Ideas for 2004...

[dj_john69]

By far in the past years, there have been way to many of those usless stray metal poles (not the road signs post) on the 2 and 10 o'clock roads...on the far side of the road seperating the road with the open Playa. I have hit a few of those poles in my days !! They suck..bottom line.

Aren't they only used to mark off the roads during the building of the festival ?? Why are they still there after the event starts ?? I dunno really but they should be taken down after the city has been mapped out and before it opens its gates.

I'm curious to see exactly how many people have had to visit the medical tents for cuts and such after hitting a metal pole. I bet if they (the metal poles) were taken down, medical personal could focus more on helping people with other emergencies.

Just my 2 cents.

~John

[Badger]

The metal pole thing was addressed at the Town Hall meeting a few weeks back.

The complaints were heard.

Not that it did me any good slicing my finger open on one of the things riding my bike at night.

In a somewhat altered state.

[dj_john69]

The metal pole thing was addressed at the Town Hall meeting a few weeks back.

The complaints were heard.

Not that it did me any good slicing my finger open on one of the things riding my bike at night.

In a somewhat altered state.

and what was said of the complaints at the Town Meeting ?? Anything good to report ?? Thanks.

~John

[Bob]

If it were an endangered garter python instead of a five-foot fencepost would ya'll have run over THAT too?

[dj_john69]

If it were an endangered garter python instead of a five-foot fencepost would ya'll have run over THAT too?

sure...it's all fair game on the Playa. lol

~John

[Chimp]

Hi all, this is a blatant crossthread attempt to push certain crossthread irritants to the bottom of the pile.

[Gothalot]

Okay Umm am I the only one that did NOT injure myself on the Playa last year?

[theCryptofishist]

Okay Umm am I the only one that did NOT injure myself on the Playa last year?

Unknown--ESD is still compiling stats.

[robbidobbs]

Aren't they only used to mark off the roads during the building of the festival ?? Why are they still there after the event starts ?? I dunno really but they should be taken down after the city has been mapped out and before it opens its gates.
I'm curious to see exactly how many people have had to visit the medical tents for cuts and such after hitting a metal pole. I bet if they (the metal poles) were taken down, medical personal could focus more on helping people with other emergencies.
Just my 2 cents.
~John

You've just spent more than 2 cents of my patience!

1) The DPW has gawddamn WAY too much to do than to project which stakes are superfluous at certain times. I'm sure Cowboy Carl is *really* interested in your stake-pulling suggestion...NOT.
2)No it's not the LLC's or the DPW's J.O.B. to protect you from yourself. Read your fucking ticket! Slow the fuck down!
3) If you feel so pants-on-fire OUTRAGED about the 400 some odd posts out there being "invisible" to you (not by me BTW) then do something about it. BTW: Corner posts have a propensity for collecting signage from surrounding theme camps over time in the populated areas.

Otherwise, you just ran out of excuses, because I am a living, breathing example of having my pants on fire about an issue that did more than give boo-boos to some people, it almost shut our asses down: the porta-potties. There are 400 units, same as your post estimate. I don't have a budget, nor pre-planned volunteers. If you want to decorate the posts, then YOU get to supply the materials, YOU get to organize the logistics of puting them on the posts, and YOU get to ask for help when the time comes. Just go to Playa Info and ask for a volunteer for a day or two. Be prepared for a lot of alone-time though. You're doing a public service, and most of the time it's thankless. There'll be plenty of thankfull people that you'll never hear. I know...people do like to shit comfortably, and they probably don't like to smack into poles.

(Warning...Ranger Humor): In 1999 I was speeding across the Playa on a call, and out jumped a pole right in front of my well-lit bike. I went down HARD on my left knee, and my Ranger-partner misspoke: Do you want me to call a Green-dot? I laughed and said: No they'd just make me feel better about the dumb thing that I did.)

Bottom line...QUIT YER BITCHIN! The Community isn't interested in whiners, only Participants.

Period.

[foamin' at the mouth]

not exactly "vault of heaven" but nonetheless interesting....note the author is a very interesting chemist who actually writes some pretty decent poetry about orbitals. Well, Carneval has been going on for a long time now (widh the image of the beautiful people in green metallic paint was on line as well as the notes...just use your imagination:
From Nature Magazine Not Astronomical but art and science:

Science in culture

ROALD HOFFMANN

Roald Hoffmann is in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853-1301, USA.

Researchers and dancers joined hands in Rio in the name of Carnaval — and popularizing science.


Science to a samba beat



For a week the city of Rio de Janeiro and its people put aside their class differences to craft an explosion of colour and music. A year of song-writing contests and work on costumes that cost months of wages lead up to informal block parades, parties, the incessant beat of samba, and a binge of popular culture. All in the middle of the Brazilian summer.



One of the high points of this festival is a competition between increasingly commercial samba 'schools', which parade down the Sambódromo, a structure like an elongated football stadium that seats 100,000. A billion more worldwide watch the performance on television.



The samba schools are judged by their theme, how well it is executed, and their spirit. And they are graded by their floats and their costumes (called fantasias), and on their song, the samba enredo, sung by a marching, walking and dancing throng of up to 5,000 people per school, and drummers playing the bateria. In a simpler time, some 50 years ago, Richard Feynman, dressed as a Greek, played a frigideira — a percussion instrument shaped like a frying pan — in a local parade.



Schools are upgraded or demoted on the basis of their ranking, and a neighbourhood's spirit depends on its team's placement. No wonder that the major samba schools hire a professional, known as a carnavalesco, to produce and direct their presentation. In Brazil this is considered a great profession.



For the first time, a major samba school, Unidos da Tijuca, chose a science theme for Carnaval — "The Dream of Creation and the Creation of the Dream: Art and Science in the Age of the Impossible". In elaborating on this theme, the carnavalesco and master alchemist Paulo Barros has worked closely over the past year with the team from the science centre at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, headed by Fátima Brito. This collective has much experience in popularizing science, but being asked to help in a Carnaval parade was something new. It's like asking scientists to advise on the half-time show at the Super Bowl — and the exposure of the human body on the floats in Rio is light years beyond Janet Jackson's flirtation with the risqué.



They took it on, the brave souls at the science centre, but not without trepidation. For there are doubters in Brazilian science who believe that the certifiably odd (I would say 'carnavalesque') representation of science in this Carnaval is but a distortion that adds to the public's misperception of science. Some in the samba community also doubted that such a complicated theme would fly.



So what did the millions see on that hot night of 22 February in Rio? A fantastic float made of clock faces, driven by a popular actor, Carlos Palma, dressed as Einstein. Another striking float with 273 men and women in blue body paint choreographed in a representation of human life. People decked out as Dolly the sheep. And androids doing the samba down the avenida.



There was even an allegory of alchemy becoming chemistry, including what looked like orbitals to this theoretical chemist — who, incidentally, was there in a Santos Dumont costume, balloons coming out of my back like angel wings, diplomatically dodging questions on who first discovered flight.



The process — a group of people intent on popularizing science in dialogue with a great samba school — was worth it by itself. But would Carnaval value this unique inclusion of science in popular culture? Three days after the parade, the judges ranked Unidos da Tijuca second (out of 14), its highest ranking ever. An analysis of the ratings by category reveals that the theme, and its ingenious, coherent execution, were responsible. I bet we see more science at Carnaval.

[foamin' at the mouth]

I'm having fantasies of orrery's made from old bicycle parts but am also looking for info about a tradition I've heard about -from neighborhoods in Bahia. Apparently community groups in Bahia districts get together and spend an entire season collaborating on the design and construction of elaborate paper balloons which they then display aloft in a --competion for best design-- for a day before they are set on fire. I've googled but cannot find anything (probably I suck at my choices for search terms.) I met an artist once who used this as a launch point for his own workl . i thin his name was Joao Grigo or something similar. Am I nits? Has anyone heard of this tradition?

[theCryptofishist]

[quote="foamin' at the mouth" Am I nits?[/quote] I dunno. Were your parents lice?












*ashamed for having picked on foam--whom I have missed*

[foamin' at the mouth]

I dunno. Were your parents lice?

snout beetles, actually. And I'm obviously an idiot who needs to go sit in the corner now for my poor "preview" skills.
smooch

[theCryptofishist]

A witty responce with all honors for the encounter going to foam.

[foamin' at the mouth]

For those of you still looking for costume ideas this in from May 6th issue of Nature:
Astronomy: Dust-filled doughnuts in space

JULIAN KROLIK

Julian Krolik, of Johns Hopkins University, is currently at the Institute of Astronomy, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 0HA, UK.
e-mail: jhk@ast.cam.ac.uk

The first images of an extragalactic object to have been captured using infrared interferometry reveal the doughnut-shaped cloud of dust that obscures the heart of a nearby active galaxy.

Active galactic nuclei are among the most exotic objects in the Universe. They radiate as much light as an entire galaxy from a region the size of the Solar System and, unlike stars, spread that light over the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to -rays. Thanks to observational advances in the past decade, we now have good evidence that the 'engine' powering each of these objects is a black hole, weighing anywhere from millions to billions of times as much as the Sun. Fortunately for the galaxies that house them (but unfortunately for distant observers like us), active galactic nuclei are often shrouded in opaque gas and dust that block a view of them from most directions. The light from them, intercepted by these dust clouds, is degraded to infrared light that tells us little about the fascinating activity deep inside.

To the further frustration of astronomers, the dust clouds are so close to the active nucleus that their structure cannot easily be made out: rough estimates put their typical size on the sky at 0.01 arcseconds (a few hundred-millionths of a degree), and even the Hubble Space Telescope can't resolve anything smaller than about 0.1 arcseconds. But this barrier is at last being breached. On page 47 of this issue, Jaffe et al.1 present infrared images of an active nucleus that have a resolution of 0.01 arcseconds, achieved through interferometry — the careful combination of images from different telescopes placed some distance apart. The obscuring dust clouds, a scant several light years from a supermassive black hole, have now come into view.

Light can be thought of either as a collection of individual energy packets called photons or as an electromagnetic wave. Interferometry exploits the wave aspect of light in that it hinges on comparing the phases of electromagnetic waves from a single source when they strike different telescopes. Measuring and retaining this phase information is a formidable technical challenge, so interferometry is not a discipline for the faint-hearted. Although the technique has been in regular use for decades at radio wavelengths, the difficulties increase as the wavelength of the light shrinks. The advance into the infrared region of the spectrum has been accomplished only recently2 and, as is usually the case, the first observations were only of nearby, comparatively bright stars3-5.



Jaffe et al.1 have used the interferometer formed by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and several smaller telescopes on the same Chilean mountain6. With this apparatus, high-resolution infrared images of faint, distant objects have been obtained for the first time. Indeed, the data shown in Jaffe and colleagues' paper1 are the first to be derived from infrared interferometry on anything outside the Milky Way. And what Jaffe et al. see is as interesting as the gear they built to see it with. Their images show a geometrically thick ring of dust that is extremely close to the central black hole in the nearest powerful active galaxy, NGC 1068 (Fig. 1). The warmest dust is no more than two or three light years from the very centre of the beast.



Figure 1 The active galaxy NGC 1068.   Full legend 
High resolution image and legend (86k)

This result is a dramatic confirmation of inferences made many years ago, but which were not entirely accepted because they were so hard to understand. Since the late 1980s, many have believed that the dust clouds surrounding active galactic nuclei are not higgledy-piggledy, but are instead arranged more or less like a thick doughnut. As a result, observers whose sight-lines fall near to the equatorial plane of any particular active galactic nucleus (most of the Universe, in fact) are relegated to seats with an obscured view of its centre; the favoured minority close to the axis of the doughnut get to see the full show unobstructed.

But this picture was difficult to accept because, in a gas cool enough to permit dust to survive, the thermal motions would be too slow to keep the doughnut puffed up and thick; the gravity of the central black hole would ensure that the doughnut collapsed to look more like a CD, if the only resistance to it were random thermal motions7. Many speculative suggestions have been made to account for the geometrical thickness of the dust doughnut7-10 but none has gained general credence. Partly to avoid this dynamical conundrum, alternative geometries for the dust (for example, a thin but warped disk11, 12) have been suggested, but these are problematic for other reasons7. Thanks to these new observations1, we now know that, at least in the nearest and brightest example of NGC 1068, a thick doughnut is in fact the right shape.

The fact that most active galactic nuclei cannot be seen clearly has many implications. Most obviously, it means that it is hard to find them, so censuses of massive black holes probably underestimate their numbers by as much as a factor of five. If most active nuclei are visible only in difficult-to-observe infrared light, their total power may actually be so large as to rival the total output of all the stars in the Universe13.

After languishing for a decade largely through lack of data, this field should now see a revival, as it is refreshed by detailed infrared imaging. The dynamical problems guessed at years ago can be brought into clearer focus; with any luck, direct images of these structures may yield clues to their solution.

[Badger]

Nice pic of that nebula.

For a pretty amazing shot of the Sombrero galaxy have a look at http://heritage.stsci.edu/2003/28/big.html. Certainly one of the more beautiful pics that Hubble has sent of the many, many galaxy shots in its portfolio.

Suitable for printing.

[Fix]

The killing post that was by our camp near Theory and Paradox was evil and had to be dealt with. It was not a sign, it was not a lamp post..(although) maybe it should have been. It was just a lone javelin hiding in the dark and preyed on the unaware. It is as simple as that, the thing was even DANGEROUS to 2000 pound vehicles much less a human being.

Deal with the danger, help keep everyone safe, would you pick up a piece of shrapnel chard, broken glass, razors or nails maybe even a needle?..

well these 4 to 5 foot high post are anchored firmly and sturdy, so when possible tie it up, stake it out, tent it, paint it, light it up, put signage on it "Danger Post !" ..just make it safe.

These short sturdy hidden post can and will result in somebody's death eventually, oh that's right..but we have been warned on every ticket..right? oh well, just leave them then..huh?...I mean every one has the right to post..right?

[Ranger Genius]

I think I know the post you're talking about. I actually saw someone riding past it get his "fluffy" scarf (you know the things I'm talking about?) wrapped around it as he sped past on his bike. Being clotheslined off of your bike at high speeds by a scarf around the neck is double-plus ungood. Peaches and I were worried he was dead, but once he regained consciousness (only a few seconds), it was clear he was okay. The damn yahoo that owned the post came out of his tent with a cheap beer in his hand. We swore at him, gave him dirty looks, and put a glow stick on the pole. Please light your structures, wires, and rebar, people! Read more than just the back of your ticket! Read the fucking survival guide so we have to invoke the back of the ticket less often!

[theCryptofishist]

Being clotheslined off of your bike at high speeds by a scarf around the neck is double-plus ungood.

Holy Isadora Duncan, Batman!

[Ranger Genius]

Sick and wrong, crypto. Sick and wrong.

[diane o'thirst]

Sick and wrong, but spot on...

[DancingTofu]

lurker wrote:
Kittens and ice cream...mmmmmmm

Raheer wrote:
Ah, Kitten-flavoured ice cream. Good stuff, but the whiskers get stuck in my teeth.

Schrodinger's Swirl, anyone? http://www.goats.com/archive/010606.html

[Ranger Genius]

Kudos to Tofu for the Goats reference. Kittens = Pop Tarts.

http://www.goats.com/archive/980301.html

[DancingTofu]

Kudos graciously accepted and eaten.