hey friends!
just to let you know I have released a new mp3 album of my 80’s vocal lounge songs! Go to www.nberg.net/song.htm to download or listen! thanks for your support much love Nora

SOURCE: www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php

Have You Heard About B Flat?
By Robert Krulwich

Morning Edition, February 16, 2007 · For reasons that remain mostly mysterious, the note we call B flat does the oddest things. Here are a few of them.

B Flats and Alligators

During World War II, the New York Philharmonic was visiting the American Museum of Natural History. During rehearsal, somebody played a note that upset a resident live alligator named Oscar. Oscar, who’d been in the museum on 81st Street, suddenly began to bellow. Naturally, with so many scientists in residence, an experiment was quickly devised to see how to get Oscar to bellow again. Various musicians — string, percussive and brass — were brought to Oscar to play various notes. It turned out the culprit was B flat, one octave below middle C.

The experiment was described back in the 1940s.

I repeated the experiment on an ABC News broadcast in the 1990s, playing a B flat to a collection of gators at a roadside attraction in Florida and recording their bellows.

Why B flat?

You’d have to ask an alligator.

B Flat and Glenway Fripp the Piano Tuner

Jay Alison (of This I Believe fame) and radio correspondent Viki Merrick live in Massachusetts and help run public radio stations on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. In their capacities as managers-poets-reporters in residence, they regularly devise short promotional “moments” featuring local personalities.

One of their promos described a trip that Glenway Fripp took up a staircase.

Mr. Fripp, a piano tuner by trade, was humming in B flat while climbing the stairs at his dad’s office building, when he noticed that his hum had somehow escaped him and was hanging, resonating without him, on the staircase landing. He couldn’t quite explain what was happening; only that his hum (and it was definitely his hum, no one else’s) had gone off without him.

If you listen to the broadcast, you can hear this for yourself. Viki Merrick recorded it. Glenway has no idea why B flat had this particular property on that particular staircase. He suspects that the walls were porous and may even contain cavities that are very B-flat friendly. That’s all he knows. But the truth is, he doesn’t have an explanation.

B Flat and Black Holes

This one’s a bit of a stretch, but here’s what happened.

In September 2003, astronomers at NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory found what can be described as sound waves emanating from a supermassive black hole. The black hole can be seen in the Perseus cluster of galaxies located 250 million light years from Earth.

Andrew Fabian of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England, analyzed the waves and announced, “We have detected their sound….” The sound he found (which is really the waves passing through gas near the black hole) translate to the note B flat.

But this is not a B flat you or I can hear. It is 57 octaves below middle C. A piano, by comparison, contains only seven octaves. So if a black hole hums, it hums at a frequency a million billion times lower than you can hear.

Picture courtesy K. Berg

www.nberg.net

Anyone have a favorite comic book? One of my favorites is Ripley’s Believe it or Not! I prefer the older versions of the comic from the late 1960’s through the 1970’s like the one pictured above. I’ve always loved reading ghost and paranormal-type stories - ones that fire the imagination! Ripley’s found interesting true stories and combined this with great comic art.

Below is a link to a list of all the Ripley’s that have been published. I have a few more to collect

http://www.dixonent.com/bion.htm

by BARRY WIGMORE

Last updated 30th November 2007

On the heartwarming scale this rates as a positive scorcher.

A forlorn tigress, heartbroken because her own cubs have died, is fooled into adopting a litter of piglets when zoo officials in California wrap them in tiger skins.

Such a thing had never been tried before, according to the email which accompanied these pictures as they were sent around the world.

Unfortunately, there was a twist in the tiger’s tale.

Though the pictures have not been faked, an animal welfare pressure group investigated and discovered they were actually taken at a zoo in Thailand.

The Sriracha Tiger Zoo, an hour’s drive from Bangkok, has been accused of causing its exhibits unnecessary suffering, and of using stunts to gain publicity.

These pictures must have been part of such a set-up, say experts, because it was unnecessary to wrap the piglets in their cute little tiger-skin coats.

It is apparently common practice in Thailand for tigers to suckle pigs, and for pigs to adopt orphaned cubs.

The tigress in these pictures was herself brought up by a sow, and sees pigs as family.

Though she had been given these babies to bring up, it is unclear whether she had lost a litter of her own, as the story claimed.

In another twist, the zoo has been investigated for allegedly breeding tigers for export to China - where tiger parts command high prices for use in traditional medicines.

Sommai Temsiripong, one of the zoo’s owners, was charged with breeding tigers without a licence. On another occasion 23 tigers died of bird flu after being fed infected raw chickens.

Critics say that behind the scenes tigers are bred in poor conditions and the the London Zoological Society has been critical of Sriracha’s animal husbandry.

Adam Roberts, an investigator with Animal Welfare International, the respected American pressure group which investigated the pictures, wrote in its quarterly magazine that the zoo - with more than 400 tigers, a handful of Asian elephants, of crocodiles, camels, snakes and other exotic animals - had many troubling exhibits.

It also houses a circus, he said, where he saw tigers leaping through rings of fire, walking across a double tightrope, parading around the ring on hind legs, and riding on the back of a horse.

“Up close, however, one could clearly see the animals’ debilitation and fear,” he added.

“All of the animals awaited their turn to perform in a gated tunnel, keepers constantly poking them with a steel pole through the iron mesh.”

Behind the scenes, bored elephants swayed at the end of 2ftlong chains anchored to the ground.

One had a long, deep scar across his ear - another was scarred across her trunk.

“After the show, the elephants stood in frot of the seats taking money from people with their trunks and passing it to the trainers astride their backs,” Mr Roberts reported.

The zoo denies any wrongdoing.

SOURCE: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?

in_article_id=498789&in_page_id=1811&ito=1595Don’t

this is very good news for Stonehenge!

updated 12:20 p.m. PT, Thurs., Dec. 6, 2007

LONDON - Plans to build a road tunnel under Stonehenge have been scrapped, the government said on Thursday, raising fears that nearby traffic could damage the ancient World Heritage Site. After years of argument over how to ease congestion around the stone circle in Wiltshire, ministers said they had decided that a tunnel would cost too much. Environmental campaigners, road groups, archaeologists and druids who worship at the site have argued for decades over how best to protect it from the thousands of cars that pass each day on two busy roads. Built between 3,000 and 1,600 B.C. as a temple, burial ground, astronomical calendar or all three, the stone circle has been described as “Britain’s pyramids.” Thousands of revelers and druids converge there on the summer solstice — the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere — to watch the sun rise. Transport Minister Tom Harris said he could not justify spending 540 million pounds on a 1.3 mile tunnel, adding: “(It) would not represent best use of taxpayers’ money.” The Liberal Democrats said the decision not to divert traffic was made after a “decade of dither and delay” by the government and could damage Stonehenge. “It puts a UNESCO World Heritage Site at risk of damage from the ever-increasing volume of traffic,” said the party’s Arts and Culture spokesman Dan Rogerson. English Heritage, the public body which looks after the site, said the decision not to build a tunnel was a “huge disappointment.”

SOURCE: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22133602/

Dream Facts and other interesting information about sleep and dreams:

1. One third of our lives are spent sleeping.

2. In your lifetime, you would’ve spent about 6 years of it dreaming. That is more than 2,100 days spent in a different world.

3. Dreams have been here as long as mankind. Back in the Roman Era, striking and significant dreams were submitted to the Senate for analysis and interpretation.

4. Everybody dreams. EVERYBODY! Simply because you do not remember your dream does not mean that you did not dream.

5. Dreams are indispensable. A lack of dream activity can mean protein deficiency or a personality disorder.

6. We dream on average of one or two hours every night. And we often even have 4-7 dreams in one night.

7. Blind people do dream. Although their dreams may not consist of vivid images, blind people can clearly recall and describe the sounds they hear or the textures they come in contact with in their dream. Their hearing and tactility are hyper-sensitive.

8. Five minutes after the end of the dream, half the content is forgotten. After ten minutes, 90% is lost.

9. The word dream stems from the Middle English word, dreme which means “joy” and “music”.

10. Men tend to dream more about other men, while women dream equally about men and women.

11. Studies have shown that our brain waves are more active when we are dreaming than when we are awake.

12. Dreamers, who are awakened right after REM sleep, are able to recall their dreams more vividly than those who slept through the night until morning.

13. Physiologically speaking, researchers found that during dreaming REM sleep, males experience erections and females experience increased vaginal blood flow - no matter what the content of the dream. In fact, “wet dreams” may not necessarily coincide with overtly sexual dream content.

14. People who are giving up smoking have longer and more intense dreams.

15. Toddlers do not dream about themselves. They do not appear in their own dreams until the age of 3 or 4.

16. If you are snoring, then you cannot be dreaming.

Thanks to: www.DreamMoods.com

thanks for surfing here! I have just started the blog so there will be lots of entries happening soon! If you haven’t checked out the rest of my website please make sure you visit elphinstudio where I have my ambient electronic music showcased. Just go to www.nberg.net/elphin.htm

peace

Nora