zombie bowling

in order to advertise a german horror TV channel, a group designed a series of bowling balls that look like chopped off heads which they are calling 13th Street Bowlingheads. spray paint artist Oliver Paaß helped to make them look fairly convincing! they put these bowling balls (and a few other designs) in several bowling alleys around germany...

do they remind anyone else of classic garbage pail kids?

if not now

nice design and message...

via fffound

dirty space news: juno launches to jupiter

yesterday the juno spacecraft launched into space aboard an Atlas V rocket, headed for a mission to analyze jupiter. apparently i wasnt the only one who thought the event qualified as dirty space news!

right??

juno will arrive at jupiter in july 2016 in order to study many still mysterious aspects of the giant planet's existence. astronomers are hoping juno will help our understanding of whether jupiter has a solid core, how much water and ammonia are deep in jupiter's atmosphere, what exactly jupiter's strong magnetic fields look like, and observe jupiter's auroras in detail.

cat's map of the bed

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horizontal milky way

i'm out at siding springs observatory again this week hanging out with some telescopes and kangaroos. this first night of observing has been a hectic one, getting the quirks of the telescope worked out and debugging some new code issues.

luckily, things are running mostly smoothly now, we are collecting spectra of 400 galaxies each hour, and a fellow observer managed to get outside for a few minutes to capture this lovely image of the milky way laying across the night sky :)

Photo Credit:  Maritza Lara-Lopez

red life

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comet crashes into the sun

here is nice footage from NASA of a comet that crashed into the sun on july 5th, 2011.



more details available at skymania

standardized testing

doesnt work.

mail: then and now

so true...

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the shuttles have landed

older generations saw the first humans launch into space and land on the moon. the shuttles have been a solid fixture in my life, all their successes and their incredible challenges.

no matter what difficult decisions the US space program must make over the next several years in light of financial decreases, we should all sit back and appreciate with awe just how much NASA has accomplished over the last several decades with a relatively small investment. they have inspired people all over the world and made space exploration seem like a normal facet of human existence.

truly awesome in the true sense of the word.

there are more photos of the shuttle program available at the big picture.

i'll leave you with this lovely nature video. as sarah suggests, switch to full screen, sit back and enjoy!

marbelous table

fun! want!

attraction/aversion

if this is jewelery artist kerry howley's goal with this collection, she has completely succeeded with me!

Attraction/Aversion is a material exploration of how people can feel seemingly opposing emotional responses simultaneously. The necklaces are made of human hair, a familiar material that we take pride in. However once off of the body hair becomes an innate source of aversion.

because they are truly beautiful pieces, but... ew!!

i'm trying to get over the creepiness and wondering why i find it so creepy. it's something about all the straggly, whispy bits of hair. they remind me of a wad of hair i might find in a shower drain, only beautifully designed.

also, i have no idea how she actually made the hair stay in these shapes.

dirty space news: the flow of pulsar wind

astronomer bryan gaensler recently claimed that the original dirty space news collection is incomplete unless i add Figure 10 of this paper, and then note the first author. so without further ado, here is an illustration of a supernova remnant in the large magellanic cloud:

Figure 10 from authors:  Q. Daniel Wang and Eric V. Gotthelf (1998)

some text from the paper with added emphasis and explanation:

"Such a relatively fast moving young pulsar [star leftover after a supernova explosion] can produce a strongly elongated pulsar wind bubble (Fig. 10). This bubble consists of several distinct regions. First, one may expect a bow shock running ahead of the pulsar, while the corresponding reverse shock terminates the free pulsar wind. The size of the region enclosed by this bow shock can be small, but the pressure can be large, depending on the ram pressure.

Enhanced synchrotron radiation can then make the region especially bright in the X-ray region. Second, accelerated by the pressure gradient between the bow shock and the ambient medium, the shocked wind materials, which are relativistically hot, naturally forms a supersonic jet inside a tunnel in the opposite direction of the pulsar's motion (Wang, Li, & Begelman 1993). Third, the jet likely shoots through the bubble and then induces another bow shock (or a series of oblique shocks) on the other side. Fourth, the terminated wind materials are forced back to the bubble, where most of the pulsar spin-down luminosity is dumped. Let us now examine this picture in a more quantitative way."

indeed.

splitscreen: a love story

Splitscreen: A Love Story from JW Griffiths on Vimeo.

keepin it real

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neptune's birthday

i missed posting about this in time, but july 12th was officially neptune's birthday, because it was exactly one neptunian year (164.79 earth years) since it was discovered in 1846.

here's the sixty symbols video about neptune, where i forget what its major moon is called and talk about beer :)

women's world cup 2011

congratulations to the US national team who has made it to the finals of the women's world cup 2011 currently taking place in germany!! the finals will take place this sunday, july 17th, and see the US take on Japan for the world title! the quarter-final matches of the US vs brasil and france over england were some fantastic highlights so far!

in honor of the excitement of the tournament, i thought i'd share a couple old photos from my serious soccer-playing days, before i busted my knee and had to have ACL reconstruction surgery.

one year my team was lucky enough to go to a week-long training camp at the university of north carolina. throughout the week, various members of the tar heels and the US women's national team spent several training sessions with our team. we spent a whole day playing with, and hanging out with soccer icon mia hamm!! she has scored more international goals in her career than any other US soccer player, male or female.

Mia Hamm, me, i cant remember who he was - the assistant coach?

one of my distinct memories of that day was her excitement at seeing her brother, who visited us on the field. he died a few years later from complications related to aplastic anemia, which is the inspiration behind the mia hamm foundation.


another of the US national team's top all-time scorers is michelle akers. i have no idea really how my coach knew her, but she accepted his invitation to come visit us in ohio and play with us for several training sessions! during one of our scrimmages, i was her mark and i remember thinking she was very tall and incredibly muscular! haha.

Michelle Akers and me

oh man, how much i loved those hot pink shorts and the super cool we are the world t-shirt that i stole from my older sister!

so many of my memories from those times come from playing soccer with these girls and traveling around to tournaments. amazing(ly bad hair cuts!).

not a handball...

the final shuttle has launched

arockalypse at flickr shares this wonderful photo of himself and his father at the first shuttle launch, STS-1, in 1981, and the final shuttle launch, STS-135, just a few days ago on July 8, 2011.

what wonderful moments to share!

reminds me of young me now me but with an incredible setting!