A seriously fantastic (and hilarious) article about the limits of the human brain.

One of several favorite paragraphs:

First, train yourself to get suspicious every time you see simplicity. Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency.

Science makes me feel stupid too. It’s just that I’ve gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn’t know what to do without that feeling. I even think it’s supposed to be this way. Let me explain.

I’m not talking about`relative stupidity’, in which the other students in the classactually read the material, think about it and ace the exam,whereas you don’t. I’m also not talking about bright peoplewho might be working in areas that don’t match their talents.Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity’. Thatkind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our effortsto push our way into the unknown.

The males have explosive erections and the female’s vagina that twist the wrong way.

Who will win in this battle for sexual control?

Find out over the next few billion years of evolution!

photosgo:

freshphotons:

aquabooks:

Today in History - December 20, 1996

Writer/astronomer Carl Sagan dies in Seattle

Has dark matter finally been detected?

Put in perspective by Science magazine. (hint, people are being sensationalists.)

OK TO GO on Vimeo

Chain of Hyper Space scenes from films (a collaboration with Mike Merrill).

Part of the thing which is so appealing about Hyper Space scenes in films is the idea that something fantastic and unknown lies at the end of them. In fact, here are the primary uses of Warp Speed/ Hyper Space as plot device:
A) Tunnel to unknown.
B) Escape from danger via total oblivion.

Both represent a kind of inversion, or temporary lifting, of the accepted order.

carolinemartin:

johnzanussi:

The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.

Prepared to have your mind blown, yet again. This video will make you feel insanely small and insignificant in relation to how infinitely big the universe is.

Oh yeah, I forgot that we have a huge blind spot of stuff we don’t know about. Crazy.

carolinemartin:

ronenreblogs:brightredlemons:snakecharmer:ummwhat:

can i bring carl sagan back to life and keep him in my backpack

In any thread involving astrophotography, but (for some reason) particularly anything from Hubble, there is inevitably a slew of people calling ‘fake’, because it’s not what you would actually see if you were standing there - because NASA include colour-coded information from other parts of the visible spectrum.

You have to remember:

• Our eyes only evolved to be maximally sensitive to the light of a G2V star filtered through a dense gas envelope. The visible spectrum is only a tiny, tiny part of the full range of EM emission, and every part gives you different information. Restricting ourselves to this tiny region of information is pointless and arbitrary, as the Universe doesn’t care enough about our personal biology to make its most beautiful wonders available in the visible spectrum.

• If you were actually standing there, you wouldn’t see much of anything at all. Deep sky objects are really, really faint, and our puny human eyes wouldn’t be able to see more than a faint smudge without being aided by long exposures.

• Moreover, because the objects are so faint, you would be using the rods (rather than the cones) to detect most of the photons coming from them - as such, the objects would look black and white anyway, as your rods are pretty insensitive to colour.

Any image taken is going to be different from what you would see with the naked eye, if only by using long exposures. There is no reason to restrict images to what we could personally see with the naked eye, as our naked eyes weren’t designed to look at astronomical objects. They are very poorly designed to do so. So please, can we stop this “fake, not even real colours, this is just conceptual art not science”-type attitude.

EDIT: Thanks to Kosmo199 for a link to a description of how these images are done. For everyone wanting to see what an image straight off the telescope looks like, here is an example. This is why we have image processing!

From Reddit user selador

carolinemartin:

Let me explain to you why I am crying right now.

Today was one of the worst days I’ve had without someone dying. Bad things have happened, very unpleasant and unfair, and I am hundreds of miles away from the top 10 people I would like to have hugs from. I woke up this morning to throw up the not-quite-cooked-enough bacon I ate last night. I did not do well on my final that may make or break my chances of being a full-time student again. I am again uncertain of my future; I don’t know what my life brings in any shape or form more than a few days out. And then some other really awful stuff I am not really at liberty to discuss in such a public forum.

But then John Zanussi posts this. I’ve seen this photo dozens of times before. That portion of it, right up there above all these letters that make words that make sentences that you read in you head and understand… that’s what you would see if you looked at a section of our sky into deep space through the eye of a needle.

My day was awful. But I am spinning around the center of this earth at a thousand miles an hour, around our sun at tens of thousands of miles per hour. And I am alive to type about how I have just again seen what billions of other little earths spinning around millions of suns look like in just one tiny section of our entire sky. And I can report that it is beautiful.

Fuck it, my life is awesome. That is why I am crying right now.