Posted by Benjamin Roudenis on October 4, 2010 0 comments
A father-son team from Park Slope decided NASA wasn’t doing enough to document the stratosphere, and decided to take matters into their own hands. After testing their “19-inch helium filled weather balloon” in Brooklyn, Luke Geissbuhler and his son Max headed upstate and launched the device, complete with a camera, into space. Here’s what the planet looks like from up there:
Posted by Benjamin Roudenis on October 4, 2010 0 comments
Chilean add agency DDB prepared and utilized this dastardly box to seriously freak out apartment dwellers in Santiago, all in the name of ADT, the home security firm. To quote their video:
“To prove residents that anyone could break into their homes unexpectedly.”
What could possibly go wrong?
When not held flat, the boxes pop open to a cube, allowing them to be inserted under doors to lie in wait for the returning home owner. The owner sees the terrifying sight of something that has gotten inside your home without your consent. To compound the brief moment of horror, it bears the slogan “Breaking into your apartment is easier than you think” next to the ADT logo.
Posted by Benjamin Roudenis on September 25, 2010 0 comments
Southerners are more like to die from the effects of the weather than people living in any other region of the US.
But for all the attention garnered by catastrophic hurricanes such as Katrina and Andrew, simple heatwaves kill far more people than all natural disasters combined, according to a newly published county-by-county map of natural hazard deaths.
Other extreme summer hazards, such as floods, and cold winter weather also outranked hurricanes, earthquakes, and wildfires, according to geographers Kevin Borden and Susan Cutter, of the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Overall, natural disasters account for less than 5% of natural hazard deaths across the US.
Large cities like San Francisco and New York are among the safest places to live, but if city living isn’t for you, the odds of dying from the weather are lowest in the Midwest.
Posted by Benjamin Roudenis on September 20, 2010 0 comments
Speaking ahead of a talk at the British Science Festival in Birmingham tomorrow, Guy Consolmagno, who is one of the pope’s astronomers, said that the traditional definition of a soul was to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions. “Any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has – has a soul.” Would he baptise an alien? “Only if they asked.”
Posted by Benjamin Roudenis on May 12, 2010 0 comments
Darryl Carpenter came up with the idea of using hay to soak up the oil spill from the ocean, while driving to a job site last Monday. The next minute he was on the phone with sub-contractor Goodson to ask: “Can you fill a large pan with water and oil, then grab a handful of hay and stir it in? Strain out the hay, then call me back and tell me what’s left in the pan.
Eureka! Carpenter had found a solution. Goodson called back elated to say: “You’re not going to believe how this works!” The hay had soaked up all of the oil in the pan. The water looked clear again. The Walton County Sheriff’s real-time video confirms this.
Donald Sensing at Sense of Events says the numbers just don’t work when you factor the area covered by the oil spill and volume of oil in the water. Visit his webite to see the math.
Posted by Benjamin Roudenis on May 3, 2010 0 comments
A semisubmersible drilling platform called the Deepwater Horizon located about 50 miles southeast of the Mississippi Delta experienced a fire and explosion at approximately 11 p.m. CDT on April 20. Subsequently, oil began spilling out into the Gulf of Mexico and efforts to contain the spill continue today. NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellite imagery has captured the spill in between cloudy days.
On April 29, the MODIS image on the Terra satellite captured a wide-view natural-color image of the oil slick (outlined in white) just off the Louisiana coast. The oil slick appears as dull gray interlocking comma shapes, one opaque and the other nearly transparent. Sunglint — the mirror-like reflection of the sun off the water — enhances the oil slick’s visibility. The northwestern tip of the oil slick almost touches the Mississippi Delta.
Credit: NASA/Earth Observatory/Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of the University of Wisconsin’s Space Science and Engineering Center MODIS Direct Broadcast system.
Posted by Benjamin Roudenis on March 7, 2010 0 comments
The magnitude 8.8 quake that slammed central Chile February 27 knocked the entire planet for a loop — literally. The sudden, large-scale movement of tectonic plates that triggered the quake shifted immense masses of rock a few meters closer to Earth’s core, tilting the planet’s axis a few centimeters and imperceptibly shortening the day, analyses indicate.
Disaster struck just after 3:34 a.m. local time, when seismic stresses that had been building for decades, if not centuries, let loose. Rocks along the interface between two tectonic plates slipped past each other a distance of seven to 11 meters, says Jian Lin, a geophysicist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
. . . . .
The movement of tectonic plates in Chile February 27 has triggered glitches in Earth’s rotation, a new analysis suggests. Sudden subduction of the Nazca plate carried large amounts of mass closer to the center of the Earth — which, conceptually but on a vastly different scale, works like spinning skaters bringing their arms closer to their bodies, says Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. As a result, Earth’s day is now about 1.26 microseconds shorter than it was before the massive quake, Gross estimates.
And because the quake’s shift in mass occurred deep in the Southern Hemisphere, Earth was slightly tipped off balance — a result similar to a spinning skater bringing in one arm but not the other. The planet’s “figure axis,” the line about which the Earth is balanced, shifted about 8 centimeters, Gross notes.
Earth’s axis is constantly wobbling at various frequencies, with some oscillations measuring several meters and taking months to unfold. Forces driving those cycles, including those resulting from winds and ocean currents, act continually across Earth’s surface and often are about a thousand times larger than those generated during the Chilean quake.
Posted by Benjamin Roudenis on May 12, 2009 0 comments
When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia , he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.
. . . . .
“I was really shocked at the results from the experiment,” Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.
“I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn’t come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up,” he said. “It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”
