At work today I was getting caught up on listening to my rather long list of podcasts. When I got to last week’s NPR Science Friday one of the segments was on The Garbage-Men, a band started by five high school students from Sarasota, Florida.
Their gimmick, and the source of their name, the instruments they play are home-built from recycled trash. Part of their act is to promote recycling, reuse and community service.
The terrific Celtic and comedy musician, Marc Gunn is once again providing a set of good Celtic music free for St Patrick’s Day over at Celtic Music Magazine.
Good evening all, sorry for the lateness of the post.
In honor of National Grammar Day I had intended to write a post with deliberately awful grammar to show the importance of good grammar. It didn’t work so well, so I scrapped it.
As with many specialties there are lots of grammar based puns and other jokes. To make this a bit more interesting, please add a comment with some of your favorites.
In the past week I’ve seen some interesting images of the Sun so I thought that cool solar imaging would make a good topic for this weeks post. The result is a more photo heavy post than normal but here are some real ‘stellar’ pics.
Leading off as a part of a series of five solar eruptions within two days, is this beautiful animation of a “Canyon of Fire” generated as a side effect of a coronal mass ejection (CME) which should have hit us in the early hours of the day (Feb 26th 2012). The impact of a CME with the ionosphere has effects on both the auroras and on global radio propagation, the latter being of interest to me as it changes how far you can reach on amateur radio.
The other day it was brought to my attention that Casey Pugh‘s amazing Star Wars Uncut project has been completed and the entire movie is now up for our viewing pleasure.
The Star Wars Uncut project was an experiment in crowdsourcing content on a truly massive scale. Casey’s team took Star Wars: A New Hope and chopped it up into 15 second scenes. At about 2 hours long once you cut out the end credits that is a very impressive number of scenes, around 480 separate scenes. The project also limited submissions to at most 3 per person so we are talking a lot of creative fan activity.
The result is one of the coolest things I have seen in a while, and yet the insanity behind trying to weed through the submissions and stitch all that content together… so like I said, geeky cool or just plain crazy?
World Book Night is a really interesting effort to put books into the hands of light or non-regular readers. “Get them interested and hopefully they will read more”, is the general idea.
The event is April 23rd, UNESCO International Day of the Book, the date of Shakespeare ‘s birth as well as his and Cervantes deaths (April 23rd 1616)
Anyway I had signed up and recently got the confirmation that on April 23rd 2012 I will be joining many others across the country (and the UK) in giving out 20 free copies of a book I’ve read and enjoyed. My current plans are to give them out at a local coffee shop near my office (More details on where and when closer to the time).
Anyway the organizers have decided to extend the deadline to register to Feb 6th at Midnight EST. So if you are interested head over and sign up tonight or tomorrow!
I just found out that master swordsman Bob Anderson passed away yesterday, January 1st 2012, at age 89.
Anderson has played a critical role in swordplay in movies since he staged fights and coached Errol Flynn in the early 50s. The former Olympic swordsman acted as stunt man in many films and as sword master for many others. Highly sought after he worked on several James Bond films as well as The Princess Bride and The Legend of Zorro.
Among the major films he was involved in were the original Star Wars trilogy where he was Darth Vader for the sword fights in Empire and Jedi, he was also sword master for the recent Lord of the Rings trilogy.
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