Well, I got the Mallo-Ware bowls I bought from eBay, and they were in better shape than they looked in the listing, and Dash has clearly busted his last bowl. Which leads to a thought: I used to prowl garage sales for entertainment, halfheartedly hoping to find something useful. (I once got a completely functional [...]
Posts Tagged ‘astronomy’
The Mutability of Immutable Decay
Boy, did this come out of left field: Something in the Sun alters the rates of radioactive decay of certain isotopes. Read that again, and slowly. You are in the presence of an exceedingly rare thing: experimental results that call into question something once thought to be about as settled as science gets. To summarize [...]
Redeye-ing the Perseids
Just a quick reminder: The Perseid meteor shower should peak tonight just before dawn, so if you can manage to haul outside between three and four ayem you are almost guaranteed to see some interplanetary grit hit the fan. Look east, but pay attention to your peripheral vision, because the meteors can appear in any [...]
Odd Lots
Several people have asked me what I think of the Calibre ebook reading, management, sync, and conversion system, and that’s in fact what I’ve been fooling with in recent days. There’s a lot in the package, way more than in any other single ebook reader or manager that I’ve yet seen. A review will follow [...]
Odd Lots
Jupiter has always looked better with a few belts, but now, astonishingly enough, one of them has gone missing. Ever want a stuffed muon? Head right over to the Particle Zoo, where that and many other cuddly plush species of atomic debris can be had, including a few (like the tachyon) that have never been [...]
Odd Lots
Pete Albrecht sent the above image, and challenged me to characterize it. What would you call it? (Answer at the end of this entry.) The people who created the indie WWII film The Downfall have had enough, and persuaded YouTube to pull hundreds of parodies of the well-known scene in which Hitler freaks out when [...]
Odd Lots
Here’s a great article from NASA on the unexpected success it’s had with the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) spacecraft in spotting previously unknown asteroids in the infrared spectrum. WISE is detecting hundreds of new asteroids every day, which is unnerving, since a rock no bigger than a Motel 6 could cause regional devastation greater [...]
Odd Lots
It happens all the time, but it’s rare that we actually watch it happen: a comet falling into the Sun. (It’s unclear to me what the brief tiny streaks are, since SOHO is a spacecraft and the image was not taken through Earth’s atmosphere, where meteors would look like that. Meteors in the solar atmosphere?) [...]
Odd Lots
Wow! The Authors’ Guild finally had a good idea a couple of weeks ago: Who Moved My Buy Button, a Web site that tracks Amazon’s “Buy” button for any given title. If the Buy button goes away (for example, if the book goes out of stock or if the publisher places it out of print–or [...]
Odd Lots
Here’s a nice detailed article about how Linux treats hard disks and how Linux partitioning works. We now have two major sunspots on the visible face of the Sun. I don’t remember the last time I saw that. (Most of the specks we’ve been giving sunspot numbers to in the last couple of years don’t [...]