MetaFilter posts tagged with venus

The Hohle Fels Venus

homunculus — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:24:28 -0800

Ancient Venus rewrites history books: Female figure was carved from a mammoth tusk 35,000 years ago. [Via]

Where the wild things are/are not.

mightshould — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:03:39 -0800

Poaching – not pears, not birds, but plants. In the feed-me-Seymour vein of green and growing things, these are the plants that eat things – too bad they aren’t able to defend themselves from people and habitat loss. But wait! There’s help on the way. A notice calling for people to volunteer to replant poached Venus Fly Traps grabs your attention. Seems there are folks who are in charge of looking after the little creatures and their habitat: “Plants are a challenge because they don’t have big brown eyes and fur,” said Tom Chisdock, when discussing public perception of the plant’s protected status. When a species is being threatened not only because of habitat loss but also because it’s easy pickings, and when the fine is $35 per event (not per plant) it’s pretty hard to deter the poachers. For legitimate resale, the plants are cultivated in greenhouses; however they aren’t fond of captivity and are difficult for the home grower to keep alive. And, what if the folks collecting the plants are semi-official? Alert advocates help. A conversation on a carnivorous plant message board went all out in identifying a situation where an aquarium was collect/poach/harvesting the plants. A discussion ensued and the response was an open letter reply by the director of Husbandry: “When we have ventured into the field, our practices have been consistent with ICPS policy regarding collection.” Yeah, they do it, but it’s OK because they are doing it within guidelines.

The Venus Calendar and Related Lore of the Dogon

sidr — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:08:21 -0800

The Venus Calendar and Related Lore of the Dogon by Philip C. Steffey, PhD.

Venus's Missing Water

homunculus — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 21:26:07 -0800

Where did Venus’s water go? Water may have once been as abundant on Venus as it is on Earth. New data from the Venus Express suggests that the planet's lack of a magnetic field has allowed water in the atmosphere to be stripped apart and carried into space by the solar wind.

Zeitgeist: Addendum

Baldons — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:40:49 -0800

We already talked (self-link, sorta) about Zeitgeist: The Movie. Its author, Peter Joseph, recently released Zeitgeist: Addendum. (beware: last two links are two hour movies) This time, it’s about money and debt, scarcity and resources. The first, financial part may look like an extended Ron Paul ad, but then there’s a sudden turn towards resource-based utopian techno-communalism, and an endorsement for The Venus project. It seems to me like "Kropotkinian anarchism meets The Matrix". In these rough times, is it time for a big leap? [Also announced: The Zeitgeist Movement, still not active]

Venus and Mars - not what we thought

desjardins — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:20:09 -0800

Why aren't men and women becoming more alike? A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge. International Sexuality Description Project findings.

Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain

Artw — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:39:53 -0800

Dan Dare, pilot of the future, scourge of the Venusian Mekon menace, and modernist architectural inspiration?

Hot space bot uses stirling engine

Artw — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 12:24:57 -0800

NASA proposes using a Stirling cooler (essentially a Stirling engine in reverse) to keep a probe cool on the surface of Venus, which has had a tendency to melt or smash previous probes. The cooler would maintain a 25cm sphere within the probe at 200°C -- 100°C above the boiling point of water but sufficiently cool for a high-temperature microcontroller to operate. The waste heat radiators on the exterior of the sphere would reach the temperature of 500°C, 40°C above the the normal Venusian surface temperature.

Venus, get your gun.

tizzie — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 05:32:03 -0800

I support gun control, but for 82-year-old Miss America Venus Ramey, I make an exception. The first redhead and the only native Kentuckian ever to be Miss America, she's pretty fearsome with a snub-nosed .38.

Retro rockets: the good old days that never will be.

cenoxo — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 17:21:32 -0800

Mr. Smith Goes to Venus — part 1^CC and part 2^CC. Legendary space artist Chesley Bonestell shows us what family vacations^CC should have been like in Coronet Magazine, March 1950. [Click thumbnails for LARGE images.]

7 mph would be the equivalent of driving at the speed of light

jessamyn — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 07:23:22 -0800

At forty miles (64.4 km) from Pluto to Sun, the Maine Solar System Model is the largest complete three-dimensional scale model of the solar system in the world. What, you didn't know there was more than one? And yes, Pluto is staying put.

Road trip to venus!

Brandon Blatcher — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 06:53:09 -0800

Road trip to venus!

The Venus Express was launched on Nov. 9th, 2005 from Baikonur, the historic spaceport in Kazakhstan. It is the first Venus probe sent by the ESA , and you can follow it's progress on the six month journey to the planet.

Exploration of Venus begin in 1962 with Mariner 2, the first space probe to fly by another planet and other flights, including the Russian Venera 7, which was the first probe to land on another planet. The Soviets took quite an interest in Venus and dominated the exploration of the planet through the '70s and '80s. A lot of the images recorded by those early craft have been reprocessed with modern technology.

In the early '90s the Magellan spacecraft spent several years mapping the surface of Venus, providing us many, many, many images and 3D maps of the planet.

As for Venus Express, it's goal is to spend two years making detailed studys of the planet's clouds and atmosphere.

Who can invent for us a cartography of autonomy, who can draw a map that includes our desires? - Hakim Bey

absalom — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 17:51:57 -0800

Cartography is a skill pretty much taken for granted now, but it wasn't always so. Accurate maps were once prized state secrets, laborious efforts that cost a fortune and took years (or even decades) to complete.

How things have changed. (Yours now, $110) It took almost 500 years to map North America, but it's only taken one tenth of that to map just everything else. In the last 50 years, we've been able to create acurate atlases of two planets and one moon (with a second in the works). Actually, we've done a lot more than that. We're actually running out of things to map.

Maybe Not.

Has Jupiter aligned with Mars?

WolfDaddy — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 22:24:47 -0800

Venus Transits the Sun. Some really gorgeous pics of this rare stellar event.

Viewing the Transit

kokogiak — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 07:56:58 -0800

Speaking of Transit Watching. I found it really interesting to see the collection of AP photos about the transit of Venus today. Apparently the compelling story is not so much the science (planets orbit the sun, got it), but the global spectacle. It's a bit of an anomaly of late, but Venus watching seems to be something the whole world peacefully agrees is a good thing. [View the viewers in Abu Dhabi, Azraq, Bangkok, Beijing, Cairo, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Kuwait, La Linea, Lebanon, London, Madras, Minsk, Nairobi, New Delhi, New York, Pakistan Paris, Potsdam, Pretoria, Rome, St. Petersburg, Sydney, Tehran, and Yokohama ]

Chasing Venus

carter — Sun, 04 Apr 2004 07:34:57 -0800

Chasing Venus Transits of Venus occur every 130 years or so when Venus can be observed passing across the face of the sun. Chasing Venus is an online exhibition by Smithsonian Institution Libraries that tells the story of how the transit has been observed since the 17th century, with early observations in England, illustrated accounts of expeditions by 18th century astronomers to various parts of the world, and early uses of photography to record observations in the 19th century. Includes links to animations of transits reconstructed from Victorian photographs, and details of a lecture series on Thursdays in April and May (first one April 8). The first transit since 1882 is this year.

Venus

homunculus — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 18:10:49 -0800

Reprocessed images from the Soviet exploration of Venus.

archimago — Wed, 23 Oct 2002 06:03:00 -0800

Who owns the moon? Apparently these people do, and they’re selling it off acre by acre. They are “The founders and leaders of the extraterrestrial real estate market.” Do we really need a Galactic Government with an embassy on the moon? I guess The Federation had to start somewhere. This just begs the question, “Does Venus have its own laws?”

luser — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 12:35:54 -0800

The Hottentot Venus is going home. An African woman named Saarjite Baartman, apparently EXTREMELY overendowed in the buttock/labia department (second floor, next to men's shoes, watch the doors), she did the freakshow thing in Europe for five years in the early 19th c., was edited down at death to her relevant bits and pickled for posterity. Ever been to an actual state-fair freakshow? I saw the alligator lady in the late 70s somewhere in Kentucky. A morally complicated experience.