#like all my life. hubble has been there in the background.........

[bisonofyesterday]

Bison’s Big Cool TURKEY DAY November 2024 Art Dump!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"BISON!" you might be wondering, "DIDN'T YOU ALREADY POST THE SATURN FIVE??", well mysterious strawman voice! I did! however I had not finished Sneak yet, but now (and by now i mean like early this month) I have! Uhm, I also didn't draw this much because of anxious depression over c e r t a i n e v e n t s early in the month, but I DID do these 2 things! Hell how about I talk about my ideas for them while I'm here eh? THE SENSATIONAL SATURN FIVE!: Pop-Science Superhero Celebrity Group! They have a deal with evil corporation Evenfall Entertainment (and partial government funding) and therefore are the stars of a half-edutainment/half-reality show where they ALSO fight glamorous crime!

Atom Ace: (Howard Hubble) brilliant inventor and total prick, a freak mutation has given Howard total control over his molecular density! Allowing him to chance size at will! He's also invented some neato repulsor rays in his gloves to fly and punch people at a distance! He may have control over his size! But not anyone else in his life! He's the father of two girls and has a weird relationship with his house AI and his science/business partner, they ALL hate eachother! (Howard is inspired by a mix of Hank Pym Ant-Man and Iron Man) Rhea: (Rhea Hubble) the spunky sweetheart of the Saturn V! Rhea can create hard light ring constructs out of her hair, they remind folks of the planet Saturn so she's named after a MOON of Saturn! She's also very rebellious and hates her dad. (as you can see she's flirting with Dani over there in the corner) (Rhea's general costume is inspired by The Wasp but that's where that reference starts and ends) Sneak: (Valentina Hubble) Rhea's older sister, Sneak is the exact opposite of Rhea, being a huge bootlicker for her dad, she also does a lot of the Five's (I.E. Evenfall Entertainment's) dirty work behind the scenes, which is easy! As she has the power of invisibility! Unfortunately she cannot create forcefields but she can harness her invisible energy into electrical arcs! (s-shock people, she can shock people) She does NOT retain her sister's sociability and sticks to the sidelines. (like her pooooowerrssssss) (Val is intended to be the Black Widow expy, but again, appearance and narrative function is basically where that starts and ends) Ternion: Howard's AI whom he made to care for his boring mansion and his children! (that triangle to the top left of her is her true form), she processes data on the Five's (I.E. Howard's) experiments, but she and Howard are also something more! As they have an incredibly unstable emotional-possibly-psychosexual co-dependent relationship! However! Howard is a massive stick in the mud, so Ternion often has to turn elsewhere for her needs! (Ternion physical appearance is tenuously inspired by The Vision), enter!: The Null: (Dhalazor Rogers) originally Howard's closest science confidant, now a background member and semi-constant nuisance for their press! As The Null turns into a HULKING ALIEN ABOMINATION when stressed! He takes 'medicine' to accommodate this, he still actually cares about the work he does (as well as being a father figure for the sisters) but it's obviously gone to Howard's head, and also that emotional maturity is what attracts Ternion to him as well, oh the drama! I just realized now maybe that also helps their ratings (The Null is obvious, the Incredible Hulk, but I also imagine him with weird fish fins like the Abomination) As I've been not at all subtle with here, the Saturn Five are intended to be expies of the Avengers to contrast against the Phenomenal Family's obvious inspirations in the Fantastic Four, Phenomenal! has tons of other expies too, but I'm gonna have to write about them in their own thingies (just know for now that Howard, Dhala, Millie, and Randy all went to the same college), but if it wasn't obvious I'm a MASSIVE fan of the Venture Bros and comics in general and I like taking toys and bashing them together, wow!

Also! The Patriots still exists! Yeah! Unfortunately right now I'm writing the sequel to something completely unrelated to either The Patriots NOR Phenomenal! So stay tuned for that hopefully this Christmas! (I won't rush myself though so I may miss it)

[oflgtfol]

NOOO WHAT HAPPENED TO HUBBLE why am i only just hearing about this now

[solarsmith49]

First Entry

So I figured I should have a preface/background post before I jump into sharing my writing lol, be warned this is kinda sappy but necessary haha.  I’m going to focus on writing for Creatus Annus; I got back into watching Mark’s channel during the initial March lockdowns after being away for a couple years, and from there into Ethan’s channel and Unus Annus.  I relate so much to Ethan in the brutally honest video talking about how he’s felt aimless and drifting the last few years, because that’s exactly how I felt for a long time- I started 2020 unemployed, no money, no direction, with seemingly no passion or drive to really get out and /live/ instead of just existing.  In April I had a breakdown, and I realized I had to get myself and my life together while I still could because it really did seem like the world was burning down (thanks covid!) and if I didn’t do it now then there wouldn’t be another chance.  I was able to mentally get myself together, and I did find another job in May (which has been a godsend).  And at about the same time as I got hired, I found Mark’s vlog talking about his surgeries and the post-op pain medicine screwup that almost killed him.   I closed my laptop and cried after that, because it was exactly what I needed to hear, when I needed to hear it, by the right person I needed to hear it from.  Because I realized it described me perfectly, not acting on my potential and (even worse) not feeling the /need/ to do so.  So I took a long look at myself, and this essay below is the first thing I wrote after watching the video, exploring my complete love of space and /why/ it drives me in the way it does.  I think it fits the whole message of Unus Annus, and what we’re trying to do here with Creatus Annus, trying to give our own answers to why our lives and our art matters.  Space colors all of my poems (as you’ll see later haha), as well as the creative tension I have from my religious and spiritual background (I was raised Catholic, and still am to a degree, but my personal beliefs range all over the place and the relationship and dialogue I have with God/the Divine and what it means to Create Things is a major theme with space).  So, here’s my first entry for the project; I’m going to write my general ideas for specifically what I want to do in the ideas thread later, but enjoy the essay - I think you guys will like it.

Even until just a few days ago, I didn’t think I had any life passions, or at least, any passions that mattered.  I have hobbies, sure - gaming, crafting, reading, general learning - but I never thought much of them because I didn’t see how I could use them or even if I should bother trying to make anything of them.  Certainly I didn’t think I had any interest that moved me enough to devote a life’s pursuit ot it - but that was another self life, perhaps the greatest, one born from a mix of complacency, lack of faith in myself, and a fear of really facing what truly honestly drives me and the action that that would demand.  The change that that would demand.  Because I do have a passion, and I love it in a general sense, learning about it and following it casually.  But it's also something I turn to in dark hours, something that resparks me when I’m tired, that keeps me going and holds my faith and sustains me when everything else fails - family, friends, my job prospects, failing health, chaos in the larger world, evil in the larger world, even when my belief in the Church burns down and God as seen through the “Catholic” lens seems distant and irrelevant.  Something that I adore with every fiber of my being and in the core of my very soul.  That something is space: the stars and galaxies and their natural functions and processes, but also in particular the space program and what it says about human nature and our relation to the wider universe and ultimately to God himself.

I believe the human endeavour to get to space and the various space programs throughout the world showcase the pinnacle of what our species can do, the best of humanity in terms of technology and cooperation and curiosity, and one of the most fundamental drives we have as humans - the drive to be remembered.  Every single human being, from the greatest to the worst of us, is the end product of 13.6 billion years of cosmic cycles, stars being formed, exploding, sending out dust that forms new stars.  Every single atom and primal element in our bodies, our carbon, iron, calcium, magnesium, everything was forged in the nuclear fusion reactor in the core of a star, untold eons ago and untold millions of lightyears away.  Probably more than once as the dust clouds combine, are forged, and then scattered by the shockwaves of supernovas across time and space.  Over and over and over again, until 4.6 billion years ago when our Sun grew from dust and the planets grew from the leftovers.  And the Earth - the Earth! - undergoing the same process in microcosm, plates shifting and rock melting and gas expanding and water sifting until the Earth was made solid, and then!  In the process, as a by-product, a side effect!  The right combination of star forged elements and electricity and chemical reactions was struck and gave the collections of dust atoms Life and Breath!  Living, self sustaining action on its own accord, independent of outside forces, movement greater than the stars because it happens on its own!  And THEN - a more focused microcosm of the star forge, as 4.5 billion years of evolution refine Life, uncounted species live and die and refine their genes and physical makeup and brain processes and living interactions with the inert world around them; the decay of their bodies feeding plants which feed animals which lets them reproduce and keep the cycle going, echoing the ancient and unaware supernovas, until at last! 100,000 years ago the human species was fully evolved, and, miraculously, became self aware.

Think about that for a minute.  As wonderful as Life is, we could have been just another species of animal, but for the greatest innovation and combination of stardust the universe has ever seen.  We were cavemen, we knew next to nothing about the stars or the wide earth or about our potential, but for the first time Life had gained the capacity to know.  For the first time in 13.6 billion years, dust atoms had gained the capability to learn their origins and how they were made and ultimately to define why they were made.  So, what is almost the very first thing we do with this capacity of thought as an infant species, newly self aware?  We make art.  We make, preserved by some quirk of fate in a French cave, handprints on a rock wall.  We - living stardust - take inert ochre and pigment and stamp an outline on the wall, and those outlines survive intact for 50,000 years.  In this scribbling of an infant species we can already recognize the drive still present in ourselves - the need to say “we were here once, and our existence mattered”.  Humanity for the first time, living relics of ancient stars, giving voice for the first time to those stars, saying in art and words what stars declared in the mute atoms and elements and light they left behind: “we existed once, and that existence mattered.”

Humanity is the universe made self aware.  And just as galaxies are made of millions of individual stars, so too do we as individuals make up Humanity as a collective.  Every single one of us is the universe learning about and defining itself.  And the impulse behind our earliest achievements of cave art is present in everything throughout our history, our collective achievements, our art, our architecture, literature, science, theology, our empires, our struggles, our failures, our compassion for each other.  It's present in all of us as individuals, for which of us doesn’t want our life, our memory to be remembered when we are gone?  We as a species are capable of such great things, great destruction and great good.  And throughout our entire history as a species, we’ve never stopped looking up at the moon and the stars, admiring them, fascinated by them, studying them, unaware at times of our origin among them but always drawn to their light, their unspoken promise.  Until finally in the 20th century, the culmination of thousands of years of research and science and engineering, the best efforts of the best we humans have to offer - we unlock the sky we’ve dreamed of for so long and we build machines to take us to the Moon.  We build the Saturn V, the Apollo capsules, we push ourselves from the cradle and beyond our ancient limits and we - fragile, living mortals - walk upon the Moon itself.  We leave our handprints, after all this time, in the purest form of star dust we will likely ever physically encounter, the living imprinting its shape into the inert, like a brother finally coming home.

But we don’t stop there.  We build satellites and the Hubble Telescope, the International Space Station and satellites and rovers and probes to pave the way for us, our reunion with the stars.  We take more stardust and primal elements and fashion them in our image, to go to other worlds and scout the cosmos for us.  We name them after the best of ourselves: Pioneer, Perseverance, Curiosity, Sojourner, Spirit, that they may represent us well to the cosmos and whatever it may contain.  We build Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, currently the furthest of our creations from the Earth in the cold vastness of interstellar space, and in Voyager 2 we place the Golden Record.  A disk of pure gold upon which we recorded the sounds and voice of Earth - water running, leaves falling in the wind, ocean waves, volcanoes bursting, birds singing, and us - human voices, human laughter, human crying, greetings in every language, our music, a baby crying, a heart beating.  We took inert stardust and imprinted ourselves, living dust, upon it, and sent it out into interstellar space to be our witness and our message.  That we, the universe living and self ware, see the stars we came from and that we understand; we say through the pinnacle of our innovation and with the same depth of expression as those first handprints, “We, the living dust, give this record back to you and for ourselves, that we existed once, and that it mattered.”  We sent it as a testimony, as an offering, as a prayer, and as a vow: that we aren’t done yet, that as long as Humanity lives we will never be done, and if we do eventually end that there will have been a time, if only briefly, that the stars knew and understood themselves, and that despite or even because of its brevity, it will have mattered.

[scifigeneration]

An Earth-sized planet found in the habitable zone of a nearby star

by Ravi Kumar Kopparapu

An artist’s impression of an exoplanet in the habitable zone around a star. Credits: ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser

A few months ago a group of NASA exoplanet astronomers, who are in the business of discovering planets around other stars, called me into a secret meeting to tell me about a planet that had captured their interest. Because my expertise lies in modeling the climate of exoplanets, they asked me to figure out whether this new planet was habitable – a place where liquid water might exist.

These NASA colleagues, Josh Schlieder and his students Emily Gilbert, Tom Barclay and Elisa Quintana, had been studying data from TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) when they discovered what may be TESS’ first known Earth-sized planet in a zone where liquid water could exist on the surface of a terrestrial planet. This is very exciting news because this new planet is relatively close to Earth, and it may be possible to observe its atmosphere with either the James Webb Space Telescope or ground-based large telescopes.

Habitable zone planets

The host star of the planet that Gilbert’s team discovered is called TESS of Interest number 700, or TOI-700. Compared to the Sun, it is a small, dim star. It is 40% the size, only about 1/50 of the Sun’s brightness and is located about 100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Dorado, which is visible from our Southern Hemisphere. For comparison, the nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away from Earth. To get a sense of these distances, if you were to travel on the fastest spacecraft (Parker Solar Probe) to reach Proxima Centauri, it would take nearly 20,000 years.

There are three planets around TOI-700: b, c and d. Planet d is Earth-size, within the star’s habitable zone and orbits TOI-700 every 37 days. My colleagues wanted me to create a climate model for Planet d using the known properties of the star and planet. Planets b and c are Earth-size and mini-Neptune-size, respectively. However, they orbit much closer to their host star, receiving 5 times and 2.6 times the starlight that our own Earth receives from the Sun. For comparison, Venus, a dry and hellishly hot world with surface temperature of approximately 860 degrees Fahrenheit, receives twice the sunlight of Earth.

Until about a decade ago, only two habitable zone planets of any size were known to astronomers: Earth and Mars. Within the last decade, however, thanks to discoveries made through both ground-based telescopes and the Kepler mission (which also looked for exoplanets from 2009 to 2019, but is now retired), astronomers have discovered about a dozen terrestrial-sized exoplanets. These are between half and two times larger than the Earth within the habitable zones of their host stars.

Despite the relatively large number of small exoplanet discoveries to date, the majority of stars are between 600 to 3,000 light-years away from Earth – too far and dim for detailed follow-up observation.

TESS has discovered its first Earth-size planet in its star’s habitable zone, the range of distances where conditions may be just right to allow the presence of liquid water on the surface.

Why is liquid water important for habitability?

Unlike Kepler, TESS’ mission is to search for planets around the Sun’s nearest neighbors: those bright enough for follow-up observations.

Between April 2018 and now, TESS discovered more than 1,500 planet candidates. Most are more than twice the size of Earth with orbits of less than 10 days. Earth, of course, takes 365 days to orbit around our Sun. As a result, the planets receive significantly more heat than Earth receives from the Sun and are too hot for liquid water to exist on the surface.

Liquid water is essential for habitability. It provides a medium for chemicals to interact with each other. While it is possible for exotic life to exist at higher pressures, or hotter temperatures – like the extremophiles found near hydro-thermal vents or the microbes found half a mile beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet – those discoveries were possible because humans were able to directly probe those extreme environments. They would not have been detectable from space.

When it comes to finding life, or even habitable conditions, beyond our solar system, humans depend entirely upon remote observations. Surface liquid water may create habitable conditions that can potentially promote life. These life forms can then interact with the atmosphere above, creating remotely detectable bio-signatures that Earth-based telescopes can detect. These bio-signatures could be current Earth-like gas compositions (oxygen, ozone, methane, carbon dioxide and water vapor), or the composition of ancient Earth 2.7 billion years ago (mostly methane and carbon dioxide, and no oxygen).

We know one such planet where this has already happened: Earth. Therefore, astronomers’ goal is to find those planets that are about Earth-size, orbiting at those distances from the star where water could exist in liquid form on the surface. These planets will be our primary targets to hunt for habitable worlds and signatures of life outside our solar system.

The three planets of the TOI 700 system orbit a small, cool M dwarf star. TOI 700 d is the first Earth-size habitable-zone world discovered by TESS. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Possible climates for planet TOI-700 d

To prove that TOI-700 d is real, Gilbert’s team needed to confirm using data from a different type of telescope. TESS detects planets when they cross in front of the star, causing a dip in the starlight. However, such dips could also be created by other sources, such as spurious instrumental noise or binary stars in the background eclipsing each other, creating false positive signals. Independent observations came from Joey Rodriguez at Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University. Rodriguez and his team confirmed the TESS detection of TOI-700 d with the Spitzer telescope, and removed any remaining doubt that it is a genuine planet.

My student Gabrielle Engelmann-Suissa and I used our modeling software to figure out what type of climate might exist on planet TOI-700 d. Because we do not yet know what kind of gases this planet may actually have in its atmosphere, we use our climate models to explore possible gas combinations that would support liquid oceans on its surface. Engelmann-Suissa, with the help of my longtime collaborator Eric Wolf, tested various scenarios including the current Earth atmosphere (77% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, remaining methane and carbon dioxide), the composition of Earth’s atmosphere 2.7 billion years ago (mostly methane and carbon dioxide) and even a Martian atmosphere (a lot of carbon dioxide) as it possibly existed 3.5 billion years ago.

Based on our models, we found that if the atmosphere of planet TOI-700 d contains a combination of methane or carbon dioxide or water vapor, the planet could be habitable. Now our team needs to confirm these hypotheses with the James Webb Space Telescope.

Bacteria living in harsh conditions like this geothermal basin in Yellowstone National Park provide clues about habitable zones on other planets. 1tomm/Shutterstock.com

Strange new worlds and their climates

The climate simulations our NASA team has completed suggest that an Earth-like atmosphere and gas pressure isn’t adequate to support liquid water on its surface. If we put the same quantity of greenhouse gases as we have on Earth on TOI-700 d, the surface temperature on this planet would still be below freezing.

Our own atmosphere supports a liquid ocean on Earth now because our star is quite big and brighter than TOI-700. One thing is for sure: All of our teams’ modeling indicates that the climates of planets around small and dim stars like TOI-700 are very unlike what we see on our Earth.

The field of exoplanets is now in a transitional era from discovering them to characterizing their atmospheres. In the history of astronomy, new techniques enable new observations of the universe including surprises like the discovery of hot-Jupiters and mini-Neptunes, which have no equivalent in our solar system. The stage is now set to observe the atmospheres of these planets to see which ones have conditions that support life.

About The Author:

Ravi Kumar Kopparapu is a Research Scientist of Planetary Studies at NASA

This article is republished from our content partners over at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

[duhragonball]

More Thoughts on Planet Trade

I started thinking about the logistics of finding and selling planets in an interstellar civilization, so I thought I should write some of this out. 

I wrote a little about what it’s like to buy a planet in my fanfic (Luffa #52, if you’re interested), and I got to thinking about what makes a planet more valuable than another, because I wanted this one to be relatively inexpensive.  So I made it hard to get to, and I made it unexceptional in natural resources, and I made the climate a little too harsh to qualify as a “paradise planet”.   I guess I sort of had my hometown in mind when I came up with the terrain.   Yeah, you could live in Downstate Illinois, but would you want to buy a whole planet of it?   Would you ever use it if it took three weeks to get there?

That got me thinking of how all these details get established before the planet goes to market.   Someone has to find out what kind of minerals are on the planet, and how nice the weather is, and so on.   And this reminded me of how exoplanets are being studied in the real world. 

When I was a kid, nobody had any idea if there were planets outside of our own solar system or not.  You could look at stars through a telescope, but any planets orbiting them would be too tiny and too dim to see.   The starlight would be too bright for a planet to be visible.   So astronomers turned all that starlight to their advantage, and started looking for changes in the light that would indicate the presence of a planet.  For example, when a planet passes in front of its star, the light that normally reaches our telescopes would get slightly dimmer.  This change would happen every time the planet completes an orbit, so it would be predictable and repeatable.  

The technique I always heard about growing up was looking for a star’s “wobble”.   Stars without planets move around the galaxy in a fairly straight line, but stars with with planets would be affected by their planets’ gravity, and follow this kind of sine wave pattern along the path they would normally take.  The Earth and the Moon do this as we orbit around the sun, but the wobble is more pronounced because the Earth and Moon are closer together in size.   The Earth (and all the other planets, moons, etc.) exert a gravitational pull on the sun, but it’s pretty miniscule compared to the reverse.   So the wobble effect on a star can be very small, but it still present whenever there’s a planet.   The result of this wobble is that the star’s distance from the Earth changes as it orbits its planet, and this slight change in distance can be detected by the Doppler shift of the light it sends to the Earth.  

There are other methods of finding exoplanets, but I think these two get the general idea across.   In both cases, it’s a lot easier to find big planets orbiting little stars, which is probably why the first confirmed exoplanets were so huge.   These were called “Hot Jupiters”, because they were at least as big as Jupiter, and they orbited really close to their parent stars.    Maybe the closeness made them easier to discover too, I’m not sure.   Over the last twenty years or so, astronomers have refined their methods, and now there’s thousands of confirmed exoplanets out there, many of them comparable in size to the Earth. 

Apparently, real-world astronomers can get a lot of information through spectroscopic means.  The exoplanet HD 209458 b has sodium in its outer atmosphere, which was observed using the Hubble Telescope.  I don’t know exactly how that was determined, but I know a thing or two about sodium, and it strongly absorbs light at two particular wavelengths that correspond to yellow.  When HD 209458 b passes in front of its star, some starlight would still pass through the upper atmosphere on the edge of the planet’s disk.  But the sodium in it would absorb those two wavelengths of yellow light, so when an astronomer looks at the spectrum of light coming from the star, they’d see less signal where those wavelengths would be.   You can detect other chemical elements the same way, but sodium’s absorption spectrum is very distinctive and so I’m not too surprised this was the first one to be found on an exoplanet.

What I’m getting at is that you can probably figure out a lot about a distant planet without actually going anywhere.   If you can measure a planet’s diameter and mass, you can calculate its density, and use this information to deduce its composition.  Gilese 436b is thought to have a helium atmosphere because its density and other information seems to support the possibility.   It’s safe to assume that if 21st Century Earth can figure that out remotely, an advanced, spacefaring civilization could make an even more conclusive determination.   So if you have a client who wants a source of cheap helium, you could find a helium planet and sell him the coordinates along with a certificate of analysis for the atmosphere.  Pretty easy money, assuming you’ve got the telescopes and a staff that knows how to use them. 

But what if there’s something more valuable on that planet, and your astronomy team couldn’t catch it?   It seems to me that the only way to be sure is to send an exploration team to do a survey.   The cheapest option would be to do it all from orbit.   Maybe a small starship, or even an unmanned probe if you really want to keep costs down.   This would fill in a lot of details, and probably bring to light potential problems like unstable weather, indigenous life, Lovecraftian horrors, etc.   Still, you’d have a hard time selling a planet as living space if you haven’t actually been there.   The surest route is to send down a landing party and conduct an extensive surveys of the surface.    Are there space germs?   Will the apples burn your mouth like Ensign Chekov in that one episode of Star Trek?   How much gold is in the crust?  How much background radiation?   Some of these questions would take a long time to answer, and that’s when I figured out that the planet trade is as much about information as property. 

I suppose that’s true about any real estate transaction.  You don’t want to buy land and then find out it’s not as good as you were led to believe.  Similarly, you don’t want to sell land and find out it you undervalued it.    But in space, the stakes are much higher, because you’re not just selling land, you’re selling entire atmospheres and ecosystems and geologies.   The buyer and the seller want to know as much as possible to minimize risk, but that information comes at a steep price.  You’d need a rare breed of explorer to go to an unknown planet and study it up close without knowing for sure what they’ll find, and they wouldn’t work for cheap.  Plus, the whole time you’ve got that guy poking rocks on Planet A, you can’t send him to check out Planet B.  You might sell B at a loss, only for your explorer to come back and declare A to be worthless, and now you’re really screwed. 

In that light, I can see why someone like Frieza got into this sort of business.   A lot of planet traders probably go broke after a few rounds of bad luck.  The lucky ones manage to succeed enough times to expand their business, and maybe some of them break a few laws to make their own luck.  This could be anything from falsifying a survey report to full-on extortion.  The richest planet traders could hire the best explorers, hardy aliens who can survive the harshest environments and come back alive.   The richest of the rich can hire lots of guys like that, and use them to explore multiple planets at the same time, making them even richer.   So they hire even more hardy aliens to work for them, and after a while they stop looking like survey crews and start looking a lot like a private army.

[hacklesacademy]

fic: then came this person, with chaos in her wake

Hackle angst. Also on ao3.

It would be foolish, Hecate knows, to place all the blame for her current predicament at the foot of one hapless first year - and yet Mildred Hubble is such a useful scapegoat, with her trailing bootlaces and catastrophic attempts at the most basic spells.

She had been preparing for an uneventful year, a repeat of the one before that and the one before that and stretching back to before that blasted girl was even born. The school is her constant and it soothes her to know that even in the face of plummeting academic standards, Cackle’s remains. That Ada remains, unwavering in her devotion to girls and staff. She knows what outsiders think - that it’s all dramatic black cloaks and soaring through the skies, bending the elements of the universe to your whim with a snap of your fingers. They don’t see the control it takes - control she feels slipping through her fingers with every botched potion, broken rule and sheer disregard for basic personal safety.

Now she's behind on her marking, down half a first year (at least until Mildred's invisibility potion wears off), can feel a headache beginning to throb behind her left temple and one of her reference books has turned into a teapot. Ada, never one to turn down an opportunity, has conjured it full and tops Hecate's cup with an absent-minded wave of her hand. If this affects the book once it's turned back into its rightful state, she's demanding a replacement paid for from the school treasury.

Hecate doesn't think it used to be this hard. She's managed whole academic years before without wanting to crack, to sit in Ada's office at the end of the day and close her eyes in tiredness, relax into the touch of gentle hand on tense shoulder and let Ada kiss all her cares away. Now, she can barely get through a week. The desire was there long before Mildred crash-landed into their pond, but now it's there at the end of every week.

There's an old witch’s tale about a frog in a cauldron, kicking his merry way about the potion as it heated up only to realise too late it had come to the boil. Working in silence on opposite sides of the desk, Hecate can feel the heat from Ada's gaze searing her skin and she knows that even if she could escape, she wouldn't. Still, maybe it’s not all the Hubble girl’s fault.  Maybe it's Agatha's pernicious influence, returning to Cackle's again and again, all snake-like charm and sly glances, a cruelly seductive parody of her sister. Or perhaps this whole pretence has simply run its course, a cauldron that bubbles over no matter how attentively you tend it.

There are moments when she wishes Agatha had given them all the obedience potion. She knew what it was, of course - among the more unsavory ingredients, it includes a frankly revolting amount of garlic - and she’d was settling on one of four different plans to avoid actually ingesting the stuff when Mildred interrupted them. But at least then it wouldn’t have been her fault. She could have given in, had an unholy approximation of what it is she really wants, rid it from her system and prayed to all the gods that Ada never found out.

How ironic, that the only woman to whom Hecate would ever give her whole entire being over has too many scruples to ever accept it. How bitterly unfair that there’s always an understudy waiting in the wings who would take it without hesitation.

Because of course Agatha knows. For all her faults - and Maud was right, she really is evil - she pays attention. It’s what she does - oozes her way back into her sister’s affection and their mother’s school, identifies the weakest link and plays the poor girl like a piano in one of Miss Bat’s chanting lessons. Dangerous when it’s one of the children, but downright humiliating when it’s a teacher. Because as much as Ada’s friendship is her biggest strength, has saved her from being a cold, angry shell of a witch one trail of breadcrumbs away from a gingerbread cottage, it is also a weakness. And a version of Ada willing to push back, who doesn’t let her Deputy Headmistress marinade uselessly in her own desire, who would work with her to stem the rising tide of mediocrity, who can hone Hecate’s sharpness and turn it into a weapon…

There are some lines Hecate will never cross and she has Ada to thank for that. Coming face to face with a fantasy better left in the privacy of her own sheets made her realise anew just how much Ada owns her, body and soul. All the things she thought she valued - excellence, discipline, strong leadership - pale in comparison next to the approval from a woman sweeter than the lemon drops she carries, who sees the good in everyone no matter how slow or stupid. Hecate has dedicated her entire life to being the best, to dragging others up to her level, and it stings that if she was lazy or weak then Ada would love her just the same (perhaps more).

But she has to maintain standards, has to be the inflexible one, because the alternative is anarchy and no one can ever know that when she puts a pupil in detention for a month for talking in class or confiscates their cat after a bad mark on a test, that when Ada gives her that frown, the one that says Hecate dear, this time you’ve gone too far , all she wants to do is sink to her knees and say Then show me . Puppies roll over and show their stomachs when they encounter an alpha, but Hecate Hardbroom will be no one’s lapdog. She always has to be one step ahead, because the alternative is trailing behind Ada with a moonstruck look in her eyes and she won’t do that. She can’t. She is Ada Cackle’s right hand. She is reliable, adamantine, stern where Ada is gentle and brutally honest where Ada cloaks her words in tender equivocation. This is her calling, this is how her Headmistress needs her, and it never used to be so hard before.

It’s like casting two spells at the same time - her focus is split, and while she’s trying to keep Mildred in line and out of trouble, some softness creeps in.  Every temper lost is a crack in the armour Hecate has spent centuries building around herself. Every argument with Ada over that wide-eyed troublesome waif pushes her closer to the edge of something she can’t bring herself to name. Naming things gives them power, and this has too much power over her already. It gets harder and harder every year, but she does it. She can’t even remember why she keeps her guard up around a woman who would never judge her for her feelings - and might even reciprocate them - but it’s a force of habit and it’s not one she’ll break because of a clumsy little girl.

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not Mildred’s blood that makes her a risk, it’s her background. Not the flat - a warm, dry modern build full of love is more than equal to a damp old house with more crumbling masonry than actual affection - but her lack of training. Hecate is aware that her own parents may have started her earlier than most, but the reward for that is control. Even the Spellbodys, who use magic more for personal convenience than rigorous academic research, instilled in their daughter a healthy respect for the Craft by the time Maud could lisp her first chants. Mildred has power, that’s undeniable, and magical dynasties have to start somewhere. But without proper guidance, she’ll teach her slapdash ways to her daughter who will teach them to her daughter and within a few generations, Cackles’ will probably be in a permanent state of what Hecate can only describe as ‘being on fire’. No, better that Mildred has her careless ways drummed out of her now rather than make a bigger mistake later on, when she’s liable to bring down the reputation of not just the school but any other witch from a non-magical background. Better that Julie Hubble think the worst her daughter has to face is snobbery rather than the fate that the Great Wizard doles out to practitioners he considers unworthy. A shrinking community with dwindling power looks to outsiders for blame, and expulsion is the lesser of the possible evils in Mildred’s future.

But just because Hecate sympathises, just because she will do everything in her power to ensure that the worst witch in the entire academy either fails her first year outright or leaves Cackle’s at the top of her class, doesn’t mean that she doesn’t want to wring the wretched girl’s neck for each spanner she throws into the works. Hecate is well-practised in the art of being in agreement with Ada Cackle about practically everything, from the dubious health benefits of Mrs Tapioca's cooking to the precise angle needed to stir potions correctly, that she's forgotten what it's like to be in opposition, how it makes her temper flare and her blood rise. It's easy to hide your expression from someone when you're standing side by side. It's so much harder when you're looking directly at them.

She reminds herself what she tells her pupils. A witch is always in control. A witch does not let her emotions interfere with the Craft. She's made girls write that five hundred times in detention - if she thought for a second it would work, she'd try it herself. An image of her writing I must not think about Ada's fingers on my skin while I'm teaching under the Headmistress' watchful gaze comes to mind, and she feels her breath catch in her throat.

"Are you alright, Hecate? Here, have some more tea."

Dear, sweet Ada. Who may sense that her second in command has feelings that go beyond professional respect and companionable fondness, but has no idea - can never, must never have any idea - that Hecate is her creature as surely as any familiar.

"Thank you, Headmistress."

Hecate Hardbroom schools her features into place, a perfect mask of cool indifference, and sips.

[kathleenseiber]

How fast is the universe expanding? Depends who you ask

As the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) turns back on April 1, scientists are preparing to get data that could shed light on some of the universe’s biggest questions.

On the morning of Aug. 17, 2017, after traveling for more than a hundred million years, the aftershocks from a massive collision in a galaxy far, far away finally reached Earth.

These ripples in the fabric of spacetime, called gravitational waves, tripped alarms at two ultra-sensitive detectors called LIGO, sending texts flying and scientists scrambling. One of the scientists was Daniel Holz, a professor in the astronomy and astrophysics and physics departments at the University of Chicago.

The discovery gave him the information he needed to make a groundbreaking new measurement of one of the most important numbers in astrophysics: the Hubble constant, which is the rate at which the universe is expanding.

The Hubble constant holds the answers to big questions about the universe, like its size, age, and history, but the two main ways to determine its value have produced significantly different results. Now there was a third way, which could resolve one of the most pressing questions in astronomy—or it could solidify the creeping suspicion, held by many in the field, that there is something substantial missing from our model of the universe.

“In a flash, we had a brand-new, completely independent way to make a measurement of one of the most profound quantities in physics,” says Holz. “That day I’ll remember all my life.”

Questioning the universe

We’ve known the universe is expanding for a long time (ever since eminent astronomer Edwin Hubble made the first measurement of the expansion in 1929, in fact) but in 1998, scientists were stunned to discover that the rate of expansion is not slowing as the universe ages, but actually accelerating over time. In the following decades, as they tried to precisely determine the rate, it has become apparent that different methods for measuring the rate produce different answers.

One of the two methods measures the brightness of supernovae—exploding stars—in distant galaxies; the other looks at tiny fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, the faint light left over from the Big Bang.

Scientists have been working for two decades to boost the accuracy and precision for each measurement, and to rule out any effects that might be compromising the results; but the two values still stubbornly disagree by almost 10 percent.

A neutron star collision causes detectable ripples in the fabric of spacetime, which are called gravitational waves. (Credit: Aurore Simonnet)

Because the supernova method looks at relatively nearby objects, and the cosmic microwave background is much more ancient, it’s possible that both methods are right—and that something profound about the universe has changed since the beginning of time.

“We don’t know if one or both of the other methods have some kind of systematic error, or if they actually reflect a fundamental truth about the universe that is missing from our current models,” says Holz. “Either is possible.”

Holz saw the possibility for a third, completely independent way to measure the Hubble constant—but it would depend on a combination of luck and extreme feats of engineering.

‘Standard sirens’

In 2005, Holz wrote a paper with Scott Hughes of Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggesting that it would be possible to calculate the Hubble constant through a combination of gravitational waves and light. They called these sources “standard sirens,” a nod to “standard candles”, which refers to the supernovae used to make the Hubble constant measurement.

But first it would take years to develop technology that could pick up something as ephemeral as ripples in the fabric of spacetime. That’s LIGO: a set of enormous, extremely sensitive detectors tuned to pick up the gravitational waves that are emitted when something big happens somewhere in the universe.

The Aug. 17, 2017 waves came from two extremely heavy neutron stars, which had spiraled around and around each other in a faraway galaxy before finally slamming together at close to the speed of light. The collision sent gravitational waves rippling across the universe and also released a burst of light, which telescopes on and around Earth picked up.

Prof. Daniel Holz writes out the formula for the Hubble constant, which measures the rate at which the universe is expanding. (Credit: U. Chicago)

That burst of light was what sent the scientific world into a tizzy. LIGO had picked up gravitational wave readings before, but all the previous ones were from collisions of two black holes, which conventional telescopes can’t see.

But they could see the light from the colliding neutron stars, and the combination of waves and light unlocked a treasure trove of scientific riches. Among them were the two pieces of information Holz needed to make his calculation of the Hubble constant.

How does it work?

To make this measurement of the Hubble constant, you need to know how fast an object—like a newly collided pair of neutron stars—is receding away from Earth, and how far away it was to begin with. The equation is surprisingly simple. It looks like this: The Hubble constant is the velocity of the object divided by the distance to the object, or H=v/d.

Somewhat counterintuitively, the easiest part to calculate is how fast the object is moving. Thanks to the bright afterglow the collision caused, astronomers could point telescopes at the sky and pinpoint the galaxy where the neutron stars collided.

Then they can take advantage of a phenomenon called redshift: As a faraway object moves away from us, the color of the light it’s giving off shifts slightly towards the red end of the spectrum. By measuring the color of the galaxy’s light, they can use this reddening to estimate how fast the galaxy is moving away from us. This is a century-old trick for astronomers.

The more difficult part is getting an accurate measure of the distance to the object. This is where gravitational waves come in. The signal the LIGO detectors pick up gets interpreted as a curve, like this:

The signal the LIGO detector in Louisiana picked up as it caught the waves from two neutron stars colliding far away in space forms a distinctive curve. (Credit: LIGO)

The shape of the signal tells scientists how big the two stars were and how much energy the collision gave off. By comparing that with how strong the waves were when they reached Earth, they could infer how far away the stars must have been.

The initial value from just this one standard siren came out to be 70 kilometers (just under 43.5 miles) per second per megaparsec. That’s right in between the other two methods: The supernova method finds about 73 (just over 45 miles) kilometers per second per megaparsec and the cosmic microwave background finds 67 (just over 41.5 miles) kilometers per second per megaparsec.

Of course, that’s only a single data point. But the LIGO detectors are turning back on after an upgrade to boost their sensitivity. While nobody knows precisely how often neutron stars collide, Holz co-wrote a paper estimating that the gravitational wave method may provide a revolutionary, extremely precise measurement of the Hubble constant within five years.

“As time goes on, we’ll observe more and more of these binary neutron star mergers, and use them as standard sirens to steadily improve our estimate of the Hubble constant. Depending on where our value falls, we might confirm one method or the other. Or we might find an entirely different value,” Holz says.

“No matter what we find, it’s gonna be interesting—and will be an important step in learning more about our universe.”

Source: University of Chicago

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[ntrending]

Dust to dust: How Earth’s most advanced observatory is unraveling our origins

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/dust-to-dust-how-earths-most-advanced-observatory-is-unraveling-our-origins/

Dust to dust: How Earth’s most advanced observatory is unraveling our origins

SAN PEDRO DE ATACAMA Visiting the Atacama Large Millimeter/Sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) is not for the faint of heart. After driving up the barren plateau to meet my guide Danilo Vidal, ALMA’s visit coordinator, the first stop was a health check. Just to hang out for a few hours at the Operations Support Facility where ALMA’s staff lives and works to solve the mysteries of the cosmos, I had to prove that my heart beat not too fast and not to slow, and that oxygen saturated at least 80 percent of my blood (at a recent sea-level physical I scored 96 percent).

But the extreme environment hasn’t stopped nearly two dozen countries from coming together to build the most ambitious astronomical tool on the planet. Getting 66 state-of-the-art antennas to operate in sync at a facility nearly as high as Everest’s base camp takes hundreds of engineers and other staff operating with military precision. Now fully functional after decades of construction and six years of upgrades, the institution is finally devoting much of its power to one of its main goals: watching for the heat glow of dust as it swirls around young stars. Already ALMA observations are rewriting the story of how those systems go from clouds of sand to families of planets, which is also the story of how Earth became the third rock from our sun.

A blood oxygen saturation of 91 percent won me clearance to carry on, although Vidal handed me a single-use canister of oxygen just in case. Then we climbed into his SUV and he hooked up his own nasal hose leading to two heavy duty oxygen tanks. “Regulations,” he said, as we started the drive up to the top of the Chajnantor Plateau, cactuses and vicuñas rolling past at the mandated 20 miles per hour.

Our eyes bias us toward the rainbow hues we can see, but many other types of light permeate the universe. Stars burn across and beyond the visible spectrum, black holes emit x-rays and radio waves, and stellar explosions shoot out rays of many varieties. Only by looking at all these different “colors” can we get a complete picture of the cosmos.

ALMA, which looks at light waves about a millimeter in length, functions as the world’s greatest set of night vision goggles. Objects emit different types of light depending on their temperature, and the observatory’s antennas let it pick out objects that aren’t hot enough to shine like stars. To its eyes, cool dust glows brightly against the frigid background of space, similar to how warm bodies shine to infrared cameras. In fact, ALMA is blind to visible light altogether, which lets it watch the skies both day and night.

The story of dust is really the story of everything we can see, which is why the astronomical communities of North America, Asia, and Europe banded together with the Chilean government and spent 1.5 billion dollars to build an observatory on top of the world’s driest mountain. Clouds of hydrogen in space collapse into stars, spinning up disks of leftover dust that eventually swirl into the planets, asteroids, and comets that make up solar systems. We can study our own cosmic neighborhood up close, but researchers ache for more diverse, younger examples to sort patterns from coincidences.

Computer models go a long way toward that goal, but there’s no substitute for images catching the planet-birthing process in action. Previous millimeter instruments lacked the necessary power, but on this front ALMA has been a game changer. “It’s rare that you get this big of a leap,” says Sean Andrews, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “This is like going from a little handheld telescope to the Hubble space telescope.”

At the top of the plateau I could immediately see how ALMA gets those money shots. Even without as much as a blade of grass in sight to help your brain calibrate size, the sprawling Array Operations Site looks huge. But before I could see the antennas up close, it was time for another health check. We entered what Vidal says now counts as the highest technical building in the world after a Nepalese train station stopped working last year, and I narrowly received clearance to continue the tour with 3% oxygen saturation to spare.

ALMA is an interferometer rather than a telescope, splitting its operations among 66 large dishes that span an area impossible for any single instrument—more than a mile across. That was the size when I visited, anyway—each of the 100-ton antennas is portable. Two monstrous forklifts, nicknamed Otto and Lore, lug a couple of antennas per day in an unceasing dance that, over the course of months, blows up the array to an unparalleled ten miles across. By expanding and contracting, astronomers can prioritize either detail or scope in a cosmological version of the smartphone’s pinch to zoom function. They just have to make sure the dishes stay plugged in the whole time (the forklifts have a battery system that supplies electricity). If the power fails and the internal machinery warms much beyond its operating temperature of 450 degrees F below zero, the driver will be left holding a multi-million dollar brick.

Fortunately that hasn’t happened yet. Finally at full power, the array creates images ten times sharper than it did during its 2011 debut, a resolution that increasingly allows astronomers to grasp the finer details of planetary formation.

The first step in a dust grain’s journey from “fluffy sand” to a proper world depends as much on how it communes with its neighbors as it does on the disk at large, according to Karin Öberg, the leader of Harvard’s astrochemistry group and one of five North American representatives on ALMA’s board. Laboratory work suggests that planetary seeds start by becoming sticky, gaining an ice coating through collisions with hydrogen and oxygen. Picking out specific elements from hundreds of light years away is tough, but ALMA has spotted extraterrestrial sugar and alcohol.

Growing larger than icy dust bunnies seemed theoretically impossible for years, empirical evidence beneath our feet notwithstanding. The spinning forces inside a disk should tear dust clumps apart before they can swell beyond the size of a rice grain, models predicted, unless somehow particles were gathering in special, denser areas.

A team led by astrophysicist Nienke van der Marel of the NRC Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics in Victoria, Canada snapped the first direct images of just such a “dust trap” while at Leiden University in the Netherlands in 2013, confirming decades of modeling. “People doing simulations of processes in a disk were working almost independently of observers,” she recalls. “Theory had drifted from observations and ALMA really brought that back together.”

Now the observatory’s new data has the simulators playing defense. When ALMA trained its dishes on HL Tau, a young star ringed by a dusty cloud 450 light years from Earth, it should have seen a smooth disk. Planets take millions of years to coalesce, the thinking went, and this system was barely a tenth that old. Yet the images came back in 2014 showing an incandescent red disk split by a half dozen crisp grooves—likely signs of baby planets hoovering up dust as they orbit. Now, a soon-to-be-published survey of 20 such disks led by Sean Andrews confirms that HL Tau is more rule than exception. However planets form, ALMA’s night vision is revealing, they’re doing it everywhere— and fast.

Returning to the Operations Support Facility halfway down the plateau, Vidal and I ran into two Italian filmmakers wandering the halls after failing their health check. They had two hours to wait for their second—and final���chance to pass. Vidal speculated that they’d ignored instructions to resist the temptation of coffee at breakfast.

Now safe to drink caffeine, we sat down for tea with Matias Radiszcz, a bearded data analyst from Santiago and unsung hero of this kind of operation. Radiszcz does battle with the facility’s main enemy: humidity. Even in a desert so dry that parts haven’t seen rain since the days of Isaac Newton, traces of water vapor always hang in the air. Radiszcz adjusts antennas to adapt to the humidity in real time. He also takes shifts as the Astronomer on Duty, deciding which observations to run out of the hundreds in the queue.

Between the altitude and the often nocturnal schedule, ALMA engineers have to get used to leading groggy lives, but participating in the unraveling of the Earth’s origin story makes the week-long shifts away from his family and the sleepless nights worthwhile. “The motivating thing is to be in the place where it’s happening,” Radiszcz says. “The Earth is like an oasis in the universe, and you can understand the value of humanity and the fragility that is life.”

By the time Vidal sent me on my way back to the town of San Pedro, the Atacama desert’s local oasis, the sun was just starting to edge below the horizon as the Earth spun Chile away from its rays. I hopped in the rental car and slowly drove back down the mountainside, a thin cloud of dust swirling behind me.

The reporting for this article was partially supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Written By Charlie Wood

[martadwatson]

Designer of the Month: Karen J Ward | Cooksongold

Jeweller Karen J Ward uses a range of traditional techniques when making her jewellery pieces, such as chasing and repoussé, texturing and stone setting. Read on to learn more about her varying design style, the tools and materials she favours and more.

Let us know a bit about yourself, detailing your background, study and training in the jewellery making industry.

When I left school circumstances dictated that I pursued a career in banking, rather than the degree course in Art I had been offered. I painted in my spare time, but always felt I was missing something.  Five years ago whilst surfing the internet, I came across a jewellery taster session and that lesson changed my life!

The chance to retrain with Nik Stanbury and Julie Moss at the York School of Jewellery was something I grabbed with both hands! I juggle my jewellery making and family commitments with working part time, and dream of the day I can become a full time designer/maker. I am based in York, and in April took part in York Open Studios 2018 – my very first exhibition!  I have learnt so much already, but it’s the tip of the iceberg, there is so much more to learn.

Tell us about your work – are there any particular materials or techniques that you favour?

For a while I have been concentrating on chasing and repoussé as I love being able to move, shape and texture the metal. I was struggling with finding my style and being part of York Open Studios really helped – having a deadline focussed my efforts.  The pieces that I created for my exhibition, evolved from chasing and repoussé techniques together with my experiments with textures.

I use sterling, Britannia, Argentium and fine silver (all from Cooksongold) depending on what I am making, and think that fine silver is my favourite. I like to incorporate gold, and precious/semi-precious stones into some of my designs, and have recently fallen in love with the beautiful toffee colour of hessonite garnets.

How would you best describe your design style?

I don’t like being ‘pigeon holed’ but if pushed would say that my design style is fluid/flowing, organic and fresh and subject to change without prior warning!

As a jewellery maker, where do you like to get your inspiration from for your pieces?

Inspiration comes from diverse points, from my fascination for the textures, shapes and curves found in nature, to the fantastic pictures of deep space from the Hubble telescope. Ideas might spring to mind fully formed, or they may evolve as I work.

Do you have a piece that you have made which you favour or are particularly proud of?

My very first ring (now worn and battle scarred) will always be special, but a piece that I am especially proud of is my Sun neckpiece (below), which marks a transition in my designing.

Equally, I am proud of making my own tools (gravers and chasing and repoussé tools) from tool steel blanks or by re-purposing old tools, and love this process just as much as making my jewellery.

What is the one item in your jewellery making workshop that you could not live without?

The item that I couldn’t live without is the first thing I bought, my Cooksongold bench peg and anvil – although as I am a bit of a magpie, and love shiny things my tumbler is a very close second!

What upcoming trends do you see being popular soon?

I’m not a follower of trends, and certainly with my jewellery, I make for pleasure and to challenge myself – to see if I can make my vision become reality.

One trend that I would like to see is an emphasis on traditional techniques and well taught design skills. CAD and 3D printing have their place, but there is nothing as satisfying as holding a finished piece that you have designed and made from scratch, by hand.

What is the most valuable lesson you have learnt from your time in the jewellery making industry?

Never, ever, stop learning (that bezel you melted – it was a lesson in torch control), oh and don’t pick up hot metal with your fingers!

Do you have any particular advice that you would give to up and coming jewellery designers, or someone interested in getting into jewellery making?

Don’t sit thinking about it – do it!  Go join a class; books and YouTube can be OK (depending on who you are reading/watching), and forums are a useful resource, but nothing beats hands-on tuition. A good teacher can make a world of difference.

…and finally, time for a bit of fun in our quick-fire round! Tell us your favourite…

…colour – blue

…food – chocolate

…place – my garden

…animal – horse

…film – Star Wars, nothing else comes near

For more details on Karen’s work, you can visit her website, or feel free to check out her Facebook page or her Instagram page. Karen will also be showcasing at the Saltaire Winter Maker’s Fair in Bradford on 9th and 10th November 2018, and has been accepted for York Open Studios 2019 to be held on 6th, 7th, 13th and 14th April 2019.

Source link

from Diamonds & Jewelry Consignment Shop https://sellringsonconsignment.com/top-posts/designer-of-the-month-karen-j-ward-cooksongold/ from Sell Rings On Consignment https://sellringsonconsignment.tumblr.com/post/179206855563

[sellringsonconsignment]

Designer of the Month: Karen J Ward | Cooksongold

Jeweller Karen J Ward uses a range of traditional techniques when making her jewellery pieces, such as chasing and repoussé, texturing and stone setting. Read on to learn more about her varying design style, the tools and materials she favours and more.

Let us know a bit about yourself, detailing your background, study and training in the jewellery making industry.

When I left school circumstances dictated that I pursued a career in banking, rather than the degree course in Art I had been offered. I painted in my spare time, but always felt I was missing something.  Five years ago whilst surfing the internet, I came across a jewellery taster session and that lesson changed my life!

The chance to retrain with Nik Stanbury and Julie Moss at the York School of Jewellery was something I grabbed with both hands! I juggle my jewellery making and family commitments with working part time, and dream of the day I can become a full time designer/maker. I am based in York, and in April took part in York Open Studios 2018 – my very first exhibition!  I have learnt so much already, but it’s the tip of the iceberg, there is so much more to learn.

Tell us about your work – are there any particular materials or techniques that you favour?

For a while I have been concentrating on chasing and repoussé as I love being able to move, shape and texture the metal. I was struggling with finding my style and being part of York Open Studios really helped – having a deadline focussed my efforts.  The pieces that I created for my exhibition, evolved from chasing and repoussé techniques together with my experiments with textures.

I use sterling, Britannia, Argentium and fine silver (all from Cooksongold) depending on what I am making, and think that fine silver is my favourite. I like to incorporate gold, and precious/semi-precious stones into some of my designs, and have recently fallen in love with the beautiful toffee colour of hessonite garnets.

How would you best describe your design style?

I don’t like being ‘pigeon holed’ but if pushed would say that my design style is fluid/flowing, organic and fresh and subject to change without prior warning!

As a jewellery maker, where do you like to get your inspiration from for your pieces?

Inspiration comes from diverse points, from my fascination for the textures, shapes and curves found in nature, to the fantastic pictures of deep space from the Hubble telescope. Ideas might spring to mind fully formed, or they may evolve as I work.

Do you have a piece that you have made which you favour or are particularly proud of?

My very first ring (now worn and battle scarred) will always be special, but a piece that I am especially proud of is my Sun neckpiece (below), which marks a transition in my designing.

Equally, I am proud of making my own tools (gravers and chasing and repoussé tools) from tool steel blanks or by re-purposing old tools, and love this process just as much as making my jewellery.

What is the one item in your jewellery making workshop that you could not live without?

The item that I couldn’t live without is the first thing I bought, my Cooksongold bench peg and anvil – although as I am a bit of a magpie, and love shiny things my tumbler is a very close second!

What upcoming trends do you see being popular soon?

I’m not a follower of trends, and certainly with my jewellery, I make for pleasure and to challenge myself – to see if I can make my vision become reality.

One trend that I would like to see is an emphasis on traditional techniques and well taught design skills. CAD and 3D printing have their place, but there is nothing as satisfying as holding a finished piece that you have designed and made from scratch, by hand.

What is the most valuable lesson you have learnt from your time in the jewellery making industry?

Never, ever, stop learning (that bezel you melted – it was a lesson in torch control), oh and don’t pick up hot metal with your fingers!

Do you have any particular advice that you would give to up and coming jewellery designers, or someone interested in getting into jewellery making?

Don’t sit thinking about it – do it!  Go join a class; books and YouTube can be OK (depending on who you are reading/watching), and forums are a useful resource, but nothing beats hands-on tuition. A good teacher can make a world of difference.

…and finally, time for a bit of fun in our quick-fire round! Tell us your favourite…

…colour – blue

…food – chocolate

…place – my garden

…animal – horse

…film – Star Wars, nothing else comes near

For more details on Karen’s work, you can visit her website, or feel free to check out her Facebook page or her Instagram page. Karen will also be showcasing at the Saltaire Winter Maker’s Fair in Bradford on 9th and 10th November 2018, and has been accepted for York Open Studios 2019 to be held on 6th, 7th, 13th and 14th April 2019.

Source link

from Diamonds & Jewelry Consignment Shop https://sellringsonconsignment.com/top-posts/designer-of-the-month-karen-j-ward-cooksongold/

[djgblogger-blog]

Astronaut Sally K. Ride's legacy – encouraging young women to embrace science and engineering

http://bit.ly/2yuWkB5

Mission specialist Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly in space. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

On June 18, 1983, 35 years ago, Sally Ride became the first American woman to launch into space, riding the Space Shuttle STS-7 flight with four other crew members. Only five years earlier, in 1978, she had been selected to the first class of 35 astronauts – including six women – who would fly on the Space Shuttle.

Sally’s first ride, with her STS-7 crewmates. In addition to launching America’s first female astronaut, it was also the first mission with a five-member crew. Front row, left to right: Ride, commander Bob Crippen, pilot Frederick Hauck. Back row, left to right: John Fabian, Norm Thagard. NASA

Much has happened in the intervening years. During the span of three decades, the shuttles flew 135 times carrying hundreds of American and international astronauts into space before they were retired in 2011. The International Space Station began to fly in 1998 and has been continuously occupied since 2001, orbiting the Earth once every 90 minutes. More than 50 women have now flown into space, most of them Americans. One of these women, Dr. Peggy Whitson, became chief of the Astronaut Office and holds the American record for number of hours in space.

The Space Shuttle democratized spaceflight

The Space Shuttle was an amazing flight vehicle: It launched like a rocket into Low Earth Orbit in only eight minutes, and landed softly like a glider after its mission. What is not well known is that the Space Shuttle was an equalizer and enabler, opening up space exploration to a wider population of people from planet Earth.

STS-50 Crew photo with commander Richard N. Richards and pilot Kenneth D. Bowersox, mission specialists Bonnie J. Dunbar, Ellen S. Baker and Carl J. Meade, and payload specialists Lawrence J. DeLucas and Eugene H. Trinh. The photo was taken in front of the Columbia Shuttle, which Dunbar helped to build. NASA

This inclusive approach began in 1972 when Congress and the president approved the Space Shuttle budget and contract. Spacesuits, seats and all crew equipment were initially designed for a larger range of sizes to fit all body types, and the waste management system was modified for females. Unlike earlier vehicles, the Space Shuttle could carry up to eight astronauts at a time. It had a design more similar to an airplane than a small capsule, with two decks, sleeping berths, large laboratories and a galley. It also provided privacy.

I graduated with an engineering degree from the University of Washington in 1971 and, by 1976, I was a young engineer working on the first Space Shuttle, Columbia, with Rockwell International at Edwards Air Force Base, in California. I helped to design and produce the thermal protection system – those heat resistant ceramic tiles – which allowed the shuttle to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere for up to 100 flights.

Mike Anderson and Bonnie Dunbar flew together on STS-89 in 1998. They both graduated from University of Washington. Anderson was killed in the Columbia accident, in 2003. NASA

It was a heady time; a new space vehicle could carry large crews and “cargo,” including space laboratories and the Hubble Space Telescope. The Shuttle also had a robotic arm, which was critical for the assembly of the International Space Station, and an “airlock” for space walks, and enabled us to build the International Space Station.

I knew from my first day at Rockwell that this vehicle had been designed for both men and women. A NASA engineer at the Langley Research Center gave me a very early “heads up” in 1973 that they would eventually select women astronauts for the Space Shuttle. In the 1970s there were visionary men and women in NASA, government and in the general public, who saw a future for more women in science and engineering, and for flying into space. Women were not beating down the door to be included in the Space Shuttle program, we were being invited to be an integral part of a larger grand design for exploring space.

1978: Becoming an astronaut

The selection process for the first class of Space Shuttle astronauts, to include women, opened in 1977. NASA approached the recruitment process with a large and innovative publicity campaign encouraging men and women of all ethnic backgrounds to apply. One of NASA’s recruiters was actress Nichelle Nichols who played Lt. Ohura on the “Star Trek” series, which was popular at the time. Sally learned about NASA’s astronaut recruitment drive through an announcement, possibly on a job bulletin board, somewhere at Stanford University. Sally had been a talented nationally ranked tennis player, but her passion was physics. The opportunity to fly into space intrigued her and looked like a challenge and rewarding career she could embrace.

Sally and I arrived at NASA at the same time in 1978 – she as part of the “TFNG” (“Thirty-Five New Guys”) astronaut class and I as a newly minted mission controller, training to support the Space Shuttle. I had already been in the aerospace industry for several years and had made my choice for “space” at the age of 9 on a cattle ranch in Washington state. I also applied for the 1978 astronaut class, but was not selected until 1980.

Sally and I connected on the Flight Crew Operations co-ed softball team. We both played softball from an early age and were both private pilots, flying our small planes together around southeast Texas. We also often discussed our perspectives on career selection, and how fortunate we were to have teachers and parents and other mentors who encouraged us to study math and science in school – the enabling subjects for becoming an astronaut.

STS-7: June 18 1983

In January 1978, NASA selected six women into the class of 35 new astronauts to fly on the Space Shuttle. From left to right are Shannon W. Lucid, Ph.D., Margaret Rhea Seddon, M.D., Kathryn D. Sullivan, Ph.D., Judith A. Resnik, Ph.D., Anna L. Fisher, M.D., and Sally K. Ride, Ph.D. NASA

Although Sally was one of six women in the 1978 class, she preferred to be considered one of 35 new astronauts – and to be judged by merit, not gender. It was important to all the women that the bar be as high as it was for the men. From an operational and safety point of view, that was also equally important. In an emergency, there are no special allowances for gender or ethnicity: Everyone had to pull their own weight. In fact, it has been said that those first six women were not just qualified, they were more than qualified.

While Sally was honored to be picked as the first woman from her class to fly, she shied away from the limelight. She believed that she flew for all Americans, regardless of gender, but she also understood the expectations on her for being selected “first.” As she flew on STS-7, she paid tribute to those who made it possible for her to be there: to her family and teachers, to those who made and operated the Space Shuttle, to her crewmates, and to all of her astronaut classmates including Dr. Kathy Sullivan, Dr. Rhea Seddon, Dr. Anna Fisher, Dr. Shannon Lucid, and Dr. Judy Resnick (who lost her life on Challenger). With all of the attention, Sally was a gracious “first.” And the launch of STS-7 had a unique celebratory flair. Signs around Kennedy Space Center said “Fly Sally Fly,” and John Denver gave a special concert the night before the launch, not far from the launch pad.

Continuing the momentum

One of the topics that Sally and I discussed frequently was why so few young girls were entering into math, technology, science and engineering – which became known as STEM careers in the late 1990s. Both of us had been encouraged and pushed by male and female mentors and “cheerleaders.” By 1972, companies with federal contracts were actively recruiting women engineers. NASA had opened up spaceflight to women in 1978, and was proud of the fact that they were recruiting and training women as astronauts and employing them in engineering and the sciences.

National needs for STEM talent and supportive employment laws were creating an environment such that if a young woman wished to become an aerospace engineer, a physicist, a chemist, a medical doctor, an astronomer or an astrophysicist, they could. One might have thought that Sally’s legendary flight, and those of other women astronauts over the last 35 years might have inspired a wave of young women (and men) into STEM careers. For example, when Sally flew into space in 1983, a 12-year-old middle school girl back then would now be 47. If she had a daughter, that daughter might be 25. After two generations, we might have expected that there would be large bow wave of young energized women entering into the STEM careers. But this hasn’t happened.

Rather, we have a growing national shortage of engineers and research scientists in this nation, which threatens our prosperity and national security. The numbers of women graduating in engineering grew from 1 percent in 1971 to about 20 percent in 35 years. But women make up 50 percent of the population, so there is room for growth. So what are the “root causes” for this lack of growth?

K-12 STEM education

Many reports have cited deficient K-12 math and science education as contributing to the relatively stagnant graduation rates in STEM careers.

Completing four years of math in high school, as well as physics, chemistry and biology is correlated with later success in science, mathematics and engineering in college. Without this preparation, career options are reduced significantly. Even though I graduated from a small school in rural Washington state, I was able to study algebra, geometry, trigonometry, math analysis, biology, chemistry and physics by the time I graduated. Those were all prerequisites for entry into the University of Washington College of Engineering. Sally had the same preparation before she entered into physics.

As part of NASA’s commitment to the next generation of explorers, NASA Ames collaborated with Sally Ride Science to sponsor and host the Sally Ride Science Festival at the NASA Research Park. Hundreds of San Francisco Bay Area girls, their teachers and parents enjoy a fun-filled interactive exploration of science, technology, engineering and mathematics on Sept. 27, 2008. NASA Ames Research Center / Dominic Hart

Although we have many great K-12 schools in the nation, too many schools now struggle to find qualified mathematics and physics teachers. Inspiring an interest in these topics is also key to retention and success. Being excited about a particular subject matter can keep a student engaged even through the tough times. Participation in “informal science education” at museums and camps is becoming instrumental for recruiting students into STEM careers, especially as teachers struggle to find the time in a cramped curriculum to teach math and science.

Research has shown that middle school is a critical period for young boys and girls to establish their attitudes toward math and science, to acquire fundamental skills that form the basis for progression into algebra, geometry and trigonometry, and to develop positive attitudes toward the pursuit of STEM careers. When Dr. Sally Ride retired from NASA, she understood this, and founded Imaginary Lines and, later, Sally Ride Science, to influence career aspirations for middle school girls. She hosted science camps throughout the nation, exposing young women and their parents to a variety of STEM career options. Sally Ride Science continues its outreach through the University of California at San Diego.

Challenging old stereotypes and honoring Sally’s legacy

Sally Ride and Bonnie Dunbar are fighting outdated stereotypes that women are not good at STEM subjects. Creativa Images/shutterstock.com

However, there are still challenges, especially in this social media-steeped society. I and other practicing women engineers have observed that young girls are often influenced by what they perceive “society thinks” of them.

In a recent discussion with an all-girl robotics team competing at NASA, I asked the high school girls if they had support from teachers and parents, and they all said “yes.” But then, they asked, “Why doesn’t society support us?” I was puzzled and asked them what they meant. They then directed me to the internet where searches on engineering careers returned a story after story of describing “hostile work environments.”

Sadly, most of these stories are very old and are often from studies with very small populations. The positive news, from companies, government, universities and such organizations as the National Academy of Engineers, Physics Girl and Society of Women Engineers, rarely rises to the top of the search results. Currently, companies and laboratories in the U.S. are desperate to employ STEM qualified and inspired women. But many of our young women continue to “opt out.”

Young women are influenced by the media images they see every day. We continue to see decades-old negative stereotypes and poor images of engineers and scientists on television programs and in the movies.

Popular TV celebrities continue to boast on air that they either didn’t like math or struggled with it. Sally Ride Science helps to combat misconceptions and dispel myths by bringing practicing scientists and engineers directly to the students. However, in order to make a more substantial difference, this program and others like it require help from the media organizations. The nation depends upon the technology and science produced by our scientists and engineers, but social media, TV hosts, writers and movie script developers rarely reflect this reality. So it may be, that in addition to K-12 challenges in our educational system, the “outdated stererotypes” portrayed in the media are also discouraging our young women from entering science and engineering careers.

Unlimited opportunities in science and engineering

The reality? More companies than ever are creating family-friendly work environments and competing for female talent. In fact, there is a higher demand from business, government and graduate schools in the U.S. for women engineers and scientists than can be met by the universities.

Both Sally and I had wonderful careers supported by both men and women. NASA was a great work environment and continues to be – the last two astronaut classes have been about 50 percent female.

I think that Sally would be proud of how far the nation has come with respect to women in space, but would also want us to focus on the future challenges for recruiting more women into science and engineering, and to reignite the passion for exploring space.

Bonnie J. Dunbar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

[scifigeneration]

Astronaut Sally K. Ride's legacy – encouraging young women to embrace science and engineering

by Bonnie J. Dunbar

On June 18, 1983, 35 years ago, Sally Ride became the first American woman to launch into space, riding the Space Shuttle STS-7 flight with four other crew members. Only five years earlier, in 1978, she had been selected to the first class of 35 astronauts – including six women – who would fly on the Space Shuttle.

Sally’s first ride, with her STS-7 crewmates. In addition to launching America’s first female astronaut, it was also the first mission with a five-member crew. Front row, left to right: Ride, commander Bob Crippen, pilot Frederick Hauck. Back row, left to right: John Fabian, Norm Thagard. NASA

Much has happened in the intervening years. During the span of three decades, the shuttles flew 135 times carrying hundreds of American and international astronauts into space before they were retired in 2011. The International Space Station began to fly in 1998 and has been continuously occupied since 2001, orbiting the Earth once every 90 minutes. More than 50 women have now flown into space, most of them Americans. One of these women, Dr. Peggy Whitson, became chief of the Astronaut Office and holds the American record for number of hours in space.

The Space Shuttle democratized spaceflight

The Space Shuttle was an amazing flight vehicle: It launched like a rocket into Low Earth Orbit in only eight minutes, and landed softly like a glider after its mission. What is not well known is that the Space Shuttle was an equalizer and enabler, opening up space exploration to a wider population of people from planet Earth.

STS-50 Crew photo with commander Richard N. Richards and pilot Kenneth D. Bowersox, mission specialists Bonnie J. Dunbar, Ellen S. Baker and Carl J. Meade, and payload specialists Lawrence J. DeLucas and Eugene H. Trinh. The photo was taken in front of the Columbia Shuttle, which Dunbar helped to build. NASA

This inclusive approach began in 1972 when Congress and the president approved the Space Shuttle budget and contract. Spacesuits, seats and all crew equipment were initially designed for a larger range of sizes to fit all body types, and the waste management system was modified for females. Unlike earlier vehicles, the Space Shuttle could carry up to eight astronauts at a time. It had a design more similar to an airplane than a small capsule, with two decks, sleeping berths, large laboratories and a galley. It also provided privacy.

I graduated with an engineering degree from the University of Washington in 1971 and, by 1976, I was a young engineer working on the first Space Shuttle, Columbia, with Rockwell International at Edwards Air Force Base, in California. I helped to design and produce the thermal protection system – those heat resistant ceramic tiles – which allowed the shuttle to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere for up to 100 flights.

Mike Anderson and Bonnie Dunbar flew together on STS-89 in 1998. They both graduated from University of Washington. Anderson was killed in the Columbia accident, in 2003. NASA

It was a heady time; a new space vehicle could carry large crews and “cargo,” including space laboratories and the Hubble Space Telescope. The Shuttle also had a robotic arm, which was critical for the assembly of the International Space Station, and an “airlock” for space walks, and enabled us to build the International Space Station.

I knew from my first day at Rockwell that this vehicle had been designed for both men and women. A NASA engineer at the Langley Research Center gave me a very early “heads up” in 1973 that they would eventually select women astronauts for the Space Shuttle. In the 1970s there were visionary men and women in NASA, government and in the general public, who saw a future for more women in science and engineering, and for flying into space. Women were not beating down the door to be included in the Space Shuttle program, we were being invited to be an integral part of a larger grand design for exploring space.

1978: Becoming an astronaut

The selection process for the first class of Space Shuttle astronauts, to include women, opened in 1977. NASA approached the recruitment process with a large and innovative publicity campaign encouraging men and women of all ethnic backgrounds to apply. One of NASA’s recruiters was actress Nichelle Nichols who played Lt. Ohura on the “Star Trek” series, which was popular at the time. Sally learned about NASA’s astronaut recruitment drive through an announcement, possibly on a job bulletin board, somewhere at Stanford University. Sally had been a talented nationally ranked tennis player, but her passion was physics. The opportunity to fly into space intrigued her and looked like a challenge and rewarding career she could embrace.

Sally and I arrived at NASA at the same time in 1978 – she as part of the “TFNG” (“Thirty-Five New Guys”) astronaut class and I as a newly minted mission controller, training to support the Space Shuttle. I had already been in the aerospace industry for several years and had made my choice for “space” at the age of 9 on a cattle ranch in Washington state. I also applied for the 1978 astronaut class, but was not selected until 1980.

Sally and I connected on the Flight Crew Operations co-ed softball team. We both played softball from an early age and were both private pilots, flying our small planes together around southeast Texas. We also often discussed our perspectives on career selection, and how fortunate we were to have teachers and parents and other mentors who encouraged us to study math and science in school – the enabling subjects for becoming an astronaut.

STS-7: June 18 1983

In January 1978, NASA selected six women into the class of 35 new astronauts to fly on the Space Shuttle. From left to right are Shannon W. Lucid, Ph.D., Margaret Rhea Seddon, M.D., Kathryn D. Sullivan, Ph.D., Judith A. Resnik, Ph.D., Anna L. Fisher, M.D., and Sally K. Ride, Ph.D. NASA

Although Sally was one of six women in the 1978 class, she preferred to be considered one of 35 new astronauts – and to be judged by merit, not gender. It was important to all the women that the bar be as high as it was for the men. From an operational and safety point of view, that was also equally important. In an emergency, there are no special allowances for gender or ethnicity: Everyone had to pull their own weight. In fact, it has been said that those first six women were not just qualified, they were more than qualified.

While Sally was honored to be picked as the first woman from her class to fly, she shied away from the limelight. She believed that she flew for all Americans, regardless of gender, but she also understood the expectations on her for being selected “first.” As she flew on STS-7, she paid tribute to those who made it possible for her to be there: to her family and teachers, to those who made and operated the Space Shuttle, to her crewmates, and to all of her astronaut classmates including Dr. Kathy Sullivan, Dr. Rhea Seddon, Dr. Anna Fisher, Dr. Shannon Lucid, and Dr. Judy Resnick (who lost her life on Challenger). With all of the attention, Sally was a gracious “first.” And the launch of STS-7 had a unique celebratory flair. Signs around Kennedy Space Center said “Fly Sally Fly,” and John Denver gave a special concert the night before the launch, not far from the launch pad.

Continuing the momentum

One of the topics that Sally and I discussed frequently was why so few young girls were entering into math, technology, science and engineering – which became known as STEM careers in the late 1990s. Both of us had been encouraged and pushed by male and female mentors and “cheerleaders.” By 1972, companies with federal contracts were actively recruiting women engineers. NASA had opened up spaceflight to women in 1978, and was proud of the fact that they were recruiting and training women as astronauts and employing them in engineering and the sciences.

National needs for STEM talent and supportive employment laws were creating an environment such that if a young woman wished to become an aerospace engineer, a physicist, a chemist, a medical doctor, an astronomer or an astrophysicist, they could. One might have thought that Sally’s legendary flight, and those of other women astronauts over the last 35 years might have inspired a wave of young women (and men) into STEM careers. For example, when Sally flew into space in 1983, a 12-year-old middle school girl back then would now be 47. If she had a daughter, that daughter might be 25. After two generations, we might have expected that there would be large bow wave of young energized women entering into the STEM careers. But this hasn’t happened.

Rather, we have a growing national shortage of engineers and research scientists in this nation, which threatens our prosperity and national security. The numbers of women graduating in engineering grew from 1 percent in 1971 to about 20 percent in 35 years. But women make up 50 percent of the population, so there is room for growth. So what are the “root causes” for this lack of growth?

K-12 STEM education

Many reports have cited deficient K-12 math and science education as contributing to the relatively stagnant graduation rates in STEM careers.

Completing four years of math in high school, as well as physics, chemistry and biology is correlated with later success in science, mathematics and engineering in college. Without this preparation, career options are reduced significantly. Even though I graduated from a small school in rural Washington state, I was able to study algebra, geometry, trigonometry, math analysis, biology, chemistry and physics by the time I graduated. Those were all prerequisites for entry into the University of Washington College of Engineering. Sally had the same preparation before she entered into physics.

As part of NASA’s commitment to the next generation of explorers, NASA Ames collaborated with Sally Ride Science to sponsor and host the Sally Ride Science Festival at the NASA Research Park. Hundreds of San Francisco Bay Area girls, their teachers and parents enjoy a fun-filled interactive exploration of science, technology, engineering and mathematics on Sept. 27, 2008. NASA Ames Research Center / Dominic Hart

Although we have many great K-12 schools in the nation, too many schools now struggle to find qualified mathematics and physics teachers. Inspiring an interest in these topics is also key to retention and success. Being excited about a particular subject matter can keep a student engaged even through the tough times. Participation in “informal science education” at museums and camps is becoming instrumental for recruiting students into STEM careers, especially as teachers struggle to find the time in a cramped curriculum to teach math and science.

Research has shown that middle school is a critical period for young boys and girls to establish their attitudes toward math and science, to acquire fundamental skills that form the basis for progression into algebra, geometry and trigonometry, and to develop positive attitudes toward the pursuit of STEM careers. When Dr. Sally Ride retired from NASA, she understood this, and founded Imaginary Lines and, later, Sally Ride Science, to influence career aspirations for middle school girls. She hosted science camps throughout the nation, exposing young women and their parents to a variety of STEM career options. Sally Ride Science continues its outreach through the University of California at San Diego.

Challenging old stereotypes and honoring Sally’s legacy

Sally Ride and Bonnie Dunbar are fighting outdated stereotypes that women are not good at STEM subjects. Creativa Images/shutterstock.com

However, there are still challenges, especially in this social media-steeped society. I and other practicing women engineers have observed that young girls are often influenced by what they perceive “society thinks” of them.

In a recent discussion with an all-girl robotics team competing at NASA, I asked the high school girls if they had support from teachers and parents, and they all said “yes.” But then, they asked, “Why doesn’t society support us?” I was puzzled and asked them what they meant. They then directed me to the internet where searches on engineering careers returned a story after story of describing “hostile work environments.”

Sadly, most of these stories are very old and are often from studies with very small populations. The positive news, from companies, government, universities and such organizations as the National Academy of Engineers, Physics Girl and Society of Women Engineers, rarely rises to the top of the search results. Currently, companies and laboratories in the U.S. are desperate to employ STEM qualified and inspired women. But many of our young women continue to “opt out.”

Young women are influenced by the media images they see every day. We continue to see decades-old negative stereotypes and poor images of engineers and scientists on television programs and in the movies.

Popular TV celebrities continue to boast on air that they either didn’t like math or struggled with it. Sally Ride Science helps to combat misconceptions and dispel myths by bringing practicing scientists and engineers directly to the students. However, in order to make a more substantial difference, this program and others like it require help from the media organizations. The nation depends upon the technology and science produced by our scientists and engineers, but social media, TV hosts, writers and movie script developers rarely reflect this reality. So it may be, that in addition to K-12 challenges in our educational system, the “outdated stererotypes” portrayed in the media are also discouraging our young women from entering science and engineering careers.

Unlimited opportunities in science and engineering

The reality? More companies than ever are creating family-friendly work environments and competing for female talent. In fact, there is a higher demand from business, government and graduate schools in the U.S. for women engineers and scientists than can be met by the universities.

Both Sally and I had wonderful careers supported by both men and women. NASA was a great work environment and continues to be – the last two astronaut classes have been about 50 percent female.

I think that Sally would be proud of how far the nation has come with respect to women in space, but would also want us to focus on the future challenges for recruiting more women into science and engineering, and to reignite the passion for exploring space.

Bonnie J. Dunbar is a retired NASA astronaut and a TEES Distinguished Research Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation, a content partner of Sci Fi Generation.

[fillthevoid-with-space]

We’re getting theoretical here, and not just astronomy theory but particle theory. That’s right, it’s a dark matter podcast! Learn what some astronomers think it is and why other astronomers think there are better explanations for certain nutty galactic phenomena. Hear about MACHOs and WIMPs! Also learn what dark matter is too hot, too cold, too medium, or just right! 

Below the cut are my sources, music credits, a vocab list, a timeline of the scientists I mention, and the transcript of this episode. Tell me what you think I should research next by messaging me here, tweeting at me at @HDandtheVoid, or asking me to my face if you know me in real life. And please subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, rate it and maybe review it, and tell friends if you think they’d like to listen!

(There’s a lot of ever-evolving info about dark matter and I was not able to cover all of it in just one episode, so get excited to hear about dark matter’s friend, dark energy, on November 6th. My thoughts on the episode after that are still the Voyager golden records, space race history, the transit of Venus, the Moon landing, or Edmond Halley. Let me know what you think!)

Glossary

astroparticle physics - the interface between astrophysics and particle physics.

baryons - heaviest particles. Ex. Protons, neutrons. In astroparticle physics, electrons are included in baryonic matter.

bosons - particles that can exist in the same state at the same location at the same time. Ex. Photons, Higgs boson.

cosmic microwave background radiation - the electromagnetic radiation left over from the time of recombination in Big Bang cosmology.

dark matter - a theoretical mass made up of unknown particles that have not been created on Earth. It is used to explain why galaxy clusters have 10x the mass that their light output suggests they would have; why distant stars on the edges of spiral galaxies orbit at the same speed as stars near the center of the galaxy; and the accretion of gases that created galaxies at the beginning of the universe.

fermions - particles that cannot exist in the same state at the same location at the same time. Ex. Protons, neutrons, electrons, leptons.

gravitational lensing - when light from more distant sources passes near a massive star, galaxy, or galaxy cluster and the object’s gravity bends the light like a lens to provide a warped angle view of space.

leptons - lightest particles. Ex. Electrons, neutrinos, tau particles, muons.

MACHO - acronym for MAssive Compact Halo Object. Made of baryonic matter, these objects are a theoretical explanation that takes the place of dark matter and include neutron stars, black holes, or brown dwarfs.

mesons - medium-weight particles. Ex. Pions, kaons.

Planck satellite - a spacecraft that operated from 2009 to 2012. It measured the dark matter content of the universe by looking at the cosmic microwave background radiation and seeing how dark matter clumped and drew the regular matter together to form galaxies.

WIMP - acronym for Weakly Interacting Massive Particle. Theoretical particles that can pass through ordinary matter without affecting it.

Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe - a spacecraft operating from 2001 to 2010 which measured temperature differences in the cosmic microwave background radiation leftover from the Big Bang.

Transcript

Sources

Fritz Zwicky via the Swedish Morphological Society

Fritz Zwicky via the American Museum of Natural History

Zwicky: “Astronomers are spherical bastards. No matter how you look at them they are just bastards“

Vera Rubin via the American Museum of Natural History

Vera Rubin via Astronomy Magazine

Morton Roberts’ 2007 article on dark matter via Harvard

Particle classifications via PhysicsNet.co.uk

Leptons via Georgia State University, copyright 2001 and all written by Carl “Rod” Nave, who has a teaching award named after him at GSU. Go Rod!

Fermions and bosons via The Particle Adventure

MOND theory by Mordehai Milgrom, published in Scientific American Aug. 2002

Newton’s Second Law of Motion via NASA

MACHOs and WIMPs via NASA

MACHOs and WIMPs via the Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics

Bertone, Gianfranco. Behind the Scenes of the Universe: From the Higgs to Dark Matter. Oxford U P: Oxford, 2013.

Tucker, Wallace H. Chandra’s Cosmos: Dark Matter, Black Holes, and Other Wonders Revealed by NASA’s Premier X-Ray Observatory. Smithsonian Books: Washington, D.C, 2017.

“a mysterious force that causes the observed accelerating expansion of the universe” (3).

“sterile neutrinos, axions, asymmetric dark matter, mirror dark matters, and extradimensional dark matter” (23).

“the concentration of dark matter is leveling off, rather than peaking sharply, in the central regions of this cluster” (31).

Timeline

Albert Einstein, German/Austrian (1879-1955)

Edwin Hubble, American (1889-1953)

Walter Baade, German (1893-1960)

Fritz Zwicky, Swiss (1898-1974)

Enrico Fermi, Italian (1901-1954)

Morton S. Roberts, American (1926- )

Vera Rubin, American (1928-2016)

Peter Higgs, English (1929- )

Kent Ford, American (1931- )

Mordehai Milgrom, Israeli (1946- )

Romeel Dave

Rachel Somerville

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Filler Music: ‘Darkmatter’ by Andrew Bird off his album Fingerlings 3

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught

[caveartfair]

The Hallucinatory Art of Milwaukee’s Most Fabled Eccentric

Portrait courtesy of the artist.

Untitled, November 18, 1978, 1978. Eugene Von Bruenchenhein Fleisher/Ollman

Above the doorway of the kitchen of his Milwaukee bungalow, Edward Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (pronounced BROON-shen-hine) mounted a small metal plaque on which he’d inscribed his various vocations: “Freelance Artist — Poet and Sculptor — Inovator [sic] — Arrow maker and Plant man — Bone artifacts constructor — Photographer and Architect — Philosopher.” Despite what he deemed to be the grand significance of these pursuits, most Milwaukeeans who encountered this runty recluse viewed him and his activities far differently, in what might be summed up with one word: oddball.

Although he craved recognition and made efforts to attain it, such an estimation didn’t faze Von Bruenchenhein. From his youth, “EVB” (as a now-adoring art world refers to him) possessed a lofty sense of his own destiny, which he knew others could not fathom. A high school dropout, graded 4-F due to his diminutive size when he tried to enlist during World War II, he never acceded beyond a menial job at a flower shop and, later, a commercial bakery. “Many who have brought enlightenment to the world seem strang [sic] to the lay man…” he noted in one of his many philosophical proclamations, in which he also declared, “I am from another world, I always felt so, and by my work it cannot be disavowed, disclaimed or, refused.”

Eugene von Bruenchenhein, Untitled (abstraction), 1956. Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery.

Eugene von Bruenchenhein, Untitled (Bone Spiral), 1960-1980. Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery.

Following EVB’s death in 1983, examples of his vast production—photography, drawings, paintings, ceramics, and sculptural constructions made from bone—were discovered, and have since been acquired by prominent international art museums and private collections. The John Michael Kohler Arts Center, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, which rescued his work and first established his reputation, is presenting “Mythologies: Eugene Von Bruenchenhein,” a sensitively installed retrospective, on view through January 14, 2018.  

An accompanying catalogue examines, in the words of contributing essayist, artist, and Wisconsin native Michelle Grabner, the “uniquely individual imagination formed within a man who was hemmed in by a midcentury, middle-American landscape.” An essay by Brett Littman, the director of New York’s Drawing Center, posits EVB as an imaginative theorist and conceiver of self-generating aesthetic systems, akin to those found in everything from classical elements of Islamic design to the buildings of Antoni Gaudí.

Indeed, it’s hard not to think of the artist as a marvelous American fusion of the visionary artistry of William Blake and Max Ernst; Von Bruenchenhein preached with passionate lyricism about the cosmic divinity apparent all around us, while realizing surreal visions of heaven and hell in paint and bone, using inventive techniques of his own devising.

Born in Marinette, Wisconsin, on July 31, 1910, to a sign maker and his wife, EVB was the second of three sons. Early in his life, the family moved to a bungalow that his father built in West Allis, a suburb of Milwaukee. His mother died when he was seven, and his father remarried shortly thereafter. His new wife was Elizabeth Mosley, a freethinking and adventurous woman who had been a school teacher in Panama and became a major inspiration for EVB, encouraging his interest in nature, especially plants, and astronomy, metaphysics, and art making.

After Moseley died in 1938, EVB met a 19-year-old woman named Evelyn Kalka at the Wisconsin State Fair. She liked to draw and paint. The couple married four years later and moved into the house EVB had grown up in, which his father gave them.

Untitled (Marie against hibiscus backdrop, hair up, arm bent and behind head, "South Pacific" feel), ca. 1940s. Eugene Von Bruenchenhein Fleisher/Ollman

Marie w Beads, ca. 1940. Eugene Von Bruenchenhein Carl Hammer Gallery

What Kalka didn’t know then is that over the years the house would turn into a fantastical realm of her husband’s obsessive art practice, packed from floor to ceiling with his creations, with its walls and floors also serving as canvases. “It was like King Tut’s tomb,” one friend later said. There were even giant exotic heads standing guard around its exterior.

Before her marriage, Kalka seems to have been adrift. She left school in the eighth grade, and was unemployed during her courtship with Von Bruenchenhein. Not long after her wedding, her husband renamed her “Marie,” after a favorite aunt. Was this evidence of his domineering personality as some contemporary critics have suggested, or—responding to the alchemy of romantic love—did Kalka elect to be transmuted by her beloved into an elevated state of womanhood by the name of Marie? We’ll probably never know.

What we do know is that EVB adored her—and it’s clear why. She possessed something of the winning wholesome sexiness of Marilyn Monroe back when she was Norma Jean. Her husband wrote poems to and about her; made crowns for “the Duchess Marie” (he was convinced of some misty aristocratic background they both possessed); painted her name on the walls of their home; and inscribed it on one of his bone towers.

But most significantly, he photographed the radiant Marie: posed against fabric backdrops printed with tropical flowers and leaves, sometimes fully dressed, but more often nude or semi-nude in lingerie or simple white panties, and sometimes gently bound by strands of cheap imitation pearls like an odalisque. Thus began an erotic dance between husband and wife, a fantasy world that unfolded over two decades. EVB would develop the images in their bathroom.

Untitled, n.d.. Eugene Von Bruenchenhein Fleisher/Ollman

City Cibola (April 3, 1981), 1981. Eugene Von Bruenchenhein Fleisher/Ollman

Contemporary critics have been divided as to how to assess these photographs. Was Marie a precursor to Cindy Sherman? How collaborative were the portraits? In any case, as the sessions went on, the initial frisson soon faded into a wife’s affectionate but bored indulgence. By 1954, Von Bruenchenhein had instead begun to turn his attention to painting.

The threat of an atomic war was also an urgent motivator and subject. Deeply distressed by the idea of nuclear destruction, he would come home from work and paint into the wee hours in a kind of frenzy, depicting horrific, saturated scenes of landscapes rife with fire and explosions on Masonite or cardboard panels cut from discarded bakery boxes. True to his idiosyncratic vision, EVB did not paint in a typical way but developed his own process, maneuvering paint with his fingers, quills, nails, leaves, sticks, and later burlap, cardboard, and crumpled paper. (Later, he would use an actual paintbrush when working on his ceramic and bone constructions. But they were paintbrushes made out of locks of Marie’s hair, bound to a stick or cocktail straw, as he had little extra cash to spend on art supplies.)

Keen to communicate his message, he appears to have sent at least one of his paintings to the Kennedy White House, as there is a letter from the Oval Office thanking him for a painting. And here it’s worth noting that while EVB is usually categorized as an “outsider artist,” he was in fact a man deeply engaged in the world. He read the newspaper, as well as books.  He had at least one volume on modern art theory, Amédée Ozenfant’s Foundations of Modern Art, a 1952 edition.

He possessed both a telescope and a microscope, and what he saw using these scientific instruments served as inspiration for many of his most remarkable paintings. He created, for instance, a whole series of hallucinatory works in psychedelic hues portraying the creatures and terrain of the First World, a colossal planet which he believed was Earth’s progenitor, having been split off from it during a cataclysmic event eons before. Other of EVB’s paintings presciently resemble images of nebulae that the Hubble telescope has documented only in the past two decades or so.

By 1959, a variety of physical ailments forced Von Bruenchenhein to leave his bakery job; for the rest of his life, he and Marie would subsist on his disability income. Although impoverished and ailing, his curiosity and creativity remained fully stoked. In the mid-1960s, his attention turned to making elaborate ballpoint drawings with the aid of rulers, French curves, and other drafting instruments. The works suggest floral imagery, birds, spaceships, and temples, which he glued into an enormous book of wallpaper samples.

Eugene von Bruenchenhein, Untitled, 1960s. Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery.

Eugene von Bruenchenhein, Untitled (n. 832), 1959. Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery.

After a few years, he began sculpting facsimiles of flowers and sedum, and assembling floriated urns, sensors, and crowns out of singularly formed clay petals and leaves. These he baked in his kitchen oven before painting. He also began assembling fantastical miniature thrones out of salvaged turkey and chicken bones that, to contemporary eyes, resemble props for a sci-fi video game, or early models for Joris Laarman’s computer-generated Bone chair.

Out of these investigations, EVB developed a whole new body of work, beginning in 1976: his tower paintings. These he created with an entirely new painting technique, in which he used the fluted ends of pieces of cardboard to apply paint onto a smooth cardboard surface, producing what looks like linear structures, which he then “built” with. The effect is somewhat reminiscent of decalcomania, a technique closely associated with Ernst; EVB’s palette resembles Ernst’s, as well. These utopian visions of a splendid new world may speak of a new civilization to come, or possibly the artist’s own arrival in a new metaphysical realm.

As if to ground his vision in a tangible reality, in 1979, EVB began assembling actual towers, each several feet tall, using poultry bones. Leg, wing, and breastbones served as the base, and smaller, thinner bones and vertebrae formed the shaft. Some of the structures are crowned, fittingly enough, with hollow eggs. So many bones were required for the series that EVB and Marie had to raid the dumpsters behind local Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants to acquire the necessary supplies. If they bear a certain resemblance to the Watts Towers in L.A., that isn’t by coincidence: A newspaper clipping about Simon Rodia’s creations was found among EVB’s personal papers. (Interestingly, these works may be the first instance of one “outsider artist” influencing another.)  

In 1981, two years before he died, EVB returned to his tower paintings. City Cibola, one of the last he completed before his death, refers to the mythic Mexican city rich in gold, which tantalized the conquistadors.

The promise of riches certainly eluded Von Bruenchenhein his entire life; but then, the curse of the prophet is that he seldom lives to see the promised land. In one of his philosophical musings, he observed: “We consider ourselves so smart and yet after the great length of time man has lived on Earth, he has just scratched the surface of knowledge. . . .As far as science goes we have only looked at the mirror, not [at] what is concealed behind.” Von Bruenchenhein may never have experienced critical acclaim or financial reward for his unique talents and vision, but it seems he did get to see behind the mirror. That’s a reward reserved for only a chosen few.  

—Marisa Bartolucci

from Artsy News

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The Link Between Autism, Baby Teeth, and Lead Levels - HuffPost

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The Link Between Autism, Baby Teeth, and Lead Levels - HuffPost

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Made In Dagenham Textual Analysis:

Which genre does the piece fit into? √ Made in Dagenham is a musical drama, despite the continued comedy element. It is based on true events set in the late 1960s, not only telling the  tale of the Women’s strike at Ford in Dagenham, but the effect on all the workers and some of their families. √ Where is the play set? Immediate location and the wider location. Ω The majority of the Musical takes place in Dagenham (either in/outside the Ford factory or in Eddie and Rita O’grady’s house), which is located in east London. There are scenes that take place in Jeremy and Lisa Hopkins house, which according to Lisa lies “in the middle of the Essex countryside”, Dagenham being just outside Essex. The Concluding conference takes place in Eastbourne, which is south of London on the coast. Ω What is significant and/or important about the locations? ▓ Dagenham is well renowned for being a poor, even poverty ridden section of the capitol. It’s a highly working class area, which is reflected in the busy working lives of most of the characters in the musical. Few characters are well spoken or educated, and most mention a desire for a break and a little more money. Rita is a prime example. In the opening of the show, we get her peak of the working mother’s morning routine, which is made hectic by her husband and kids. However in the Home of Hopkins we see a different story –educated house wife Lisa is bored stiff with the amount of time and Money she has on her hands. She is almost a complete opposite to Rita, but shares her views on Corporal punishment (both of their children have been caned by Mr Buckton) and Women’s rights, supporting her throughout the musical. ▓ When is the play set?  Are there any specific references to day, season or year? ♣ Eddie states in scene 6 that “Millwall’s last season in Division 3 South, so that’s 1958. I been married about ten years.” Which indicates that the Musical is set 1968. Also, upon research tells that the original strikes took place in 1968.  Eddie also (when asked about the date) thinks it might be ‘Pancake day’ which took place on the 27th of February, indicating it is early spring. The original Conference in Eastbourne took place on the 25th of April 1968 ♣ How much time passes during the play? ₔ Based on this, roughly two months pass in the space of the musical, (approximately 8 weeks.) How is the passage of time represented? ₠ After ‘wossname’ in scene 4, the scene jumps to Westminster with Prime Minister, but upon returning to Dagenham in scene 6 with the number ‘PAY DAY’ its now jumped to evening and the factory workers are celebrating pay day. In Scene 9, Harold opens the scene by saying “So Barbara, you’ve had those lovely legs of yours under the desk for a week now” having given her the job in scene 5 indicating a week has passed since then. In ‘Everybody Out” when the Machinists are off to Liverpool, there is a break in the singing where the music reflects the sound of a train moving at speed, which indicates the Workers have made the journey to Liverpool. Between choruses the song jumps to sections of dialogue, often phone calls between higher-class characters panicking about a potential strike, which shows time passing in the choruses. There is a montage used for the number ‘Storm Clouds’ in which scenes blurred together and connected with sections of song. It moves between locations and jumps through time, mostly with a chorus of “Storm Clouds, on the horizon”. Act 2 scene 2 see Rita is handing out the striker pay, which hints another week has passed and this is their fist pay day since going on strike. The launch of the 1600E Cortina is also mentioned to be on Friday, and the next scene jumps to that launch in a Car Showroom. ₠ How wealthy are the characters? ₡ There is a definite split between characters in terms of pay: Rita and Eddie are both working parents, who at the beginning of the show have been re-graded to B grade, meaning they’re paid for unskilled work. The same goes for all the female machinists; Beryl, Clare, Cass and Sandra. This is easy to see from the way thy talk about they’re working environment, they’re constant verbal abuse of management (shouting “Bastards” at every mention) and the uneducated quality of their diction. The Shop stewards (Connie, Sid and Bill) are perhaps a little better off even before the women were graded B, as they are part of the union. Monty was a convener and is being paid more again, however they are all still very much the working class. We see these characters more in meeting than grafting. Mr Hopkins, Mr Macer and Mr Hubble are all much higher up in Directing and management. Of these, Hopkins is likely paid the most. They are well off, and few worries over money. Hopkins has a country house in Essex (as mentioned by Lisa) we never see these characters getting their hands dirty. They spend all their time organizing meetings, telling people what to do, and it seems most importantly, drinking tea. Mr Tooley is the Ford U.S Executive. He Pay grade is considerably higher, with great responsibilities regarding the company. He even flies over from America to try and bust the strike. Other only worries he has about money is making sure other people don’t get too much of it. He is all boss, and is treated with great courtesy by all the management team at Ford. Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle work in the government; Wilson being the Prime minister and so are both of the upper class. They also have no need to worry about money (of their own). Harold Smokes a pipe and states that the TUC “pay for my holidays in the Scilly Isles. They underlay in my bathroom!” and Barbra’s learning to drive –both a costly. ₡ Is there a hierarchy? ₣ Interestingly enough, there isn’t always a correlation between pay grade and position in the hierarchy. At Westminster, although Harold Wilson is Prime Minister, Barbara Castle is a much stronger character than him, and isn’t afraid to disagree with him, often putting him in his place by saying “I’m a busy women” going as far as “ I’ll turn on you”. Mr Tooley easily has the most power at Ford, we see he’s top of the Hierarchy as soon as he arrives on the scene at the beginning of act 2. He enters on dry ice with the sound of a chopper I the background and with his barking attitude and bullish nature soon sets everyone on edge. No-one can go against his order. Next comes Hopkins, or orders all the shop stewards around. He tells Hubble off for his dirty jokes. Despite this he has a very different relationship with the workers –they make fun of him behind his back, and Sid and Bill do so cheekily in front of his face. Although Monty is technically higher up than them as a Union Convener, they mock him and show little respect, indicating the hierarchy works the other way round in relation to their pay grade. With the machinists, the majority of them seem reasonably equal, however Beryl seems a head above the other women due to her attitude, particularly towards Clare. She appears to be at the bottom of the hierarchy due to her limited aspirations and imagination, never mind her constant inability to put her name on… errr…errr… things. Initially Rita seems just part of the crowd, but she is put forward to go to the meeting with management with Connie and Monty. From here she becomes the ringleader, and eventually lead the women in, through and out of the strike until they achieve equal pay. She doesn’t back down, and refuses to take anything less than their demands. Lisa Hopkins has little chance to be part of a hierarchy, as she seems to have little chance to interact with people. However, upon meeting Rita she seems to treat her as an equal, offering to start a petition with her. However, she does seem to hold a little more power, being the wife of Managing Director Hopkins. ₣ How does their wealth or lack of it affect them? ₤ The effect of Money is most easily observed in the Hopkins and O’grady Households. Where as we see Lisa and Jeremy Hopkins positively swimming in money, with a large house and every latest product they could want, Rita and Eddie O’grady are working parents, who have tow work together to pay the bills and have very little time to spare. Hopkins is rich enough to have a trophy wife, Lisa. She is educated, beautiful and despite her own wishes doesn’t work. When the women decide to strike, it has a heavy effect on the O’grady household; soon enough their television is taken away, and they struggle heavily. Aside from the pressure put on Hopkins to get them back to work, the Hopkins are untouched. Sandra struggles heavily on strikers pay of £2 a week, and her will breaks upon being offered a promotions contra, showing she struggles heavily with the strain of having little to no money. Perhaps due to their excess of money, the higher-class men such as Hopkins and Harold Wilson are numb to these effects. Connie, who’s been struggling against the inequality of the sexist payment system all her life is passionate about issue. She even mentioned in her solo Song that originally she made jokes to make herself fell better, but now “it doesn’t seem quite so funny”. She can look back and see her mistakes, and heavily regrets them. For this reason she acts as a true guide to the women, and is the main trigger for the strikes, as she gives Rita the incentive. The male factory workers hold some resentment against management, as they seem to do nothing and get paid much more, shown by the fun they poke at them. However, they have some level of acceptance for the small wage they get. They are divided opinions when the women go on strike. Initially the men are supportive, though with no direct helping hand. Some mock them for going on strike. This all changes however when Mr Tooley lays off nearly 5000 men. Rather than blame Tooley, many men get angry with the women – “you happy now, Connie Riley!? You’ve closed down Dagenham!”. This shows there is a faire amount of pressure on them due to their low wage, and they can’t afford not to work. ₤ What are the social environments of the characters like? ₦ Are their differences in the social backgrounds and current environments? ₦ Many of the workers have very little social lives; most of it consists of work breaks and parties on payday. We see the Women having a chat on their break early in act one, and all the workers are at bar for the number ‘Pay Day’. The most socializing we see them do is on their tea breaks. For many of them, this will be how it was since they were teenagers, so their socials background doesn’t change, pehrpas starting out like Barry; as an apprentice. Lisa Hopkins has the most unfortunate social life. In the middle of the Essex countryside, as she rightly points out, she has nothing to do. In the late 1960s it wouldn’t be seen as socially acceptable for a trophy wife to go out and socialize without her husband. Unable to work, she can only go out shopping and spend time with a horse that ‘doesn’t like her’. We see her holding a huge grudge against her husband due to this, and she tests him often, trying to get a reaction, by serving duck eggs fro breakfast and states that her morning routine will be to “set fire to the women’s institute” –every word riddled with sarcasm. Naturally, the odd social event comes upon, which she is permitted to attend on the arm of her husband. Her social background was from that of a higher-class Family, meaning she will have spent time learning etiquette. She will have spent little time in the company of men (as that was socially unacceptable) even when studying her degree. The most socializing she can do is a ‘Tupperware party’ ; as suggested by her husband. Connie spends half her time with the men, and half with the women, as it’s her job to keep up communication between management and the machinists. She’s grown old working in a man’s world, and that’s what she’s used to. She’s says she’s been in the job since she was 16, and she feels very trapped in what she’s doing, but also that it was her own doing. We don’t see much of Barbara Castle or Harold Winson’s social lives, as Barbara is very professional, and we only see them in work. Its clear that Harold has little experience with women (socially) and he Babbles a lot when the machinists visit Barbara in Westminster, reeling of the times he’s met women, and even including ‘passing them on the stairs’. ₦ How will this affect how the characters will interact with one another? ₧ When Hopkins and other management team member such as Macer, Hubble and Mr Buckton interact with characters like Rita or Connie, they treat them very formerly but are slightly patronizing. They attempt to use complicated language to try and confuse them to avoid arguments or resistance. This works at first for Mr Buckton on Rita, though its clear that she’s a quick learner as she uses what she learnt from him against Hopkins in their meeting. When Barbara interacts with Harold, he attempt to be a little informal with her, being very round-about, but she cuts straight to the point. She very professional about her job; as a strong women in a mans world, she can’t afford mistakes. Interestingly enough, she softens a little when talking to Rita and the machinists, seemingly torn between he job and her desires she even says its her ‘job to get them back to work, but then again she’s a women’. This shows she is much less formal with the working class women, perhaps because she came into politics to ‘ease the lot of the working classes’. In their own groups, they often treat each other as equal (the men to the men, the women to the women). They all tend to tease Barry the apprentice, as he’s the youngest there, and hasn’t really established himself as one of the team yet. ₧ Are any of the characters influenced by events/beliefs? ₨ What effect does this have on the way the characters behave? ₩ All the women share the view that they should have equal pay. The first event that affects all the machinists is the new grade; they are put down as unskilled workers. They are all outraged at this, and decide to put forward a formal grievance. Rita is the main character motivated by events within the show. Her meeting with Mr Buckton seems to flare a little passion inside her. When Management have to organise a meeting due to the fact that Monty hasn’t signed off the new grades, Rita is vote to attend with Connie and Monty by the women. Hopkins, Hubble and Macer make no effort to listen in this meeting, and persist the machinists are unskilled despite Rita’s good arguments (partially inspired by Connie’s wise words in her solo song). This motivates Rita to the point that she urges the other women to go on strike, even traveling to Liverpool to convince the women there. this is all after she though she wouldn’t speak up at all as she “ain’t political”. Every time the bosses through something at them, she uses the blow to motivate herself. Mr Tooley is clearly motivated by his capitalist beliefs. He is determined that women shouldn’t have equal pay, as it would cost more for Ford, describing “Domino theory” to show how once they have equal pay in Britain, it’ll spread to Europe. He believes in being brutal, and lays off 5000 workers just to cut off the O’grady’s money in an attempt to bust the strike. Harold Wilson seems to believe that women shouldn’t6 be working. He has a very old fashioned view on things, and even questions why women are working, as the war is over. Rather than try and tackle any problem himself, he gives them to others to deal with, even creating a new ‘position in parliament’ for Barbara Castle. When Connie falls ill, and beseeches Rita to take over from her, Rita agrees. It is this event that influences Eddie to take the kids away, as their mother isn’t supporting them. He feels (rightly) that he has tried his best to support Rita until this point, but they can’t go on like this. Although Rita is heartbroken, she refuses to back down, and decides to see everything through. At the end of the show however, Eddie understands when he watches Rita give her speech, and gain the vote for equal pay. Lisa Hopkins, in conflict with her husband believes she should be aloud to work. She’s a few decades before her time, unable to use her degree in History. The Women striking seems to inspire some extra defiance in her, and she starts a Job working for the Spectator Magazine. ₨ ₩ What clues are there to the past lives of the characters? ₪ How will their past affect their futures? ₫ Are there any references to key events prior to the play? € Do any of the characters carry scars or memories from past events? ₭ How does this affect them now? ₮ Are their conflicts of tension between what the characters want? ₯ Do the main characters want to change their situations? ₰ Is there a difference in what the characters say they will do and actually do? ₱ How does morality or upbringings affect the characters actions? ₲ Are there direct references to the characters appearances? ₳ Are there any connections between how a character looks and behaves? ₴ What is the significance of the title? (Metaphoric or literal) ₵ Are there any key lines or speeches that summarise or capture the mood of the play? ₸ What is the main plot and how does it develop? ₹ Is there a sub plot? ₺ How can the shape of the play be best described – a story? Episodes? A journey? As a diagram or map? ₼ Which scenes are the most important? Why? ₽ Which scene is the least important? Why? ₾ How important to the piece is the set/lighting/costume/props/sound? ⃰ What is the climax of the play? Are issues resolved at the end? How much direction is given by the playwright in terms of stage directions? ℅ Which character is the antagonist? (Opposes the main action) ℓ Are their other protagonists or antagonists?№ Do any of the characters change from one to the other? ℗ How formal is the language used by the characters? ™ What is the level of education of the characters? Ω Do the characters use certain phrases or words or ways of speaking? ℮ How are the songs structured? (Monologue, dialogue, duologue, triologue, short sentences etc) ⅍ What kind of imagery is used? ⅎ What is the objective of each scene/unit? What is the super objective of the play? ⅓ What are the characters motivations and do they change in each scene? ↄ Does the play relate to any previous theatrical or written work? ← If so what are the links between them? ↑