On Cultureteca this week, David Bowie announces Blackstar for the date of his sixty-ninth birthday; NASA’s Curiosity rover relays the first images of active sand dunes on Mars; Raspberry Pi unveils a single-board computer for just $5; the 2015 Davis Cup in tennis reaches a climax, with Great Britain against Belgium; and Leicester City’s Jamie Vardy breaks a Premier League record for goals scored in consecutive games.
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David Bowie Confirms Blackstar
David Bowie took Friday to confirm the upcoming release of Blackstar, his twenty-fifth studio album. The record will be out on 8 January 2016, the date of Bowie’s sixty-ninth birthday.
The title track, a ten-minute dark jewel, was released as the first single from the album on 20 November. An excerpt serves as the theme tune for the six-part crime drama series The Last Panthers, created by Jack Thorne, directed by Johan Renck, and starring Samantha Morton, John Hurt, and Tahar Rahim. The Last Panthers premiered on Canal+ in France on 26 October, and on Sky Atlantic in the UK, Ireland, Italy, Germany, and Austria on 12 November. A US premiere is scheduled for spring 2016 on SundanceTV.
Other than the lead single, there is so far fairly little to go on regarding the content of the album. A reported seven-song, forty-five-minute tracklist, with titles such as ”Tis a Pity She Was a Whore’, ‘Dollar Days’, and ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’; rumours of recording sessions with jazz musicians at the Magic Shop in New York; the purported collaboration of James Murphy, founder of LCD Soundsystem; and suggestions that the new album will combine Gregorian chants with Kraftwerk – all of this has been questioned by Bowie’s team, who have cited ‘inaccurate reporting’.
A smattering of early reviews in MOJO, Classic Pop, and Q have depicted ‘a genre-hopping return to his experimental prime’ and ‘Headgame-playing art-rock Sinatra’, with Q positing ‘There are layers upon layers here which will go on revealing themselves, play after play’.
Bowie was similarly surreptitious in the build up to his previous album, 2013’s The Next Day. The record – his first in ten years – was announced on his sixty-sixth birthday, accompanied by the surprise release of the single ‘Where Are We Now?’. In the meantime Bowie has co-written Lazarus with the Tony-winning Irish playwright Enda Walsh. The production is based on The Man Who Fell to Earth, Walter Tevis’s 1963 sci-fi novel and the film adaptation of 1976, which was directed by Nicolas Roeg and starred Bowie as the alien who arrives on Earth in search of water to save his home planet.
Lazarus is directed by Ivo van Hove and stars Michael C. Hall. It features reworked music from Bowie’s catalogue alongside new compositions – although the artist has confirmed that ‘Blackstar’ will play no part in the process. Lazarus will open at the New York Theatre Workshop on 7 December.
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Curiosity Rover Shows Sand Dunes On Mars
On Wednesday NASA’s Curiosity rover sent us the first up-close images of sand dunes on Mars. In black and white, taken by the rover’s Navigation Cameras which afford a wide-angle view of the terrain, they show darkly textured ripples of sand, with hills in the background, while Curiosity has often also succeeded in capturing something of itself in the frame.
Curiosity was launched on 26 November 2011, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It landed in the northwest of Gale Crater on 6 August 2012, on a plain known as Aeolis Palus. The rover’s mission is to investigate the environmental and geological history of Mars, particularly whether the conditions for microbial life have ever existed inside Gale Crater: a crater 154 kilometres in diameter, and estimated to be 3.5-3.8 billion years old.
Aeolis Mons – otherwise known as Mount Sharp – is a mountain in the centre of Gale Crater, rising to 5.5 kilometres. Aeolis Palus is the plain between the northern wall of the crater and the northern foothills of Aeolis Mons. And Peace Vallis is an outflow channel, flowing from the hills of the crater southeast to Aeolis Palus, which appears to have been carved into the surface by liquid water.
The dunes displayed this week by Curiosity – distinguished from much smaller sand ripples or drifts – are informally known as the Bagnold Dunes, after the British military commander and pioneer of desert exploration Ralph Alger Bagnold. Bagnold’s The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes, published in 1941, is still used by NASA today in the study of sand transportation by wind.
The Bagnold Dunes lie on the northwestern flank of Aeolis Mons. As their name implies, they are active dunes, products of wind-blown sand, and some of them appear to be migrating by around 1 metre per year. They are the first active dunes ever visited anywhere in the solar system beyond Earth.
Curiosity drove about 500 metres in less than five weeks to reach the Bagnold Dunes. The hope is that the rover’s exploration will improve our understanding of the interaction between dunes and wind in a low-gravity, low-pressure environment. Nathan Bridges of the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, one of the Curiosity team’s lead planners, said:
‘These dunes have a different texture from dunes on Earth. The ripples on them are much larger than ripples on top of dunes on Earth, and we don’t know why. We have models based on the lower air pressure. It takes a higher wind speed to get a particle moving. But now we’ll have the first opportunity to make detailed observations.’
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Raspberry Pi Release $5 Computer
Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton announced on Thursday the immediate release of Raspberry Pi Zero. This latest addition to the Raspberry Pi family makes a programmable single-board computer available to all for the staggeringly low cost of just $5.
Made in Wales, the computer features the following specifications:
- A Broadcom BCM2835 application processor
- 1GHz ARM11 core (40% faster than Raspberry Pi 1)
- 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM
- A micro-SD card slot
- A mini-HDMI socket for 1080p60 video output
- Micro-USB sockets for data and power
- An unpopulated 40-pin GPIO header
- Identical pinout to Model A+/B+/2B
- An unpopulated composite video header
- Our smallest ever form factor, at 65mm x 30mm x 5mm
The Raspberry Pi Zero is available to order in the United States from Adafruit, and to purchase in-store at Micro Center; while in the United Kingdom it can be acquired via The Pi Hut and Pimoroni. UK residents can also find the computer on the cover of the December issue of The MagPi, the official Raspberry Pi magazine, which costs £5.99, and comes with project ideas and an interview with board designer Mike Stimson.
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Great Britain Win the 2015 Davis Cup
The 2015 Davis Cup – the premier international team event in men’s tennis – concluded between Friday and Sunday as Great Britain travelled to face Belgium in the final, which took place on clay in Ghent. As always, the match was the best of five rubbers: two singles on the Friday followed by a doubles on the Saturday, with two reverse singles scheduled for the Sunday presuming the match still needed to find a winner.
The British singles players were Andy Murray, the world number 3, and Kyle Edmund, twenty years old last January, who rose over the course of the season to finish at a near high of world number 102. Lining up for Belgium were David Goffin, who ended the year world number 16, and Ruben Bemelmans, the world number 96, down twelve places from his height at the end of September.
Given the rankings and Andy Murray’s supremacy in the singles rubbers this season, the doubles match on the Saturday was always likely to prove decisive. On Friday Edmund gave Goffin a scare before the Belgian prevailed in five sets, 3-6, 1-6, 6-2, 6-1, 6-0, and Murray beat Bemelmans with relative ease, 6-3, 6-2, 7-5.
On Saturday Murray paired with his brother Jamie: the only doubles specialist on court, a doubles finalist at this year’s Wimbledon and US Open alongside John Peers. Goffin partnered Steve Darcis, the world number 75 in the singles rankings, but a recent doubt owing to an ankle injury sustained last month in Stockholm. Though after two sets it looked like the match could go either way, the brothers were the more consistent couple over the course of the match, coming through 6-4, 4-6, 6-3, 6-2.
This gave the British team a commanding lead, and Andy Murray dispatched Goffin in the first rubber on Sunday, 6-3, 7-5, 6-3, to lead his country to victory. This was Belgium’s first final since 1904, and Great Britain’s first title since 1936. Their tenth title in total – with final defeats in 1937 and 1978 coming between the successes of 1936 and 2015 – it capped a miraculous recovery in British tennis, as back in 2010 the team were on the verge of falling into Europe’s third and lowest tier.
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Jamie Vardy Scores in Record Eleventh Consecutive Premier League Game
Jamie Vardy of Leicester City broke on Saturday the Premier League record for goals in consecutive games. His first half effort at the King Power Stadium, in a match against Manchester United which ended 1-1, made him the only player in the twenty-four year history of the league to have scored in eleven matches in a row.
Vardy’s strike on Saturday was aided significantly by David De Gea, who did his utmost to narrow his body and leave the goal gaping, but Vardy’s achievement is remarkable – especially for a twenty-eight year old striker who only four years ago was playing for Fleetwood Town in the Conference in front of 768 people. It is a credit to a player at the peak of confidence, supremely fit and hard working, and with the ability to find the target
Five players had previously scored in seven consecutive Premier League games: Mark Stein, Ian Wright, Alan Shearer, Thierry Henry, and Emmanuel Adebayor. Two players had managed the feat of scoring in eight matches in a row: Ruud van Nistelrooy in 2002 and Daniel Sturridge in 2014. But Vardy’s run of thirteen goals in eleven consecutive games this season bettered a record of ten set by Van Nistelrooy in 2003, which was completed across the end of the 2002-03 season and the start of 2003-04.
Van Nistelrooy was among the first to congratulate the Leicester player:
Well done vardy7! You're number one now and you deserved it. #11inarow. https://t.co/qJHjZlnFDA
— Ruud van Nistelrooy (@RvN1776) November 28, 2015
Vardy is still one game short of equalling the all-time record for consecutive goals scored in the top flight of English football. This was set by the Irishman Jimmy Dunne, who scored in twelve consecutive matches playing for Sheffield United in 1931-32. Blackpool’s Stan Mortensen managed fifteen goals in consecutive games in the top tier in 1950-51, but he missed several matches during the run owing to injury.
