Since I was just talking about scale and space in the comments, I thought I should also pop in this little number I saw today on the site of absolutely-damn-great SF writer Walter Jon Williams.
(If it were me, I would have worked O Fortuna into the soundtrack–but then, if it were me it wouldn’t look [...]
Posted in One-and-done, Science and Technology | No Comments »
What you’re looking at there is something called The Local Cavity–although in this case “local” takes on a meaning somewhat larger than in typical conversation. It’s essentially a 300-light-year in diameter hole in space. Maybe ‘hole’ is stretching it a bit, since it’s not so much that it’s empty, as that it’s WAY less full [...]
Posted in Science and Technology | 2 Comments »
That’s an image from the “Blood Falls”, a five-story, blood-red waterfall that pours very slowly–the falls are frozen, and so flow slowy–out of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys. That multi-coloured bump in the lower left is a tent, if that helps you get an idea of scale
The falls were first observed around [...]
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If these are really the 10 most absurd scientific papers from last year then published hard science has nothing, absurditywise, on published humanities. (I’d actually be interested in reading the results of “Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?”)
(0 Comments)Very busy this week on birthday-related activities. Regular schedule to resume soon. In the meantime, here are a couple of cool simulations to play with, since that seems to be something I’m interested in this week. First, a physics tool to simulate cloth as a grid of constrained points. Second, a quite cool fire simulation–I especially like making words and images out of wood and then setting them ablaze.
(0 Comments)What you’re looking at there is the sad and beautiful story of the death of two stars, and the casting of two other survivors into the darkness.
I’ve been sitting here playing with the My Solar System gravity simulator since reading about it in Discovery–it’s a cool educational toy for modelling interaction of bodies under gravity. [...]
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Just as a follow-up to that last post, I noticed this morning some recent research which essentially proves that women find the same man more attractive if they see him sitting in an expensive car, than in a less expensive one. Men don’t care about what car a woman is in. (Fortunately for the women of Canada, I use my beat-up, high mileage Focus to help mask the blinding brilliance of my attractiveness.)
(0 Comments)And the professor is back to lead us through the second in our series of posts looking at real, actual, modern science stories that illustrate the “we’re living in science fiction” notion. Last time we focused primarily on medicine, and specifically on different kinds of regeneration. We’re still working our way through modern mad medical [...]
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Having just mentioned that I prefer transcript to video, let me cite another case where I would make an exception.
Here’s a quote from an IM chat I was having with a Boston pal last week:
(9:15:32 AM) Chris: Friday 7pm
The Singularity: An Appraisal
Alastair Reynolds
Karl Schroeder
Charles Stross
Vernor Vinge
Arguably the idea of the Singularity — a period [...]
Posted in Books, Science and Technology | No Comments »
I am dragging the Professor out of the archives to headline a series of link posts I’m going to be doing about medical “we live in science fiction now” stories (and maybe some medical “mad science”) pieces as well. I’ve been gathering these stories for quite some time–each one alone is a bit shocking or [...]
Posted in Science and Technology | 1 Comment »
It’s weird–or maybe not so weird, really–but reading certain news items my reactions are almost entirely filtered through my years of training as a science fiction reader. Sometimes I read the story and suddenly see all kinds of comparisons between some real world event and things I’ve read–either direct connections, or analogies. Sometimes I read [...]
Posted in Food and Drink, Science and Technology | 1 Comment »
You may recall that I was pretty seriously geeked a while back by the implications of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
Well, they’ve taken a new image, using infrared light this time, which lets them see even deeper.
There is information, images, videos, and more about the newly release survey at the Hubble site.
Posted in Science and Technology | No Comments »
Speaking of battle-of-the-sexes banter fodder, and academic papers, you did all see that article last week about the researchers who wanted to compare the views of men in their 20s who had never been exposed to pornography with regular users? You know, the one where they had to cancel the research because they couldn’t find any men in their 20s who had never been exposed to porn…
(0 Comments)You know the punchline: “I don’t make the rules, I just enjoy them.” I pull this out every now and then when Dr. Wife points out to me some way in which our society is constructed to make things better for men, while giving women the less pleasant end of the stick.
I’m sure I’ll get [...]
Posted in Science and Technology | 2 Comments »
Watch this. Just watch it.
Posted in Science and Technology | 4 Comments »
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