Current Affairs
End of Days
Are you ready for the End of the World? Master of the Apocalyptic Blockbuster Roland Emmerich unveils his latest doomsday disaster on Friday November 13: 2012, starring John Cusack as sci-fi writer Jackson Curtis, a divorced father who occasionally moonlights as a limousine driver. First come the mass suicides in Guatemala in anticipation of the end of the world. Then vast cracks are found in California fault lines; Curtis saves his ex-wife, child and her new boyfriend in the nick of time as Los Angeles crumbles into the sea. Rio, Washington DC, and the Vatican in Rome are all destroyed in short order. Oh, did I mention the sooper sekrit society that is constructing giant arks in the Himalayas to save a small fraction of humanity from impending doom? It's all delivered in Emmerich's trademark cataclysmic style (what io9 has dubbed "disaster porn"). Check it out:
Color-Challenged Astronomers Are Lost in a Latte' Universe
God was sitting up late one night designing the universe. He
took care of simple things first. Gravity would construct stars, galaxies and
planets. Biological evolution would ensure a robust diversity of life forms.
But what color to make the universe? God looked down into his foamy cup of latte' and decided that the color beige would be just perfect. In reality God hadn't invented the other colors yet so He didn't have much of a choice at the time.
The Night That Martians Took Broadway!
The Balloon Boy saga from a couple weeks ago will go down in
mass media history as one of the great hoaxes. Network news was riveted on
following the wayward balloon for over two hours because they were convinced
there was a stowaway child onboard. Maybe we were primed for this sort of hoax (more later).
But 71 years ago today the mother of all media hoaxes took
place. On the night before Halloween in 1938 CBS Radio presented an hour-long adaptation
of H. G. Wells' classic science fiction story “The War of the Worlds.”
Rocket Ready To Go Nowhere
Like someone who just bought a new car, earlier this week
NASA proudly rolled out its next generation spaceship, the Ares I-X. The spindly
rocket looks anemic compared to its predecessors, the space shuttle, Saturn V,
and Saturn IB. But at a height of
310 feet it casts a long pencil-like shadow over the Kennedy Space Center causeway.
Ironically, the Augustine Commission report that formally
came out this week cast a black eclipse shadow over this arrow-craft that is
scheduled for its maiden test flight in just a few days.
When We’ll Really Nuke The Moon
The dust is still settling from the public blowup over
NASA’s LCROSS experiment to go prospecting for water on the moon by crashing a
rocket booster into it last Friday. The impact was a PR flub. There were no
dramatic images for any evidence of the smashup.
Nevertheless, I have subsequently received a few angry
e-mails from people who are incensed that we would harm Earth’s only natural
satellite.
The tersest note was from a retired Marine:
“Stop bombing the fu*king moon.”
In a subsequent communication he philosophized:
Moon Survives Unprovoked Attack!
Internet traffic on blogs, YouTube, and discussion boards was nearly predicting the end of the world today.
It didn’t happen.
People warned that a missile launched by evil government scientists was going to plow into the virgin Moon and explode. The effects on Earth from disrupting the celestial harmony would be unpredictable but devastating: tsunamis, meteorite showers, volcanoes – and even more global warming.
What happened instead? Early morning news anchors were speechless at the NASA live TV feed. That’s because absolutely nothing was seen happening at the ground zero moment.
Apollo 11 Site in Higher Defintion
What a difference the time of day makes on the moon.
NASA’s
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has re-photographed the Apollo 11 landing site on
the Sea of Tranquility. The first picture released on July 17 showed the long
shadow of the lander because the sun was low in the sky. It was essentially
late afternoon on the moon.
Probing the Galactic Empire
Exactly 400 years ago Galileo Galilei aimed a small handheld
telescope at the Milky Way and later wrote: “ The galaxy is nothing else
than a congeries of innumerable stars.”
This was a staggering revelation for his time because the
total number of individual stars that can be seen with the naked eye on a very
dark night is 3,000 to 4,000. Galileo realized there were myraid more. The
universe suddenly got bigger and more complex.
My God It's Full Of Stars!
"This is an ancient dwarf galaxy that has been stripped of stars by close encounters the Milky Way. It contains as many as 10 million stars but could have been significantly bigger long ago.
There are 100,000 stars in this in one view from Hubble. Looking into a snowstorm of stars is humbling. These kinds of views leave me with little doubt that the universe must have a virtual infinity of habitable worlds with unimaginably diverse life forms. Imagine the planets that could be orbiting these stars! "
Bootprints On The Moon
Last month a reader left a comment on this site wondering where the “Apollo artifacts” were that I said NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter would photograph.
Well this is the coolest picture to date from LRO that captures the activities of Apollo astronauts at a moon-landing site. It is littered with hardware!
LRO flew over the flat lava plain in western Oceanus Procellarum where Apollo 12 landed on November 14, 1969. The unmanned Surveyor 3 landed there two years earlier.
