I’m curious – HOW did Larrakin music acquire the rights to the song Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree?
My understanding (thanks mostly to wikipedia) is:
In 1932, Marion Sinclair wrote the to “Kookaburra” which was entered in 1934 into a competition run by the Girl Guides Association of Victoria, with the rights of the winning song to be sold to raise money for the purchase of a camping ground.
While the song is still under copyright according to Australian copyright law, Marion Sinclair died in 1988, and so the publishing rights are held by Larrikin Music. In the United States, the rights are administered by Music Sales Corporation in New York City.
So, I’m wondering – how did Larrakin music acquire the rights?
And whose interests are they seeking to protect? – the estate of Marion Sinclair? The Girl Guides? Their own?
I’m curious and just don’t get it.
Fang – Mike Seyfang
February 1st, 2010 by mseyfang in education · 1 Comment
In my previous blog post you will note some confusion as to which month (Dec 2009 or Jan 2010) had two full moons.
http://www.ga.gov.au/geodesy/astro/moonphases/phase2009.jsp
NOTE: All Times are in Universal Time (UTC). Remember to add the time offset from UTC for your locality.
2009 DEC. 31 19 13 is Fri Jan 1st 5:43am in Adelaide.
2010 JAN. 30 6 18 is Sat Jan 30th 4:48pm in Adelaide.
So in Adelaide (where I was making the observations / comments) Sat Jan30th (and Fri Jan 1st)
is a blue moon because January 2010 is the month in which two full moons occurred.
Fang – Mike Seyfang
On Friday night I noticed a rather full moon as I drove past the crazy crowd emerging from the big day out. Saturday night was clear in teh sky, at 7.00pm I noticed THIS blog post and decided to pack my camera, my two girls and head out to get a picture o the full (and possibly big, even blue) moon. The whole experience was rather fun and I actually learned some stuff.
UPDATE thanks to Richard (comments) and Ian (astroblog) for the clarifications on east/west and UTC vs local time.
Here is the story… By now it was 7.30pm so we jumped in the car and headed toward the beach (where I thought a good un-interrupted view of the moon would likely be found). On the way I got out my i-phone and checked to compass to see where 72degrees to the EAST would be and figured that the hills would be a better option. With no real clue of which public places face this direction we headed to mt lofty (at least we knew there was food and a car-park there). On arrival there were lots of people with cameras setting up to take photos (all facing to where the sun was setting). Un-peturbed I broke our my i-phone and saw that 72 degrees was pretty close to dead EAST (ie nearly 180 degrees from the WESTward sunset). So, on my lonesome I set up my tripod facing the other way near the ‘picadilly valley’ lookout and checked the time – 8:15pm). *OOPS – tks to Richard for pointing my EAST/WEST transposition now corrected in caps.
It was still pretty bright so I fiddled with a couple of old lenses, making sure everything was working – no sign of a ‘blue moon’ or ‘bloody great mars in opposition’. Then, at about 8.30, right in front of me was a most spectacular moon just becoming visible having fully risen over the distant horizon. This was my first real learning moment – cemented forever in my brain is the fact that the ‘azimuth’ is indeed the point on the horizon toward which that number on a compass points. FINALLY a clue on how to read those fancy star-charts.
I banged off a few photos noting that there was no apparent extra distortion of the size of the moon due to nearby objects, because there were none. (The next night I would be looking through some trees n stuff to get the full effect).
What I learned for sure:
- It is possible to calculate where and when the moon will appear over the horizon. http://www.ga.gov.au/bin/astro/sunmoonposn – followed the (rather tedious) steps to get position of moon-rise as seen from Adelaide and got the answer ‘72degrees to the EAST’. http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?obj=moon&n=5 – said 8.20pm Adelaide time. The answer depends on your current location and time (which iphones are really good at passing onto websites). There is even this nifty free tool to make the calculations easier on an iphone (which I now have thanks to @vinbrown @fang Yeh it is pretty good and free too: http://bit.ly/9PIFMx. Never again will I feel it is too hard to work out what that pry thing in the sky might be!
- Saturday night’s moon was the biggest we will see all year (because it is at the perigee of its elliptical orbit). This is true at any place on earth in a given day.
- Passers by will happily agree with any mumbo jumbo about blue moons, horizon distortions, mars being in opposition, annual internet rumours of mars being the same size of the moon..
- Twitter followers will call bullshit on any tiny innacuracy. One of my tweeted photos from Saturday night had the caption ‘blue moon’ – Thanks @tarale for pointing out that new years eve was our last blue moon.
- The mystery distortion of rising moon near horizon does not always occur. (Saturday night relevant to a distant horizon, Sunday night relative to nearby trees, roofs, distant hills).
- Learning can be fun, and its better when you can ask questions with twitter and blogs.
What I am still learning:
- In opposition – so Mars and the Moon were in opposition on Saturday night. I think this means they were both ‘full’ because the sun was almost (not eclipse-like direct) directly behind me as I viewed them.
- perigee vs apogee (the a in apogee stands for ‘away’)
- A blue moon is when two full moons happen in the same calendar month (ie December 2,31 2009 at locations on UTC). Either of those full moons could be considered the ‘blue’ moon and there is no effect on color.
What is confusing me:
- Ian’s blue moons ideas (I get the notion of any two interesting phases in a single calendar month, but – what was special about January 2010?) AH – as Ian points out over on the comments to HIS POST – the moon phase data I consulted is in UTC. So, in Adelaide,
http://www.ga.gov.au/geodesy/astro/moonphases/phase2009.jsp
NOTE: All Times are in Universal Time (UTC). Remember to add the time offset from UTC for your locality.
2009 DEC. 31 19 13 is Fri Jan 1st 5:43am in Adelaide.
2010 JAN. 30 6 18 is Sat Jan 30th 4:48pm in Adelaide.
So in Adelaide (where I was making the observations / comments) Sat Jan30th (and Fri Jan 1st) is a blue moon because January 2010 is the month in which two full moons occurred.
- What things are global vs local phenomona… (when to use UTC, local time, whose local time???)
- Do the solar system planets revolve around the sun in roughly a single 2d plane?
- And too many more to bang out in a single lunch-break.
Thanks all for inspiring my learning and keep them tips n corrections coming!!!
Fang – Mike Seyfang
technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang
On monday night, a bunch of science bloggers addressed the newly re-ignited south australian chapter of the australian science communicators (#ascsa) at the newly re-furbished royal institution (#riaus) in adelaide. During the evening, our host, @lisushi asked participants to use the hash tag “#ascsa” for photos, tweets, blog posts about the event. Sadly, I was the only person tweeting / flickring during the event and could only find one or two others using the hashtag on twitter in the days following. So… I have created a little yahoo pipe, which builds an rss feed of good things tagged with ‘ascsa’.
The trick is to subscribe to THIS RSS FEED in your favourite reader and to remember to tag your tweets, photos and blog posts in the future. This will help us form a community of people interested in science blogging in south oz.
UPDATE: Thanks to @corribaker for pointing out this link to a web page where you can stream the audio if you have a flash-compatible browser. Still hanging out for a link to an .mp3 file, and will nag the #RiAus to create an RSS feed of “true podcasts” that we can subscribe to, share and comment on.
I am assured that the audio recording from the panel will be made available shortly – I will update this post if I notice.
The bloggers on the stage are (from left to right):
It was great to hear first hand from actual science bloggers. While we covered a lot of ground there is still so much to talk about. I got all excited when the conversation turned to finding and using creative commons licensed images to use in blog posts. Couldn’t resist grabbing the microphone and urging people to CONTRIBUTE their photos (and .mp3, video and text) to the COMMONS by choosing platforms and open license.
I see a brilliant opportunity for our local science communicators and the RiAus to show real leadership in bringing science to the people and people to science through open and effective use of emerging online tools. For example, wouldn’t it be great if most talks of a public nature that are given at the magnificent RiAus venue were available as true podcasts – via an RSS feed of openly licensed .mp3 files with comments / trackbacks etc enabled.
This might just be the subject of my upcoming presentation to this bunch – stay tuned!
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?SearchFor=ascsa&_id=28d570f1e7f8cf11b4b6a64d21c310b5
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=28d570f1e7f8cf11b4b6a64d21c310b5
Fang – Mike Seyfang
technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang
While on recent holidays in Middleton, South Australia, I spotted these curious creatures in a tree at a friend’s beach-house. I have not seen them anywhere else before or since!
Having uploaded a close-up to flickr, I posted a link to twitter and got several responses like this one (from the ‘Royal Institution’ of science no less:
Ri_Aus @fang not sure but have you seen this http://bit.ly/4VVqvP- may help!10:16 AM Jan 19th from TweetDeck in reply to fang
Pointing me to helpful online taxonomy tools, which would be great if I already knew what it was or had any idea how to classify creatures. (Having visited a few of these sites I’m now not sure I should be using the word ‘bug’ in my title!).
I would therefore be most greatful to anyone who can help me identify these curios little creatures and answer the obvious question “are they mating while crawling arround in back-to-back formation?”
Thanks in advance.
Fang – Mike Seyfang
technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang
