rigorousintuition.ca

http://ubu.com/film/wilson_rider.html

Duration: 136'13"

This is a TVRip of the Austrian broadcast of the original Black Rider musical, performed in 1990 as part of the Wiener Festwochen. There is a 7-minute introduction in German, and the dialogue and music is in both German and English.

The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets is a self-billed "musical fable" in the avant-garde tradition created through the collaboration of theatre director Robert Wilson, musician Tom Waits, and writer William S. Burroughs. Wilson was largely responsible for the design and direction. Burroughs wrote the book, while Waits wrote the music and lyrics. The project began in about 1988 when Wilson approached Waits. The story is based on a German folktale called Der Freischütz, which had previously been made into an opera by Carl Maria von Weber. It premiered at Hamburg's Thalia Theatre on March 31, 1990. November Theatre produced its world English-language premiere in 1998 at the Edmonton International Fringe Festival in Canada, and the American English-language premiere at the New York International Fringe Festival in 1999. Waits recorded much of the music from the play in different arrangements under the eponymous title, The Black Rider.

Wilhelm, a file clerk, falls in love with a huntsman's daughter. In order to marry, Wilhelm must prove his worth as a hunter and gain her father's approval, but, as "a man of pen and ink", his shot is lousy and his hopes of marriage worsen. That is until he is offered magic bullets by the devil, Pegleg - who assures him that his bullets will always have a sure shot. However, Pegleg stipulates that, while most of the bullets will hit anything Wilhelm pleases, one of the bullets is under Pegleg's control. Foolish, naive, and overrun with desperate hope, Wilhelm accepts the Faustian pact. On the day of Wilhelm's wedding, the final bullet strikes his beloved dead. He then goes mad, and joins the previous victims of Satan's cunning in the Devil's carnival.

Although based on folklore, the story contains strong autobiographical elements from Burroughs' own life: he accidentally shot his own wife in a drunken attempt at recreating the William Tell legend, and the story as a whole may be construed as a warning tale about the destructive powers of addiction.

The music to The Black Rider was composed and performed by Tom Waits, and was released as a record in 1993. The best known track is probably the ballad "November", which is still occasionally performed by Waits during concerts. "'Tain't No Sin" features spoken word dialogue by Burroughs. The album has a cult status amongst many Waits fans.

• ScienceCasts | Secret Lives of Solar Flares
  
  
  
  [EXCERPTS FROM NASA SCIENCE: SCIENCE NEWS; 19SEP11. HIGHLIGHTS MINE.] ... “We’ve just learned that some flares are many times stronger than previously thought,” says University of Colorado physicist Tom Woods who led the research team. “Solar flares were already the biggest explosions in the solar system—and this discovery makes them even bigger.”
  
  
  
  NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), launched in February 2010, made the finding: About 1 in 7 flares experience an “aftershock.” About ninety minutes after the flare dies down, it springs to life again, producing an extra surge of extreme ultraviolet radiation.
  
  “We call it the ‘late phase flare,’” says Woods. “The energy in the late phase can exceed the energy of the primary flare by as much as a factor of four.” ... [MORE.]

Aurora From Orbit Sept. 17, 2011

This gorgeous view of the aurora was taken from the International Space Station as it crossed over the southern Indian Ocean on September 17, 2011. The sped-up movie spans the time period from 12:22 to 12:45 PM ET.

While aurora are often seen near the poles, this aurora appeared at lower latitudes due to a geomagnetic storm – the insertion of energy into Earth's magnetic environment called the magnetosphere – caused by a coronal mass ejection from the sun that erupted ...

Nordic wrote:I can't embed this here, but here's the link to it:

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogal ... =112616781#

Really spectacular shot of the Aurora Borealis taken from space.

Aurora From Orbit Sept. 17, 2011

This gorgeous view of the aurora was taken from the International Space Station as it crossed over the southern Indian Ocean on September 17, 2011. The sped-up movie spans the time period from 12:22 to 12:45 PM ET.

While aurora are often seen near the poles, this aurora appeared at lower latitudes due to a geomagnetic storm – the insertion of energy into Earth's magnetic environment called the magnetosphere – caused by a coronal mass ejection from the sun that erupted ...

• The first TED video is kind of a quick overview of particle physics studied at Large Hadron Collider. Brian Cox speaks about copious neutrinos pouring from the sun: there are something like 60 billion neutrinos flying per second through every square centimeter of your body. Higgs particles, which have not been discovered, are necessary for predictions formulated for LHC.
  
  Brian Cox on CERN’s Supercollider
  — Brian Cox at TED dot com | filmed May, 2008
  
  
  
  The second TED video here shows the collapse of some twenty tons of magnets due to a faulty wire, but not your ordinary wire!
  
  What went wrong at the Large Hadron Collider
  — Brian Cox at TED dot com | filmed February, 2009