Linear A.
Ancient language, lost to the modern day. Largely undecipherable.
This sequence of 12 frames was taken over a span of about 45 minutes on March 12, 2008. In that brief time, Cassini covered almost 25,000 miles in its approach to a flyby encounter with Enceladus. The overexposure and smearing of the images gives a hint of the raw speed involved - 32,211 mph. Shortly after this sequence, at its closest, Cassini approached within 32.3 miles of the surface of Enceladus.
Humans are pretty cool.
The Cassini Narrow Angle Camera is a 1 megapixel sensor on a 2000mm f/10.5 reflector, but I can’t find any details on shutter speeds they actually use to get those images.
I mean on one hand, you’re going really fast, but on the other hand, the moon is very far away. And space is pretty dark when you’re that far from the sun, but then again, the moon is pretty shiny.
And why does it take so long for the camera to start exposing for the big, bright object in the frame, instead of blowing it out and blurring everything? It must be metering automatically, right?
(Previously.)
Trying to write my thesis…
PubMed link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/
Check the citations…
(Source: scienceblogs.com)
LED lamp powered by tomato array.
[sic,sic, sic, sick sick sick]
What do you make of a comment like that?
+1 for remembering other deep-sea extremophiles, but -20 for hubris.
Einstein’s Box
Albert Einstein once envisioned an interesting theoretical experiment in which a single light particle would be trapped and then released, allowing for the measurement of the relationship between mass and energy. The scientific community waited in nerdy anticipation while Einstein set to work on his box. Convinced he’d broken through, Einstein telegraphed Niels Bohr, “Come to Leiden this instant! I have captured a photon—seen it in all its fleeting glory from Alpha to Omega.”
“I’m right here,” replied Bohr from the adjoining room shaking his head and pouring another rum punch. Bohr trundled over to Einstein’s desk where he found his fellow physicist eating a slice of four-cheese pizza.
“God dammit, Al! That was the last piece.”
“Did you see the photon?”
“No.”
“It must have hopped out of the box and onto the pizza.”
“A likely story.”
“Here Niels, you can have the box. Some gorgonzola and maybe a few photons are still left.”
“Keep your stupid box, Al.”
Bohr, as is well documented, abandoned science and returned to his job as a cheese monger in Copenhagen; while Einstein went on to have a distinguished scientific career, despite that hair.
In the course of writing this essay, I was tempted many times to pick a villain. Maybe the perfectly named Almroth Wright, who threw his considerable medical reputation behind the ptomaine theory and so delayed the proper re-understanding of scurvy for many years. Or the nameless Admiralty flunkie who helped his career by championing the switch to West Indian limes. Or even poor Scott himself, sermonizing about the virtues of scientific progress while never conducting a proper experiment, taking dreadful risks, and showing a most unscientific reliance on pure grit to get his men out of any difficulty.
But the villain here is just good old human ignorance, that master of disguise. We tend to think that knowledge, once acquired, is something permanent. Instead, even holding on to it requires constant, careful effort.
tl;dr: scurvy bad, science hard.
freshphotons:madeofstarstuff:altergrin:
dan mccarthy the biography of a carbon atom
Tom Ellard, University of New South Wales
Oh no! Boring social sciences conference coming up!
You need a flask of hooch. Let’s play!
To win Mad Minutes the speaker has to state the bleeding obvious followed by a spectacular name drop. Examples:
Comment from Linear A on the Colliding Web Sciences graphic:
Hey, you know what I’m tired of? Venn diagram abuse.
I mean seriously, what the hell does this “graph” even mean? Math encompasses a large part of psychology, but never touches economics? And I count 13 circles, but only 12 headings. Does the last one represent dark matter? The missing quark?
Good points. Also, the definition of “web science” is a little vague:
The Web is the largest human information construct in history. The Web is transforming society. In order to…
* understand what the Web is
* engineer its future
* ensure its social benefit
…we need a new interdisciplinary field that we call Web Science.Should we really include Biology and Ecology in our study of the web?
Regardless, I like the visualization of the impact and overlap of Psychology, Economics, Law, etc. on technology. I’m not picky about lining up ovals and labels.
I like the inclusion of biology and ecology. The web is made of people, and humans follow the scientific laws defined by those disciplines, so the web must also, to some extent. The web is also made of machines and engineer-y stuff, so we include those disciplines too, and it’s all very groovy, like reading the entire back catalog of Wired magazine.
I’m less enthusiastic about “socio-cultural” as a topic, which defined as “anti-corporate ‘open source’ values” sounds like an artificial construct to quiet the zealots who like to shout about such things. If this is A Science, man up and discuss it in terms of actual disciplines like economics and sociology.
I’m also not sure about focusing strictly on the web, when there are so many other protocols people use to exchange data over the internet. What about email, messaging, virtual worlds, mobile devices… Hey, remember when P2P was going to change the world? The WWW could be replaced in an instant when the next big thing comes along.
So yeah, “web science” is a cool and probably necessary idea. But the graphic was coming via dataviz, and as data visualization goes it wouldn’t even make a good Powerpoint slide.
…boy, am i turning into a bitter curmudgeon or what? i’m gonna get another coffee and write a devastating takedown of the new tori amos album next.
