The Comet

the Comet from Christian Stangl on Vimeo.

"In 2016 an exciting mission was ended.
The Rosetta spacecraft made its final manouver. A controlled hard-landing on the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67p).
Before that Rosetta accompanied the Comet for more then 2 years. It researched valuable scientific data, brought a lander on to the comets surface and took a vast number of pictures.

2017 Esa released over 400000 images from Rosettas comet mission.
Based on these material Motion Designer Christian Stangl and Composer Wolfgang Stangl worked together to create this shortfilm.
The sequences are digitally enhanced real-footage from the probe."

Apollo 11 Moon Launch 50th Anniversary | CBS News Special Coverage, live stream

This full broadcast of of the Apollo 11 Moon launch is pretty awesome.  Includes some great commercials within the coverage. 

Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Season 5, Episode 11

 "Red pill or blue pill? You get both when Neil deGrasse Tyson interviews Morpheus himself, actor Laurence Fishburne. They sat down while Neil was in New Mexico filming COSMOS and Laurence was filming The Signal, a new indie sci-fi film. You’ll get a healthy dose of reality, as they talk about Fishburne’s roles in The Matrix, Searching for Bobby Fischer, and CSI. And you’ll dive into the world of the imagination as the two sci-fi fans discuss why style can be more important than substance in sci-fi and geek out over Star Trek, Superman and Watchmen. They also talk about chess, science vs. religion, planetariums and using math and science to explore the world. Laurence tells Neil how and why he became an actor at age 10, and discusses his future plans to produce, direct, write plays and return to Broadway. You’ll also find out what role Laurence wanted to play but didn’t, and why he got the key to the city of Cambridge."  (via StarTalkRadio)

How do we know the Earth goes about the sun?

Image: NASA. A view of the sunrise (and moon) as seen from the ISS captured by astronaut Karen Nyberg

"The geocentric model is no more crazy than saying that a tennis ball is made of protons, neutrons and electrons. Sure, we all (most of us) believe there are these particles like electrons – but how do normal humans know this? In fact, the evidence in our everyday lives doesn’t make it obvious that there are protons and electrons (yes, you could argue the mere fact of things like computers says these have to exist). The same is true for the heliocentric model."

"The first big problem with the geocentric model was the retrograde motion of planets like Mars. If you looked at the location of Mars each night, it might sometimes do this."

(Read the rest  at Wired)

How big is the Universe?

How Big Is The Universe? from Beakus on Vimeo.

(via IO9.com)

Web Nuggets 4

How Ancient Alexandria Became an Intellectual Center - Wired Science

"They had to start from scratch. Alexandria was a brand-new city with a population consisting most of soldiers and sailors of the Ptolemies’ armed forces, bureaucrats and clerks of their administration, and the mixed bag of traders, businessmen, craftsman [sic], swindlers, and whatnot, who see opportunity in, as it were, a fresh playing field. Intellectuals had to be blandished into coming to a place that to all outward appearances was a cultural wasteland."  

Can't find a time machine to go back to Ancient Alexandria?  Looking for something closer to home to read?  Check out openlibrary.org 

Gravitational Waves and Inflation explained by PHD comics.  

 (via I09)

A few posts on Art.  

The Guardian had an article titled "The 10 Greatest works of art ever".  Pretty tough list to put together.  Though I do enjoy this one:

(Chauvet Cave Paintins (c 30,000 years ago)

BoingBoing.net had this great picture of some London Street Art. 

(photo: Jason Weisberger)

Huffington Post had an article on 'The Gorgeous History of Tattoos, From 1900 to Present". 

"The mind is an endless train weaving its way through the landscape of reality.

But who made the train tracks and where is the conductor?”

From the book ‘Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves: Sushi, Psychedelics, Parallel Universes, and the Quest for Transcendence’ by Clifford A. Pickover

Web Nuggets 1

Some of the interesting articles I have bumped up against while surfing the information superhighway...

Ruins of Bustling Port Unearthed at Egypt’s Giza Pyramids- livescience.com

“The remains of a bustling port and barracks for sailors or military troops have been discovered near the Giza Pyramids. They were in use while the pyramids were being built about 4,500 years ago.”
(found via grahamhancock.com)

NASA to Make Water on the Moon and Oxygen on Mars - Discovery.com

“NASA is planning missions to demonstrate how to make water on the moon and oxygen on Mars.”
(via grahamhancock.com)

20 Year Old Hunter S. Thompson’s Superb Advice on How to Find Your Purpose and Live a Meaningful Life - Brainpickings.org

“It is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it.”

(via disinfo.com)

A New Scientific Model That Defines Alien Intelligence - IO9.com

“Should we ever detect an extraterrestrial civilization, or any kind of alien life for that matter, it's a safe bet they'll look very different from us. They'll also probably think in a way that's completely foreign to what we're used to. Here's how experts believe we might be able to predict what the minds of aliens will be like."

Sun Gazing 101

Super Human Abilities Confirmed by NASA...

The Internet often can have some way out there concepts, ideas, conspiracies, which all have their place in the human story. But this is one of the most intriguing ideas I've come across in a while. The idea is that instead of getting our nutrition from the "normal" way we can get all we need from "Sun gazing (also known as sun-eating) [which] is the strict practice of gradually introducing sunlight into your eyes at the lowest ultraviolet-index times of day – sunrise and sunset."

Read on at the link above or watch the documentaries below and start staring at the sun.

The World Outside My Window - Time Lapse of Earth from the ISS

Awesome time lapse Footage from the ISS






(Via IO9.com)

The overview effect... Awesome!

"On the 40th anniversary of the famous ‘Blue Marble’ photograph taken of Earth from space, Planetary Collective presents a short film documenting astronauts’ life-changing stories of seeing the Earth from the outside – a perspective-altering experience often described as the Overview Effect."

OVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo.

Thanks 2E for bringing this to my attention. Coob.

Finding planets

Nasa's Hubble telescope finds signs of water of five distant planets.
(via the Independent)

"Nasa has reported that “faint signatures of water” have been found in the atmospheres of five planets outside our solar system, marking a further development in the search for planets capable of supporting alien life." read the rest


Alien Super-Earths Plentiful in Exoplanet Search.
(via space.com) 

"Observations using space-based and ground-based telescopes have indicated that a new class of objects dubbed super-Earths – worlds that are about two to 10 times our planet's mass and up to two times its radius – could be among the most common type of planets orbiting other stars." read the rest

Inner Space and quantum Space

NASA gets itself a quantum computer.  What are their plans?

"According to physicist David Deutsch, a quantum system can work on a million computations at once while a standard desktop PC works on just one. Put another way, a 30-qubit system would be equal in processing power to a traditional 10 teraflop machine, which crunches trillions of operations each second.
These computers will help us find the most expedient solution to a complex problem. As such, they're poised to revolutionize the way we go about data analysis and optimization — including such realms as air traffic control, courier routing, protein modeling, weather prediction, database querying, and hacking tough encryption schemes."

Read the rest. 

(via IO9)


A Neuroscientist's Radical Theory of How Networks become Consciousness

"It’s a question that’s perplexed philosophers for centuries and scientists for decades: Where does consciousness come from? We know it exists, at least in ourselves. But how it arises from chemistry and electricity in our brains is an unsolved mystery.
Neuroscientist Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, thinks he might know the answer. According to Koch, consciousness arises within any sufficiently complex, information-processing system. All animals, from humans on down to earthworms, are conscious; even the internet could be. That’s just the way the universe works."

Read the rest on Wired.com

(via Grahamhancock.com)

Mars Showcase

Wow!  Amazing footage from the European Space Agency


(Via Io9)

something large, something small, and something else

Something rather large and mind boggling:


via (deepastronomy.com)

Something rather small and mind boggling:

A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics

"Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality..."

"...The amplituhedron looks like an intricate, multifaceted jewel in higher dimensions. Encoded in its volume are the most basic features of reality that can be calculated, “scattering amplitudes,” which represent the likelihood that a certain set of particles will turn into certain other particles upon colliding. These numbers are what particle physicists calculate and test to high precision at particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland."

Read more.

 Which kind of made me think of Inra's net. 

"Francis Harold Cook describes the metaphor of Indra's net from the perspective of the Huayan school in the book Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra:
Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering "like" stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring." (via wikipedia).

91 Centimeters

This is a short animated film that I watched this morning.  At first my thoughts about what the movie meant ran towards whether or not the individual is the center of his or her own universe; that is, did the meteorite knock the man, Henry, out of his world by 91 centimeters or did it knock the world 91 centimeters away from him.  Of course, when I contemplated the role of the psychologist/psychiatrist in the overall narrative, I began to see the movie as a parable for some sort of sudden onset mental illness that Henry is dealing with all alone; thus the relative or I guess absolute indifference of everyone around him.

What do you think?   

Cosmography of the Local Universe

(via io9.com)