Take a Quart of Rice, two Quarts of strong Gravy; set it on the Fire very high, and let it stew soberly, but not boil; then put in an Onion stuck with Cloves, and a bunch of Sweet Herbs; then put in a large Pullet, fill the belly with force'd meat and Oysters, with half a pound of Bacon; let these stew together 'till it's tender, and about the thickness of Hasty-pudding; then put in the force'd meat ball that you have fried, and some you must stew with it: then take it up and beat the Yolks of three Eggs, and a [……?] quartern of Butter rowled up in flour, and shake them well together, with the Juice of a Limon; and then dish it with the Fowl in the middle, and the Bacon and Forcemeat balls round it; garnish with Limon, and […..?] Bread, round the brims of your Dish, and serve it.
So, how do you explain the name?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word monastic[k], as seems fairly obvious, has various meanings "of or relating to members of a community living under religious vows and generally subject to a fixed rule, as monks, nuns, friars, etc.; of or relating to a monastery or monasteries." It is hard to see the association with monastic orders and the rich dish given above, is it not?
There are two other meanings of the word monastic[k] given in the OED. One relates to bookbinding, and designates "a method of binding in thick bevelled boards covered in khaki-coloured calf or brown hard-grained morocco, and finished by tooling without gold.' Perhaps this usage is a nod to the role of monasteries as early libraries, or maybe the brown monkish robes – but I cannot think of a culinary connection. The third usage is in relation to ceramics, and designates "a type of glaze that produces a dull finish" which was the monastic method [of glazing tiles] which came in with the Gothic architecture about the end of the twelfth century." Unless this is related to the dish above as it may be cooked in a brown ceramic pot, by the same method as a marmite refers to the pot and the contained soup/stew.
I leave it to you now, my friends, to come up with some ideas.
It does sound very rich, so possibly the association is to Tudor-era monasteries and their famously lavish diet?
Monasteries and convents were getting a bad rep for luxurious (and sinful) living as early as the 1300s and by the 1700s were a running joke to non-Catholics. The richness of the dish may have given it its name -- you start with plain, ascetic rice and then add all this fat, delicious stuff (but still call it a rice dish). But I like your idea about the pot better.


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Ferry operator Caledonian MacBrayne has reported that its staff have increasingly been dealing with aggressive passengers.
In one incident, a man jumped up on to the counter at a ticket office while angrily complaining to CalMac workers about a sailing.
Police were called and the man was found and arrested.
In other incidents, staff on ferries and at ports have been verbally abused and threatened by drunk passengers.
CalMac's director of safety, environment and security, Louis de Wolff, said: "Safety of our staff is a priority for us and recently we have seen a small upsurge of abusive passengers behaving in an intolerable way towards staff. This is unacceptable.
"With people out and about socialising more over the festive period we felt this was a good time to reinforce the standards of behaviour we expect passengers to have towards our staff.
"Good customer service is important for us and we are always striving to improve the way we deal with passengers, but in return we expect the same levels of courtesy."
CalMac runs a fleet of 32 vessels across a network of 27 islands and mainland destinations on Scotland's west coast.
Last year, it carried more than five million passengers and 1.2 million vehicles.


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//

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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


At Mandarin For Life students enjoy a unique and play-based approach to understanding and memorising Chinese characters. For many students, Chinese characters are the hardest part of learning Mandarin. After all, there are over 50,000 Chinese characters, or "HanZi", and a dictionary will typically list 20,000 characters. An educated Chinese person will know around 8,000 characters. And to read a newspaper you must learn about 2,000 HanZi.
With the hands-on exercises such as HanZi dominoes, magnetic spelling bee, building blocks, magic writing mats and play dough in the Junior Mandarin and Young Learners Mandarin courses, students truly learn through play and play to learn.
The relevant learning materials have been tested to be toxic-paint and chemical free to assure safe learning and playing.


United Air Specialists Inc. announces the launch of an interactive cost savings calculator on its Web site (www.uasinc.com/FilterCalculator.aspx). The calculator enables users to determine their approximate annual energy and operational savings by using UAS' Protura Nanofiber cartridge filters in conjunction with UAS dust collection equipment.
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Wednesday, 5 February 2014, 1:00PM
The Lives of Stars
Professor Carolin Crawford
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Stars are a ubiquitous feature of our local Galactic environment. They do not last forever – but form, develop and evolve over timescales of millions or billions of years, eventually to expire in dramatic style. We look at the lifecycles of different kinds of stars, and in particular, what they reveal about our own origins.
Outreach Officer at the Institute of Astronomy and Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, and Emeritus Gresham Professor of Astronomy, Carolin Crawford is one of Britain's foremost science communicators.
After receiving her PhD from Newnham College, Cambridge, Professor Crawford went on to a series of fellowships from Balliol College, Oxford, Trinity Hall, Cambridge and the Royal Society. In 2004 she was appointed as a Fellow and College Lecturer at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where she is now also the undergraduate Admissions Tutor for the Physical Sciences. Since 2005 she has combined her college role with that of Outreach Officer at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge.
Professor Crawford's primary research interests are in combining X-ray, optical and near-infrared observations to study the physical processes occurring around massive galaxies at the core of clusters of galaxies. In particular, she observes the complex interplay between the hot intra-cluster medium, filaments of warm ionized gas, cold molecular clouds, star formation and the radio plasma flowing out from the central supermassive black hole.
In 2009 Professor Crawford's outstanding abilities at science communication were recognized by a Women of Outstanding Achievement Award by the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology, presented for "communication of science with a contribution to society."
Appointed as the 36th Gresham Professor of Astronomy in 2011, Professor Crawford delivered a series of free public lectures where she carried out her intention "to showcase the very latest developments and ideas in astronomy and cosmology, whilst putting them into the context of the process of scientific discovery."
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This is part of the series: Astronomy lectures by Carolin Crawford
Astronomy Science
This talk concerns stars, the most easily observable objects in the night sky. The nearest to us − and the most easily studied example − is the Sun, which will be a topic for one of next year's lectures. They are all massive spheres of gas that exist in the form of stars for only as long as they can fight the inexorable inward pull of gravity by producing energy deep within their core. Stars differ from one another in fundamental properties that may not be so obvious to the first glance, but which dictate that they live out very different kinds of lives and deaths. Stars are not eternal and everlasting, though they may as well seem so compared to human lifespans. Our Galaxy is a dynamic environment - stars are being born, and stars are dying even as you read this; and during their lives they generate all the elements that prove so crucial to the formation of planets, and to our own existence.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN STARS
To the unaided eye, it is immediately apparent that not all stars shine with the same brightness, and that they are not distributed evenly across the night sky. If you are fortunate to have a clear dark night, you may even see that they are not all simply white in colour: for example there is a marked contrast between the very orangey-red Betelgeuse at one of Orion's shoulders and the very blue-white Rigel marking his opposite knee. The difference in star colours is best recorded in digital images, as there is not enough light from stars to trigger colour vision in the human eye.
From fairly simple observations we can infer much about the intrinsic physical properties of stars, and it soon becomes apparent that the Sun is only a fairly average and (thankfully!) pretty dull star. Other stars display an enormous range of: brightness (stars shine with luminosities that are tens of thousands of times fainter and over a million times brighter than our Sun); of surface temperature (from below 3,000K to greater than 30,000K); of size (with diameters of about ten km for neutron stars, about 1.4 million km for our Sun, and up the largest known star at just under two billion km); of mass (from about a tenth the mass of our Sun to around 100 times greater); of age (some still being formed, while others are perhaps eleven billion years old); of chemical composition (some are of primordial composition, some have more of the heavier elements present in their atmosphere); and of environment (not all are as isolated as the Sun - many live in binary systems, where two stars continually orbit one another; others are gathered into loose open clusters containing between tens to hundreds of young stars, or into the tightly packed round globular clusters alongside hundreds of thousands of companions).
A fundamental key to understanding how different types of stars develop through their lives is the observation that these properties are related to one another. But to make a meaningful comparison of stellar properties, let alone how they then determine the process that is known (a little misleadingly) as stellar evolution, we need to have knowledge of the intrinsic or true, physical properties. This is not a trivial process, and depends on being able to first establish the distance to a star.
THE LUMINOSITIES OF STARS
We can only observe how bright a star appears to be. A star shining with the same luminosity will appear fainter if viewed at a larger distances. How much of the light from a star is actually captured by a telescope at the Earth is diluted down by the inverse square of its separation from us. The fact that many of these stars appear so bright in the night sky despite their colossal distances immediately demonstrates the incredibly luminosities under consideration. [A discussion of how we measure distances to distant stars is interesting in its own right, and is postponed to another lecture in April on How the Earth moves.]
If you ever dip a toe into the world of amateur astronomy, you rapidly run into the archaic measure we use for the brightness of stars, known as their magnitude. This measurement scale was originally devised by Hipparchus, a 2nd Century BC Greek astronomer who introduced it as a system to compare the brightness of different stars: the very brightest stars that could be seen with the unaided eye were labelled 'first' magnitude, the very faintest marked 'sixth' magnitude, and all other stars were distributed between these two extremes according to their brightness. As this is a scale that stems from observations with the unaided eye, it is an example of a logarithmic scale, because visual perception does not follow a linear relationship. Second magnitude stars are about as half as bright as first-magnitude stars, whereas a sixth magnitude star is about 100 times fainter. The scale is also confusing as it works 'backwards', in that dimmer stars have greater magnitudes – and it doesn't help that since the scale was introduced, some stars were subsequently measured to be brighter than first magnitude, so negative values of magnitude had to be introduced (for example, Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, has a magnitude of -1.5). The scale was refined when astronomers were able to better record the light from stars in the nineteenth century, and a difference of magnitude of one is now defined to correspond to a drop in brightness by a factor of 2.512. We still use the magnitude scale, even though we no longer have to rely on the human eye for recording our observations; the largest telescopes in use now can regularly objects observe down to magnitude of 27.
The problem remains that magnitudes are still an observed rather than an intrinsic measure of the luminosity of the star. To be able to compare the true brightness of stars we scale them to an 'absolute' magnitude, which is the magnitude a star would have if it were placed at the (not entirely arbitrary) distance of 32.6 light-years away from us. The range of absolute magnitudes of stars varies between -6 to 16, with the Sun featuring at only a very modest 'five'.
THE COLOURS (AND HENCE TEMPERATURES) OF STARS
A further complication is that stars have different colours: some will produce far more blue light than red, and vice versa. The colour a star emits most strongly depends on its surface temperature; hotter objects give off more of their light at shorter (ie bluer) wavelengths of light, and cooler objects glow with redder colours. If we plot the amount of light radiated at different wavelengths by a star (ie its spectrum), it follows a characteristic curve known as a black body. This spectrum is generated by thermal radiation, and where curve peaks can give a good estimate of the temperature of the body giving off the light. So at first pass, the dominant colour of a star reveals its temperature. Most of the light that we receive from the surface of Sun comes from a region known as the photosphere, and its distinct yellowy-white colour (better viewed from space than filtered through our atmosphere) reveals it to be at a temperature of around 5800K. Blue-white stars are much hotter, with surface temperatures around 12,000K, while redder stars radiate from surfaces at about 3000K. The colour of a star thus complicates the measurement of a star's brightness, as different colour stars will show different magnitudes at different wavelengths; and so a measured magnitude always has to be quoted for the specific colour band it was recorded in. Conversely, this can also be a good way to estimate a star's temperature; different black-body curves will produce different values for the magnitudes compared in two or more colours.
THE SIZES OF STARS
Nearly all stars appear as points of light, even when viewed through the most powerful telescopes available. Only a few hundred of the larger and closer stars can be resolved into a disc, and in those cases you can infer the real diameter of the star from a measurement of its angular width (as long as you have a reliable estimate of its distance away from us). This measurement is much easier to make for larger and closer stars – the star Betelgeuse is a good example: at a distance of 'only' 650 light-years away from us, it is also intrinsically a large star (of a type known as a red supergiant), and we can even resolve features such as starspots on its surface. But stars like Betelgeuse remain very much the exception. Instead we have to rely on other ways to infer the diameter of stars, and we can use their luminosity and temperature (as inferred from observations of their brightness and colour). In particular, for an object emitting black-body radiation, the luminosity emitted from the whole surface area of a star radius R is given by the equation L=4πR2σT4 (where T is its temperature and σ is a constant). Thus if we know a star's luminosity L, and its temperature T, we can infer its size R. This relation implies that for a given luminosity, a hotter star must be smaller; or that for a given temperature, a brighter star must be larger.
THE HERTZSPRUNG-RUSSELL DIAGRAM
Thus most easily measured quantities of a star's brightness at different colours enable us to characterise it in terms of its surface temperature (T) and luminosity (L), which are related to one another through the radius of the star. If we want to understand more about the differences between stars, then the best place to start is by comparing the distribution of these properties in a graph of L against T. Whether plotted with the empirical measurements of colour and magnitude, or translated into the intrinsic properties of temperature and luminosity on the two axes, it is known as the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram after the work of Ejnar Hertzsprung (1873-1967) and Henry Norris Russell (1877 – 1957).
The whole area of the graph is not filled uniformly, and stars populate certain combinations of luminosity and temperature more than others. Most noticeably, there is a long thin track that stretches diagonally from upper left to lower right across the diagram, moving from hot and bright stars down to ones which are cool and faint; there are only a few stars occupying the areas to either side. About 90% of all stars lie on this main sequence, including our Sun, which is located midway along the track. As each pair of (L, T) measurements corresponds uniquely to a stellar radius, the different concentrations of stars in this plot offer different size classes as well. There are luminous cool stars that occupy a region above the lower part of the main sequence, and the relationship between L and T determines that they must be huge − consequently they are known as giants. Typically they are ten – 100 times wider than the main sequence stars of comparable temperatures, and can be 100 – 1000 times more luminous. The coolest are known as red giants, and examples of this kind of star that we can see in the night sky include Aldebaran and Arcturus. Above and to the left of the red giants are the much rarer supergiant stars – named because they are more luminous, and thus must be larger than the red giants of comparable temperature. Their radii extend up to about 1500 times that of the Sun, and examples in the night sky include Betelgeuse (a red, and thus cool, supergiant) and Rigel a hot (blue-white) supergiant. The diameter of Betelgeuse is greater than the size of Jupiter's orbit around the Sun; although the star's surface temperature is much cooler than that of the Sun, at only about 3,500K, the fact that it is radiating through such an enormous surface area means that it is over 9000 times more luminous. Together, giants and supergiants comprise only about 1% of all stars. Most of the remaining 9% are hot but very dim; thus they must be small – probably not much bigger than the Earth – and are termed white dwarfs.
Except for certain types of star known as variable stars, or the last mad hurrah of a massive star as it explodes in a supernova, most stars do not appear to change their luminosity or brightness on human timescales. We can expect that stars will change any of their luminosity, size or temperature, however, as they evolve through their lives. If they do so, then they will change their position in the HR diagram. The tendency of stars to concentrate in certain parts of the colour-magnitude diagram then suggests that many stars occupy those regions for a comparatively large fraction of their lives − the longer that phases lasts, then the greater the number of stars will be observed with those properties. Conversely, sparser areas that contain relatively few stars represent only a very short-lived period of a star's life. Thus the HR diagram shows us that a star spends most of its life sitting on the main sequence, and spends only a short period in any of the giant, supergiant and white dwarf phases. Whilst we cannot track the evolution of any single star, we can match the observed distribution of stars in this plot to predictions that emerge theoretical models of their development and evolution. By now we can confidently map out well-determined tracks through the HR diagram followed out by different kinds of stars as they live out their life; consequently we can now invert this information to use a star's position in the HR diagram to tell us where it is in its stellar life cycle. The only caveat is that if at any stage of its life a star is obscured from view – if it is surrounded by dust clouds, for example – then it will not feature on this diagram.
THE MASSES OF STARS
There is another physical property of a star, which (unlike the temperature, size or luminosity) we can assume remains broadly constant throughout its life, and that is its mass. The mass of a star cannot be observed directly, and neither can it be simply inferred from its size, as stars can have different densities. It is most easily calculated where we see two stars orbiting each other in a binary system. Each is accelerated by the gravitational attraction of the other, and so their relative masses can be calculated from observations of their speed of revolution around each other and their separation. Using this method, stellar masses have been measured to range from about a tenth to a hundred times the mass of the Sun. Very low mass stars are thought to be much more common than those of high mass. The lower limit of about 8% of a Solar mass comes about because objects of lesser mass never achieve a high enough core temperature for nuclear fusion to begin. Low mass objects are thought to commonly form in the same way as, and alongside, stars and they are known as brown dwarfs. At the other extreme, the upper limit to a star's mass is somewhere between 100-150 Solar masses. Stars any more massive than this will emit so much light that the outwards pressure exerted by this radiation (which is negligible in stars like our Sun) would be so great as to blow the star apart.
Once we incorporate the knowledge of stellar masses into the HR diagram, it becomes apparent that there is a simple relationship of the mass of a star to its place on the main sequence. This follows the form L ∝ M3 ie more massive stars on the main sequence are more luminous – and thus hotter. This makes sense in terms of a star needing to sustain a stable balance between its self-gravity and the outward pressure due to the energy it produces. The more massive a star is, the higher the inward pressure due to gravity it will experience, and so the more energy the star will have to produce at its core to counteract it; the increased rate of nuclear fusion both raises its central temperature and releases more energy to make the star shine more brightly. Supergiants are more massive than the red giants, which are in turn more massive than white dwarfs; but unlike for stars on the main sequence, there does not seem to be any correlation of mass with the luminosity or temperature within each of these classes.
So what does the mass variation along the main sequence tell us? We assume that once formed, a star does not undergo a significant change from its initial mass. It is only right at the very end of its life that it will undergo a dramatic loss of matter. (We shall ignore any mass loss through stellar winds that stream from the surface of a star all through its life, as it accumulates to a total which is only a tiny fraction of its original mass; likewise we shall not consider here exchanges of matter between stars such as happen to companions in a binary system, as such interactions can accelerate and distort the natural stellar development.) If a star does not change its mass, then its location on the HR diagram cannot move up or down the main sequence during its life; thus during this phase a star remains constant in its luminosity and surface temperature.
THE INTERSTELLAR MEDIUM
Stars are born from the material of the interstellar medium. Interstellar space is not truly empty, but filled with a tenuous gas at a range of temperatures. It is comprised of neutral or ionised atoms, mixed with molecules and tiny particles of solid matter known as dust. The composition of the gas is mainly hydrogen (90%) and helium (8%), with the remainder (2%) in the form of heavier elements. Some of this gas is primordial, never having been incorporated into stars; as we shall see, some of the matter has already been part of stars, before being recycled back into the interstellar medium.
Much of the space between the stars is filled with what is known as the hot, and warm intercloud medium, which is completely transparent at visible wavelengths. Although very widespread, it is at such a low density that it does not contain the bulk of the matter, and it is mostly fully ionised hydrogen. Embedded within the intercloud medium are distinct diffuse clouds, each smaller, denser and cooler than their surroundings. These cooler clouds take up a lot less space (only about 3% of the volume), but their higher density means that they contain much more of the mass of the interstellar medium. The diffuse clouds are again mostly transparent, made up of mostly neutral atoms that can only be detected in the radio, IR and microwave wavebands, along with from the emission from molecules and dust. Within these diffuse clouds are the densest and coolest pockets of gas, so condensed that the dust carried within them renders them opaque in the visible and UV. The deepest internal reaches of these clouds drop to temperatures where the atoms have joined up to build many different (and mostly carbon-based) molecules, so they are known as molecular clouds. Even within these clouds are small clumps or cores, each containing a mass of material anywhere between a half to a thousand or a million Solar masses. Even though these clumps are the very densest patches of the interstellar space, they still contain well over a trillion times fewer gas molecules and atoms compared to the high density of Earth's atmosphere. However, they provide the most favourable conditions for the formation of stars.
Even though the mass of each particle in an interstellar dust cloud is tiny, they combine to make a large total mass distributed throughout the cloud. Every atom (or molecule) in a gas cloud experiences the gravitational attraction of the combined mass of all the others. If there is the slightest over-density of matter in a diffuse cloud, it will make the gravity slightly stronger in one location than in another, and will preferentially pull some of the surrounding matter toward it. This will increase the overdensity, enhance the gravitational pull, and attract more matter… leading gradually to a runaway process of gravitational collapse. Energy has to be conserved within this process, and so as matter falls under gravity, the potential energy released is converted into heat. The contraction will continue until gravity has squeezed the cloud so tight that in the central region it reaches a density and temperature sufficient for nuclear fusion to be triggered – this requires temperatures of about eighteen million degrees K, and this threshold marks the formation of a proto-star. Of course this is very much a simplification; the heat released during the contraction phase will warm the surrounding material, slowing its collapse. The star formation will pause until any dust particles in the cloud have been evaporated – then the material stops absorbing the heat, the radiation can escape away and the contraction under gravity can resume. There are also other factors – such as the strength of any magnetic field threading through the gas, the amount of rotation present, or the fact that the cloud will not be uniform in density or temperature or shape – which can all also inhibit a cloud's contraction under gravity.
We see star formation is an ongoing process throughout the disc of our galaxy. Many of these diffuse gas clouds have existed for billions of years, so how have they resisted gravitational collapse up to now? The reason is that even if they are only a few degrees above absolute zero, all the atoms in an interstellar cloud are in continual motion (after all, the temperature of a cloud is just a measure of the average kinetic energy of the random and microscopic motions of its constituent particles). This constant jiggling produces a net outwards pressure, which, if large enough, enables the particles in a cloud to resist the local pull of self-gravity. Thus whether or not a cloud of a certain size will collapse to form stars is dictated by a delicate balance between its density and temperature: the warmer a cloud, the higher the density that is required for self-gravity to overcome the thermal pressure. So it is the densest and coolest regions of the interstellar medium that provide the most favourable conditions for stars to form. All the dark clouds that have not just collapsed already are just slightly too sparse, or too hot to collapse spontaneously. A cloud in the disc of our galaxy can thus exist in an undisturbed 'equilibrium state' for many millions or billions of years until only the slightest triggering mechanism tips it over into gravitational collapse. A cloud will only form stars if either the density or the temperature changes significantly. A decrease in temperature is hard to effect quickly, whereas an increase in density can be achieved rapidly; the gas in a cloud can be squeezed suddenly, for example by the gravitational tidal effect, or a collision with another cloud, by the push of stellar winds, or compression from a supernova blast wave.
Many stars are born in small groups or larger clusters, where all are formed from the collapse of the same diffuse cloud. The original cloud will not have been uniform, and any enhancements in density will become exaggerated as the material collapses. It will fragment into smaller denser pockets which each start a runaway gravitational collapse on their own. Each of these clumps will form an individual star, along with any accompanying planetary system. Binary or multiple star systems might form as different fragments collapse nearby each other. One parent gas cloud can form an 'open' cluster of young stars, where tens to hundreds of stars are formed at around the same time, just with a range of masses. The young hot stars will not always stay together. Gravitational ties are tenuous, and within a few million years the random motions of individual stars will cause them to disperse and become independent of each other.
Star formation is inefficient, and clusters of newly-formed stars remain embedded in the remnants of their parent cloud. Their winds and UV radiation erode the surrounding matter, and excite the gas atoms contained in the clouds to glow with their own light. Such star formation nurseries can be clearly seen as the emission 'nebulae', and in a galaxy like our own, they occur in the flat disc, following a distinctive spiral pattern. This spiral is not simply created by the different orbital speeds of material at difference distances from the centre, as the spiral arms would wind up in a relatively short time. Instead a 'density wave' is thought to sweep around the disc, travelling more slowly than the stars and gas rotate around the centre of the galaxy. As the wave moves through portions of the disc, it compresses all the material that passes through it, triggering the gravitational collapse of gas clouds, and leaving in its wake an arc of newly formed bright blue star clusters.
PROTO-STARS
The exact process of star birth is impossible to observe directly, as it is shielded from observation behind opaque clouds of gas and dust. It also happens quickly, compared to the eventual lifetime of the star itself. Only the very core of a dense pocket of gas reaches high enough temperatures for nuclear fusion to commence – and the surrounding layers of dust and gas are later dispersed by the winds and radiation. More massive stars form more quickly; while a Solar-mass star is estimated to take about ten million years to form from the gas cloud, a fifteen Solar-mass star may take only 100,000 years to complete the same process. As the dense clump of gas originally condensed from the cloud, it will have spun up and flattened out to form a thick circumstellar disc around the protostar (which will itself perhaps end up as an accompanying planetary system). Even when this torus of gas and dust veils the early star from view, the presence of the young stellar objects is revealed by twin jets of gas streaming out in opposite directions along an axis perpendicular to the disc. The gas in these jets moves at high speeds, at up to 50-100 km/s, and while they may last only for about 10,000 years, the jets carry significant amounts of mass away from the system. They stretch out for up to a light year above and below the protostar, ending only where they ram into surrounding interstellar gas, forming glowing knots of compressed gas.
THE MAIN SEQUENCE REVISITED
A protostar arrives suddenly onto the HR diagram at the bottom right, as it only has low temperature and luminosity to begin with. It takes a while to balance out how much energy it needs to generate at its core to counteract gravity, and as it stabilises it follows a path on the HR diagram that lands it onto the place on the main sequence appropriate for its mass. The length of time a star will spend on the main sequence – ie the speed with which it will get through its life – depends entirely on its mass. Stars of different masses don't evolve at the same rate: remember, the more massive the star, the more energy it has to produce to counteract the greater self-gravity. Even though it may have started with more fuel originally, it will burn so furiously that it exhausts that supply far more rapidly: more massive stars live furiously and die young.
A high-mass star burns with a bluer colour because it is hotter, and has a main sequence lifetime of only a few tens of millions of years. Thus when we see groups of blue stars within a galaxy, we know these are young stars, and so that they trace the most recent star formation events. The HR diagram also gives us a way to age the stars in a cluster; these are assumed to have formed at about the same time, from the same cloud of hot gas and dust. They are thus all the same age, and of similar chemical composition; the only difference between them is the mass of each individual star. If you plot their positions in the HR diagram, the main sequence is still apparent, but it is truncated at a place that depends on the cluster's age. More massive stars have shorter lifetimes, and many of them in the cluster have already exhausted their fuel to move away from the main sequence; the age of the most massive stars still remaining on the main sequence can thus translate into an age for the cluster.
THE EVOLUTION OF LOWER MASS STARS
Stars like our Sun (with masses between about 0.8 – 10 Solar masses) behave in a similar way to each other. For most of their life, and while on the main sequence, they convert hydrogen into helium. This happens via a process of nuclear fusion that converts four hydrogen nuclei (ie protons) into a single helium nucleus; each reaction also produces two positrons, two neutrinos and energy in the form of gamma rays. As a helium nucleus has less mass than the original four protons, the difference in mass (about 0.7%) is converted into energy (mass and energy are equivalent to each other in the principle encapsulated by the equation by E=mc2). The Sun loses mass to energy at the astonishing rate of four million kg of mass every second – while this may seem enormous, the loss of mass remains insignificant compared to the Sun's total mass of around 2 x 1030 kg. As protons are each positively charged, they must be smashed together at high speed to overcome the electric repulsion of like charges. The hotter a gas, the faster all the particles in the gas are moving, so the fusion process can only operate at temperatures over ten million degrees. The conversion of hydrogen to helium thus cannot occur throughout a star, but only where the temperature is the greatest, at the very centre and in a surrounding region known as the core. Nuclear reactions place at the centre of the Sun only where the temperature is about fifteen million K and the density is around 160,000 kg/m3.
During its 5-billion lifetime, the Sun has already converted about half the hydrogen in its core into helium, and it has sufficient fuel to continue doing so for about another six billion years or so. Once it runs out of sufficiently hot hydrogen, however, it can no longer produce enough energy to withstand the squeeze of gravity. There is no mixing of material between the core and the rest of the star, so the supply of fuel at the centre is not replenished with fresh hydrogen. The star can no longer support the weight of its outer layers, which now begin to compress the core. As it shrinks, however, gravitational potential energy is converted to thermal energy, and the core increases in temperature to a point where fusion of hydrogen can be restarted – but in the depleted core. Hydrogen fusion will now take place in the shell of unprocessed material immediately surrounding the original core, as this region has also increased in temperature. There is now a cycle of fuel depletion, shrinking, heating and re-ignition that repeats as subsequent layers are exhausted, sustaining hydrogen fusion in a concentric shell around the core that moves gradually outward through the star. This process adds more layers of helium 'ash' to the central core, which by now is entirely composed of helium. Very low mass stars will reach a point where the cycle of compression no longer heats the layer of hydrogen around the core sufficiently, and nuclear reactions will then cease.
Stars with mass above a half-Solar mass will continue until the process of the gravitational compression has heated the core to a temperature of 100 million degrees, enabling a new range of nuclear processes. Helium fusion reactions are initiated which create yet heavier nuclei such as carbon and oxygen – and again the associated release of energy temporarily halts the contraction of the core, stabilising the star. Less energy is released in each reaction, however, and so the helium in the core is exhausted much more rapidly than was the case for the hydrogen; it is consumed within about 10% of the star's lifetime on the main sequence, around only about 100 million years. Once the helium fusion stops at the centre, it might also then continue in a shell around the core, now surrounded by a slightly outer shell of hydrogen fusion.
By now the changes in the structure of the star, and the development of its temperature and luminosity, mean that it has moved to a new location on the HR diagram; it no longer sits on the main sequence. It has become a red giant, as much more energy is now directed into the star's outer layers than before, and its atmosphere puffs up to many times its original size. The outermost layers are now much further away from the source of energy, and the surface cools down to appear dim and red. When it reaches this stage, the Sun's atmosphere will grow so large as to engulf Mercury and Venus. A red giant has expanded so much that its outer layers experience a much-reduced surface gravity, and become vulnerable to escape away from the star and into space.
Heavier elements can be created within the cool distended envelopes of red giant stars. Neutrons released from the nuclear reactions going on in the shells can combine with any existing heavy nuclei that may be already present in the gas layers (where these nuclei were not created by the nuclear reactions in that star, but are merely present as they were in the original cloud that the star formed from, if it had been enriched by earlier generations of stars). Adding a single neutron to a nucleus increases its mass by one, but does not change its chemical properties, so it forms a different isotope of the same element. If that isotope is unstable, however, given time it will eject an electron, converting one of its neutrons to a proton to become a different element. The whole process can repeat to build up a variety of heavier elements, but this a very slow process, as there is a low density of neutrons being released to be available for capture. The long time between neutron captures allows time for some radioactive decay, and only certain elements (for example, strontium zirconium barium lanthanum and lead) can be made in this way. The cool envelopes of red giants are also an ideal environment for the tiny solid particles of carbonate and silicate that make up the interstellar dust.
A star of a mass similar to the Sun also reaches a limit as to how much the core can be heated from successive cycles of gravitational compression, and eventually all nuclear reactions in both core and shells can no longer be re-ignited. The star puffs away its outer envelope – often in several stages thousands of years apart – and in this way loses a substantial amount of its mass; this expands away to form a shell, leaving the central core of the star exposed.
THE WHITE DWARF
The core of the star exposed by the dispersing outer atmosphere can contain about half the mass of the Sun, all packed into a volume about the size of the Earth. This is a stable body known as a white dwarf, and it is able to resist further gravitational collapse through electron degeneracy pressure – the fact that electrons resist being squeezed too tightly together. Although it is hot, at a temperature between 5,000 − 30,000K, there is insufficient hydrogen and helium remaining to continue fusion, and any nuclear reactions involving heavier elements require much higher temperatures. So in the absence of any further fusion, the white dwarf will cool and fade; its small size means that it will radiate its energy away only slowly, and it will take a timescale of billions of years for it to become a cold, dark and dense ball of compressed matter, rich in carbon and oxygen.
THE PLANETARY NEBULA
The outer shell of gas expanding away from the core forms a temporary structure known as a planetary nebula (which, despite the name, has nothing to do with planets!). This nebula will eventually disperse into space within a few tens of thousands of years; but while they are close to the hot, bright white dwarf, the gas atoms glow and shine, illuminating a very pleasing variety of shapes and patterns within the nebulae. Some (such as the famous Ring nebula) take the simple form of a bubble surrounding the white dwarf, while others show much more intricate structures indicating shells or winds and even far outer halos created from material shrugged off during earlier episodes in the star's evolution. Some planetary nebulae have a bipolar or 'hourglass' shape, where the outflow has been modified and constricted by a ring of opaque matter that obscures the white dwarf.
THE EVOLUTION OF MORE MASSIVE STARS
More massive stars – with masses some 10-50 times that of our Sun – will begin life on the main sequence in the same way, but the greater gravitational compression they experience will raise the temperature in the core so much higher that they can convert hydrogen to helium using a more efficient process. Here the nuclear reactions involve carbon, nitrogen and oxygen as catalysts to speed things up, causing the stars to burn 10,000 to 100,000 times brighter, but also get through their main sequence life very much faster. The much greater mass present in these stars means that they can continue to fusion processes that involve and create much heavier elements – each time the fusion of one fuel is exhausted at the core, the gravitational compression increases the central temperature enough that its products can then be used in further reactions, thus making elements of ever increasing atomic weight. The internal structure of the centre of such a star near the end of its life is complicated, resembling the structure of an onion. The outermost shells would contain hydrogen fusing into helium, surrounding inner and deeper layers where helium is fused to carbon and oxygen, where carbon is then fused into neon and magnesium, and so on. If temperatures reach about eight billion degrees at the very centre, a core of iron is created from the fusion of silicon. Each step in this chain forming ever-heavier elements at higher temperatures lasts for a progressively tinier fraction of the star's life; the stage of iron production may only last for about a week. But the formation of iron-type elements marks the point where nuclear fusion is no longer a viable energy source; iron is the most tightly bound atomic nucleus, and any heavier elements only release energy when split into lighter elements. The star now has no further means to create energy from fusion reactions.
Once the options for a central energy supply are completely depleted, the inward pull of gravity finally wins. The core of the star becomes so compressed by the overlying layers that it will reach densities as high as a trillion kg per cubic metre, and temperatures in excess of ten billion degrees K. At that point the matter undergoes a process known as photo-disintegration, whereby photons split the iron nuclei into protons and neutrons. Any free electrons combine with these protons to form even more neutrons, releasing a huge flux of neutrinos in the process. The iron core of about 12,000 km diameter then rapidly collapses to form a neutron star only about 10- 20 km across; at this point the matter can resist any further gravitational pull through neutron degeneracy pressure. The matter is far denser than that in a white dwarf, and a single teaspoonful would weigh a billion tonnes on Earth.
The catastrophic collapse of the core into a neutron star happens in less than a second, and it leaves the outermost layers of the star temporarily unsupported. They crash down, only to bounce on the incompressible surface of the neutron star, and the potential energy released from this collapse is then released instantly to form a massive explosion known as a supernova. So much energy is liberated that the event can outshine the light of its entire host galaxy for a few days/weeks/months – this is even though only 0.01% of the energy is released as light! Most of it is carried away in the form of neutrinos. A supernova creates an intense flood of neutrons which can bombard the ions and atoms of the stellar debris. This allows a much more rapid neutron capture process, where two or three neutrons can be acquired by the atomic nuclei in the debris before it undergoes radioactive decay, and a different set of heavy elements can be created than from the slower process operating in the envelopes of red giant stars.
The hot debris from the outer layers of the star explodes out through space at speeds of about 5000 km/s, rapidly sweeping out a huge bubble of hot gas, surrounded by layers of material swept up in the expanding blast wave. As the material ploughs into its surroundings it creates shocks which heat and compress the gas – both in the debris and the interstellar medium – to millions of degrees. The expansion of the material slows down only after about 10,000 to 20,000 years to form a spherical shell known as a supernova remnant. Such a remnant can remain visible for tens of thousands of years as a colourful network of filaments extending many tens of light-years across. Long after the initial explosion has faded, these remain the only indication of the dramatic event that has taken place, and eventually this material becomes completely mixed with the dust and gas clouds of the interstellar medium.
THE MOST MASSIVE STARS
Stars with mass between 50 – 100 Solar masses have the shortest lives of all. They will progress through the same basic steps of generating energy by nuclear fusion of ever heavier elements, but a key difference is that they will lose a lot of their mass through a stellar wind. With mass-loss rates of up to a millionth of a solar mass a year, sometimes these rarest but most massive stars can lose so much matter that the core is left exposed. This then drastically alters the final stages of their development as they are not able to undergo shell burning. They thus never turn into red giants, and are known as Wolf-Rayet stars, where expanding shells of gas surround the exposed core of the star. Although they still end their lives in a giant supernova explosion, the light from the event will indicate a distinct lack of hydrogen in the ejecta. This is known as a 'type 1b' supernova, and indicates that most of the outermost (and hydrogen-rich) material had been lost long before the explosion in the strong stellar wind.
With so much mass, the final stages gravitational compression are so great that they can overcome neutron degeneracy pressure, and there is no mechanism beyond that able to halt the contraction. The collapse continues until all the mass of the star is squashed into an infinitely small space to form a singularity – a region of the most extreme gravity anywhere in the Universe known as a black hole.
COSMIC RECYCLING
The elements made in stars are returned back to interstellar space through a variety of processes. First of all, through the stellar winds that flow from all stars during their lives, although massive hot stars and red giants are the most effective at returning material to the interstellar medium. Winds are a fairly gentle form of dispersal, and can account for a significant return of material to the environment. The creation of a planetary nebulae is a slightly more dramatic shedding of material, which is both hotter and denser – but both winds and planetary nebulae distribute material that is only modestly enriched in heavy elements. Although supernovae provide the most violent ejection of stellar material, their comparative rarity means that they return less material to the interstellar medium than one might expect. However, supernovae are not only the major source of heavy elements, but the energy of the expanding gas shell is so great that the ejected material is mixed much more thoroughly with its surroundings, and over a much larger volume of space.
While the very first stars are expected to have formed from primordial gas containing only hydrogen and helium, once they run through their rapid lives to become supernovae, the process of contamination of the interstellar medium with heavy elements is begun. Each generation of short-lived and massive stars steadily increases the proportion of heavy elements in the clouds with time. But there is less enrichment than one might suppose. High mass stars are far less common than the longer-lived low mass objects, and even though the nuclear reactions in stars will have been running for nearly all of the Universe's 13.8 billion years, only about 5% of all stars ever born have evolved past the first stage of converting hydrogen into helium. In addition, not all material is recycled – many heavy elements remain locked into neutron stars, black holes, brown and white dwarfs, and in any planets that are not absorbed by its star at the end of its life. But slowly, the interstellar medium is enriched beyond its original primordial chemical composition with a smattering of heavier elements, to evolve in its chemical composition. This affects the chemical composition of the future stars that will condense from that reservoir of material. Thus the observed 'metallicity' of a star can provide an indication of the level of enrichment in heavy elements that had occurred in its host cloud prior to the star's formation. A very old and long-lived star would have formed when the metallicity of the interstellar medium was lower than when the Sun was formed. Indeed, we see a gradient in behaviour supporting this interpretation, where stars in the Milky Way show different levels of enrichment in heavy elements that represent different epochs of star formation: younger stars have high metallicities, and older stars tend to have lower metallicities. Thus the chemical composition of individual stars in a galaxy can start to teach us about the formation of that galaxy.
© Professor Carolin Crawford, 2014
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Quiz: Can you name these would-be presidents?
Can you name these would-be presidents?
By: Bambi Turner
For every newly-elected POTUS delivering a victory speech to cheering crowds, there's an opponent who didn't quite make the grade. Take our quiz to see how much you know about the people who were almost president.
What future president lost to Benjamin Harrison in the 1888 election?
William Taft
Grover Cleveland was victorious in 1884 and 1892, but lost to Benjamin Harrison in 1888 -- making Cleveland the only president to serve non-consecutive terms.
What newspaper falsely gave the 1948 election to Dewey?
Chicago Daily Tribune
The Chicago Tribune was so assured of Thomas Dewey's victory over Harry Truman that it printed the now famous "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline before the results of the 1948 election were finalized.
Who lost to Barack Obama in the 2012 election?
After losing the Republican nomination to John McCain in 2008, Mitt Romney finally made the ticket in 2012 -- only to lose the presidential race to Barack Obama.
Who tied with Aaron Burr in the 1800 presidential election?
Burr and Jefferson tied in the 1800 election, leaving the House of Representatives to pick the president. They chose Jefferson, leaving also-ran Burr understandably angry.
Aaron Burr was still vice president when he shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel.
Burr was still serving as vice president under Thomas Jefferson when he fatally shot Alexander Hamilton in a July 1804 duel.
What was Charles Evans Hughes doing before he threw his hat into the 1916 presidential race
serving prison term
serving on the Supreme Court
serving breakfast at his family diner
Hughes was a Supreme Court justice when he ran for president in 1916. After losing to Woodrow Wilson, he went back to the Supreme Court and eventually became Chief Justice.
Al Gore narrowly lost to George Bush despite a recount in this state.
After two terms as vice president under Bill Clinton, Al Gore narrowly lost the 2000 election to George Bush, despite a careful recount in Florida -- where results were hotly contested.
How many votes separated President George Bush from also-ran Al Gore in Florida?
Just 537 votes separated the two candidates -- though the difference may be more or less depending on your definition of hanging chad.
Who did George McClellan run against in 1864 on an unsuccessful anti-war platform?
McClellan not only lost the 1864 election to Lincoln but also lost his consulting job with the railroads after his employer worried that bad blood between McClellan and Lincoln could cost the company business.
Before he ran for president, Adlai Stevenson was governor of this state.
Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson picked up just 89 electoral votes when he ran against Dwight Eisenhower in 1952.
Adlai Stevenson did better when he ran against Eisenhower again in 1956.
Stevenson picked up even fewer electoral votes in 1956 then he did in 1952, wining just 73 votes to Eisenhower's 457.
What issue won George Wallace 10 million votes in the 1968 presidential race?
Wallace won five states and 10 million votes in 1968 running on a pro-segregation ticket, but still lost soundly to Richard Nixon.
Where was Wallace when he was shot in an assassination attempt during his 1972 campaign?
A 1972 assassination attempt in Maryland left Wallace paralyzed.
This is the only state Walter Mondale won in his 1984 presidential campaign.
Mondale won only Washington D.C. and his home state of Minnesota in the 1984 race, giving him a mere 13 electoral votes against Ronald Reagan.
What was unusual about Mondale's pick for VP?
She was a woman.
He was an ex-con.
He was openly gay.
Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro for his running mate, making her the first female vice presidential candidate to run on a major party ticket.
How many times did Bob Dole run for president?
Dole ran three times -- in 1980, 1988 and 1996. In his final attempt in 1996, he lost to Bill Clinton by a whopping 220 electoral votes.
George Washington only narrowly won the presidential election in 1789.
Washington won by a landslide in both 1789 and 1792 -- mostly because he ran unopposed in both of his bids for president.
What year did a woman run for president for the first time?
Ohio's Victoria Woodhull ran under the Equal Rights Party in 1872 -- almost half a century before women even earned the right to vote.
What state is home to a museum dedicated to presidential losers?
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What state did Michael Dukakis serve as governor of before running for president?
Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts before running against George Bush in the 1988 presidential election.
Which 2016 candidate climbed Mount Everest?
Before he was the Libertarian candidate for president in 2016, Gary Johnson scaled Mount Everest in 2003.
What department did Hillary Clinton represent before she attempted a presidential run in 2016?
Clinton served as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013. After she resigned to focus on her presidential campaign, she was replaced as Secretary of State by John Kerry.
How many electoral votes separated Clinton and Trump in the 2016 election?
Clinton lost the POTUS position by 74 electoral votes, earning 232 to Trump's 306.
Clinton was the first candidate to win the popular vote, but lose the election.
The 2016 election was the fifth time that a candidate won the popular vote but lost the election. It also happened in 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000.
Donald Trump never ran for president before the 2016 race.
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What year did Nixon finally win a presidential election?
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What year did Strom Thurmond run for president?
Thurmond lost to Dewey and Truman in the 1948 race while running on an anti-integration platform. Many years later, the public learned that the pro-segregation candidate fathered a child with an African-American woman during his youth.
How many years did Strom Thurmond serve in the Senate?
Despite his loss in the 1948 presidential race, Thurmond served in the Senate for 48 years and was still in office at the age of 100.
Who beat Samuel Tilden by one electoral vote to clench the 1876 presidential race?
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Interview: The Makers of Metal Evolution - That Shelf
Interview: The Makers of Metal Evolution
by That Shelf Staff | June 12, 2012, 9:30 am
With possibly one of the coolest job titles of the face of the planet, heavy metal anthropologist Sam Dunn has previously chronicled the world of heavy metal music with his Banger Films cohort Scot McFayden in the Gemini award winning Metal: A Headbanger's Journey and in their follow-up Global Metal (as well as doing some work following Rush and Alice Cooper specifically). But when dealing with a sub-genre of music that has so many smaller sub-genres and styles within it, two movies just aren't really enough.
Partnering with VH-1, the duo has crafted the ultimate Heavy Metal Family Tree in the 10 part documentary series Metal Evolution (out today on DVD from Alliance Films) spanning metal's history for several episodes to start before getting into more specified questions about everything from Glam and Nu-Metal to Power Metal, Prog Rock, Thrash, Shock Rock, and the possibility that Grunge might even have some decidedly metal roots. It's a sprawling an immensely fun journey down the rabbit hole of one of pop cultures more decidedly tawdry and primal pleasures.
With the honest and self effacing Dunn front and centre, who refuses to hide his dislike or disappointment towards certain aspects of metal culture, the series offers a great insider look for both fans and newbies alike. Dork Shelf had a chance to catch up with Dunn and McFayden in Toronto last week to talk about all things metal, and some not so metal parts of the filmmaking process.
Dork Shelf: Academically you guys have pretty much been able to carve your own path, so I guess my first earnestly nerdy question is, how do you guys feel about having one of the coolest jobs out there?
Sam Dunn: (laughs) I like to think Iron Maiden has the coolest gig on the face of the planet.
Scot McFayden: (laughs) I mean, you kind of lose perspective sometimes. If someone had told us five, six, seven years ago that this was what we would be doing we wouldn't have really believed it. When we were making Metal: A Headbanger's Journey and it took five years to raise the money and you told us it would have been successful and that we would have all of these other films under our belt it would have been hard to believe. So sometimes you lose that perspective and step back and realize that it's pretty amazing. But it's also hard work because we have a staff now and we have to figure out what we want to do for the rest of the year and what we want to do for the following year. It becomes a real career and it just dawns on you suddenly that it's what you're going to be doing your entire life. (laughs)
SD: I remember Lars Ulrich said that it's harder to stay successful than it is to become successful, and I think there's a real element to that, especially for us because I think we've always been our own toughest critics and we set the bar higher for ourselves than anyone else. We probably could have done less and we might still be here, but who knows if we would be totally happy with the results? I think that it's that challenge of what happens when your livelihood depends on your creativity and your ability to brainstorm and execute projects there comes a certain stress and pressure with that, but hey, we're not going to complain because it's a great thing to be doing, especially something like that that fans can directly identify with. I think that's a real added value to what we do is knowing that we've connected with people with what we do. That's nice.
DS: You kind of mapped out a little bit where this series was headed in Global Metal, but what were some of the actual logistical challenges of bringing something like this together that finds you having to deal with all of these artists' schedules or flying all around the world to shape an entire series?
SM: Man, there's so many. Just the fact that scheduling and timing and getting over 300 artists together and trying to figure out when you can get them and when you can edit and trying to fit everything in together, and not everyone's available. I think one of the first groups we called was Slayer and they said the guys were busy right now, and we we're just, like, "What do you mean? We're making the biggest thing on the history of metal ever!" (laughs) We thought they were going to be a sure thing. I mean, we got them eventually, but we thought after making all these films that it was going to be a no brainer, but we still had to go through the same processes on this one that we did in our previous films.
DS: I'm sure it didn't help your case that metal bands, especially in this day and age where album sales don't really mean a lot, make most of their income through relentless touring, which is something you guys definitely touch on.
SD: Totally, and just to take another perspective on that, I think that's the reason why metal is doing relatively well. It's always depended on the live abilities of the bands. Of course record sales are important to metal just like any other style of music, but I think to really be a metal band that has endurance and stamina, you have to be able to perform live. I think interestingly that the reason that we still see festivals like Dokk'em or see Iron Maiden on the road is because touring has always been a huge part of the pie for these guys. I think that's why it's remained hot.
DS: Was there ever a branch of metal where you felt like you needed to know more, like with Power Metal which you admittedly stated you weren't all that familiar with?
SM: Well, we had researchers and writers as well on this one just because of the scope of it. Certainly one of our writers was a huge Prog Metal fan, so it was difficult to not make that into a four hour episode…
DS: …which would be fitting for Prog Metal…
SM: (laughs) Exactly! I mean, Sam obviously knows a lot more specifics than I do, but in general it was a long process for all of us. With this one, even when you think you know a genre, you have to break it down and look at that in the writing. For each episode it was a question of how we would tell that story, and it's never easy.
SD: Compared to say Headbanger's Journey roughly seven years ago now, one of our biggest challenges was access to the artists, like we just talked about. Although it was tough to get some of the access, people know us now, so the challenge here was taking something as potentially dry as all of this history and build compelling stories out of them. Most often there would just be too much information, too many bands to consider, too many different paths to follow, and which ones to follow, and when we follow them how far do we want to go when we're talking about something like double bass drumming or distortion or any number of nerdy details that we think are really interesting and cool, but you can't turn it into an instructional video. (laughs) So I think, really, for the most part the scale and the scope and condensing it was the biggest writing challenge overall.
DS: In terms of setting things up, you guys are dealing with people that can sometimes be considered as being somewhat eccentric. Did you have any strange requests or people that were difficult to deal with or anything you had to walk away from?
SD: Hmmmm… Right now I'm flashing back to Gene Simmons for the Rush documentary we did (Beyond the Lighted Stage). He walked into the room and demanded that we change our entire lighting set-up even though we had already done hundreds of interviews with the same set-up.
SM: Well, I'm thinking of someone else, but that's also for the Alice Cooper thing we were just working on…
SD: We often get asked who were problem interviews or if any crazy things happened, and there really wasn't a lot. The only person that stood us up in all of the hundreds of interviews was Stephen Pearcy, the lead singer for Ratt. I think it certainly didn't do my very open anti-Glam Metal perspective any favours. I was just thinking that we were out to debunk stereotypes or to at least bring more light to the subject and it's, like, "Fuck, this guy is totally fulfilling every stereotype that I thought of." (laughs) I don't think he did Glam Metal any favours on that day, but, you know, I struggle to really think of something. I think what's really driven us to this point is that we've humanized metal. We tried to put a human face on something that people didn't always consider to be human and something that people can still to some degree see as Cro-Magnon. I think that what we found in large was that these people were musicians who were fully committed to what they do, they have families. We don't want to make metal boring, but we want to show they are real people.
DS: When you guys are talking about the birth of American Metal early on in the series, and specifically when talking about Aerosmith, there's an interesting point that gets brought up about how critics and connoisseurs tend to over-intellectualize things. Do you think that's something that has led to metal having all of these different sub-genres?
SM: I mean, that's a great question. Who created it? Was it the fans or was it ultimately something more critical.
SD: Yeah. I guess what we tried to show – and I'm not even sure if this answers your question – was that metal HAS an evolution, and I think no matter how much work we put into conveying that, the masses still think that there was this big bang in the 1980s when all of these people showed up with hairspray and spandex like it came out of nowhere, almost; that it didn't have a history. But, then again, everything and everyone has a history, and when you look at it there's a definite clear and connective tissue between different sounds. That's what we tried to show.
SM: And I think also, to compare it to film, you can take something like The Exorcist, which was this explosive new thing when it came out, and then there was a whole bunch of movies that tried to copy that. I think that we noticed that within each of these subgenres that there were these bands who were doing something relatively new compared to the rest of the genre. Then people would try to do that and then it would die because too many people were trying to do the same thing. Just like anything in pop culture it all rises and falls somewhat on trends and longevity is about being able to overcome them. Some of the early bands that we found that started these subgenres were almost always the most interesting and the most successful, with a few exceptions. And with something like early US and UK metal it's not something you can easily classify because it doesn't really fall into any sort of sub-genre because they didn't exist yet. It was always something almost regional and that region created its own specific sound that was unique and brave.
SD: Metal fans are the genre's own experts, right? The musicians are fans, the fans are often musicians, and in many cases both are experts, and it just goes around and around in a circle. I think when that happens the whole community becomes involved in telling this history of this music, and I think that the sub-genres of metal are very much a product of fans caring too deeply about the music (laughs) and wanting to create their own history of this music. Even Rolling Stone, Time Magazine, People, none of them give a shit. So the fans are going to do it themselves, and really the breakdown into all of these subgenres is really a product of fan dialogue over the decades. It's really true! It's kind of great that there aren't any hired intellectuals that can just sit back and tell this history of metal. Maybe that's our job. (laughs)
DS: The show is very self-effacing and truthful towards the audience, especially when you, Samm, say that you really don't like Glam Metal and Nu-Metal. If you had to choose one of those two to chronicle again, which would you most likely revisit?
SD: Neither. Is that an option? Actually, I think that Nu-Metal is kind of more interesting because of the roots of it and how they came from somewhere that was quite groundbreaking when we talk about bands like Rage Against the Machine and Pantera and Faith No More and the Anthrax/Public Enemy collaboration, those were bands that were dabbling in something new in combining that groove element with the heaviness of metal. That was a really important time in music, and one of my favourite lines in the whole episode and the whole series overall was that it makes known that since Led Zeppelin that the groove had kind of been lost in metal, and it wasn't until someone said that when I realized it was true. It disappeared then, and it was brought back with those bands. So when you put it in that perspective, I think this was something that was really stretching the boundaries of metal in a new way.
DS: Which is something that Glam Metal never had…
SM: Nope. I mean, it's great drinking music, but yeah, Nu-Metal just turned out to be something we thought was going to be a challenge, but really the early stuff and talking the roots of it became something that was hard to cut down because you have something like the Beastie Boys which we had something about but we didn't get a chance to include, but it turned out to be a really interesting episode, even though a lot of hardcore's might have skipped that one initially.
DS: Conversely when you start talking about Grunge and Power Metal, those were two sections that seemed to give you the most trouble because it was debatable if Grunge had any metal elements at all and because you guys knew so little about Power Metal going in.
SM: Those two were definitely the hardest of the episodes to lock. You know, Power Metal is a hard topic to make interesting because a lot of the bands are ones that people have never heard of, so you have to figure out some way to tell the story in a different way. And with Grunge, there really wasn't a lot of love for metal, and people's attitude for being included in the history wasn't the greatest. There were some people we just couldn't get.
SD: Power Metal was very, very difficult because it's an unusual genre because it's a genre that's been created retrospectively and is made up of those more obscure bands. Then again, when Deep Purple came out, they weren't even thought of as metal, but now we call them power metal because they inspired Blind Guardian. It's inherently backward looking, so we had to tell the story of Power Metal in a totally different way where the bulk of the episode is actually made up of pre-Power Metal bands and not the proper movement. That's also because it's a very European genre. In North America, the bands are often small because even in the underground here, it's less familiar than in Europe. It was really challenging. We beat our heads against the wall for way too long on that one.
Death to False Metal • DVD • Global Metal • Heavy Metal • Metal Evolution • Metal: A Headbanger's Journey • review • Samm Dunn • Scot McFayden • TV
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Daniel Glewis, Head of Property Management at Shaws Kensington, an estate and lettings agency in London, discusses the importance of offering Rent Protection Insurance to his landlords in our latest video.
Daniel Glewis, Head of Property Management at Shaws Kensington in London, discusses the importance of offering Rent Protection Insurance to his landlords in our latest video.
"I think there are a number of landlords who've rented a property for many years and feel as though they've never had a problem so they're never going to have a problem," says Glewis. "But the potential unforeseen circumstances in life - people losing their job or falling ill - means the majority of our landlords do decide they want to take out a policy as protection."


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According to the ProJo, Governor Carcieri has chosen Alice Gibney as the new presiding Justice for the RI Superior Court. Fabulous choice!!
Governor Carcieri has chosen Superior Court Judge Alice Bridget Gibney to be the next presiding justice of her court.
Gibney, 62, who has served as a Superior Court judge for 25 years and before that, as a Workers' Compensation commissioner, was notified of the appointment Thursday afternoon by the governor. The nomination is subject to Senate confirmation.
Gibney, of Warwick, has been the acting presiding justice since Joseph F. Rodgers Jr. retired from the bench last week and is the most senior judge on the state's major trial court. She is married to veteran trial lawyer Robert D. Parrillo. They have one son, Nicholas Parrillo.
Rodgers had supported Gibney's candidacy for the position over two less senior judges on his court who were also finalists for the post -- Daniel A. Procaccini and Jeffrey A. Lanphear.
Testifying in her favor before the Judicial Nominating Commission, Rodgers told the screening panel that Gibney is the "most respected and beloved" justice in his court, including "yours truly."


Leah Banks had problems seeing while driving at night. The first diagnosis was incorrect. The second one showed a brain tumor was putting pressure on a key juncture where the optic nerves from both eyes intersect.
Cancer researcher Leah Banks noticed her vision was impaired as she drove at night. Car lights were blindingly bright, and the problem made her wonder whether driving after sunset was in the best interest of safety.
"I also noticed that my peripheral vision was blurry, so I scheduled an appointment with my optometrist," said Banks, 34, a postdoctoral fellow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. She didn't initially think her visual disturbances were serious. She thought she needed new glasses. Her optometrist thought likewise and suggested she probably had astigmatism, a curvature in the cornea, the clear outer windshield of the eye.
The optometrist prescribed new lenses. The diagnosis, however, was incorrect.
Banks' dogged search for a precise diagnosis consumed much of last year and only for the past six months has she resumed her research at the lab. She found her visual disturbances were not caused by astigmatism but by a brain tumor that had put pressure on a key juncture where the optic nerves from both eyes intersect. The discovery resulted in a daring four-hour surgery during which the tumor was removed through her nose.
The monthslong medical odyssey temporarily rocked the young scientist's world.
Her tumor, although benign, was defined as pituitary adenoma, a type of abnormality that affects 9 percent to 12 percent of people diagnosed annually in the United States with a brain tumor. A surprising 1 in 4 Americans are estimated to have a tumor in the pituitary gland without knowing it because there are no symptoms, according to researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan.
Pituitary adenomas can cause excruciating headaches — and, as was for Banks, they also can steal eyesight.
More than 120 different kinds of tumors are known to infiltrate the central nervous system, ranging from benign to malignant. The tumor that claimed the life of Sen. John McCain last year was the most lethal form of brain tumor, a malignant glioblastoma. But among the 86,000 people in the United States diagnosed annually with a brain tumor, an estimated 69 percent have growths that, like Banks' tumor, are found to be benign, data from the American Brain Tumor Association show.
Benign means cells from the growth — when viewed through a microscope — appear normal and have zero hallmarks that are consistent with cancer. Despite being noncancerous, the growths can still produce consequences, studies have found.
"I decided to explore my options online and look for different types of eye doctors," said Banks, who holds a doctorate in cancer biology. A native of Vacaville, California, near the state capital in Sacramento, she has concentrated on cancer research because of a promise she made to her grandparents. Both developed colon cancer and died of it. She vowed to pursue a career that would seek answers on why healthy cells go awry and become malignant, and to explore methods of effective treatment.
She didn't initially suspect an abnormal growth in her brain would interfere with the pursuit of her dreams.
"I work long hours doing bench experiments with lab tools," she said of working in a laboratory at a long, equipment-filled countertop known in research as a bench, "so my vision is vitally important.
Her search for a physician who might help led her to an ophthalmologist, who performed a series of tests.
"When he shined a bright light in my eye, I couldn't see the light," Banks recalled, noting that the eye specialist recommended she see a neuro-ophthalmologist.
Her next step was to the offices of Dr. Howard Pomeranz, chief of neuro-ophthalmology at Northwell Health in Great Neck.
"From an ophthalmological standpoint, one of the first things we think of when a patient complains of bright lights while driving is cataracts. But she was too young for that," Pomeranz said.
After examining his patient's eyes, he suggested the problem might be a tumor. But Banks would need confirmatory imaging tests.
"I am in a subspecialty of ophthalmology that deals with any neurological disorder, any problem in the brain — from a brain tumor to multiple sclerosis — that can affect vision," Pomeranz said, noting that in his arcane area of medicine he frequently sees patients who have the kind of tumor he suspected had infiltrated Banks' brain.
Banks had a non-secreting tumor.
Pomeranz said pituitary tumors usually produce no symptoms until they become large enough to put pressure on the optic chiasma, an X-shaped structure in the brain where the optic nerve from each eye meets at a central point — the midsection of the X.
When results from the MRI were in, Pomeranz knew his initial hunch of a tumor was correct. Banks was stunned by the finding, as a thousand thoughts raced through her mind.
"We went through all of the tests and pictures of the optic nerve and I knew right away it was something severe," Banks said. "I was definitely in a state of shock.
"As a cancer researcher, it was also shocking because in my lab some of us are working on neuroblastoma," she said of a nervous system tumor.
Assurances that it was likely benign were of little solace, she said, because her eyesight was at stake and her future seemingly in jeopardy. A key question was how the growth began in her pituitary.
The pituitary gland, about the size of a pea, is situated in the brain just behind the bridge of the nose. It is part of the endocrine system, which secretes hormones and long has been called the master gland because it controls hormones throughout the body, including those secreted by the thyroid and adrenal glands.
Pituitary tumors can occur at any age, but they are more common in older people. Women are more affected than men, particularly during the childbearing years, the American Brain Tumor Association has found.
Banks was hospitalized the evening that all of her medical tests were in and confirmed. She would next meet with Dr. Mark Eisenberg, Northwell Health's director of the Skull Base Center and Pituitary Neuroendocrine Disorders Center.
He told Banks that because of the size and location of her tumor, it was best to remove it endoscopically through her nose. An endoscope is a thin flexible tube and light that allows a surgeon access to parts of the brain without making large incisions or removing parts of the skull.
Eisenberg was assisted in the operation by otolaryngologist Dr. Margherita Bruni. Removing the tumor from Banks' pituitary took four hours, the doctors said.
Banks said she's pleased the diagnosis, tumor and hospitalization are behind her. The entire affair frightened a lot of people — her parents, who flew in from California, and her boss, Dr. Alea Mills, discoverer of a gene called Chd5, which suppresses cancer growth. Mills and Banks' lab colleagues came to visit her in the hospital.
"At first, I had wanted to be a doctor because doctors save lives. But after I got to graduate school, I knew that I wanted to focus on cancer research," said Banks, who also tutors Long Island high school students and encourages them to pursue careers in science.


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On Sunday, February 10th, pray for Venezuela!
United in their concern to "avoid still greater suffering and pain for the people" and in their hope for a change in the course of the political and democratic situation that Venezuela is currently going through, the Venezuelan Bishops' Conference has launched a joint communiqué, together with the Conference of Male and Female Religious and the National Council of the Laity in Venezuela, published on Monday, February 4th in Caracas.
They speak of the difficult situation that is currently being written in the annals of Venezuelan history and one that both the Venezuelan people and clergy and also the international community are witnessing with great hope, and yet at the same time with great concern.
In their communiqué, the presidents of the three bodies, which most fully represent the Catholic Church of the country, denounce "the growing, politically motivated repression, the violation of human rights and the selective and arbitrary detentions," of individuals and they stress that this path of democratic change to be allowed to unfold peacefully and with the National Constitution in hand.
The current political situation in Venezuela is the result of the presidential elections held in May 2018 which, according to the official government version, were won by the current President Nicolas Maduro, but which were widely qualified as "illegitimate" by the majority of countries in the international community. It includes other Latin American countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Santa Lucia, as well as Canada, Spain and the United States. They base their decision on accounts of numerous irregularities in the way in which elections were held.
Hence, given the illegitimate nature of the elections, President Maduro would thereby cease to be the legitimate president as at the conclusion of his previous mandate, on 10 January, and therefore no longer be recognized as President of the Republic.
Instead, and in accordance with the Venezuelan Constitution, the acting president of Venezuela would be the president of the National Assembly of the country, who in this case is Juan Gerardo Guaidó. And so, on 11 January 2019, Guaidó announced that he would be invoking article 233 of the Constitution and calling new national elections, and on 23 January he was sworn in as acting president of Venezuela.
PLEASE, on Sunday, February 10th, please pray for the People of Venezuela!


The motivation for the Alexander-Murray compromise was President Donald Trump's reckless refusal to distribute cost-sharing reduction payments to insurance companies – money the government promised insurers in exchange for participating in Obamacare. The CBO had previously warned that ending the payments would actually cost the government $194 billion over 10 years, because it would force other federal programs to pay out more in subsidies to consumers in the individual health insurance market. Trump ignored this warning.
The Alexander-Murray bill would restore the payments for two years. The CBO predicts that, although the damage has been done for 2018, the bill would restrain premiums and cut government spending in 2019. If the payments were continued beyond that point, the savings would presumably continue, as well.
But the Alexander-Murray plan contains much more, and the CBO's findings on the bill's Obamacare reforms are the most illuminating pieces of the new analysis. For example, the bill would allow all people to buy "copper" (as opposed to gold, silver or bronze) health-care plans, which would offer consumers less generous benefits at a lower monthly price. The CBO found that this provision would draw more healthy people into the individual market, lowering average premiums and saving the government $1 billion. Streamlining the process through which states can obtain waivers from Obamacare rules, meanwhile, would spur more state-based experimentation.
These selling points, however, may not change Republican thinking, at least not judging by GOP leaders' behavior. HuffPost reported Tuesday that House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., told conservative lawmakers that the Alexander-Murray plan probably would not be attached to a year-end budget package, the most likely vehicle for its passage. Trump has been all over the map on the compromise, seeming to encourage the deal at one point, and then, at another, demanding absurd new concessions that Democrats would never accept. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, on Tuesday released their own, more conservative version that calls for dismantling major pieces of Obamacare – an unhelpful, partisan proposal that would hurt health-care markets, cannot pass and makes real compromise more difficult.
Republicans can continue ignoring reality, tempting chaos in health-care markets and risking the nation's fiscal health. But they cannot claim they were not warned.