This is for me...
If you happen to come across this blog just know that these are simply thoughts and frustrations that I am getting out. Through ranting, and reblogging or whatever it is that I feel like doing. That is all.
Inside the creative process of a medical illustrator.
It's Okay To Be Smart: sarahonthemountain reblogged your link: I don’t always link to...
sarahonthemountain reblogged your link: I don’t always link to enormous pictures of the moon …
My science question of the day- why do some areas of the moon’s surface have far more craters than others?Excellent question!
First take a look at this recent shot of…
“I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small, because they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars” - Neil deGrasse Tyson
Just when you thought that Dr. Tyson’s video exploration of everything that makes us special in our world and beyond couldn’t get any better, it gets the GIF treatment. Nice work.
Watch it again, and then again.
(Source: secretariats)
“When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art.”
Stanford neuroscientists host the world’s first love competition, asking contestants between the ages of 10 and 75 to spend 5 minutes in an fMRI machine thinking deeply about the person they love. The results are certain to bring a tear to your eye.
Complementary reading: 5 essential books on the psychology of love.
“1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”
kottke.org: Space is closer than you might think
Space always seems so far away and much of it actually is. But space is actually quite close to where we are all sitting right now. The Kármán line, the commonly accepted boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and space, is only 62 miles above sea level.
The line was named after Theodore von Kármán, (1881-1963) a Hungarian-American engineer and physicist who was active primarily in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics. He first calculated that around this altitude the Earth’s atmosphere becomes too thin for aeronautical purposes (because any vehicle at this altitude would have to travel faster than orbital velocity in order to derive sufficient aerodynamic lift from the atmosphere to support itself). Also, there is an abrupt increase in atmospheric temperature and interaction with solar radiation.
A distance of 62 miles can covered by a car on the interstate in less than an hour. Stable Earth orbits are achievable at only 100 miles above the Earth, with the ISS and Space Shuttles usually orbiting at a height of ~200 miles. To show how small a distance that really is, I made the following image…the orange line in the upper left represents 200 miles away from the surface.
Pretty crazy.
It took thousands of years of human ingenuity to make it 62 miles above sea level, even for a few minutes. In the half century since then, we’ve turned our orbital shell into a virtual electronic junkyard, and have space probes about to leave the solar system.
How high above Earth will the next 50 years take us?
Stephen Fry’s fantastic essay on language, animated in kinetic typography.
Also see these 5 essential books on language.
