Are "fan pods" the future of concerts? - by Richard Trapunski - 8 May 2020

Are "fan pods" the future of concerts?

The first post-quarantine concert is Travis McCready in Arkansas – and an extensive list of COVID-19 protocols will be in place

by Richard Trapunski

May 8, 2020

1:29 PM

Maria Jose Govea

MorMor played within a pod at last year's Red Bull Music Festival in Toronto – though not for social distancing reasons.

It's going to be quite awhile before concerts happen in Toronto again, but in some parts of the United States, where COVID-19 restrictions are being loosened, live music is already seeing a tentative return.

On May 15, the first non-livestream concert in North America in close to two months will happen in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Country-rock singer Travis McCready, frontman of the band Bishop Gunn, will play a solo acoustic show at the venue Temple Live.

The venue's website lists its extensive COVID-19 operating protocol for the show. The venue will operate at 20 per cent capacity, from 1,100 to 229. The space will have one-way walkways, the venue will be sanitized via "fog sprayers," soap and paper towel dispensers will be no-touch, masks will be available for purchase and every attendee will have their temperature taken when entering the venue. Food and drink will all be prepackaged or have lids.

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Most intriguingly and most reminiscent of the dystopia Love Is Blind predicted just months ago, Ticketmaster says attendees will be separated into “fan pods,” rows of two to 12 tickets sold in groups at least six feet apart.

Could this be a glimpse into the near future of live music?

UPDATE (5/11): An earlier version of this story reported that Live Nation was putting on the concert. It is not. NOW regrets the error. 

@trapunski

RIP Tony Allen (1940 - 2020) - Drum Pioneer of Afrobeat - Requiescat in pace et in amore

 (Tony Allen: The 5 Major Drum Patterns of Afrobeat 3:22 min)

Tony Allen (1940-2020): Pioneering drummer of Afrobeat dies

Few drummers have played such a key role in creating a musical genre and style as Tony Allen. The Nigerian drummer, who died of an aneurysm aged 79 in Paris, where he lived, was the percussive genius behind Afrobeat. His long-time pioneering collaborator Fela Kuti (1938-1997), the famed Nigerian musician and composer, once declared “without Tony Allen, there would be no Afrobeat.”
Tony Oladipo Allen was born in Lagos in 1940, the son of an auto mechanic. Having learned electronics he worked as a radio technician in his teens, which enabled him to repair band amplifiers when he did become a musician. Astonishingly, he did not take up the drums until he was 18, inspired by modern jazz.

A later collaborator, Sébastien Tellier, said this led him to “a very mysterious way to play drums.” Having learned by himself, without lessons, he “created another way to play.” Within four months of taking up the drums he announced he wanted to be a musician.

Tony Allen in 2015 (Photo credit–Tore Sætre)

Allen grew up listening to local West African music and immersed himself in jazz. His great contribution was bringing the two genres together. Allen described Afrobeat as “a fusion of beats and patterns. There was highlife [a popular West African music incorporating foreign rhythms and Western instruments], there was local Yoruba music like apala and sakara, there was jazz, and there was Western popular music like funk and R&B.”

He listened carefully to the jazz greats, studying Art Blakey and Max Roach above all. Blakey’s influence was huge, and Allen paid tribute to him in a four-track tribute EP in 2017. Allen described Blakey—in words that could also be applied to himself—as a magician because his playing sounded like more than one person on the drums. Indeed, when Allen finally left Kuti’s band, it took four percussionists to replace him!

In the jazz drummers he listened to, Allen heard an overall approach as well as technical skills. They were, he said, “telling a story by playing different rhythms, and they were doing it with independent coordination. That’s the way the drums should be played.” His approach was to follow “one central idea,” while allowing his limbs to play four independent lines and patterns on the drum kit. “You listen to it flowing like a river,” he said.

Allen’s focus on that one idea enabled him to be a flexible and constantly developing centrepiece of a band’s sound. Martín Perna, of Brooklyn-based Afrobeat group Antibalas, said that “with all that variation, he’s somehow more hypnotic than a pattern that doesn’t change.”

Fela Kuti Live (1971)

This ability to create four independent lines enabled him to cultivate a swinging polyrhythm. Roach’s playing got him interested in the hi-hat, which he thought overlooked in African drumming and which became central to his playing.

The Beninese singer Angélique Kidjo, who recorded often with him, described Allen as putting “the percussionist’s role into the drums” of Afrobeat, centred around the cowbell. This allowed him to be remarkably laid back even while still the lynchpin of his band’s sound.

Kuti’s band, with whom he recorded dozens of albums, played six-hour sets four nights a week, with individual songs often the length of an LP side, so a certain stamina and reserve were necessary. Kidjo said that when playing Allen never even broke into a sweat!

Kidjo and Allen had been hoping to record again together with the Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango, who died in March of coronavirus.

When he taught Femi Koleoso, one of Allen’s first questions to the young drummer was, “Why is everything so aggressive?” Instead Allen encouraged playing quietly so the younger player could understand what was inside the beat. Allen himself had learned from a West Coast jazz drummer to practice playing on pillows to add flexibility: “Effortless—that’s what I tried to catch from [drummer Frank Butler].”

Tony Allen in 2010

Once Allen started playing, he quickly found work in Lagos’ highlife bands. In 1964, he auditioned for a jazz band organised by Fela Ransome-Kuti, as he was then known.

Kuti had just returned to newly independent Nigeria after five years studying music in London, where he played in an expatriate highlife band. The Lagos jazz band had only limited success, and Kuti began to expand its influences. This “highlife jazz” band, Koola Lobitos, meshed Kuti and Allen’s musical conceptions, blending jazz with local pop forms.

Koola Lobitos were locally successful in Nigeria and Ghana (home of Allen’s maternal family), and Ghanaian promoter Raymond Aziz coined the term Afrobeat to describe them.

In 1969, at the height of the Biafran secessionist conflict, Koola Lobitos undertook a 10-month tour of the US. There Kuti met Sandra Izsadore, who introduced him to the writings of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver and other black radicals. He became sympathetic to the Pan-Africanism of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah.

The band threw American funk into their mix, and Kuti began to write more explicitly political lyrics influenced by the Black Power movement, like “Black Man’s Cry” and “Why Black Man Dey Suffer.” Kuti expounded in these songs a black nationalist philosophy he called Blackism.

On their return to Lagos the band was renamed Fela Ransome-Kuti and Africa 70. He would later change his own name to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti—“he who has control over death.” Kuti’s politicisation made him a vocal critic of government corruption, mismanagement, abuses of the underprivileged and the military. This made him a target of the authorities and he was beaten, arrested and jailed frequently.

The rock drummer Ginger Baker (1939-2019), who had first met Kuti in London, lived in Nigeria between 1970 and 1976, funding the country’s first 16-track recording studio and playing on several Africa 70 recordings including the remarkable album Live! (1971). He spent a lot of time at Kuti’s house, which the bandleader fenced around in 1974 and declared an independent state, the Kalakuta Republic.

In 1977, after Kuti sang his satire about the army, “Zombie,” around a thousand soldiers attacked Kalakuta, burning the house and beating and raping its residents. Kuti’s 77-year-old mother, a veteran of the anti-colonial struggles, was thrown from a window. She died the following year from the trauma.

Allen admired Kuti’s refusal to fawn: “To sing against the government? Most of the bands I knew were praising them … Fela was against flattery, and so was I. I don’t want to play the music of flattery.”

He also recognised the legitimacy of Kuti’s targets. “What [Fela] was challenging, he was right,” he said, and he had realised that the government response was brutal: “I just said: ‘[Fela] is going to be an icon, and they will kill him one day.’”

However, this agreement only went so far.

Perhaps in response to the treatment meted out to Kuti, he withdrew from “singing militant,” saying “It’s not my thing.” The step back was not to his credit, especially as he continued to acknowledge Kuti’s authority. In 2016, Allen said that “If you check most of his [Fela’s] lyrics … in the 70s and 80s, that is what is happening right now.”

The band performed and recorded regularly through all this. Kuti was providing the band arrangements, with Allen creating his own essential sound within that. The drummer was musically happy, but felt increasingly financially exploited.

In 1978, the band played the Berlin Jazz Festival, and a recent CD reissue of Live! included the astonishing 16-minute drum duet between Allen and Baker recorded there. Baker’s big hitting, which often obscured some of his real jazz qualities as a drummer, are here brilliantly focused and directed by Allen’s groove. There was also a fine live performance of “Egbe Mi O” by Allen and Baker at a 2013 tribute concert to Kuti.

The financial disputes came to a head in Berlin, where the whole band quit in a dispute over unpaid royalties. Allen recorded one album with Africa 70 but could not establish his own band in Nigeria. He moved to London before settling in Paris in 1985.

The early French recordings were disappointing, with his playing disappearing under a swamp of electronica. He never sat still, however, and continued expanding his musical palette into what he called Afrofunk. By the late 1990s he was beginning to achieve a more successful sound. Paving the way was Black Voices (1999), an often hypnotic album that gave Allen space to swing inside dub electronics.

Allen was fêted by younger performers, like Blur’s Damon Albarn, who became a frequent collaborator in projects like The Good, The Bad and the Queen, alongside Clash bassist Paul Simonon and former Verve guitarist Simon Tong. A new song with Albarn’s Gorillaz and rapper Skepta has just been released.

Allen also recently released Rejoice with veteran South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela (1939-2018), whom he had met in Lagos in the 1970s. He had been planning an album this year with young musicians in Nigeria, London, Paris and America. “I want to take care of youngsters—they have messages and I want to bring them on my beat.”

Asked to sum himself up in three words, Allen said “Simple gentle guy.” The comment was an understatement, but it could not hide his real drive. “I still challenge myself every time with my playing. I still want to play something impossible, something that I never played before. That’s what I’m after.”

Tony Allen - Moanin (10:30 min) 

http://archive.vn/phn9Y

Little Richard - Early Rock ’n’ roller - Dead at 87 - Requiescat in Pace et In Amore - 12 May 2020

 

Legendary rock ’n’ roll singer and pianist Little Richard died from bone cancer May 9 at the age of 87. As one of the leading figures in rock ’n’ roll when it emerged as a distinct musical form in the mid-1950s, Little Richard played a significant role in shaping the genre and left an indelible influence on the world of music and pop culture in the decades that followed.

Little Richard in the 1950s

Richard Wayne Penniman was born December 5, 1932, in Macon, Georgia. He grew up poor in a family with 12 children. His parents were deeply religious and heavily involved in their local Baptist church, but they also maintained attachments to more earthly concerns. In addition to his role as a church deacon, Richard’s father was a moonshiner and a nightclub owner. This kind of split personality, in which religious morality concealed a more complicated, often illicit truth, was a conflict that would only be intensified in Little Richard.

The future singer and musician was the ultimate outsider. Besides his poverty, Little Richard was black in the segregated American south, and he was gay in a conservative Baptist community that denounced such things in no uncertain terms. The unconventional and defiant persona he adopted as a performer—effeminate, self-aggrandizing and wild—was undoubtedly a response to this, conscious or not. If he was forced to be an outsider, Richard seemed to be saying, then he was determined to be all the way outside. This was more personal than political, but the implicit challenge to the status quo and official morality that Little Richard embodied animated his music and, in part, explains his enduring appeal.

Like many of the R&B performers of his generation, Richard first sang in church. His initial attempts at a career in music came at the end of the 1940s, when he performed with regional medicine shows, essentially touring variety shows sponsored by one or another dubious miracle drug. Richard gradually found his way into the R&B world, performing with or befriending the likes of Johnny Otis and Billy Wright, whose look Richard borrowed for his own.

Richard’s first recordings of R&B music for the RCA label in the early 1950s failed to attract more than local attention. He continued to work as a musician, but could not support himself through music alone. He was working as a dishwasher in a Greyhound bus station when the independent Specialty Records label heard his demo and decided to record him in 1955. The results are legendary.

“Tutti Frutti” introduced Little Richard to the world. It was an unlikely hit. Richard had long performed another version of the song featuring sexually gratuitous lyrics. Cleaned up for the recorded version, the song retained enough suggestiveness that the suggestion seemed more like a recommendation.

Little Richard in 1956

The framework in which the enticing, though not profound, lyrics found a home was an explosive performance by Richard and his backing musicians. Richard’s attack on the piano was at times so insistent and even violent that the listener imagined him playing the instrument with balled up fists. Drummer Earl Palmer, who transitioned the music away from the swing feel of jazz and R&B bands and into the firm backbeat that became the signature of rock ’n’ roll, gave this and other Richard songs a distinctive groove. Lee Allen’s saxophone soared above it all, concise and confident.

Then there was Little Richard’s voice itself. He was shouting more than singing, punctuating his lines with the now-famous falsetto exclamations that the Beatles would imitate on their own recordings of the 1960s. He typically introduced Allen’s saxophone solos with a lacerating scream.

This was the basic formula that most of Richard’s greatest hits were built upon. It was exciting every time. Among his best recordings were “Long Tall Sally,” “Rip It Up,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “Ready Teddy,” “Lucille,” “Jenny, Jenny,” “The Girl Can’t Help It,” “Keep A-Knockin’” and “Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!”

It was not so much the lyrics but the liberating energy of the music that mattered. Of the many performers associated with 1950s rock ’n’ roll, none seemed quite as wild or eccentric as Little Richard. He wore his hair in a tall pompadour, liberally applied pancake makeup on his face, wore a pencil-thin mustache above his lips and black eyeliner. He might be found seated at his piano or standing on top of it.

While they may not have been profound, the suggestiveness of many of the lyrics did reinforce the impression, cultivated by Richard throughout his career, that the singer was someone who had seen the things no one was supposed to see and heard the things that no one was supposed to talk about. His own life was lived as a dramatically open secret. His witty exchanges with countless interviewers always threatened to reveal just a little more than the listener was prepared for.

Little Richard’s music coincided with and found a large audience in the new teenage culture of the 1950s. It also contributed to changing attitudes in race relations. A frequently cited passage from Charles White’s biography The Life and Times of Little Richard is worth citing again. “With Richard,” music producer and arranger H.B. Barnum explained, “although they still had the audiences segregated in the building, they were there together. And most times, before the end of the night, they would all be mixed together.” Little Richard’s music grabbed people by the collar and hurled them across the “color line.”

The first wave of rock ’n’ roll led by Little Richard and a few others ended swiftly, as many of the genre’s leading figures had their careers interrupted or their lives cut short. Chuck Berry was thrown in prison in 1960 under the Mann Act. Elvis Presley was drafted into the army in 1958. Jerry Lee Lewis was caught up in a sex scandal, also in 1958, which saw him vilified internationally. Buddy Holly died in a 1959 plane crash that also claimed the lives of Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. Eddie Cochran died in a car accident in 1960.

For his part, Little Richard abandoned his rock ’n’ roll career in 1958, retreating into the church and gospel music. This began a lifelong cycle in which he would transition back and forth between the secular world of rock ’n’ roll and his religious life.

Offers to perform in Europe in the early 1960s, where up-and-coming rock musicians idolized and imitated him, drew him away from gospel music for the first time. Opening acts on his famously rowdy 1960s British tours included The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Some of Little Richard’s bands of this period included guitar legend Jimi Hendrix and keyboardist Billy Preston.

None of Richard’s later recordings had the power or influence of his work from the 1950s, but his live performances retained their ferociousness for decades. Like many of his contemporaries, Richard was cheated out of music royalties and never saw the financial success that later generations of rock stars would achieve. He was always quick to remind interviewers and other musicians of his role in the music’s history, and the extent to which subsequent generations of musicians had copied his moves. From Elvis Presley and the Beatles to James Brown and Prince, Little Richard is always there somewhere in the music he helped to invent.

His brief but explosive contribution of the 1950s endures.

Archive.today

Archive

Rome, Italy: Seagulls Eating Rats After Restuarants and Cafes Close

Seagulls 'now eating rats' after closure of cafes and restaurants in Rome during coronavirus lockdown

• Imogen Braddick

The closure of cafes and restaurants in Rome due to the coronavirus outbreak means seagulls have had to change their habits and start eating rats, zoologists claim.

Without any scraps to feed on in the empty streets of the Italian capital, which is usually buzzing with tourists, seagulls have had to adapt to survive.

"Animals are changing their habits as we change ours,” zoologist Bruno Cignini told local newspaper Corriere della Sera.

Mr Cignini, who works at Rome University Tor Vergata, said: “They are catching mostly pigeons but also swallows and black birds.

“They’re also going after fish in the Tiber. Luckily, they are also eating rats.”
The seagull population in Rome has exploded in recent years, according to experts, and last year, Matteo Salvini, the former deputy prime minister, joked that the birds were “the size of pterodactyls”.

He said: "Here in Rome there are seagulls that look like pterodactyls."

He made the comment during a Twitter argument with Rome’s mayor Virginia Raggi after she accused him of not providing the city with additional police.

As Italy prepared to reopen parks and public gardens on Monday, health officials reported 174 deaths, the lowest number since the national lockdown began on March 10.

A child rides a scooter at the Piazza Navona in Rome during the country's lockdown (AFP via Getty Images)

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said manufacturing and construction companies would be able to resume business, with retail reopening a fortnight later on May 18.

People will be allowed to visit close relatives as long as they respect social distancing measures and wear a mask, he said.

 https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/seagulls-eat-rats-coronavirus-lockdown-a4430881.html

Dumping subway trains into the ocean ... in a good way - by Phoebe Parke (CNN) 27 Feb 2015

Usually, dumping metal into the ocean is a bad thing, but for once throwing disused items into the sea is working out for the greater good.

Over 2,500 New York subway cars have been used to create an underwater reef for crustaceans and fish in the Atlantic.

Over a period of three years, photographer Stephen Mallon of the Front Room Gallery captured images of the carriages being put in place, and his photos now are being shown in a solo exhibition in New York.

"I had read about the subway cars being dropped into the Atlantic, but I thought the project was over," said Mallon. "Then in 2007 I was scouting for another shoot and saw the barges being loaded up."

Once the subway cars had been decommissioned, they were cleaned and every part of them that could be removed -- seats, straps and wheels -- was recycled or sold. Then the carriages were stacked onto a barge, which transported them to the dropping point.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/02/26/world/subway-cars-coral-reef/index.html

Hubble Space Telescope - 9,000 Days in Space - 2 May 2020

The Hubble Space Telescope recently celebrated its 30th year of scientific observations and remains the longest-running space-based astronomical observatory. This will be its last decade of operation before it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere, unless immediate plans are made to boost it to a higher orbit, a maneuver which was previously performed during servicing missions by the now-discontinued Space Shuttle program.

Astronomers have taken 1.4 million observations with the telescope and produced more than 17,000 peer-reviewed scientific publications. The data it has produced will fuel further research for many years after the telescope itself has ceased operations.

                                                             * * *

The Hubble Space Telescope as seen from space shuttle Discovery during its second servicing mission. Hubble, which orbits 600 kilometers above Earth, has been a keystone of astronomical investigations for the past twenty-five years.

For the past 25 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has been one of the most fruitful and versatile astronomical platforms ever launched into space. For more than 9,000 days, the telescope has provided outstanding scientific data in the near ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum on nebulae, globular clusters, galaxies, supernovae, exoplanets, black holes and our own solar system. For a generation, Hubble has inspired and spearheaded a new era of inquiry about the cosmos.

Hubble was launched on April 24, 1990 on board the space shuttle Discovery. It was the first of NASA’s Great Observatories to be launched, a constellation of four space telescopes which also includes the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (de-orbited in 2000), the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Each was designed to observe different wavelengths, complementing the others and combining their views into a greater whole. The series has been one of NASA’s most successful scientific programs. Every telescope launched (with the exception of Compton) remains in at least partial operation.

Six instruments are used to collect light focused by Hubble’s mirrors: Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS). Data is then beamed down to Earth for processing, distribution and study.

The Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way. It is the largest and most massive galaxy of the Local Group, a collection of about 45 galaxies to which the Milky Way belongs. It contains an estimated one trillion stars.

Significantly, none of the instruments on the telescope are part of its original equipment. One of the main reasons for launching Hubble by space shuttle was that the instruments on board could be replaced as newer ones became available. Indeed, almost everything on Hubble—scientific instruments, batteries, gyroscopes, solar panels, computers—has been upgraded. Only the original mirrors and the substructure itself remain from the original launch. The final scheduled service mission was in 2009.

While it is a public relations boost for NASA, Hubble’s true importance lies in its continued and vast contributions to astronomy. One of its initial goals was to observe a specific class of stars known as Cepheid variables, whose brightness can be determined, and then donmeasure their distance from Earth. This greatly increased the precision in measuring the expansion rate of the universe, reducing the margin of error from fifty percent to ten percent.

A follow-up study, this time observing supernovae in distant galaxies, found that the expansion rate of the universe is increasing, rather than decreasing as expected. Ground-based observations confirmed the existence of the poorly understood force driving the expansion, called “dark energy.” Its discovery was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for physics.

The “Pillars of Creation”, a part of the Eagle Nebula containing a large amount of gas, dust and newly born stars. The leftmost pillar is about four light years in length, approximately the distance from the Sun to its nearest stellar neighbor.

Hubble’s high resolution also made possible the first direct studies of supermassive black holes. These objects were first identified as radio sources in distant galaxies but the source was unclear. Something extraordinarily powerful would have to be generating a great deal of energy to be seen from billions of light years away. After decades of work, it became clear in the 1960s that the only explanation for what astronomers were seeing was the energy emitted from an accretion disk of black holes millions and even billions of times the mass of our Sun.

Here, the Chandra observatory has played a key role in understanding these objects, working in tandem with Hubble to dig deeper into the underlying physics that drives these events. It was Chandra which first discovered that the nearby Andromeda galaxy most likely has two supermassive black holes instead of one. Combined efforts using Hubble, Chandra and other telescopes have since shown that supermassive black holes are common features of galactic nuclei.

Hubble also contributed substantially to our understanding of the mechanics by which giant clouds of gas and dust collapse to form new stars. Its stunning portrait of the Eagle Nebula in 1995 became a popular poster and screen background for millions worldwide. This image captured pillars of dense gas containing even denser cores becoming new stars, simultaneously being evaporated by the young and brilliant stars already formed. A recent image captures motions in the intervening 14 years, measuring a 200 kilometer per second growth of a jet associated with a young star.

The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, taken in 2012 over twenty-three days. Except for a few stars, everything in this image is an entire galaxy, some of which are 13.2 billion years old.

Infrared images of the Eagle Nebula were taken by the Spitzer telescope in 2007 to see inside the clouds, complementing Hubble’s observations. The most striking feature revealed is the abundance of hot dust, most likely warmed by a nearby supernova from 8,000 to 9,000 years ago. If so, the explosion’s blast wave would have toppled the three pillars 6,000 years ago. Since light takes 7,000 years to travel from the Eagle Nebula to Earth, we will see whether or not this prediction is true within a millennium.

Perhaps the most extraordinary science done by the observatory are the deep field images, the first of which was the Hubble Deep Field (HDF) taken in 1995. Focusing on an area of the sky less than 100 times the size of the Moon as viewed from Earth, where only a handful Milky Way stars can be seen, Hubble collected light for eleven days.

In that minute region of space, Hubble revealed to astronomers and the public alike just how large space is. About 3,000 distinct galaxies were observed in the images, each containing tens of billions of stars, with spiral, irregular and elliptical galaxies all present. The study provided the first in-depth look at the early universe, seeing galaxies as far as 12 billion light years away and thus—since light takes time to travel through space—galaxies as they were 12 billion years ago. Astronomers were astonished by the number and variety of young galaxies Hubble revealed.

The Lagoon Nebula is between 4,000 and 6,000 light-years from Earth and was first discovered in 1654. It contains a central structure known as the Hourglass Nebula, within which were the first direct observations of active star formation by accretion.

These images motivated a succession of subsequent “deep field” explorations, created with new generations of improved cameras aboard Hubble. In 2003-2004, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) was taken, focusing on 11 square arcminutes in the constellation Fornax and looking back in time 13 billion years to view 10,000 galaxies forming less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) was taken in 2012 focusing in on a region of the HUDF. The exposure was taken over twenty-three days, collecting data on galaxies that are ten billion times fainter than the human eye can see. Some of the 5,500 newly discovered galaxies are 13.2 billion years old, the oldest ever observed in visible light. Due in part to this work, astronomers estimate that the observable universe contains 200 billion galaxies.

The first proposal to use a rocket to put a telescope in space was published by the German physicist Hermann Oberth in 1923. In his work Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (“The Rocket into Planetary Space”), which was previously a doctoral dissertation rejected as “utopian”, he suggests that rockets could eventually lift telescopes into Earth orbit. His work, alongside that of Robert Goddard, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Oberth’s assistant Wernher von Braun founded modern rocketry and paved the way for every space telescope that has flown.

Hubble’s origins date back to 1946, when the astronomer Lyman Spitzer published the paper “Astronomical advantages of an extraterrestrial observatory,” which first laid out the scientific justifications for putting an observatory above the atmosphere. Spitzer argued that if the best telescopes of the day could have been placed where there is no air, the lack of turbulence would increase the angular resolution of each by at least ten-fold. Moreover, they would also be able to observe infrared and ultraviolet light, which are largely blocked by Earth’s atmosphere.

The uncoated backup mirror for the Hubble Space Telescope produced by Kodak. When the aberration in Hubble’s primary mirror was discovered, NASA realized that they had launched a flawed mirror while a perfect one remained on the ground. This mirror has never been used and currently resides at the Smithsonian Institution Aerospace Museum.

After a series of small-scale instruments designed to show that infrared and ultraviolet astronomy could in fact be successfully done in space, NASA approved the plans for a space-based 3-meter reflecting telescope in 1968. It was provisionally known as the Large Space Telescope (LST) and first slated to launch in 1979.

Though the astronomical community fully backed the creation of the instrument, NASA faced funding hurdles from a recalcitrant Congress and public spending cuts instigated by President Gerald Ford. Now that the geopolitical impetus for space exploration had vanished—after the United States beat the Soviet Union to the Moon—there was little interest in providing money for spaceflight, especially for missions that had no military purpose, only scientific knowledge. Funding for the project was deleted in 1974. It was only after a Herculean effort by astronomers campaigning for the LST that funding was restored, and even then it was four years later at only half the original budget. As a result construction of the primary mirror and other instruments began the year the telescope was originally slated to launch.

Here, NASA ran up against the US military. The company commissioned to build the mirror, Perkin-Elmer, was well known to the US government for its development of the optics used on the Keyhole-9 HEXAGON spy satellites. Soon after it was announced that Perkin-Elmer would be producing the mirrors for LST, the US Air Force demanded that the experience, techniques and personnel involved in making the KH-9 satellites not be used in the development of the LST because those resources were classified. As a result, Perkin-Elmer was forced to develop the team and facilities to design the mirror from scratch, causing the scheduled launch date of 1983 to slip to 1986.

The spiral galaxy M100, imaged before and after Hubble’s corrective optics were installed. The dramatic improvement in image quality has allowed the telescope to obtain images of both the formation of stars and the collisions of distant galaxies.

Further delays were caused by the Challenger disaster in 1986, which grounded the shuttle fleet. The newly renamed Hubble Space Telescope, designed to be carried into space by a shuttle, was forced to wait in a clean room purged with nitrogen until its launch could be rescheduled. The cost of the wait was approximately $6 million a month, but it did allow engineers to make improvements such as replacing a possibly failure-prone battery. It also allowed the computer experts to further develop the software needed to control Hubble, which was not ready in 1986 and only just completed when Hubble finally launched in 1990.

Almost immediately, a flaw potentially fatal for the scientific usefulness of Hubble was discovered. The first light images from the telescope were of drastically lower quality than expected. An investigation into the problem indicated that Perkin-Elmer had ground the mirror precisely, but 0.002 millimeters out of shape. This error had actually been caught during mirror development by one of the testing procedures. However, a second test did not show the spherical aberration and that measurement was adopted as the more valid as a cost-cutting management decision.

However, Hubble was designed to be repaired and to have instruments replaced during subsequent shuttle missions. A plan was drafted to bring a corrective mirror to the telescope during Service Mission 1 scheduled for December 1993. During five space walks, clocking in at 35 hours and 28 minutes, astronauts took out the High Speed Photometer and installed the COSTAR device, a robotic assembly of 5,300 parts which deployed six adjustable corrective mirrors in the optical paths of the other scientific instruments.

Astronauts also used the mission to replace wobbly solar arrays and defective gyros as well as install the second generation Wide Field Planetary Camera. On February 21, 1994, the newly repaired Hubble released the most detailed image yet of Pluto and its moon, Charon, beginning a career for which it has become internationally famous.

NGC 5257 and NGC 5258, two spiral galaxies in the constellation Virgo. Both are distorted by their mutual gravitational interaction and are connected by a thin bridge of matter shared between the two. This sort of imagery would have been impossible if Hubble’s optics had not been corrected.

Despite the colossal success of Hubble, NASA has made plans to end the mission. As the shuttle program was close to ending, the 2009 service mission to the telescope included installing a ring on the outside of Hubble, allowing future missions—manned or robotic—to more easily capture the telescope. The intention is not—as would be logical—to attach a rocket that would boost its orbit in an effort to combat the slow orbital decay caused by atmospheric drag. Instead, in what can only be described as an act of anti-scientific vandalism and a deliberate coup de grâce, NASA plans to attach a rocket to guide Hubble towards the Earth, burning up the telescope during re-entry.

The justification for this is that the next generation James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be Hubble’s successor. In any scientific sense, this is not true. The JWST will complement the Hubble space telescope, looking more towards infrared rather than ultraviolet light. This will allow a greater focus on objects more distant and colder than what Hubble is optimized to study. It is expected to be able to detect stars in the early universe 280 million years older than Hubble.

However, the launch of the JWST has been pushed back from an initial date sometime in 2011 to October 2018. Primary responsibility for this rests with the constant threats by congressional Republicans, particularly those on the House Appropriations Committee, to end the project. In fact, in 2011, they did fully cancel the project, though funding was later restored after an international scientific appeal. For its part, the Obama administration ensures that funding levels remain as low as feasible.

As such, there is no replacement for Hubble. At a cost of $10 billion (a pittance compared to what the US spends on wars abroad or surveillance at home), after two and a half decades of groundbreaking scientific discoveries and a generation of being the fuel for excitement of scientific discovery, Hubble is expected to be forcibly de-orbited in 2024 as its orbital decay brings to a close its scientific observations. JWST, which is not serviceable in orbit, is expected to live only another four years beyond that. No credible plans exist for a successor mission. One begun in earnest right now, developed at the same pace as JWST, would begin observations in 2037.

https://archive.is/KqjMK

U.K. police looking for person dressed as 17th-century plague doctor - 30 April 2020

Police in the U.K. are looking for a mysterious person who has been spotted walking around a Norwich suburb dressed as a 17th-century plague doctor.

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Police in the U.K. are looking for a mysterious person who has been spotted walking around a Norwich suburb dressed as a 17th-century plague doctor.

Video and pictures of the person, uploaded by Jade Gosbell and verified by social media intelligence and news agency Storyful, show the unidentified person walking through a park in Hellesdon wearing a long black coat, hat, gloves and pointed beak mask.

A spokesperson for Norfolk Police said their officers are looking to trace the individual "in order to provide words of advice about the implications of his actions on the local community."

Hellesdon residents have taken to the local Facebook community page in recent weeks to express concern that the person’s black-clad appearance would frighten their kids.

Physicians who tended to plague victims in 17th-century Europe covered themselves head to toe in robes and wore masks with long bird-like beaks. The look was created by Charles de Lorme, a plague doctor who played a role in treating many European royals during the time.

Before the germ theory of disease, doctors mistakenly believed that the plague spread through poisoned air and thought the beaked masks would purify the air.

The beaks were filled with theriac, a mixture of more than 55 herbs and other compounds including cinnamon, myrrh and honey. The shape of the beak was supposedly designed to give the air enough time to be cleansed by the herbs before it reached the nose.

Britain is currently under lockdown amid the growing COVID-19 pandemic.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/health/coronavirus/u-k-police-looking-for-person-dressed-as-17th-century-plague-doctor-1.4919012