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February 2, 2011 / Jeff

Kepler-11 and Six Orbiting Planets

From here:

NASA’s Kepler space telescope watches a star, Kepler-11. The star appears to blink in a pattern. It dims like clockwork as six “hands” of differing size orbit around it at different rates. Kepler-11 dims when its six orbiting planets cross between it and the Kepler spacecraft. Calculations show the planets are nested in circular orbits that lie in almost the same plane. Animation credit: NASA/Tim Pyle

December 23, 2010 / Jeff

The Quest for Cosmic Justice

An interesting address given by Dr. Thomas Sowell about his book, The Quest for Cosmic Justice:

November 20, 2010 / Jeff

The Mass Distribution of Stars and the Weibull Statistical Function

October 27, 2010 / Jeff

Al Franken’s New Comedy Sketch

A few laughs from the senator from Minnesota:

Simply hilarious. This is good evidence that the Democrats are losing their minds as they head into the coming electoral disaster.

August 26, 2010 / Jeff

Pi Is Wrong!

Bob Palais makes a good point.

August 26, 2010 / Jeff

Glenn Gould on Bach’s D-minor Keyboard Concerto

July 23, 2010 / Jeff

Who Wrote This Cadenza?

I have a recording of Mozart’s 24th Piano Concerto, K 491, with Paulina Osetinskaya at the piano, and Samuel Litkov conducting the St. Petersburg Festival Orchestra. The recording was made around 1993 and is a Sony 1994 release.

It’s not at all a bad performance, especially for a budget recording. The cadenza of the first movement is particularly good. Now, I’ve been going absolutely mad trying to find out the author of the cadenza, but so far, I’ve had no luck.

Here it is:

This marvelous cadenza clearly has the hallmarks of nineteenth-century romanticism about it—no surprise since this concerto was beloved of performers of that period—and the clever simultaneous quodlibet formed from two of the principal motifs of the concerto indicates contrapuntal skill. Of the composers from that time period that I know of, who are known to have written cadenzas for this piece, I’ve ruled out Brahms, Hummel, Fauré, and Busoni. I have yet to check out Saint-Saëns, who I understand wrote cadenzas for this work also.

Do you know who wrote this cadenza? If you do, I’d love to know.

July 27, 2009 / Jeff

Watch the White House Astroturf the Senate with Twitter

I just came across “Tweet Your Senator,” in which you can enter your ZIP code and send a tweet to one of your senators. Naturally, every message is in favor of the so-called “health care reform,” and the text of each message is only one of about five or so predefined messages. A fine example of astroturfing in our digital age.

August 19, 2008 / Jeff

Insane, Incompetent Government

If your name is James Robinson, then you’re in trouble.

Can anyone tell me with a straight face that this terror watch list is a good idea?

April 10, 2008 / Jeff

Never Delay a Prompting

Thomas S. Monson, sixteenth President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, once said:

Never delay a prompting. When you honor a prompting and then stand back a pace, you realize that the Lord gave you the prompting. It makes me feel good that the Lord even knows who I am and knows me well enough to know that if He has an errand to be run and He prompts me to run the errand, the errand will get done. That’s the testimony of my life.

From the LDS Newsroom.

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