When he rang the doorbell, Zia hadn't planned to step inside. He was there to pick up his fiancee who was babysitting, but she couldn't leave (the parents were running late) so Zia agreed to hang out for a bit. His fiancee said, "Let me introduce you to the kids" — the 2-year-old girl, the 7-year-old boy and, most important, squatting, with no shoes on, surrounded by ants on the back patio, the oldest — the 9-year-old — the one he would make world-famous on YouTube.
This is the boy he now calls "The Philosopher."
posted by These Birds of a Feather
on Mar 29, 2013 -
31 comments
The Nature of Computation -
Intellects Vast and Warm and Sympathetic: "I hand you a network or graph, and ask whether there is a path through the network that crosses each edge exactly once, returning to its starting point. (That is, I ask whether there is a 'Eulerian' cycle.) Then I hand you another network, and ask whether there is a path which visits each node exactly once. (That is, I ask whether there is a 'Hamiltonian' cycle.) How hard is it to answer me?" (
via)
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on Dec 1, 2012 -
19 comments
One of my favorite
blogs happens to be local to me. Eric Berger, the Houston Chronicle's "SciGuy" usually reports on the
weather. But he also posts entertaining and serious stuff as well.
[more inside]
posted by PapaLobo
on Nov 22, 2011 -
3 comments
Exit Mundi's thoughts on the latest anticipated apocalypse: the
coming apocalypse in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 A.D.. (No kidding.)
[more inside]
posted by WCityMike
on Jan 3, 2009 -
79 comments
Five years and 800,000 images went into producing a 4 gigapixel
mosaic image of the galactic plane, which when printed out is 180 feet long. But it has been made browser-sized by
GLIMPSE, the Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire, the research group which, along with
MIPSGAL, created the image:
A Glimpse of the Milky Way.
posted by Kronos_to_Earth
on Jun 5, 2008 -
14 comments
Leave the planet to travel into the largest structures of the universe, then plunge into the tiniest. Forty two orders of magnitude in thirty six minutes....
Cosmic Voyage. (single link Google video
via)
[more inside]
posted by Kronos_to_Earth
on May 30, 2008 -
11 comments
Renegade physicists! have published the book
Endless Universe and
talked to NPR's Tom Ashbrook about their alternative theories of the beginning of the universe: 'The Big Bang' is an
unfortunate misnomer and was not the beginning of time, but rather the
formation of a singularity in the universe. "And what we're seeing is that the Big Bang doesn't have to be the beginning of time. It's perfectly possible that the Big Bang was just a violent event in a pre-existing universe..."
posted by frobozz
on Jun 2, 2007 -
18 comments
Prominent cosmologist Simon D.M. White has written a provocative
paper posted to the astrophysics arxiv complaining that too much time is being devoted to the quest to understand the nature of the
elusive dark energy: "Dark Energy is undeniably an interesting problem to attack through astronomical observation, but it is one of many and not necessarily the one where significant progress is most likely to follow a major investment of resources."
He worries generally that observational cosmology/astrophysics/astronomy may turn away from the construction of instruments of general utility (such as the
Hubble Space Telescope), to concentrate on a small number of massive experiments narrowly focused on solving particular problems (such as
WMAP and the
Large Hadron Collider), to the detriment of the
"quirky small-science" type of astronomy.
posted by snoktruix
on Apr 21, 2007 -
8 comments
Before the Big Bang -
way,
way out of my depth, but I thought this comment was intriguing: "The paper as published, along with a longer follow up paper, looks to my untrained eye a nearly complete quantum gravitation theory, which is an exciting prospect in itself. However, as with all physical theories, we will await for experimental support before popping the cork." Here's some more on
loop quantum gravity,
spin networks,
the big bang and
ekpyrosis.
posted by kliuless
on Apr 16, 2006 -
18 comments
