Back in the Golden Age
Built a scaffolding, scraped the side of the house, replaced the tails at the top. I don’t think I could climb up there now. Cindy got tired of how long it was all taking me and hired some people to paint the rest of the house.
this is us
Twenty years ago the Voyager 1 space craft beamed back a photograph of our tiny planet.
Carl Sagan on the pale blue dot:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ’superstar,’ every ’supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
this unique 18-minute genre has its own requirements
From a Wired article on how to ace a TED Talk:
“I’m surprised to see that half the people here know my career in some detail and the other half don’t know who I am,” he says.
Science is fine, but not when it messes with our illusions.
If she had included solar power and African child warriors, it would have been so perfect a TED talk that there would have been no need for others.
Wolfram wraps his talk by saying that when it comes to trying to boil down the universe to a simple algorithm, “it’s almost embarrassing not to at least try.”
“Just because someone has an ego,” he says, citing a writer whose name I can’t read from my scribbled notes, “doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
Pluto is changing color
See also: crash blossoms.
Don’t Stare; You’ll Go Blind
Solar eclipse, seen from Kalfeng, China.
(Here)
earliest photo of the universe
Scientists released the photo Tuesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. It’s the most complete picture of the early universe so far, showing galaxies with stars that are already hundreds of millions of years old, along with the unmistakable primordial signs of the first cluster of stars.
super Earth
Astronomers have discovered a new Earth-like planet that is larger than our own and may be more than half covered with water, according to a study published Wednesday in the science journal Nature.
The so-called “super Earth” is about 42 light years away in another solar system and has a radius nearly 2.7 times larger than that of our planet, according to the study by the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.
But:
Its temperature is estimated at between 280 and 120 degrees Celsius (536 and 248 degrees Fahrenheit) with its host star about one-fifth the size of the Sun, according to the scientists.
‘the weirdest thing’
Dr Tandberg said: “I agree with everyone in the science community that this light was the weirdest thing. I have never seen anything like this ever.
“It may have been anything from an exploding missile whose launch went wrong – to a comet or other celestial object that for some reason has been behaving strangely.
Hat tip Andrea
GJ 758 B
Astronomers say they have taken the first direct image of a planet-like object orbiting a star much like our own sun.
The object called GJ 758 B orbits a parent star that is comparable in mass and temperature to our own sun, said study team member Michael McElwain of Princeton University. The star lies 300 trillion miles (480 trillion km), or about 50 light-years, from Earth.
whiteboard
GRB 090423
Astronomers have seen the light from a gamma-ray burst, now the most distant object ever recorded.
The discovery is especially exciting for scientists because the explosion occurred during the so-called “cosmic dark ages”, which started a mere 400,000 years after the Big Bang set the Universe in motion some 13.7 billion years ago.
2012
I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff.
it’s raining rocks
When a front moves in, small rocks rain down on the surface, a new study suggests.
More satisfying than the ending to Magnolia.
quote out of context
Evidence is mounting, however, for things on which the moon has no impact.
Sun Ra Meets Napoleon
Over the winter of 2004-2005, the Philadelphia-based Slought Foundation sponsored an exhibition titled “Sun Ra Meets Napoleon: Fragments of the Alter-Future”. In conjunction with the exhibition, a 1990 recording of Sun Ra in conversation with jazz critic Francis Davis was released.
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coldest, driest, calmest
The coldest, driest, calmest place on earth has been found.
All these elements combine to make the perfect recipe for an astronomical observation post: “The astronomical images taken at Ridge A should be at least three times sharper than at the best sites currently used by astronomers,” Saunders said. “Because the sky there is so much darker and drier, it means that a modestly-sized telescope there would be as powerful as the largest telescopes anywhere else on earth.”
Where’s the moon?
This morning on the 2 train, a large white-haired man boarded in downtown Brooklyn, wearing overalls and a hat covered with all manner of buttons, clutching a worn, wrinkled photocopy. As the train started to move, he sat up straight, held the paper aloft, and began reciting the following to the assembled commuters, in the sing-song tone of a storyteller or a town cryer. This continued until I exited the train, a few stops later, and has been playing in my head for the better part of the day.
Where’s the moon, where’s the moon?
Where’s the moon, where’s the moon?The globe in Columbus Circle–that’s the Earth.
The moon’s on 63rd Street West;
It’s a simple test
Of spacial reality.How well did you do?
Where’s the moon, where’s the moon?
Where’s the moon, where’s the moon…?
Cosmic Dust Rocks Tonight!
Perseid meteors (red) streak past stars in the skies over Amman, Jordan, in August 2005.
The peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower will be especially dazzling in August 2009, experts say, due to a gravitational boost from Saturn.
Photograph by Ali Jarekji/Reuters.
WASP wobbles backwards
A newly discovered planet orbits its star backwards.
WASP-17 is about half the mass of Jupiter but bloated to twice its size. “This planet is only as dense as expanded polystyrene, 70 times less dense than the planet we’re standing on,” said professor Coel Hellier of Keele University.
The bloated planet can be explained by a highly elliptical orbit, which brings it close to the star and then far away. Like exaggerated tides on Earth, the tidal effects on WASP-17 heat and stretch the planet, the researchers suggest.
The tides are not a daily affair, however. “Instead it’s creating a huge amount of friction on the inside of the planet and generating a lot of energy, which might be making the planet big and puffy,” Seager said.
gulp
Anthony Wesley, an amateur astronomer, found an earth-sized impact blot on Jupiter.
I was imaging Jupiter until about midnight and seriously thought about packing up and going back to the house to watch the golf and the cricket. In the end I decided to just take a break and I went back to the house to watch Tom Watson almost make history.
I came back down half an hour later and I could see this black mark had turned into view.
Useful and Beautiful Devices
Skinner’s July 2009 auction of Science, Technology & Clocks features the most comprehensive collection of scientific instruments to come to market in a long time. From a private collection, offerings include several important pairs of globes by Newton, a sextant by Ramsden, an octant by George Jones, equinoctial dials, astrolabes, chronometers, microscopes and nautical antiques.
Le voyage dans la lune | Georges Méliès | 1902
Buzz Aldrin was a Presbyterian
And it turns out that the first food consumed on the moon was bread and wine:
“In the radio blackout, I opened the little plastic packages which contained the bread and the wine. I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine slowly curled and gracefully came up the side of the cup. Then I read the Scripture, ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit. Apart from me you can do nothing.’ I had intended to read my communion passage back to earth, but at the last minute [they] had requested that I not do this. NASA was already embroiled in a legal battle with Madelyn Murray O’Hare, the celebrated opponent of religion, over the Apollo 8 crew reading from Genesis while orbiting the moon at Christmas. I agreed reluctantly. …I ate the tiny Host and swallowed the wine. I gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquility. It was interesting for me to think: the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the very first food eaten there, were the communion elements.”
The ‘lost’ NASA tapes
Detail of the Earthrise picture taken by the first Lunar Orbiter in 1966, as rendered at the time.
Detail of the Earthrise picture taken by the first Lunar Orbiter in 1966, rendered with modern technology.
A MacBook Pro and forty-year-old tape drives are helping restore the original Lunar Orbiter tapes.
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Cindy’s Bruised Elbow
Cindy had too much to drink, tried to look up at the stars–and promptly pitched over. It’s just a matter of time before we get an image of Jesus in one of her bruises.
