Tag: outer space
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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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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 […]