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Benvenuti in queste pagine dedicate a scienza, storia ed arte. Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, Torino

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

ESO - AB Pictoris and its companion


European Southern Observatory (ESO) - Coronagraphic image of AB Pictoris showing its tiny companion (bottom left). The data was obtained on 16 March 2003 with NACO on the VLT, using a 1.4 arcsec occulting mask on top of AB Pictoris.

Chandra Proxima Centauri

"The Chandra X-ray Observatory is a satellite launched on STS-93 by NASA on July 23, 1999. It was named in honor of Indian-American physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar who is known for determining the maximum mass for white dwarfs. "Chandra" also means "moon" or "luminous" in Sanskrit. Chandra Observatory is the third of NASA's four Great Observatories. The first wasHubble Space Telescope; second the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, launched in 1991; and last is the Spitzer Space Telescope." read more at
See at http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2004/proxima/ images of Proxima Centauri.
"Proxima Centauri: A red dwarf star 4 light years from the Sun. (Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO). X-ray observations of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, have shown that its surface is in a state of turmoil. Flares, or explosive outbursts occur almost continually. This behavior can be traced to Proxima Centauri's low mass, about a tenth that of the Sun. In the cores of low mass stars, nuclear fusion reactions that convert hydrogen to helium proceed very slowly, and create a turbulent, convective motion throughout their interiors. This motion stores up magnetic energy which is often released explosively in the star's upper atmosphere where it produces flares in X-rays and other forms of light. X-rays from Proxima Centauri are consistent with a point-like source. The extended X-ray glow is an instrumental effect. The nature of the two dots above the image is unknown - they could be background sources."

Physics - Chance of thunder and gamma-ray flashes

Physics - Chance of thunder—and gamma-ray flashes
In a paper appearing in Physical Review Letters, scientists in Italy (Tavani et al.) present new space-based observations of gamma-ray emissions from thunderclouds, called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs). Their analysis suggests that storms located deep within our atmosphere sometimes produce bursts of electrons with energies up to 100 MeV.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Craters on Mercury


This image has been obtained processing an image recorded by the spacecraft MESSENGER  during its planet fly-by  (credits: NASA-JPL)

Lord Arthur Savile's Crime

Il delitto di Lord Arthur Savile, titolo originale Lord Arthur Savile's Crime è un racconto di Oscar Wilde del 1887. Il sottotitolo dell'opera era A Study of Duty (letteralmente "uno studio sul dovere").
In this story,  Lord Arthur Savile, is introduced by Lady Windermere to Mr Septimus R. Podgers, a chiromantist, who reads his palm and tells him that he will be a murderer. Lord Arthur wants to marry, so he decides that he has no right to do so until he has committed the murder...
...
Suddenly she looked eagerly round the room, and said, in her clear contralto voice, 'Where is my cheiromantist?'  'Your what, Gladys?' exclaimed the Duchess, giving an involuntary start. 'My cheiromantist, Duchess; I can't live without him at present.'
 'Dear Gladys! you are always so original,' murmured the Duchess, trying to remember what a cheiromantist really was, and hoping it was not the same as a cheiropodist.
 'He comes to see my hand twice a week regularly,' continued Lady Windermere, 'and is most interesting about it.'  'Good heavens!' said the Duchess to herself, 'he is a sort of cheiropodist after all. How very dreadful. I hope he is a foreigner at any rate. It wouldn't be quite so bad then.'
 'I must certainly introduce him to you.' 'Introduce him!' cried the Duchess; 'you don't mean to say he is here?' and she began looking about for a small tortoise-shell fan and a very tattered lace shawl, so as to be ready to go at a moment's notice.

Rhapsody in Blue

At http://www.archive.org/details/rhapblue11924 there is the original recording of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.  This record was released soon after the piece was first performed (1924)  and soon replaced by an electrically recorded record.
Gershwin told his first biographer Isaac Goldberg in 1931: "It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang, that is so often so stimulating to a composer – I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise... And there I suddenly heard, and even saw on paper – the complete construction of the Rhapsody, from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind and tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance."

Analogue audio - Cylinders and 78 rpm

"Phonograph cylinders were the earliest commercial medium for recording and reproducing sound. Commonly known simply as "records" in their era of greatest popularity (c. 1888–1915), these cylinder shaped objects had an audio recording engraved on the outside surface which could be reproduced when the cylinder was played on a mechanical phonograph. The competing disc-shaped gramophone record system triumphed in the market place to become the dominant commercial audio medium in the 1910s, and commercial mass production of phonograph cylinders ended in 1929" from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph_cylinder
"Early disc recordings were produced in a variety of speeds ranging from 60 to 130 rpm, and a variety of sizes. From 1900, the two leading manufacturers of flat records were Columbia, which used 80 rpm as its speed, and Victor, which used 76.59 rpm. Since one company's records were playable on the other's machines, the standard speed became 78 rpm, which is around the average speed between the two. By 1925, the speed of the record became standardised at a nominal value of 78 rpm."
You can listen old cylinders and 78 rpms at http://www.archive.org/details/78rpm Internet Archive has a huge collection, quite interesting for researches on the modern music history.
rpm = revolutions per minute

Sunday, January 2, 2011

E A Poe - The Gold-Bug

William Legrand becomes obsessed with searching for treasure after being bitten by a scarab-like bug thought to be made of pure gold. He notifies his closest friend, the narrator, telling him to immediately come visit him at his home on Sullivan's Island in South Carolina. Upon the narrator's arrival, Legrand informs him that they are embarking upon a search for lost treasure of the pirate Captain Kidd. http://poe.thefreelibrary.com/Gold-Bug


Profiles - Duchess of Medina Sidonia

"Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo was not only a novelist but also a historian, and lived in her palace in Sanlúcar with the most important private archive in Europe, said to be more than one million historical documents. She spent the latter years of her life cataloguing this legacy, in the residence where he ancestors have lived since 1297. The Duchess said in an interview in 2004 that the oldest document in the archive dates from 1128, and published a book ‘Africa versus America’ at the beginning of this decade, the result of years of exhaustive research of her own archive and others in Spain. In it, she challenged the official history that the Americas were discovered by Christopher Columbus, claiming that trade had been taking place across the Atlantic for centuries before the official ‘Discovery.’"
Read more:
http://www.typicallyspanish.com/news/publish/article_15508.shtml#ixzz19sDv9POH
and http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/misc/newsid_1683000/1683276.stm

A fish or a bird - Geoglyphs Titicaca



A geoglyph of Titicaca - As seen by Google Maps



The geoglyph viewed from the ground (Courtesy, Gary Mariscal Herrera, Director Instituto Nacional de Cultura, Peru)

Centenario - Jose Maria Arguedas

2011, Centenario della nascita di Jose Maria Arguedas, here a poem

They say that we do not know anything
That we are backwardness
That our head needs changing for a better one

They say that some learned men are saying this about us
These academics who reproduce themselves
In our own lives

What is there on the banks of these rivers, Doctor?
Take out your binoculars
And your spectacles
Look if you can.
Five hundred flowers
From five hundred different types of potato
Grow on the terraces
Above abysses
That your eyes don't reach
Those five hundred flowers
Are my brain
My flesh

From: A call to certain academics by José María Arguedas, translated from the Quechua by William Rowe.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

New Horizons in Space Missions

New Horizons is a NASA spacecraft mission currently moving toward Pluto. It is expected to be the firsts pacecraft to fly by and study this dwarf planet and its moons, Charon, Nix, and Hydra.
New Horizons was launched on January, 2006. It flew by Jupiter on February, 2007, and orbited Saturn on June, 2008. It will arrive at Pluto on July, 2015, after which it will continue into the Kuiper belt.
Pluto is the largest object of the Kuiper belt, which is the region of the Solar System extending from the orbit of Neptune (at 30 AU) to approximately 55 AU from the Sun. The belt consists mainly of small bodies, remnants from the Solar System's formation. It is the home to at least three dwarf planets – Pluto, Haumea, and Makemake. Some of the Solar System's moons, such as Neptune's Triton and Saturn's Phoebe, are also believed to have originated in the region.
More info Wiki

W. Irving - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

This evening the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving.
"Another of his sources of fearful pleasure was to pass long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives, as they sat spinning by the fire, with a row of apples roasting and spluttering along the hearth, and listen to their marvellous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields, and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges, and haunted houses, and particularly of the headless horseman, or Galloping Hessian of the Hollow, as they sometimes called him. He would delight them equally by his anecdotes of witchcraft, and of the direful omens and portentous sights and sounds in the air, which prevailed in the earlier times of Connecticut; and would frighten them woefully with speculations upon comets and shooting stars; and with the alarming fact that the world did absolutely turn round, and that they were half the time topsy-turvy!"

Owl butterflies

Torino, Museo Scienze

Dumbledore, not Silente

A dumbledore is a bee (bombo). The Headmaster of Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore, has a name showing one of the features of his character: as a bee in summer, he is always moving and his humming is pervading all the school. On the contary, the italian translation of the name in Albus Silente changes the character in authority and austerity.