Glass harp

It’s been a while since I posted something musical.

As a child I drove my parents nuts by rubbing a wet finger around the rim of wine glasses. Stupidly, I taught my stepson this same technique (and then had to remind him of the difference in behavioral expectations between our kitchen, and a restaurant). Clearly, neither I nor my stepson were thinking big enough.

This performance is by the Glass Duo, a Polish team, during the June 2010 Chamber Music Festival in Bologna, Italy. It was recorded in the Chiostro della Basilica di Santo Stefano.

Wallpaper Monday: Blue Marble

This has been all over the astronomy/geek blogs since NASA released it last Thursday. It shows the potential of NASA’s newest Earth-observing satellite, the Suomi NPP, which photographed sections of the Earth on 4 January. The high resolution sections were then composited into a seamless single image which just happens to make a glorious wallpaper. Isn’t it great when hard science produces something beautiful in the process? When it comes to astronomy, that seems to happen more often than not.

The resolution on this image is staggering. If you head over to the NASA Image Gallery, you can download several file sizes, including the full one — which is a whopping 17.2 MB.

So, you know, click that link to emplanetize.

Saturday picture show

The Atlantic’s In Focus (edited by Alan Taylor, formerly of The Big Picture) has two features on the wreck of the Costa Concordia. The first is of the wreck itself, as it happened and shortly afterward. There are some spectacular (and spectacularly horrifying) images in this series.

The second, which I found even more gripping, is of the aftermath and the Italian rescue divers’ efforts to find survivors. Looking at the conditions these divers are working in makes it abundantly obvious that they are risking their lives with every dive. Pushing through floating furniture, going down underwater corridors and around corners and through broken windows…the number of opportunities for something to go wrong are too numerous to think about. And as if that weren’t enough, the ship is shifting, gradually moving back toward a dropoff into much deeper water. It’s a diving nightmare, yet they were going back again and again, desperately hoping to find one more living person.

Their courage stands in stark contrast to the absolute cowardice of Captain Schettino, the man responsible for the wreck who then fled the ship shortly afterwards. The recorded phone call between him and Gregorio de Falco, the local harbor authority, has now become legend in Italy. While the captain stood on shore, watching his passengers trying to flee (he later claimed that he slipped and fell into a lifeboat while overseeing the rescue effort), de Falco called him and said:

Listen, there are people going down from the prow using the rope ladder; you take that rope ladder on the opposite side, you go aboard and you tell me the number of people and what they have on board. Is that clear? You tell me whether there are children, women or people needing assistance. And you tell me the number of each of these categories. Is that clear? Schettino, maybe you saved yourself from the sea, but I’ll make you pay for sure. Go aboard, damn it.

Schettino did not go. So far the death toll stands at 16.

De Falco became a national hero, much to his dismay, because he was just doing his job. If only Captain Schettino had done the same.

Spiegel has a good three-part article on how the wreck occurred, why it was an accident waiting to happen, and why the aftermath was so much worse than it had to be. Suffice to say that if you’re on a cruise ship and you have reason to believe something has gone seriously wrong, don’t wait for an announcement and don’t wait for any of the crew to help you. In today’s “bigger is better” cruise ship industry, experienced and well-trained crews are not the norm.

The Costa Concordia wrecked at 9:45 at night. The emergency alert to passengers did not sound until 10:58.

Dichotomy

I saw a Jesus fish decal on the bumper of a car this morning. It caught my eye because that was the second Jesus fish I have seen in five years of living here.

In the US, these decals are ubiquitous. They’re found in rear windows and on back bumpers of cars all over, along with bumper stickers proclaiming Christian religious statements. It’s not uncommon to see religious billboards on roads and highways. Many Americans feel the need to advertise their religiosity. Meanwhile, at the government level, Article VI of the US Constitution states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Yet a couple of intelligent debaters could spend hours on the question of which candidate is less likely to be elected President: a Muslim, or an atheist.

In Portugal, you can’t walk 500 meters without falling over a church. Their bells ring out the hours every day, and the masses every weekend. The calendar is packed full of saints’ holidays, which are observed nationwide, and the main south entrance to Lisboa features a huge statue of Jesus. Religion is impossible to avoid in Portuguese daily life.

But nobody ever puts a Jesus fish on their car. There are no religious bumper stickers or billboards. The Portuguese do not advertise their personal beliefs because they don’t think it’s anyone else’s business. And religion makes no appearance in public office — there are no prayers opening legislative sessions, as there are in the US. Candidates for high office do not proclaim their religious observance, and speeches aren’t ended with “God bless Portugal.”

It’s such an interesting dichotomy. In the US, a supposedly secular nation, religion is very public. And in Portugal, perceived as a Catholic nation, religion is very private.

SOPA means…

After the global hullabaloo caused by the so-called “Stop Online Piracy Act,” which didn’t do much to stop online piracy but did a whole lot to protect the interests of certain large corporations with expensive teams of lawyers and lobbyists, this email came into my inbox from a friend in Stockholm:

SOPA means garbage in Swedish. I think that’s appropriate.

So do I.

Laranja ouro

Today I learned a Portuguese proverb:

Laranja de manhã é ouro, à tarde prata, e à noite mata.

Which translates to: “Orange in the morning is gold; in the afternoon, silver; and at night it kills.”

The Portuguese love their orange juice in the mornings. Most cafés have an industrial juicer right next to the espresso machine, and a giant bin of oranges somewhere nearby. It’s not so common to have it in the afternoon, and nobody orders it at night. Apparently, someone figured out long ago that the acidity of the juice does no favors to the digestion process while sleeping, and can lead to acid reflux or heartburn.

Interestingly enough, I never crave fresh orange juice at night. I do in the mornings, and sometimes in the afternoon. Is this my body’s intuition speaking, or my cultural training?

At any rate, I am now happily sucking down a fresh glass of orange juice and committing this proverb to memory. The best part is that it solves a long-standing problem I’ve had with remembering the difference between prata and prato. One means silver, the other means a plate or dish, and I am forever confusing the two. Now I can just remember that prata rhymes with mata.

Wallpaper Monday

The Algarve has been a little too sunny lately, and I’m starting to crave a good rainstorm and the resulting temporary streams and waterfalls. As a substitute, here’s a lush scene from Mpumalanga, South Africa: Mac-Mac Falls, dropping the Mac-Mac River 65 meters (213 feet) in a big hurry.

(Click the image to cascadize.)

iBooks Author and the freakout

Tech bloggers and columnists are having a freakout over Apple’s newly introduced iBooks Author, a program that allows authors to format e-books using interactive images, music, videos, and spoken recordings. It was designed largely for the textbook industry, and offers potential that no existing e-book format comes close to at the moment.

It is also free.

So why the freakout? Because the EULA (End User Licensing Agreement) stipulates that the format is proprietary, and that if a user wants to profit from that format, said user must profit through Apple’s e-book store and nowhere else.

Apple is not asserting ownership of content, it’s asserting ownership of a proprietary format. Writers will not write in iBooks Author. They will write in Scrivener, Pages, Word, whatever, and then import that text into iBooks Author in order to format it for publishing in Apple’s store. The text will always belong to the author. The presentation of that text, as produced with this program, will have a restriction: either sell it in Apple’s store, or give it away for free.

In essence, Apple is saying, “Here is a program that will enable you to create interactive layouts using media forms in ways that no other program currently allows. We are giving you that program for free. Anything you format with this free program, you can give away for free in turn. But if you want to profit off something you format with our free program, then we want a share of those profits.”

This doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. It apparently does to a lot of other folks. A typical example of the pundit backlash can be found at ZDNet, where the headline “Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement” tells you right away what you’re in for.

The author starts out by quoting another pundit, who writes:

It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty.

This is a false equivalence. Word and Photoshop are not free programs. They are not being distributed worldwide, free of charge, for anyone to use who wants to.

The ZDNet author goes on to claim that if an author writes “a work of staggering literary genius,” formats it in iBooks Author, and has it rejected by Apple, that author is then “out of luck” because this work can’t be sold elsewhere. No, that author can then lay out that same work of staggering literary genius in .mobi, .epub, .pdf and any other format they want, using any number of other formatting programs, and sell it wherever they want. (Note: the author updated his post to walk this back a bit, while complaining about the difficulty of maintaining multiple layouts for multiple formats. You mean like e-book authors do right now when they output their text in multiple formats for Kindles, iPads and Nooks?)

The only way this EULA would be as “mind-bogglingly greedy and evil” as this pundit claims is if it were the only formatting program available in the entire e-publishing industry and all authors were forced to use it.

What is it about Apple that sends so many tech writers over the edge, frothing at the mouth and spouting easily disproven untruths? I’ve never quite understood it.

Saturday picture show

Here’s a little something to brighten up your monitor…an HD time lapse in Yosemite National Park. The glimpses of fall colors are marvelous.

(via Bad Astronomy)

A new canada-cy

In the “so insane you couldn’t make this shit up” reality show that is the Republican primaries, this week alone has seen Perry abandon ship (shortly after saying he was a fighter who would never give up because America needed him), Santorum retroactively win the Iowa caucuses (and complain about not getting a concession speech from Romney), Romney declare that “maybe” he’d release his tax returns in April (wink wink nod nod), and Gingrich launch a full-court attack on a debate moderator for daring to bring up his second ex-wife’s recent interview, in which she noted that when Gingrich asked her for an “open marriage,” he’d already been screwing around with his soon-to-be third wife for quite some time.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to the remaining field of Republican candidates: Canada.