Placing this here for my own convenience. Full status and for any other cities go to the source:

cleardarksky.com

edit: added more area charts. As I had some false positives lately with just the one.

cute video of our impending time/matter space implosion!

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.

via coke cans

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.

Sonar. Dolphins do it. Bats do it.

People can too. Or at least one boy can.

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.

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.

More on this story at Scientific American

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):

For and from my brother.

If you can see anything in these two pictures, you are probably colorblind. I’m not sure if this means there could be a way to make colorblindness useful, but it’s a good demonstration nonetheless. Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for the “answers”.

from Structure Strangeness

and the “answers”:

This fact you often forget.

Here, let me help :

Especially when you just make shit up. Apparently a

Dr James Anderson, from the University of Reading’s computer science department, says his new theorem solves an extremely important problem – the problem of nothing.

link

He calls his “number” nullity, and it is a representation of a number “off of the number line”. He proudly touts in his video that he has solved the problem that has been plaguing mathematicians for 1200 years, ie: solving problems that would require division by zero. He thereby demonstrates solving 0⁰ with his nullity.

The problem here is, anyone can make up anything not attached to the number line (he showed integers in the video, but I assume he meant all Reals). He is attaching rules that were developed for Real numbers, and trying to say they work for things that aren’t on the Real number line. You can’t go arbitrarily attaching theorems to things, no matter how basic they are. He is making a label for the absence of division by zero, no more. And you can’t compute jack with just a label.

Well, if you can just make crap up like that, I could make, say, a “new” number 3! This number 3 doesn’t reside on the number line, but I’m going to brilliantly assign it the value of the integer 6. Sure, it isn’t actually six, but I’m going to treat it like six so, therefore by my theory: 3 + 3 = 12! w00t, I made new math!

I tried looking over the article to see if he tried, y’know, actually proving something like nullity should exist, but I didn’t find it. If anyone else does, let me know. The report states clearly he is a Computer Science professor at the University of Reading. I’m shocked. I love how he’s showing it to a bunch of pre-teens instead of his actual peers. The kids don’t know what the hell is going on and won’t argue against it. They get to be on TV for it, I mean, why protest?

I wish the semester weren’t over, but I may try to bounce this article off my Discrete Math teacher to watch his head pop off.

Here’s one released today from NASA, but only in a handout to reporters. Luckily, many of them scanned it. It’s the Victoria Crater on Mars, the same one the Opportunity robot has trucked to the edge of.

(Click the pictureto get the full size jobby from Wikipedia)

Beaming people in “Star Trek” fashion is still in the realms of science fiction, but physicists in Denmark have teleported information from light to matter bringing quantum communication and computing closer to reality.

read more…

This half-wolf, half-something was killed in Maine yesterday. It looks eerily human from the picture, so much so that I have a hard time not thinking it’s fake. The story is from a legitimate news source, as far as I know.

Apparently residents have spotted and reported a weird beast with eerie howls for the last 15 years. But so have thousands of girl scout campouts over the last hundred years.

Our solar system has two new members, and one prodigal son.

The International Astronomy Union (IAU) finally decided what constitutes a planet and reaffirmed that Pluto belongs as one. In doing so, three other bodies in our system have been elevated to planetary status: Pluto’s moon Charon, a previous asteroid named Ceres, and the nicknamed “Xena” (2003 UB313).

All the new planets combined with Pluto have their own classification: Plutons. I guess they are Planet-lites. This ends the debate (for now) over whether Pluto should be known and taught as a planet. And it firmly cements Mickey’s dog.

More info from Guardian Unlimited…

edit: apparently I spoke too soon. Not only was this proposal struck down (I had thought it was already apporved but in the final stages of being initiated) but now Pluto is technically no longer a planet. it is now classified as a dwarf planet along with the 3 others mentioned above.

There has been a wave of distributed computing projects over the years. The first big public one was SETI@Home, the search for extraterrestrial radio signals from intelligent beings. (Although, some may argue that that crown should be given to GIMPS, the search for ever larger Mersenne Primes). Sometimes associated with wacky UFO dreamers that call Art Bell nightly, and othertimes applauded for it’s novel approach to a huge issue: How to sort through infinitely long radios streams on infinitely many channels, to possibly find someone else out there.

Eventually, the concept started to catch on. Cancer research, AIDS research, protein folding, artificial intelligence, Riemann Zeta functions… you name it, there was some kind of distributed computing project for it.

Stardust@Home doesn’t use your computer to process data, it uses your eyes. It uses everyones eyes to scan a sheet of aerogel at microscopic levels to find interstellar dust.

On January 15, 2006, the Stardust spacecraft’s sample return capsule parachuted gently onto the Utah desert. Nestled within the capsule were precious particles collected during Stardust’s dramatic encounter with comet Wild 2 in January of 2004 and something else, even rarer and no less precious: tiny particles of interstellar dust that originate in distant stars, light-years away. They are the first such pristine particles ever collected in space, and scientists are eagerly waiting for their chance to “get their hands” on them.

Before they can be studied, though, these tiny interstellar grains will have to be found. This will not be easy. Unlike the thousand of particles of varying sizes collected from the comet, scientists estimate that Stardust collected only around 45 interstellar dust particles. They are tiny—only about a micron (a millionth of a meter) in size! These miniscule particles are embedded in an aerogel collector 1,000 square centimeters in size. To make things worse the collector plates are interspersed with flaws, cracks, and an uneven surface. All this makes the interstellar dust particles extremely difficult to locate.

If we were doing this project twenty years ago, we would have searched for the tracks through a high-magnification microscope. Because the view of the microscope is so small, we would have to move the microscope more than 1.6 million times to search the whole collector. In each field of view, you would focus up and down by hand to look for the tracks. This is so much work, that even starting twenty years ago, we would still be doing it today!

I’ve been waiting for this project to finally start, as it’s been delayed a few times over the last year. But it finally started last week, and I have given several goes to the image viewer. I can’t stare at the images for too long, but I can give it a few minutes a day. I like the direction that it takes us. I mean, the search for interstellar dust is neat and all, but what I really mean is the way it is taking distributed “computing” to another level.

Seemed to be an obvious joke, but no… A recently discovered dinosaur species has been officially named with the help of a children’s museum to: Dracorex hogwartsia.

“Officially endorsed” by Rowling.

wow.

Creepy but fascinating evolution of a parasite wasp that literally does brain surgery on roaches to turn them into zombies. It then rides the roach by controlling the roaches antennas, and turns it into a living host for its offspring.