Month: June 2016

Todo list: Fly jets, fix Hubble, sing Drowning Pool

Back in the 90s, John Hetlinger helped fix the Hubble Space Telescope…but now, aged 82, the highlight of all his various careers as fighter pilot, engineer and more, is, apparently, to sing for Simon Cowell on America’s Got Talent. And, what a song choice! Drowning Pool’s “Bodies”. Now, to take his career to the next level, band has invited him to join them on stage for a jam at Chicago’s Open Air Festival in July. Great publicity for the band, Cowell’s TV show and a senioer wannabe rockstar and ex-fighter pilot.

drowning-hetlinger

Before they were famous

A clip from US TV from 1978 reporting on the “Rocky Horror” craze features a young Michael Stipe in drag. Stipe later of R.E.M fame, of course.

Stipe is not the first celebrity to have pre-empted their fame with a media appearance. Others include Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page playing guitar in a skiffle band on a TV show and telling the presenter he wanted to “go into biological research”.

A young David Bowie, at the age of 17 still known as Davey Jones, and then with flowing blonde locks was interviewed by Cliff Michelmore about his long hair and his foundation of The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-haired Men. Leave it aaht, daahlin’

The best Phil Collins could muster back in the days when he was a drama student was a lovely knitting pattern, although he did play the Artful Dodger in the stage production of Lionel Bart’s Oliver. It’s almost as if these people had put themselves into a position whereafter they might eventually become famous…

phil-collins-knitting-pattern

New chemical elements

The four recently discovered chemical elements that fill some of the gaps in the Periodic Table have been assigned provisional names by IUPAC, the names are now up for public consultation. There is no lemium, no bowium, no woganium, no princium. Instead, we have nihonium, moscovium, tennessine, and oganesson.

  • Nihonium and symbol Nh, for the element 113, named for Nihon (Japan)
  • Moscovium and symbol Mc, for the element 115, named for Moscow
  • Tennessine and symbol Ts, for the element 117, named for Tennessee
  • Oganesson and symbol Og, for the element 118, named for Yuri Oganessian, pioneering transactinoid scientist

The convention is to name discovered elements after mythological concepts or characters, including astronomical objects, minerals or similar substances, places or geographical regions, a property of the element, or a scientist. You have until 8th November 2016, to stake any claims against the provisional names, according to the IUPAC notice just published.

Classic Chords #10 – Mad Punk

My band C5 rehearsing Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” last night and trying to get that Nile Style guitar part as close as possible to the original song. Basically, the chords are Bm, D, F#m, E, with the usual Chic cleverness of not playing whole chords and doing something neat with the transitions, so there’s a bit off hammering-on and almost certainly some 6ths when it comes to the D and the E chords, and that F#m can toggle between an F#m7 when it feels happy too.

classic-chords-mad-punk
Anyway, it occurred to me that a neat mashup would work between “Get Lucky” and Tears for Fears “Mad World” (made relatively recently famous again by Gary Jules). The verse for that song is in Am, so the sequence is Am, C, G, D…but if we transpose up a tone we get… Bm, D, A, E. Now, I know what you’re thinking that’s not the same as Get Lucky, there’s an A major chord where Daft Punk play an F#m…but…look at the chords Amaj is A, C#, E. F#m is A, C#, F#. Different! But, if we add the 7th to that chord that’s the not E, so F#m7 is A, C#, E, F# or think of it another way (see diagram) F#m7 is basically an Amaj with F# as a bass note. Let’s mash!

Here’s a short clip of me playing “Get Lucky” followed by “Mad World”

Oh, by the way, that background to the chords is a photo of the windfarm off Skegness I took with a big zoom at sunset from the campsite in Stiffkey, North Norfolk, a couple of summers ago. Shout out to Roger and Jo L!

Meanwhile, persuaded my daughter to join me on vocals for a new cover of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”, which I was working on but couldn’t get as high as Pharell, here it is in all its mixed down mastered funked out technicolour glory on my Imaging Storm sound and vision site.

Web hosts should secure the web

There are millions of sites that are not encrypted. It is, after all, an additional expense and quite a painful process to implement security certificates on a website and unless you’re Paypal, Amazon or whatever you might not think it worth it. But, having an https:// address as opposed to an http:// not only makes a small difference to search engine optimisation (SEO) and gives a site a little nudge upwards in the Google search engine results pages (SERPs), but also ensures to some degree that your visitors’ privacy is protected to some extent when they interact with your site, whether commenting on a blog post or buying something from your online shop.

lock-stock-and-beachhut

But, like I say, web hosts charge for their SSL (secure socket layer) setup that gives you the security s in your web address and it’s a big faff to set up if you are are small website on shared hosting and don’t have full access to your server. Your tumblr, twitter, facebook, youtube, googlemail and wordpress.com blog and many others are SSL protected by default these days, perhaps it is time the web hosts for the millions of small sites out there stepped up to the mark and enabled free SSL across the board for all the sites they host. It would make the web a much safer place.

Maybe some web hosts already offer free SSL, it looks like one or two did back in 2012, but it’s usually a paid service. They should offer the basics for small sites for free and scale it per the usual freemium model.

Beryllium at ground zero

The alkaline earth metal, beryllium (Be) sits at the top of Group 2 of the chemical elements in the Periodic Table above magnesium (Mg) and alongside Group 1 alkali metal, lithium (Li). It is usually thought of as a divalent metal, bonding to two other atoms and is rarely found in any other form, it is present in the gemstones beryl (aquamarine, emerald) and chrysoberyl. In the free state it is a steel-grey, low-density but strong, but brittle metal. It is acutely toxic, causing chemical pneumonia, and chronic inhalation of dust containing its compounds is an occupational hazard that leads to the lung disease berylliosis.

Original Be compound structure without annotation on CW site
Original Be compound structure without annotation on CW site

Of course, some chemists love a challenge and recently I wrote about new research into beryllium that has seen the synthesis of a very unusual structure containing the element in a unique position in a compound where it behaves as a molecular element, in the 0 oxidation state, Be(0), rather than the almost ubiquitous divalent Be(II). My news item appeared in the RSC’s Chemistry World magazine and as with many of these structural and bonding odddities attracted the interest of readers far and wide. Last time I checked, it had been shared on social media 1664 times, and its popularity in the Feedly news reader is reported as being four times greater than other updates in the Chemistry World feed.

I shared it to the Sciencebase Facebook page, obviously, and it garnered a lot of interest there too. One reader commented that the structure was reminiscent of a Google Doodle, which I thought was an interesting observation, it’s almost like a molecular Picasso of the search engine’s logo.

Idea for a song – Other side of the tracks

UPDATE: 23rd June – Well, I wrote a new song, it started off with some South American loops and I built up a new guitar part on my Tele, added some bass guitar, messed around with various percussion samples and ad libbed a melody with a few lyrics from my lyrics book, just to get a guide vocal in place. I expanded and fine tuned them but it was with thoughts of the following Italian tale that gave me the title and the allusion: Latin Class.

Back in my late teens, I went InterRailing around Europe with a friend having been dumped unceremoniously by a university girlfriend. I got robbed in France, got blind drunk on the train to Belgrade, was kicked awake by mounted police outside Amsterdam station, was almost strip searched on the journey home by customs…

None of my adventure, compares to the tale I heard of a great railway journey of the past…Chris King of The Trainhacker shared with me a few of his memories of his loves and travels back in the day, I’ve extrapolated his tweets with some poetic embellishment of my own into the background story for what might become a new song, it’s either going to be call “Well chuffed”, “The other side of the tracks” or “Matching collar and cuffs”, haven’t decided yet.

I fell in love with an Italian traffic cop in Vatican City…she had long, dark hair, a golden tan, the crispest, whitest uniform, matching collar and cuffs. She was smoking Marlboro Reds when to do so was still the height of fashion and passion. She had a gun and she shouted “Ciao, bella!” to the Vespa girls as they whizzed around her roundabout in their pretty frocks and bobby socks.

Fiat-Viterbo
I was kooky, I knew it. It was love and I’ve still got the grainy black and white photo from ’88 to prove it. Memories of a boozy haze of raffia-wrapped Chianti bottles mingled with the greenest of olives and she wrapped me round her little finger and told me to confess my sins. I didn’t talk back, being forte was not my forte, but for a few short weeks, I lived la vida loca all the way down la dolce vita.

I borrowed a friend’s 500 to reach the other side of the sun-scorched tracks, the heat-buckled rails. On the long journey home, I found a long dark hair entangled in the webbing of my rucksack…it made me weep and reminded me of the taste of salted caramel gelati and the smell of two-stroke…

Classic Chords #9 All Right Now

UPDATE: Rich, the lead guitarist in my band, C5, showed me an alternative fingering for the Em9/A in this song, a version he’d been playing since his high school band. Sounds good to me, I reckon Kossof overdubbed with this version of the chord.

“All Right Now” was the big 1970 hit from the blues-rock band Free with one of the most recognisable but easy to fluff guitar riffs of all time. Unfortunately, for the budding axe hero, Paul Kossoff was not playing anything particularly simple on a single guitar in this song by bassist Andy Fraser and singer Paul Rodgers. Ostensibly, it’s just a standard A major chord with a jangly bit of a D(add4). But, the song has been dissected and aficionados know only too well that there are at least two guitars overdubbed, one playing the A major with a fretted A on the sixth string and the other playing an A major with a fretted A and E on the 1st and 2nd strings.

classic-chord-all-right-now

The D(add4) is often played incorrectly as an open (first position) C major chord shape at the third fret, a D(add2), but the fifth string isn’t fretted in that jangly chord at all, there’s an A at the 5th on the sixth string instead of the C note on the fifth string. There’s a nice Youtube tutorial showing what’s really going on in the studio version of “All Right Now”. Of course, if your the band’s only guitarist and you want to cover this song live, you’re going to have to compromise, unless you’ve got a twin-neck and two left and two right hands.

That “jangly” D(add4) chord is, funnily enough, a substitue for an A7 that is taken up a kind of non-scale in various blues-rock songs, the break in Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker” for instance, and in the main riff of Rush’s “Beneath, Between and Behind” (which inevitably sounds very like the former) and no doubt others. Have a listen to Heartbreaker from 2’51” and the opening of BB&B to hear what I mean, same riff basically, you have to agree.

I’ve now recorded myself playing the riff twice in both formats and overdubbed them here: