Astronomy:
This is at least the second article I've seen about liquid water at or near the site of one of our landers on Mars. Given the helpful diagram at the right (edited from a NASA image), can anyone tell me what I'm missing?- It looks like part of the fireball seen over Austin last weekend has been found. Neat! Bad joke/question: It's a meteor in the sky, and a meteorite on the ground. If you throw it or take it on a plane, is it a meteor again?
- The good news: Europa was selected as the target for a big NASA mission. The bad news: we won't get there until 2025 or 2026. The worse news: ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.
- Given that the Hubble repair mission was one of the first things I blogged about on here, news that Hubble might not get repaired due to the debris from the colliding satellites has made me sad.
- Luckily, I have this Flickr tagger thingy to make me happy again. You post an image of the sky to Flickr, a server analyzes it and tells you what's in it, and the people running the server get another shot to analyze to see if it has any info they missed. Awesome.
Technology:
- I was in love with this G1 Android-controlled robotic blimp the first time I saw it, but I think I've accepted that it isn't worth the $600 or so it'd take to put it together.
- I. Want. So. Bad.
- A new company is working on commercial, space-based solar power within a decade. Sweet. There's a cool Asimov story about that in I think it was I, Robot (the collection of short stories that has zero relation to the movie, if for no other reason than that the short stories are entertaining).
- Ok, bear with me. DARPA's remote-controlled insects are absolutely awesome, and not at all creepy. But I understand that it probably sounds like they're creepy. Here's the thing: Imagine a spy camera, tiny speaker, microphone, and transmitter on these things. Now imagine a rescue crew at the other end of the remote control, searching through rubble for earthquaker survivors or whatnot. Now imagine a cockroach crawling up to someone's ear and whispering, "Stay calm, we're coming for you." Ok, you're right. That's creepy. But it's still freaking awesome.
Politics:
- Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas is likely to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. I had heard her name when I wrote my picks, but I thought Daschle was a lock. Oops.
- This comparison of diagramming an Obama sentence to diagramming a Palin sentence is high geekery, and thus awesome.
- Teehee. The Obama Administration is setting the right-wing loonies up as foils. I love this strategy. "Look how crazy our opponents are." Giggle. Getting the right wing to either say, "These people don't speak for us!" or "Yes, we're crazy!" (leaving pretty much no other choice) is just beautiful.
Entertainment:
- Nate Silver has figured out who's going to win Oscars this weekend. Why bother having the ceremony? Ah, I see; we need to find out who wins Best Supporting Actress (apparently Kate Winslet won it in all the other awards, but she got nominated for Best Actress for the same role at the Oscars, and that threw his model off).
Atheism:
Art:
- Layer Tennis sounds absolutely awesome. I may have to try something similar (but on a non-competitive level) with McCarron.
- Every frame in this movie is a painting. Over 6000 paintings for a five-minute film. Beautiful, but I really wish the artist had chosen different music to set it to.
Science:
- Very briefly: One of Einstein's problems with quantum mechanics was that it allowed for entanglement of particles, leading to "spooky action at a distance," where things done to one particle happen to the other one, too. It turns out the human eye may be sensitive enough to detect it. If so, the people detecting it would briefly become entangled with one another. This is leading me to visions of the precogs in Minority Report or perhaps the pilots in Dune. Very strange, very potentially cool.
- Damn you, YouTube! How can you not have a clip of "Your Komodo Dragon" from The Freshman? Is it because only about six of us actually saw that movie, and nobody bought the DVD to rip it? My comments about this story of a thought-to-be-extinct bird being photographed and then promptly sold as food would now only make sense to the six of us. But seriously, isn't that tragically hilarious, fellow Freshman-viewers?
- I am absolutely going to have to buy one of these posters to frame and hang.
The Internets:
- Shaquille O'Neal Tweets, and is a bit of a tech junky. Neat.
Jeebus, this post has 26 links in it. As always, leave your comments on these or anything else (but seriously, you could probably keep it to these this time) below.
3 comments:
Followup: By the phase diagram of water (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Water_phase_diagram.svg/512px-Water_phase_diagram.svg.png) and the ~10 Pa/250 K conditions on Mars (at the lander site; it's colder other places, and presumably slightly warmer in some places), water should sublimate from ice to vapor. The reason liquid water is interesting is it suggests things are dissolved in the water that change that phase diagram, thus making liquid water *elsewhere* on Mars possible.
To see what I mean, follow along from the line on the left just above "1" in that diagram. As T increases, you should pass directly from the "S" (solid) section to the "V" (vapor) section. Going through "L" (liquid) requires something funky going on.
1. I'm alone in the office this week and we have a full kitchen. I'll take a stab at your creations. But I think I'll substitute jalapenos in half of the batch.
2. Though I love making the reference myself, we did go to Europa in the end: http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0345413989. Twice even: http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0345438205.
3. The painting movie is awesome.
1. That's the whole thing. Put in whatever you want!
2. Yeah yeah yeah.
3. Indeed.
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