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Name Change
“Stuff and Things” is just about the most generic junk you could use, and it’s hardly original. I’m not good at original.
I’m actually just going to move everything to my own domain. See you there!
Posted in Personal
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Late Discoveries
These days I discover music quite serendipitously. You could say it’s not much different from when I used to buy CDs at the used music store based solely on cover art, except the paths tend to be a little more circuitous now.
On a Reddit thread about a potentially crummy use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by GoPro (the camera maker) to suppress a review, people started discussing alternative camera brands for the same kind of strap-a-camera-to-my-helmet-and-jump-off-a-mountain type of purpose the GoPro is used for. A brand named Contour came up.
Having never heard of it, I decide to check out their website. Nice, tiny cameras with HD capacity, pretty neat stuff, but how about some videos? I clicked randomly on a windsurfing video and suddenly my whole evening changed.
That song is awesome. What is it, who’s it by? The video page gives no clue. I type out some of the lyrics into Google and after a few attempts, I get my answer – “Our Lives”, by Ou Est Le Swimming Pool.
The whole album (The Golden Year) is on Rdio, so I’m good to go. But who are these guys, do they have anything else out? Let’s Wikipedia them up real quick and…
…oh.
On 20 August 2010, Charles Haddon, the lead singer of the band, died after a performance at Pukkelpop, Belgium. He committed suicide in the backstage artists’ parking area.
Following the links from Wikipedia takes us to a Daily Mail article which explains that, during the concert, Haddon stagedived unexpectedly and injured a young girl. He was distraught over this, and fought with the other band members afterwards. A few hours later, he killed himself by climbing up a communications mast and jumping off.
He was 22 years old.
That’s a sad story. I had a whole point I was going to make about how finding out an artist is dead upon discovering their work is not necessarily that uncommon a thing, especially since our ability to explore older works continues to expand as more and more things are digitized and made more easily available, but now it’s a little derailed as I keep listening to the album and getting a little more sad each time. I guess it’s just the fact that it was so recent, and he was so young, and I could say that it was such a pointless death but I don’t want to get judgy about the psychology of suicide just now.
I’m just glad I discovered his music, better late than never. R.I.P. Charles Haddon.
Posted in Culture, Personal
Tagged charles haddon, music, ou est le swimming pool, suicide, synthpop
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(not so urban) Cometgazing
It’s been cloudy, so I haven’t had a chance to look for the comet again. Tonight, after yesterday’s storm, the sky is fairly clear, but the horizon is still covered up. I can see Jupiter quite nicely in the sky, and I want to haul out the spotting scope again, but it’s also rather windy and wet outside. And Jupiter is still a bit high in the sky, making it awkward to look through the scope. And I’m lazy.
Meanwhile, however, I came across this video made up of images taken by one of the STEREO spacecraft. I heartily recommend watching the introductory video in the Wikipedia page to understand what and where the STEREO craft are located. It will make the next video a little clearer.
STEREO is floating along, watching the sun, and suddenly (well, “suddenly”, over a period of many days) C/2011 L4 Pan-STARRS photobombs the view.
Just so you understand the enormity of what we’re seeing here – we have managed to put a camera so far away from our world that we can take a selfie with a comet in the way.
Incidentally, it appears that STEREO-B is about 286.6 million kilometers away from Earth, while C/2011 L4 is about 175 million kilometers away (warning, this link requires Java in your browser; if you turn on the plug-in, remember to disable it afterwards).
Posted in Space Sciences
Tagged c/2011 l4, comet, nasa, pan-starrs, panstarrs, stereo-b, time-lapse
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Urban Cometgazing
I wanted to catch a glimpse of Comet C/2011 L4 (also known as Pan-STARRS – even though that’s the name of the telescope that found it, and should it find another, I doubt they’ll name it Pan-STARRS Part Deux), but it had been cloudy at dusk over the past few days.
On Thursday evening, there were some clouds on the western horizon but the sky was clear otherwise; I got home from work with enough time before sunset to haul out my binoculars and the camera. I opened my bedroom window to get an unobstructed view of the sky, and started scanning for the comet.
The online diagram I found wasn’t very explicit about when exactly I would find it, and I had read that the comet could be very faint; indeed, by the time I found it, I had to do the trick of not looking directly at it so my rods could detect it.
I managed to take a few pictures, but they’re not very sharp since I didn’t bother setting up the tripod. I can generally hand-hold a long exposure up to a second or two (which is what I had to do to capture the image) but there was a bitter wind blowing into my bedroom, and by the time it got dark enough to get some good shots, I couldn’t feel my fingers.
Comet C/2011 L4 Pan-STARRS, on March 14, 2013. 85mm, 1.6 seconds at f/2.2, ISO 200
85mm, 1.3 seconds at f/2.2, ISO 200
85mm, 3.2 seconds at f/4.5, ISO 200
I briefly tried to use my beast lens, but that’s impossible to hand-hold, and it’s also impossible to find a faint object through it.
It’s been cloudy since Thursday, so I haven’t had a chance to try again. The comet is supposed to get fainter with time now that it’s going away from the sun.
Posted in Personal, Photography, Space Sciences
Tagged c/2011 l4, comet, pan-starrs, stargazing
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Urban Stargazing
Living in the outskirts of New York City, there are limited celestial bodies I can see on any given night. Tonight happened to be a clear, relatively windless night, and so I decided to haul out my spotting scope to see how Jupiter would look through it.
I received the spotting scope as a gift last year and I used it while in Florida for Christmas.
Taken with a mobile phone
A spotting scope is not a good tool for stargazing, if for no other reason that the alignment of the objective in line with the body of the scope means that, unless the object you are observing is within a few degrees of the horizon, it’s going to get awkward to look up through it. Instruments meant for skyward aiming will have a prism attachment allowing the objective to be placed perpendicular to the body of the scope.
I do not currently own an appropriate device, and therefore must make do. My scope is 80mm device with a 20-60x zoomable objective. I’m not sure how this compares to a proper telescope but I figured, if nothing else, it might let me see Jupiter’s moons.
Quite fascinatingly, it did just that. I was unable to take photos through the scope, but I can still demonstrate for you the sights I’ve seen through the wonder that is Stellarium.
At 20x, this is pretty much exactly what I saw tonight:
As viewed on March 9, 2013
Well, not exactly — the moons were slightly more puncticular than they appear in that graphic, which is a cropped screenshot from Stellarium. (I’m including a dictionary link to that word because I just learned it tonight).
Watching this quintet move across the field of view was exciting enough, but then I remembered about the zoom function of the objective. At 60x, things looked a little bit like this:
As viewed on March 9, 2013
The software rendering is a bit more detailed, but you could definitely see a slight banding pattern to the planet. I did not notice if the moon closest to Jupiter had indeed a bit of a red shade to it.
Turning on labels in Stellarium reveals the names of the participants in this particular dance:
As viewed on March 9, 2013
In the grand scheme of amateur astronomy, this is pretty bush league stuff; but to my recollection this may have been the first time I have ever, in my entire life, seen the moons of Jupiter with my own eyes. I felt like Galileo pointing his telescope at Jupiter for the first time and seeing that there were bodies out in the universe that did not appear to revolve around the Earth. This is what he saw, over 400 years ago.
This site describes Galileo’s observations and his dawning realization that, rather than seeing Jupiter passing by some background stars, he was seeing bodies revolving around it.
Anyway, so that’s what happened tonight instead of homework.
Posted in History, Space Sciences
Tagged calisto, europa, galileo, ganymede, io, jupiter, spotting scope, telescope
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Soundcloud
Just a quickie – I want to support things like Soundcloud or Jamendo, places where you can connect directly to an artist. But I’m new to these things.
I just signed up for Soundcloud, thinking that an account would allow me to follow people and easily listen to their music, particularly on my phone. However, from what I’m gathering, they’ve changed the interface and now it’s all weird. You have a “stream” where the people you follow show up, but you have lost the ability to delete people, it seems. For example, I don’t know if it’s a new account thing, but Live with Ryan Seacrest (or whatever the show is called) shows up on my stream. I don’t care about that, so I want it gone. Except I can’t remove it, I don’t see any way to do so, and Googling just finds me other people within the last three months complaining about having lost this feature. I can go directly into the Ryan Seacrest page, and choose to “mute” it, but it still shows up in my stream.
I’m sure some further digging might solve this, but that’s not even the main problem; the mobile app doesn’t seem to give me any options to find the people I’m following. It looks that if I “like” a song or person, then I might be able to see it, but straight up following someone doesn’t work.
Since the mobile is my main platform, that’s a deal breaker.
And you know, I’ve spent basically about a half hour trying to figure this stuff out and I’m giving up, which seems silly, but honestly? There’s not enough time to deal with cumbersome user experiences. This is the world we live in now, and every slightly complicated feature you put in your app or service is going to drive people away — particularly when there are alternatives that don’t make me jump through those hoops.
All I wanted was to load up Soundcloud on my phone and listen to a specific person; the app did not make this possible in any intuitive way. Which means it’s out. I guess I’ll keep using Soundcloud as a music discovery service, but on my desktop, and when I find something I really like I’ll just have to download the mp3 and use it that way, like some sort of caveman.
Unless, again, I’m missing some obvious functionality, but nothing seemed to jump out at me.
==
Which is all a long-winded way of saying, listen to this:
Posted in Computers, Culture
Tagged lorde, mobile app, music, music service, royals, soundcloud
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Happy New Year
I’ve carried out the obligatory WordPress theme change!
Posted in Personal
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HELLO BLAHG
Last time I wrote, it was the second week of school; now we’re coming up on the final 3 weeks.
I’ve been stupid busy. But here’s a quickie: Michael Schumacher retires again after a disappointing comeback.
The 2012 Formula 1 season was pretty awesome. Can’t wait til next year.
Posted in Personal, Sport
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Russian Rails
I’m on my second week of school and I have tons of abortive posts to write, but I felt like shooting this one off real quick:
Using Google Translate on the comments, there’s a mention of Kirov.
I thought it was interesting because the engines look so different from what I’m used to, except for some of the diesels in the latter half. There’s a GIGANTIC engine being used in passenger service, but later you see it pulling some empty freight. There’s some pretty wide looking gauge rail, and then there are some freight operations in some frighteningly narrow gauge. The rails are bent to hell, and the hoppers sway to and fro in such a way that it’s just unbelievable that they don’t topple over (around 6:25 or so).
Some of the “engines” look like some janketty re-purposed trucks. One of the vehicles looks like it has wooden planks covering the doorway.
Then there are other little details, like the cannibalized car stereo in the engine playing some cheesy russian pop with english lyrics in the chorus, cassettes strewn all about. There’s the speedometer needle that bounces uncontrollably.
Russia fascinates me. I know so little about it beyond all the Cold War bullshit we grew up with (“we”, meaning people in their 30s). I fly around over it on Google Earth and it’s just such an incredibly vast country. I see all these cities that I know nothing about and I wonder about the daily lives of their citizens. I mean, I sort of do this with most countries, but there’s something so… massive about Russia that it overwhelms me a little. We sometimes complain about the size of the US or Canada, how it takes like six or seven hours to go from east to west, but that’s nothing compared to some of the distances in Russia.
Posted in Culture, Rail
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Stuff & Things 