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Friday, September 20, 2002 |
A Shocking Space Movie
The far heavens don't change. We can see change in our solar system: planets, comets, asteroids move. Sometimes a comet hits a planet, they pass in front of each other, etc. But aside from the occasional supermova, the rest of the universe seems unchanging. Things are just too far away for us to see any changes.
That's starting to change. Yesterday NASA released footage of the interior of the amazing and incredibly beautiful Crab Nebula. This nebula is the remnant of a star that exploded nearly a thousand years ago. The movie shows "bright wispy structures can be seen moving outward at half the speed of light to form an expanding ring, visible in both X-ray and optical images. These wisps appear to originate from a shock wave that shows up as an inner X-ray ring. Dozen of knots in the ring brighten and fade. They jitter around and occasionally undergo outbursts that give rise to expanding clouds of particles."
It's beautiful stuff.
10:30:43 PM Permalink
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New iMac
So, after I made some posts the other night about the update to Jaguar and iTunes, I started having some troubles with my iMac. Namely, I couldn't boot. It was giving me that old "hard disk, what hard disk?" icon when I tried to start it. My internal CD drive had been in bad shape for a while, it worked only sporadically, but since I didnt' need to boot off it, I just used my outbord USB Sony CD RW toload software.
Anyway, the drive was dead. I took it into the store where I bought it, I guess 3 1/2 years ago, and talked about getting a new hard drive. Then I asked if they had any used machines around. Turns out they did, so I got a 450 mHz machine (twice as fast as the old 233 mHz Rev B), with 384 MB RAM, internal DVD, 20 gigs (the old one had only 6), Firewire (the old one was USB only). So what the hell, I brought it home. It's not the Ma I want (I'd get a 17" iMac and a 15" laptop if I had my druthers), but it is a new iMac, and runs Jaguar much better (meaning, faster) than the old one. Luckily, I had backed my data up to a Windows machine over the network before I got Jaguar a few weeks ago, so I didn't lose any data.
One thing: the new machine is Red!
10:18:33 PM Permalink
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"That Thin, That Wild Mercury Sound...
...it's metallic and bright gold with whatever that conjures up. "
Someone has transcribed and posted the 1978 Dylan Interview in Playboy Magazine, in which Bob used that wonderful phrase, speaking with Ron Rosenbaum. It's a pretty remarkable interview, and a couple years ago Rosenbaum wrote a nice memoir of doing the interview. The two go together.
In Rosenbaum's memoir, he mentions something often ignored, that Bob elaborated some on the sound he heard:
That ethereal twilight light, you know. It's the sound of the street with the sunrays, the sun shining down at a particular time, on a particular type of building. A particular type of people walking on a particular type of street. It's an outdoor sound that drifts even into open windows that you can hear. The sound of bells and distant railroad trains and arguments in apartments and the clinking of silverware and knives and forks and beating with leather straps. It's all-it's all there
Alas, a lot of the interview is about Renaldo & Clara, and try as I might, I just can't reconcile myself to this disaster. Still Rosenbaum does get some more interesting stuff out of Dylan:
How many singers feel the same way ten years later that they felt when they wrote tile song? Wait till it gets to be 20 years, you know? Now, there's a certain amount of act that you can put on, you know, you can get through on it, but there's got to be something to it that is real-not just for the moment. And a lot of my songs don't work. I wrote a lot of them just by gut-because my gut told me to write them-and they usually don't work so good as the years go on. A lot of them do work. With those, there's some truth about every one of them. And I don't think I'd be singing if I weren't writing, you know. I would have no reason or purpose to be out there singing. I mean, I don't consider myself . . . the life of the party. [Laughs]
The stuff about the singing, now nearly 25 years and, what, 1500+ concerts, since that interview is fascianting. But that "life of the party" line is rich.
10:08:06 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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