carmina burana

carmina burana is a fantastically powerful piece of music for a full orchestra and chorus, composed by carl orff in 1935 and 1936. you hear the last movement often in dramatic cinematic scenes, as you might recognize from this video clip:



as a teenager, i sang in the cincinnati may festival youth chorus for a few years. one year, we were lucky enough to learn this entire piece and perform at the gorgeous music hall with the adult chorus and the full cincinnati symphony orchestra! what a thrilling experience!

the video above shows that exact chorus and orchestra performing the memorable movement in 2000, just a few years after i left the group! the director, james conlon, was an intimidating man to a high school student. we were able to rehearse with the adult choir several times before we performed the piece on stage. i sat among the sopranos, continuously amazed by the powerful vibration of their collective voices. most of the rehearsals were directed by the adult choir conductor, but i distinctly remember the first rehearsal with mr. conlon.

during a quiet moment is the rehearsal, when mr. conlon was explaining an important point, my watch started beeping to tell the hour - completely mortifying my fragile young self after it took me a couple seconds to realize i was the cause of the terrible sounds!! oh NO! he stopped cold. he turned to me furiously, pointed directly at me with his director's wand, and declared that such a scene should never interrupt him again! *gasp* ... yes, sir. sorry, sir.

needless to say, i never wore that silly watch to rehearsal again, and still have nasty flashbacks sometimes when i hear cell phones ringing at inopportune times. in fact, seeing him in the above video reminded me of the incident (obviously) just after i remembered the thrill of actually performing carmina burana on stage!

anyway, the thing that reminded me of all these events, was this little video of alternative lyrics to carmina burana, that i just found on neat-o-rama. this made me cry from laughing! enjoy!

the great unveiling - TED 2009

last week saw the 2009 session of the TED conference with the theme "the great unveiling." several videos of talks are available to view already on the website, but i'm intrigued by TED prize winner, jill tartar. she is the director of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute’s Center for SETI Research and as a TED prize winner, she can share her vision ("wish") to change the world. she states:

"I wish that you would empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company.”

her ideas gone much beyond the public flashing SETI related graphics on our screen savers hoping to receive signals from distant planets! read more about her ideas: here.


in other TED news, xkcd identifies a critical question facing participants of all modern social networks:

three seed potato bread

tasty saturday morning activity! can you identify the three seeds?

the biggest galaxy in the universe

IC 1101 the biggest galaxy we've found in the universe! it lives 1 billion light years away (at z = 0.0767) in the massive abell 2029 galaxy cluster. the unromantic name comes from the index catalogue which was created at the end of the 19th century.

IC 1101 floats with a girth of 6 million light years, making it 60 times larger than our milky way with its mere 100,000 light year diameter. how many stars does the most massive elliptical galaxy contain? 100,000,000,000,000 = 100 trillion = 10^14 stars. how does the number of stars in the largest galaxy in the universe compare to the number of cells in the human body? see starts with a bang to find out!


the above right image shows the entire abell 2029 cluster in optical light from the digitized sky survey. IC 1101 is the big bright one living right at the center. the left image shows what the cluster looks like in x-ray light, as seen by the chandra telescope. the optical views shows lots of individual galaxies floating around the biggest concentration of mass that sits right at the center. the x-ray light is created by very very hot gas. the image shows a smooth distribution of multi-million degree gas, concentrated at the center of the cluster, but extending far out into the outer regions! here's another optical image...


one thing i wonder... why is this the most massive galaxy in the universe? why dont galaxies get bigger? there are several galaxies at the centers of different clusters that are close to this big, but what creates an upper limit on the mass of a galaxy? (and the dark matter halo that it lives in?) basically, the limits are set by the initial distribution of matter after the big bang, time, and the expansion of the universe, but... i still wonder.

snow joke in nottingham

i love the building in the center.


still with the heeled boots, and thinking umbrellas protect from the snow ;)














the invisible man's house...


a snow flap...


the sled riding hill - with a cleared path in the middle in order to safely walk back up the hill!






cyclists are hardcore!








my little snowman in front of ye olde trip to jerusalem - 1189 AD.


when i walked passed a couple hours later, someone had added and very happy little snowman friend!

mmm... bacon

astropixie has been baconified! :)


and to commemorate the occasion, i will share one of my favorite quotes from the simpsons:

Homer: Are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Pork chops?
Lisa: Dad, those all come from the same animal.
Homer: Heh heh heh. Ooh, yeah, right, Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.

how many days are in each month?

as soon as i learned the knuckle trick, it was all i ever needed to quickly remember how many days are in each month! as demonstrated in the photo below, start with two fists. the leftmost knuckle represents january, then the valley is february, the next knuckle is march, etc... all the months on knuckles have 31 days. the valley months have 30 (or how ever many february has in a particular year!). very useful!


image found at top of the lawn.

calvin and hobbes in the snow

never get tired of calvin & hobbes.

venus and the moon over my 'hood

finally caught a few glimpses of the crescent moon and venus shining over my neighborhood of nottingham at the end of last month. lovely!





venus is to the lower right of the moon, although its a bit tough to spot in the small versions of the photos! oh well.

millenium falcon sled

i would love to do some sled riding with this: the millenium falcon sled!!


by the way, it sounds so weird to my ear to hear everyone in england talk about going "sledging."

while on the star wars theme, i'll share these funny action figures. you decided... obama or darth vader??

dick cheney helps economy?

once again, the onion finds a way to hysterically encompass many of the US's political issues into one solid headline:

Cheney Dunk Tank Raises $800 Billion For Nation


if only it were that easy (and that fun)...

physics turns me on

y tu?


get your very own here

snow creatures

in honor of snow finally sticking to the ground a little bit in nottingham... here are various snow creatures i've found pictures of around the web!

snow face from neatorama.







funny snowmen pics from unmc...







simonk at flickr...



mbryan777 at flickr...



snowman guarding... a beach! from extra medium at flickr



from chick-a-dee at flickr


carnby street - london!