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Presenting
Michael Egan
replied:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
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Michelle in AZ
Reader Comment
Brooklyn
Love reign o'er him
Trump 'Pee On Me' Statues Appear in Brooklyn - NBC New York
BSmasher
Thanks, Brain!
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• As a competitor, the most extraordinary moment of figure skating that Toller Cranston ever saw involved a very ill Bob McAvoy and his pairs partner Mary Petrie. Mr. McAvoy's dream was to go to the World Championships, and he had the opportunity to do just that in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, in 1970. Unfortunately, he became very ill on the plane trip to Yugoslavia and went straight to a hospital as soon as he arrived. Nevertheless, he forced himself to compete on the ice. The first half of the performance went well, but then Mr. McAvoy's illness caught up with him, making him weak, and he dropped his partner on the ice as he himself fell. The two lay on the ice for a few seconds as their music continued playing, and then they got up, bruised and bleeding from their fall. Mr. McAvoy made a gesture to his partner that asked, "Would you like to continue?" Ms. Petrie did, and at this point the audience came alive, cheering them on with such enthusiasm that they skated the performance of a lifetime, followed by an enormous ovation from the crowd. Their scores reflected their fall, but Mr. Cranston says, "It was a moment when skating took a back seat to integrity, sportsmanship, and the belief that nothing is impossible to a willing heart."
• In 1997, figure skater Scott Hamilton contracted testicular cancer. He got the best treatment available in the world at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and his cancer was cured. Mr. Hamilton and other members of Discover Stars on Ice had already raised millions of dollars for the Make-a-Wish Foundation, which helps make the wishes of seriously ill children come true. As an expert in fund-raising he wanted to do something to pay back the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, so he held a benefit for it. Participants donating their talent and time included skaters Brian Boitano, Kurt Browning, Ekaterina Gordeeva, Rosalynn Sumners, Katerina Witt, Paul Wylie, and Kristi Yamaguchi, saxophonist Kenny G., and singer Olivia Newton-John. During his performance, Mr. Hamilton fell while attempting a triple toe loop, but the audience, which included Jack Nicholson and Cindy Crawford, applauded the fall.
• Figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi once skated a short program to "Doop Doop," by Dancelife Orchestra. In their short program, skaters are required to perform certain movements to demonstrate their technical skill. This created a problem for Kristi's choreographer, Sandra Bezic. "Doop Doop" is a funky song, danced to by hip chicks. What would any hip chick do during a traditional spiral, which is a required element in short programs? Ms. Bezic solved the problem by having Ms. Yamaguchi look bored during the spiral, holding her hand on her chin, tapping her cheek with a finger, and occasionally looking at her watch to see if it was time to stop the boring spiral. Ms. Bezic writes, "Competitive choreography is often about ways to do things differently within the confines of the rules."
• People sometimes think that because ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean have worked together so long that they are able to tell what the other is thinking. Well, on the ice that is true - but off the ice it is definitely not true. While in Australia, Mr. Dean was swimming when he was caught by an undertow and taken out to sea. After fighting the undertow, he was exhausted and in real danger of drowning, so he waved to Ms. Torvill, who was on the beach. She waved back, then continued having a good time. Fortunately, a friend saw that Mr. Dean was in trouble, so he went out to him on a boogie-board, and the two eventually made it back to shore.
• Judges in figure skating can honestly make mistakes. While judging an event, Morry Stillwell was watching skater Christopher Bowman and taking notes when his pencil broke. He reached for another pencil, taking his eyes away from the skater for a very brief time, then turned his eyes back upon the skater. However, after the program was finished and the judges' scores were posted, Mr. Stillwell saw that his scores were way above all the other judges' scores. Shocked, he asked another judge, "What happened?" The other judge replied, "He hit the wall, you dumb ****."
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
THE CRYBABY IS CONFIRMED.
VOTE FOR THE REAL VETERAN REPUGS!
BABY TRUMP BREAKS HIS PIGGY BANK.
THE "CUSHY KUSHNER" TAX PLAN.
NUNERS!
THE BLIND, DEAF AND DUMB REPUGS SURE TELL NASTY LIES!
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Rained all night. Quite nice.
2018 Pennsylvania Conference for Women
Amal Clooney
Amal Clooney had a good reason for not attending Princess Eugenie's wedding on Friday.
Serving as one of the keynote speakers at the 2018 Pennsylvania Conference for Women that morning, the renowned human rights lawyer, 40, spoke out against President-for-now Donald Trump (R-Amoral) for mocking Christine Blasey Ford's testimony that Brett Kavanaugh allegedly sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers - which Kavanaugh has denied.
"A president shouldn't ridicule a woman who courageously comes forward to allege abuse," Clooney said during the conference, according to Philadelphia Magazine.
"Survivors in any country deserve the chance to look their abusers in the eye and for history to record what has happened to them," Clooney added during the speech, reported the Daily Mail.
Amal Clooney
Space Force
Neil deGrasse Tyson
President-for-now Trump (R-Grifter) raised eyebrows earlier this year when he announced plans to create a "Space Force," which would become the sixth branch of the military.
And despite some snickers among political observers, renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn't think the Space Force is that crazy of an idea. But Tyson, one of the authors of "Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military," has a note of caution.
"Just because it came out of Trump's mouth doesn't mean it's crazy," he said this week on Midday Movers (video above). "But, if while doing this, you do not continue to invest in innovations in science and technology, you are making a fatal mistake that will compromise the future health, wealth and security of the nation."
What Tyson means is that a lack of investment in other forms of space innovation could mean the US would "begin to fade."
"And we'll continue - it's not a cliff edge," he said. "It's a fade. One day, you wake up and say, 'No one is asking us to have a seat at the table. Japan, China, and Russia are mounting this mission to Mars, and they didn't even invite us.'"
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Britain's All-Time Favorite Album
'Sgt. Pepper'
Over a half-century after its release, the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band has been named the most popular British album of all time.
The Official Charts Company, which has tracked album sales in the U.K. since 1969, proclaimed the Fab Four's 1967 masterpiece as Britain's favorite album, using a metric based on album sales, downloads and streams, the Associated Press reports.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band defeated second place finisher Adele's 21 and third place Oasis' (What's the Story) Morning Glory? for the honor. Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon and Michael Jackson's Thriller claimed Numbers Four and Five on the all-time Official Studio Albums Chart, which was revealed in full on Saturday.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the lone album from the 1960s, and the lone Beatles album, to make the Official Charts Company's Top 40 list. The Beatles' 1967 LP previously placed Number One on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
'Sgt. Pepper'
10 Trillion Frames Per Second
World's Fastest Camera
What happens when a new technology is so precise that it operates on a scale beyond our characterization capabilities? For example, the lasers used at INRS produce ultrashort pulses in the femtosecond range (10-15 s) that are far too short to visualize. Although some measurements are possible, nothing beats a clear image, says INRS professor and ultrafast imaging specialist Jinyang Liang. He and his colleagues, led by Caltech's Lihong Wang, have developed what they call T-CUP: the world's fastest camera, capable of capturing ten trillion (1013) frames per second. This new camera literally makes it possible to freeze time to see phenomena -- and even light! -- in extremely slow motion.
In recent years, the junction between innovations in non-linear optics and imaging has opened the door for new and highly efficient methods for microscopic analysis of dynamic phenomena in biology and physics. But to harness the potential of these methods, there needs to be a way to record images in real time at a very short temporal resolution -- in a single exposure.
Using current imaging techniques, measurements taken with ultrashort laser pulses must be repeated many times, which is appropriate for some types of inert samples, but impossible for other more fragile ones. For example, laser-engraved glass can tolerate only a single laser pulse, leaving less than a picosecond to capture the results. In such a case, the imaging technique must be able to capture the entire process in real time.
Compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) was a good starting point them. At 100 billion frames per second, this method approached, but did not meet, the specifications required to integrate femtosecond lasers. To improve on the concept, the new T-CUP system was developed based on a femtosecond streak camera that also incorporates a data acquisition type used in applications such as tomography.
"We knew that by using only a femtosecond streak camera, the image quality would be limited," says Professor Lihong Wang, the Bren Professor of Medial Engineering and Electrical Engineering at Caltech and the Director of Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory (COIL). "So to improve this, we added another camera that acquires a static image. Combined with the image acquired by the femtosecond streak camera, we can use what is called a Radon transformation to obtain high-quality images while recording ten trillion frames per second."
World's Fastest Camera
Scientists Recreate
Earth's Climate
More than 100,000 years ago, global sea levels rose an estimated 6 to 9 meters (20 to 30 feet) higher than today, with as much as half of that derived from Greenland's ice sheet melting - an outcome we may see in today's world given the current state of our rapidly changing climate.
Using marine and terrestrial geological archives, researchers have created a century-by-century timeline of climatic conditions throughout the last 100,000 years. These showed that after an early period of peak warmth, some centuries during the Last Interglacial (between 129,000 and 116,000 years ago) were much warmer than others, resulting in southern Europe experiencing dry spells and cold water spreading through the North Atlantic. This led to a relatively unstable climate that saw "abrupt" changes in oceanic currents, rainfall, and ice melting.
For the study, published in Nature Communications, researchers pulled samples from Greenland ice cores and compared them to both deep-sea sediment samples taken at the Portuguese Margin and to mineral deposits found in a cave in Italy. Together, these samples revealed that certain centuries experienced more rapid sediment buildup than others, indicating periods of higher ice runoff due to a dryer, warmer climate.
"We know from independent evidence that part of the Greenland ice sheet melted during the LIG, contributing higher mean global sea level than present," lead author Chronis Tzedakis, from University College London, told IFLScience.
Based on these climate model experiments, Tzedakis suggests Greenland's ice-melt and runoff could have contributed to a weakening of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), ultimately creating a cooling effect in the North Atlantic and an arid climate in southern Europe.
Earth's Climate
Witches Plan
Hex
Dozens of witches say they plan to gather in New York City this month to hex Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh (R-Unqualified), who was sworn in to the nation's highest court last week despite facing several allegations of sexual misconduct.
Dakota Bracciale, a Brooklyn-based witch who is organizing the Oct. 20 event, said the witches see the hex as a radical act of resistance that continues witchcraft's long history as a refuge and weapon for the "oppressed, downtrodden and marginalized."
"Witchcraft has been used throughout history as a tool and ally for people on the fringes of society who will not ever really get justice through the powers that be," Bracciale told HuffPost. "So they have to exact their own justice."
Bracciale, who organized three hexes against President Donald Trump (R-Crooked) last year, said the ritual is meant to be cathartic for victims of sexual assault. Kavanaugh will apparently be a focal point for the hex, but not the only target. The public hex is meant to exact revenge on "all rapists and the patriarchy at large which emboldens, rewards and protects them," a Facebook page dedicated to the event states.
Bracciale said a hex is fundamentally different from a "binding" spell, which is about trying to block someone from doing something and limits others' agency. A hex is a more direct attack that treats its target as an equal in a supernatural fistfight, Bracciale said.
Hex
'Vampire' Buried In Cemetery of Children
Italy
A "vampire burial" unearthed at a Roman site in Italy is evidence of ancient funeral practices to stop corpses rising from the dead, according to archaeologists.
The body of a 10-year-old child was buried ritualistically with a stone in its mouth, possibly out of fear it would return to spread disease to its community.
Known locally as the "Vampire of Lugnano", evidence collected from the bones suggest the child was infected with malaria at the time it died.
The remains are the latest unusual discovery to emerge from the Cemetery of Children, a site containing dozens of children's bodies and evidence of witchcraft including toad bones, raven talons and bronze cauldrons.
Dated to a time in the fifth century when a deadly malaria outbreak swept across central Italy, archaeologists thought the cemetery had been set aside specifically for the babies and young children who would have been most vulnerable to the disease.
Italy
Googly Eyes On A Statue
Savannah, Georgia
Police in Savannah, Georgia, may have just come across the biggest investigation since the days of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: Who put googly eyes on a statue?
On Thursday, the Southern city posted pictures of the statue online.
"Who did this?!" the city's official Facebook page said. "Someone placed googly eyes on our historic #NathanaelGreene statue in #JohnsonSquare. It may look funny but harming our historic monuments and public property is no laughing matter, in fact, it's a crime."
Nathanael Greene was a Revolutionary War general who was buried in the city's Johnson Square.
Savannah has asked for the public's help in finding the villainous vandal.
Savannah, Georgia
Moons Can Have Moons
Moonmoons
Could a moon actually have its own moon, orbiting around it, rather than around the planet?
Yes, scientists believe - and one of the names for such objects is absolutely superb: moonmoons.
In a paper on the pre-print service arXiv, scientists from the Carnegie Institution for Science and the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux discuss the existence of such objects.
Boringly, those scientists use the term 'submoon', but others have suggested the name 'moonmoon', according to Gizmodo.
Moonmoons (or submoons) need to be close enough to the moon to be bound by its gravity - but not so close they're torn to bits by tidal forces.
Moonmoons
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
