Drop by RVCA at the corner of Haight and Ashbury before April 20 to vote for this year’s street fair poster. These were photographed through glass, the originals are much more vividly colored.
The winner gets $500.00 so your votes count!
No recommendations, 3 are by different friends and none of them are mine.
Another amazing Astronomy Photo of the Day:
Combined Solar Eclipse Corona from Earth and Space
Image Credits: J. Vilinga (Angola, IAP), LASCO, NRL, SOHO, ESA, NASA;
Processing: R. Wittich; Composition & Copyright: S. Koutchmy (IAP, CNRS)Explanation: Sometimes, a total eclipse is a good time to eye the Sun. Taking advantage of an unusual juxtaposition of Earth, Moon and Sun, the featured image depicts the total solar eclipse that occurred last month as it appeared — nearly simultaneously — from both Earth and space. The innermost image shows the total eclipse from the ground, with the central pupil created by the bright Sun covered by a comparatively dark Moon. Surrounding the blocked solar disk is the tenuous corona of Sun imaged in white light, easily visible from the ground only during an eclipse. Normally, this corona is hard to track far from the Sun, but the featured montage matches it to false-colored observations of the Sun from NASA and ESA’s space-based, Sun-orbiting, Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Observations like this allow the study of the constantly changing magnetic activity both near and far from the Sun, the same activity that ultimately drives Earth’s auroras.
WOW! This is a nice new addition:APOD is also available in: Arabic, Bahasa Indonesian, Catalan, Chinese, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Farsi, Farsi, Galego, German, French, Hebrew, Japanese,Korean, Montenegrin, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Turkish
A fluffle (which is what you call a group of lagomorphs) of huge white rabbits has invaded the Civic Center.
I have been waiting for this wake-up call to happen for the last 50 years. I’m happy to have lived long enough to see it and know that my kids are part of this sea-change.
A lot of demographic research is showing that this is radically changing among younger voters. Not just in the Democratic Party, where younger voters are moving, galloping, to the left, but also among younger Republican voters, who are far less conservative than their Republican elders.
As this Vox piece reports:
Piles of research had already indicated that the youngest generation is much more liberal than its predecessors.But it turns out it’s not just that young people are in general more likely to identify as liberal or that young liberals are to the left of older liberals — though both of these phenomena do appear to be true.
It turns out young Republicans are also likely to be to the left of older Republicans, according to a new study from Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California San Diego.
Perhaps just as surprising: Fewer young Republicans are willing to identify themselves as conservative.
Her claim:
“I know [student loan forgiveness] works because Bill and I did that. We both borrowed money when we went to law school and we paid it back as a percentage of our income, so I could go to work at the Children’s Defense Fund, not some big law firm that would pay me more. I wanted to do the work I loved…I want everyone to have that chance.”
Hillary Clinton tells this story to struggling students. She told it to minority students in Mississippi in November, 2015, and she recently told it againto minority students in Brooklyn.
The odds are high that Hillary’s story is a fabrication. In all likelihood, her family had enough income to afford Yale Law School in the early 1970s. At that time, the tuition was well in reach for an upper middle class.
But there’s a bigger problem with Hillary’s story: The loan forgiveness program she refers to didn’t exist in the early 1970s.
Source: Is Hillary’s Personal Story About Student Loans a Fabrication? | Alternet
The Tax Justice Network estimates the global elite are sitting on 21–32 TRILLION DOLLARS of untaxed assets. Clearly, only a portion of that is owed to the US or any other nation in taxes – the highest tax bracket in the US is 39.6% of income. But consider that a small universal income of $2,000 a year to every adult in the US – enough to keep some people from missing a mortgage payment or skimping on food or medicine – would cost only around $563bn each year.
Released in April 1976, the Ramones’ self-titled debut album introduced the world to four unsmiling hoods in ripped jeans and leather jackets, and to the uncompromising attitude known as punk.
Ramones’ minimalist tunes, slapstick lyrics, buzzsaw guitars, and blitzkrieg tempo became the wellspring for a genre of music and a strain of culture.
On this first album’s 40th anniversary, the Queens Museum and the GRAMMY Museum are partnering to present an unprecedented two-part exhibition celebrating the lasting influence of punk rock progenitors the Ramones. Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk.
Source: Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: | Queens Museum
Here’s some images of the exhibit:
“Transparent wood is a good material for solar cells, since it’s a low-cost, readily available and renewable resource,” Berglund says. “This becomes particularly important in covering large surfaces with solar cells.”
Berglund says transparent wood panels can also be used for windows, and semitransparent facades, when the idea is to let light in but maintain privacy.
The optically transparent wood is a type of wood veneer in which the lignin, a component of the cell walls, is removed chemically.”When the lignin is removed, the wood becomes beautifully white.
But because wood isn’t not naturally transparent, we achieve that effect with some nanoscale tailoring,” he says.The white porous veneer substrate is impregnated with a transparent polymer and the optical properties of the two are then matched, he says.”No one has previously considered the possibility of creating larger transparent structures for use as solar cells and in buildings,” he says
Source: Wood windows? Transparent wood material used for buildings, solar cells — ScienceDaily
The original headline calls it a ‘robotic artist’ but while it’s interesting it’s about as much art as one of those adult coloring books that are presently a fad.
The computerized technique, which basically spray paints a photo, isn’t likely to spawn a wave of giant graffiti, but it can be used in digital fabrication, digital and visual arts, artistic stylization and other applications.
The researchers wanted to create a way to help non-artists create accurate reproductions of photographs as large-scale murals using spray painting. So, they developed a computer-aided system that uses an ordinary paint spray can, tracks the can’s position relative to the wall or canvas and recognizes what image it “wants” to paint. As the person waves the pre-programmed spray can around the canvas, the system automatically operates the spray on/off button to reproduce the specific image as a spray painting.
This is a video of it in action, unfortunately it won’t embed.
The prototype is fast and light-weight: it includes two webcams and QR-coded cubes for tracking, and a small actuation device for the spray can, attached via a 3D-printed mount. Paint commands are transmitted via radio directly connected to a servo-motor operating the spray nozzle. Running on a nearby computer, the real-time algorithm determines the optimal amount of paint of the current color to spray at the spray can’s tracked location. The end result is that the painting reveals itself as the user waves the can around, without the user necessarily needing to know the image beforehand.
Source: Scientists invent robotic ‘artist’ that spray paints giant murals
Alphabetical order as we would recognise it first appeared over three thousand years ago in Ugaritic, written in a cuneiform script made of wedge-shaped signs impressed on clay tablets.
The Ugaritic alphabet was in use in the ancient city of Ugarit, uncovered at Ras Shamra in modern Syria.
Some of the surviving tablets discovered by archaeologists are known as “abecedaria”, where the letters of the alphabet are written in order, possibly for teaching or as a training exercise for new scribes.
The destruction of Ugarit in around 1200 BCE was not the end for alphabetical order.
The Phoenicians, living in what is now modern Syria and Lebanon, used the same order for their own alphabet. While their language was related to Ugaritic, their writing system was not. Instead of cuneiform wedge-shapes, the Phoenicians used linear letters, which were much more similar to those we use in English today. The Phoenician alphabet began with the letters Aleph, Bet, Gimel, and Dalet which are strikingly similar to our own A, B, C and D.
Dr Steele said: “The links from the ancient past to our alphabet today are no coincidence. The Greeks borrowed the Phoenician writing system and they still kept the same order of signs: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta.
They transported the alphabet to Italy, where it was passed on to the Etruscans, and also to the Romans, who still kept the same order: A, B, C, D, which is why our modern alphabet is the way it is today.”
Source: Easy as Alep, Bet, Gimel? Cambridge research explores social context of ancient writing
And then there’s this:
The Truthiness Shall Set You Freak
Stannous Flouride's Book of Truthiness 