A friend of mine posted a link to a PDF on the web site of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, about an attempt in the 1990s to build a replica of the original antenna used by the first radio astronomer, Karl Jansky back in the 1930s. I happen to know a little about Jansky, because the site where he discovered / created the science of radio astronomy was at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, where I worked for several years. In fact, while I was the webmaster for the Bell Labs site, we posted a story about a couple of Bell Labs scientists who decided that Jansky's work should be honored with a monument at the exact location where radio astronomy was born.
The monument took the form of a stylized rendition of the original, which you can see in both of the links in the first paragraph.
Sadly, Bell Labs moved out of the building in Holmdel a few years ago. There have been attempts to sell the building and redevelop the huge tract of land in the middle of a very wealthy community, but they've come to naught, and the property is blocked off and basically inaccessible at this point. Back in 2007, shortly before the barriers were erected, I visited the site and took some pictures. Lucent, the corporate father of Bell Labs, had fallen on hard times, and the maintenance of a monument to their glorious corporate and scientific past at a location they didn't even want to own any more took a pretty low priority.
The text of the monument reads:
At this location in 1931, Karl Jansky, a Bell Laboratories physicist and radio researcher, recorded for the first time radio signals from beyond the Earth. The source of these signals -- radio noise at a wavelength of 14.6 meters -- was the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
This sculpture commemorates Jansky's discovery, first announced in 1933, which gave birth to the science of radio astronomy. The sculpture is oriented as Jansky’s antenna was at 7:10 p.m. on September 16, 1932, at a moment of maximum signal. As his directional antenna rotated, the center of our galaxy came into view in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, low on the southern horizon.
Radio Astronomy pioneer Karl Jansky died in 1950, years before the scientific community realized the significance of his discovery. In 1973, the International Astronomical Union gave his name to the international unit of radio flux density. Jansky’s work led to a number of breakthroughs in astronomy: the discovery of quasars, pulsars, radio galaxies, and near this site in 1964, the Nobel Prize-winning discovery by Bell Laboratories scientists of the cosmic microwave background which has revolutionized our understanding of the origin of the universe.
It’s sad that the monument was left to the elements and blocked by barricades. I hope that someday it will be accessible again.
You hear the band name “Japandroids”, maybe you think “Haircut 100 Tribute Band”? Something like that. Definitely an 80s synth-pop thing going on here.
Uh-uh.
Think more along the lines of classic NZ noisemeisters Bailter Space, shimmering waves of melodic noise. Great stuff. In this video from KEXP, they take Big Black's classic “Racer X” and make it their own.
They’re currently touring the world and releasing a single every two months that includes an interesting cover on the B-side. The first one, which had Racer X on it, is sold out, but you can get their new Younger Us single b/w a cover of X’s “Sex and Dying in High Society”. While you’re there, feel free to buy their two albums as well. Great stuff.
Now listening to: "Not Made In Japan" from Crazy Price by Messer Chups.
I've been spending more time than usual on YouTube lately thanks to my new iPad. One of the most amazing music videos I've found is for Laura Barrett's song Robot Ponies. My musical hero John Peel always said "I just want to hear something I've never heard before." This song definitely qualifies.
Now listening to: "Robot Ponies" from Earth Sciences by Laura Barrett.
There are too many photo days all clustered up at nearly the same time. Last Sunday was Pinhole Day. I took my new Gakken Stereo Pinhole Camera out for a spin. This weekend, being May 1st, is International Commie Camera Day 2010. I hope to take my Kiev 88cm and Kiev II out for the day. Next week is ’Roid Week. I have plenty of Polaroid cameras to use for that, although I should probably repair my 250, which has a few tiny pinholes in it; the light leaks only tend to show up when I use 3000 speed film in daylight, though.
The Impossible Project did it; they released new film for Polaroid cameras. The first film out is for SX-70-style cameras only; good thing I have three of those (two actual SX-70s and a OneStep). They'll be releasing 600 and Spectra style films over the next several months. The 600 is supposedly a more traditional black and white film, unlike the PX100, which has a kind of sepia tone. It also seems pretty picky; you need to protect it from sunlight, you need to develop in a narrow range of temperatures, and so on. Still, I've seen some pretty interesting shots so far on Flickr. I ordered five packs of the PX100 on the day it became available, so hopefully I'll have it soon.
I didn't get to watch as much curling this year as I did during the last Winter Olympics, but I still got to see a fair amount, including the championship games for both the men and women. I used to watch curling on TV when I was growing up in Detroit, because the Canadian TV station across the river in Windsor used to air it often. I think it appealed to my sense of the absurd, with the sweeping in particular looking profoundly silly. But seeing it as an adult, I can definitely see the subtlties that evaded me when I was a kid. And I love a sport where some of the best athletes are in the forties. Kevin Martin, the Canadian men's skip, and Cheryl Bernard, the Canadian women's skip, are both 43; Carolyn Darbyshire of the Canadian team is 46. It's a pity we won't be seeing any more curling here in the U.S. until the next Winter Olympics, because I genuinely enjoy watching it. Then again, maybe we're better off not having it on TV here; NBC's host last night joked that NBC stood for "Nothing But Curling", but it was more like "Nothing But Commercials". It felt like we were only getting to watch half of the spiel.
In honor of the just-completed Olympic curling competition, here's my favorite curling-as-metaphor-for-failing-romance song, Tournament of Hearts by the Weakerthans.
I've been going through my photos from my trip to Frankfurt last September and came across this one. I stumbled across an anti-nuclear protest march near the river my first Saturday there.
I was walking along in the opposite direction, looking at the march, amused, when I was approached by two very excited people who accosted me in very fast German. "Ich spreche kein Deutsch", I said with a slightly exaggerated American accent (I can't speak much German, but when I do I have a reasonably good accent, but it's sometimes useful to play up the fact that I really don't speak the language) and smiled. They immediately switched to English.
I had a very nice bag with me (it was a bag I got from my friend Marshall from the 2000 Apple Worldwide Developers' Conference), and my new friends were wondering if maybe I had room in it for some nuclear waste. They didn't have anywhere else to put it, so they were hoping I could help them out. I laughed and suggested that maybe there was a mountain in Nevada where they could store it, as my bag was already pretty heavy with all the cameras I had in it. "I think maybe they don't want to take this waste either." No, I suppose maybe they don't.
"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull
his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand
this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they
receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
- Albert Einstein, explaining radio
There used to be a cat
Mischief, 1988 - December 20, 2003
Sylvester (the Dorito Fiend), who died at Thanksgiving, 2000.
![[ photo of Mischief, a black and white cat ]](/images/moosechief.jpeg)
![[ photo of Sylvester, a black and white cat ]](/images/conehead_sm.jpeg)
