Sky CHRISTINA MANNING

Swaying down this dark city lane,

we are a cluster of hands and scarves,

kisses and stumbling feet.

But are these collisions the work of planets

atomic, celestial, or something more earthbound:

walking with you on Broome Street,

catching my heel on a cobblestone, a little drunk.

If matrimony is an astronomy,

inscrutable physics, seen from a distance

(it's true your face in repose

has its familiar constellations,

Venusian lips, your eyes, a quiet firmament),

then I want to understand the valence and force

that holds me to you.

Give me a theorem to live by.

If love is just science

then show me its place in the sky.

MP3 has several clear-cut advantages:

• Streaming capability. For audio clips of any length, streaming is a far better alternative than traditional download-and-play. A great deal of web traffic is still traveling on limited dial-up connections with, at best, a 56K modem. Streaming audio allows even these relatively low-bandwidth connections to experience multimedia without the wait.

• Smaller files size than other codecs. MP3 compression is state of the art, and the results are wonderfully compact.

• Superior sound compression. Streaming ability and small file sizes are solid features but would be worthless if MP3 quality were unacceptable. Fortunately, MP3 files maintain much of the original fidelity for most types of audio including music and, as shown in this demonstration, voiceovers .

Because Flash 4 is capable of encoding MP3 natively, no special plug-in other than the Flash 4 player is required. Browsers with the Flash 3 player installed will still be able to view the file ”they just won't be able to hear it. This is both good and bad news: On the positive side, if you're authoring a work that is not reliant on audio, then the much larger (at the time of this writing) installed base of Flash 3 users will be able to view it. On the other hand, if the audio is vital to the movie, you have to make sure your audience is aware of the necessity of the Flash 4 player. (Check out www. moock .org for a free downloadable Java-less Flash player tester. This will tell your viewers which version player they have and instruct them to upgrade.)