And so it has come to this…
I’m going to be MIA for the next three weeks as I get through the last week and a half of classes and assignments, and exams after that. If I waste any time on here instead of getting some sweet sweet 6+ GPAs I won’t forgive myself. So will not be accessing Tumblr at all.
Take care. See y’all on the flipside.
Keith Emerson Breaks Down the Moog
One of the masters of the instrument answers an audience question about how the Moog works.
High-res
Today’s Google Doodle is a Moog Synthesizer. Here’s the instructions…
(Moog is pronounced to rhyme with Vogue, by the way. Not Moo with a G at the end.)
I was so excited this morning, despite having had 3 hours sleep, to see that the Google doodle was in honour of Robert Moog!
This works because water is a POLAR MOLECULE! Actually more just the electro fields produced by charges.
Can’t wait til December for the solar eclipse here in Australia. Still trying to find a way to get there!
A few people have alerted me to this video of toddlers and you can watch as a little boy hugs a little girl multiple times and each time he does, she pushes him away. A few of the times, he seems to be prompted to continue by the person with the camera. It’s a full two minutes and nothing changes – he hugs her, she pushes him away, he gets up and hugs her again and she pushes him away again.
Clearly this isn’t street harassment because they know each other and it isn’t sexual harassment because they’re toddlers and don’t have an understanding of all that, but it is a problematic situation in which adults are standing by and letting (encouraging?) this little boy to do something the girl doesn’t want him to do and then instead of helping her use her words to tell him to stop, they’re letting her push him down over and over.
The Good Men Project linked to the video via the How to Be a Dad’s site, where the author labels the post “My Life with Women” and writes, “This one symbolizes every attempt I’ve ever made at relationships with the fairer sex… …. …. until my wife.”
The he writes, “I could be the misogynist here and make some comments about just how badly the lady little treats this fine, young man, but women are pretty great. Maybe this kid needs to get a job, buy a sweet ride (Power Wheels, perhaps?) and learn some Karate, proving himself a worthy love interest?”
And I find that very problematic. Implying that this little toddler and all women who reject men are stuck-up, bitchy, and only after good-looking or rich men is harmful. Instead of looking at the actions and saying, this girl doesn’t want to be hugged, they are focusing on the poor boy and how mean she is. She may have 10 reasons or only 1 for why she doesn’t want to be hugged by him and all of them are valid and should be respected.
No means no, even when you’re a toddler. Especially when you’re a toddler. Fifteen percent of sexual assault and abuse victims are under age 12. Teaching kids how to protect themselves at a very young age is crucial to helping them know how to prevent or get help if they are victimized and can teach them skills they can use all of their life.
This attitude that women owe men attention no matter what contributes to how, when some men are ignored or rejected by the women they harass on the street, they call them a bitch, a ho, throw trash at them, chase them, or tell them they were ugly anyway. Instead of thinking logically about all the reasons why a woman may not respond positively to a man who hollers at her on the street, men feel it is an affront on their masculinity and lash out.
Another problematic aspect of the video is the number of people who applauded how persistent the kid is. Some people in the comments of posts talked about being disappointed he never got her in the end. Guess what, you don’t always “get the girl” in the end. No means no! 1,006,970 women and 370,990 men are stalked annually in the U.S. We need to teach kids, especially boys because they are the bulk of the stalkers, not to follow or keep hugging etc women and girls who clearly don’t want that attention.
THANK YOU! This video really isn’t cute; it’s everything wrong with gender relations these days in micro-form.
Everything I was thinking in the back of my mind back when I saw this on my dash, and a little bit more.
Astronomer Jill Tarter, the inspiration for heroine Ellie Arroway in the novel andmovie ”Contact,” is retiring after spending 35 years scanning the heavens for signals from intelligent aliens.
Tarter is stepping down as the director of the Center for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., the organization’s officials announced today (May 22).
But rather than go lie on a beach somewhere,Tarter will continue to devote herself to the search for E.T. She’s shifting into a full-time fundraising role for the SETI Institute, which had to shut down a set of alien-hunting radio telescopes for more than seven months last year due to budget shortfalls.
“That was a wake-up call,” Tarter told SPACE.com, explaining why she decided to focus on fundraising full-time. “I can’t put it off any longer. It’s really critical.”
A long research career
Tarter, 68, got involved in the SETI search in the 1970s, joining a small group of NASA scientists who were developing new equipment and strategies to make systematic SETI radio observations.
She signed on after reading “Project Cyclops,” a seminal 1971 NASA report that described how to use Earth-based radio telescopes to hunt for signs of intelligent alien life up to 1,000 light-years away.
“I hadn’t ever been thinking about SETI, or intelligent life elsewhere,” Tarter said. “But when I read that document, I was absolutely astonished by the fact that I lived in the first generation of humans that could actually try to do an experiment to answer this really old question.”
“The fact that I was alive with the right skill set, at just the right time to tackle this important question, was what hooked me,” she added. “That’s why I signed up to SETI when I was getting out of graduate school. And I’ve stayed hooked. I just think it’s an amazing privilege to try and take on this challenge, and answer this old, fundamental question.”
Though Congress killed NASA’s SETI efforts in 1993, Tarter kept up the search. She’d already been with the SETI Institute for nearly a decade at that point, helping to create the nonprofit organization in 1984. In the decades since, she has continued to shape and steer the Institute’s sky-scanning efforts, long serving as director of its Center for SETI Research.
Today, the SETI Institute employs more than 150 people, and its scientists are engaged in a range of astrobiology work beyond just looking for radio signals. Tarter said she’s proud of the progress the organization has made since the early days, when a handful of pioneering scientists ran the whole show.
The Institute “is far bigger than I ever envisioned it would be when we incorporated it in 1984 with very modest goals to save NASA money,” Tarter said. “We have a very vibrant institution of astrobiology, and also education and public outreach, that most people don’t know about.”
Funding the search
One of the SETI Institute’s main signal-scanning tools is the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a set of 42 radio dishes located about 300 miles (500 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco. The ATA began scanning the heavens for “technosignatures” — electromagnetic signals that could betray the presence of an intelligent alien civilization — in 2007. [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life]
SETI had to shut the ATA down in April 2011, however, after budget problems forced the Institute’s former partner, the University of California, Berkeley, to withdraw from the project.
The telescopes came back online in December, after SETI secured enough money from private citizens and the United States Air Force, which is interested in using the array to track satellites and space debris, SETI officials said.
In April 2012, California-based nonprofit SRI International came onboard, taking over management duty of the Hat Creek Radio Observatory (which includes the ATA).
The experience convinced Tarter that she could make a bigger difference in the SETI search by focusing entirely on fundraising — which she’s been doing part-time for many years as the Institute’s Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI — than by continuing to direct the Center for SETI Research.
“It was just eye-opening,” she said. “We’ve got to get stable funding into the house to do SETI research. We have a new partner — we got that deal done, so we can operate the array. But now we’ve got to provide funding for people to actually use it and do clever things, and do research, and look in new ways.”
Tarter added that the Institute needs to raise $2 million every year to keep SETI research going. That’s the starting point, but she hopes to shoot for $20 million annually at some point, to expand the search and support a variety of SETI activity around the world.
A wealth of exoplanets to explore
Tarter said she doesn’t particularly enjoy fundraising, but views it as so important to the future of SETI research that she feels compelled to take it on. She’s excited about the Institute’s current work, and its future.
The ATA, for example, has been listening for signals from the many alien planetcandidates discovered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. To date, Kepler has flagged more than 2,300 such potential planets. While only a small fraction have been confirmed so far, the Kepler team estimates that at least 80 percent of them will end up being the real deal.
The current flood of alien planet discoveries is investing the SETI search with more purpose and enthusiasm, Tarter said. Astronomers can now point their radio scopes at many star systems that are known to harbor planets, some of which may even be Earth-like worlds.
“The Kepler worlds are really legitimizing SETI,” Tarter said. “All of us that are even peripherally involved with that are looking and saying, ‘You know, Earth 2.0 — that’s just right around the corner. We can almost taste it.’”
Tarter’s colleagues will celebrate the researcher and her career on June 23, during a gala event at the SETICon II conference in Santa Clara, Calif. SETICon II, which runs from June 22-24, will bring together scientists, artists and entertainers to explore humanity’s place in the universe and the future of the search for life beyond Earth.
