theidlerhour
"To awaken my spirit through hard work and dedicate my life to knowledge... What do you seek?"
229 posts
Latest Posts by theidlerhour
Mars will lose its largest moon, but gain a ring
Mars’ largest moon, Phobos, is slowly falling toward the planet, but rather than smash into the surface, it likely will be shredded and the pieces strewn about the planet in a ring like the rings encircling Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune.
UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Benjamin Black and graduate student Tushar Mittal estimate the cohesiveness of Phobos and conclude that it is insufficient to resist the tidal forces that will pull it apart when it gets closer to Mars.
Mars tugs differently on different parts of Phobos. As Phobos gets closer to the planet, the tugs are enough to actually pull the moon apart, the scientists say. This is because Phobos is highly fractured, with lots of pores and rubble. “Dismembering it is analogous to pulling apart a granola bar”, Black said, “scattering crumbs and chunks everywhere.”
Read more about the fate of Phobos
The Princess in the Forest. Gouache on paper. 35.5 x 40 cm.
Art by John Bauer.(1882-1918).
Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.
Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions: The Agony of Being Connected to Everything in the Universe (via operationdeitas)
There is no such thing as veganism as there are always going to be microscopic animals on everything you eat.
Tonight please pray for all the innocent lives that will be lost in Syria due to the airstrike decision which has been agreed upon.
Subvisual Subway - Bacteria of the New York City subway- Craig Ward
Vantablack is a substance made of carbon nanotubules, and is the blackest substance ever created. It absorbs approximately 99.965% of visible light that hits it. When a photon strikes the material, instead of bouncing off of it (like most other surfaces), it becomes trapped in the nanotubules, continually deflecting from tube to tube before eventually becoming heat.
(Source)
Lego Sisyphus
Destroy the idea that men should respect women because we are their daughters, mothers, and sisters. Reinforce the idea that men should respect women because we are people.
(via masalaoflife)
Teen breaks Rubik’s Cube new world record (video)
DENDROMORPHIC
[adjective]
shaped like a tree.
Etymology: from Greek dendron, “tree” + morphē, “shape”.
[hoooook]
If Earth had Saturn’s Rings
From an excellent post by Jason Davis
From Washington, D.C., the rings would only fill a portion of the sky, but appear striking nonetheless. Here, we see them at sunrise.
From Guatemala, only 14 degrees above the equator, the rings would begin to stretch across the horizon. Their reflected light would make the moon much brighter.
From Earth’s equator, Saturn’s rings would be viewed edge-on, appearing as a thin, bright line bisecting the sky.
At the March and September equinoxes, the Sun would be positioned directly over the rings, casting a dramatic shadow at the equator.
At midnight at the Tropic of Capricorn, which sits at 23 degrees south latitude, the Earth casts a shadow over the middle of the rings, while the outer portions remain lit.
via x
What is to give light must endure burning.
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning (via nezua)
Once you start thinking of ‘poet’ as identity, once you start thinking that being a poet is just like being anything else that you are, as being something else that you were born, then you can go about doing the things that poets do, and you can go about that more comfortably. Or at least I think so. Or at least it gives you a rationale for why you’re doing what poets do. Like, ‘Why are you still in the dark, trying to read, at two o’clock in the morning?’ ‘Oh, because I’m a poet.’ ‘Why are you pulling your car over to write a line down and you’re already late to where you’re going?’ ‘Because I’m a poet.’
Jericho Brown, interviewed by Elisa Gonzalez for Washington Square Review (via bostonpoetryslam)
Is it possible to have a spacesuit that is skin tight? My logic on this is that space wants to separate your bodies atoms but can the pressure be neutralized by having a tight enough skin suit? Am I even making sense?
Meet Dava Newman:
Now NASA’s Deputy Administrator (second-in-command). She’s spent years at MIT developing what’s known as the “BioSuit” - basically a skintight spacesuit that would use mechanical counter-pressure to apply about a third of an atmosphere on the body, enabling exploration with full range of motion, minimizing the energy spent fighting your own bubble-boy-of-a-suit.
There were a couple of problems remaining when she left to work for NASA:
The design so far still includes a pressurized helmet that has a seal issue with the rest of the suit. Also certain parts of the suit (the hands as you can see above) are difficult to get quite right.
The second problem is going to be returned to in a few years. The last I heard the research group was going to let material science develop carbon nanotubes and graphene a bit more and then try using those two materials somehow in the design.
It’s a super promising design and I hope they get it down pat! As is, it stands to benefit the medical community as well as to open astronaut qualifications to people shorter than 5′5″ (or somewhere around there) - below which apparently they can’t even apply to be an astronaut due to the spacesuits not being made small enough.
(Image credit: Professor Dava Newman: Inventor, Science Engineering; Guillermo Trotti, A.I.A., Trotti and Associates, Inc. (Cambridge, MA): Design; Dainese (Vincenca, Italy): Fabrication; Douglas Sonders: Photography)
This satellite, Explorer 24, was a 12-foot-diameter inflatable sphere developed by an engineering team at Langley. It provided information on complex solar radiation/air-density relationships in the upper atmosphere. It was launched on November 21, 1964.
We need people who don’t ask us to become different for their own acceptance and terms of approval. We need people, and we need to be the people who give others the permission to sit in their own skins and not be afraid. That’s the best gift you are ever going to give someone— the permission to feel safe in their own skin. To feel worthy. To feel like they are enough.
Hannah Brencher (via shammyb)
Shadow illusion
The human brain uses shadows to interpret how objects move. By faking the shadow, one can fake the perceived motion of an object. The red circle moves along a line.
Interactive version:
http://www.malinc.se/m/ModellingIllusions.php
Modern math is like a pyramid, and the broad fundament is often not fun. It is at the higher and apical levels of geometry, topology, analysis, number theory, and mathematical logic that the fun and profundity start, when the calculators and contextless formulae fall away and all that’s left are pencil & paper and what gets called “genius,” viz. the particular blend of reason and ecstatic creativity that characterizes what is best about the human mind. Those who’ve been privileged (or forced) to study it understand that the practice of higher mathematics is, in fact, an “art” and that it depends no less than other arts on inspiration, courage, toil, etc….but with the added stricture that the “truths” the art of math tries to express are deductive, necessary, a priori truths, capable of both derivation and demonstration by logical proof.
David Foster Wallace, Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama (via mindfuckmath)
A Nigerian student has achieved the highest grades at a Japanese university for the past 50 years, while solving a mathematical equation which was unsolvable 30 years ago, in his first semester.
Ufot Ekong achieved a first in electrical engineering at Tokai University in Tokyo, scoring the best marks since 1965, CCTV Africa reported.
Ekong, from Lagos, also plays the saxophone, and runs a retail wears and accessories shop in Japan called Strictly African Japan.
The Nigerian speaks English, French, Japanese and Yoruba, his country’s native language, and paid his way through university himself.
He currently works for Nissan and has already patented two products, as well as making an electric car which reaches up to 128 kmph.
During his time at university, Ekong has won six awards for academic excellence.
Source
