"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."
The hexagon is similar to Earth's polar vortex, which has winds blowing in a circular pattern around the polar region....
A system of clouds lies within the hexagon. The clouds appear to be whipping around the hexagon like cars on a racetrack.
"We've never seen anything like this on any other planet." "Whipping around the hexagon like cars on a racetrack." Fucking rad, right?! Be sure to click through to the article itself to see the ridiculously cool pictures.
My music-listening habits can get so hermetic, what with the headphones and all, that sometimes it prohibits me from enjoying what I'm hearing. I'd been kind of knee-jerk with the meh about the new LCD Soundsystem, just because it's been so hyped lately (a full 90 on Metacritic; thx for the link, Richard). But then I heard "Get Innocuous!" out at the bar last night, and it was like someone had opened all the windows and doors and let a rush of cool spring night air in. It was just what my appreciation of the song needed. Revisiting it this morning, even with my headphones on the train, just confirmed the awesomeness. When those sharp, hard strings come in sounding like a traffic jam at the end and then get pulled way up in the mix to fully reveal themselves as a string section...wow. That's some of the most exciting stuff I've heard recently.
Chicagoans, have you been out to see the Bound Stems yet? I caught them opening for the Long Winters last weekend (OMG, another fucking mind-blower of a show), and they totally come off, in the best way possible, like Chicago's answer to the New Pornographers. They seem like a bunch of genuinely nice people having fun making music together, with an adorable, hooky tunefulness that's married to their own version of the stereotypical Chicago post-rock aesthetic. I'm just starting to spend some time with Appreciation Night, and I dig it so far. (Be sure to also check out the interview and free songs from their Daytrotter session last fall.)
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