Charlie Hoey: The Tumblr

NdGT on what a scientist thinks about right before being executed. I <3 NdGT.

#neil degrasse tyson #religion #science #HIYO

Jupiter-Venus Conjunction - the user forum at The Astronomy Picture of the Day (Starship Asterisk*) does not disappoint. Lots of beautiful amateur astro photography that didn’t quite make it onto the main APOD website.

— 1 month ago with 7 notes

#amateur #astronomy #jupiter #mars #science #venus

Programming Moments

Looking through some code, listening to Jackie Mittoo, realizing I just spent a good 20 minutes getting a lot done entirely inside my head. Just clicking around, reminding myself of where things are, reading some docs, sipping my coffee, making decisions. Untangling a knot.

I try not to forget that everyday we are building machines with our minds, little repeatable electron storms. Keyboards convert our ideas into tiny etchings of magnetic information on a hard drive, that when played back through an electronic brain, breathe and react to stimulus. Monitors magnify that process. Isn’t crazy to think about it that way? A terminal window full of code files is just a microscope for your hard drive. You’re writing things that move a little arm around that makes tiny electromagnetic dots on it. All these things are happening all day long. We’re instructing a robotic stylus how to etch a whirring platinum disc just so.

— 3 months ago with 18 notes

#programming #jackie mittoo #science #the future

"The irony of this new discovery is that for hundreds of years educators did seem to sense that children’s brains had to be built up through exercises of increasing difficulty that strengthened brain functions. Up through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a classical education often included rote memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened the auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and thus not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking. Often a great deal of attention was paid to exact elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words. Then in the 1960s educators dropped such traditional exercises from the curriculum, because they were too rigid, boring, and “not relevant.” But the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematically exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols. For the rest of us, their disappearance may have contributed to the general decline of eloquence, which requires memory and a level of auditory brainpower unfamiliar to us now. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 the debaters would comfortably speak for an hour or more without notes, in extended memorized paragraphs; today many of the most learned among us, raised in our most elite schools since the 1960s, prefer the omnipresent PowerPoint presentation—the ultimate compensation for a weak premotor cortex."

The Brain that Changes Itself

— 4 months ago with 46 notes

#education #brain #memory #science

"It’s not like I get stopped at restaurants."

Apollo astronaut Jack Schmitt on being the last human to set foot on the moon

— 4 months ago

#science #nasa #fame #jack schmitt

A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.

Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age, would not reveal his country of origin. “Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I’m here to stop it ever happening.”

— 5 months ago with 62 notes

#science #LHC #time travel

360 time-lapse videos of the sky - one a day for nearly a year - shown as a single mosaic. Best viewed in stunning HD.

(Source: murphlab.com)

— 5 months ago with 1 note

#clouds #san francisco #sky #timelapse #science

the-star-stuff:

This illustration shows all 1,235 of the potential alien planet candidates NASA’s Kepler mission has found to date. The planets are pictured crossing front of their host stars, which are all represented to scale.
CREDIT: Jason Rowe and Kepler team

— 6 months ago with 225 notes

#science #stars #seti

New rule: if you hate science, you’re not allowed to use technology. Fair’s fair.

— 6 months ago with 4 notes

#GOP #science

scipsy:

Feynman with bongo drums (1956) (via)

— 6 months ago with 223 notes

#feynman #science #bongos