What Ever Happened To Courtney Love?

Courtney Love used to be in a band called "Hole."  I bought one of her songs--"Malibu." She's a pretty awful singer.  She really needs to quit music and concentrate on acting--where she has more natural talent, IMHO. Now I see from this old news report that her mood swings are out of control again--now she's offending and insulting her own daughter.

Oh, yeah Courtney?  You're really starting to look like Baby Jane Hudson--but I think that was your schtick all along.  

Christmas In August

I rarely rave about consumer products, but here's one I really like:

Link  It's a "power failure" flashlight/night light. The cylindrical flashlight rests in the bottom portion that plugs into the wall.  It's charged by inductive coupling (no wires or prongs). When you lift the light out of its charging cradle it lights. When the room darkens, the bottom turns into a night light. I'm getting some of these to give as Christmas gifts this year.

A Thermometer of Perturbation

The physics of radiation and understanding the nature of the atom did not consume every scientific imagination at the dawn of the 20th century. Other scientists were busy trying to connect life processes down to the chemical level, rather than trying to build physics up to meet chemistry. The space between physics and biology has always been chemistry's domain.

Other scientists were trying to benefit all of physical science and one prachtig example was  J. H. van 't Hoff*, winner of the very first Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1901.  Van 't Hoff's prize citation reads "for his work on the laws of chemical dynamics and also osmotic pressure." What van 't Hoff did was to apply mathematical prowess to chemical equilibria, showing how balances shift when heated.

Van 't Hoff's eponymous equation relates an equilibrium ratio, K, to absolute temperature, showing how chemical reactions shift according to temperature. The law holds for chemistry, physics, biology, geology, meteorology—the whole broad swath—anywhere heat affects chemical balance. In a sense, van 't Hoff quantified Le Chatelier's qualitative principle.

A youthful van 't Hoff also made the visionary proposal that tetrahedral carbon existed and that right and left-handed stereoisomers explained observed optical activity, but he thought it wise to exclude such controversy from his PhD dissertation. Watch this video here: link
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*Note the elision of van 't which in Dutch means van het. In German, van het corresponds to von das. Dutch melded the three Germanic genders der, die, and das into just two: de and het.

For LL: Cisco Kid

Commenter LL couldn't take my previous post, a song penned by the L.A. band War. I know he likes things South of the Border, so there's always this instead:

Indians Sweat And Seethe Over Power Failure

Fathoming Good and Evil

Photo negative of a pool taken underwater by my father ca. 1975

We humans look bilaterally symmetric, but inside we are not. Our hearts and stomachs are not symmetrically balanced, nor is our digestive tract. Bilateral (and higher) symmetry is common in nature and also appears unseen in right and left-handed versions of the same molecules.* We even speak of left and right in politics.

Then there is the symmetry of matter and anti-matter. And the symmetry of good and bad. This is something different altogether. Though the symmetry of matter and anti-matter is as symmetric as a number line, with plus and minus arrayed symmetrically about zero, only one side prevails in the world we know.  I asked a while back:

Who broke the mirror so long ago?

Who can fathom why matter prevails while the equal and opposite realm of anti-matter remains all but unrealized? 

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*Right and left handed versions of the same molecules are chiral, a word which stems from a Greek word meaning handedness.

Madonna's Woes and Tramping Abroad

Madonna got into a bit of trouble overseas in France. link  I'm mostly bored with the details and won't go into them. The crowd's reaction reminded me of a Patti Smith concert I saw in Florence, Italy, back in 1979.  Smith really riled the crowd and retired from performing afterwards.

My mother salvaged an old diary I kept on that trip and returned it to me last month. Here's what I said about that concert then.

Martedì 10 settembre [1979]
Rome, Villa Borghese 

Wow what a night last night. I went to the Patti Smith concert at the stadium in Florence. The stadium looked like a huge bathtub. I couldn't believe it when I arrived. It was as if Led Zeppelin were playing. There were people all over 5 hours before the concert began. We waited away from the noisy mob collecting near the gates. I caught some sleep. Then there was a shout--the gates were opening. We made for the nearest gate.
After waiting in the hot noisy crowd (like so many grains of sand all trying to get through the neck of an hourglass) we broke through to the inside and picked ourselves some good seats.
Below it was like pigs to a feeding trough, pushing shoving, shouting, etc. I remember laughing as we watched people scaling the fence around the field track. At the top there was 3 wires of barbwire and some people would get their shirts or pants caught.
Well after some length of time the music began. First it was tapes. Lynyrd Skynyrd "Street Survivors" and then Dire Straits--"Down By The Waterfront."
When the equipment was tested, I thought at first it was just the roadies tuning up stuff, but then they played songs, rock like "You Really Got Me" and then quit--the tapes continued. But when the real band began I realized it was the same musicians.
Patti Smith had a hard time with the audience. First of all she barely knew a word of Italian, only "ti capisc" which she pronounced like "ti capeach."  Secondly the audience couldn't understand a word of English.
She had a problem with people climbing up on the stage--the crowd was absolutely unruly.
"Hey man, you wanna climb the stage, get your own stage, man."
The last song they played was "My Generation."  Before this though the guitarist played the first few notes of the Star Spangled Banner (like Hendrix at Woodstock) and a big American flag came up behind them. Then all the Italians gave it the finger. Then the Who song--then a finale and then chaos; people surged up onto the stage like the pressure of being pushed forward reached a breaking point.
Then "Hey man, get the fuck off the stage" but there was nothing that could be done.
Patti tried to talk with them. "Hey you know" she said to one, "you light up my life." She tried to get him to sit down at the piano "fucking sit down, asshole....how do you say sit down in Italian" she said through 80,000 pairs of ears--but to no avail.
The chaos ended when the road crew swept the undesirables off the stage and then, like a giant bathtub, the moment came when the plug was pulled and it started to drain, not without leaving a residue of paper, cans, and bottles though. So went the concert in Italy.

My own recollection of the same concert, written a year and a half ago from memory is here.
It's interesting for me to compare the two accounts--one fresh and the other filtered by 30 years of  experience and memory.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel: A Ghost Of Britons Past

Separated at birth?  Kenneth Branagh channels Isambard Kingdom Brunel:

Kenneth Branagh at the 2012 London Olympics

Isambard Kingdom Brunel

The likeness was intentional. More on Brunel here

I Can't Be Counted On At All

I saw the Meat Puppets a couple times back in the 80's and then again at Red Rocks when they kinda sort made it. Nirvana actually did more for their sales than they did themselves when Kurt Cobain covered their song "Lake of Fire." My wife used to have a huge crush on the guitar player. Good thing he got older and heavier. Wicked good guitar riffing starting at 3m 10s.

The Vortex is a Downwards Death Spiral

More than 50 years before Rutherford's proof of the positively charged nucleus in 1909 (published in 1911), a physicist named Rankine had notions which today sound downright prescient. He described in 1850:

Each atom of matter consists of a nucleus, or central point, enveloped by an elastic atmosphere which is retained in its position by attractive forces, and that the elasticity due to heat arises from the centrifugal force of these atmospheres, revolving or oscillating about their nuclei or central points. link

There were no plus and minus charges in Rankine's so-called Vortex Theory.  There were no protons and electrons--there was no polarity. Things were held together presumably by gravity.  But the notion of a hard kernel having squishy orbiting clouds is intriguing in retrospect. It's reminiscent of what came later.  Or something.

Then there was Nagaota whose 1904 planetary model for the atom was in part correct.  Just as the planets circled the sun with gravity and momentum in balance...so it was at the atomic level with electrostatic forces and momentum: a tiny negative electron revolved around a positive nucleus. What gravity writ large, electrostatics writ small: electrostatic attraction countered an electron's momentum, keeping things in balance. This had the added appeal of offering a certain symmetry for the outwardly large and the inwardly small: everything was just whirling masses in motion. Turtles all the way down and up. A few remaining fundamental differences between atoms and planets remained, such as the way that electrons always circled in discrete orbits while planets did not (or did they?), but these problems were sure to be solved.  And as wrong as the model proved to be, it stuck with us:

Engraven Images

If you were a kid of a certain age who collected coins, you might recall that one unattainable possession: the 1909-s V.D.B Lincoln Cent.

The "S" stands for San Francisco where it was minted; the V.D.B. stands for the sculptor's name, Victor David Brenner. When the coin first appeared in 1909 to mark the centennial of Lincoln's birth, it was the first coin to bear the likeness of a real person.  Previously, all U.S. coins had carried the likenesses of stylized subjects like Lady Liberty, Indians, and so forth. Also, previous coin designs had had artist's initials, but VDB's were deemed too ostentatious--or too something--and were moved to the front of coin, just under Lincoln's shoulder, where they still reside. Pull out a penny and have look.

Friday, I'm In Love

The Proof Was In The Pudding

[continued in part from here]

After Thomson discovered and defined the negative portion of the atom, his attention turned to the positive portion which was ill-defined. One problem was that there was no simple tool to probe inside atoms. Electrons could be fired at matter, but so what?  They just softly scattered off (it turns out that organized matter diffracts them but that came later).

The alpha particle was Rutherford's baby: he had named it and had shown that is was a helium atom stripped of electrons, i.e., He²⁺.  By 1909, Rutherford and his students were firing alpha particles at everything in sight, looking for any new and unusual effects, but also testing theories about the positive part of Thomson's Plum Pudding Model.

Rutherford had earlier noted the thickness of sheets of materials needed to stop alpha particles. But why did they? There was nothing about JJ Thomson's atom that should get in the way. If the positively charged portion of each atom were a uniformly thin gruel, alpha particles should sail right through.  But they noticed deflection--eppur si muove.

Eventually, they began measuring how much thin sheets of gold foil deflected beams of alpha particles. The experimental set-up involved aiming a beam of alpha particles at a gold foil and putting a detector on the other side to measure deflection angles of the "filtered" particles. In a sense, Rutherford was trying to quantify the density of the positive pudding portion. The more closely they looked, the more deflection they observed. Almost as an aside, Rutherford suggested putting the detector in front of the gold foil. When they did so, and to everyone's utter surprise, a detectable amount of alpha particles appeared to bounce off the gold foil rather than pass through it. It took Rutherford two years to digest, confirm, reconfirm and then to announce what this all meant. In Rutherford's words:

It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you. On consideration, I realized that this scattering backward must be the result of a single collision, and when I made calculations I saw that it was impossible to get anything of that order of magnitude unless you took a system in which the greater part of the mass of the atom was concentrated in a minute nucleus. It was then that I had the idea of an atom with a minute massive center, carrying a charge.

[Continued in part here]

Plum Pudding

The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.
- Albert. A. Michelson, speech at the dedication of Ryerson Physics Lab, U. of Chicago 1894

The following year, Roentgen discovered X-rays; a year later, in 1896, Becquerel discovered radioactivity; and J.J. Thomson electrified physics in 1897 when he announced that cathode "rays" were really beams of electrons or what he called "corpuscles."

Thomson knew as much as anyone about electricity and its conduction--that electricity could flow here and there like invisible water and it could even be tamed and put to use. The electron, named after the Greek word for amber, had even been proposed before but had remained safely ensconced in matter. Thomson disclosed it. Disrobed it. What the electron lost in privacy, it gained in primacy and notoriety. Alone and naked for the first time, the electron succumbed to further scrutiny--first its mass-to-charge ratio was measured by Thomson. Soon after, it was actually weighed by Millikan (ironically at the University of Chicago--see quote above). But the real shocker at the time was that atoms were divisible--they were not a-tomos. This destroyed a comfortable notion of integrity.

JJ Thomson. Note the photograph (second from right) which is an early X-ray of the hand of Frau Roentgen

Knowing that he could strip off little negative bits, but not having a working notion of the countervailing positive portion which was surely left behind, Thomson theorized that electrons were uniformly sprinkled in a positively-charged, amorphous medium. The model was dubbed Plum Pudding. And why not? Thompson went with what he knew.  He would have overreached any data to have proposed anything else. And so, for the interregnum roughly corresponding to the Edwardian era—until Ernest Rutherford undid it—the atomic model looked like this:

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Suggested reading: history of the electron

This story continues here: link

"Little Martha"

Was It Better Before Before They Voted For What's-His Name?

Exene Cervenka chooses not to endorse Obama: link

Remember when her band X dissed Reagan?:

I always got the impression that guitarist Billy Zoom was a closet Republican.
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Important update: Billy Zoom appears in the comments to set the record straight:

BillyZoomJuly 23, 2012 9:48 PM

I'm not in the closet. Reagan was a great president.
BZ

Compare & Contrast

Here's another old song by Led Zeppelin, from their 4th (1971) LP called "The Battle of Evermore":

The Queen of Light took her Bow and then she turned to go
The Prince of Peace embraced the Gloom and walked the Night alone
Oh, dance in the dark of Night, sing to the morning Light
The Dark Lord rides in force tonight, and Time will tell us all
Oh, throw down your Plow and Hoe, rest not to lock your Home
Side by side we await the Might, of the darkest of them All 

I hear the horses' Thunder down in the Valley below
I'm waiting for the Angels of Avalon, waiting for the eastern Glow
The Apples of the Valley hold the Seeds of Happiness
The Ground is rich from tender Care, repay do not forget, no, no
Dance in the dark of Night, sing to the morning Light
The Apples turn to brown and black, the Tyrant's Face is red
Oh, War is the common Cry, pick up your Swords and fly
The Sky is filled with good and bad, Mortals never know 

Oh well, the Night is long, the Beads of Time pass slow
Tired Eyes on the Sunrise, waiting for the eastern Glow
The Pain of War cannot exceed the Woe of Aftermath
The Drums will shake the castle Wall, the Ring Wraiths ride in black (ride on)
Sing as you raise your Bow, (ride on) shoot straighter than before
No Comfort has the Fire at Night that lights the Face so cold
Oh, dance in the dark of Night, sing to the morning Light
The magic Runes are writ in Gold to bring the Balance back, bring it back...

At last the Sun is shining, the Clouds of blue roll by
With Flames from the Dragon of Darkness, the Sunlight blinds his Eyes

Oh, bring it back, bring it back, bring it back, bring it back, bring it back...

The story reminds me of the older (1940) animation sequence created by Walt Disney and set to music in his masterpiece, Fantasia:


Of course the original story is much older than either work of art.

Compare & Contrast

Guys used to write this sort of lyrics:

It is the springtime of my loving-the second season I am to know
You are the sunlight in my growing - so little warmth I've felt before.
It isn't hard to feel me glowing - I watched the fire that grew so low.

It is the summer of my smiles - flee from me Keepers of the Gloom.
Speak to me only with your eyes. It is to you I give this tune.
Ain't so hard to recognize - These things are clear to all from time to time.

Talk Talk Talk Talk - I've felt the coldness of my winter
I never thought it would ever go. I cursed the gloom that set upon us...
But I know that I love you so

These are the seasons of emotion and like the winds they rise and fall

This is the wonder of devotion - I seek the torch we all must hold.
This is the mystery of the quotient - Upon us all, upon us all a little rain must fall...It's just a little rain...

Two decades later (1992), pop lyrics were met with this unrelated song:

What happened? Where did all that rage come from? What harshed the mellow? It couldn't have been Bush II. I blame bad parenting. Have I pointed out how Tom Morello and Barack Obama had nearly the same pedigree?

Quantum of Solstice

The sun tracks lower across the sky each day now...have you noticed?  I do because I tend to wake up everyday at sunrise. Summer's worst heat hasn't even hit and the sun, always a leading indicator of the seasons, is already ebbing. Heat is a lagging indicator. Out here, the best summer days are in the fall when the ocean has finally warmed and the sun sets earlier allowing spectacular seaside sunset bonfires: link  And there are far fewer tourists in September and October. I just hacked up a stack of wooden pallets to use as bonfire fodder this fall.

solstice

mid-13c., from O.Fr. solstice, from L. solstitium "point at which the sun seems to stand still," from sol "sun" (see sol) + pp. stem of sistere "to come to a stop, make stand still" (see assist).  

The etymology of solstice captures a 13th century optical illusion, when people still thought that the sun moved across the sky by day. It traced a bit higher each day in the summer until the end of June when it appeared to stop and reverse course to a lower arc each day until the end of December when it again stood still and then headed back up. The process appeared discontinuous or "quantized" because each day the motion started in a slightly different place than it began. Of course the whole coupled motion is a continuous process, but imagine being the first to figure how things all really worked: eppur si muove.

More Aqua Velvets

From their website:

A fascinating blend of spaghetti western, shimmering psychedelia, pristine surf, latin rhythms, mysterious faraway places, and a tongue-in-cheek dash of lounge. link

Here's a link to my all-time favorite Aqua Velvets song, Summer At Dreampoint