WHAT'S NEW IN ASTRONOMY

Before I get started with what's new, I'll put up this beautiful shot of an erupting Icelandic volcano. It reveals three different kinds of lightning occurring simultaneously.

Most people believe that stars are formed by the action of gravity on rotating disks of gas and dust. That's widely believed but last year two physicists got the million dollar Shaw Prize for proving it wrong. According to them gravity alone wouldn't be able to destabilize the disk and attract matter inward while angular momentum was simultaneously pushing it out.

These guys claim the missing ingredient is magnetism. Apparently not all disks are sufficiently conductive and those that aren't will never form stars. Some disks remain...disks.

Above, the far side of the Moon. It's cratered more than the side facing us, but that's what you would expect of the side facing outer space. What people want to know is how come it's not covered by smooth, dark, volcanic maria (seas) like the near side. The answer appears to  be that the Lunar crust on our side is simply thinner for some reason.

Here's an odd one: a distant asteroid named "Chaklido" has just been discovered to have rings like Saturn. Chaklido is 250 km in diameter.

HOMEMADE MOBILES

I love modern art mobiles but you don't see many for sale these days. It looks like if you want that sort of thing you're stuck with making it yourself. My kid's birthday is coming up soon and I think and I'll take a stab at it. I'll come up with something original but I'll start by seeing what ideas are already out there.

The obvious first place to start is Calder but his ideas have been stolen so many times that the whole world has memorized them.

Then there's Miro (above). He had tons of useful ideas. Half his paintings seem like they were made with mobiles in mind. What appears above as lines in a 2D painting could be made of thin black wire in 3D.

What a guy!

Tim Biskup (above) should try his hand at mobiles. His style is perfect for them.

Ready-made ones are available for babies (above). I don't know...maybe they could be altered.

Mary Blair's shapes (above) and colors seem like a useful resource.

It's not too hard to imagine what a character-based Blair mobile (above) might look like. My kid would probably prefer something more manly, of course.

I'll try to resist giving my kid the standard dorm room beer molecule (above) .

DRAWING ON THE IPAD

I've been using my iPad mini a lot lately, more so than my desktop. I use it for cartooning (above) and animation. I work on several sketching apps but the one I always return to is "Paper" by a studio called 53. I thought I'd put up a few examples of how different artists use that program so you can get an idea of its range. 

Paper is especially good at watercolor-type sketches (above).  Unlike real watercolors you can dial up the color saturation where you need to and get rich darks that approximate gauche.

People even do acrylic-type pictures (above) on this app, but I'm not crazy about the way they look. In my opinion you're better off using a desktop program for something like that.

Paper seems to work best when it's used for light-hearted, watercolor styles like the one above.

It's amazing how quickly it lets you can draw scenes like this one (above).

You can teach yourself color with it.

Paper doesn't contain any fonts but it's friendly to funky hand-drawn lettering. In a meeting I'd rather have a real pencil and a real legal pad, but Paper's writing could still be useful for other purposes.

There's (above) that 90s light-hearted style again. If you use Paper you may find yourself drawing and painting in that style because the program strongly supports it. If that's not your thing I wouldn't worry about it. Believe it or not, the program's artistic bias actually helps you to define your own unique style. I guess having something to conceptually bounce off of is actually stimulating.

A caveat: Paper is a wonderful app but it has bugs and its stylus, called "Pencil," doesn't always work like you want it to. Face it, none of the drawing and animating apps are perfect. I still recommend it. The basic app is free and comes with their very best brush tool, so you can't complain about the price. If you don't have a stylus you can use your finger. About a third of everything I've done has been with my finger, even when I have a stylus in my hand.

Lots of people have said that this is the drawing app Steve Jobs would have created if he'd put his mind to it. That's high praise.

WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM CRIME

The other day I was sitting in a restaurant, eavesdropping on the conversation of what I imagined were two criminals at the next table. They went in and out of some East European language, so I couldn't understand all of what they were saying, but it seemed like the young guy, who looked like a youthful Tony Soprano, was pleading with the old guy (probably not family), to give him a chance to prove himself. The older guy laughed it off and said there was no way he was going to trust somebody that young with that kind of responsibility. Responsibility? Responsibility for what, I wondered.

I had to leave before learning how this played out, but I got the feeling that the young guy was going to get what he wanted.  The old guy delighted in tormenting him with frequent cel phone calls, and you don't tease people that way unless you like them.

What struck me about this conversation was how oddly natural it seemed. A young criminal attempted to make himself useful to an older criminal who apparently liked and trusted him. They both came from similar backgrounds, both were street smart and ambitious,  both knew the value of loyalty.  Not only that but they needed each other. The old one needed the young one's energy and ability to take risks, the young one needed the older one to show him the ropes and open organizational doors. It was a comfortable fit.

How different than the way non-criminals climb the ladder! For them it's done through Human Relations departments, forms, background checks to college, and the like. Criminals, on the other hand,  don't care if you've gone to college, they just want to know if you can get the job done.

Maybe criminals know something we don't. Isn't getting the job done the most important thing? It seems to me that we waste the lives of millions of people who are potentially good and even great at what they do, but who are free spirits who find school and the practice of ticket-punching to be intolerable. They don't like following someone else's agenda. How much schooling did Carnegie, Ford and J.P. Morgan have? We seem to be telling people like them that we don't want them, that there's no place for them. 

I think there is such a thing as a criminal type. Sociopaths do exist, and I believe in coming down on them strong, but are all criminals sociopaths? Aren't at least some of them just part of an alternative economy? Why are we torturing these people? 

Forget drugs and all that, what I'm talking about is legalizing the black market. Nobody should need a permit to sell anything that's not stolen or dangerous, or carried out in a wholly inappropriate place. Starting a business should be as easy as renting a location and hanging out a sign. Health care, Social Security and all that are all good ideas but they shouldn't be the responsibility of the employer



College is so over-rated. When the government began guaranteeing school loans, and students were flush with borrowed dollars, zillions of new colleges sprang up all over the country to get the easy money. There was a race to the bottom as every new school dumbed down the curriculum even farther to please students and rake in the bucks.

INTERVIEW WITH EDDIE FITZGERALD

EXT. UNCLE EDDIE'S HOUSE:

IN THE BACKYARD:

EDDIE: "Glad to meetcha! They told me you'd be coming. Have a seat, have a seat!"

INTERVIEWER: "Thanks! It's an honor to meet you, sir. I do interviews for Animation Magazine and they tell me you have stories about every big shot in the animation business."

EDDIE: "Haw! Do I!? If I told you only half the stories I know, we'd be here all month. You name the show and I worked on it. I've worked with eeeeeeeeverybody."

INTERVIEWER: "Really!? Do you know John Kricfalusi?"

EDDIE: "John K? Um, well, not exactly." 

INTERVIEWER: "Mike Fontanelli?"

EDDIE: "Fonta...who?"

INTERVIEWER: "How about Eric Goldberg?"

EDDIE: "Gee, he never answers my..."

INTERVIEWER: "How about Brad Bird?"

EDDIE: "Brad Bird...hmmm, I think I parked in his space once."

INTERVIEWER: "Seth MacFarlane?"

EDDIE: "You don't have his number, do you?"

INTERVIEWER: "Matt Groening?"

EDDIE: "Um, no."

INTERVIEWER: "Pete Docter?"

EDDIE: "Nope."

INTERVIEWER: "Tim Burton?"

EDDIE: "Er...well, not really."

INTERVIEWER: "Bill Kopp?"

EDDIE: "Well, actually, I haven't...." 

INTERVIEWER: "How about John Lasseter?"

EDDIE: "John Lassater!? How the heck am I supposed to meet John Lassater? He lives in Cuppertino or Emeryville...some place like that." 

INTERVIEWER: "Well how about producers like...someone like Steven Spielberg?"

EDDIE: "Ahhhhh, stop right there. Steven. Now we're talkin'. Yes, yes, I've been over to his house several times. He just emailed me last week." 

INTERVIEWER: "Really? Can we see it?"

EDDIE: "No need. I memorized it...it said, 'You missed the grass near the rose bushes and the front lawn could use a really robust watering this time.' He calls the watering 'robust.' Isn't that poetic? Only Steven would think of something like that."

EDDIE: "Hey, what's that on your lens?"

INTERVIEWER: "Oh, a pebble got under the lens cover."

EDDIE: "Hold still. I have my Swiss Army Knife. I'll dig it out!"

OUTCAULT

Outcault was of course, the creator of Hogan's Alley and of the Yellow Kid, America's first regular comic strip character. Outcault was a terrific draughtsman, and a wonderful colorist.

I used to find his work off-putting and old-fashioned, maybe because the one panel, super-large format seemed like an inefficient way to tell a story. Somewhere along the line I came to accept the strip on its own terms, story be damned, and now I love it. In the day when newspapers seemed as big as bed sheets the effect of these poster-size pages must have been nothing less than glorious.

Bye the way, look at how saturated the color is here (above). Is that a result of computer enhancement or were the original newspaper pages like that? 

I'm guessing that this muted color (above) is what the public saw. Outcault distracts us from the dim color by reserving his brightest colors for the foreground and muting the backgrounds.

Haw! He didn't always get his perspective right, but it doesn't matter.  

This (above) looks like a page from a book, and maybe these were the bold colors that Outcault would have preferred to work with. The subject is unfortunately racist but I include it here because the execution is so beautiful.

  Boy, Outcault cartoons inspired toys (above) even in the late 1890s! I wonder if any toys were made of the Thomas Nast characters? Were there Boss Tweed dolls? There must have been lots of Nast Santa Clauses.

Near the end of the run Hogan's Alley Outcault began his popular Buster Brown strip and that spawned even more toys.

For comparison, here's (above) toys made from McKay's characters.

By the way, I'm sorry to run these toy pictures without attribution. I'll try to find out where they came from and put up a link to it. 

MORE RECENT ASTRONOMY PICTURES

Above is Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. It's tiger stripe surface constantly changes due to water ice escaping from the interior and reshaping the surface. Recently discovered gravitational fluctuations indicate that a large liquid ocean may exist under the surface, making Enceladus a candidate for life.

Where the moon gets its warmth isn't understood. Another moon of more or less the same size and distance from Saturn is completely dead.

The inflation theory has come under attack recently by scientists who claim that it's not needed to explain why the universe is as uniform as it is. In March new data was recorded by a microwave observatory at the South Pole that seems to confirm the inflation theory. The findings are controversial and the facts are still being checked.

Here's (above) an odd one: a galaxy that's tearing itself apart from the inside. Not much star formation is visible in the pinwheel, but lots of recently created star clusters appear in the matter ejected from the galaxy.

Above, the Great Nebula in Orion, about 1500 light years away. It's in the same spiral arm that we inhabit. The colors are unfortunately false. They're added to code  temperature and composition.

Here (above) are new gamma ray photos of the center of our galaxy. They've caused quite a stir because they may be evidence that particles of dark matter (called "WIMPS) are colliding with each other there, and producing much more gamma rays than present theory allows for. This conclusion is so far hotly contested.