I got a great seat on the steps of the Capitol facing the Mall, and I was able to watch about half of the public dress rehearsal for the Memorial Day special, which included Tony Danza, Steve Buscemi, and Charlotte Church. She sang “The Prayer,” in tribute to the heroes and victims of 9/11. Her soprano is even richer than I remember from her CD, though her speaking voice remains burbly. The setting sun and the amber-lit National Mall made for a wondrous backdrop behind the stage. Washington really is a beautiful city.
She Who Burbles
Charlotte Church is singing here in Washington, for the Memorial Day concert on the Capitol Lawn. There’s a live open rehearsal scheduled for 7pm tonight, at the same place. I should walk down there and check it out. According to my girlfriend, between songs and through applause, Ms. Church emits a precociously high-pitched “ThankYOU!” which can only be described as a “burble.” I must confirm whether that is truly what it sounds like.
Slingshot
MeFi on Supernova
MeFi feedback on the HR8210 supernova story has some interesting info, playing down the media-induced sensationalism surrounding the discovery.
On Speed Ramping
I can tolerate seeing Matrix-style speed ramping (a.k.a. “Bullet Time,” the speedup-slowdown time effect, often with an abrupt transition from fast to slow) used in every other commercial for cars and roller coasters, but the way the effect was abused in When Animals Invade Your Home was just plain silly.
Some tips for you video editors out there: first of all, speed ramps don’t look good with walking people or animals, and using footage shot on video rather than high-speed film makes it even worse. Indiscriminate speed-adjustments on video footage tend to create jarring, jerky movements, more so if your keyframes are out of sync at the transition between the fast and the slow clips. When slowing down your footage on lower-end editing machines, always do it at increments which maintain an integer of frames per second, else you’ll get that same jerky movement effect caused by poor frame interpolation. When in doubt, use halfs and fourths.
Not that I have a very big audience of video editors out there, anyway. :P
Goliath
Nova Potential
The white dwarf HR 8210 may be set to go supernova, as its mass approaches the Chandrasekhar Limit. The star is 150 light-years away, which puts our planet well into the danger zone. Even more sobering is the fact that, if the star has already gone nova, we won’t know till 150 years after the event. So if HR8210 had decided to start violently blowing off its excess mass in 1853, we would only start seeing the first wave of light and radiation around next year.
Update: The danger is mostly just media-induced sensationalism. More here.
Love and Toilet Seats
Contrary to what you may have read on the web, ******* and I are not yet married, we are not vegetarians, and love does NOT mean never having to lift the toilet seat. (When the original article was published a couple of years ago, the writer, a good friend, used our actual names for his hypothetical “neighbors.” Tiff and I had great fun tweaking the frantic callers who rung us up to see if the rumors were true. I told them it happened because I was pregnant.)
Nicotine Water
Nicotine-spiked bottled water. I don’t know what to say.
SMS Weblog
Check it out: SMS Blog. Let’s see if it works… Yup, it works! Now my mobile blog is no longer alone.