NASA Mars Orbiter Images May Show Long-Lost 1971 Soviet Lander

story: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-132&cid=release_2013-132

Survey stupidity; Forrester Consulting screws up.

The Boston Globe has been doing good things, including months-long investigative pieces. The newspaper is alive and kicking.

They also have embraced online options, and have a website with full content, and an e-paper "replica edition," which mimics the look and layout of the paper product.

But they're still trying to figure out a non-paper future, so they hired Forrester Consulting to send out a long e-survey to subscribers. (See below.) Almost all the questions revolve around phone and tablet use.

The only problem: the survey is Flash-based, so it can't be viewed or completed on most phones and tablets.

D'oh.

Too true.

http://xkcd.com/1197/

Yeah, that's how it's done.

@TheOnion: Fast-Talking Computer Hacker Just Has To Break Through Encryption Shield Before He Can Upload The Nano-Virus

http://onion.com/Z6JDlh

Extracting Playable Audio from Pictures of Antique Phonograph Records

Interesting technique resurrects very early recordings from the 1800's,
when all that remains is a printed photograph of the original disc.

http://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/extracting-audio-from-pictures/

How far Is It To Mars?

Interesting visualization:
http://www.distancetomars.com/

(Props to Joe Hanson:
http://www.itsokaytobesmart.com/post/47084431881/how-far-is-it-to-mars#_=_ )

Used Parachute on Mars Flaps in the Wind

This sequence of seven images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows wind-caused changes in the parachute of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft as the chute lay on the Martian ground during months after its use in safe landing of the Curiosity rover. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Animated image, story:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-121&cid=release_2013-121

Meteor and Northern Lights

Story, full-res:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/04/01/stunningly_beautiful_astrophotos_aurorae_a_comet_and_a_meteor.html

Text, video and olfactory convergence, in beta.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFbYadm_mrw&feature=youtube_gdata_player

"The greatest gags, tweets, jests and jokes from the past year"

example:


More:
http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/year_greatest_gags_tweets_jests_yxa3DhkTZ9uXQY4mM4pmqN/0

Happy Easter! Oh, by the way: Belief in science yields better behavior than belief in religion.

"RELIGION IS WIDELY seen as offering people amoral compass, a powerful guide to judgment and behavior. But what if you believe in something besides religion? Could a faith in science similarly guide your values?

"The answer appears to be yes: In a new study, psychologists found that people who were studying science, believed in science, or were exposed to scientific words were harsher in condemning a crime and were more generous to others compared to people who weren’t engaged with science.

"The authors of the study suggest 'there is a lay image or notion of ‘science’ that is associated with concepts of rationality, impartiality, fairness, technological progress, and ultimately, the idea that we are to use these rational tools for the mutual benefit of all people in society.'"

Ma-Kellams, C. & Blascovich, J., “Does ‘Science’ Make You Moral? The Effects of Priming Science on Moral Judgments and Behavior,” PLoS ONE (March 2013).


http://epaper.bostonglobe.com/epaper/showlink.aspx?bookmarkid=D8QAW441O6B&issue=10182013033100000000001001&article=8b5a2ed1-b771-46fc-950d-89979d9c3f7c

Mars Gigapixel Panorama

Low-res sample:


Full-res panorama:
http://www.360cities.net/image/mars-gigapixel-panorama-curiosity-solar-days-136-149#681.67,-13.76,42.5

Hilariously Accurate Comics About The Internet - DesignTAXI.com

Example:

More:
http://designtaxi.com/news/356776/Hilariously-Accurate-Comics-About-The-Internet/

Unintended Art of the Anthropocene: The Sound of Ice Melting

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/imageo/2013/03/27/unintended-art-of-the-anthropocene-the-sound-of-ice-melting/

And, in related news:

Arctic Ice Hits Annual Max and it’s the 6th Lowest on Record:
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/arctic-ice-hits-annual-max-may-be-tied-to-cold-snowy-march-15782

The Law of Inverse Relationships

http://thechive.com/2013/03/27/real-truth-pops-like-a-kernel-31-photos

A new Hollywood record: The Croods movie required 80 million CPU hours to animate

Lucas123 writes"It may be a movie about a stone age family, but DreamWorks said its latest 3D animated movie The Croods took more compute cycles to create than any other movie they've made. The movie required a whopping 80 million compute hours to render, 15 million more hours than DreamWorks' last record holder, The Rise of the Guardians. The production studio said between 300 and 400 animators worked on The Croods over the past three years. The images they created, from raw sketches to stereoscopic high-definition shots, required about 250TB of data storage capacity. When the movie industry moved from producing 2D to 3D high-definition movies over the past decade, the data required to produce the films increased tremendously. For DreamWorks, the amount of data needed to create a stereoscopic film leaped by 30%."

This date in science: Biggest North American earthquake since seismic data began to be collected.

March 27, 1964. On this date, at 5:36 p.m. local time, a 9.2 magnitude earthquake struck in the Prince William Sound region of Alaska, causing extensive initial damage and a subsequent tsunami.

Story:
http://earthsky.org/earth/this-date-in-science-biggest-earthquake-in-north-america

Hot shot.

Careful with the rebound.

Extremely popular on the web!

(from: http://thechive.com/2013/03/22/i-cant-prove-that-any-of-this-isnt-real-but-somethings-fishy-33-photos/obvious-photoshop-fail-19/ )

Literally unEarthly: "Defrosting of Martian Dunes with Large Gullies" on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJQZa2vLDQA&feature=youtube_gdata_player

On the 10th Anniversary of the Iraq War

"The Last Letter: A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran"

Powerful, moving, disturbing.

http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/the_last_letter_20130318/

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/tomasyoung.asp

Analysis of@Chandra Xray data shows what triggered the Kepler supernova.

"The new Chandra analysis shows that the Kepler supernova was triggered by an interaction between a white dwarf and a red giant star. The crucial evidence from Chandra was a disk-shaped structure near the center of the remnant. The researchers interpret this X-ray emission to be caused by the collision between supernova debris and disk-shaped material that the giant star expelled before the explosion."

Video simulation of Kepler supernova explosion:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2013/kepler/animations.html

More info, images: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2013/kepler/

My only contribution: I had a potato with dinner.

Boston police report 336 citations for drinking in public 26 arrests from the St. Patrick's Day parade in Southie  http://t.co/6VngEc3YDM

(https://twitter.com/BostonDotCom/status/313444326086684672)

St Patrick's Day, Delaware, 1757

Newspapers don't publish missing persons reports like this anymore:

"Run away: Irish servant girl, named Honor Bryant, of short stature, dark hair, down look, has remarkable large breasts." DE1757

(https://twitter.com/TweetsofOld/status/313337674473820160)

Happy St. Patrick's day! From NASA: a rare, cloud-free view of Ireland, from space:

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/nasa-satellite-snaps-rare-cloud-free-and-not-so-rare-snow-covered-emerald-ireland

Yesterday's Tweet o' the Day

John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) tweeted at 8:13 PM on Tue, Mar 12, 2013:

"Today is the birthday of both Mitt Romney & Ron Jeremy, whose respective careers have both been a little hard to swallow."

A do-it-yourself medium-format camera --- for around $40.

via kickstarter.com

Great read: When electricity was new, towns tried to mimic moonlight with special lights on gigantic towers.

Story, more illustrations: m.theatlantic.com

Cassini Spies Bright Venus From Saturn Orbit - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Explanation: jpl.nasa.gov

Mars may experience a "once-in-a-billion-year" cometary impact next year.

"The first comet discovered this year, Comet C/2013 A1, is currently projected to pass within about 23,000 miles (37,000 km) of the surface of Mars late in 2014. While this event in itself promises spectacular views for astronomers, the uncertainty of the comet's orbit includes a significant chance of an impact on Mars...

"...This would not be a minor collision. Rather, it would be a once in a billion years collision, generating a crater roughly 500 km (300 mi) in diameter. The equivalent explosive force would be in the range of five to twenty billion megatons of TNT. I'm not sure that any number can really let us understand the magnitude of the collision – does half a trillion Hiroshima bombs convey a more comprehensible image? Another comparison is that the impact is about equal to a tenth of a second of the Sun's total energy output focused on one spot on the Martian surface. Not a pleasant experience for any planet."

Full story:
http://www.gizmag.com/comet-c2013-a1-mars/26472/

Record-breaking 320-gigapixel panorama shows London in all its glory

click through for full, zoomable version:

via gizmag.com

Swirling Sediment Reveals Erosive Power of Nemo in New England: NASA Image of the Day #NEMO

via earthobservatory.nasa.gov

before and after pix:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=80523&src=eoa-iotd

There's no trick to this at all. Watch.

via youtube.com

New Study Measures Boston's Happiness via Twitter

The redder, the happier, according to the study...

via bostinno.com

How that “Golden Eagle Snatches Kid” video was produced

View this embed ›

Full story:buzzfeed.com

Amazing Large-Scale, Photo-Realistic Portraits Made Of Shredded Poems

via designtaxi.com

Detailed analysis of Russian meteor emerges

NASA now calculates that the meteor was 17 metres (56') across and weighed 10,000 ton(nes). The explosive energy was nearly 500 kilotons. (The Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons.)

Here's the part to make you go "Hmmmmmm:"

It was a totally ordinary rock. The "meteor was an ordinary chondrite containing olivine, sulfite and about 10% iron. The material is consistent with a stony meteoroid from the asteroid belt."

In other words, nothing special at all. There are millions more out there just like it, waiting their turn. :)

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/more-details-of-russian-meteor-emerge.html

via blogs.nature.com

A wonderful spoof on that hideous "... and God made a farmer" Superbowl ad.

http://www.upworthy.com/this-is-what-it-looks-like-when-a-commercial-actually...

Google poetics

A fews days ago, I wrote about the Pentametron --- software that culls Twitter feeds to generate accidental sonnets.
(http://fredlanga.blogspot.com/2013/02/accidental-sonnets.html)

Turns out that humans are deliberately using Google Search's autofill to generate equally strange poetry.

----------------

--------------

--------------------

-------------

It's called GooglePoetics; read more at http://www.googlepoetics.com/.

(Kudos to DesignTaxi.com, where I first read about this.)

Every observed/recorded meteorite fall on Earth since 2300 BC

Huge, interactive map version: http://osm2.cartodb.com/tables/2320/public#/map

Low-res, static image:

BTW: The site overplays the data. It's NOT "Every meteorite fall on Earth since 2300 BC." It's only those that have been observed, recorded, or recovered.

Places with large populations and long formal histories are thus over-represented; places with light populations an/or poor record-keepig are not. The American Midwest (with intensive farming) turns up many buried meteorites; places like the Amazon Jungle do not. Deserts make rocks easy to find. Oceans do not. And so on.

It's also just a few thousand years; an eyeblink of geologic time.

So take the data with a grain of salt. It's interesting, but if we really had a complete record, the whole planet would be the deep red of multiple strikes. Every place got hit. Every place will get hit again.

another romantic valentine's card

geekiest valentine rhyme?

83 Percent of Radiologists Didn't Spot the Gorilla Hiding in This CT Scan

Another fascinating variant on the famous "invisible gorilla" experiment (http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html); this once agains shows how we see what we expect to see --- and not much else.

story: gizmodo.com

#nemo aftermath in #boston

Pictures from today's Globe; more pix, stories at http://bostonglobe.com .

Scituate:

Boston:

See the full gallery on Posterous

New Landsat about to be launched from Vanderberg (just after 1pm EST)

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

via nasa.gov

Spectacular 360-degree Mars Panorama - Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 177

Hundreds of separate photos, seamlessly stitched together:

http://www.360cities.net/image/mars-panorama-curiosity-solar-day-177#84.79,11.36,40.4

Picasso's mystery medium? An ordinary commercial house paint, made by the Ripolin company.

story:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/10/picasso-house-paint-mystery-x-ray_n_...

via huffingtonpost.com

In wake of #Nemo, MIT vs Harvard Snowball War set for today

@BostonDotCom: RT @YTCambridge:
MIT vs Harvard Snowball War is set for noon by Cambridge Public Library. Bring your school colors. http://on.fb.me/Xy9waR

"The Blizzard of 2013 Timelapse" on YouTube

Massachusetts "Super Storm Nemo Monster Waves" on YouTube

Now in the Gulf of Maine, #nemo develops a hurricane-like eye (2pm est)

See #nemo evolve over 3 days, from space, via NOAA's GOES-13 satellite

http://t.co/t1sZSfZ1

#nemo pix from yesterday, shamelessly stolen from other sources

The T shut down yesterday, and won't restart today; there's no mass transit in Boston.

Here, Green Line trolleys are wearing their snow condoms, to protect the couplers.

Salem, Mass:

more (mostly from yesterday):
http://bostinno.com/2013/02/08/photos-of-winter-storm-nemo-burying-boston

See the full gallery on Posterous

#Nemo's 2/3rds over; two morning snapshots from my Boston Apartment window, 8AM

See the full gallery on Posterous

#Nemo composite, 10PM local time last night

via cimss.ssec.wisc.edu

Snowy Saturday

Real-time weather buoys #nemo

With 12-18 hours to go; the storm is still building into the area. Seas are running 20+ (6m) offshore, and 15 feet (5m) in Massachusetts Bay. High tide is at 10 tonight, and 11 tomorrow morning. Lots of flooding is expected.

Click through for real-time data from local buoys.

via boston.com

http://www.boston.com/weather/marine/buoy.html#

Even God's impressed with this storm

@TheTweetOfGod:

Well, the weather outside is frightful,
Because Mother Nature's spiteful.
The entire Northeast's been hit.
Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.

"Nemo?" We can do better.

At least, a local comedian thinks so:

@BigFatWhale: Don't give The Weather Channel power they don't have. That's how monarchs happen. This storm is #BigNancy. The people's storm.

Boston... Power out for thousands, evacuations expected

My apartment is fine, but it's getting nasty outside...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Boston.com Newsletters" <
>  
>
> More than 5,000 power outages have already been reported as winds down tree limbs and wires. In Marshfield, officials said they expected to ask shorefront residents to evacuate themselves because of concerns about storm-driven tides tonight and Saturday morning.
>
>

If you like violent weather...

Check out the NWS forecast for Bpston:

Highlights:
========================

Blizzard watch:

* potential historic winter storm and blizzard to impact much of
southern New England Friday into Sat

* 1 to 2 feet of snow possible for much of southern New England
except areas near the South Coast where there may be some mixing

...We are confident that much of the region
will receive 1 to 2 feet of snow. We also expect a middle level deformation band that
will lead to localized higher amounts across the interior.

The main show looks to be Friday night into Saturday morning as
this low bombs out ... which will lead to tremendous snowfall
rates and perhaps even some thunder accompanying the storm. Would
expect hourly snowfall rates on the order of 2 to 3 inches per
hour with a tremendous cold conveyer belt on the backside of this
system.

In addition...very strong winds of 50 to 60 miles per hour will be battering
the coastal plain leading to considerable blowing and drifting
snow.

Travel may become almost impossible with blizzard conditions
possible. A blizzard watch has been expanded to cover southern
Worcester County as well as all of eastern Massachusetts...southern Rhode
Island and northern Connecticut. This blizzard watch includes the
Boston to Providence corridor...given the potential for 50 to 60
miles per hour winds and considerable blowing and drifting snow. The timing
of the blizzard conditions will not exactly match that of the
watch as it stands now. This timing will be refined with later
forecasts. The high wind watches have been dropped in favor of the
blizzard watches.

===========

Yee ha!

Full text:

http://www.wunderground.com/DisplayDisc.asp?DiscussionCode=BOX&StateCode=...

Explore an Erupting Volcano With This Stunning 360 Degree Interactive Video

video: http://www.spiegel.de/static/360grad/kamtschatka/

story:

via gizmodo.com

Ah, it's still happening today. :-)

@TweetsofOld: Albert Satterlee became suddenly insane Sunday and sent to the Asylum. Women and religion were at the bottom of it. ALABAMA1900

Accidental sonnets

Another boy without a sharper knife;
Appreciate the little things in life.
I’m freezing waiting for the bus instead.
Ten minutes on the phone and nothing said.

I never thought relationships were hard.
I have an Olive Garden credit card.
I’m getting absolutely nothing done.
So many people never find the one.

This lonely feeling haunting me again.
Shall hang the clothes and wash the dishes then.
It doesn’t really matter anymore.
I’m gonna open up a liquor store.

I thought the world revolved around the sun.
I’m disappointed, goodnight everyone.

The above was produced by the Pentametron, an automated software site that culls Twitter in real-time for bits of iambic prose, and then manufactures couplets.

The Pentametron's stated goal is "to find inadvertent poetry in the endless torrents of language that slosh around the internet." Its slogan:

With algorithms subtle and discrete
I seek iambic writings to retweet.

Because it's just software, and because so many tweets are crap, a lot of what Pentametron produces is junk. But occasionally, it spews out a gem.

appreciate the little things in life
this music drowning everybody out.

http://pentametron.com/

Nice shot, eh?

http://thechive.com/2013/02/01/daily-afternoon-randomness-in-hq-45-photos-4