Young Wizards Is My Favorite Book Series Because Where Else Are You Going To Find A Book Where A Twelve

All right, lovely YW people on my dash (and beyond), willing to hook me up on whats so awesome about it? The title sounds dorky but apparently this is good

last night i dreamed i was an orca, and my pod needed me to find out why there were no more fish in our part of the ocean, so i dove down really deep, to where i could draw spell circles on the ocean floor, and performed whale magic to find out.

i don’t remember why there weren’t any fish, but i think the whole point of this dream is that i was a whale wizard, and that’s basically awesome.

Mind-Blowing Beauty of Mars’ Dunes: HiRISE Photos

Mars plays host to a huge number of dune fields — regions where fine wind-blown material gets deposited to form arguably some of the most beautiful dunes that can be found on any planetary body in the solar system. Using the powerful High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, planetary scientists have an orbital view on these features that aid our understanding of aeolian (wind-formed) processes and Martian geology. Here are some of our favorite Mars dunes as seen by HiRISE.

guys

guys

less than three months til the games wizard play release

The most basic mobile phone is in fact a communications devices that shames all of science fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators. Captain Kirk had to //tune// his fucking communicator and it couldn’t text or take a photo that he could stick a nice Polaroid filter on. Science fiction didn’t see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make amazing things happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.

Warren Ellis » How To See The Future (via ultralaser)

#oh my god everything about this article is hitting me where I live     #forsake manufactured normalacy and look at how extraordinary the world is right now     #there are six people living in space and we can /print/ organs and control satilites with apps     #”Voyager 1 is more than 11 billion miles away and it’s run off 64K of computing power and an eight-track tape deck”     #the internet itself is a goddamn miracle in the making in that humanity—vast swathes of otherwise unconnected humanity—gets together     #to watch cat videos and talk about television and laugh at each other’s jokes     #if the world isn’t thrilling you YOU ARE NOT PAYING ATTENTION     #god     #I’m all     #yeah  (via notbecauseofvictories)

Don’t forget the fact that two robots on another planet have Twitter accounts and people here on Earth can follow them and their discoveries. Astronaut Col. Chris Hadfield—my favorite Canadian—has a Tumblr and posted images from space so that we could see what he was seeing. We can watch videos of galaxies merging on YouTube. And we are making so many scientific discoveries that there’s actually a blog called World Science Festival that details discoveries made each WEEK.

Yes, the world is still fucked up in any number of ways, and the problems need to be fixed. But the world’s also amazing.

(via gehayi)

Finally! A black hole that you can visit and survive!

Want a trip through a black hole without having to experience that pesky death? You’re in luck. There’s a special kind of black hole that’s not just survivable, but might get you to another time, or another universe.

Black holes are, traditionally, the scariest things in the universe. Huge, mysterious, inescapable, they wander through the universe and eat everything that gets too close. “Too close” is defined by their event horizon. This is the point at which they go dark, because it requires so much energy to escape them that not even light can get away. Since not even a photon can cross the barrier, no event that happens inside the horizon can ever have an effect on people outside.

Unless, something very odd was going on in the center of the black hole. Most black holes spin - this is something that was discovered way back in the 1960s by physicist Roy Kerr. It wasn’t exactly a shock, because most of the material that collapses into a black hole was already spinning. Sometimes, however, the spin on Kerr black holes goes a little above and beyond. Ever spun a glass of water, or soda bottle, so that the liquid inside swirls? Sometimes, if you spin it enough, the liquid actually parts, leaving a clear center and a spinning ring of water around it. The same kind of thing can happen in Kerr black holes. Instead of a singularity at the center, there’s a ring. And you can go through the open portion of that ring without touching the gravitational crush.

What’s on the other side? A lot of people have wondered. Some people think that these kind of black holes might be our key to time travel. They might be wormholes that let us hop between different points of the universe. Or they might be portals to different universes entirely. First we’ll have to find a few, and then we’ll need a few volunteers to go through. Preferably ones that haven’t seen Event Horizon.

Top Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Second Image: Dana Berry/NASA

Via NASA, Astrophysics Spectator, Discovery.

—Book of Night with Moon, xi, v.3

Sweet…I love these.

hologram: Saturn’s rings, photographed by Cassini, 18th January 2007.

Images taken as Cassini moves from one side of the ring plane to the other, neatly showing how the rings look in reflected and transmitted light (brighter and darker, respectively).

Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI. Animation: AgeOfDestruction.

Clouds Around V1331 Cyg Processing by Judy Schmidt

A complex nebular fountain-like structure that appears to originate from the star it was found around. The morphology of the nebular structure is quantified and discussed. Evidence for secular outflows is found from the optical data.[**]