Immense coils of hot, electrified gas in the Sun’s atmosphere behave like a musical instrument, scientists say.These “coronal loops” carry acoustic waves in much the same way that sound is carried through a pipe organ.
Solar explosions called micro-flares generate sound booms which are then propagated along the coronal loops.
“The effect is much like plucking a guitar string,” Professor Robert von Fay-Siebenbuergen told BBC News at the National Astronomy Meeting in Preston.
Before most of Manhattan could shake itself out of bed, the great Empire State Building light-show smackdown — an eerily silent rainbow of shifting color high above the city that continued for 71 predawn minutes yesterday — had its finale an hour before sunrise.Tests early on Friday compared three methods of illuminating the Empire State Building. On the building’s left face were its existing lights; in the center, the light-emitting diodes of Color Kinetics; on the right face, those of Philips.
At stake was a $5 million contract to bring 21st-century illumination to the city’s tallest skyscraper. And so, four blocks away from the building that jutted into the clear night sky, in a command center 28 floors above depopulated streets, walkie-talkies squawked as the building’s management witnessed a Kong vs. Godzilla face-off between two lighting behemoths.
“Now that’s a red,” said James T. Connors, the general manager of the Empire State Building Company, observing solid test-pattern blocks of color as they bathed nine floors in light. Primary hues soon yielded to vibrant stripes, spectrum cascades, strobe effects and programmed sequences called “Fourth of July,” “New Year’s Eve” and “Fireworks.”
Above, on the narrow 72nd floor parapet of the skyscraper at Fifth Avenue and West 34th Street — which is ordinarily dark after midnight — the two contenders, Color Kinetics Inc. and Philips Electronics, had installed test stands of high-brightness light-emitting diodes, or L.E.D.’s.
The test marked the beginning of a high-tech future for the landmark skyscraper. For more than a quarter century, the color of the floodlights has been changed by teams of maintenance workers. More than 200 times a year, the workers brave the elements for six hours to install, by hand, colored plastic lenses on 208 10,000-watt upward-facing floodlights on the 72nd and 81st floors, and more lights in the spire.
In the future, the building will be flooded in “intelligent illumination,” employing a new generation of computer-controlled L.E.D.’s capable of producing millions of colors and an infinity of patterns.
Yesterday’s test began at 3:58 a.m. Floors 72 to 81 on the western face were illuminated: Color Kinetics on the northern portion of the face, and Philips to the south.
The competition demonstrates “nothing less than the digitalization of an entire major industry, replacing archaic mechanical illumination with smarter lighting,”
Chemists at the University of California, San Diego have demonstrated the feasibility of exploiting sunlight to transform a greenhouse gas into a useful product.Many Earth Week activities will draw attention to the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the resulting impact on global climate. Now Clifford Kubiak, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and his graduate student Aaron Sathrum have developed a prototype device that can capture energy from the sun, convert it to electrical energy and “split” carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide (CO) and oxygen.
Because their device is not yet optimized, they still need to input additional energy for the process to work. However, they hope that their results, which they presented at last month’s meeting of the American Chemical Society, will draw attention to the promise of the approach.
“For every mention of CO2 splitting, there are more than 100 articles on splitting water to produce hydrogen, yet CO2 splitting uses up more of what you want to put a dent into,” explained Kubiak. “It also produces CO, an important industrial chemical, which is normally produced from natural gas. So with CO2 splitting you can save fuel, produce a useful chemical and reduce a greenhouse gas.”
I had a meeting with Gisela, the director for Antigona this evening. It was a very productive meeting. Nothing was settled. Well a few things were settled, but far more interesting were the questions that were raised. Approaching a text as a framework to ask questions is far more significant than treating it as an answer or a question that need be answered.
One of the questions we asked was what is the role of a narrator, a story teller, in our contemporary world. I was hard pressed to find an analog to the role of the story teller as found in traditional social settings. An actor, obviously is a story teller. There are all manner of radio and television personalities that come to mind. Yet none of these hold the same resonance as the traditional storyteller. Homer or the Shaman. These do not exist as a cultural stronghold in our society.
Nothing quite feels right to me. Gisela mentioned the rock star or the DJ as a modern analog. Its an interesting approach, but I am not sure how it intersects with the text. There was a lot more to the discussion but much of it was like this, circling around an answer that we both felt was there, but never quite hitting on it. I did have a wonderful Chai Latte in the process though.
Some of the problem with locating this personality is related to the nature of religion and spirituality in our culture. America gives one the choice, Atheism or Fundamentalism. ‘In God We Trust” is printed on our money, but that symbol swings both ways. God money I’ll do anything for you. The role of the story teller necessarily lives between these two extremes, just as the Shaman lives between the physical world and the land of spirits. It is not a sermon but there is a spiritual quality to the storytellers work. They are the grand narrator.
These are some interesting questions that will resolve themselves, or not, as we progress with the piece.
And just what the fuck does this have to do with light?!?!?!
Yet another reason why I love my job. It has absolutely nothing, and yet everything to do with it. Discussing the notion of time as projecting both forwards and back continually into this evolving moment does not in any way translate directly into the placement of lighting equipment or colors. It does however, begin to point the way to a worldview. A way of seeing and a way of being. When that world is understood, when you can see through the worldview of the piece, then questions like the angle and color of lights begin to answer themselves. It becomes obvious.
We did speak about the quality of light some. That it must be an exploration of the lightness of light. That is, the essence of light. Light at its core being. What is the existential foundation of light? When it is stripped bare, what is light?
This is not an easy question. I do not know if it a question that can be answered. A physicist even is hard pressed to answer it. Well, is it a wave or a particle? “Its both. Yet not quite either. You see, it changes.” How much harder in an aesthetic pursuit where even a simple binary like that is not possible.
Light is everything. It is our entire reality. At least our physical reality. We go through our day to day lives in a world of signs and signifiers. Yet every object we see is no object. We see light. The computer screen you read these words on is light, perhaps that is obvious but even then we find occasion to mistake the screen for too solid flesh. The computer is light, at least everything that you do not touch. The walls in the room in which you are sitting, the people around you every day, all are light.
This is no metaphor. This is our life. We often forget that we are constantly living this illusion. Believing in the reality of our sensory world we think we see ‘real’ solid objects. It is real and it is solid, but our sight is just light. Turn off the overhead light and turn on a desk lamp. The world is changed.
A new world is born.
There are loads of different types of clients out there and chances are at some point you’ll get to meet all of them. So let’s take a look through some typical clients and see if you recognise a few of your own in there!
