Archive for the 'Off Topic' Category
Off Topic: Speed Queen Washing Machines
September 25th, 2016Yesterday, our 19 year old Fisher & Paykel washing machine blew up. Before anyone suggests fixing it, know this: SmartDrive motor melted (several coils fused into a single black blob), the boards up on the console fried and the drum was punctured—not necessarily in that order. It looks like someone fired a .22 from the […]
Interoceptive Ability Predicts Survival on a London Trading Floor
September 20th, 2016Via: Nature: Interoception is the sensing of physiological signals originating inside the body, such as hunger, pain and heart rate. People with greater sensitivity to interoceptive signals, as measured by, for example, tests of heart beat detection, perform better in laboratory studies of risky decision-making. However, there has been little field work to determine if […]
ALTA 8 – Moving Pictures
September 19th, 2016When I was in photography school more than a couple of decades ago, I used to hang out with the extreme slow mo and bullet-slicing-playing-cards-in-half weirdos. We used to wonder what tech would exist in 20 years along these lines, and we all chuckled and agreed that film would mostly be gone… Nobody guessed that […]
Proxima b: Planet Found in Habitable Zone Around Nearest Star, ‘Temperature Suitable for Liquid Water to Exist on Its Surface’
August 24th, 2016Via: European Southern Observatory: Astronomers using ESO telescopes and other facilities have found clear evidence of a planet orbiting the closest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri. The long-sought world, designated Proxima b, orbits its cool red parent star every 11 days and has a temperature suitable for liquid water to exist on its surface. This […]
Organisms Might Be Quantum Machines
August 18th, 2016Via: BBC: [Quantum effects] might be at work behind some very familiar processes, from the photosynthesis that powers plants – and ultimately feeds us all – to the familiar sight of birds on their seasonal migrations. Quantum physics might even play a role in our sense of smell.
The Tunguska Event
August 18th, 2016Via: BBC: On 30 June 1908, an explosion ripped through the air above a remote forest in Siberia, near the Podkamennaya Tunguska river. The fireball is believed to have been 50-100m wide. It depleted 2,000 sq km of the taiga forest in the area, flattening about 80 million trees. The earth trembled. Windows smashed in […]
Rumor: Possible Earth-Like Planet Around Proxima Centauri
August 15th, 2016Via: PhysOrg: The hunt for exoplanets has been heating up in recent years. Since it began its mission in 2009, over four thousand exoplanet candidates have been discovered by the Kepler mission, several hundred of which have been confirmed to be “Earth-like” (i.e. terrestrial). And of these, some 216 planets have been shown to be […]
1980s Nuclear War Nightmares
August 1st, 2016Reading the piece about the 390th Strategic Missile Wing in Tucson, Arizona reminded me about being somewhat traumatized as a child by seeing news shows on TV discussing nuclear war. Yep, even as a young kid, I used to watch a lot of news on TV and read newspapers and news magazines. I was so […]
‘Welcome to Jupiter’: NASA Mission Puts Juno in Orbit After Five-Year Journey
July 5th, 2016Via: Guardian: After a five-year voyage across 1.8bn miles (2.8bn km), Nasa’s Juno spacecraft has reached Jupiter and successfully entered its orbit. … Juno’s mission is to peer through Jupiter’s cloud-socked atmosphere and map the interior from a unique vantage point above the poles. Among the lingering questions: How much water exists? Is there a […]
Yes, There Have Been Aliens
June 11th, 2016Via: New York Times: LAST month astronomers from the Kepler spacecraft team announced the discovery of 1,284 new planets, all orbiting stars outside our solar system. The total number of such “exoplanets” confirmed via Kepler and other methods now stands at more than 3,000. This represents a revolution in planetary knowledge. A decade or so […]
