Viva La Vida
I’ve had some time now to listen to Viva La Vida, the new album by Coldplay.“Violet Hill” by Coldplay; Full Music Video
The album is definitely different then their past 3 albums. In many ways, however, it remains the same old Coldplay. Exploring new timbres and song structures, Coldplay tries very hard to do something new, but it remains a little too familiar.
In the very first song, Life in Technicolor, it is quicky apparent that this album is to be different. The slowly building synth that we all know Coldplay for is abruptly kick started by a satar, giving a unique middle-eastern flare. Unfortunately, many of the songs resort back to the same melodic falsetto that we’ve heard again and again on 3 other albums.
To boil it all down, if you like Coldplay, there’s no reason to not like this ablum. It’s musically tight, has some neat ideas, and is different enough from their previous efforts to provide something new. If you weren’t a Coldplay fan before, this probably won’t change your mind. 3.5/5
A Break
Today is a nice break from the heat and humidity. Instead of being hot as all get out, it was a pleasant 20 degrees today. The models are pushing the heat back in by the end of the week, which will be just in time for me to do night shifts and not notice it too much! Not that I’m not thankful for the nice weather we had over this long weekend!Weather Moment: Low Pressure Systems
Low pressure systems are the “engine” that drive weather. They are what interact with warm and cold fronts, and they function to convert and dissipate the energy stored within the fronts. These systems have a “traditional” or “classical” progression that can be observed.
Frontal Wave
The first sign of the development of a low pressure system is the appearance of a frontal wave. This is a slight bend in an area of high thermal contrast. This is the beginnings of the warm and cold fronts.
Surface Low Appearance
As the wave tightens, and the cold front becomes more perpendicular to the warm front, the low pressure center appears on the inflection point of the warm and cold fronts (where the two fronts attach to each other). The low will then move with the mean flow aloft, following the troughs of upper-level waves (more on that later). As the low moves, the fronts move along with it. And naturally, the weather associated with those fronts moves along as well.
Mature Low
A satellite image depicting a mature low pressure system. The cold front is represented by the blue line, the warm front by the red line, and the trowel by the blue/red half-arrows. The center of the low circulation is marked by the large L.
One funny characteristics of cold fronts is that they are often faster moving that warm fronts. This can result in the warm front moving “along” the warm front and lifting the warm air up. This is called an occlusion process. The warm air aloft then is pulled towards the low and around it, rising in height. This warm air aloft is called an occlusion, or more frequently today, a trowel.
A mature low will have 4 distinct areas and kinds of precipitation: warm front precipitation, cold front precipitation, occlusion/trowel precipitation, and “wrap around” precipitation. Wrap-around precipitation is the weather that occurs in extremely close proximity.
Low Dissipation
Eventually, the warm and cold fronts pull themselves off the low pressure system. It can be likened that the “gas” for a low pressure system is the temperature contrast present in the fronts. When the fronts leave the low, warm air wraps around it and soon there is no more sharp temperature contrasts. When this happens, the low will “fill in” and dissipate.
Why Is It Called A Low Pressure System?
When a low pressure system begins to form, air is pulled in towards the center of it. We have discovered that, more or less, air in the atmosphere doesn’t like to compress. So instead of compressing as all this air meets in one place, it pushes air upwards. This creates a circulation where air moves in towards the low at the surface, rises some height, then flows out and away from the low. This results in low pressure near the surface, where the air is rising, and higher pressure somewhere above, where the air is moving outwards. Thus, a low pressure system is called such because the surface pressure is actually lower than the areas around it. As it “dies,” the surface pressure will return to the normal pressure around the low.
I should mention that this is an extremely brief overview of low pressure systems. If you would like to learn more, there are entire books written on the subject, and to this day it is still an area of active research.
Next week, land and sea breezes!
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it–she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.