Placing this here for my own convenience. Full status and for any other cities go to the source:
edit: added more area charts. As I had some false positives lately with just the one.
Archive for category science
Large Hadron Rap
Aug 10
cute video of our impending time/matter space implosion!
Domino Logic Gates
Jul 28
I love when I can post stuff that’s nerdy, yet I can still show to my not-quite-as-nerdy friends.
Here are simple logic gates, done in dominos.
Metronome Synchronization
Jun 21
via coke cans
See more funny videos at CollegeHumor
Wiki Articles of the Day. My attempt at making the wikipedia chain addictions into something (anti-)productive for you, the reader! (Henceforth tagged as WAOTD.)
Hedy Lamarr – Talk about a Renaissance woman. Not only a gorgeous and celebrated actress, but also an award winning scientist.
Hedy Lamarr (November 9, 1913 – January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American actress. Though known primarily for her great beauty and her successful film career, she also co-invented an early form of spread spectrum encoding, a key to modern wireless communication.
I may slot these into the extrinsic posts instead.
Seeing with sound
Nov 27
Sonar. Dolphins do it. Bats do it.
People can too. Or at least one boy can.
Tesla Coil Mario theme
Nov 10
The coolest link you will see all day(week).
Why is it always the Super Mario theme that gets played on weird things? Because it’s awesome, that’s why.
Checkers solved
Jul 20
Reducing the game of checkers into a group of algorithms of movement, computer scientist Jonathan Schaeffer has developed a program called Chinook that he has proven that at the least will draw. Apparently checkers played in a perfect game will always end in a draw.
Forget hoity-toity chess programs, Chinook has long ago ditched any human competition. The work since then was only to find an unbeatable game, and a proof to the algorithm that is the game of checkers. On the Chinook website is a link to the proof for verification. (I started to, but then I realized how much non-fun I had in my discrete math and program verification course, and decided to put it off until never.)
You can also play against the program, in a more dumbed-down version that is difficult, but that won’t always win.
Mars is the pits
Jun 7
Seven dark patches were found on Mars near a volcano, and dubbed the seven sisters, by researchers last month.
This week, they focused in on one of them, and it appears to be a very deep hole. A hole that could most likely be able to reach a depth inside Mars that would be warm enough to have liquid water.
I can’t wait until the Mars Bats Invasion.
The geological oddity measures some 330 feet (100 meters) across and is located on an otherwise bright dusty lava plain to the northeast of Arsia Mons, one of the four giant Tharsis volcanoes on the red planet.
The hole might be the sort of place that could support life or serve as a habitat for future astronauts, researchers speculated.
Three things that seemingly have nothing to do with each other, but John Kanzius stumbled on a link between them. While trying to do his own private research on ways to battle cancer, he was working with radio frequencies to attack cancer cells. What he found was that the radio frequencies he was using separated the hydrogen and oxygen from salt water, enough to hold a constant flame above a test tube filled only with the salt water.
Discovered just as most great inventions through time: while researching something completely different, someone stumbles on something completely new and unrelated.
The only thing I wonder about is the same I wonder about the other guy who ran his car on water recently, it’s (sort-of) conservation of energy. Or rather, does it take more energy to get the “fuel” out of the water than is obtained from burning it as a fuel?
Randall Munroe writes xkcd, one of the very few webcomics that I can truly laugh at, connect to, and that I never get tired of. (I love dangling prepositions!) He’s a very smart and insightful guy, and often interjects math and science into the strips, as well as purely philosophical ramblings. He gave a talk at MIT a few weeks ago.
Here is a link to some pictures from the talk.
And here are some videos of the event, including him being pelted with plastic balls (which is homage to one of his strips about the nature of becoming an adult.)
and you can find a few more by using this xkcd query to YouTube.
A lot of fantastical space news in the past few months, I can’t believe I missed this one.
In March, NASA released images of a Saturn that show an odd hexagon formation spinning over it’s north pole. The pictures are stunning, especially the moving gif.
“This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.”
Two spacecraft, just enough apart to make a stereoscopic image of anything they are pointng at, have been used to make stereoscopic images of the Sun.
Here is the release statement.
And here is the link to the page with all the pictures. Although they are true stereoscopic, they don’t seem to be offering the pictures in anything but red/blue 3d glasses format. There are movies as well as pictures.
Some samples (click to enlarge):
