Madison Sights and Sounds

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November is less than six months away

Can you remember back to 1957? I can. In the American automotive industry, it was the golden era of 'fins,' exemplified by the now-famous '57 Chevy. European car manufacturers (There were no Japanese cars yet) thought the fins were a garish, over-the-top design, but in a few years they bent to our will and we saw Mercedes Benzes with fins. And they were ugly! They just didn't have the pizazz, the in-your-face 'hot stuff' that American designers grew up with. I want that feeling back again, that feeling of fun, and adventure, that feeling of leading the world, not through fear or intimidation, but with a smile and a zest for the joys that life can bring.
Maybe you can remember the creation of the Peace Corps, or Americans landing on the moon, and how the entire world looked up to us, and how we saw both of those events as human touchstones. The sign we left on the moon says, "We came in peace for all mankind," and we surely did. I want that feeling again.
Our political system has been under a withering attack for almost a decade. Profit and patronage have trumped the middle class values and aspirations that are the heart and soul of America.
I want a new deck of cards; I want to be proud of my Chevy or Ford; I want to help the rest of the world to eat, sleep and play in peace -- the way we should be doing.
I want a change.

Scientists discover new ocean current

(Tillamook Head Lighthouse, looking from Chapman Point of Ecola State Park, Lewis and Clark National and State Historical Park, Oregon, Oregon Coast, USA, North America. Photo by Rolf Hicker.)

(From NASA's Earth Observatory) Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered a new climate pattern called the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation. This new pattern explains, for the first time, changes in the water that are important in helping commercial fishermen understand fluctuations in the fish stock. They're also finding that as the temperature of the Earth is warming, large fluctuations in these factors could help climatologists predict how the oceans will respond in a warmer world. The research appears in the April 30 edition of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.


"We've been able to explain, for the first time, the changes in salinity, nutrients and chlorophyll that we see in the Northeast Pacific," said Emanuele Di Lorenzo, assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

Since 1945, fishermen in the California current of the Pacific Ocean have been tracking temperature, salinity and nutrients, among other things, in the ocean to help them predict changes in fish populations like sardines and anchovies that are important for the industry. Studying this data, along with satellite images, Di Lorenzo discovered a pattern of current that he named the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation.

Recent satellite data suggest that this current is undergoing intensification as the temperature of the Earth has risen over the past few decades.

"Although the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation is part of a natural cycle of the climate system, we find evidence suggesting that its amplitude may increase as global warming progresses," said Di Lorenzo.

If this is true, this newly found climate pattern mey help scientists predict how the ecosystem of the Pacific Ocean is likely to change if the world continues to warm, as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

More fun from Billy Gates

(From BBC News)Virtual telescope opens night sky

Twirling galaxies, exotic nebulae and exploding stars are now just a mouse click away for amateur astronomers.

Microsoft has launched WorldWide Telescope, a free tool that stitches together images from some of the best ground- and space-based telescopes.

Collections include pictures from the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes, as well as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.


The web-based tool also allows users to pan and zoom around the planets, and trace their locations in the night sky.

"Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago," explained Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

"[It's] a beautiful platform for explaining and getting people excited about astronomy, and I think the professional astronomers will come to use it as well," said Roy Williams of the California Institute of Technology

Detailed view

To use the new system, users need to download WorldWide Telescope from the web. It only runs on Windows operating systems.
Users can explore the Moon and selected planets in more detail

The web portal gives star-gazers access to "terabytes" of data. It allows them to explore planets, moons and other celestial objects and track their precise position in the sky from any location on Earth, "at any time in the past or future".

Data from sources including the US space agency Nasa allows users to switch between views at different wavelengths and through different telescopes.

Nasa contributed imagery from its Mars Rovers, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Around 30 images from Chandra are available through the program including X-ray data and multi-wavelength composite photographs.

Other data sets include the ongoing Sloan Digital Sky Survey, also known as the Cosmic Genome Project, which aims to capture detailed optical images of more than a quarter of the night sky.

WorldWide Telescope, launched as a beta, or test version, also features tours of the Universe by leading astronomers, as well as the ability for a user to record their own.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

2GHz or faster processor
2GB of RAM
1-10GB of free disk space
Graphics card with 128 MB RAM or 256 VRAM
Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista
Net connection
Macs must run Windows OS

A tour called Dust and Us by Alyssa Goodman, professor of astronomy at Harvard, walks through the dark regions in galaxies where stars and planets form.

"I see the WorldWide Telescope as having an important educational mission," said Robert Kirshner, professor of astronomy at Harvard University.

"[It] gives somebody a kind of freedom to follow their imagination."

Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, described it as a "powerful tool for education" and said he hoped it would "inspire young people to explore astronomy and science".

Stellar options

Microsoft's new application is not the only tool that allows astronomers to explore the night sky from their computers.


Stellarium is an open source alternative to Microsoft's offering
Last year, Microsoft rival Google launched Sky, an add-on to Google Earth which allows astronomers to glide through images of more than one million stars and 200 million galaxies.

Optional layers allow users to explore images from the Hubble Space Telescope as well as animations of lunar cycles.

Other applications have been available for longer.

For example, Stellarium is a free open source tool that gives people a chance to access more than 210 million stars, in addition to planets and moons.

The project was launched in 2001 by Fabien Chereau, a Research Engineer at the Paris Astronomical Observatory, and is used in many planetariums.

Like WorldWide Telescope the software allows users to record and play their own tours of the Universe.

Stand up and be counted

(Photo is Neil Young's website. Click on headline to go there and stream his album.)
By JON PARELES (NY Times) April 28

Neil Young unleashes a digital broadside today. His new album, "Living With War" (Reprise), was recorded and mostly written three to four weeks ago and as of Friday can be heard in its entirety free on his Web site, www.neilyoung.com, and on satellite radio networks.
Mr. Young half-jokingly describes "Living With War" as his "metal folk protest" album. It's his blunt statement about the Iraq war; "History was a cruel judge of overconfidence/back in the days of shock and awe," he sings, strumming an electric guitar and leading a power trio with a sound that harks back to Young albums like "Rust Never Sleeps" and "Ragged Glory."

Some songs add a trumpet or a 100-voice choir, hastily convened in Los Angeles for one 12-hour session. During the nine new songs he sympathizes with soldiers and war victims, insists "Don't need no more lies," longs for a leader to reunite America and prays for peace.

In a song whose title alone has already brought him the fury of right-wing blogs, he urges, "Let's Impeach the President." It ends with Mr. Young shouting, "Flip, flop," amid contradictory sound bites of President Bush. But Mr. Young insists the album is nonpartisan.

"If you impeach Bush, you're doing a huge favor for the Republicans," he argued, speaking by telephone from California. "They can run again with some pride."

Mr. Young is a Canadian citizen. But having lived in the United States since the 1960's, he sings as if he were an American. The title song of "Living With War" quotes "The Star-Spangled Banner," and the album ends with the choir singing "America the Beautiful."

The album's release is a high-tech, globe-spanning update of a topical song tradition that's much older than recordings: the broadside, a songwriter's rapid response to events of the day. "They had these songs that everybody knew the melodies to," Mr. Young said. "They'd just write new words, and the minstrels would be traveling around spreading the word. Music spreads like wildfire when you do it that way."

On Tuesday a higher-quality version will be for sale as a download from online music stores, and a CD will be in stores next week as soon as it can be manufactured and shipped. Eventually a DVD will be released with video of the recording sessions, which took place March 29 to April 6. Many of the songs on the album were first takes, recorded immediately after Mr. Young taught them to the band. On March 31 he wrote three songs: "Let's Impeach the President" before breakfast, "Looking for a Leader" after he recorded "Let's Impeach the President" and "Roger and Out" the same evening.

Mr. Young's Web site will have a more elaborate presentation, available free. It will include a page designed like a cable-news broadcast, complete with visuals (including recording-session scenes), ticker and logo: LWW (for "Living With War") rather than CNN. "Even if it turns out that we can't sell it with the news in it, we won't sell it, we'll just stream it," he said. "We don't have to sell it. We can still get it out there. This has nothing to do with money as far as I'm concerned."

Mr. Young wants the album heard as a whole. The online streams play through from beginning to end; until the CD is ready, the downloadable copies will be available only as a bundle of the full album. "That first impression is so important," he said. "Instead of just going to 'Let's Impeach the President,' people will have to absorb the whole thing. To understand the songs, you need to understand where the whole album's coming from. It protects my right as an artist to have the work presented the way I created it."

Mr. Young has always been impatient with the time lag between writing a song and getting it to the world. When four student protesters were shot dead at Kent State University in 1970, he wrote "Ohio," recorded it with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and released it two and a half weeks later by sending acetates � preliminary pressings � to radio stations. (He will be on tour this summer as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in what's billed as the Freedom of Speech Tour.)

After 9/11 Mr. Young wrote "Let's Roll," a song about the passengers who brought down a hijacked plane in Pennsylvania, and released it free online. "Now we have the Internet," he said. "It doesn't sound as good, but it's much faster, and it gets around the world. That's huge, that's as big as we get."

The songs on "Living With War" are straightforward and single-minded, setting aside the allusive, enigmatic quality of Mr. Young's rock classics. "These are all ideas we've heard before," he said. "There's nothing new in there. I just connected the dots."

The protest song, rocked-up slightly from its folky 1960's form, has been making a comeback during the Iraq war, from arena bands like Pearl Jam, the Rolling Stones and Green Day to indie-rockers like Bright Eyes and blues-rockers like Keb' Mo' and Robert Cray. Bruce Springsteen's latest album is a tribute to the protest-song mentor Pete Seeger, although it features old folk songs rather than Mr. Seeger's topical material.

"We are the silent majority now, and we haven't done a damn thing," Mr. Young said. "We've stood by and watched this happen. But there's more of us than there is of them, and we have to do something. When people start talking and see they can get away with it, it's going to happen everywhere. It's going to be a landslide, it's going to be a tidal wave. This is just the tip of it."

Mr. Young said that he made "Living With War" not with a plan, but on an impulse. "I don't know what actually did it," he said. "It happened really fast, faster than I think I've ever experienced. There was just a kind of a wave."

As in the 60's, protest songs risk self-righteousness and preaching only to the converted. Only the most generalized ones outlast the interest in whatever headlines inspired them. There's not a lot of mystery to the songs on "Living With War"; they make their points as forthrightly as possible. Yet in the Internet era information � not just songs but blogs, videos, photos, drawings, e-mail jottings � is in the paradoxical position of being published worldwide and perhaps archived forever, but also being impulsive and ephemeral. A song for the Internet doesn't have to be one for the ages. Like an old broadside, it just has to get around for its moment, for right now. "Living With War" � irate, passionate, tuneful, thoughtful and obstinate � is definitely worth a click.

New Jersey has a Hall of Fame -- Yeah, That's Right!

By DANIELA FLORES, Associated Press Writer Sat May 3, 2:13 PM ET

Pop quiz: What comes to mind when you think about Yogi Berra, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein and Toni Morrison? Brilliant minds, inspiring souls, trailblazers � all are likely responses.And ... New Jersey? Yep. They all have strong ties to the oft-maligned Garden State, and they're among the first 15 people to be inducted Sunday into New Jersey's new Hall of Fame."I think anything you get inducted to you feel good about," said 82-year-old Berra, the famous New York Yankee catcher who lives in Montclair in northern New Jersey. "Heck to get inducted with all them guys, that's pretty good."

Berra, who's lived in New Jersey for 52 years, is in good company.In addition to Edison, Einstein and Morrison, the inaugural class includes Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen, Meryl Streep, astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and Vince Lombardi."There's no doubt this will be a historic event for the state," said Don Jay Smith, the hall's executive director. "New Jersey is often the butt of jokes, nationally, and yet when people see who has claimed New Jersey as their home, they will be very impressed."

Edison's great-granddaughter, Elizabeth Sloane Eggemann, of White House Station in northwest New Jersey, said the famous inventor would be thrilled by the honor, and she hopes children are inspired by all of the hall's inductees."It's really great to recognize all the accomplishments," she said.

The Hall of Fame exists only as a virtual entity now, but officials are raising money to build a permanent museum. The first class was chosen through an online vote after 25 finalists were announced in 2006.All inductees must have lived in the state for at least five years, though organizers made an exception to that rule for Underground Railroad pioneer Harriet Tubman.

Smith said he expects most of the living inductees to attend Sunday's induction ceremony at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. Two inductees, Streep and former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley, have asked that the presentation of their awards be held until they can receive them in person.

"Meryl Streep was honored to be among the first class to be inducted to the New Jersey Hall of Fame," her representative, Michelle Benson, said in a statement. "Because of the significance of the Hall of Fame, she has asked that the presentation of her award be postponed until she can accept in person."

John Lombardi said his grandfather, a legendary coach who led the Green Bay Packers to seven NFL championships, would get a kick out of his induction into the state's hall of fame."I kind of look at the list of the 'who's who' who are getting inducted and I kind of laugh because I'm like, Edison, Einstein, then my grandfather," he said. "I think he'd be laughing out loud. He had a healthy ego but I don't think he ever thought he was up there with those guys."___

(Pic: Jersey Hall of Famer Yogi Berra with yours truly)

Madison's Streets

The streets are a mess. Just about every major thoroughfare through and across our fair borough is cracked, uneven and dotted with potholes.

What's going on? Maybe our luxury SUVs and sedans have such good suspensions we can't feel the bumps? Are we trying to send a message, like 'Don't move here, we can't even take care of our roads?'

Repaving a road used to be a gargantuan undertaking, but in the last ten years or so somebody invented an incredible re-paving machine that can transform a couple of miles of street almost overnight. Can't we get this done, or is a job like this caught up in some bureaucratic 'That's not our road, it's the county's, or the state's or Aunt Tillie's.'?

Let's take a timeout from tree salvation and fix our roads so a seven-year-old Ford can pick up a pizza at Rocco's and get back home without jarring the driver's dentures!

The Official Jersey Breakfast Sandwich

If you're from New Jersey, you know what it is; if you're a native you know there's only one authentic response when you order this classic. Go ahead, order up!