A Farewell to the Captain...

I had 2 share this Deek Jeter commerial with everyone.
-Obsdian

Keep an Eye Open...

Ok, folks: This is the latest report on the Ebola epidemic. It makes one wonder, what can we expect here in the good ole USA...
-Obsidian

Speak Your Mind!...

 "Paul's letters are demanding and forceful, but in person he is weak, and his speeches are worthless!"
-2 Corinthians 10:10
 (Sometimes it's the effect of what we say that matters the most)

The Coming Ebola Virus...

Keep your vibratons up, folks. Remember the power of positive thinking!
-Obsidian

So long NFL Chump!...

In case you haven't heard, NFL's Baltimore Ravens running back, Ray Rice has just been released from the team & suspended from football indefinitely by the league, for punching out his then fiance in the hotel elevator in Vegas, last year & trying to pawn it off as if she had just gotten drunk & fell down.

Ray Rice, you're a big-ass-loser: No more football for you, chump!
-Obsidian

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ0m9fsOAp8

 

@ Track 187...

I was @ Ronnie Norpel's Track 187 last night & the poet George Wallace rocked that house!

A farewell on my Left & my Right...

I am grateful to Thomas Fucalaro for finding & sharing this classic pic on FB. Yeah, i'm truly missing these 2 incredible poets & human/extraordinaires!
-Obsidian

Space the Final Frontier...

Japan to launch military space force: report

9 hours ago

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A Japanese H-IIA rocket with the NASA-Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory onboard blasts off from the launching pad at Tanegashima Space Center on the Japanese southwestern island of Tanegashima, about 1,000km (621 miles) southwest of Tokyo, in this photo taken by Kyodo early February 28, 2014. (REUTERS/Kyodo)

Tokyo (AFP) - Japan is planning to launch a military space force by 2019 that would initially be tasked with protecting satellites from dangerous debris orbiting the Earth, a report said.

The move is aimed at strengthening Japan-US cooperation in space, and comes after the countries pledged to boost joint work on monitoring space debris, Kyodo news agency said Sunday.

Japan would provide the US military with information obtained by the force as part of the joint bid to strengthen ties in space, the so-called "fourth battlefield", Kyodo said, citing unnamed sources.

Japan's defence ministry is looking at creating the new force using personnel from the Air Self-Defence Force, the country's air force, it added.

The unit would acquire radar and telescope facilities, jointly with the science ministry and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, to run its observatory operations, Kyodo said.

Thousands of pieces of debris -- including old satellites as well as pieces of rockets and other space equipment -- are orbiting the Earth and threaten to collide with functioning communications and reconnaissance satellites.

Back like a Rash...

Ok, folks. It looks like Obsidian & Hobobob are back at it again. We’ll be dropping by the poetry scene to do a long-awaited double feature at the lovely Ronnie Norpel’s Track 187 Culture Clash-Warhol Flashback Birthday Bash!

The location will be: The West End (Bar) 955 West End Avenue, New York, NY

The date will be: Wednesday August 6^th. The Show is from 6-9pm.

So cancel all your appointments and dates and come on over & let us regale you one more time! We look forward to seeing you there.

-Obsidian & Hobobob

The Skies are not Safe...

What's the deal with these (pardon me, if you will) Asian airlines, theses days?

Plane crashes in Taiwan, 47 trapped, feared dead

AP Photo: Wong Yao-wen

Rescue workers work next to the wreckage of TransAsia Airways flight GE222 which crashed while attempting to land in stormy weather on the Taiwanese island of Penghu, late Wednesday, July 23, 2014. A plane landing in stormy weather crashed outside an airport on a small Taiwanese island late Wednesday, and a transport minister said dozens of people were trapped and feared dead.

2 hr ago By Associated Press

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TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — A plane landing in stormy weather crashed outside an airport on a small Taiwanese island late Wednesday, and the transport minister said 47 people were trapped and feared dead.

Another 11 people were injured when the ATR-72 operated by Taiwan's TransAsia Airways crashed on Penghu, an island in the Taiwan Strait between Taiwan and China, Transport Minister Yeh Kuang-shih was quoted as saying by the government's Central News Agency. The plane was arriving from Kaohsiung, a city in southern Taiwan.

Typhoon hits Taiwan, 47 people killed in plane crash

54 min ago Duration: 0:42 Views: 9

The twin-engine turboprop plane crashed while making a second landing attempt with a total of 58 passengers and crew members aboard, according to Yeh.

President Ma Ying-jeou called it "a very sad day in the history of Taiwanese aviation" and ordered authorities to quickly clarify the details, said a spokesman for his office, Ma Wei-kuo, the news agency reported.

The plane crashed in the village of Xixi outside the airport. Photos in local media showed firefighters using flashlights to look at wreckage in the darkness, and buildings and cars damaged by debris.

About 200 military personnel were sent to help recover the people who were on the plane, Taiwanese Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Luo Shou-he said, according to the Central News Agency.

The ministry said military vehicles and ambulances were rushing people to hospitals and an air force rescue team was on standby to transfer survivors to Taiwan's main island if needed for treatment, the agency reported.

AP Photo: Wong Yao-wen

Rescue workers survey the wreckage of TransAsia Airways flight GE222 which crashed while attempting to land in stormy weather on the Taiwanese island of Penghu, late Wednesday, July 23, 2014.

The flight left Kaohsiung at 4:53 p.m. for Magong on Penghu, according to the head of Taiwan's Civil Aeronautics Administration, Jean Shen. The plane lost contact with the tower at 7:06 p.m. after saying it would make a second landing attempt.

Visibility as the plane approached was 1,600 meters (one mile), which met standards for landing, and two flights had landed before GE222, one at 5:34 p.m. and the other at 6:57 p.m., the aviation agency reported. Shen said the plane was 14 years old.

But the Central News Agency, citing the county fire department, said it appeared heavy rain reduced visibility and the pilot was forced to pull up and make the second landing attempt. The news agency had earlier quoted a local fire chief as saying 51 people had been killed.

Taiwan was battered by Typhoon Matmo overnight Tuesday, and the Central Weather Bureau warned of heavy rain Wednesday evening, even after the center of the storm had moved west to mainland China.

TransAsia Airways' general manager, Hsu Yi-Tsung, bowed deeply before reporters and tearfully apologized for the accident, the Central News Agency said.

Hsu said the carrier was arranging to take the relatives of passengers on the flight to Magong on Thursday morning and that it would spare no effort in the rescue and in handling the aftermath, the report said.

Taiwan's last major aviation disaster also was near Penghu. A China Airlines Boeing 747 broke apart in midair in 2002 and crashed into the Taiwan Strait, killing all 225 people aboard.

In October 2013, a Lao Airlines ATR-72 crashed during a heavy storm as it approached Pakse Airport in southern Laos, killing all 49 people on board.

Bing Maps

Missing Laptop...

Haven't posted for a while-had gotten my laptop stolen. Not to worry! i have a new one & am ready 2 post again! Been partying a little, on the side, too...
-Obsidian

 

About the Paranormal...

Investigative reporter Linda Moulton Howe investigates the paranormal & she's good. Don't be afraid of knowledge!

DJ Debut...

Had a blast @ Hobobob aka Gregory's DJ debut @ the Broadway Dive Friday night!

About the Higgs Boson Particle...

I thought they already had this down pat-i guess i was wrong...

The Why are we here?...

Universe Shouldn't Be Here, According to Higgs Physics

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The BICEP2 telescope in Antarctica, seen at twilight.

The universe shouldn't exist — at least according to a new theory.

Modeling of conditions soon after the Big Bang suggests the universe should have collapsed just microseconds after its explosive birth, the new study suggests.

"During the early universe, we expected cosmic inflation — this is a rapid expansion of the universe right after the Big Bang," said study co-author Robert Hogan, a doctoral candidate in physics at King's College in London. "This expansion causes lots of stuff to shake around, and if we shake it too much, we could go into this new energy space, which could cause the universe to collapse."

Physicists draw that conclusion from a model that accounts for the properties of the newly discovered Higgs boson particle, which is thought to explain how other particles get their mass; faint traces of gravitational waves formed at the universe's origin also inform the conclusion. [Doomsday: The 9 Real Ways Earth Could End]

Of course, there must be something missing from these calculations.
"We are here talking about it," Hogan told Live Science. "That means we have to extend our theories to explain why this didn't happen."


Bang!


One possible explanation holds that during the fiery flash after the primordial Big Bang explosion, matter raced outward at breakneck speeds in a process known as cosmic inflation. This bent and squeezed space-time, creating ripples known as gravitational waves that also twisted the radiation that passed through the universe, Hogan said.

Though those events would have occurred 13.8 billion years ago, a telescope at the South Pole known as the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP2) recently detected the faint traces of cosmic inflation in the background microwave radiation that pervades the universe: in particular, characteristic twisted or curled waves called the B-mode pattern. (Other scientists have already begun to question the findings, saying the results may just be from dust in the Milky Way.)

But gravity wasn't the only force at play in the early universe. A ubiquitous energy field, called the Higgs field, permeates the universe and gives mass to the particles that trudge through the field. Scientists found the telltale sign of that field in 2012, when they discovered the Higgs boson and then determined its mass. [6 Implications of Finding a Higgs Boson Particle]

With a greater understanding of cosmic inflation's properties and the Higgs boson mass, Hogan and his colleague, Malcolm Fairbairn, who is also a physicist at King's College London, tried to recreate the conditions of cosmic inflation after the Big Bang.

What they found was bad news for, well, everything. The newborn universe should have experienced an intense jittering in the energy field, known as quantum fluctuation. Those jitters, in turn, could have disrupted the Higgs field, in essence rolling the entire system into a much lower energy state that would make the collapse of the universe inevitable.


Missing ingredient


So if the universe shouldn't exist, why is it here?

"The generic expectation is that there must be some new physics that we haven't put in our theories yet, because we haven't been able to discover them," Hogan said.

One leading possibility, known as the theory of supersymmetry, proposes that there are superpartner particles for all the currently known particles, and perhaps more-powerful particle accelerators could find these particles, Hogan said.

But the theory of cosmic inflation is still speculative, and some physicists hint that what looked like primordial gravitational waves to the BICEP2 telescope may actually be signals from cosmic dust in the galaxy, said Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and author of "The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World" (Dutton Adult, 2012).
If the details of cosmic inflation change, then Hogan and Fairbairn's model would need to adapt as well, Carroll told Live Science. Caroll was not involved in the study.

Interestingly, this isn't the first time that physicists have said the Higgs boson spells doom for the universe. Others have calculated that the Higgs boson's mass would lead to a fundamentally unstable universe that could end apocalyptically in billions of years.

The mass of the Higgs boson, about 126 times that of the proton, turns out to be "right on the edge," in terms of the universe's stability, Carroll said. A little bit lighter, and the Higgs field would be much more easily perturbed; a little heavier, and the current Higgs field would be incredibly stable.

Hogan will present his findings Tuesday (June 24) at the Royal Astronomical Society meeting in Portsmouth, England, and the study was published May 20 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Give me your mind, for a while...

Linda Moulton Howe's research is premier, folks. Check it out: