Category: Misc

I saw this picture (taken by Hubble Space Telescope) sometime last week. Isn't it amazing? It always blows me away to see a picture like this, because it reminds me of just how many other stars are really out there. When you hear the numbers, it sounds like such an abstract concept. But to see a picture of even a small portion of sky - taken by a powerful telescope - you really get a sense of how densly packed with stars the sky really is. This picture is of the stars of open cluster NGC 290, which is a cluster of young stars that lies about 200,000 light-years distant in a neighboring galaxy called the Small Cloud of Magellan (SMC).

Or as some call it, digital crack.

If anybody hasn't heard of it - which I doubt, if you're a gamer - it's a MMORPG (massive-multiplayer online role-playing game) made by Blzzard. Blazzard is the company that produced some of the best games ever made, like Diablo, Warcraft, and Starcraft. Actually, I would have to say that Blizzard is my all-time favorite game company. I don't think I've ever played a game they made that wasn't amazing. This game is kind of like online D&D (Dungeons and Dragons), where you get to explore the world, fight monsters, find treasure, cast spells, and all that sort of stuff. But the cool part is that you are playing in an enormous, persistent world with thousands of other people. So the cities are actually full of real people. You can group up with other players and take on stuff too tough to fight alone. I dig it. I've played with everyone from 11-year olds to grandmothers. In the game I play a Tauren warrior (which looks like a minotaur from Greek mythology). Currently, I'm level 32. Which probably means nothing to anyone reading this, but I'm pretty proud of it. What a geek! If anyone out there is also playing this game, or had been thinking of starting, I am on the Earthern Ring realm, and would love to play with friends.

Is this not one of the coolest things you've even seen? This photo (taken by SOHO, which has a UNH instrument on it) shows an arch of ionized gas floating above the surface of the Sun. The crazy, twisted magnetic fields near the surface of the Sun can trap ionized gases in these huge, looping structures. The arches eventually break free of the Sun, and can lead to communications and power failures here on Earth, 93 million miles away.

Ah, the amusing nature of small-town crime. We got a free copy of our town newspaper yesterday, which they hoped would entice us to subscribe. Hmm...tough decision. This 30-page paper includes seven full pages of ads (and lots of additional ads scattered among the 'news', as well), ten pages of classifieds, and two pages of 'letters to the editor'. The front page news was an article on the latest attempt by the town council to raise the wastewater rates. By $1.82 per month (for us, at least). Oh boy. The only redeeming quality of small-town papers is the police blotter. Those are usually gold. Here are a few gems from the Boerne paper - which I swear are reproduced here word for word:

Friday, March 24, 2:02 a.m. - One of two suspicious juveniles sitting in a van outside a complaintant's residence turned out to be her son.

Monday, March 27, 7:41 p.m. - A plastic egg left on a front porch inscribed with the words "Caution, open at own risk" contained animal excrement.

Saturday, April 1, 10:28 p.m. - A small campfire received a verbal warning and was extinguished.

Sunday, April 2, 9:13 p.m. - The ice cream man's cacophony gave the caller a headache, and he asked that the guy chill.

I think they speak for themselves, no?

Astronomers are finding new planets outside of our own solar system all the time. One of the projects I am currently working on is called Kepler, and is a NASA-funded orbiting telescope designed specifically to find extrasolar planets. It's a pretty exciting project to be working on - this stuff is cutting-edge science. Hoepfully I'll get to go to the launch, which should be in a couple of years. This image is an artist's depiction of what an extrasolar planet orbiting a distant red dwarf star might look like, complete with a hypothetical moon.

Has anyone else out there played God of War for the Playstation 2? I've been wanting to pick it up ever since it won "Console Game of the Year" in the gaming magazine I subscribe to - but it has been 50 bucks since it first came out. Well just this past week it got added to the PS2 "Greatest Hits" collection - which means it got marked down to $20. Aww yeah! This is a sweet game. Incredibly violent, with awesome level design and animation. The visuals are stunning. Just look at some of these screenshots. It looks even better in person. And there is just something about being a 6 foot tall guy taking on beasties that are as big as skyscrapers - and winning - that is pretty damn cool. Dig it!

Scientists may have found evidence for another liquid ocean in our solar system. They have long suspected that Jupiter's moon Europa harbors a liquid ocean beneath its icy crust, and recent data from the Cassini spacecraft has given tantalizing hints that a similar ocean might lie beneath the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus.

Is the Antartic ice sheet melting? Climatologists think global warming may be melting the ice that encases our southernmost continent. The orbiting GRACE satellite has taken extremely sensitive measurements of the Earth's gravity, and the data suggests that Antartica may have lost a significant amount of ice between 2002 and 2005. While they calculate that this ice would only have raised the world's oceans by a fraction of an inch, that it a LOT more water than it sounds like - almost 40 trillion gallons. In the image below is a picture of one of the icebergs along the Antartic coast.

Don't worry - HAL didn't try to cut him loose. What you are seeing was a novel satellite idea. This unneeded Russian Orlan spacesuit was pushed out of the International Space Station earlier this month. Dubbed Suitsat-1, it was filled mostly with old clothes, and a radio transmitter. Suitsat-1 will orbit the Earth once every 90 minutes until it burns up in the Earth's atmosphere - which should happen within a few weeks.

These tracks were made by the Apollo 14 crew's two-wheeled Modularized Equipment Transporter (MET) - which the astronauts referred to as the "rickshaw" - which was designed to help the astronauts explore the Moon's surface. It carried lunar handtools, sample containers, spare film and a Lunar Surface Penetrometer. The tracks in the soil show the path of Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell as they explored this lunar landscape.