In the 70’s, Wolfson was the song writer and lyricist behind a new kind of rock band: one that focused on composition and production, not on the musicians and live performances. It was very much like classical music: kind of anti-Grateful Dead.

He brought his set of songs based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe to Alan Parsons, and the two formed the Alan Parsons Project with the songs as the core of their first album.

For my party, they peaked with their first two albums. I Robot was constantly on my (and everyone else’s) turntable in 1978. But for many the band is associated with their more pop oriented sound from the 80’s.

Whatever. Here’s a video set to the opening track from their first album (the Orson Welles narration was added for a 1987 re-release, the music starts about one minute in).

It was just announced. Check your newswire.

A supernova (at the bottom left) in a distant galaxy:

You can tab to move to new rows in Excel if you highlight the blank cells you are filling first.

Normally, the tab key just moves you along the same row: Excel’s default is to assume that you are keying in an infinitely long row if you are using the tab key. That is, if you haven’t highlighted the space you intend to fill first.

This is a great tip if you are entering a big array of data from a hard copy, and find it annoying to have to constantly look up to see if you’re at the end of a line.

You can tap enter to move to new columns in Excel if you highlight the blank cells you are filling first.

Normally, the enter key just moves you down along the same column: Excel’s default is to assume that you are keying in an infinitely long column if you are using the enter key. That is, if you haven’t highlighted the space you intend to fill first.

This is a great tip if you are entering a big array of data from a hard copy, and find it annoying to have to constantly look up to see if you’re at the end of a line.

NASA is back with newer and better research about life on Mars (at least in the distant pass).

They’re still talking about the same rock that they were in the 90’s. But now they have images like this:

The evidence is still circumstantial – but much stronger.

The stuff that looks like fabric running across the image is a biomorph: an imprint of a structure that doesn’t look geological, so by elimination it was probably produced by life. Basically, it’s a footprint.

NASA showed biomorphs when they made their initial findings public in the 90’s.

There are two things different about this one (and the others in the paper). First, this came from inside the meteorite; they had to crack it to find this. Second, it’s on top of, inside of, and covered by a mineral that formed from Martian water seeping into cracks in the meteorite when it was still part of the Martian crust.

Here’s the evidence, in sum they can show that:

• The rock formed on Mars with cracks.
• Water flowed into the cracks on Mars.
• Something in the water on Mars left an impression that isn’t geological, and that looks like similar impressions found on Earth.
• While still on Mars, water continued to flow into the cracks and sealed that stuff up.
• The rock (a boulder, really) got blasted off of Mars as a result of a meteor impact.
• Millions of years later a fist size piece of it was all that was left after it burned up in the atmosphere.

The second and fourth points are the new ones. The only part that is circumstantial is the italicized word.

You be the judge.

“Ripe for the Plucking, but Fewer Dare to Try” discusses the compensations – both positive and negative – of the job of picking coconuts in India. This is a good topic for an economics class that includes a globally diverse perspective.

The work pays well – better than office jobs – because no one wants to do it any more.

Part of the reason is that this is a job that used to be done by dalits (the contemporary term for members of the caste formerly known as “untouchables”). So, coconut pickers now get a wage premium in the open market because of the opportunity costs.

A second opportunity cost is that the job is high risk (pickers fall out of trees).

The article also mentions the problem the shortage of labor creates, since coconuts are a major, and deeply interconnected part, of the Indian economy.