#Memphis Astronomical Society

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

The Memphis Astronomical Society will present the following presentations at ourFriday, January 10th, 2019 General meeting held at Christian Brothers University in the Science Auditorium of Assissi Hall.The meeting begins at 8:00 pmAll MAS Programs are FREE and open to the general public. Telescope "How to" Seminar -- Your Questions Answered / Panel Discussion

Have you ever wondered what telescope to buy?  Or what eye pieces to pick up?  Or ever thought of getting started in astrophotography and wanted to know what equipment you'll need?

As we kick off 2020, a panel of experts will be on hand to answer your astronomy-related questions.  Whether it be observing gear, places to go to get the best views of the night sky, topics of interest in astronomy, or any other questions you can think of, come on out to our January 2020 meeting.

This will be a very different format from previous meetings as we will not be doing a formal lecture, but a Q&A panel to help engage the audience and get all of YOUR QUESTIONS answered!  Don't miss this highly-informative meeting of the Memphis Astronomical Society!

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

“Lemma the Librarian - The Last Dance”

Published: 14 April 2018*

http://www.mcstories.com/LemmaTheLibrarian/index.html

“The Last Dance” brings an end to the episodic nature of the series. Everything from here on out is welded quite tightly into the main plot - or, rather, the main plot constitutes what happens in the last three stories. Spoilers for “The Last Dance” from here on out. What seems like a straightforward get-the-book smash-and-grab (which involves Lemma and Iola going undercover in a harem, because @midorikonton knows which side her bread is buttered on) turns into the return of fairy murdergoblin “Red” for his third and final confrontation with Lemma. Red loses, although mostly thanks to Iason and Rhoda and Rhoda’s Machamp rage-demon Sonneillon. (Rhoda being, of course, the person Lemma used the ghost last time to call for.)

Lemma’s desire to be enslaved is something she’s been dealing with, more or less successfully, up until this point, but it’s something Iason and Iola don’t actually know about yet. That reticence is now coming back to bite her in the ass. The most important conflict in this story isn’t the fight against Red, or Lugal’s** magic clothes; it’s between Lemma and Iola over what the right course of action while trapped in the palace is. Lemma wants to give in, of course, but Iola’s experience with mind-control has been a lot more traumatic than Lemma’s, and she has a very strong personal/cultural “go down fighting” ethos, and she doesn’t seem to have this particular kink on any level anyways. We were reminded just last story of all of Iola’s trauma around the whole magical mind-controlled sex thing. But unlike that time, Lemma, for strategic reasons, doesn’t feel like she has to room to let Iola do her own thing. So she doesn’t just go along with the enchantments, she actively throws her magical weight behind glamouring Iola too. Iola doesn’t know the actual reasons Lemma did this, but I’m not sure it’d make a difference anyways: she would understand it, correctly, as just as awful a betrayal either way.

The party - now up to four with the addition of Rhoda - is off to Hattush to find the last, most apocalyptic book, and it’s all very dramatic. But what sticks with me the most about the end is Iola’s refusal to tell Lemma everything’s ok.

*Look, it was supposed to be out this week, but the EMCSA (my canonical reference for links and dates) is on a one week break, I’m travelling next week, and its been posted to Tumblr now. Also it’s been burning a hole in my drafts folder for nearly a month now. ;P

**His death at the hands of Red is a little abrupt, but he’s enough of a controlling jerk I can’t brink myself to feel too sorry for him. Plus, you know, dying abruptly is a peril of kingship. (If Red had murdered, say, poor Simta, I’d be a lot angrier; but Jenny seems to have learned her lesson since the Vamp!Brea business***.)

***Yes, I’m still mad. ;P

When The Fuck Are We? 🤷

For the first time, we’re further back in time than the Bronze Age Collapse! “Possession with Intent” is set in Khemeth, which is clearly K•m•t, Egypt*. Ancient Egypt is one of those things everyone at least knows a little about** so I’ll focus on two slightly more obscure points.

The first is Iason’s reference to Khemeth being “the breadbasket of the Inner Sea”, which is both true and false in an interesting way. Egypt, being spectacularly fertile, essentially one-dimensonal, and laid out on a lazy, easily navigable river, is indeed just about the optimum imaginable setting for extracting massive food surpluses with ancient technology and governance. But it wasn’t a big export from Egypt (Egypt’s main ancient export was papyrus, thanks to its ecologically-enforced monopoly). Rather, it was mostly used to pump up Egypt’s own population, and in particular the showpiece capital cities such as Memphis, Thebes, or Alexandria. In the ancient world, having an unnecessarily - nay, infeasibly - large capital was a point of pride, which is where Egypt’s actual role as a breadbasket comes in: after it lost its independence in 30BCE, the Romans told Alexandria to get stuffed and began exporting Egypt’s wonderful easy grain surpluses to Rome, instead***. But of course, there’s not much here to imaginably suggest that we’re in the Roman Empire, timeline-wise.

Which brings us to the other point: the party being around for the invention of pyramids is obviously just for the joke, but even discounting that Egypt is old. The usual comparison is to note that when Augustus began redirecting the Egyptian grain surplus to Rome, the pyramids at Giza were already older than Augustus is now. The Egyptian state that survived the Bronze Age Collapse was the already declining New Kingdom, third of the traditional old/middle/new kingdoms division of ancient Egyptian history; it’s the heir to a polity stretching back into the 31st C BCE. Egypt is old. 

“The Last Dance” takes us to the one city-dwelling society even older than Egypt. Lagasch/Lagash is a Sumerian town, and Sumer (the south end of Mesopotamia, so modern-day south-central Iraq) has recognizable cities all the way back into the fifth freakin’ millennium BCE, and a historical record stretching patchily into the late fourth. Lagash ceased to exist as in independent city-state in the late third millennium*****, so about as long before our stop in Etruria as that was before Mercia, or Mercia is before the present day (and this story doesn’t seem to be taking place at the end of Lagash’s time as an independent polity, either). Based on some truly shoddy historical research******, we might slap this with a date of 2500 BCE - old enough to actually start getting close to the invention of the pyramids.

Sumerian, like Etruscan, is a language that seems to be unrelated to every other known language. (Before you come up with a brilliant theory that will revolutionize ancient history - no, they don’t seem to be related to each other, either.) Unlike Etruscan, we have such a huge corpus of text that we can translate it fairly reliably. (It helps that Sumerian remained in use as a record-keeping language for centuries after it had stopped being spoken - rather like Latin in Medieval/Early Modern Europe.) I’ve already mentioned the problems with king lists and such, but one of the great things about Mesopotamia is that unlike the logistical records of Mycenae, or the glorifying propaganda of Egypt, we have all of that and also preserved letters, and that lets us look so much further afield into the culture, you don’t even know. We even have recognizable preserved jokes: a regional administrator writes the central palace complaining that his requests for supplies to repair a dangerously deteriorating wall have been ignored, and it’s going to fall over and hurt someone. He demands supplies again, “and if you can’t send those at least send a doctor”.

Also, despite what Neal Stephenson will tell you, Sumerian is not glossolalic and you can’t use it to mind-control people.

*Look, you try transliterating Coptic into Latin characters! Like its distant relatives the Semitic languages, Coptic is based around consonantal root-words, into which vowels are slotted to make verbs, adjectives, and so forth. It makes for somewhat awkward transliterations.

**He says, and then panics trying to figure out how much people who aren’t actually historians have read about ancient Egypt. Tutankhamen’s weird Sun cultist dad is common knowledge, right?

***Rome’s peak in the Augustan period at a couple of hundred thousand, maybe a million****, was almost entirely on the back of the annona, a massive subsidized bread ration distributed to the Roman civic populace, and supplied in large part by Egypt. (It’s not terribly comparable to modern food stamps or other social welfare; in an ancient context, it’s more like spiking the football.) The population cratered between then and the burned-out husk the Goths and Byzantines squabbled over in the 6th C CE, but not because of the “fall of Rome”. Rather, the 4th C CE founding of Constantinople and the redirection of the Egyptian grain surplus there (so the new capital would bulk up to an appropriately prestigious population) was what really did it for Rome; and all of that happened when the Roman Empire was still riding high. The state of Rome was closer before and after the Visigoth sack than either was to Augustus’ city of marble. 

****The brilliant if wildly opinionated historian Colin McEvedy had a great turn of phrase arguing for 250,000. (He has a great turn of phrase for everything, you should read him.) After laying out the more archaeological arguments about land use and suchlike, he notes that the one solid literary record for the annona we have, around the time of Augustus, gives a little less than a quarter of a million rations, and “who ever heard of a dictator who put a smaller figure on his largesse than he needed to. If [Augustus] had fed a million Romans he would have said so.” 

*****We can peg it to exact years relative to related dates - the Mesopotamians were pretty through chroniclers, so we know how long kings ruled, in what regnal year they went on what campaign, and so forth, but they’re floating around in a little bit of a void. There are a couple of different possible chronologies depending on which recorded astronomical events you make line up with which calculated astronomical events.

******To wit, googling “Lagash king list dates” and looking for names that resemble “Lugal”. My historiography prof just shuddered and doesn’t know why.

~

Next time: the thrilling climax! Oh, man, does Lemma do some climaxing.

[lohveandfilm]

If Beale Street Could Talk and the Privilege of Love

The first thought that hit me after watching If Beale Street Could Talk was, “Well that hurt.” My second thought was that they never actually went to Beale Street (which I only knew because I went to Memphis once). I’m sure Baldwin chose this title assuming that his audience would be familiar with a site of such importance to the history of black culture in the United States. Meanwhile, it took a total solar eclipse to get me to Tennessee, a strong dislike of country music to keep me out of Nashville, and a mother obsessed with TripAdvisor to get me to Beale Street. If not for these coincidences of (literally) astronomical importance, I probably could have gone my whole life not knowing the significance of Beale Street. It was upon realizing these coincidences that I fully realized I am not the audience for this movie. If Barry Jenkins had been trying to play to a white audience, the Beale Street reference would have been explained, as is probably true for a number of other references I’m sure I missed due to cultural differences. This is the frame of mind I’ve tried to maintain while thinking about love in this film.

In If Beale Street Could Talk, I wanted so desperately for Tish and Fonny to have a happy ending. I wished I could pluck their relationship out of the mess of society and let them love freely and happily for the rest of their lives. Now, though, I see my initial reaction as naïve. The love between Tish and Fonny isn’t just affected by politics, their love is itself political. Their ability to stay in a loving relationship, however strained it may be, is a protest against the system that aims to tear black families apart. If this story existed in a utopia of social equality, their love would be beautiful, but it wouldn’t hold the significance imbued upon it by the circumstances. Even my original desire to see a happy ending was partly a hope that the system would work just this once, that justice could prevail for two truly good people. Of course, implicit in this desire is my inherent optimism in the virtuosity of our institutions, which is very likely a product of the privileged life experience that has allowed me to place my trust in those institutions. My instinct is to fight the failures of these institutions, believing that if I bring wrongdoings to light, those in charge will see the errors of their ways. As Freeburg says, though, Tish and Fonny accept that they are powerless (on this scale) to change the systems that oppress them. This acknowledgement and acceptance is what allows them to create such a deep and moving love; their love is a safe haven from the hostilities of the world around them.

(After being rejected by so many places, Tish and Fonny take advantage of a moment of kindness to create a world of their own, where their love keeps them safe.)

What I realized about my wish for Tish and Fonny is that what I wanted was for them to get the love story afforded to other couples in film, the victory of love above all struggles. What I also realized, however, is that a majority of the films from which I unconsciously based these desires feature wealthy white heterosexual couples. Their struggles seem trivial in the face of the racism and hatred experienced by Tish and Fonny. Isn’t that exactly Baldwin’s point? Love never exists in a vacuum. Cederstrom notes that in Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone, “the only setting in which Leo and Barbara can find happiness is high on a hillside, as they camp out under the stars.” The rest of this interracial couple’s relationship is a constant struggle against the racist and sexist structures of American society. The only people who get to have relationships seemingly outside of these societal structures are those that benefit from them.

Yet perhaps this is why Tish and Fonny’s love doesn’t seem like a struggle to maintain. Unlike the other Baldwin works described in the readings, Tish and Fonny are both black. Fonny’s imprisonment emphasizes the role of race in their lives, but nothing inherent to their relationship itself brings up racial dynamics like it did for Leo and Barbara. Tish and Fonny are struggling, but they are going through the struggle together, experiencing the same discriminatory practices. They don’t have to confront the system to stay in love; the system is already part of their everyday lives. They fight for Fonny’s innocence, but though this individual situation may be representational of a larger issue, no one in this film is trying to tackle an issue. This is about one man’s freedom, a single win against a sea of losses. It’s about the love of one couple, for each other and their family, pulling them through the darkest period of their lives.

[tyleroakley-obsessed]

Hey, y’all! Here’s your list of fun things to do around town this weekend in Memphis. But first: thoughts and prayers to East Memphis, because TDOT is shutting down Poplar at I-240. Poplar Avenue will be closed right near I-240 this weekend from Friday at 9 p.m. until Monday at 6 a.m. From TDOT: “During the Poplar Avenue closure, I-240 ramps that cross over I-240 or under Poplar Avenue will be closed. I-240 will remain open.” Read more here and see a map here. OK, here are your five things to do this weekend in Memphis, plus a few extras: 1. Family Science Night, Pink Palace, Friday, 7-10 p.m. $12, free for kids 2 and under, all ages Enjoy telescope observations on the lawn with the Memphis Astronomical Society, watch a planetarium show, conduct experiments, and meet local scientists. Food trucks will be on site in case all that science-ing makes you hungry. 2. Grrrl’s Night, Cadre Building, Friday, 6-9 p.m., $25 advance, $30 at the door This fourth annual ladies’ night fundraiser for Alive Animal Rescue will feature cruelty-free beauty and fashion. Ticket purchase gets you cocktails and appetizers,a raffle ticket, and professional pampering. Attendees will also have the chance to win raffle prizes and bid on silent auction items. 3. Memphis Caribbean Jerk Festival, Tiger Lane, Saturday, noon to 7 p.m., $15 adv./$20 gate, kids 12 and under free, all ages/kid-friendly The 3rd annual Memphis Caribbean Jerk Festival and Family Fun Day will offer jerk and Caribbean foods, live entertainment, a dominoes tournament, kids’ activities and more. Proceeds benefit the Sickle Cell Foundation of Tennessee. 4. Saddle Creek Beer Garden, Shops of Saddle Creek, Saturday 4 p.m. – 9 p.m. / Sunday 2 p.m. – 6 p.m., free to enter, all ages/kid-friendly Saddle Creek will host a weekly beer garden featuring domestic, import, and local beers starting this weekend. For the kickoff on Saturday, they’ll have live music, a featured local brewery (it’s Meddlesome), and food trucks. Starting next week, the beer garden will be Fridays through Sundays. Read more here. 5. Ovaryaction feat. Marco Pave, The Hi-Tone Cafe, Saturday July 14th, $10, show at 7 p.m., 18 and over Political activist and hip-hop entrepreneur Marco Pave continually supports the Bluff City, so it’s no surprise he’s headlining Ovaryaction, presented by and for A Step Ahead Foundation. Marco’s album Welcome to Grc Lnd – released last year – voices, argues, and frames perspectives of Memphians not always heard; he’s pushing forward a new wave of Memphis hip-hop that’s undeniably his own. There’s a ton of live music in Memphis this weekend. Catch Boy George & Culture Club with The B52s at Live at the Garden on Friday ($45 for lawn tickets; gates at 6:30 p.m./show at 8:30 p.m.). On Saturday, you can catch hip hop artist Marco Pave at the Hi-Tone for the Ovaryaction fundraiser for A Step Ahead Foundation ($10 tickets, 18+, show at 7 p.m.) Also on Saturday, Modest Mouse performs at the Orpheum ($45+, 8 p.m.) and Alison Krauss is at Mud Island ($55+, 8 p.m.) On Sunday, catch the final show of the Levitt Shell’s summer season with bluesy funk rock duo The Peterson Brothers (free, 7:30 p.m.). Check out the Listen Up Guide for July for more show recs for the rest of the month. Playhouse on the Square’s Theatreworks hosts the world premiere of the original play, CRIB. I sat down with Marcus Cox from Playhouse recently and he told me about this show, and I can.not.wait. to see it. It’s about Rajon, a star college basketball star facing expulsion for plagiarism accusations. CRIB runs Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and on Sundays at 2 p.m. through July 29. PWYC night is July 19. Read more and get tickets here. Check out the preview video below. For more ideas for this weekend, check out the blog’s calendar here. Are you a home owner in Memphis, with a broken garage door? Call ASAP garage door today at 901-461-0385 or checkout https://ift.tt/1B5z3Pc

http://ilovememphisblog.com/2018/07/5-things-to-do-this-weekend-7-13-7-15/

[weblistposting-blog]

New Post has been published on Weblistposting

New Post has been published on https://weblistposting.com/why-americas-richest-cities-maintain-getting-richer/

Why America’s Richest Cities Maintain Getting Richer

Within the fall of 2013, in an inn suite overlooking New york Metropolis’s Instances Square, the gaming giant Electronic Arts unveiled Towns of The following day, the contemporary addition to its hugely successful SimCity franchise of laptop games. In place of racking up points the same old way, through killing awful guys, players of the SimCity collection take a fee of Cities. In the role of mayor, they have got the energy to change things like tax rates, zoning ordinances, and land-use policies, and to do so to boost monetary improvement and create jobs. Inside the latest iteration of the game, by means of clicking on man or woman citizens they can see the outcomes, they’re having on humans’ lives.

America’s Richest Cities 

Diario las America’s

In Towns of Day after today’s grim destiny, there may be a technologically superior infrastructure that’s owned through an elite cadre called ControlNet. The mayor can do things to restriction their energy, however handiest on the hazard of stifling the City’s economic boom. Too little increase and the Metropolis devolves into dystopian squalor; an excessive amount of, and it will become so unequal that its residents can rarely have the funds for to live in it. To be successful, players should locate and navigate the precarious course between those two equally unpalatable city options.

In Towns of Day after today’s grim destiny, there may be a technologically superior infrastructure that’s owned through an elite cadre called ControlNet. The mayor can do things to restriction their energy, however handiest on the hazard of stifling the City’s economic boom. Too little increase and the Metropolis devolves into dystopian squalor; an excessive amount of, and it will become so unequal that its residents can rarely have the funds for to live in it. To be successful, players should locate and navigate the precarious course between those two equally unpalatable city options.

Sound familiar? The futuristic City might be an in-game fiction, but the basic dilemma that the game describes is gambling out in real Cities these days. The maximum important and revolutionary industries and the most talented, maximum ambitious, and wealthiest people are converging as in no way earlier than in a relative handful of leading movie star Cities that are expertise and tech hubs. This small institution of elite locations forges ever forward, while most others battle, stagnate, or fall behind. This technique is one I love to name winner-take-all urbanism.

while that word is my very own coinage, the wider phenomenon of winner-take-all economics has been diagnosed for quite a while. Almost two decades ago, the economists Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook dinner popularized the concept of the winner-take-all financial system and society. The rudiments of the principle are evident Inside the exertions market for expert athletes: As excessive because the earnings of the common athlete may be, the pay hole among middling games and superstars is sizable. Frank and Prepare dinner noticed this winner-take-all phenomenon spreading at some stage in the wider financial system, as large pay disparities regarded in industries ranging from consulting, banking, and control to layout, style, remedy, and regulation. The profits hole among CEOs and the average employee soared. In the kind of four, a long time spanning from 1978 to 2015, CEO pay extended by means of more than 940 percent, at the same time as that of a standard employee grew through simply 10 percentage. The common CEO earned 20 Instances what the common employee did in 1965; by the 2000s, the ratio had grown to greater than 300 to one, in which it has remained for the reason that.

Cities had been caught up in this winner-take-all phenomenon, too. just because the economic system confers disproportionate rewards to celeb talent, celebrity Cities, to borrow a word originated by means of the researchers Joseph Gyourko, Christopher Mayer, and Todd Sinai, similarly tower above the relaxation. They generate the best stages of innovation, control and entice the most important stocks of global capital and investment, have massive concentrations of main-part finance, media, enjoyment, and tech industries, and are domestic to a disproportionate percentage of the sector’s talent. they are not just the places in which the maximum bold and most gifted humans want to be—they’re wherein such human beings feel they want to be.

This dynamic is cumulative and self-reinforcing. movie star Towns’ expanding economies spur demand for greater and higher restaurants, theaters, nightclubs, galleries, and different amenities. a hit businesspeople and marketers endow their museums, concert halls, non-public faculties, and universities. Their developing tax revenues are plowed into new and higher colleges, greater transit, higher libraries, more and higher parks, and so forth, which in addition reinforces and perpetuates their benefits. they have got precise styles of economies which can be based totally around the maximum innovative and maximum fee-brought industries, in particular finance, media, leisure and tech; agencies in celeb Cities are fashioned and scaled up to greater quick. All of this attracts still more industries and greater skills. It’s an effective, ongoing comments loop that compounds the advantages of these Towns over the years.

list of cities

Furthermore, the advantages that accrue to superstar Towns are notably greater enduring than those who accrue to superstar talent. Regardless of how big the call, expertise rises and falls. professional athletes have rather short careers and may be sidelined by way of accidents, or even the most important draws on the film-theater field workplace get older and fade with time. massive Towns can and do decline, of course—Detroit was a massive, rich City at one time—however, the most important and most dominant ones have a tendency to redouble their strengths. Over less than two many years, Big apple Metropolis become hit by using a large terrorist assault, the collapse of its tech economy Within the dot-com bust, a globe-shaking economic crisis in 2008, and Hurricane Sandy, and but it stays the most economically powerful Town Within the world.

real-estate expenses offer a clear indicator of the dominance of superstar Cities and the large gap between them and the relaxation. To get at this, I tracked housing prices Within the greater than 11,000 zip codes across us for which the actual estate firm Zillow has information. There are just one hundred sixty zip codes where the median home rate turned into $1 million or greater; eighty percent of them were placed Within the Ny, L. A., and San Francisco metro areas. All but 4 of the 28 zip codes where median home values were more than $2 million have been placed in or around those three Towns: eleven Within the San Francisco Bay Location, seven in Los Angeles, and six in NY. In 2016, fifty-seven percent of houses Inside the Bay Place had been worth more than one million bucks, up from much less than 20 percent of them in 2012. Meanwhile, 56 percent of the zip codes for which information are available to have median home values of less than $200,000, and more or less 15 percentage have median domestic values of much less than $a hundred,000.

One way to visualise the enormity of the space between celebrity Cities and the rest can be seen Within the determine beneath, which indicates the number of homes one could purchase in Cities throughout the U.S. For the charge of just one in NY’s luxurious SoHo neighborhood. For the price of one SoHo apartment (with a mean price of about $3 million) one could buy 18 homes in Las Vegas, 20 in Nashville, 23 in Atlanta, 29 in Detroit, 30 in Cleveland, 34 in St. Louis, and 38 in Memphis. The disparities are even more staggering while looking at precise zip codes. That one SoHo apartment is well worth as many as 50 houses in components of Toledo and 70 homes in components of Detroit. In a single neighborhood in Mahoning County, domestic of Youngstown, Ohio, a SoHo apartment owner may want to find the money for extra than 100 houses.

The astronomical real-estate costs of celeb Cities—and the dazzling hole among those expenses and those of most anywhere else—are the made from the underlying motor of capitalist improvement: a clustering pressure that attracts humans and resources collectively. key things cluster in Cities. First, and most manifestly, is firms and industries. big, populous Cities expand thriving enterprise clusters, like finance in The big apple and London, films in Los Angeles, fashion in Milan and Paris, and generation Within the Bay Area. Even more importantly, skilled and bold humans cluster in Towns. but this system generates any other force that operates Inside the other course: whilst clustering drives growth, it additionally will increase the opposition for restricted urban area. The more matters cluster in a City; the more costly its land gets. The greater high-priced land and housing fees come to be, the more humans and businesses get driven out.

Maintenance

This land crunch is not only a outcome of herbal economic forces—this is, of restricted delivery In the face of surging call for. It additionally stems from the efforts of city landlords and house owners to limit what’s built, and in doing with the intention to Maintain the costs in their very own real-estate holdings excessive. During the last several years, a developing chorus of urban economists has decried the manner that NIMBY sentiment (NIMBY being an acronym for “no longer-in-my-returned-yard”) continues city housing charges unnecessarily excessive. Traditionally, NIMBYs had been concerned residents who have been inspired to Preserve “terrible” matters, like prisons or waste-remedy vegetation, out of their own ideal neighborhoods. while there’s truly an area for community upkeep and environmental conservation, NIMBYs do greater than that: Nicely-intended or now not, after they reflexively block any and all improvement, they keep high housing values however put a brake at the very clustering that produced them. as the Bloomberg View writer Noah Smith positioned it, “It’s landlords, no longer company overlords, who are sucking up the wealth In the economy.”

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

The Memphis Astronomical Society will present the following presentations at our Friday, August 2nd, 2019 General meeting held at Christian Brothers University in the Science Auditorium of Assissi Hall. The meeting begins at 8:00 pmAll MAS Programs are FREE and open to the general public  The Solar Neutrino Dilemma By Dr. William Busler

The Sun is powered by thermonuclear reactions in which hydrogen is converted into helium as energy is released. These reactions also produce neutrinos, tiny neutral subatomic particles. For over 30 years, a scarcity of detectable neutrinos cast doubt on the whole scenario. However, a new understanding brought resolution to the quandary. Bill will bring us up to date on recent advances in neutrino detection and other means of reconciling the discrepancy.

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

The Memphis Astronomical Society will present the following presentations at our Friday, August 2nd, 2019 General meeting held at Christian Brothers University in the Science Auditorium of Assissi Hall. The meeting begins at 8:00 pm All MAS Programs are FREE and open to the general public. The Solar Neutrino Dilemma By Dr. William Busler The Sun is powered by thermonuclear reactions in which hydrogen is converted into helium as energy is released. These reactions also produce neutrinos, tiny neutral subatomic particles. For over 30 years, a scarcity of detectable neutrinos cast doubt on the whole scenario. However, a new understanding brought resolution to the quandary. Bill will bring us up to date on recent advances in neutrino detection and other means of reconciling the discrepancy. www.memphisastro.org

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

The Memphis Astronomical Societywill present the following presentations at our Friday, July 12th, 2019

General meeting held at Christian Brothers University in the Science Auditorium of Assissi Hall.

The meeting begins at 8:00 pm

All MAS Programs are FREE and open to the general public.

Taking a Picture of an Exoplanet

by Richard Townley

Is it possible to take a direct image of an exoplanet, with enough resolving power to reveal continents on the planet's surface? It may indeed be possible, with a new mission concept called the 'Solar Gravity Lens'. This mission would use the Sun's gravity as a giant lens, allowing us to use it as a virtual telescope, with enough power to see details on an exoplanet's surface. Presenter Richard Townley will explain the mission concept, and the exciting potential for discovery it holds.

followed by a short break and then

The Speed of Light

by Bill Wilson

Does light have a speed? Of course it does, you say. But how do you know that? And what in your daily experience would even lead you to ask the question in the first place? This is the story of how we came to know what we know today and what its implications are.

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

Coming this Friday at the monthly meeting of Memphis Astronomical Society on the Christian Brothers University campus in central Memphis at 8PM:  “Space Law 

By Michelle Hanlon, Mississippi School of Law The media and many commercial space companies -- particularly the ones seeking to colonize Mars or mine asteroids - seek to characterize outer space as a lawless frontier. But there are, in fact, laws that apply in space. The foundations of space law are grounded in general international law and custom; an enduring framework for the regulation of all space activity was established by the Outer Space Treaty, which opened for signature in 1967. Now, however, we stand on the threshold of a new space era -- an era in which humanity has the opportunity to transition into a true space-faring species. Can the law keep up?To answer these questions, we are honored to host...   Michelle Hanlon, Associate Director of the Air and Space Law Program at the University of Mississippi School of Law.   Michelle is also the Co-Founder of For All Moonkind, the only organization in the Universe focused on preserving human history in space, starting with Neil Armstrong's bootprint which currently is not protected or even recognized by any international custom, agreement or regulation.  Michelle will present an introduction to space law and discuss the challenges new space technologies and missions present to the existing space law regime.“ 

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbS8jlQqMv0) Mid-South Astronomy Blog from WREG-TV News Channel 3 for Monday, May 1, 2017

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

Join #Memphis #Astronomical Society @society_memphis for a public stargazing session at Burton's Sugar Farm in Michigan City, MS. Begins after sunset tonight. www.memphisastro.org (at Burton's Sugar Farm Wood Working) https://www.instagram.com/p/BmEw5eon1hA/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1wc3bbm33fjn2

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

#BackyardAstronomy: the #Memphis #Astronomical Society sets up for public #stargazing at @ShelbyFarmsPark Saturday evening. @society_memphis (at Shelby Farms Park)

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

#Memphis #Astronomical Society will hold a public observing session at @ShelbyFarmsPark at the visitor center off Walnut Grove & Farm Road starting at 8PM tonight. Skies should be mostly clear allowing for good stargazing. Follow them on Twitter "@society_memphis" or visit their website for more details & meeting times: www.memphisastro.org (at Shelby Farms Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/BvFfFbxgsqr/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=oyhupj22wrm4

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

#Memphis #Astronomical Society "@society_memphis" will be holding a public #astronomy observing session at Burton's Sugar Farm in Michigan City, MS this evening. Details and further directions available at www.memphisastro.org #BackyardAstronomy #KeepLookingUp (at Burton's Sugar Farm - Catfish in the Barn) https://www.instagram.com/p/BtHekuYggX3/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=cgiywjjxd5o7

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

“ We will be meeting at Shelby Farms, P5 Parking Area to view tomorrow night's eclipse. The eclipse starts at 9:30 PM CST and ends at 11:44 PM CST. Directions to the viewing on MAS Facebook.” #Memphis #Astronomical Society (at WREG News Channel 3) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bs37fQjgcPX/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1gyco3qbllyh5

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

Should be great stargazing tonight. Join #Memphis #Astronomical Society @society_memphis at Burton's Sugar Farm tonight for a public observing session. #BackyardAstronomy #KeepLookingUp (at Burton's Sugar Farm Wood Working) https://www.instagram.com/p/BsRYImfgtMr/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1kdn7sso9ntua