olafismybestfriend

[olafismybestfriend]

sometimes he gets over-excited [x x x x]

[olafismybestfriend]

shout out to the girls that hate their bodies but are trying really really hard to find the beauty and comfort in them because that shit is hard and takes a lot of time and is emotionally exhausting. i’m proud of y'all.

[olafismybestfriend]

I hope you all fall in love with someone who never stops choosing you and I hope you feel at home when you look at them

[olafismybestfriend]

Unknown Jamael’s star role in Hamilton: 25-year-old cast in West End version of hit musical (Daily Mail):

Jamael Westman — a 25-year-old actor from Brixton, South London, fresh out of drama school — has won the coveted title role in the eagerly awaited London version of smash-hit musical Hamilton.

Westman, a Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts graduate (and fully trained football coach) won the role in President Obama’s favourite show after five auditions, including one in front of Hamilton’s creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s director Thomas Kail, music director Alex Lacamoire and producers Jeffrey Seller and Cameron Mackintosh.

The part of Alexander Hamilton is one of the landmark theatrical roles of the 21st century — and a towering achievement for the 6ft 4in actor who graduated from RADA only last year.

But Westman is an impressive character. He has deep feelings about what it means to be a black man in the UK. He’s confident. He told me that if he doesn’t know something, he’ll work at it until he masters it — whether it be playing a musical instrument, learning a role or sussing out how to play every position on a football team (even goalkeeper, which he hates).

[…]

He sang at the local Roman Catholic Church and Miles Davis, Marshall Mathers and Bob Marley were all part of the eclectic mix of music playing at home in South London, where he was raised by his Irish-born mother — a lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths College — and his Jamaican-born football coach father.

Rapping, he declared, ‘is in my bones’. Which is one of the reasons he won the role.

Miranda told me that he was lucky enough to catch Jamael at a ‘call back’ in London at Cameron Mackintosh’s office, and he was bowled over by the countertenor. ‘He was just fantastic, and versatile, and all those things Hamilton needs to be,’ he said. ‘You know: “Young, scrappy and hungry.”’ (That’s a line, in case you’re wondering, from one of Hamilton’s best-known songs, My Shot.)

In fact, during my interview with Jamael, he used the very same line to describe himself.

Both Miranda and Mackintosh, in separate conversations in London and New York, observed that Jamael had the skills to make it seem as though each performance was being given for the first time.

‘Well, that’s the whole ball game, isn’t it?’ Lin-Manuel said. ‘To make it feel as though it’s happening for the first time on stage at night.’ He added that he’s seen a lot of people audition, both in the U.S. and UK, for the role that he created.

‘So when you know you’ve got it, you’ve got it — and I know we’ve really got it here, with Jamael.’

Miranda told me that when he was writing the concept album for Hamilton, he had hip-hop and R&B voices in mind.

‘I wasn’t thinking about what colour the people were. I was thinking: “Who’s the best rapper to embody Thomas Jefferson? Or Alexander Hamilton?”

‘I was having fun with the idea of matching rappers with these people,’ he said, adding that when the director, Thomas Kail, was developing the stage show, he decided to elevate that idea of diversity to a principle for the casting of the show.

‘When you take the people out of the stuff of legend, and destroy the statue version, it actually makes them more accessible,’ he said.

The Latin-American, Asian and Afro-Caribbean faces in his show mirror society.

That colour-blind idea resonates with Jamael, too. He said that the opportunity to work and play with a company ‘made up of people of colour, without the subject matter having anything to do with race’ would have a positive impact not only on him, but the whole ensemble — and the audience, too.

‘A story that traditionally would have been told by an all-white cast is being given a new lease of life, superseding the deluded expectations of prejudice.’

Jamael said he gets his confidence and strength from his mother. ‘Her people — my grandmother — are from Coose in County Galway; and I heard her stories, and the stories of my other grandparents.

‘Some came here from Ireland and Jamaica in the Fifties, and having heard their stories gave me an appreciation of their struggles. It’s what’s bought me to this place … to this very room where it happens,’ he said, a reference to another famous line in Hamilton.

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With advice from Daveed Diggs, Class of 2017 celebrates the Baccalaureate [x]:

[…] Diggs’ speech — which he titled “Daveed Diggs Says Some Things” — was by turns hilarious and grave. He spoke both from notes and off-the-cuff, delivering elements of his address in rap and demonstrating the literary and performance skills for which he is widely acclaimed. From a rap adaptation of a work of literature to a disturbing anecdote about a frightening stop by police officers, Diggs held the audience’s rapt attention.

His address also included specific advice. Some serious, some quite playful — such as turning down offers of speaking engagements at prestigious institutions and immediately forgetting the content of his address. From the beginning, he had the graduates laughing as he wondered aloud how to properly address Brown President Christina Paxson.

He followed with a high-speed recitation of a rap adaptation of Jean Toomer’s “Cane” that he wrote in 2003 while at Brown. Diggs went on to talk about self-doubt, a long period before starring in “Hamilton” during which he felt unsuccessful, as well as the deep political divisions that characterize American civic life.

“You were born into a time in our country that feels different than any I have ever known,” Diggs said, adding that he was grateful that the graduates would be the ones to confront the difficulties of the moment. “These times in many ways defy explanation. But what these times really need are people who challenge all explanations. They never thought outside the box because they never accepted the premise that there was a box.”

“Our world desperately needs you now,” Diggs implored. “We need your new ideas because our old ones have made a big mess of things. If you’re like I was, you’re a little nervous at this moment. You know that a lot of people sacrificed a lot to get you to this point and you feel like you owe them a great success story. But also, if you’re like I was, you have no idea what you’re going to do after tomorrow.”

Diggs, who said he felt like he was born two years and four months ago, when he began starring in “Hamilton,” told the students: “Maybe you have a timeline in your head, some date by which you’re going to be successful… The work for you and us all in this is the day-to-day. It’s the stitching together a nation divided. It is the honest effort to understand the circumstances of the people around us.” […]

throwback to Lin’s graduation words of wisdom at Wesleyan & University of Pennsylvania

[olafismybestfriend]

Don’t say maybe if you want to say no.

Paulo Coelho (via goodquoteco)

[olafismybestfriend]

There’s been a lot of talk, deserved talk tonight about the cabinet, about those four brilliant men who pushed us higher, who pushed us to greatness. Deserved talk, but I wanna talk for a second about my cabinet, which was this brilliant company of actors. I wish I knew which camera to look into - I know you’re often in a room on the side, but I wanna tell you something.

[olafismybestfriend]

Incoming! We’ve Got Science from Jupiter!

Our Juno spacecraft has just released some exciting new science from its first close flyby of Jupiter! 

In case you don’t know, the Juno spacecraft entered orbit around the gas giant on July 4, 2016…about a year ago. Since then, it has been collecting data and images from this unique vantage point.

Juno is in a polar orbit around Jupiter, which means that the majority of each orbit is spent well away from the gas giant. But once every 53 days its trajectory approaches Jupiter from above its north pole, where it begins a close two-hour transit flying north to south with its eight science instruments collecting data and its JunoCam camera snapping pictures.

Space Fact: The download of six megabytes of data collected during the two-hour transit can take one-and-a-half days!

Juno and her cloud-piercing science instruments are helping us get a better understanding of the processes happening on Jupiter. These new results portray the planet as a complex, gigantic, turbulent world that we still need to study and unravel its mysteries.

So what did this first science flyby tell us? Let’s break it down…

1. Tumultuous Cyclones

Juno’s imager, JunoCam, has showed us that both of Jupiter’s poles are covered in tumultuous cyclones and anticyclone storms, densely clustered and rubbing together. Some of these storms as large as Earth!

These storms are still puzzling. We’re still not exactly sure how they formed or how they interact with each other. Future close flybys will help us better understand these mysterious cyclones. 

Seen above, waves of clouds (at 37.8 degrees latitude) dominate this three-dimensional Jovian cloudscape. JunoCam obtained this enhanced-color picture on May 19, 2017, at 5:50 UTC from an altitude of 5,500 miles (8,900 kilometers). Details as small as 4 miles (6 kilometers) across can be identified in this image.

An even closer view of the same image shows small bright high clouds that are about 16 miles (25 kilometers) across and in some areas appear to form “squall lines” (a narrow band of high winds and storms associated with a cold front). On Jupiter, clouds this high are almost certainly comprised of water and/or ammonia ice.

2. Jupiter’s Atmosphere

Juno’s Microwave Radiometer is an instrument that samples the thermal microwave radiation from Jupiter’s atmosphere from the tops of the ammonia clouds to deep within its atmosphere.

Data from this instrument suggest that the ammonia is quite variable and continues to increase as far down as we can see with MWR, which is a few hundred kilometers. In the cut-out image below, orange signifies high ammonia abundance and blue signifies low ammonia abundance. Jupiter appears to have a band around its equator high in ammonia abundance, with a column shown in orange.

Why does this ammonia matter? Well, ammonia is a good tracer of other relatively rare gases and fluids in the atmosphere…like water. Understanding the relative abundances of these materials helps us have a better idea of how and when Jupiter formed in the early solar system.

This instrument has also given us more information about Jupiter’s iconic belts and zones. Data suggest that the belt near Jupiter’s equator penetrates all the way down, while the belts and zones at other latitudes seem to evolve to other structures.

3. Stronger-Than-Expected Magnetic Field

Prior to Juno, it was known that Jupiter had the most intense magnetic field in the solar system…but measurements from Juno’s magnetometer investigation (MAG) indicate that the gas giant’s magnetic field is even stronger than models expected, and more irregular in shape.

At 7.766 Gauss, it is about 10 times stronger than the strongest magnetic field found on Earth! What is Gauss? Magnetic field strengths are measured in units called Gauss or Teslas. A magnetic field with a strength of 10,000 Gauss also has a strength of 1 Tesla.  

Juno is giving us a unique view of the magnetic field close to Jupiter that we’ve never had before. For example, data from the spacecraft (displayed in the graphic above) suggests that the planet’s magnetic field is “lumpy”, meaning its stronger in some places and weaker in others. This uneven distribution suggests that the field might be generated by dynamo action (where the motion of electrically conducting fluid creates a self-sustaining magnetic field) closer to the surface, above the layer of metallic hydrogen. Juno’s orbital track is illustrated with the black curve. 

4. Sounds of Jupiter

Juno also observed plasma wave signals from Jupiter’s ionosphere. This movie shows results from Juno’s radio wave detector that were recorded while it passed close to Jupiter. Waves in the plasma (the charged gas) in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter have different frequencies that depend on the types of ions present, and their densities. 

Mapping out these ions in the jovian system helps us understand how the upper atmosphere works including the aurora. Beyond the visual representation of the data, the data have been made into sounds where the frequencies and playback speed have been shifted to be audible to human ears.

5. Jovian “Southern Lights”

The complexity and richness of Jupiter’s “southern lights” (also known as auroras) are on display in this animation of false-color maps from our Juno spacecraft. Auroras result when energetic electrons from the magnetosphere crash into the molecular hydrogen in the Jovian upper atmosphere. The data for this animation were obtained by Juno’s Ultraviolet Spectrograph. 

During Juno’s next flyby on July 11, the spacecraft will fly directly over one of the most iconic features in the entire solar system – one that every school kid knows – Jupiter’s Great Red Spot! If anybody is going to get to the bottom of what is going on below those mammoth swirling crimson cloud tops, it’s Juno.

Stay updated on all things Juno and Jupiter by following along on social media: Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Tumblr

Learn more about the Juno spacecraft and its mission at Jupiter HERE.

[olafismybestfriend]

Nikita Gill

[olafismybestfriend]

ariana is literally in hospital because she’s been in hysterics for 15 hours, has allegedly discussed ending her career and is actively blaming herself for all of this and people are angry for her cancelling her tour?? priorities people, please.

people have lost their lives. families have been separated, an 8 year old girl has just been identified as the second victim. ariana’s whole team actively tried to protect people by taking young kids into safe areas- include her own mother.

this isn’t just a small inconvenience. this is a tragedy. think before you react. i’ve got too many people around me thinking about themselves other than those who deserve and need it.

people still do not consider their idols as human and continue to expect ariana to tour when she’s in pain. it’s sickening.

[olafismybestfriend]

@thegoodquote

[olafismybestfriend]

Scientists find a lost continent underneath the island of Mauritius

Scientists have long theorized that about 200 million years ago, a giant stretch of land connected what are now India and Madagascar to form an ancient supercontinent called Gondwana.

In a new paper, geoscientists finally concluded that not only was the supercontinent real, fragments of it still exist — sunken leagues beneath the tiny isle of Mauritius.

“Our findings confirm the existence of continental crust beneath Mauritius,” the paper says.

Researchers were first tipped off to the continental crust’s presence because of a strange feature that’s unique to Mauritius: The pull of gravity is particularly strong on the island. Read more

follow @the-future-now​

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WATCH: Lin-Manuel Miranda Freaked Out Meeting Weird Al

[olafismybestfriend]

Sometimes I stay up late thinking about Everyone and everything My head just keeps on spinning And I never know what’s happening Cause life is short and cold and warm And unexplainable and

[olafismybestfriend]

J.K. Rowling is releasing three new books in the Harry Potter universe

On Sept. 6, J.K. Rowling will release three “eBook shorts:“ Hogwarts: An Incomplete and Unreliable Guide will explain some of the intricacies of the school; Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists will discuss dark magic; and Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies will tell the backstories of faculty members. But it doesn’t seem as though all of the eBooks will be totally original writing.

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at a revel with Chicago on a hot night [x x x x]

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