The Internet Song

New demo! A song of longing, set on the internet.

Lights in the sky

Strange lights in the sky over DC, southwest of Bethesda from about 2:50 - 3am this morning. A steady, punctuated flickering, red and blue, for a while, not intermittent flashes. My Scully hypothesis is that it was a) police lights or b) distant lightning. Didn't really look like either of those. I'm still formulating my Mulder hypothesis.

Did anyone else see them?

Internet gleanings/current events

Some cool stuff in recent news:

First, this. Astronomers have discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting a red dwarf, Gliese 581, about 20 light-years away. It's in the habitable zone, meaning that water could exist in liquid form on the surface. Life, Unbounded explains:

With a 37 day orbit (putting it about 0.15 AU from the 1/3rd solar mass star) there's a good chance that GL 581 g is tidally locked - with a permanent day and night side, although it's by no means clear that tidal locking is inevitable. This poses significant questions about any climate on the planetary surface - something astronomers and planetary scientists have been worrying about for a while for this kind of scenario. A thick enough atmosphere and thermal transport could help even out the drastic day/night temperature difference and keep things stable.

 And then this: two dolphin species, the Guyana dolphin and the bottlenose dolphin, have been observed to alter the structure of their calls during interspecific interactions. This is cool for several reasons: first, it adds to our evidence that dolphins are skilled mimics. Secondly, it opens the possibility that these two different species could be capable of communicating with each other in some way. From the Beeb:

When bottlenose dolphins swim together, they emit longer, lower frequency calls, that are modulated.

In contrast, Guyana dolphins usually communicate using higher frequency whistles that have their own particular structure.

But often, the two species swim together in one group. These interactions are usually antagonistic, as the larger bottlenose dolphins harass the smaller Guyana dolphins.

When the two dolphins gather, they produce quite different calls, Dr May-Collado has discovered.

Crucially, calls emitted during these multi-species encounters are of an intermediate frequency and duration.

In other words, the dolphins start communicating in a style that is somewhere between those of the two separate species

In sadder news, Shiloh, one of the bottlenose dolphins at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, has died after a long illness. She was the mother of Chesapeake, the first calf born in captivity at the Aquarium, and the grandmother of Bayley, who is now about two years old. Shiloh was estimated to be about 31 years old, which isn't bad for a dolphin, but the news still came as a shock. I studied Shiloh's whistles for more than a year. Her contact call was a pretty, modulated upsweep with which I became very familiar. I'm going to miss her. So long, Shiloh, and thanks for all the fish.

And finally, I went to hear Richard Dawkins and Neil DeGrasse Tyson speak at Howard University the other day. The talk was an unscripted chat about the "poetry of science". Tyson spent a little too much time showboating - I would have like to hear more from Dawkins, devoted little fangirl that I am - but overall it was most enjoyable. I have to say, though...  Tyson was voted World's Sexiest Astrophysicist by People Magazine in 2000, but that Richard Dawkins is foxy. That hyperliterate Oxford-honed diction, that silver hair, that sultry voice... sigh.

Oh, and there are lots of new songs in the works: the Gargle Blasters are working on a cover of Pink Floyd's Young Lust... ooh, I need a dirty woman.



Coming attractions:

• The finished version of Homeopathy (in both censored and uncensored form... because this is a family blog)
• The finished version of Uncertainty (now with 100% more awesome due to sax solo by my dad)
•  More Young Lust
• Tabula Rasa (too full of angst for immediate release)
• The Night You Can't Remember (Magnetic Fields cover!)
• The Internet Song (work in progress)

Man, we almost have a setlist! Watch out, open mic night - the Gargle Blasters are coming.

Created things

Some recent ones:

Spray paint! I'm miffed the photo doesn't show off the eye-stabbingly fluorescent orange color it actually is. 

12x12 canvas, acrylic and ink

Piece of plywood, acrylic and ink

Huge piece of plywood, acrylic and ink

Homeopathy + MySpace

Another demo from the Gargle Blasters! This one's about homeopathy (from thoughtbunny to mp3 in under 24 hours, aw yeah)...



Our gallant triumvirate of sexy has only had a name for about a day, but wow it's all over the internet. Feed the collective ego here and here!

Uncertainty Strikes Back

Check out the latest version of Uncertainty, recorded with Alex in his most excellent basement!

Uncertainty

I wrote half a love song about physics. Have a listen!



I’m uncertain as to whether I should trust you
I’ve never been all that good at romance
You always seem to know just what I’m thinking
And that thought makes me happy in my pants

You’re photon-like in your acceleration
Stick with me baby, surely we’ll go far
I’ve calculated just how fast you’re moving
I just can’t be quite certain where you are

And curled up, cat-like, in my bed
The thought keeps turning in my head
It fills me with both joy and dread
I think I’m both alive and dead

*UPDATE*

New verses! Now with increased GarageBand sexiness!



I’ll pull you in past my event horizon
To terraform my lonely little moon
My heart is beating faster than a pulsar
And burning like the Lyrids do in June

Oh darling, won’t you tell me that you love me?
You light up the dark matter in my soul
I find my lust for you is supermassive
And growing like Andromeda’s black hole

Sperm whale... off Miami Beach

An injured sperm whale calf has been spotted off the coast of Miami Beach. Efforts are underway to find its mother, but if she is not found, the calf will probably be euthanized.

The opening was fantastic! Forgot to take pictures, as usual, but turnout was impressive and the company was grand. Thanks guys.

Breathe

The show opening is coming up! It's happening at Pure Wine Cafe on Monday, August 23, 6:30 - 10:30pm. There will be art and food and free bubbles!

There's an RSVPable facebook event here.

DC Animal News Examiner

I'm now the Animal News Examiner for the Washington, DC section of Examiner.com!

I'll be writing about everything animal in DC. Check out my page here, and tell all your friends. Tell your loved ones. Tell your pets.

Ring of fire

I'm in Hawaii right now, and it's been blowing my mind at every turn. Today's adventure: a hike around an active volcano, Kilauea. We came to the caldera's edge just after sunset and waited for the sky to get dark. As the light faded, the glow from the lake of lava inside the crater got brighter and brighter. Until it looked like this (click for monstrously large version) :

Then over to the Observatories at Mauna Kea, the world's largest astronomical observatory. The combined light-gathering power of the telescopes on the volcano summit is sixty times greater than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. The Keck Telescope and twelve others are at the top, but we went up halfway to the visitor center, where volunteers with telescopes let us use them to gawk at distant astronomical objects. I saw the Ring Nebula, 2,300 light years away. There were more stars in the sky than I had ever seen. The Milky Way was a carpet of tiny lights. "Beautiful" doesn't quite capture it.

Mind = blown.

Updates

I've got a few things going on, mostly exciting!

First, I'm framing a number of paintings for the show at the Pure Wine Cafe in Ellicott City. This entails many hours in the basement every day, playing with power tools and painting things and otherwise fooling around and getting covered in schmutz. Pictures to come...

There have been many adventures with Wowbagger, including swimming holes, night hikes followed by swimming holes, and a beautiful 18th century graveyard we stumbled upon after a relaxing tubing session down a river and an epic barefoot trek through knee-deep mud (whilst trying to get back to the parking lot).

I have a job! I will be tutoring nervous high school kidlings in the dark arts of the SAT. Had to retake the bloody test in its entirety to get the job - needless to say, I am not as smart as I was in high school - but it seems to have been worth it. I start in September. I never thought my first job out of college would require business casual and respectable conduct, but so it goes.

Finally, I've found another venue that might be interested in my art. I've been slacking recently, but I'm gonna have to start churning out new ones again. This is exciting!

A rough draft of my latest:

She's going to be a maenad. With prehensile hair.

Life is good!

Submitted my abstract for the LSA conference in January... months of coding and banging of my head against walls and other stationary objects come to fruition! There will be more coding, of course. Our n (low, approaching silly) is still a problem, so there's lots more data crunching to do before January, but I don't have to worry about that for a while.

Meanwhile, I'm working on framing a number of my paintings for this art show coming up. This entails hanging out in the basement for hours on end whilst high on spray paint fumes and playing with power tools.

I saw Iron Maiden in concert! Dream Theater opened during a sunshower, which was lovely. Then, just as Maiden came onstage, the sky cleared and a rainbow appeared opposite a pretty sunset. Rainbows are so metal.

Fig. 1) Eddie!

Fig. 2)   |m|

Life is pretty sweet.

Planet Word

Stephen Fry is going to host a BBC series on language! It's called Planet Word, and I am geekgiddy about it. He's a beautifully erudite writer and speaker, and one of my very favorite people-I-don't-actually-know-personally. I can't wait to see what the show will be like.

Here's a teaser, from a blog essay he wrote a while back:

But above all let there be pleasure. Let there be textural delight, let there be silken words and flinty words and sodden speeches and soaking speeches and crackling utterance and utterance that quivers and wobbles like rennet. Let there be rapid firecracker phrases and language that oozes like a lake of lava. Words are your birthright. Unlike music, painting, dance and raffia work, you don’t have to be taught any part of language or buy any equipment to use it, all the power of it was in you from the moment the head of daddy’s little wiggler fused with the wall of mummy’s little bubble. So if you’ve got it, use it. Don’t be afraid of it, don’t believe it belongs to anyone else, don’t let anyone bully you into believing that there are rules and secrets of grammar and verbal deployment that you are not privy to. Don’t be humiliated by dinosaurs into thinking yourself inferior because you can’t spell broccoli or moccasins. Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors.

Do read the whole thing. It made me all shivery.

Finally, this dates back to his Bit of Fry and Laurie days:

Ego boost

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Apparently. Give it a shot!