I LIKE TO THINK ABOUT...IF I WAS FROM PARIS (WOULD I SAY OOH LA LA LA LA LA LA LAA?)

I never do music posts. This is mainly because I have the musical talent of Mumble from Happy Feet. Yet, I'm glad to inform you that I know really good music when I hear it (sometimes). Grace Potter and the Nocturnals were guests on David Letterman the other night and I was blown away that the performance was live. Once you see the video you'll know what I mean; Grace's voice is flawless. It's incredible. To my untrained ear even more so...hum- I don't really know what I'm saying. Can you see why I stuck to art and science posts?

I LIKE TO THINK ABOUT...MY GALACTIC ROAD TRIP

You know, any kind of vacation is sweet, but intergalactic road trips beat New York flat. Not like I know from experience, Bigelow Aerospace wont launch its first space guests until 2015 (the company plans to build a "fleet of space taxis, space-hotels-even a private moon base." (The Year in Science- Discovery- 100 Top Stories of 2010, article written by David Kushner)) Yet until that happens and I'm one hundred and fifty years old, I get to sit back and watch sci-fi movies and wear nebula prints.

I LIKE TO THINK ABOUT...IDEAS WORTH SPREADING

Even on Christmas Eve I can't resist a good blog post! I've been watching tons of TED talks these past few days and I wanted to assimilate all of these ideas that I've thought up out of my head and into yours...are your minds ready for this tsunami of knowledge? Don't worry, this is the kind of messed up stuff that I think about around two in the morning...

While I think this is very interesting...and creative, who is this fool to decide the origins of beauty? Who is this man to say that because of my ancestors, I like teardrop shapes? Oh-right. He got a degree in philosophy or art history thirty years ago...it's interesting how once you receive your degree, you always have it. It's not like a drivers license that has to be renewed ever so often, no. Once your an expert in the complex art of Asian-American studies, you will always be an expert of Asian-American studies years after you forget the names of your professors let alone the principles of the useless study that you are a so called master in. It'd be interesting if they could take away that plaque on graduates bedroom walls when they forget the Pythagorean theorem or causes of WWI. We'd probably a much more educated society.

Now this is crazy. I wonder how many non-deciding decisions I make in a day...this is going to haunt me the next time I go to the DMV.
I'd also like to mention how funny this guy is- I really want to read his cookbook!

This last one speaks for itself. Funny, useful, scientific, charming, and nerdy- this is the best TED talk ever.
Merry Christmas to all and to all a goodnight!

I LIKE TO THINK ABOUT...THINKING AS AN INTROVERT

This is an extroverted world. Mainly because extravert's are loud attention seekers...but it also just seems to be the way society is designed. That people say what they're thinking and yell to be heard, repeat what they say over and over again, while introverts like me are gradually convinced that there is something wrong with us not liking parties and wanting alone time. Seriously world, wake up. Half of all people are introverts trying to live in an extroverted world. We're thinkers and dreamers, but it seems like that's not enough. We have to be aggressive and pushy and loud and annoying to be thought of as normal..hmmm- sorry extrovert friends, I'm bashing all of your bad qualities, but I know there are some good qualities too. None of which I will mention in this post/rant. Sorry.
Psychology Today had an article called 'Revenge of the Introvert' in one of their past issues. It began with an anecdote from a psychiatrist wondering why she was so tired after seeing her patients for the day. She was so worn out that she, a therapist, had to go see a another therapist. Why? She's an introvert who found the constant interaction with people tiring.
That's just case sample #1- here's the rest of the article. REVENGE OF THE INTROVERT
I have also experienced this phenomenon...I grew up with an extroverted parent and two extroverted friends who thought it was so odd how I liked to be alone all the time. In middle school I was emo (okay, so that was partially because of my My Chemical Romance-esq military jacket and no smile policy), in high school things started to even out. I came into my own and realized that I didn't have to like what other people did. I didn't need to go to dance parties and those stupid teen clubs where girls do that grinding stuff...this could go off on a completely different tangent about how stupid that makes girls look, but I'll try and stay on topic- I could like reading and drawing and staying home on Friday nights. Screw other people.
With love to my introverted friends, I'm putting up some links to their blogs and fan fiction accounts. One of the awesome parts about being introverts is our incredible ability to have so much web presence!
Emily- This Is What I Did Today, CoolStudyGuide's
Amanda- angel-unknown
There are also amazing studies done on the effects of introversion on religious belief and politics. In an article by Neuropolitics.org in March 2006 (I write this to be wary of how old the document in question is and take its findings with a grain of salt...what a strange idiom.)
"Extroverts are usually more religious, more likely to literally interpret religious doctrine, more likely to believe in their political party's platforms, more likely to organize themselves into social groups, and more
likely to align their beliefs to what other people believe in those same social groups."
"On the other hand, introverts are typically less religious, less likely to participate in organized groups, less likely to believe in their political party's platforms, and less likely to give as much weight to what other people believe, inside or outside of their social groups."
I just thought that this was particularly interesting and I'll probably do another post on it later!

I LIKE TO THINK ABOUT...THE AMERICAN OBSESSION

Tis the season to go watch The Nutcracker Ballet! I just saw the NCDT performance last night and loved it so much more than usual...the dancers were amazing. Absolutely amazing. I was a dancer a long time ago and performed in the ballet twice as a rat and babushka, which gives me a very exciting view of the performance. A good dancer is a good dancer, but it's interesting to focus on why they're a good dancer. The main "point" being that the dance must look effortless. Absolutely effortless.
My question though is, why is The Nutcracker so popular in America? It isn't this popular anywhere else in the world. As you may have guessed, and or heard, NPR asked this question on their show On Point.
Here's an essay that I wrote to describe my experience as an aspiring ballerina.

Where We Danced

The majority of my young life was spent in a tutu; it was pink with glitter and rhinestones that left tornadoes of sparkles behind me when I twirled. And I twirled often; I trained for ten years at the School of the North Carolina Dance Theater with a dream to become a professional, nine-to-five dancer. My first ballet was The Nutcracker, which my parents and I went to see when I was at the tender age of two. According to my mom, at the end of the performance I yelled, clapped, and waved my stuffed animals in the air with glee; the next day I was signed up for a dance class. After ten years of ballet, I sit in the studio and watch the professional perform- but now I know that dancing isn’t all gum drops and sugar plum fairies.
I began my training at the age of three with Ms. Sabrina, a young modern dancer with a large tolerance for children. At three you don’t so much as dance, but run amuck in wild circles of twinkles, and spin so fast that your hair pins fly out. Ms. Sabrina would put on a song and tell us to be amoebas wriggling on the floor; then she would say, “Be tigers!” We’d growl at each other and put our tutus around our faces because we were kids and that’s what kids do.
After class, my classmates and I would walk out into the lobby and eat our dinner where we could watch the trained dancers in the main studio. They would leap and twirl effortlessly with grace and precision before landing on the box of their point shoes, which struck the mat with a dull thud. The music would reverberate through the studios grey walls and grey floor, over the hum of the air conditioning and motherly chitchat. Our minds were off in a cloud of lollipops and candy-canes, where we were prima ballerinas and playing lead in The Nutcracker. Just like professionals, our point shoes would drum to Tchaikovsky and we would leap into the air in the white tutu of the sugar plum fairy.
As you rise threw the ranks of a ballet school, the list of restrictions and regulations grows longer and longer. Our pretty pink tutus were no longer allowed and all of our leotards, tights, hair, and shoes were the same. We’d sit in the lobby watching the professional dancers as our mothers made our buns- a complex routine involving hair nets and a massive amount of bobby pins. They’d mist halos of hair spray above our heads that would cover the room in a sticky fog. By the end of the ritual, our hair was pulled back so tightly that we couldn’t move our eyebrows from a state of perpetual surprise. Suddenly, ballet was no longer fun and games, but a lot of work. Facing the mirror in a group of blue clad dancers, we mimicked each other as the music played on. Like little blue robots, we’d wined up and do our dance to the beat of the song and the insistent clapping of our instructor’s hands.
This rigorous schedule followed us into Ballet two and our new red leotards, but now we were at the studio ten hours a week. We wound up, repeating the dances over and over and over again. The buns, that we worked so hard to perfect, ejected bobby pins from our hair during pirouettes. Our legs bent and our slippers scampered to keep up with the music; after every exercise we would lean against the beams in exhaustion. Yet with all of our suffering, we still repeated the routines and suffered the pain because it would be worth it when we could dance like the professionals.
We thought this until our point shoes came in; those shimmering rectangular shoes became the symbol of our pain and misery. To wear a point shoe you have to prepare your feet by clipping your toe-nails, covering them in wool, using band aids, or gel pads- anything to keep the pain away. It was the pain of watching a girl drilling her toes into the floor, and the sound of bullets that it made as she scurried across the mat. And it was a searing pain on the top of your toe as if you’d stayed by the fire too long, but also a pinching pain that cramped your feet and sent spasms threw your legs.
We ended class in the lobby among the toddlers and professionals removing our musty shoes and sweat soaked wrapping to care for our feet. By the end of the first month, I’d lost both of my little toe-nails to large blue bruises that dotted the tips of my toes on both feet. Blisters had formed and popped; some of them large and bulbuls with puss and others heated and red. Being a nine-to-five dancer was no longer appealing, and the last thing I could imagine was jamming my feet into those satin traps every day.
Sitting in the studio now, among the grey walls, the smog of hair spray, and the fumes of tortured feet, I don’t regret quitting. Still, there is a tug in my gut every year when we go to see The Nutcracker. I watch the ballerinas in white tutus twirl on their point shoes; they effortlessly jump into the air and gallop across the stage at the beat of the conductors wand. I clap and yell and cheer for the dancers at curtain call, the same as when I was young. And sometimes I think that maybe, just maybe, I could be a ballerina too.

I LIKE TO THINK ABOUT...A SIXTH SENSE- NO SHAMALAN. I PROMISE

This video is incredible. Period.

I LIKE TO THINK ABOUT...WHAT I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS THIS YEAR

So...Christmas is just around the corner and to get ready for the holiday cheer, I'm posting my list for Santa to see this year. It's a pretty short list and I bet you can guess number one!

M.O.N.E.Y- the most important thing in the whole wide universe. Yes, it will buy me happiness. Not really, but I like going out to eat and shopping and stuff. If this post doesn't sound particularly like me try voicing it as Eric Cartman- I'm watching all of the South Park Christmas Episodes currently so he's sort of stuck in my head. Isn't that coool you guys?

Okay, number two is How we Decide by Jonah Lehrer. He's that cool dude from a previous post in the sweater and philosopher glasses. I'm currently enjoying his book Proust was a Neuroscientist and he's so brilliant that I'm annotating it for fun. I can't wait to read another of his books...it's kind of a shame I have to wait till Christmas.

Number three is Steve Martin's new book An Object of Beauty. Not only is Steve likable, funny, talented, and successful, he also has an art collection. It's a book about art to go with my book about science! It's totally awweesome. Right Keeneey?

Other things include a new purse, some mittens, anything related to Star Trek, a magazine- actually lots of Magazines, and maybe, I don't know, some money?

I LIKE TO THINK ABOUT...TAKING PICTURES OF MY HOME GALAXY- SAY CHEESE MILKY WAY

To satisfy all of my geeky needs, I joyfully joined the Science Olympiad team. Participating in the two fields of Astronomy and Anatomy- My brain is having a field day. More than any other part of my brain, the occipital lobe is particularly excited because of the amazing images that I've been looking at of quasars, black holes, massive blackholes, supermassive blackholes (which are different things...scientists are just as good at naming things as musicians- seriously, who names their child Moon Unit, Pixie, Apple, Peaches (I'm especially baffled by the plural of peaches), who names there child a tangible noun? Period. Answer: Musicians), globular clusters, supernovas, and eclipsing binaries! The best site for star gazing within ones own home is Chandra- The X-ray Observatory. Go check out the gallery of amazing objects. I'm particularly smitten with our own milky way... Ain't she pretty...y'all. Here's a couple more that I liked.

Centaurus A- About 1 million light-years away in the constellation Centaurus. It's the fifth brightest galaxy and one of the closest to Earth. It's called a radio galaxy because it's believed that there is a relativistic jet which extracts energy from the vicinity of a possible supermassive blackhole at the center of the galaxy that is responsible for the emission of radio wavelengths.
Epsilon Aurigae- An eclipsing binary system that is approximately 2000 light years from earth. It is unusually dim for a star of its size and is suspected to be surrounded by a massive cloud of dust which obscures its light. It's the subject of a nation wide observing campaign for 2010 and 2011.
Perseus A (NGC 1275) - Located around 273 million light years away, Perseus A is situated around the large Perseus cluster of galaxies. Long gaseous filaments made up of threads of gas stretch out beyond the galaxy, into the multimillion-degree, X-ray–emitting gas that fills the cluster. The amount of gas contained in a typical thread is approximately one million times the mass of our own Sun. Thanks to Wikipedia for making me sound smarter than I actually am :) When I make sense of the gaseous filaments of Perseus A, I'll let you know.

I LIKE TO THINK ABOUT...WHEN GALAXIES COLLIDE

Here's a video...I love Felicia Day! And colliding galaxies, but that's pretty well stated in the title.

I LIKE TO THINK ABOUT...BAD PUNS LIKE 'OP' ART

Recently, I was invited to a private tour of the Bechtler Museum in downtown Charlotte. It's a modern art museum consisting of the many pieces from post world war two and a couple of Warhol's and Lichtenstein's. We had a very knowledgeable curator who told us countless facts on the works, and my favorite tid bit of information was that the abstract art created from optical allusions was nick named 'op' art- like pop art without the first 'p'.
I'm a sucker for optical illusions, and not just because they're so fun to look at. I think it's interesting that our brain takes so much of the burden in processing sight; the eyes capture photons, but that's it. The rest of the mental processing puts the blurred images right side up, makes them neat and tidy, and then gives us depth perception and the like. It even processes the visual information so that we know immediately what we're looking at. Here's a couple of examples of op art that I particularly like- it's by an artist named Andy Gilmore (This is his site)