Posts Tagged ‘science’

Because you can

Monday, June 21st, 2010

I was just having a conversation on Friday with someone about a bunch of Google employees who had ordered up a ridiculous amount of silly putty so they could do an experiment with dropping it from a great height. As someone educated in a faculty of engineering, this made tremendous sense to me: I’ve done [...]

More on the Synthetic Life thing

Friday, May 21st, 2010

Oh, This Is Going To Be A BIG Deal

Friday, May 21st, 2010

“I feel sure of only one conclusion. The ability to design and create new forms of life marks a turning-point in the history of our species and our planet.” If you haven’t read this yet, read it. I’m going to need some time to take this all in, but I’m going to have to go [...]

Link posts are easy

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Links, pithy comments, you know the drill. The graphics on this one might not be astonishing, but the idea of supermassive black holes being flung from collisons at galactic cores is probably cool enough on its own to sustain interest. I love how science writers drop line like “these objects can have masses equivalent to [...]

Scale and Space

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

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 [...]

Home Sweet Blasted Clean Void

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

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 [...]

A Horror Movie Waiting To Happen

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

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 [...]

March 6, 2010 11:50 pm

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.

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Matters of Gravity

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

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 [...]

The Unholy Tab Closing

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

OK, my open tab situation has got to the point where I was forced to research new Firefox plugins. I might talk about that soon, since that old “favourite plugins” post is waaaay out of date, and due for an updating. Right now, though, I want to run through a bunch of these things, attaching [...]

Professor Membrane’s Modern Medicine Sideshow…

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

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 [...]

The return, and regeneration, of Professor Membrane

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

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 [...]

No Fear Of The Dreaded Two-Day-er

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

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 [...]

Even Deeper Field

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

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.

Bias in my favour

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

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 [...]