Art!

I've decided to branch out and do some art. And not something small. Inspired by a local artist (whose name escapes me) who made angels out of aluminum cans and bits from the junk yard, I've decided to make an angel from found objects and things I have laying around.



The wings are constructed from parts of four shipping pallets. The spine is a wooden post (as Marco d'Eramo says in The Pig and the Skyscraper, we're a nation very fond of wood) that I found at the site of the former DAV Thrift Store on Southwest Blvd. They are attached to the spine by a two-by-four, also from one of the pallets. I'll use a piece of wood that I found in my basement (once the wood dries out, anyway) as an additional wing brace.

For the angel's breast, I'll use the old gas tank from my first motorcycle, Arcadia. I'll add a halo (once I discover the head piece) that is the old rear sprocket off my current motorcycle.

I'm going to have to find a way to make the angel stand up on its own. Perhaps I'll add a simple base; I don't think I want to try making legs.

Anyways, I'll post more about the angel as she takes shape. And of course, more adventures in radio. Stay tuned, true believer!

Channel 37

So I was reading the latest SBE newsletter and there was an op-ed by the SBE's General Counsel. I'm not going to talk about that op-ed because I don't know enough about the issues he mentions. What I do want to talk about is something mentioned in passing in that op-ed, TV channel 37.

Channel 37 is a channel that "has never been used by any over-the-air television station in Canada or the United States" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_37). Think about this for a minute. In all the umpteen million TV stations in the U.S. and Canada, nobody has ever used this channel. Why is this?

Turns out that channel 37 - or rather the frequency band from 608 MHz to 614 MHz - is very important to radio astronomy. Since radio astronomy deals with very weak signals - on the order of 10^-18 watts - any activity on this channel has the potential of causing significant interference to those sorts of measurements (http://www.ae5d.com/37/). It's also used in Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), another technique used in radio astronomy and a subject I know nothing about. :)

So there's a bit of randomness for you. Reporting from the Channel 37 News Desk, I'm Kit Peters.