a different kind of spam

another hilarious comic from abstruse goose.

here's a little preview...


click below for the full comic!

magnetism

artist caleb charland demonstrates magnetism: a very fun force to play with.

rare photos of famous people

a blog called something beautiful has a great collection of rarely seen photographs of famous people. it took me quite a while to get through the whole collection, but it was worth the journey! here are my favorites:

melanie griffith and don johnson


bob marley


salvador dali


pablo picasso


miss marilyn.


charles bukowski and mickey rourke, back when rourke was so cute.


alfred hitchcock with his children


i couldnt even tell who this was at first...


sean connery! ha!

george clooney and his teeth

what happens in a black hole...

found at fresh photons.

chiang mai, thailand

in april, 2009, i shared the story of traveling for 38 hours to get across thailand. here is the (much delayed) continuation of that story.

once the bus from koh chang ("best waterfight ever") dropped me off in bangkok, i took a tuk-tuk to the train station...


... where i saw huge (decades old) images of the king everywhere.


after 17 hours on the train for a trip that was advertised to take 14 hours, i made it to chiang mai, in the northwestern region of thailand.


some parts of the ancient wall still surround the square-shaped old part of the city.


a canal/moat system also surrounds the old city.


the region is known for wooden carvings and stone/gem inlays.


i wasnt disappointed!




there are markets open all over the city selling food and goods all day, and almost all night!


this group sat right in the middle of the the pedestrian path at a night market. all the musicians were blind and their music sounded amazing!


a beautiful place to visit is the flower market.


these are necklaces or bracelets for your buddha statues!


people present impressive offerings at all the many temples throughout the city. this one includes cigar(ette)s in the style of the hill tribes. i found some at a little hidden shop and tried one out of curiosity. yuck!!




this is the view from inside the little hidden shop:


this man sat with his collection on a completely empty road and seemed very pleased when i asked if i could take his photo.


this was a page inside a beginner's thai language book. so the important scenarios to understand: old people yelling at kids, mustached-men beating snakes, life in prison, and liquor...?


i visited an orphanage one afternoon and played with a lot of active two-year-olds.








i'm working on an entire post dedicated to the food i encountered in chiang mai... coming soon!

isaac newton - the personality

the latest video from the ongoing sixty symbols of physics and astronomy project explores the personality of one of history's greatest scientists: isaac newton.



feel free to suggest topics you'd like to see discussed in a sixty symbols video in the comments.

IMAX hubble 3D - preview

the IMAX hubble 3D website has been updated including a preview of the film.

check it out!

look for the release at IMAX and IMAX 3D movie theatres on march 19th, 2010!

alka-seltzer in space

we take a lot for granted - including gravity. the way our bodies have naturally evolved to function and the way we've designed nearly everything, assumes that gravity always pulls us towards the center of the earth. so what happens when youre in space, and gravity is weak and doesnt have a preferred direction?

some astronauts decided to add an alka-seltzer pill to a glob of water to see what would happen! it wasnt what i expected...

See more funny videos and Technology Videos at Today's Big Thing.

julia child cooks primordial soup

i'm speechless... she uses a big old knife to point with, and later she uses a mixing spoon! haha!

"Julia Child cooks up a batch of primordial soup and explains how these simple ingredients produce amino acids - the building blocks of life. This video played in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Life in The Universe gallery from 1976 until the gallery closed."

blast from the past

there is a nice gallery of photos on flickr that show a modern scene with an image of the location from the past superimposed - the effect is really great! here is my favorite, but be sure to check out the whole gallery.


i also like this one by jason e powell.


found via mike's meandering mind.

star wars cakes

why didnt i think to get a star wars theme cake for my 30th birthday? there's always the 31st to plan for...




see the whole set at funcrawler.com

guinness and the mouse

Some Guinness was spilled on the bar room floor
as the pub was closed for the night.
Out from his hole crept a wee brown mouse
and stood in the pale moonlight.
He lapped up the frothy brew from the floor
and back on his haunches he sat.
And all night long you could hear him roar
"Bring on the God damn cat!!!"

hola mars

right now our neighbor mars is as physically as close as it ever gets to us, a position called opposition. mars is the bright orange speckle rising in the eastern sky.


to get ahold of mars' position in our sky for the next couple months, look up a bit after sunset on friday, the 29th of january, and see our nearly full moon sitting just next to mars in the sky for the evening.

tethys plays peek-a-boo

saturn's moons play games with the space craft cassini in today's astronomy picture of the day. the tiny moon tethys pokes around the side of saturn's largest moon, titan.


you can see a huge crater on tethys in the image, and you can clearly see one of the most intriguing features of titan: the dense atmosphere that surrounds it! titan is the only satellite in our solar system known to have such a substantial atmosphere which places it on the top of the list of candidates to host some sort of microbial extraterrestrial life. there is currently discussion happening about future missions to explore titan more closely.

mike brown (aka - pluto killer!) wrote a great description of his team's discovery of some storms in titan's atmosphere.

you can watch a video of the entire occultation shown in the image above, or you can learn more about saturn from the sixty symbols video!

when a cat upsets your gravity

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

i'll also take this opportunity to point you in the direction of the cat lovers version of the sartorialist: the catorialist!

belly bump

this adorable photo is of an old friend of mine who is pregnant with twins. her little boy is excited about the growing belly!

how many dimensions?

abstruse goose has a funny comic out. i like this punchline, but click here to see the whole thing.

the known universe

todays APOD is a stunning video of the known universe created by the american museum of natural history.



the video flows from the surface of the earth out to our cosmic horizon, which is the farthest part of the universe that is available for us to view.

carnival of space #137

the 137th carnival of space is up over at one astronomer's noise. enjoy this week's summary of space reading!

is that a rocket in your pocket?

speaking of the ambiguously pronounced planet uranus, i was just pointed to the cover of an album from mitch miller... which doesnt leave much to the imagination...


i couldnt find a recording of the music though :(

6 day banana

of the seven days of the banana shelf life, day 6 looks perfect to me!


link

rhythm and geometry

this looks fun to do, but tough to figure out!



spotted at cynical-c

hubble in 3D!

at the american astronomical society meeting last week, i watched astronaut john grunsfeld talk about his experiences during his recent mission to repair the hubble space telescope. he shared personal stories about the other astronauts on the mission, videos they took in flight, emotions he felt during the ups and downs of the mission, and general impressions of the functionality of the new and improved hubble! at the end, the (maybe 3000?) astronomers in the room gave him a much-deserved standing ovation (which i have rarely ever seen from astronomers).


an interesting piece of information shared by grunsfeld (at the right of the image above) is that the pilot of the hubble repair mission, scott altman (center in the image above), was the pilot double for tom cruise's character in the film top gun! he earned a whopping $23 per day for his efforts, but it was his middle finger shown during the infamous upside down air scene.

with all the hoopla surrounding the potential for 3D movies, thanks to the recent release of the film avatar (which i thoroughly enjoyed), i wanted to give you enough time to get excited about a film i'm certainly looking forward to seeing: hubble IMAX 3D!

the crew of STS-125 carried an IMAX camera aboard in order to film the entire 12 day mission for the movie! the film will open in march 2010 and will "chronicle the life story of the hubble space telescope." astronomers used the hubble to capture all the images in the montage below!


another random bit of info about the film - it will be narrated by leonardo dicaprio, seen here recording for the movie in a photo i got via bob jacobs.

how do you pronounce uranus?

i tell you what i think in the newest sixty symbols video (filmed when i was feeling pretty ill before the holiday season!).

impressive improv piano

the video below shows a 14 year old jennifer lin performing at TED in 2004. her whole performance is incredibly impressive, but the improv segment that begins at the 16:20 mark is amazing!



i havent been able to find any information about what she is doing now. does anyone know?