravitational waves from them, it will help astronomers understand these bizarre and incredibly violent phenomena.
Even better, we're not starting fresh. Last year, the European Space Agency launched LISA Pathfinder into space. LISA stands for Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, and is basically a super-LIGO in space. LISA Pathfinder is a benchmark mission to test the very sophisticated technology involved. If it works, then a full-up LISA may be launched in the coming years, which will consist of three separate detectors separated in space by millions of kilometers. Its sensitivity will be far, far higher than LIGO's, and will rip the field of gravitational wave astronomy wide open.
Whenever we find a new window into the Universe—radio waves, gamma rays, even the invention of the telescope itself—immense wonders have been our reward. In the vast majority of cases we had no clue what was waiting for us once we peered outwards in a new way. Stars numbered beyond imagining, galaxies packed together clear across the cosmos, planets, nebulae, and even an eventual understanding of how the Universe came to be, how it changes, and how it will evolve in the future.
The treasures, the beauty, the knowledge, have fundamentally changed how we humans see ourselves and our place in the Universe. And here we stand, our hand on another window, ready to throw it open.
What will we see when we look through?
Further Reading
- Markus Pössel at Universe Today has a great write-up on the details of how LIGO works.
- Of course the LIGO page is chock full o' info and has a nice tutorial on gravitational waves.
- Seth Fletcher at Scientific American has a good essay on what this all means.
- You should read Ethan Siegel's piece at Forbes, too.
Uluru is a gigantic sandstone monolith in the Australian Outback. And I do mean gigantic; it's 3 kilometers (10,000 feet) across its widest point, and juts up an imposing 350 meters into the sky.
Well, imposing from the ground. From space it looks decidedly different.
The image above is from Proba-1, a European Space Agency satellite designed as a testbed for new tech. Proba-1 is less than a meter on a side and when it launched in 2001 had a lot of cutting-edge tech on it (paving the way for the later generation Proba-V sat). It has a high-resolution camera onboard capable of seeing objects just 10 meters across, which is pretty good for a camera 600 kilometers above the Earth.
Uluru is amazing. Australia's northwest desert used to be a shallow sea. The seabed was made of iron-rich sand, and Uluru was part of a huge alluvial fan, sediment deposited from streams or rivers that spread out into a fan shape. This built up many layers of sand, deposited over the seasons. Eventually the sea dried up, leaving behind all those layers, now compressed into rock, and colored red as the iron oxidized, forming rust.
About 400 million years ago, mountain ranges in that area were thrust up due to tectonic forces. This uplifted the layers of sandstone, tilting them from horizontal to very nearly vertical. Most of those uplifted blocks have eroded away, but Uluru still remains. The scoring, the lines you see across the top are actually the layers of sandstone deposited by those prehistoric rivers! The layers have different strengths, and erode at different rates, causing the striations. If the layers hadn't been tilted upward, we'd only see one layer, the top one.
Geology is weird.
But miserly—it uses the same processes all over the world. As I read about the geologic history of Uluru I had to laugh: It's very similar to what happened outside my window! The western part of the U.S. was also once a shallow sea with iron-rich sand (the remains of the ancestral Rockies, mountains that built up and eroded away long, long ago). The sea dried up, the current Rockies pushed their way skyward, and uplift exposed the layered sandstone. The city of Boulder's west end is graced by the Flatirons, immense and iconic sheets of reddish rock cracked and pushed to dizzying angles by the powerful forces under the Earth's surface.
You can see examples of this uplift all over town; I took this picture while biking north of Boulder:
You can see the layers of rock, pushed up at an angle. Keep tilting until they're vertical, and multiply the size by a gajillion, and you get Uluru.
The Proba-1 image is grayscale, but other images from space show its color. I've been to Australia twice, but never to this area. It's a long way from anywhere, but if I go back, I may have to put this on the agenda. To see such a thing from up close must be truly magnificent.
NASA's 2017 Budget Request: The Good, the Bad, and the Same Old Same Old
NASA and the White House have announced their proposed budget request for the fiscal year of 2017 (the government year starting Oct. 1). As usual, there's good news and bad news.
First, let me be clear: This is not NASA's actual budget. Every year, the space agency gets together with the president's staf,f and they hammer out a budget based on what they want to do. Usually there are some guiding principles, like beefing up commercial spaceflight, getting back to the Moon or going to Mars, things like that.
In the meantime, in Congress, the House works out its own separate budget for NASA (and everything else in the federal government). Once approved in committee, it goes to the floor for approval by all the representatives, and then that version of the budget bill goes to the Senate. They then work out their own version, both sides of Congress hammer out their compromises, and then finally, they present that to the president as part of the federal budget to approve or deny.
Got it? So the budget we're hearing about now from NASA is just a request to Congress and will very likely undergo changes, some big and many small. But change it will.
Also, all of this is a bit of a hot take from me, a quick look first impression of what's what. As time goes on we'll get more of a sense of what these numbers mean … and what Congress is likely to say about them (for another take on all this, see my Alan Boyle's summary at GeekWire, Casey Dreier's at the Planetary Society and also Jeff Foust's at SpaceNews).
So, given all that, what have we got? Let's look at the biggies first.
Overall, the budget requested totals slightly more than $19 billion. That's down from last year's enacted budget of just less than $19.3 billion but is also the highest request the president has ever made. So yay? Kinda? As always, I'd like to see NASA's budget doubled. Remember as you read everything below, NASA's budget is less than 1 percent of the federal budget. That's a good thing to bear in mind.
Space Launch System, or SLS, is the heavy lift launch rocket NASA is developing, and Orion is the capsule being developed with it that will carry humans into space. The requests for the two this year are $1.31 billion and $1.12 billion respectively. This can be compared with what was actually enacted for them last year: $2 billion, and $1.27 billion. That means the request is far less than last year's funding, down by $690 and $150 million.
Personally, I am no fan of SLS. I've written about this many times; I don't think this rocket is really needed, and it costs so much that very little money will be left over in NASA's budget to actually do anything with it after it's built (it's like buying a car so expensive you can't afford groceries).
However the Senate is very pro-SLS (some joke it's actually the Senate Launch System). Last year, the requested budget from the president for SLS was $1.36 billion, and Congress added $650 million to it! So I expect this request, like last year's, will be heavily modified (added to) by Congress. This past year, Orion was actually funded at a higher amount than last year's request as well.
Commercial Crew and Cargo (the part that funds companies like SpaceX and Boeing to take supplies and humans into space) gets a total of about $2.76 billion. The crew funding is down a bit from last year, but it looks like overall this will be a robust amount to fund these companies (the Commercial Spaceflight Federation agrees). I'm all for this; we rely on Russians right now to get our astronauts up to the International Space Station, and that is a terrible situation to be in. Commercial Crew gets mixed support in Congress; some Congress critters support it strongly, while others do everything they can to slow it down and feed more to SLS.
As for science, that's hit and miss. Astrophysics got a bump of $51 million over last year to $781 million, which is nice (the James Webb Space Telescope got less funding than last year, but that's part of the planned-for needs of the mission; less money is needed next year than for the previous year). Heliophysics (studying the Sun) got a bump of just under $50 million to almost $700 million, so that's good too.
Bizarrely, planetary science got slashed again by the White House. It drops from $1.63 billion to $1.52 billion, a cut of over $110 million. Mind you, this is the division that produced the successful flyby of Pluto last year. You may remember that. It's a bona fide mystery why, year after year, the president's request continues to try to cut what's arguably the most successful part of NASA, both scientifically and in the public eye. My only hope is that, as they have done in previous years, Congress steps in and puts that number back to where it should be.
Incidentally, as Casey Dreier at the Planetary Society points out, a lot of this cut goes into the budget for the Europa mission (to Jupiter's icy moon that has an ocean of water under its surface). It's looking like the White House wants to fund an orbiter, but Congress has been clear on wanting a more expensive lander mission (I do too, duh). It's not clear what rocket will be used there either; the Senate will want to use SLS, of course, while the president will want the Atlas V. I have my doubts that relying on SLS, a rocket that won't be useable for nearly a decade, is a good bet. However, it would be able to launch a much more ambitious Europa mission and get it to Jupiter faster. So, I'm conflicted here and have no obvious resolution to this mess (unless SpaceX gets their Falcon Heavy operating soon).
Earth science gets a boost this year in the request, up more than $110 million from last year, to just more than $2 billion. I wonder what will happen there when this gets to Congress? The total number may stay about the same (it did last year), but I would bet funding will be rearranged by Congress, since Earth science covers missions that study climate change. We know how the GOP-controlled Congress feels about that.
While Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, doesn't directly control NASA money, he can influence what NASA does; mind you he is running for president under the banner of cutting government spending. He also has been beating the drums hard to promote his anti-science agenda. His counterparts in the House feel the same way, so I'm fairly confident this part of the budget will see some changes.
And maddeningly, NASA's education arm suffers another big cut in this request, from $115 million enacted last year to $100 million. Madness. For some reason, the president's office has been slashing this part of the budget year after year, and that's just a terrible idea. Plain and simple. I worked in the education community using NASA funds for several years, and I saw first hand how much of an impact it had. NASA's outreach efforts are part of why people correctly think of NASA as the shining example of humanity's vision of exploration. Cutting that effort makes zero sense.
So for now, there we go. Again, these are some quick looks with my opinion added; I reserve the right to modify my opinions as more facts come in. We'll see.
And again, remember how tiny a fraction of the federal budget NASA gets. Imagine if, instead of squabbling over pennies, we funded our space exploration at the level that it actually needs. What wonders would we see, what benefits would be reaped on Earth, how could we add to our compendium of knowledge about the Universe?
Per politicus, ad astra.
New Study: Yup, Thermometers Do Show Global Warming Is Real
A common claim by climate change deniers is that scientists have been "altering" ground-based temperature data to make it look like the Earth is warming. This claim—which is not just wrong, but exactly wrong, as I'll get to in a sec—has gotten more traction than most others offered by the forces of anti-science.
Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, has been using this false claim as a blunt hammer against scientists in NOAA, for example, holding hearing after hearing trying to pin charges of conspiracy on them. But of course he's wrong and is wasting huge amounts of taxpayer money pursuing a lie. As I've written before, the scientists aren't "altering" the data, they're correcting them.
A new paper has come out reinforcing this. Researchers from Berkeley, the University of York, and NOAA have looked at the temperatures recorded at stations across the U.S. They assessed the corrections being applied to the data and have confirmed their accuracy. In other words, despite Smith's claims, the techniques the scientists are using to calibrate the data are solid.
The basic idea is this: There are temperature stations all over the U.S., and many have been in use for more than a century. However, over the years, some have been moved, replaced, or their environment has changed. This, of course, changes the temperature they record.
To account for that, scientists apply a correction to the data to make sure that they are comparing apples to apples when looking at modern measurements versus older ones. But how do they know if the corrections are accurate?
Actually, there are quite a few ways, but in the new study the researchers looked at more modern stations that are known to be quite accurate and compared them to the data from nearby older stations during the 12-year period where the two different systems were both in operation at the same time. As was expected, the uncorrected data from the older stations didn't match the newer ones well. However, when the corrections were applied, the older stations did in fact match the newer ones much better. This shows that the corrections being applied are in fact making the data more accurate.
Smith and his allies want you to think that scientists are nefariously altering the data, but that's not the case. Calibrating data isn't "altering" it. Think of it more like editing typos and bad grammar. Once those are gone, you get a far better picture of what's actually happening*.
Interestingly, there are still some residual errors in the older measurements even after adjustments—that's not too surprising; in the real world it's almost impossible to completely correct such issues. But what's funny is what the researchers found: Even after adjustments, the older systems still tend to underestimate maximum (and average) temperature trends compared with the newer systems during the overlap period)—consistent with other research that found the same trend.
This puts lie to Smith's claims again. If scientists are altering the data to make it look like the planet is warming up, why would they underestimate the temperature trends?
The answer is obvious: They aren't trying to make the planet look like it's heating up. The planet is heating up, and they're measuring that. That's what the data are telling us, that's what the planet is telling us, and as long as our politicians in charge are sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling "LALALALALALA" as loudly as they can, we'll never get off our oil-soaked butts and get anything done to prevent an environmental catastrophe.
*Zeke Hausfather, the lead author on the new study, wrote about the methodology they're using in an article for Skeptical Science last year, which has the details on all this if you're interested.
A Small Asteroid Will Definitely Miss Earth on March 5. But by How Much?
In the "don't panic" category, the small(ish) asteroid 2013 TX68 will definitely miss the Earth when it swings by our fair world on March 5.
The orbital mechanics on this are pretty clear; it certainly won't hit us. The thing is, it's not clear by how much it'll miss us, and the range is a bit uncertain: It'll pass somewhere between 17,000 to 14 million kilometers from Earth.
Yeah. That's a big gray area. So what gives?
TX68 is a rock roughly 30 meters across*, and that's pretty small as these things go. That means that at any respectable distance from Earth it's essentially invisible; too faint to detect. We can only see it when it gets close enough to Earth to be visible to telescopes, and that window of opportunity doesn't last long.
It was discovered in October 2013 when it was about 1.5 million kilometers away (nearly four times farther than the Moon) and was only observed over a three-day span before it became too difficult to see. That makes getting an accurate orbit for TX68 really hard. I've written about this before:
Think of it this way. Imagine you're an outfielder in a baseball game. You see the pitcher throw the ball, and the batter swings. It's a hit! But one-tenth of a second after the batter makes contact, you close your eyes.
Now, based on the fraction of a second you saw the ball move, can you catch it?
I would be willing to bet a lot of money you won't. You weren't able to watch the ball long enough to get a good fix on its direction, its speed, its position. It could land next to you, or it could fall 40 meters away, or it could be knocked right out of the park.
The only way to catch it would be to keep your eyes on it, observe it as long as possible until you can be completely sure of where its headed.
That's the problem; with only three days of observations of TX68 back in 2013, it's impossible to predict exactly where it will be when it passes the Earth in March. What you get is a fuzzy prediction that puts it near the Earth, with a range of likely distances based on that. The closest it can get is 17,000 kilometers, but it could pass us 14 million kilometers away.
From a position of "Ohmygod is this thing gonna hit us?" we're pretty safe. From an astronomer's position of "Hey I want to observe this thing for myself and help nail down its orbit" it's frustrating. That uncertainty means we're not even really sure where it'll be in the sky at a given time. Our best bet is to use wide-field telescopes, scan the most likely areas it'll appear, and hope for the best.
And I hope the best is what we get. TX68 is a near-Earth asteroid, passing pretty close to us; it could impact us in the future. As it stands right now the odds are extremely low for the next few decades … but that's based on the orbit as we know it now. After this pass we should increase our understanding of the orbit substantially.
To be honest, that won't be easy. If it does pass only a few tens of thousands of kilometers away, the Earth's gravity will change its orbit (it also may pass within 20,000 kilometers of the Moon, further altering the asteroid's orbit), making it even harder to predict its future position.
All of this underscores our need to have more eyes on the sky. An impact from a TX68-sized asteroid is pretty rare; statistically speaking it only happens every few centuries. But smaller rocks are more common, and impacts from them more frequent; the Chelyabinsk event of 2013 was caused by a rock a mere 19 meters across and impacts from something that size happen on the every-few-decades timescale. The more 'scopes we have scanning the skies, the more likely we'll be able to see such a rock in advance, and the more time we'll have to do something about it… assuming we get around to figuring out just what to do.
* Correction, Feb. 9, 2016: I originally wrote that TX68 was 100 meters across; it's actually 100 feet or 30 meters across (the error is my fault, but oh how I wish everyone used metric!). That changes the statistical frequency of impact from millennia to centuries.
Music of the Spheres
When space and astronomy based time-lapse animations started becoming popular a couple of years ago, all it took was some cool imagery to get noticed. But over time we've seen a lot of such animations, and (unless the footage is really dramatic or unusual) it's tougher to draw attention now.
Nicolaus Wegner—who has created quite a few stunning storm time-lapse animations I've featured on the blog—knows this. He wanted to make a video highlighting "… how important and amazing our Earth is." Using footage from various space probes and astronauts on the International Space Station, he put together this short video. "Final Frontier," to do so.
Mind you, we've seen a lot of this footage before. What makes this special? Hint: Listen to the music as the images roll by.
The music Wegner used is called "Falling Short" by Danny Odon. It's electronica, and as the video starts (with images of the Sun, Pluto, the comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and more), it's eerie, driving. But when the video cuts to shots of Earth it becomes more melodic, fluid, and soothing.
Then, building a bit in tension, it cuts to very odd and disturbing tones as the video shows the weird moons of Saturn in motion seen by the Cassini mission, reminding us that our solar system is a bizarre place once we leave the confines of Earth. It's a clever bit of storytelling, allowing the music to set the tone and manifest the theme without having to overtly state it.
I've said this many times, but the choice of music is critical to short videos like these. I'm a soundtrack geek, and when I watch movies, TV, and short films like this one, I find myself paying as much attention to the music as the footage. Working together, they inform our brain far more than either can on their own.
Edgar Mitchell, 1930–2016
I'm very saddened to write that we've lost another Moon walker: His family just announced that Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, died on Thursday.
By coincidence, he died on the 45th anniversary of his mission, just one day short of the anniversary of the date he landed on the Moon.
All 12 men who walked on the Moon are heroes. They risked their lives to go where no human had gone before, and our planet—our species—is the better for it. What Mitchell and his fellow astronauts did will forever be a part of history. Each mission was an amazing story, and I urge you to read about Apollo 14 (and also read Andy Chaikin's fantastic A Man on the Moon, too, for insight into the Apollo program and the people involved).
To be fair, too, Mitchell will also be known for some of his more unconventional beliefs. For example, he was a vocal advocate in the UFO community. He believed that aliens were visiting Earth and that there's a government conspiracy to cover it up. As you can imagine, he and I didn't see eye to eye on that.
However, that doesn't mean he believed in all conspiracies. I met Mitchell a few years ago at a gathering of space enthusiasts, and chatted with him briefly about people who believe the Apollo Moon landings were faked (I haven't talked about it in a while, but a little while ago I wrote extensively on the subject). I asked him if he had ever run into Bart Sibrel, one of the biggest mouthpieces for that silly idea (yes, the guy Buzz Aldrin punched).
Mitchell laughed, and said that Sibrel came to his house on false pretenses (a Sibrel forte) and once inside started making accusations of fakery, demanding Mitchell swear on a Bible that he did in fact walk on the Moon. Mitchell told me he did swear on the Bible, and then said he immediately—and literally—kicked Sibrel out of his house.
That still makes me smile.
And a lot of people give Mitchell grief for conducting ESP experiments while on Apollo 14. That sort of thing was pretty popular in the late '60s and early '70s, and a lot of the experiments going on weren't well conducted. Mind you, I don't think such extrasensory powers exist; the evidence is at best very shaky and the cases that get popular tend to be fraudulent. However, I also have no problems in general testing such claims, and having three men out in space, tens or hundreds of thousands of kilometers from Earth does make for a decent control setting. I don't really blame him for trying, even if he may have been biased toward believing in it.
My point? People are complicated. If there's a bigger testament to the reality of the fields of science, mathematics, and engineering than walking on the Moon, then I'm unaware of it. But that didn't prevent him from still having beliefs that were at odds with some the principles of those same fields. But in that sense he was no different than the rest of us. We all have them, to one degree or another.
I think it's OK to remember that, especially when talking about the life and career of someone like Mitchell. It highlights the complex nature of how we think, of what makes us who we are. Of how it makes us human. Reflecting on ourselves is a natural response to hearing of someone's death, and if his legacy is in part to remind us of what it means to be human, then that's not such a bad one.
And one final note. Mitchell was the sixth human to step foot on the Moon. With his death, there are now only seven people alive who have left bootprints there. I hope that we see humans walking on the Moon once again, and soon; soon enough that the Apollo astronauts themselves can witness it. We owe them that much.
Gigantic Space Telescope's Main Mirror Now Complete
Well, this is pretty cool news: The main mirror for the James Webb Space Telescope is now fully assembled!
OK, first, JWST is the successor* to Hubble, an observatory optimized for viewing the Universe in infrared wavelengths, outside what our human eyes can see. This will make JWST very sensitive to distant galaxies, low-mass stars, planets orbiting other stars, and about a zillion other very interesting astronomical objects.
And second, JWST's mirror isn't like other telescope's, where you have a giant solid piece of glass. Instead, JWST's mirror—which is 6.5 meters across!—is made up of an array of 18 hexagonal segments, each about 1.3 meters wide.
There are lots of advantages to this design; each mirror can be made much lighter weight than 1/18th of a big mirror, and mass matters when you're launching a 'scope into space. The mirrors are made of beryllium, which is very lightweight, so each segment has a mass of only 20 kilograms (45 pounds)!
Also, the entire assembly folds up like origami, allowing the completed mirror to fit inside the payload space of an Ariane 5 rocket. Finally, each mirror has its own independent actuators on the backside, allowing each segment to be individually adjusted to ensure perfect focus for the 'scope.
The assembly of the main mirror is a big milestone for the observatory. It's fantastically complex, and nothing quite like this has ever been flown into space before.
Oh, another thing about the mirrors: They're coated with gold. Gold reflects infrared light very well (most glasses don't), so it makes a great coating. Each mirror has a layer just a tenth of a micron thick; that's 0.001 times as thick as a human hair! Even though it's covering about 25 square meters in total, the layering is so thin that the total mass of gold used isn't much, about 50 grams. The gold used is ultra pure and not cheap, but the kind of pure gold you can get on the market runs about $40/gram right now, so at that price JWST has only about two grand worth on it. That's probably the least expensive part of the entire mission.
A lot of the work done on the mirror segments was performed at Ball Aerospace, just down the road from me in Boulder, Colorado. When the assembly was finished in 2012, they had a small press event, and I was able to attend. The highlight of that day was seeing one of the flight mirrors (that is, one of the actual segments that will fly into space as part of JWST's main mirror) from just a couple of meters away! It was in a clean room, and I got a shot of it through a door:
Yes, that's me reflected in the hexagonal mirror. That was a pretty cool day.
The final assembly of the mirror segments on to the "back plane" was accomplished this week at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The entire process took several weeks.
I've had varying opinions on JWST over the years; it will be a magnificent and ambitious space telescope, and will revolutionize infrared astronomy in much the same way Hubble did for visible (and ultraviolet) light. But it's also had massive cost overruns and is far, far behind its original schedule, and that's bruised NASA's overall budget (and politics) for other astronomical missions over the years.
But while that still aches a bit for me, that doesn't affect what this mission will hopefully accomplish: Give us the clearest, deepest, and best view of the Universe we've ever had at these wavelengths.
Congratulations to everyone involved in getting this important step done! And keep up the good work; there's still a ways to go before the scheduled October 2018 launch.
*Over the years I've seen a lot of people refer to JWST as the "replacement" for Hubble. That's just not correct; for one thing they look at different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, so JWST can't replace Hubble in that regard. Plus, if all goes well, Hubble will still be in use when JWST gets to work, so we'll have both telescopes to peer into the Universe. One of the things I'm most excited about is having both of them look at some of the same objects at the same time; many phenomena are far easier to understand once you get different eyes looking at them.
Is This the Biggest Spiral Galaxy in the Universe?
Nature does love spirals.
From the cream floating in your coffee cup to hurricanes to galaxies themselves, spirals form on a vast range of scales. They may be for different reasons (coffee and hurricanes have faster rotation in the center, winding up the arms, whereas galaxies form spirals from a more subtle and complex effect that acts like an interstellar traffic jam), but when you have stuff that spins, spirals can arise naturally.
But how big a spiral can you get? Our Milky Way galaxy is pretty beefy, one of the bigger spiral galaxies in the Universe. It's roughly 100,000 light-years across, or a quintillion kilometers. That's a lot of kilometers.
Don't go bragging to your friends just yet though. It turns out spirals can get bigger. Way, way bigger.
The galaxy pictured at the top of this post is called Malin 1. It's faint; so dim it was only discovered in 1986, and was the first discovered in a class of galaxies called low-surface brightness spiral galaxies. Most spirals are pretty bright and easy to see, but LSBs are much fainter. Despite that, they can grow to huge sizes.
I've known about Malin 1 for a while, but it hadn't really registered with me one way or another. That changed instantly when I saw a new paper about it, which was featured on the American Astronomical Society's Nova site, where notable discoveries are highlighted.
I saw the photo of it and nodded in admiration; it's a very pretty and interesting spiral. But then I saw the distance, and my brain did a double take. Malin 1 is 1.2 billion light-years away.
"Wait," my brain said, shaking itself. "What? That can't be right!"
But it is: 1.2 billion light-years is a tremendous distance. If it's that far, and that big in the image, it must be huge. Freaking huge.
Yeah. My brain was right. Malin 1 is more than a half-million light-years across.
Holy Haleakala. That's ridiculous. It's hard to explain how big that is. The Milky Way is titanic, and Malin 1 dwarfs it.
Here, this'll help. I added a drawing of the Milky Way into the Malin 1 image, roughly to scale. Malin 1 is easily five times wider than the Milky Way.
That's very interesting indeed. How do you get galaxies that big? We know most (if not all) galaxies grow by eating smaller galaxies (literally the smaller galaxy gets ripped apart by the bigger galaxy's gravity, its gas and stars ingested by the bigger beast), or merging with galaxies of comparable size. We can see the leftover remnants of smaller galaxies the Milky Way has eaten, and in a few billion years we'll double in mass when the Andromeda galaxy collides with us.
But it's not clear how Malin 1 (or other low surface-brightness galaxies like it but somewhat smaller) grew to such enormous proportions. And why isn't it brighter, like other, smaller spirals? Digging through some papers on Malin 1 I found that it's not forming stars as rapidly as the Milky Way; stars are born in the Milky Way at twice or more the rate they are in Malin 1. That may be why it's dimmer (fewer massive stars born means less light coming from the galaxy). But I don't think anyone really knows.
I'm usually not all that impressed by cosmic records; finding the most distant this or the biggest that. I'm more excited when that record tells us something. The most distant galaxy tells us how young the Universe was when the first galaxies formed, for example.
In the case of Malin 1, it's telling us how physics operates on the biggest scales. Spirals can form in galaxies five times bigger than ours … and somehow that may also be correlated with the galaxy being dim.
There are also some peculiar features in Malin 1; you can see a long straight feature pointing away from it at about the 11 o'clock position (another one, on the opposite side of the galaxy center, is likely a background galaxy coincidentally superposed). This feature may be a long stream of gas and stars pulled out from Malin 1 by a close encounter with another galaxy off the edge of the picture. These long features were invisible in previous images but can be seen here thanks to the power of the giant Magellan 6.5 meter telescope, which took the image (and some sophisticated techniques used to enhance the image as well). A Hubble image taken a few years earlier only hinted at the far-flung spiral arms, showing you just how important the telescope size can be (Hubble's mirror is 2.4 meters across).
It's not surprising to me that our census of the Universe is still incomplete; there are lots of things so far away—or close by and so dim—they're invisible to our prying eyes. But it's still something of a shock when we find objects this flippin' huge that have managed to evade us for so long.
It's a sobering lesson. The Universe is almost incomprehensibly vast, and still holds many of its secrets dear. What else have we missed?
Science Ranch 2016
Update, Feb. 7, 2016: As of today, Science Ranch 2016 has sold out. However, we do maintain a waiting list in case spots open up. If you want to be on the list, please contact us!
If you love science (and yes, you do), meeting other people who also love science, and being outdoors in a spectacular setting, then do I have something for you.
My wife and I run a company called Science Getaways, where we take fun vacations and make them better by adding SCIENCE. Today we're announcing our next getaway: Sylvan Dale Guest Ranch in Loveland, Colorado.
Science Ranch 2016, as we're calling it, will be from Sunday, July 31, to Saturday, Aug. 6. The Sylvan Dale Guest Ranch is located at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, in a really lovely valley where the Big Thompson River comes out of the mountains. Some of the rocks in the cliff walls visible from the ranch are well over a billion years old! The geography and wildlife of the area are just breathtaking.
Speaking of which, we'll have three guest scientists joining us: Dr. Dave Armstrong, an ecologist who co-owns the ranch and knows the area extremely well; Dr. Holly Brunkal, a Colorado geologist and a perennial Getaways favorite (this will be the fourth time she's joined us); and my old friend Dr. Dan Durda, an expert on asteroids and suborbital spaceflight. All three will give talks, and Dave and Holly will lead us on hikes to see the biology and the geology of the region up close.
And, as usual, I'll be giving a talk, and I'll have my solar telescope for viewing activity on the Sun as well as my trusty 20 cm Celestron telescope to take advantage of the dark skies there.
You'll also have the option to take a day trip up to Rocky Mountain National Park (included in the vacation*), one of my favorite places in the world. The views from up there are truly magnificent.
There's plenty to do at the ranch, too: horseback riding, trap shooting, cookouts, an overnight pack ride, bass fishing, campfires, a heated swimming pool … and an optional river raft ride down the Cache la Poudre River. Or you can simply sit by the Big Thompson River outside your cabin and read a book. We're very low pressure about activities; do or do not, as you see fit. The lodging rate includes three home-cooked meals per day and all the ranch activities.
This Getaway is also perfect for families; there are activities just for kids, including riding and horse care, and their inquisitive minds will love the hikes and other science activities we'll be doing.
Sylvan Dale is a second-generation family-owned guest ranch. If you've never been to a dude ranch, you're going to fall in love with this type of vacation. The ranch is very comfortable and homey; it's not at all like a hotel or resort. It's a wonderful atmosphere, and we love it. But what makes Science Getaways really special, and what keeps people coming back so frequently, are the folks you'll spend the week with. Science Ranchers (as we call those who come on our ranch vacations) are some of the friendliest, most fun and interesting people you'll ever meet. A Science Getaway is not so much like taking a group vacation, it's more like hanging out with 30 friends in a really cool place.
If this sounds like fun to you, then head over to the Science Getaways page and reserve a spot. We're keeping attendance lower than usual for this one, and we expect it to sell out. I hope to see lots of BABloggees there!
*Note: Travel to and from the ranch is not included in the price; check the registration page to make sure what is and is not part of the price.

subset: commoncrawl


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Best Mascot (2010)
How do you take the measure of a mascot? Is it the ability to pump up the crowd when the game's going badly? Is it athleticism, creativity or community involvement? Is it cuddliness, orneriness or just plain silliness? Or is it the ability to kick the snot out of the other mascots during the annual UCA Mascot National Championships (including that darned Big Jay from the University of Kansas)? It's all of those things, which is why Chip, the University of Colorado's costumed buffalo, has won that contest two years running and earned his place among the animal elite.
More Sports & Recreation Awards
Best Move by a General ManagerFiring Clint Hurdle
Best Sports Team General ManagerMark Warkentien
Best Sports Team ? CollegeUniversity of Denver Pioneers hockey
Best Coach ? CollegeGeorge Gwozdecky


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Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding News
Kerry Pushes for Gaza Cease-Fire
Jul 28, 2014
As Secretary of State John Kerry implores an end to the current crisis in the Middle East, violence continues in the region. Jane Harman joins NOW With Alex Wagner to discuss on MSNBC.
Putin's Choice: 'Confronting the Extremes'
Jul 24, 2014
Since Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was brought down over east Ukraine, Putin has been under intense pressure to persuade pro-Russian separatists accused by the West of shooting it down to stop fighting. William Pomeranz talks about what he thinks Putin will do next.
"Guerra contra las drogas": la de ellos bien, la de nosotros mal
Jul 21, 2014
Latin American Program Global Fellow Juan Carlos Garzón discusses why he believes ending the drug war in Colombia would enable the redefinition of the political strategy in regards to the drug problem. This article is in Spanish.
Cynthia J. Arnson Testifies Before the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
Jul 17, 2014
Cynthia J. Arnson, Director of the Latin American Program, joined a panel of experts in testifying before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to discuss the crisis in Central America and what's driving the exodus of unaccompanied minors.
Jane Harman on the Violence in Gaza and the Immigration Crisis
Jul 14, 2014
Director Jane Harman discusses the escalating violence between Israel and the Palestinians and the immigration crisis on CBS News' Talk of the Nation with Gerald Seib, Danielle Pletka, and Nia-Malika Henderson.
How to Keep ISIS Terror from U.S. Shores
Jul 01, 2014
"Iraq was never the U.S.'s to win. That point -- along with lowered expectations and focused goals -- must be the basis of any new approach to the region," writes Aaron David Miller.
Iraq Needs to Stop Trying to Make 'Inclusive' Happen
Jul 01, 2014
"Overcoming sectarian divisions won't solve Iraq's crisis. Embracing them will," writes Marina Ottaway.
Brzezinski, Ischinger, and Pifer Discuss Mutual Security
Jun 30, 2014
The transcript of the Global Europe Program's June 16, 2014, event "Mutual Security on Hold? Russia, the West, and European Security Architecture," is now available. The discussion focused on the challenges facing mutual security, particularly the transatlantic relationship, in the wake of the crisis with Ukraine and Russia. This event also marked the 50th anniversary of the Munich Security Conference, which is chaired by Wilson Center Distinguished Scholar Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger.
Distinguished Scholar Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger Interviewed about Ukraine
Jun 26, 2014
Wilson Center Distinguished Scholar Wolfgang Ischinger – Chairman of the Munich Security Conference, and former German Ambassador to the United States – appeared on the Charlie Rose Show on June 25 to discuss the ongoing tensions in Ukraine.
Can the U.S. Rally Middle Eastern Countries to Halt Iraq Violence?
Jun 23, 2014
Wilson Center Scholar Robin Wright, David Ignatius, Tavis Smiley and CBS News Political Director John Dickerson discuss Secretary of State John Kerry's trip to push the Middle East to address the instability in Iraq.


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Callanish sunset
Started Nov 4, 2012 | Discussions thread
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Wow Marco,
that's what I call a kick off. Your firsts post are impressive. As another poster already pointed out, the sun is clipped but well... unless you are doing HDR here, you either end up with the sun clipped or shadows drowned so it is fine the way it is.
Joerg V's gear list:Joerg V's gear list
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Coroner's Report: Psycho Sleepover
- By Robert Fure
- @RobertFure
- January 12, 2012
There comes a time in every man's life when he has to take a risk. When looking for a title to review this week, I was faced with a dilemma. Namely, I was tired and stuck on my computer, which mean Blu-ray was out of the question. I could have...
Kevin Carr's Weekly Report Card: April 15, 2011
- By Kevin Carr
- @kevincarr
- April 15, 2011
This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr dresses up in a fabulous blue feather outfit and takes a trip to Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. There, he runs into a couple blue macaws trying to escape exotic bird smuggles, but he's too busy getting his freak on to help out. Later,...
Boiling Point: Hey, Horror Movie Characters
- By Robert Fure
- @RobertFure
- October 25, 2010
This rant is entitled "Hey, Horror Movie Characters" for three reasons. One, 31 Days of Horror is in full effect and we're talking horror every day. Two, it's directed at characters in a horror movie. Three, I can't put "Kill the Mother Fucker" in the subject header. I love horror...
Boiling Point: Grow Up, Old People (Especially You, Ebert)
- By Robert Fure
- @RobertFure
- April 19, 2010
On Kick Ass, Roger Ebert, and why old people need to grow up and learn a thing or two from us whipper-snappers who know fiction is fake and not a life-map....
Wes Craven to 'Scream' Again?
- By Scott Beggs
- @scottmbeggs
- October 19, 2009
You know it's a guaranteed thing when a "very reliable source" says it's so. Could the master of horror be back at the helm for Scream 4?...
Commentary Track: Slasher Films as Art
- By Robert Fure
- @RobertFure
- February 11, 2009
We've been talking a lot about slashers and the fun we have watching them. But is there more to the blood soaked hack 'em ups? Robert Fure makes the case for the Slasher as Artistic expression....


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Dana James "Jim" Hutton (May 31, 1934 – June 2, 1979) was an American actor in film and television best remembered for his role as Ellery Queen in the 1970s TV series of the same name and his screen partnership with Paula Prentiss in five films, starting with Where the Boys Are. He was the father of actor Timothy Hutton.
List of links to Jim Hutton fansites:


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Lemon Fritters - Paparojotes
Makes 30 fritters servings.
Read Reviews / Add a Review
1 pint milk
Beat together the milk with the water and egg yolks. Add the flour gradually.
While beating, add the lemon zest, sugar, cinnamon, and four beaten egg whites. When well mixed, leave to rest for half an hour.
Heat oil in a frying pan, dip the lemon leaves in the batter and fry carefully. To serve, arrange on a napkin and sprinkle with confectioners sugar and a little cinnamon.
Eat just the coating, not the leaves!
by Raimundo González from the book
Enjoy Our Free Catalog
Recipe Reviews for Lemon Fritters


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Thank you for your interest in supporting Krochet Kids intl. financially! Because of your partnership women in Uganda and Peru are being empowered to rise above poverty, forever. The best part? They're taking their families and their communities with them! We generate the vast majority of our funding through the sale of our products, so you can know that when you make a donation, 100% of your money goes directly to our efforts on the ground. Directly to the the provision of fair-wage jobs, holistic education and one-on-one mentorship.
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When considering buying a new camera, there's really no need to bankrupt the bank account by assuming that the latest point and shoot or SLR with 18-24 mega pixel is going to give you the best results. The pixel count comes into play when your blowing your images up. I updated my film camera to a Minolta D7 with its 6.1 mega pixels and got some good results from it, where now I have a 10.1 mp Nikon D200, which doesn't really produce any better results. In all honesty, I think I ought to have just kept the Minolta, as I was becoming more familiar with its operation and spent more time thinking about up-dating the lens quality.
Related articles
- What Camera Should I Buy? UPDATED VERSION – September 2011 (photofocus.com)


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I think that there should most definitely be more than just the Avengers, FF, and X-Men. There is far more to the Marvel Universe than just those 3 teams! In my opinion, they could totally leave the Fantastic Four out of the game altogether. I wouldnt even miss them. As far as the X-Men go, they've had their time in the spotlight and their brilliance has faded with the passing of time. Yeah..I still like them, but I dont want them dominating MUA 2. And that goes for the Avengers as well. The Avengers are by far my favorite team, but I dont want an all Avengers line-up either. I think that the lesser-known teams deserve some equal time in a game of this nature. I say give us some New Warriors, Young Avengers, Alpha Flight, Thunderbolts, etc. All of those teams have some great characters that are just as deserving of a place in this game as any of the "big guns". Maybe even more so being that they are considered second-tier characters. I would think that Marvel would WANT to get them out there and noticed. The more exposure that they give to their characters in the mainstream, the more readers they are going to bring to their comic books!! Sure...everybody knows who Captain America or Human Torch or Wolverine is...but how many in the mainstream public has a clue who Songbird, Sasquatch, or Namorita is?? This game could change all that by spotlighting those lesser known characters and giving them a voice and a presence in the minds of the buying public!
I'd rather not have teams like the FF since it's more fun to make your own team imo.
I think Runaways and Young Avengers should definatly be in it. Heroes For Hire would be awesome too.
The New Warriors deserves a spot, especially Penance.
The original thunderbolts with Baron Zemo,the beetle, songbird and moonstone. The latter two may actually have a chance appearing in this game.
Young Advengers Should be on the list.
major teams for me and with villains in the game, Iam sure there will be a team for them as well
Inhumans... I'd love to play with medusa and blackbolt..


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Companies put so much time and money into their efforts to establish household names that it always amazes me when they turn around and destroy one. ...
I try hard in my daily life not to engage in uncomfortable situations regarding race. But it is impossible for me to ignore the statistics regarding the number of people of color honored in the history of the Emmys.
Compared to Russell's de-spining of a television news anchor, every other moment in this season of True Blood may seem tame by comparison. Instead of focusing on the gory or the baroque, they episode thrives on what isn't said.
Do you know about Dexter the lovable serial killer? The first time I watched an episode, I could not believe what I just experienced. I was rooting fo...
Have you ever watched an awards show and wondered about those lucky/fanatic people seen in the background during red carpet interviews? Well, at the 62nd Annual Emmys, I was one of them.
Missing golden opportunities is nothing new for an awards show that celebrates TV, but never makes for good TV.
Lots of surprises this year, and as Emmy shows go, I thought this was a pretty good one. It was a nice balance between new blood and Betty White.
Bryan Cranston was "humbled" to win his third Emmy for Best Actor in a Drama Series. Winners, please stop using that cliche. The only thing less humbling than winning an award is winning the same award three times.
The Emmys aren't just about honoring the finest achievements in television. They are also about teaching valuable lessons to us, the home viewers. Lesson #1: Apparently, I love Kyra Sedgwick.
It's time for the increasingly hazardous annual ritual of predicting the shows and performers that will win, while also indulging in one last opportunity to state who or what should win.
The Motion Picture Academy does an injustice, not only to the recipients but to their fans, by continuing its new policy of presenting honorary Oscars at a special function in November instead of the ceremony next February.
The 60th annual Emmy Awards are this Sunday, and here are the parties and pre-parties we think you should know about.
And you thought voting members of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences only had eyes for cable.
If for some reason you haven't watched the acclaimed UK original Life On Mars, it's all gathered together in one neat package with audio commentary, behind the scenes documentaries and more.


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I can understand him getting it from being in the area the lantern lands, but this seems a bit odd.
If thresh walks out of max range of the lantern, he gains the shield: intended?
# 1 Jan 8, 2013
# 3 Jan 8, 2013Lantern gives the shielding effect for 6 seconds, regardless of where it is. If you get it back, feel free to wander around passing out shields.
It would help if the particle effect for this wasn't broken (the lantern light "runs away" from you across the map).
# 5 Jan 8, 2013CertainlyT champ.


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Meet The Faculty
John Uebler
Kurt Christiansen
Catherine Battersby
Richard Battersby
Kevin Bowman
Kimberly Bowman
John Buggeln
Jennifer Cerny
Emily Uebler
Mitch Barnes
Mitch Barnes joined the Culver Academies faculty in 1992. He earned a bachelor's degree in communications (Radio & Television) at Bethany College in 1987, where he developed his skills in broadcasting, public speaking, history, and theatre. He earned a master's degree in liberal studies from Valparaiso University with an emphasis in multicultural education in 1998. He spent five years working in education as Director of the YMCA Black Achievers program in Columbus, Ohio and as Assistant Director of Admissions at Denison University before being appointed to the faculty at Culver.
Since coming to Culver, Mr. Barnes has served in several capacities: counselor, college advisor, and diversity coordinator. He joined the English and History Departments (now Humanities) in 1996, teaching Speech and Racism in American Society. In 2007 he began teaching American Studies. Mr. Barnes coached wrestling from 1992 to 1996.
In 1996 Mr. Barnes became the head coach of the speech team, which has won two Indiana High School Forensic Association state championships, one state runner-up, and earned four state champions, four state runners-up, and two national qualifiers.
His wife, Cory Barnes, is the Director of Academic Advising and together they have three children: Katie-CGA '09, Marin, and Hayes.
American Studies
Racism in American Society


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ATLANTA (CNN) -- About 1 in every 25 patients seeking treatment at hospitals acquired an infection there in 2011, according to a new study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Patients acquired some 721,800 infections at hospitals that year, according to the research. Of those infected, about 75,000 died, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- although the study did not investigate how often an infection actually caused or contributed to the patient's death.
Pneumonia and surgical-site infections were the most common types of infection -- each accounting for about 22% of all infections -- followed by gastrointestinal infections such as Clostridium difficile, urinary tract infections and infections of the bloodstream.
While highlighting the grim reality that too many people become infected when seeking medical treatment in hospitals and other health care facilities, the study also shows progress from past estimates.
Click the link to the right to read the rest of the story from CNN.


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01 Apr 2013
The sudden rise of pale blue is a sign that our lifestyles are too rushed.
This is according to Anne Roselt, Plascon's colour manager, who says by incorporating this hue into your home décor, you can create an oasis among the chaos.
If you're a regular follower of trends in fashion, you would have noticed pale blues have been featured in many top European fashion collections including Giorgio Armani, Dior, Givenchy, Ralph Lauren, Temperley London and Valentino.
Its rise in popularity is a cautionary signal that we need to spend less time rushing around and rather take some time to enjoy a little peace in our lives.
As a colour associated with invoking a sense of calm and serenity, pale and soft blues are the ideal element to introduce into your home décor.
Pale blue takes its inspiration from Mother Nature and the calming and tranquil soft blues of the sky and the oceans.
Using these elements as guidance, use the palette to tap into the associative qualities that this colour radiates through your home and create a sanctuary for you and your family.
A pale blue for every room
Pale blues often create an atmosphere of peace and calm in the area they are used. With this in mind, use pale blues in rooms where you spend time resting or relaxing.
Bedrooms and bathrooms are ideal spaces because these are some of the areas you use to relax.
If you have a study in your home, think about adding a touch of pale blue to the décor because the calming effects of this colour mean it is not distracting and can help you focus and think more clearly and intuitively.
Tips, tricks and ideas
You don't only need to use blue on your walls. Since blue goes so well with other similar pale colours, think of incorporating blue as a trim that brings skirtings, doors and furniture alive.
If you're worried that a pale blue room may be too cold, stop worrying.
Adding a touch of yellow or red to a blue room will warm it up a bit and create a beautiful visual contrast.
Pale blue is ideal for small rooms because the soft nature of it makes the space appear larger.
Natural light within the room will also enhance this effect because of the reflecting nature of the colour.
If you're looking for a decorative angle that says elegance, consider using multiple pastel colours with pale blues such as pink, yellow or sea-form green.
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Simple Definition of logy
: not able to think or move normally because of being tired, sick, etc.
Examples of logy
<the next morning I was feeling logy, having stayed up half the night>
Variants of logy
Origin of logy
perhaps from Dutch log heavy; akin to Middle Low German luggich lazy
First Known Use: 1847
Simple Definition of -logy
: area of knowledge : theory : science
: speech or writing
Full Definition of -logy
1 : oral or written expression <phraseology>
2 : doctrine : theory : science <ethnology>
Origin of -logy
French -logie, from Latin -logia, from Greek, from logos word
-LOGY Defined for Kids
Definition of -logy
: area of knowledge : science <biology>
Learn More about logy
Thesaurus: All synonyms and antonyms for "logy"
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College Women
Team of the week: Florida International
Monday, September 13, 2010
The Panthers took a commanding win at the Wolverine Invitational, posting a 44-over 896 at the University of Michigan Golf Course in Ann Arbor, Mich. Florida International, which finished 2009-10 at No. 88 in the Golfweek/Sagarin College Rankings, defeated runner-up Iowa State by 11 shots.
Golfweek.com readers: We value your input and welcome your comments, but please be respectful in this forum.
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Polycom SoundPoint IP 670 - VoIP phone - SIP - 6 linesItem#: YYI1-DF4592 | Model#: 1200746G1
Currently Out Of Stock!
Polycom SoundPoint IP 670 - VoIP phone Product Details
Product Type: VoIP phone
Phone Features
Key Expansion Module Max Qty: 3
Dialer Type: Keypad
Dialer Location: Base
Conference Call Capability: 3-way
Intercom: Yes
Speakerphone: Yes ( digital duplex )
Caller ID: Yes
Voice Mail Capability: Yes
Call Waiting: Yes
Call Forwarding: Yes
Call Transfer: Yes
Call Hold: Yes
Call Screening: Yes
Menu Operation: Yes
Function Buttons: Speakerphone button, transfer button, directory button, headset button , menu navigation keys, mute button, hold button, redial button
Volume Control: Yes
Ringer Control: Yes
Indicators: Speakerphone indicator, headset
Additional Functions: Call timer, built-in clock
Additional Features: Built-in web server
IP Telephony
Main Features: Multiline support, integrated Ethernet switch, Power over Ethernet (PoE) support
VoIP Protocols: SIP
Voice Codecs: G.722, G.729ab, G.711u, G.711a
Lines Supported: 6 lines
Quality of Service: IEEE 802.1Q (VLAN), IEEE 802.1p, Type of Service (ToS)
IP Address Assignment: DHCP, static
Network Protocols: TFTP, HTTP
Network Ports Qty: 2 x Ethernet 10Base-T/100Base-TX/1000Base-T
Voice Features: Comfort noise generation (CNG), voice activity detection (VAD), echo cancellation (ECN), HD Voice
Network Features: Network Address Translation (NAT)
Type: LCD display - color
Display Location: Base
Display Resolution: 320 x 160 pixels
Display Information: Date, time
Features: Wallpaper, backlit
Connections: 1 x USB ¦ 1 x headset jack
Hearing Aid Compatible: Yes
Cables Included: Network cable
Compliant Standards: VCCI Class B ITE, CISPR 22 Class B, EN 61000-3-2, EN 61000-3-3, EN55024, UL 60950, CSA 22.2 No. 60950, EN55022 Class B, ICES-003 Class B, AS/NZS 60950-1, RoHS, IEC 60950-1, EN 60950-1, FCC CFR47 Part 15 B
Dimensions & Weight (Base)
Width: 10.4 in
Depth: 7.5 in
Height: 5.9 in
Manufacturer Warranty
Service & Support: 1 year warranty
Service & Support Details: Limited warranty - 1 year
Manufactured by: Adtran
Warranty provided by: Adtran
Mfg Part No: 1200746G1
UPC No: 610807681809
Box Size: ( Length:0, Width:0, Depth:0)
Shipping Weight: 4.0000 pound(s)
Click here for full warranty and support information
- Limited Warranty: A full text version of the limited warranty
may be obtained by mailing a self addressed, stamped envelope to the
address below and requesting the warranty for item number: YYI1-DF4592
Warranty Information
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Miami, FL. 33144
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Acoustic Guitar
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Will travel 10 miles from Takoma Park
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Respond to Review of Il Vegetariano
by Signal
Review: Like the other reviewers, we were initially confused by the process, getting in line/in the crowd to make an order and pay the man sitting on the till at the back, then waiting with a receipt to get the food from the kitchen staff. But once we understood we felt very comfortable and returned there a few times for good value vegan food, including interesting desserts! Plenty of space and good atmosphere.
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Red Sox coverage in today's Globe
Posted by Peter Abraham, Globe Staff November 3, 2011 05:08 AM
Dale Sveum is hoping the Red Sox will wave him in as their new manager.
The Red Sox notebook has the Red Sox and Cubs getting more time to talk compensation for Theo Epstein and three Sox winning Silver Sluggers.
Tony Massarotti has a good breakdown of where the Sox are roster-wise this winter.
Follow Boston Globe Red Sox news on Facebook
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Where is the best place to purchase a fetal monitor and do I need any additional equip for a UP/UC?
fetal monitor
Lord give me patience, at least til August 10th
Comments (4)
You can rent one here for 25$ a month and up.
Other birth supplies you might need or want you can get at this place.
Here is an Emergency Childbirth Manual you can print out.
DD 12, DS 9, Twin DD 7, DS 1, DS 7-21-10.
Depending on where all you'll be laboring and just having had our UC I would suggest having a shower curtain or two along with some large plastic backed pads to cover anywhere you'll be walking, a few trash bags, trash can or two sitting around, latex gloves, alcohol prep pads, cord clamps and scissors, bowl or two for placenta, blankets/towels, whitch hazel for pads, and depends instead of the pads w/mesh panty.
You really can get by on very little. We have a big box of birth supplies sitting around unused, but I've listed all the things that we did use for/during birth/labor and in the last few days.


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This is a story about Underground Los Angeles. Not the underground music scene – the underground art scene. The subway art scene.
Every station on the Red Line is decorated with fascinating artwork, in several cases as a counterpoint to – or an ironic commentary on – the area where the station is located.
Don't try to catch a quick glimpse of the art from inside the subway car during the few seconds you're in each station. Red Line art is not part of the normal tourist route, but it's worth a morning or an afternoon. You need to get off the train at some of the 14 stations, wander around the platform, go up to a higher level to get a broad view. Explore both sides of the turnstiles. Once you've seen the art at one station, take the train in the same direction to the next station and enjoy the artwork there.
The best place to start a Red Line art tour is at the North Hollywood terminus. Going down the steps or escalator, you see three wide ceramic layers. The topmost layer depicts the 1950s San Fernando Valley: pickup trucks and tract houses. The middle layer is the valley in the early 19th century: Catholic missions and rancheros. The lowest layer is the valley in the era of Native Americans, before Europeans arrived, and it depicts their remnants: baskets, petroglyphs and bones.
The history lesson is clear: Each era is built on top of previous ones. As you pass these three strata and go deep into the bowels of the subway, it might feel as if the below-ground world you're entering is one with a different view of life and history than the one that prevails aboveground. As you'll see, that feeling is accurate.
The stop after NoHo is Universal City, serving popular tourist sites Universal Studios and CityWalk. The aboveground narrative is a bust-out celebration of movies and music.
The below-ground narrative is different. At the Universal City Red Line platform, there are four massive rectangular columns decorated with handmade ceramics on all four sides. In English and Spanish, the tiles tell a story of the difficulties faced by native people and black settlers, and of their unrecognized contributions. It's Southern California history with a progressive edge.
Aboveground, it's all fun and games and diversions from daily life. Below, it's a stark story of 19th-century exploitation, war, strife and thorny racial relations.
Margaret Garcia's artwork (construction designed by Kate Diamond) has a harsh beauty. It's deliberately rough-hewn and naive, a hodgepodge of hand-lettered text and portraits, the spaces between filled by ceramic depictions of cannons, guns, hands, flowers, bones, acorns and cut-off legs. The four massive columns, with their garish colors and their message of justice for those who were denied it in California in the 1800s, produce a searing effect, artistically and emotionally.
Two stops beyond Universal City is the Hollywood/Vine station. Once you get off the train, you see ceilings covered with thousands of film-reel holders. The walls of the station represent film stock.
Up a level, there's a metal railing with five horizontal rails, like a musical staff. Soldered onto the handrail-cum-musical-staff are a large steel clef and the musical notes of the song "Hooray for Hollywood."
Most of the artwork at this station – dozens of tongue-in-cheek variations on what "star" might mean – was created by Gilbert "Magu" Lujan: tile fantasies of different sizes, some placed in out-of-the-way corners, ready to be discovered.
Lujan's takes on "star" include a 1948 Chevy modified so it rides low to the ground – "Low-Rider Star" – and an anthropomorphic animal standing with each of its back paws inside a small car, each of which is atop a star – "Flying With Stars."
"Skidding Star" shows a large five-pointed star wearing a red bikini. The two lower points of the star are "legs" covered in tar or grime, skidding on a downslope lined with palm trees and stars. The idea that a star can skid downward is the mordantly comic underside of the Hollywood dream.
Above, at street level, are the sleaze and glitz of tourist Hollywood: the sidewalk with stars' names inscribed inside stars; well-known theaters; actors dressed as superheroes.
But below ground is Lujan's art, which gives "Hooray for Hollywood" a dark meaning. In one piece, a 1950s car with three passengers emerges with musical notes out of a landscape of mountains and houses and stars, all framed by an odd-looking Hollywood sign. But "Hooray" is spelled "Hurray," like a carny huckster urging the marks to hurry in: a sardonic view of Hollywood.
Several stops later, you get to the Westlake/MacArthur Park station. Go up the steps and you find 13 lovely ceramic depictions of scenes in and around the park. Some are night scenes (in blue) and some are daytime (in rose). One of the most striking shows two middle-age men talking and eating at Langer's Deli (a half-block away).
Even though these ceramics were done by Sonia Romero in 2010, for the most part they show scenes either from a MacArthur Park that no longer exists. Or if in present time, they show an idealized park, not the one you see when you go up and walk across the street.
Each station on the Red Line boasts artwork worth seeing. Here are a few examples: At the Wilshire/Vermont stop, artist Bob Zoell, using large typographic symbols on tiled columns, created outlines that look human and mechanical. The Civic Center station features Jonathan Borofsky's soft mannequins flying overhead. The Pershing Square station has spectacular neon pieces crafted by Stephen Antonakos.
Most amazing of all is the Hollywood/Highland station. The art piece is the entire station, designed by Sheila Klein and built by Dworsky Associates. Named "Underground Girl," it's meant, perhaps, to be an abstract prone female.
I don't see it that way. When I look at the station from above, I feel as if I'm inside the belly of a whale. Or maybe in a spaceship hangar that's part of a high-budget sci-fi movie. It's beautiful and breathtaking in its ambition and execution.
As L.A.'s downtown continues to blossom, as pricier condos and lofts are built there, as more eco-consciousness takes over, the subway clientele will probably gentrify.
I just hope the change doesn't happen too quickly. I like the Red Line the way it is. Unless I'm on the subway, I'd never rub elbows with a Gothic-script-tattooed guy or a Buffalo Bill wannabe.
And that's as much a part of the Red Line's raffish charm as its artwork.


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And so it came, the coup de grace. The final "barrier" to "opportunities" for women in combat is no more. With a stroke of their pens, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin E. Dempsey decreed that no battlefield mission or military role is off-limits to the female sex. The defense secretary and the general thus liberated mothers, daughters, sisters and wives to kill and be killed in the infantry, commando raids, even in Obama administration "overseas contingency operations." In so doing, they also slashed away at that last institutional protection for the space that separates men and women, where civilization once grew.
It (civilization) has been struggling there for decades, as social engineers and radical feminists -- all heirs to Marx -- have been cutting away at elemental human instinct, social grace, language and thought itself. This overhaul of manners and mores, the family structure and marriage -- even private aspects of the relationship between men and women -- has been successful to a point where the cultural argument against women in combat (women in the military being a lost cause) is rarely voiced, not even on the right. (I watched Fox News on women-in-combat announcement day, listening in vain for just one culture warrior.)
We are left to make only the utilitarian arguments -- body strength and speed, unit cohesion, even urinary tract infections and other hazards that front-line deployment pose to females. These are compellingly logical points, but they are unlikely to reverse an ideological juggernaut. When the secretary of defense says putting women in combat is about "making our military ... and America stronger" and no one says he's lying to further a Marxian ideal via social engineering, the cultural argument is lost, and the culture it comes from is bound and gagged, hostage to what we know as "political correctness."
I still see threads of the cultural argument in emails and some blog responses to the Pentagon's latest whack at creating "gender neutrality." It erupts like a reflex against the conditioning to deny differences defined, at their essence, by muscle mass and womb. Such conditioning erodes the male protective instinct -- which, surely, is what war is supposed to arise from -- and the female nurturing instinct, which surely is what a civilization depends on.
No more. Women with wombs and without manly muscle mass now count as Pentagon-approved "warriors," modern-day knights in Kevlar, soon to be humping 80-pound packs over mountain and desert.
Diana West is the author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character (St. Martin's Press, 2013), and The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization (St. Martin's Press, 2007).
Team Jeb: Rubio is a phony on family values given some of the hip-hop he listens to; Update: Team Jeb responds | Allahpundit


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Dr. Wes Allison received his bachelor's degree in biochemistry at the University of Oklahoma where he was inducted into Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society and graduated with special distinction. He went on to graduate at the top of his class in medical school at the University of Oklahoma and was inducted into the prestigious Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. He then moved to Louisville in 2005 where he completed his General Surgery internship as well as his Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery residency. During his time at the University of Louisville, he was invited each year to present his clinical research at national meetings in the fields of Pediatric ENT and Otology.
Dr. Allison has been with Advanced ENT and Allergy since 2010. He is board certified in adult/pediatric otolaryngology and facial plastic surgery by the American Board of Otolaryngology – he truly enjoys and is proficient in all aspects of ear, nose, and throat surgery. His love for children and pediatric care is a large reason he chose this specialty, and as a parent he knows how stressful it can be to have a sick child. He has a special interest in the medical and surgical management of sinus disease, and he fully understands the importance of addressing allergy as an underlying component of these problems. He is one of few ENT physicians in the area who has completed both written/oral examinations to achieve fellow status in the American Academy of Otolaryngic Allergy. He is also fully certified in minimally invasive balloon sinuplasty and regularly performs these procedures in the office. Other areas of interest include the diagnosis and surgical management of salivary gland, thyroid, and parathyroid disorders. He is American College of Surgeons certified in head and neck ultrasound diagnosis and fine needle aspiration. Dr. Allison is a firm believer in taking the time to listen to each patient's concerns and perspectives in deciding on a mutually agreeable and effective plan in that patient's care.
Though he was raised in Oklahoma and is still a diehard "Sooner", Dr. Allison fell in love with the Louisville area and currently enjoys cheering on U of L Cardinal athletics throughout the year. His first love is his family – he and his wife Angela are proud parents of two girls, age 4 and 6 months. In his spare time he also enjoys live music, working out, traveling, and skiing.
6801 Dixie Highway Suite 128
Louisville, Kentucky 40258
(502) 995-5525
(502) 459-3717
3515 Poplar Level Road
Louisville, Kentucky 40213
(502) 995-5525
(502) 459-3717
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"Dr. Allison is great!! I never feel rushed at my appointment. He is a great listener!! He realizes I am on a fixed income and takes that into consideration when prescribing me medications. His nurse is really sweet and returns my calls in a timely manner. I started with this doctor 2 years ago and never left dissatisfied. Dr. Allison and his nurse make me feel like family."
- Vitals.com review
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Respond to Review of Pepples Donut Farm
by RAMONATHEBUS
Review: i have to agree with the other reviewer, i lived in portland for eight years and yes pepples is better than voodoo donuts and even mighty o donuts in seattle. they are always trying new things and different flavors and the place is organic, so no gmo bullshit. the brunch is also very tasty, i have taken a bunch of my meat-eating friends there and they have all enjoyed the brunch, even though the intial thought of eating vegan freaked them out. how can you go wrong, nice staff, good coffee, organic, super tasty food aaaandd kickass vegan donuts .. all right here in oaktown...
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Get lost in our MoOM, The Museum of Online Museums.
Fresh Signals
Very helpful, the Dinner Party Wine Bottle Calculator.
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Flying Pig 5k, 2014
Cindy Leach, Lisa Finley and Carol Felton show off their flying pig outfits as they approach the finish line in the Flying Pig 5k on Sunday, April 6, 2014 at Spring Canyon Park in Fort Collins. The event benefited the Family Support Services Program which provides support to families with a family member with developmental disabilities.
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