currently 1230am CST — there have been several tornadic outbreaks with damaging winds / hail… in Arkansas, Illinois, Tennessee, Louisiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio, Alabama, Mississippi, Indiana, Louisiana, and Michigan…
Areas to watch out for next will most likely be Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia.
Illinois and Michigan are getting hit with hail and damaging winds– also possible tornadoes detected:
By 6am EST 1/23/2012 — look in the area marked below for severe weather to develop:
Watch the east coast states (new england)… it is up for debate as to whether severe will hit these areas.. or will the cooler weather kill the storm when it arrives in the north east?
I would venture a guess that AT LEAST damaging winds will reach New York. Be prepared as always.
JAN. 22ND CME IMPACT: Arriving a little later than expected, a coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth’s magnetic field at 0617 UT on Jan. 22nd. According to analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab, the CME strongly compressed Earth’s magnetic field and briefly exposed satellites in geosynchronous orbit to solar wind plasma. For the next 24 hours, Earth’s magnetic field reverberated from the impact, stirring bright auroras around the Arctic Circle. Bjørn Jørgensen observed this display from Tromsø, Norway:
“This was amazing,” he says. “It was a wonderful experience to see these stunning auroras.”
NOAA forecasters estimate a 10% – 25% chance of continued geomagnetic storms tonight as effects from the CME impact subside. The odds will increase again on Jan. 24-25 as a new CME (from today’s M9-clare) approaches Earth. High-latitude sky watchers should remain alert for aurorasfr/ spaceweather.com
ALMOST-X FLARE AND CME: This morning, Jan. 23rd around 0359 UT, big sunspot 1402 erupted, producing a long-duration M9-class solar flare. The explosion’s M9-ranking puts it on the threshold of being an X-flare, the most powerful kind. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the flare’s extreme ultraviolet flash:
The Solar and Heliosphere Observatory (SOHO) and the STEREO-Behind spacecraft have both detected a CME rapidly emerging from the blast site. Analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab estimate a velocity of 2200 km. There is little doubt that the cloud is heading in the general direction of Earth. A preliminary inspection of SOHO/STEREO imagery suggests that the CME will deliver a strong glancing blow to Earth’s magnetic field on Jan. 24-25 as it sails mostly north of our planet.
This ingenious promotional video for the Zurich Chamber Orchestra transforms the musical notes played by the first violinist in a symphony by Ferdinand Ries into a roller coaster track in real time.
The video was created by the production studio Virtual Republic. On their Vimeo page, they explain, “The notes and bars were exactly synchronised with the progression in the animation so that the typical movements of a rollercoaster ride match the dramatic composition of the music.”
We can now hear, across a gulf of 140 years, some silly noises and a count to six, one of the earliest audio recordings.
Until recently, the oldest recorded sounds of known date which anyone could hear had been captured in 1888 on the “perfected” phonograph introduced that year by Thomas Edison. But Edison had invented his original phonograph eleven years before that, in 1877–and recorded sound itself is even older: In the 1850s, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville of Paris created the phonautograph, an instrument which scratched records of aerial sound waves on soot-blackened paper, not for playback, but for visual study. This means there is a big disparity between when sound was first recorded (around 1857) and the earliest recorded sounds we could actually listen to (1888).
That changed in 2008 when FirstSounds.org released a sound file created from a phonautogram of “Au Clair de la Lune” as sung on April 9, 1860. Suddenly we could hear more distantly into the past than ever before.
Even so, the intervening history of recorded sound — including the transformation by American inventors of the phonautograph into a “talking machine” — has remained frustratingly silent. The indented tinfoil sheets produced by Edison’s exhibition phonographs of 1877-78 weren’t regarded as permanently playable recordings, and little care was taken to preserve them in a playable state. No intelligible sound recovered from a historical tinfoil recording has ever been published.
So what else exists from before 1888? If we exclude recordings that weren’t intended for playback or to be permanently playable, then the oldest sound recordings preserved today are found at the National Museum of American History — experimental phonograms made starting in 1881 by the Volta Laboratory Association, which consisted of telephone pioneer Alexander Graham Bell, scientific instrument maker Charles Sumner Tainter, and chemist Chichester A. Bell.
With the support of a Lemelson Center Fellowship and the help of curator Carlene Stephens, I carried out a study of early sound recordings at the Museum, including the Volta materials, between October and December 2011. By comparing artifacts from the Volta collection with experiments described in notebooks at the Museum and the Library of Congress, I was able to identify a number of unlabeled items. One of these — a small copper disc with a laterally modulated or “zig-zag” sound recording — turned out to have been prepared shortly before October 20, 1881, to test whether electrically depositing a layer of metal on a recorded wax disc, and then using the metal negative to stamp out copies, might work as a basis for duplication in a future recording industry. “In this way a piece of music, for instance, can be recorded once,” Tainter had speculated, “and any number of copies made from this original record, and the music reproduced from each of the copies.”
The October 1881 date makes this one of the oldest known American sound recordings in existence, so a question naturally arises: What’s on it? The written documentation I could find identifies the disc’s content only vaguely as “words and sounds … shouted into the mouth-piece,” but the Volta group’s notebooks reveal the general kind of test recitation they were then using, as for example:
July 4, 1881: “Several trilled R’s–then–‘Mary had a little lamb, whose fleece was white as snow, and every where that Mary went the lamb was sure to go.’–Several trilled R’s–then–‘How is that for high’–trilled R’s–and–One–two–three–four–five–six–seven–eight–nine–”
July 9, 1881: “There was a girl named O’Brian / Whose feet were like those of Orion, / To the circus she would go, / To see the great show, / And scratch the left ear of the lion. Trilled R’s. – ‘How is that for high’ more trilled R’s.”
Apart from the recurring expression “How is that for high” — roughly equivalent in 1881 to “How do you like them apples” — the most striking common denominator here is the “trilled R’s.” From laboratory notes, I could tell that this sound had recorded unusually well, and that the Volta group had often inserted it at beginnings, ends, and section breaks. But I didn’t know quite what it had sounded like. After all, nobody alive today had ever heard any of these experiments.
In December 2011, Dr. Carl Haber unveiled the first sounds extracted from Volta recordings using an optical scanning technology developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with the Library of Congress. One of the items chosen for this pilot project was the copper disc from October 1881. So now, at last, we can hear, across a gulf of 130 years: Trilled R’s–one, two, three, four, five, six–trilled R’s.
This post also appears on the National Museum of American History’s O Say Can You See? blog, anAtlantic partner site.
Most of us have no trouble imagining the benefits of having more time off work: more time with friends and family, less stress, finally learning to play the violin. But the benefits of working less, it turns out, aren’t just for the individual enjoying a happier life. A culture less focused on the rat race means serious benefits for the planet and the economy, as well.
In this interview with Free Speech TV, sociologist Juliet Schor—who wrote the article Less Work, More Living in our Fall 2011 issue—explains why less work could work for all of us. (No Video? Check it out at the link below.)
Google used its homepage to protest SOPA and PIPA.
Update, Jan. 19: Following the blackout protests, 18 Senators—including 7 former sponsors of the bill—withdrew their support for the Protect IP Act, leaving it without enough votes.
Today, if you tried to find an apartment on Craigslist, Google photos of cute cats, or look up the 14th president on Wikipedia, you surely noticed something strange. These sites, cornerstones of our Internet lives, are blacked out today—and they’re not alone. A massive digital strike is underway, all in protest of what sounds like friendly legislation: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and its peer, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate.
So why is the Internet on strike? Because what’s at stake in the bills, opponents say, is a lot bigger than LOLCats. According to the ACLU, the legislation “would not only impact unlawful infringing content, but also a wealth of completely legal content that has nothing to do with online piracy.”
SOPA would allow owners of intellectual property to cripple foreign sites that are using their copyrighted material illegally (for example, by demanding that search engines not index them, or that ad agencies not contract with them). But since this process would be governed by the “good faith belief” that sites are infringing, rather than judicial review, there’s a lot of worry that it would be misused.
Potential for abuse is rampant. As Public Knowledge points out, Google could easily take it upon itself to delist every viral video site on the internet with a “good faith belief” that they’re hosting copyrighted material. Leaving YouTube as the only major video portal. Comcast (an ISP) owns NBC (a content provider). Think they might have an interest in shuttering some rival domains? Under SOPA, they can do it without even asking for permission. […]
SOPA also includes an “anti-circumvention” clause, which holds that telling people how to work around SOPA is nearly as bad as violating its main provisions. In other words: if your status update links to The Pirate Bay, Facebook would be legally obligated to remove it. Ditto tweets, YouTube videos, Tumblr or WordPress posts, or sites indexed by Google. And if Google, Twitter, WordPress, Facebook, etc. let it stand? They face a government “enjoinment.” They could and would be shut down.
The resources it would take to self-police are monumental for established companies, and unattainable for start-ups. SOPA would censor every online social outlet you have, and prevent new ones from emerging.
In fact, SOPA has been having a rough road of late: the Obama administration came out against it, knocking it off course for the time being, and three co-sponsors of the bills withdrew their support as the Internet blackout (which the L.A. Timesestimates to include some 10,000 websites) began. But PIPA is still set for mark-up next week.
And so the protest continues. Google, in a petition it’s circulating, states, “There’s no need to make American social networks, blogs and search engines censor the Internet or undermine the existing laws that have enabled the Web to thrive, creating millions of U.S. jobs.” A group of artists sent an open letter to Congress, explaining that “copyright law exists to promote the arts, but the new penalties in PIPA could be used against the new social media channels we depend on to make a living, and endanger freedom of expression.”
Environmental activists are reducing plastic waste pollution by tackling disposable plastic bags, one city at a time. About 20 U.S. cities and towns have passed disposable bag reduction laws, including San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
Whether they impose a nominal fee for single-use, disposable bags, or ban them altogether, the laws encourage consumers to develop habits to replace disposable bags, particularly those made from plastic.
The most recent city to join the effort to ban the bag is Portland, Ore., which has banned single-use plastic bags at the checkouts of large retailers. The change was met with overwhelming support from most Portlanders, says Stiv Wilson of 5 Gyres Institute, who helped give out free reusable bags at grocery stores to ease the transition for shoppers on October 15, when the ban took effect.
The Portland ordinance, unanimously approved by Portland City Council, was the culmination of a four-year campaign by the Surfrider Foundation Portland Chapter, 5 Gyres Institute, and the Oregon League of Conservation Voters. It reflects growing public concern about the environmental impact of disposable plastic.
“Plastic bags typically have a low recycling rate, seem to be littered often and have an easy alternative in reusable bags,” says Bill Hickman, coordinator of the Surfrider Foundation’s “Rise Above Plastics” program. “We hope that people understand some of the unintended consequences that go along with a disposable lifestyle.”
The Majestic Plastic Bag
The epic journey of a plastic bag from its release into the wild to ultimate destination in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Disposable shopping bags are a significant source of plastic pollution in the oceans, where scientists have identified five huge gyres of “plastic soup.” “We’ve reached a tipping point where we can’t keep up with the stuff that’s in the ocean,” says Wilson, who has visited three of the gyres for research. “I’ve seen it firsthand, and it’s startling.”
Proponents of ban-the-bag ordinances have faced powerful industry-backed counter-campaigns. The American Chemistry Council, a trade group representing plastics manufacturers, defeated legislation for a statewide ban on single-use bags in California, and spent $1.4 million in Seattle in 2008 to defeat a referendum that would have imposed a 20-cent fee on disposable grocery bags. Plastic bag manufacturer and recycler Hilex Poly Company funded a campaign that defeated Oregon’s proposed statewide ban earlier this year.
Campaigners hope the success of municipal ordinances will motivate grocers to support statewide bans in the near future.
This week will be quite conflicted in so many ways. An introductory note that I would like ot make is that electronic devices and anything that is plugged in — regardless of how you read that —- will be challenged this week. When you find yourself in a situation where that happens, step back and think about what went before. There are patterns that are developing at this time and there are many clues out there as to how they are forming. YOu will know them if you are willing to do a little sleuthing. Or just pay attention. This is a week in which a keen sense of wonder will serve you well. Also, you can find that your body is doing strange things. Analyze that also. It too has a pattern to it. Listen to your body. Honor it, and do as it requests, a nap, a snack, a meditation, a removal from a situation…. It will benefit you in the long run. Do not worry about having to make excuses for your actions. Things will flow in a new and different way and a lot of the old niceties are not necessary right now. There are new and different energies coming in at this time, and they require a new response. We are all learning. Continue reading →
