Steven S. Holland

So today, shortly after getting home from work, I heard some singing, some bells, and all sorts of banging on drums and whistles outside my building.  Due to the porch roof, I couldn’t see anything from my window, so I went downstairs to investigate more closely.  What I found was a group of men dressed in white, with bells, drums, and towels (or so they appeared) dancing right outside.   One of them spotted me, and came over and told me about their background.  Apparently, my building, The Perry, was once The Drake (which clarifies the graffiti down the block that says “save the drake”), which was apparently once a bar/brothel/hotel that was a pretty wild place to be back 30 years ago.  The guy told me all about the respectable first floor, which regularly rejected them, and the “rat hole” basement, which readily let them in, including – according to one of the dudes dancing – beer served in metal buckets.  These guys used to hang out at the Drake in the 60s/70s and have been doing the dancing ever since, which is a good 30 years, as one specified.  Specifically, every 7th Tuesday after Easter is “Drake Tuesday”, which they come and dance out in front of the building, on the porch, and in front of the “save the drake” graffiti.

One of the guys also mentioned that, in viewing this dance, I was granted 1 year and 1 day of good luck.  I’ll take it.

The dancing?  According to their website:

The Morris is a living tradition of ritual dance and music, whose origins are shrouded in mystery, not to mention antiquity. The dance comes from England where it has been danced for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. John of Gaunt is said by some to have brought the dance back from Saracen Spain where he had been crusading. Others believe its origins are pre-Christian, possibly Druidic, perhaps even pagan. Similar dances are found throughout Europe and the Near East. Believe what you will. Many theories exist and, for now, no one can prove you wrong.

Morris dancing was almost lost in England during the nineteenth century. The tradition nearly died along with many other old, community based customs during the Industrial Revolution. The most recent revival began in England in the early twentieth century with the work of collectors like Cecil Sharp. There are hundreds of Morris teams in England now and at least 100 in the U.S. and Canada as well as other parts of the world.

Here are some pictures I took:

The videos were way over the upload limits for this site, so I threw them up on youtube:

Here is what I first saw when I walked outside.

Then they headed up onto the porch!

This article from NASA talks about the measurement of magentic portals that connect the earth to the sun every 8 minutes, due to their magnetic fields pushing against each other and forming connections.  It is always interesting to see something happening on a such a large scale and with these huge fields that, as the article points out, many people didn’t believe in only 10 years ago.
I find the interaction of the electromagnetic waves on the scale of the solar system, between immensely large objects (here the earth and the sun) to be fascinating.  I spend so much time dealing with such small scale fields – antennas, microwave circuits, where fields are coerced into existence in these carefully designed structures to behave in a certain way.  Then I read articles on fields stretching 100 million miles between the earth and the sun, or the various effects the sun’s fields have on the earth, such as solar flares – fields covering half our solar system, in unbounded space, whose origins are not always clear or understood.  I mean, the earth’s magnetic field seems such a simple field that we take for granted – yet why it exists in the first place is not fully understood – you can’t exactly cut the earth in half and take a peak at it’s cross-section. It has even been shown to have flipped thousands of times over it’s lifetime – also something that we don’t quite understand the reason for.

Images of the earth and moon from 31 million miles away.

“A NASA spacecraft designed to look for comets turned its cameras homeward, capturing a unique view of the moonEarth as seen from 31 million miles away. The spacecraft, Deep Impact, took shots at 15-minute intervals, which were combined to make the sequence shown below. passing in front of the

The latest images show the moon and Earth in greater detail than previous ones taken by orbiting spacecraft, showing oceans and continents on our planet and craters on the moon. By studying how Earth looks from so far away, the scientists hope to sharpen their search for alien worlds that may share similar characteristics”

Nasa’s Picture of the day has an image taken using the magnification due to gravity of a galaxy to see galaxies much further on. It’s a phenomenon that has been used for a long time to see distant objects.
Really interesting to see an actual image of how this looks.

I came across a page detailing the past year in the life of the Hubble Telescope, and what’s in store for it’s future: Nasa’s news website on Hubble. It aslo talked, however, about Google Sky, which is a google earth feature that allows you to look at the sky in addition to what is on the earth. This is really neat, I am currently downloading Google earth to play with this a bit.

Has anyone used this before?