inside the image above, ronnie walker has included a comet, a spiral galaxy, an open star cluster, and a supernova remnant. can you find them? can you also identify the rings of Supernova 1987A, the Eskimo Nebula, the Crab Nebula, Thor's Helmut, the Carhwheel Galaxy, and the Ant Nebula? there are also several other additions when you inspect a large version of the image.
yes, they get a bit jarring when you actually listen to them, but they easily fit into the background hum enough that they dont really annoy me. what's more annoying is the low quality of football played so far in this tournament! i imagine the play will improve as the players settle into the tournament, get used to the altitude, the uber-round and light jabulani ball, and the loud vuvuzela horns droning during the games. i hope so, anyway.
one other thing - do the replays shown during the world cup matches seem ridiculously slow to anyone else? almost any expression a person can make looks impossibly hilarious when played really sllooooowwwlly!! i've laughed out loud several times when they show frustrated coaches or players. one memorable look came from david beckham on the sideline during the USA vs. england match. the image below is obviously photoshopped (see tv reflection in table), but i still think its funny!
i've been looking forward to today's match between the USA and England for a loooong time! my flag is flying high and my red cowboy boots are all shined up and ready for victory - YEEHAW! i think which ever of these two teams manages to win the group will have a relatively easy time making it thru to the late stages! you never know though, we'll see...
so who do you have placed to win the whole shuh-bang?? i'm going for spain this time because i like a lot of individual players (torres, of course) and i'm hoping for a big win by a team that has never won la copa mundial before. i know the USA surprised us all last summer by defeating spain and making it to their first ever FIFA international tournament final, but my statement still stands.
in other world cup new, i think the official world cup anthem by shakira is so bad that i wont even post a link to it, but i will share this video by the great angelique kidjo and famous musical crew:
during the build up to this world cup, i learned about the phenomenon of the world cup sticker book, which many people fill up during their childhood world cups, but i never knew about it growing up in the US... so i've decided to collect now! i've filled up about half the book so far, but i have a lot of repeat player stickers. as i do not know very many young people here to trade with, please let me know if you have extras that you might like to swap!!!
all i see are equations: a funny little comic by abstruse goose.
this is funny, but not entirely true (hopefully)! i tend to look at things on more of an intuition level - not always attaching equations to simple events. if something confuses me or doesnt make sense at first glance, then i'll think about it a bit more in depth in order to try to understand it.
the comic above is posted with a cool link to found functions and a quote from the late great carl sagan: science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
this reminded me of a little video clip i saw this week where neil degrasse tyson discusses how we should be trying to teach students and people how to ask questions about why things are the way they are instead of just trying to memorize some facts or believe anything people tell you.
ever wonder how the shuttle gets from the big storage locker to the upright launchpad position? this incredible ~4 min timelapse video from Scott Andrews, Stan Jirman and Philip Scott Andrews tells the six-week story of the preparation for launch.
[embedded video was a pain, so please CLICK HERE to view]
the video shows the discovery shuttle preparing for the STS-131 mission. make sure to watch there very end, when the shuttle returns to earth!
steve martin is apparently tired of making funny films and writing books and has decided to take his banjo-playing a little more seriously. he released a record last year and has been hitting several music festivals this year with the steep canyon boys. here they are singing a little song called "atheists don't have no songs."
i managed to cut myself while gardening, then burn myself across the cut in a perpendicular direction while cooking. it looks like a little dagger from zelda.
it has certainly been a rough week for the central american country of guatemala. the big picture gives a rough idea of the aftermath of the volcanic ash from pacaya volcano eruption, landslides caused by tropical storm agatha, and this amazing photo of a sinkhole that swallowed an entire building in guatemala city!!
the sink hole is estimated to be 30 meters wide and over 60 meters deep. and looks like something straight out of science fiction. incredible.
a couple weekends ago i went to a music festival called all tomorrow's parties which was curated by simpsons creator matt groening (pronounced GRAY-ning, apparently).
interestingly, in order to get to the festival, we had to drive by a local power plant which i like to call england's "springfield."
as the curator, matt groening chose and invited all the bands that came and designed the programs. he made four different program covers... the one on the right features the strange-looking and energetic iggy pop and the left shows daniel johnston with his famous hi, how are you character, jeremiah the frog.
one of the most memorable acts for me was definitely daniel johnston.
clocky is an alarm clock that runs away from you and hides after you hit the snooze button. when the alarm goes off again, you are forced to get out of bed and find clocky, therefore making you less likely to snooze indefinitely.
this clever little device was invented by gauri nanda while she was a graduate student at MIT. she published the study and earned herself a 2005 Ig nobel prize! the Ig nobel prizes are awarded each year by an organization called improbable research to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology."
so, congratulations gauri... only a few years too late ;)
the rose and crown pub in nottingham offers a plethora of condiments to choose from when eating in their establishment:
ironically, HP sauce, which is commonly called "brown sauce," has a blue packet.
i wondered whether the contents of the packets offered as wide a variety of colors as their containers. the answer is simply, no.
we considered doing a blind taste test in our office to see whether people could identify each condiment by taste alone. in the end, we didnt go thru with this experiment. the results didnt seem to be worth the flavours.
seth shostak is a senior astronomer at the SETI institute, but he used to make films when he was in graduate school. great to see old hobbies of well-known astronomers!
seth writes: "One of the many doubtful activities of my youth was making films. I started doing this at age 11, and by the time I was a teenager, my buddy Jerry Rebold and I had already constructed a sound system that occasionally worked with our wind-up, 16mm camera.
In 1967, while in grad school, fellow student Bob O'Connell, Jerry Rebold and I made a half-hour film entitled "The Teenage Monster Blob from Outer Space, Which I Was." This parody of 1950s sci-fi films starred six pounds of Play-Doh.
The film bombed. It was, as O'Connell called it, "a turkey." This disgusting failure prompted us to change our cinematic strategy in two ways: (1) our next film was just going to be a trailer, rather than a complete film -- that way we could save money and just put in the good parts, and (2) if we were making turkeys, why not make a REAL turkey?
Ergo, this short "preview" film, shot mostly at Caltech and at that school's Owens Valley Radio Observatory. Observant viewers will note then-department chair Jesse Greenstein in the role of Walter Cronkite, and a few other astronomers too (including yours truly).
"The Turkey that Ate St. Louis" was entered in the Baltimore International Film Festival, and automatically inserted into the feature-film category, where it faced competition from major motion pictures from both America and Europe. Despite this uneven playing field, "The Turkey" lost.
"The Teenage Monster Blob" eventually became more popular. Too late."
the sky is blue, the sun is shining, and i´ve been bombarded by birthday besitos already! me gusta mucho.
so far barcelona has proven to be a fascinating city to explore. from getting lost in the gothic neighborhoods to finding the modernista architecture, its certainly not a boring place to be! i´m going to walk around montjuic park today, and then try to think of something interesting to cook for my wonderful hosts for dinner.
i´m staying in the big city until friday, then i head off along the coast for the rest of my trip. happy happy joy joy.
in honor of the world cup next month, a pub near my house is offering sausages from a dozen different countries playing in the tournament. it really made me laugh when i saw the sign, but now i'm curious about what sausages will be featured from various countries like the US, france, and even england. so of course i will be watching at least a few matches there!
i think the sausage variety is a much better idea than the one developed by Walkers crisps (potato chips). they have created 15 new flavours of crisps from different countries in the world cup, including: South African sweet chutney, Spanish chicken paella, Irish stew, American cheeseburger, Japanese chicken teriyaki, etc...
i mean, the british love their crisps and they certainly have an arsenal of unique and interesting flavours already on the shelves (eg. "prawn cocktail" or "smoky bacon"), but i think maybe this has gone too far....?
once i recognized the pattern, i knew it had to be continued: i'm going to try to spend my birthdays in different countries for as many years as i can!
the spacecraft cassini continues to explore saturn's environment and captured this lovely timelapse of saturn's aurora between october 5th and 8th, 2009.
auroras (aurori? aurorae?) occur because energetic particles coming from the sun react with a planet's magnetic field. magnetic fields naturally have directional field lines which act as "traffic lanes" that guide the electrically charged solar wind particles to the north and south magnetic poles.
once concentrated at the poles, the particles begin to react with the gas in the planet's upper atmosphere. the atoms and molecules of the atmospheric gas absorb some of the energy of the foreign particles and become "excited." when they get exhausted from being excited, they return to their relaxed state by sending off a photon of light which we see collectively as the glow of an aurora.
the type of gas in the atmosphere that reacts with the solar particles determines the color of the aurora we see. on earth, the gas is mostly atomic oxygen (which produces a red glow), molecular nitrogen (blue), and molecular oxygen (green).
the animated image of saturn's aurora is almost as mesmerizing as voyager's approaching view of jupiter in the late 1970s.
what is the connection between giraffes, wine corks, and the distribution of galaxies in the universe? watch the newest sixty symbols video to find out! i found this one really interesting...
astronaut mike massimino, who was on the mission to fix the hubble space telescope, teaches us the process of how one uses the toilet while in the weightless atmosphere of space. the astronauts discuss their individual techniques (not in too much detail, dont worry), and they also reveal the dirty little secret of NASA space flight: the "alignment camera."
if you have clear skies today, look for the tiny crescent moon and try to spot venus nearby! its rare (and exciting, i think) to see another planet during the day.
the pair will be brilliant in the evening sky as well!
