After the Ives 3rd, during intermission, setting up for Dvorak’s 9th last week.
Yes, it is that beautiful.
And the acoustics are better.
Descent To The Disney Depths
The Disney Concert Hall is an amazing, beautiful building, designed by the genius Frank Gehey. It offers an almost endless variety of views of sweeping lines, both interior and exterior, and vast interior spaces.
These are the escalators that lead down into the parking garages, opening at top to the balconies leading to the upper level seats.
Gorgeous!
Filed under Los Angeles, Music, Photography
Taking A Wild Leap
It’s February 29th, which doesn’t happen that often, so I figured I might comment in my unique and inimitable style. But first, what did I have to say about this unusual date four years ago? Oddly, pretty much NOTHING AT ALL about the date, but a bunch of really nice pictures of Clay Lacy’s DC-3.
It’s no doubt an amazing aircraft, but… Leap Day? Nothing?
Okay, so let’s make up for that a bit. Acknowledging that it’s a day that only comes once every four years and even then not in years evenly divided by 100 unless it’s also a year evenly divisible by 400 (a good summary here), the random synapse firing that occurred to my somewhat sleep deprived brain was along the lines of, “That’s messy. I don’t like it. Why don’t we fix it?”
And by “fix it” of course, I’m not talking about coming up with some weird and unique calendar that somehow does away with that quarter of a day (“ish”) that’s extra. I’m talking about moving the planet’s orbit so that it’s a precisely even number of days long.
Go big or go home!
Since the Earth’s orbit takes it around the Sun in 365.25 days, the easiest way to get to an even integer would be to get rid of the 0.25 days. Moving the Earth closer to the Sun would make it orbit faster, so it would be easier to go to 365 days than to 366.
But…
If we go to a precise 365 day orbit, all of those folks born on February 29th would never, ever again have a birthday. Plus, of course, by moving the Earth closer to the Sun when we’re already destroying it with climate change would mean that we’ll fry and die that much sooner, so maybe that would be a second negative on that plan.
Plus, with a 365 day year, we still have that somewhat annoying “extra” day in there that means that if this year your birthday is on a Monday, next year it will be on a Tuesday, and the year after that a Wednesday, and so on. Still messy.
So let’s move the Earth even closer to the Sun and give it a 364-day orbit! This solves the calendar problem completely! Thirteen months of 28 days each! Uniformity! Standardization! Easy to remember!
Oh, right, it’s also boring. We would also fry and die a LOT faster, which most days I would consider to be bad thing, but frying and dying fast while being bored is so, so much worse.
Instead, I think we’ll have to move the Earth’s orbit out, away from the sun. This gives us a slightly longer year while simultaneously helping to cool the planet so that we can continue sans guilt to burn fossil fuels like they’re going out of style.
Moving out to a precise 366-day orbit doesn’t give us a fantastic, evenly divisible calendar. We would have to go out to a 372-day orbit to do that, and that might be far enough away from the Sun that we would freeze to death slowly instead of frying and dying quickly, so let’s table that idea.
No, the 366-day orbit gets my vote. It makes permanent leap years, which we’re already used to. We’ve all seen tons of February 29ths – now we would just see them every year.
We would also still have an annual variance in respect to which dates fall on which days of the week. The 366-day calendar gives us 52 weeks plus two days, but since there are seven days in a week, the match of days of the week to dates on the calendars would repeat every seven years. In other words, if your birthday was on Monday this year it would be on Wednesday in 2021, on Friday in 2022, on Sunday in 2023, on Tuesday in 2024, on Thursday in 2025, on Saturday in 2026, and again on Monday in 2027.
A little bit regular, but not boring!
(And saving the world in good measure!)
I hope that someone gets right on this.
Filed under Astronomy, Deep Thoughts, Paul
Music City Panorama
(Click to embiggenate to the max)
Standing on the corner of 1st Street & Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles last night. The Disney Concert Hall is at the left, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (the south end of the Music Center) on the right. Just off to the far right of this view, down the hill, is the iconic Los Angeles City Hall.
The Ives 3rd Symphony was interesting, particularly after watching much of a pre-concert talk being given in the DCH lobby about Ives. There is so much I don’t know about him or his music. I’ll have to correct that.
The Dvorak 9th Symphony (the “New World” Symphony) was beyond words, spectacular, amazing, fantastic, ausgezeichnet, mind blowing… To hear it in that almost acoustically perfect space, with the LA Philharmonic giving it their all, and the energetic Gustavo Dudamel conducting… If you can listen to that without being moved to tears of joy, we probably can’t be friends.
Even if you’re not a classical music fan… Even if you can’t see it at the Disney Concert Hall or its like… Even if you can’t see it performed by the LA Philharmonic or an equivalent group… Even if it’s a high school band in the gym and you’re only there because your hair dresser’s kid is playing third flute…
Go see the New World Symphony performed live. It’s a bucket list item.
Filed under Los Angeles, Music, Panorama, Photography
It’s A New World
Dvorak’s to be specific.
Dvorak’s 9th and Ives’ 3rd. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while.
I expect it to be spectacular!
Filed under Los Angeles, Music, Photography
Another Early Morning View From The Hangar
Taken the same day as last week, just a different view.
(Click to enlarge)
From left to right, the A6M3 Zero, the P-51 Mustang, the F8 Bearcat, the (red) F-24, and the F6 Hellcat.
Filed under CAF, Panorama, Photography
Venus & Luna At Dusk
There it is! I mentioned last night that I could see the one-day old crescent moon just barely above the horizon. Tonight it had climbed a bit and was easily visible with Venus.
About forty minutes later, after I had gotten my haircut, it was fully dark, but the moon was still above the hills and billboards. If you zoom in, even with this cheezy iPhone picture (which, let’s admit, has a pretty amazing camera in it as much as I might make jest), you can see the outline of the almost New Moon illuminated by Earthshine.
For the record, NO ONE in the shopping center was admiring the sight. and EVERYONE was wondering who the geek with the nice haircut was taking pictures of the sky while standing in traffic.
We know the answer to that one, don’t we?
Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Space
Venus At Dusk
I didn’t notice it until I was in the car, on the freeway, and couldn’t take pictures, but just barely above the horizon, in a notch between two hills, was the teeniest, tiniest little sliver of a moon.
Stunning!
Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Space
Racing The Storm
Today it was back to clear and a million, but yesterday there were showers about. When we give rides at the CAF safety is our number one concern, so we don’t fly in any sort of threatening or inclement weather. But yesterday the main line of storms was still about 100 miles to the north and what we had locally was widely scattered and light, so we got our scheduled ride in. But it looked dramatic.
Filed under CAF, Photography, Weather
Battening Down
It wasn’t a particularly strong or violent storm, but it looked dramatic. But you can never be too careful, so all of the aircraft were buttoned up and battened down.
Filed under CAF, Photography, Weather
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 