CPT Spirits in the Sky - John Lennon born October 9, 1940 - Heart of the Beatles

This month is the 77th birthday of John Lennon, born October 9, 1940, died December 8, 1980.

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Spirits in the Sky - Death - Such a Final Notion - But what if people hadn't died?

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The mind is a marvelous thing of somewhat magical qualities because it has the ability to reject any principle like the laws of nature or laws of god and imagine a world without those laws.

You should try it some time.

For example, take the principle of death, what if death could be undone for people.  Then take some of the people who died way to early in life and just imagine what they could have done with a "normal" life span compared to what they did in a tragically shortened life.

Like Jesus for example.  Now JC turned everything in the world upside down for all time and he died at age 33 after preaching just 3 short years.  What if he stuck around preaching until he was 70 which is not all that old anymore?  Then he would have had 37 more years of preaching and imagine what impact that might have had on things.

There might never have been any question of him being the true Messiah and all those various sects and denominations of Christianity might never have existed, sects which led us into 2000 years of warfare, hatred and willingness to ignore the Ten Commandments although Jesus never said there were Ten, just one and then a second.

Singers and composers seem to be targets for early death.  Buddy Holly died at just 22, Hank Williams at 29, Patsy Cline - Jim Croce - Momma Cass Elliot all at 30, Karen Carpenter at 32,  Bob Marley at 36, Harry Chapin at 38, John Lennon at 40 and Elvis at 42.

Holly, Williams, Croce, Marley, Chapin and Lennon were among the greatest song writers of all time and were not even close to reaching their peak in terms of creative output.

Consider the enormous body of work all these gifted artists, singers and songwriters all, generated in their abbreviated lifetimes.  All of them should have lived 28-48 years longer if they lived a normal life meaning we lost out on more than 50% of their potential musical contributions to our history.

Then there is the strange 27 Club, those artists who died at the age of 27, and this includes a host of singers pushing the envelope like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Kurt Cobain and the most recent addition Amy Winehouse.

How bizarre is that?  Not a single one died of anything remotely connected to "normal" circumstances.  Some people even speculate they might have subconsciously or even consciously died when they reached that age.  Drugs, booze and prescription drugs all played a role in the deaths.

Let's change fields of entertainment and take movies for example.  James Dean died at 24, when he was just getting started while Marilyn Monroe died at 36, at the peak of her popularity and Natalie Wood died at 43.  Even though Natalie spent her entire life in movies she was just reaching new fans and rebuilding her image.

So how did they die?  A car wreck, drug overdose and drowning, again no natural causes and we were all cheated out of an entire body of work.

Of course in politics there was Bobby Kennedy at 43 and John Kennedy at 46 who along with their friend Martin Luther King, Jr. at 39 all were taken at the beginning of their contributions to America.

And let us never forget the enchanting fairy tale story line of Diana, Princess of Wales, dead at age 36, because of her contributions to the future of royalty in terms of personality and legacy.

Is there a lesson?  Make sure when you are planning your life the way the insurance and finance companies want you to you take the time to enjoy the present as if it were the last days of your life because it just might be.

Actuarial tables suck!

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CPT Spirits in the Sky - Janis Joplin, Charter Member of the 27 Club!

From the Gulf Coast of Texas to the San Francisco Underground, Janis Joplin was the Queen of Blues when the Blues came from the Heart and Soul and Life or Death hung in the balance.  It has been forty-five years since Janis died, at just 27 years old, when the world was just beginning to sit up and take notice.  The following is her biography from A&E Network.

Bio. - AE Network

Janis Joplin Biography

Singer (1943–1970)

Singer Janis Joplin rose to fame in the late 1960s and was known for her powerful, blues-inspired vocals. She died of an accidental drug overdose in 1970.

Synopsis

Born on January 19, 1943, in Port Arthur, Texas, Janis Joplin developed a love of music at an early age, but her career didn't take off until she joined the band Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1966. Their 1968 album, Cheap Thrills, was a huge hit. However, friction between Joplin and the band prompted her to part ways with Big Brother soon after. Known for her powerful, blues-inspired vocals, Joplin released her first solo effort, I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, in 1969. The album received mixed reviews, but her second project, Pearl (1971), released after Joplin's death, was a huge success. The singer died of an accidental overdose on October 4, 1970, at age 27.

Wild Child

Janis Lyn Joplin was born on January 19, 1943, in Port Arthur, Texas. Breaking new ground for women in rock music, Joplin rose to fame in the late 1960s and became known for her powerful, blues-inspired vocals. She grew up in a small Texas town known for its connections to the oil industry with a skyline and dotted with oil tanks and refineries. For years, Joplin struggled to escape from this confining community, and spent even longer to trying to overcome her memories of her difficult years there.

Developing a love for music at an early age, Joplin sang in her church choir as a child and showed some promise as a performer. She was an only child until the age of 6, when her sister, Laura, was born. Four years later, her brother, Michael, arrived. Joplin was a good student and fairly popular until around the age of 14, when some side effects of puberty started to kick in. She got acne and gained some weight.

At Thomas Jefferson High School, Joplin began to rebel. She eschewed the popular girls' fashions of the late 1950s, often choosing to wear men's shirts and tights, or short skirts. Joplin, who liked to stand out from the crowd, became the target of some teasing as well as a popular subject in the school's rumor mill. She was called a "pig" by some, while others said that she was sexually promiscuous.

Joplin eventually developed a group of guy friends who shared her interest in music and the Beat Generation, which rejected the standard norms and emphasized creative expression (Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were two of the Beat movement's leading figures).

Early Musical Interests

Musically, Janis Joplin and her friends gravitated toward blues and jazz, admiring such artists as Lead Belly. Joplin was also inspired by legendary blues vocalists Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Odetta, an early leading figure in the folk music movement. The group frequented local working-class bars in the nearby town of Vinton, Louisiana. By her senior year of high school, Joplin had developed a reputation as a ballsy, tough-talking girl who like to drink and be outrageous.


After graduating from high school, Joplin enrolled at Lamar State College of Technology in the neighboring town of Beaumont, Texas. There, she devoted more time to hanging out and drinking with friends than to her studies. At the end of her first semester at Lamar, Joplin left the school. She went on to attend Port Arthur College, where she took some secretarial courses, before moving to Los Angeles in the summer of 1961. This first effort to break away from wasn't a success, however, and Joplin thus returned to Port Arthur for a time.

In the summer of 1962, Joplin fled to the University of Texas at Austin, where she studied art. In Austin, Joplin began performing at folksings—casual musical gatherings where anyone can perform—on campus and at Threadgill's, a gas station turned bar, with the Waller Creek Boys, a musical trio with whom she was friends. With her forceful, gutsy singing style, Joplin amazed many audience members. She was unlike any other white female vocalist at the time (folk icons like Joan Baez and Judy Collins were known for their gentle sound).

In January 1963, Joplin ditched school to check out the emerging music scene in San Francisco with friend Chet Helms. But this stint out west, like her first, proved to be unsuccessful, as Joplin struggled to make it as a singer in the Bay Area. She played some gigs, including a side-stage performance at the 1963 Monterey Folk Festival—but her career didn't gain much traction. Joplin then spent some time in New York City, where she hoped to have better luck getting her career off the ground, but her drinking and drug use (she'd begun regularly using speed, or amphetamine, among other drugs) there proved to be detrimental to her musical aspirations. In 1965, she left San Francisco and returned home in an effort to get herself together again.

Back in Texas, Joplin took a break from her music and her hard-partying lifestyle, and dressed conservatively, putting her long, often messy hair into a bun and doing everything else she could to appear straight-laced. But the conventional life was not for her, and her desire to pursue her musical dreams wouldn't remain submerged for long.

Joplin slowly returned to performing, and in May 1966, was recruited by friend Travis Rivers to audition for a new psychedelic rock band based in San Francisco, Big Brother and the Holding Company. At the time, the group was managed by another longtime friend of Joplin's, Chet Helms. Big Brother, whose members included James Gurley, Dave Getz, Peter Albin and Sam Andrew, was part of the burgeoning San Francisco music scene of the late 1960s; among the other bands involved in this scene were the Grateful Dead.

Big Brother

Joplin blew the band away during her audition, and was quickly offered membership into the group. In her early days with Big Brother, she sang only a few songs and played the tambourine in the background. But it wasn't long before Joplin assumed a bigger role in the band, as Big Brother developed quite a following in the Bay Area. Their appearance at the now legendary Monterey Pop Festival in 1967—specifically their version of "Ball and Chain" (originally made famous by R&B legend Big Mama Thornton) brought the group further acclaim. Most of the praise, however, focused on Joplin's incredible vocals. Fueled by heroin, amphetamines and the bourbon she drank straight from the bottle during gigs, Joplin's unrestrained sexual style and raw, gutsy sound mesmerized audiences—and all of this attention caused some tension between Joplin and her bandmates.


After hearing Joplin at Monterey, Columbia Records President Clive Davis wanted to sign the band. Albert Grossman, who already managed Bob Dylan, the Band, and Peter, Paul & Mary, later signed on as the band's manager, and was able to get them out of another record deal they'd signed earlier with Mainstream Records.

While their recordings for Mainstream never found much of an audience, Big Brother's first album for Columbia, Cheap Thrills (1968), was a huge hit. While the album was wildly successful—quickly becoming a certified gold record with songs like "Piece of My Heart" and "Summertime"—creating it had been a challenging process, causing even more problems between Joplin and band's other members. (The album was produced by John Simon, who'd had the band do take after take in an attempt to create a technically perfect sound.)

Cheap Thrills helped solidify Joplin's reputation as a unique, dynamic, bluesy rock singer. Despite Big Brother's continued success, Joplin was becoming frustrated with group, feeling that she was being held back professionally.

Solo Career

Joplin struggled with her decision to leave Big Brother, as her bandmates had been like a family to her, but she eventually decided to part ways with the group. She played with Big Brother for the last time in December 1968.


Following a historic performance at Woodstock (August 1969), Joplin released her first solo effort, I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, in September 1969, with Kozmic Blues Band. Some of the project's most memorable songs were "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)" and "To Love Somebody," a cover of a Bee Gees tune. But Kozmic Blues received mixed reviews, with some media outlets criticizing Joplin personally. Feeling uniquely pressured to prove herself as a female solo artist in a male-dominated industry, the criticism caused distress for Joplin. "That was a pretty heavy time for me," she later said in an interview with Howard Smith of The Village Voice. "It was really important, you know, whether people were going to accept me or not." (Joplin's interview with Smith was her last; it took place on September 30, 1970, just four days before her death.) Outside of music, Joplin appeared to be struggling with alcohol and drugs, including an addiction to heroin.

Joplin's next album would be her most successful, but, tragically, also her last. She recorded Pearl with the Full Tilt Boogie Band and wrote two of its songs, the powerful, rocking "Move Over" and "Mercedes Benz," a gospel-styled send-up of consumerism.

Tragic Death and Legacy

Following a long struggle with substance abuse, Joplin died from an accidental heroin overdose on October 4, 1970, at a hotel in Hollywood's Landmark Hotel. Completed by Joplin's producer, Pearl was released in 1971 and quickly became a hit. The single "Me and Bobby McGee," written by Kris Kristofferson, a former love of Joplin's, reached the top of the charts.

Despite her untimely death, Janis Joplin's songs continue to attract new fans and inspire performers. Numerous collections of her songs have been released over the years, including In Concert (1971) and Box of Pearls (1999). In recognition of her significant accomplishments, Joplin was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, and honored with a Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Awards in 2005.

Dubbed the "first lady of rock 'n' roll," Joplin has been the subject of several books and documentaries, including Love, Janis (1992), written by sister Laura Joplin. That book was adapted into a play of the same title. Amy Berg’s documentary, Janis: Little Girl Blue, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2015.
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A NASA satellite that monitors CO2 is revealing the inner workings of our planet

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That’s key to figure out how our world will respond to climate change

by Alessandra Potenza@ale_potenza  Oct 12, 2017, 2:00pm EDT

NASA is advancing new tools like the supercomputer model that created this simulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to better understand what will happen to Earth’s climate if the land and ocean can no longer absorb nearly half of all climate-warming CO2 emissions. Image: NASA / GSFC

Thanks to a NASA satellite that’s been mapping the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in unprecedented detail, scientists are learning much more about how plants work, and how the land and oceans suck up and release CO2. This information could help us figure out how our world will respond to global warming.

New research shows that during the 2015–2016 El Niño, for instance, droughts, heat, and fires in tropical areas caused plants and soil on three continents to contribute to the largest growth of carbon dioxide on record. Plants use CO2 to grow, and they suck it out of the atmosphere. But during this event, because of little rain and higher than normal temperatures in South America, Africa, and Asia, some plants didn’t absorb as much CO2; others died and decomposed more quickly, releasing the carbon they’d pulled from the air. The newly observed behavior may provide clues for how the changing climate will create new feedback systems that can accelerate global warming.

The OCO-2 satellite, launched in 2014. Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech

These findings, published in one of five studies coming out today in Science, represent just the first batch of discoveries from a mission NASA launched in 2014. The satellite, called Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, or OCO-2, is designed to monitor carbon dioxide in our planet’s atmosphere. CO2 levels have been increasing since the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, and because CO2 is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, our planet is warming up. Today, we keep pumping out huge amounts of carbon by burning fossil fuels, but about 25 percent of those emissions are absorbed by the ocean, and another 25 percent is vacuumed up by plants. Today’s papers are the beginnings of explanations about how this carbon is taken up, and if these processes will last as the world continues to warm.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty on what the world might be like in 100 years, and understanding more of what we’re seeing now can help us predict better what the future holds,” says Annmarie Eldering, the deputy project scientist for the OCO-2 mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and the co-author of a few of the studies.

The OCO-2 satellite zooms around the Earth over 14 times a day, gathering about 100,000 measurements per day — including in areas that haven’t been observed much before, like the middle of the ocean and the Amazon rainforest. Using that data, researchers put together a map of CO2 concentrations over the planet, to see how the gas is absorbed and emitted, and how it’s dispersed into the atmosphere.

This map shows how CO2 concentrations in the Northern Hemisphere change dramatically from season to season. Photo: A. Eldering et al., Science (2017)

One such map, described in one of the studies, shows how the Northern Hemisphere — where most continents are — is engulfed in carbon dioxide in the winter. But as the spring arrives and plants reactivate, concentrations take a nosedive. “To me, it was just like, ‘Wow!’” says Eldering. “It looked like some monster took a bite out of the carbon dioxide in those regions. I was amazed by how powerful the natural systems are.” Another study shows that the OCO-2 satellite can be used to track CO2 over really small areas, like volcanoes and cities like Los Angeles. That could be used not only to better understand city pollution, but also to predict when volcanoes will erupt.

As scientists keep delving through the first years of data, here are some of their major findings so far.

EL NIÑO

The OCO-2 satellite launched in July 2014, right before the beginning of one of the strongest El Niños ever. “It was just dumb luck,” says Scott Denning, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, who was not involved in the research. El Niño is a recurring climate pattern that brings warm waters to the tropical Pacific Ocean, affecting weather all over the globe. And the first El Niño the satellite observed was a doozy.

“IT WAS JUST DUMB LUCK.”

An extra 2.5 gigatons of CO2 was released into the air compared to 2011, when conditions were normal, one of the Sciencepapers reported. That extra carbon, about 25 million Statues of Liberty worth of mass, came from tropical areas in South America, Africa, and Asia — where plants all reacted differently. In South America, the plants’ growth was stunted by drought, causing them to vacuum up less CO2 than usual. In Africa, the heat caused dead plants to decompose more quickly, releasing high amounts of CO2. And in Asia, drought and heat caused forest fires, which also pumped huge quantities of carbon into the air.

In another study, researchers looked at how the same El Niño affected the ocean. Although the world’s oceans suck in about 25 percent of our CO2 emissions, different oceans behave differently: while the northern Atlantic absorbs CO2, the tropical Pacific usually releases CO2, says study co-author Abhishek Chatterjee, a scientist at University Space Research Association, working at NASA Goddard. That’s because powerful winds that blow east to west across the Pacific carry deep ocean water rich in CO2 to the surface. From there, part of that CO2 is leaked into the atmosphere.

But during El Niño, those winds weaken, bringing less CO2 to the surface. That means less carbon is dispersed into the air. But how little? The rate at which CO2 leaked from the tropical Pacific dropped as much as 54 percent between March and July 2015, the first months of El Niño, Chatterjee and his colleagues found. The concentrations of CO2 then skyrocketed as plants in South America, Africa, and Asia released huge amounts of carbon as described in the other Science paper.

“This is really a first for the carbon cycle community,” Chatterjee says. Scientists have long wondered how exactly CO2 fluctuates during El Niños, what roles the land and ocean play, and these papers finally provide some answers to these questions. “Observations from OCO-2 have solved that critical scientific puzzle,” Chatterjee says.

VOLCANOES AND CITIES

The OCO-2 satellite makes such high-resolution measurements that researchers can look at CO2 concentrations over very small areas, such as a city or a volcano. CO2 over Los Angeles, for instance, was higher in the winter, when plants absorb less CO2 and more plants die, than in the summer, according to one of the Science studies. It was also higher in urban areas, where there are more cars and power plant emissions, than in suburban areas, says lead author Florian Schwandner, an analytical geochemist at JPL. The findings show that the OCO-2 satellite can quickly scan cities for pollution, complementing ground-based measurements.

The Yasur volcano in Vanuatu, in 2006. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The OCO-2 satellite can also be used to monitor active volcanoes, such as the Yasur volcano in Vanuatu, which constantly spews out a plume rich in CO2. The measurements suggest that Yasur is pumping out 41.6 kilotons of CO2 a day. When a volcano emits CO2, it means new batches of magma are moving toward the surface — a sign of unrest. So this new technique could be used to predict volcanic eruptions, Schwandner says. “We can’t stop a volcano, but we can evacuate people,” he says. “And the earlier we get the heads up the better.”

PHOTOSYNTHESIS

The OCO-2 satellite can also detect when plants take solar energy to grow, a process known as photosynthesis. During photosynthesis, plants emit a tiny amount of that energy back into the atmosphere, effectively glowing. This glow is invisible to the naked eye, but not to the OCO-2 satellite, which measures it at a much higher resolution than previous satellites like NASA’s Global Ozone Monitoring Instrument 2, according to another study published inScience.

“IT’S KINDA OF A DOUBLE WHAMMY.”

Detecting photosynthesis is key to understand whether plants are absorbing CO2. These measurements were used in one of the two El Niño papers, to figure out that during the 2015-2016 El Niño, plants in South America weren’t absorbing as much carbon. In the future, these worldwide observations of photosynthesis can be used to improve predictions of how productive crops will be in the future, as the world warms up, Eldering says.

All these observations have one main goal: to help us better understand the planet we live in — and how it’ll change in the future. And monitoring CO2 can help us unravel the mystery. “CO2 affects climate change, but also climate change affects CO2,” Denning says. “It’s kinda of a double whammy.”