My guess is that “Radar Love” is going to get a lot of love in this category, and it’s easy to understand why. Still, as I have explained before, I’m a simply country boy.

So let’s see how many dueling lead guitarists Molly Hatchet can line up across the front of the stage for the solo to “Flirtin’ with Disaster.”

Happy Saturday. Y’all drive safe now, y’hear? Full story »

Katrin is a twenty-three year-old with a six year-old’s face. The first time I met her, I watched her drink neat rum without wincing. I couldn’t tell if it was responsible for the moisture in her eyes.

The second time I saw Katrin we were at a squat party, both wasted. She was high up, barefoot on fourth-floor scaffolding. Her asymmetrical blonde hair looked white in the streetlights. Katrin slipped and dangled from the rusted bend of an unstable pole. I can’t feel my feet, I don’t know where to put them. I guided her down with beer-slurred words, hands on my heart as if to keep it inside. Full story »

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“We choose … to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” 
                    – JFK’s moon speech, 1962

He snaps off the transistor
voice, choosing the hard things,
more concerned with politics in hand:
the rigged feel of a borrowed
boat, the smile on a borrowed wife –
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The summer of 1986 has lodged itself in the pleasure centers of my brain, although a hard look at the details makes me wonder why. Yeah, I was working in what passed for a cool job for a kid who’d recently graduated from college (copy and production manager at a rock radio station, albeit one that paid me less than $13,000 a year), and maybe that’s most of it. I remember lots of sunny weather, pool parties, incredible music, and I remember Karen, the staggeringly beautiful woman that I dated for awhile. Tall, lean, a study in elegance with a quiet smile that could have lit every stage on Broadway. Full story »

On Monday, I wrote that there were only two possibilities for why Venus’ surface temperature is so hot – either something internal to the planet’s crust and core was keeping Venus hot, or something about the atmosphere was. Tuesday I showed that it wasn’t internal heating. Wednesday I disproved the “Venus formed recently” hypothesis. And yesterday I ruled out a celestial collision that might have melted Venus’ crust, effectively absolving Venus’ core of any responsiblity for Venus’ surface temperature. Given the planet itself can’t be the source of the heat,the atmosphere has to be keeping the surface hot somehow. Full story »

It’s been a big week for the USA.

First, American troops raided Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and killed al Qaeda’s leader.

And today is the 50th anniversary of America’s first manned space flight. On May 5th, 1961, Alan Shepard lifted off from  Cape Canaveral for a 15 minute flight that got America on the board against the hated Soviets, whose hero Yuri Gagarin had not only already flown in space but had orbited the earth some weeks earlier.

While Shepard’s flight was only a jog compared to Gagarin’s, it had plenty of drama. The US was trailing the Soviets in rocket technology and the previous two launches (one with a dummy astronaut) had gone off course and subsequently  had to  be destroyed.  No one at NASA could say for certain that Shepard might not go the way of his mannequin predecessor.

In fact, Shepard’s flight was delayed three days as NASA technicians tried to solve potential flight problems. Full story »

Yesterday’s song was tough, but today? This is easy. There are a lot of great sunny day songs out there, but I don’t know that anybody has ever quite captured the magic like Scot Sax. So dial up the smiles, folks – here’s Bachelor Number One and “I Am the Summertime.”

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Artist rendition of celestial impact that formed the Moon.
Fahad Sulehria, www.novacelestia.com

The images returned by various robotic probes to Venus suggest that the planet’s crust is geologically young – less than a billion years old. Scientists currently believe that, because Venus has no continental drift to speak of, heat generated by radioactive decay in Venus’ core gradually builds up until it’s hot enough to melt significant portions of the crust. The resulting volcanism would release so much lava that it would largely erase geologic features that existed prior to the “resurfacing.”

Another alternative hypothesis for the young observed age of Venus’ surface is that Venus could have been impacted by a large asteroid or comet that released enough energy in the collision to resurface Venus. Full story »

And now, for today’s reading.

I’ve written in the past–whether it was about IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge or City Forward projects–about the different ways that cities can serve as laboratories of government and how cool it is that these projects can be part of this process. Given their size and immediacy in our lives, they are the level of government we are most intimate with. You may think state and national government is more exciting; still, nothing comes close to the city in terms of its impact on our day to day lives, and as they are more immediate, we can also have a much greater impact on them. Full story »

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I didn’t realize how hard this one was going to be when I slotted it into the challenge. I just spent the last hour and a half sifting through my iTunes, playing, sampling, searching. Checking to see what was available on YouTube. Deciding, undeciding. So many choices – The Samples, Garbage, Queensryche, REM, Van Morrison, Peter Gabriel, The Pinetops, on and on and on.

I finally settled here, with Jets Overhead, a band I think may be the best of our current generation. Full story »

Simulation of planetary accretion (Ken Rice, UC-Riverside)

Yesterday we found that, for Venus to be hot due to internal heating, either the planet’s core would have to be a star, its crust would have to be less than a meter thick, or its crust would have be composed of diamond. None of these is remotely possible, so the internal heating hypothesis has been entirely disproved. Another hypothesis proposed by climate disruption deniers for why the surface temperature of Venus is so hot is that Venus might have formed recently (geologically speaking) instead of having formed about 4.5 billion years ago along with the Earth and the rest of the planets.

We can test this hypothesis a couple of different ways. The first is to again use the mathematics of a black body. In the case of an ideal black body the size of Venus, we can calculate the amount of time it would take to cool from one temperature to another as Venus radiates energy into space. Full story »

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I’ve had three favorite bands in my life and at various points each has done a song or two I didn’t care for. With Queen it was “Get Down Make Love.” With U2 I haven’t exactly hated much, but there have been a few tracks along the way that I felt weakened the overall impact of the record.

But man, no band I ever loved hit a sour note quite like The Police did on Synchronicity. I guess Sting figured he had to let Andy write a song or he’d be upset or something, but whatever the reasoning, “Mother” was the mother of all bad ideas. Full story »

Hemispheric view of Venus produced by Magellan.

One of the hypotheses proposed by climate disruption deniers for Venus’ hot surface temperature is that Venus has an unusually hot core. The logic goes like this – if the core is hot enough, then the surface temperature would be from heat bleeding through the crust instead of from the greenhouse effect of a 97% carbon dioxide (CO₂) atmosphere. This hypothesis can be quickly disproved by running three simple calculations.

Scientists estimate that Venus’ solid crust is about 50 km thick, and data from robotic probes indicates that it’s of similar composition to the Earth’s crust. The Earth’s crust is largely silicates, and so I’ve simplified the following calculations by assuming that the entire surface of Venus is composed of silica (silicon dioxide, SiO₂, aka quartz), which makes up about 60% of the Earth’s crust. Full story »

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TRANSCRIPT Full story »