A few years ago, a friend of mine told me about his young son, then three years old. It turns out the sprog was not only playing games on his folks’ computer, he had figured out how to install new ones on his own. This was not a child prodigy, and he wasn’t reading at the time – he’d learned it intuitively, by watching what his parents did and noticing how user interfaces
Category: Too Cool
Too cool, part 15: Welcome our mantis shrimp overlords
I have been watching the development of the local praying mantises with interest, but this variety of ‘mantis’ is something else entirely. While at least one variety of these could supposedly be found in Florida when I was there, I never did locate one, which is perhaps for the better. But this means I have no image to use here, and will instead send you over to Not Exactly Rocket
Showoff
So yeah, I’m well outside of the range of the annular eclipse, still taking place as I type this I believe, and my friend in Kansas thought he was too. But at least he was watching carefully at sunset when he got the right conditions.
No filters needed when it’s this low on the horizon, since the atmosphere cuts the light levels down to manageable levels. Notice
Too cool, part 14: Up close with the shuttle
Okay, first off, I apologize to those whose attention span will not be able to handle a 45 minute video – I know, this is the internet, the TL;DR Channel, where three minutes is a chore. Chill out, get a Pepsi or some tea, and stay on the same page for a bit (it’ll make me happier when looking at the site stats, too.)
Second, I’m really sorry they didn’t do this sooner, before
… and part two
There are actually two themes I’m continuing here. The first is the limits of our knowledge, which is a “half-empty” perspective there’s a better way of expressing it, which we’ll get to in a moment. The second theme being continued here is special efforts made by scientists to communicate their work to the general public. The previous example (last
That’s 154 to you and me
On this date 22 years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope was borne into space on Shuttle Discovery, the one that recently did its last flyby over DC (well, okay, it had help) before delivery to the Udvar-Hazy center. The Hubble will be retired
Too cool, part 13: I’m a spider, raargh!
Since I have yet to obtain any images illustrating this (and because there may not even be examples of such within this country, I may not ever, sniff,) I refer you to Alex Wild of Myrmecos fame, guest-blogging on Scientific American’s site, for his post on “The fly that banks on arachnophobia.”
If you wish, pause for a second and try to imagine how a fly might benefit from something
Too cool, part 12: Won’t fit in the bag
Courtesy of NASA’s Astronomy Photo of the Day, I present one of the most interesting examples of unintuitive physics: the curvature of spacetime to produce a gravitational lens. The ring that you see here is not the shock wave from a supernova affecting the surrounding gases, as I first
Too cool, part 11: Sylvan Heights Bird Park
As I indicated in the previous post, we had a trip planned that might produce some new images, and while I’d like to build the suspense to the point of frustration, I find this a hard thing to do, especially when I lead the post off with a header photo. So yes, we did get some useful stuff, and this will be another multiple post.
Nature photographers, as well as amateur naturalists and simply
Shhhh! TV…
I know it’s short notice, but I just found out about it myself, courtesy of The Manatee. If you get Discovery Channel, there is a new show premiering tonight right after Mythbusters, going by the pseudonym of Penn & Teller Tell A Lie, and it sounds like it should be pretty cool. I’ll be recording it, so if you miss it, come on by and bring popcorn.
But not beer…
See?