Tag: outer space
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A giddy mass of waltzing things
A quote about the earth from Orbital by Samantha Harvey: It’s not peripheral and it’s not the centre; it’s not everything and it’s not nothing, but it seems much more than something. It’s made of rock but appears from here as gleam and ether, a nimble planet that moves three ways—in rotation on its axis,…
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In favor of the opposition of Saturn
My wife sent me something about the opposition of Saturn last Saturday night, which meant it’d be more visible than usual. While at the library that day I saw they had a monocular telescope for checkout to use with smartphones, so I decided to check it out in case I had the opportunity to try…
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Black hole stun from backwater bipeds
In case you haven’t been following the news (and who can blame you?), that’s the first-ever image of a black hole: There’s plenty of writing out there on what it means, much of it going over my head, but here’s some grounding perspective from Scientific American: It is also worth noting that in the two…
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My Birthday Planets
Thanks to Fourmilab (via kottke), I discovered exactly how the planets were aligned on the day of my birth: You can find your own here.
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The Hunt for Vulcan
I’ve never forgotten the scene in Men in Black, when Jay (Will Smith) and Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) are sitting on a bench facing the New York City skyline. Jay has gotten a brief but shocking glimpse of the secret alien world Kay is trying to recruit him into, one that few people know about.…
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The Martian
I conducted an experiment with The Martian. Too many times I’ve read a book before seeing its movie version and have come out of the theater disappointed they didn’t show this or showed too much of that, and above all that I knew what was going to happen. Seems the conventional wisdom is that you…
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How to Feel Small
I like things that make me feel small. Like If The Moon Were Only 1 Pixel, a “tediously accurate scale model of the solar system” that, as you scroll horizontally, reveals the vast span of our neighborhood: Or Why Time Flies, a philosophical exploration of our fungible awareness of time: Or The Scale of the Universe (my favorite), which, as…
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Einterstellar
My new definition of cosmic irony: to be in the midst of Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe as I went to see Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, a marvel of a film that directly references Einstein and his theory of relativity. I had a chuckle during the film when that moment arrived, not because I…
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An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth
Chris Hadfield couldn’t just be a fighter pilot, engineer, astronaut, photographer, musician, or the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station: he just had to be a damn good writer too. At one point in his superb memoir An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, Hadfield describes what it’s like to exit the ISS into…