Saturday, May 12, 2007

Another Big Old Bunch Of Random Links

Wow, if it weren't for Star Wars and Blake's 7, this would be the Scientific Edition of Random Links...

Images of Earth from Planetary Spacecraft: Lots of pictures of home sweet home, taken from very far away.

Science in Two Minutes or Less: Discover magazine held a contest asking readers to explain string theory in a two-minute video. You can view the competitors and choose your own favorite. (I note that the physics club from my old alma mater, New Mexico Tech has an entry... They don't really explain string theory very well, or possibly at all, but, man, do they make me nostalgic for my college days.)

New Pictures of Jupiter: Amazing images of Jupiter and its moons taken from the New Horizons space probe.

Star Wars Gangsta Rap: Not worksafe, but surprisingly entertaining.

Blake's 7: Rebel: A new audio-play remake of the classic British SF TV series, presented in 5-minute segments. I've listened to the first three, and I think it's fairly well done given the limitations of the format, but, as a huge fan of the original, I can't keep my brain from constantly screaming out that it's wrong. It didn't happen like that! That character doesn't behave that way! And their voices are all wrong! I find, though, that if I imagine it as a dramatization of the "real" events produced many, many years later, I can relax and enjoy it better. I'm sure this says something about me.

Maximizing Survival Time Inside the Event Horizon of a Black Hole: If you've ever wondered what you should do upon falling into a black hole in order to maximize your survival time before your inevitable doom, here's some helpful advice.

Inner Life of a Cell (short version, long version): Very cool computer-animated video illustrating some of the complicated goings-on inside a cell. The short version is three minutes or so, and consists entirely of nifty but somewhat baffling images. The long version is about eight minutes and features a narration involving a lot of polysyllabic words.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for the link to Earth images. That is too cool! One question, though. I noticed that most of the pictures had Antarctica to the bottom of the image. Is that because we Americans are used to thinking of the earth that way, or were the photos originally exposed that direction?

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  2. I think they're just oriented that way because the usual convention with images and maps is that north=up.

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