Artists’ concepts of space colony studies conducted by NASA in the seventies.
Sense of wonder and belief in technology abound.
Archive of posts filed under the science category.
Awesome space colonies
TEDGlobal 2010, compressed
An excellent set of reports from TEDGlobal 2010 by Ethan Zuckerman.
What if the Earth stood still?
Instead of spinning on its axis, that is.
Witold Fraczek’s article explains the consequences.
Due to the disappearance of centrifugal force, the oceans would be completely realigned. As gravity would be the only meaningful force, the ellipsoidic “bump” would disappear and the water recede towards the poles.
Finland would be submerged completely, and a globe-spanning mega-continent would connect the existing landmasses around the equator.
Periodic table of irrational nonsense
I’m a sucker for periodic tables, and have blogged about quite a few thus far.
This table on nonsense is off Why Evolution is True – a blog celebrating the book of the same name. A worthy topic on which I’m still undecided which to read first: Coyne or Dawkins.
Eclipse on Easter Island
Eclipse on Easter Island is a worthy reminder why Astronomy Picture of the Day should indeed be read on a daily basis.
Countdown to an open source von Neumann machine: initiated
Replication done, but self-assembly is a bitch.
Well, there'll be at least 114 parts to it
Blogging the periodic table, by Sam Kean. Unfortunately at Slate, which is so deeply penetrated by advertisements as to be hard to read.
"Hella" as a SI-approved unit prefix
My first exposure to the expression “hella” was on the cover of Metallica’s veritable Garage Days Re-revisited EP. Where it is used to describe how much their recording conditions sucked.
A far more recent meaning for the word is its use to denote 10^27, as proposed by Austin Sendek. These days a related blog and plenty of facebook pages, both pro and against.
Me, count me in as pro. Especially when the official prefixes do not reach the heights of hella. Yet.
Open Luna
If open source projects competed for sheer audacity, Open Luna, a plan to build a permanent scientific station near the moon’s south pole, would win by a sizable margin.
February, begun with mirth
First up (and a snippeted of on the right), XKCD’s take on the Mars Rover, now on day 1960+ of its 90 day mission (probably the greatest bargain ever created by NASA).
Second, yet another fine piece from Oatmeal, this time on annoying facebook user stereotypes.
A compendium of geographica
Atlas Obscura, a collection of world’s wonders, curiosities and esoterica.
In other words: a cornucopia of material with which to kill time in boring meetings.
Amateur hour
Two great examples why astronomy is still an everyman science: almost Hubble-caliber photos from a garden shed, a fifteen year old discovers a pulsar.
Ideas of 2009
As listed by New York Times, this is a prospective list of the ideas of 2009.
Sadly, the previous years’ lists are not available with trivial URL manipulation.
Mathematically correct breakfast
The wonders of internet never ever cease: instructions how to create duo of interlocked Möbius strips out of a single bagel.
Sorry about that, chief
The Viking probes missed discovery of ice on Mars by this much, back in 1970s.
Drake Equation 2.0
The classic Drake Equation, the estimated number of alien civilizations in the galaxy, has competition. An updated version has been developed in England.
Today’s xkcd comic has nothing to do with the news, but is certainly appropriately timed.
What to do when zombies attack (in theory)
Probably the coolest scientific paper title of the year: When zombies attack!: Mathematical modelling of an outbreak of zombie infection.
Bonus points for one of the authors for having a question mark embedded in his surname.
Astronomical photography
The winners of the annual Astronomy Photography awards are awesome indeed.
Armchair astronomy
Probably the second easiest way ever to participate in meaningful science – Galaxy Zoo challenges users to visually classify galaxies.
Unsurprisingly, the crowdsourced astronomy project has a very informative blog, and has generated close to a dozen papers during its two years of existence.
(The easiest way, I hear the laziest amongst the readers query; that’d be BOINC, where computers do all the work).
Moonbow
Moonbow by Calvin Bradshaw (public domain)
As awe-inspiring concepts that re-invigorate faith in the world are concerned, moonbows come out on top.
As the wikipedia article explains:
A moonbow is a rainbow produced by light reflected off the surface of the moon rather than from direct sunlight.
The phenomena is rare, as expected, but there are several locations which feature an occasional moonbow. The chance to see one would probably be the best reason ever to visit Trans-Ili Alatau in Kazakhstan.
Blog turns into a book, or vice versa
Bad Astronomy is a science/skeptic blog run by Phil Plait.
Just noted that he’s published a book by the same name already in 2002, so that’s not definitely a rider on the blog-to-book wave.
A wave of whose fruits I haven’t really sampled (apart from the first LOLcat colleckshun).
The recent Pervasive Game doesn’t count, I’d have bought it even without the blog. I’ve referred to Waiterrant, BLDGBLOG and Bent Objects before, but not acted on any of them.
A gentle reminder
This awesome image of the recent solar eclipse is a neat reminder why the Astronomy Picture of the Day is a website to follow.
Economist: back to the moon?
I’ve been a fan of the laconic and plain Economist for ages, but haven’t a) subscribed to the magazine or b) actively followed their website.
Today they started a ten day-long debate on whether it’s worthwhile to return to the Moon.
Definitely worth reading.
But I’ll stick to purchasing the odd issue here and there as opposed to subscribing – the information overload in the weekly 80+ pages causes cherrypicking.
Academic camera hacking
Photography-related projects at MIT’s Media Lab.
Quite impressive. And not exactly mainstream in a couple of years.
Pandora's Toybox
Toy Chest is a wiki page packed with things that are “software tools/thinking toys that humanities students and others without programming skills”. Even for somebody who has the skills the list contains a lot of interesting tools to experiment with.
