Skip to main content

Home/ Trawling The Net/ Group items tagged large

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
fishead ...*∞º˙

BBC News - Clues to Antarctica space blast - 1 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8547534.stm

makes you think interesting

shared by fishead ...*∞º˙ on 04 Mar 10 - Cached
  • A large space rock may have exploded over Antarctica thousands of years ago, showering a large area with debris, according to new research.The evidence comes from accumulations of tiny meteoritic particles and a layer of extraterrestrial dust found in Antarctic ice cores.
fishead ...*∞º˙

Clever folds in a globe give new perspectives on Earth - tech - 10 December 2009 - New ... - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...new-perspectives-on-earth.html

shared by fishead ...*∞º˙ on 01 Jan 10 - Cached
  • fishead ...*∞º˙ on 01 Jan 10
     
    "Video: A new way to unfold the Earth's surface produces a new kind of map A new technique for unpeeling the Earth's skin and displaying it on a flat surface provides a fresh perspective on geography, making it possible to create maps that string out the continents for easy comparison, or lump together the world's oceans into one huge mass of water surrounded by coastlines. See a gallery of the new maps "Myriahedral projection" was developed by Jack van Wijk, a computer scientist at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. "The basic idea is surprisingly simple," says van Wijk. His algorithms divide the globe's surface into small polygons that are unfolded into a flat map, just as a cube can be unfolded into six squares. Cartographers have tried this trick before; van Wijk's innovation is to up the number of polygons from just a few to thousands. He has coined the word "myriahedral" to describe it, a combination of "myriad" with "polyhedron", the name for polygonal 3D shapes. Warping reality The mathematical impossibility of flattening the surface of a sphere has long troubled mapmakers. "Consider peeling an orange and trying to flatten it out," says van Wijk. "The surface has to distort or crack." Some solutions distort the size of the continents while roughly preserving their shape - the familiar Mercator projection, for instance, makes Europe and North America disproportionately large compared with Africa. Others, like the Peters projection, keep landmasses at the correct relative sizes, at the expense of warping their shapes. An ideal map would combine the best properties of both, but that is only possible by inserting gaps into the Earth's surface, resulting in a map with confusing interruptions. Van Wijk's method makes it possible to direct those cuts in a way that minimises such confusion. Maps of significance When generating a map he assigns a "weighting" to each edge on the polyhedron to signal its importance, influencing the pl
fishead ...*∞º˙

Russia May Send Spacecraft to Deflect Incoming Asteroid : Discovery News - 0 views

news.discovery.com/...steroid-spacecraft-russia.html

shared by fishead ...*∞º˙ on 31 Dec 09 - Cached
  • fishead ...*∞º˙ on 31 Dec 09
     
    "Russia is considering sending a spacecraft to a large asteroid to knock it off its path and prevent a possible collision with Earth, the head of the country's space agency said Wednesday. Anatoly Perminov said the space agency will hold a meeting soon to assess a mission to Apophis, telling Golos Rossii radio that it would invite NASA, the European Space Agency, the Chinese space agency and others to join the project once it is finalized. When the 270-meter (885-foot) asteroid was first discovered in 2004, astronomers estimated the chances of it smashing into Earth in its first flyby in 2029 were as high as 1-in-37, but have since lowered their estimate. Further studies ruled out the possibility of an impact in 2029, when the asteroid is expected to come no closer than 18,300 miles (29,450 kilometers) above Earth's surface, but they indicated a small possibility of a hit on subsequent encounters. In October, NASA lowered the odds that Apophis could hit Earth in 2036 from a 1-in-45,000 as earlier thought to a 1-in-250,000 chance after researchers recalculated the asteroid's path. It said another close encounter in 2068 will involve a 1-in-330,000 chance of impact. Without mentioning NASA findings, Perminov said that he heard from a scientist that Apophis is getting closer and may hit the planet. "I don't remember exactly, but it seems to me it could hit the Earth by 2032," Perminov said. "People's lives are at stake. We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people," Perminov said. Scientists have long theorized about asteroid deflection strategies. Some have proposed sending a probe to circle around a dangerous asteroid to gradually change its trajectory. Others suggested sending a spacecraft to collide with the asteroid and alter its momentum, or using nuclear weapons to hit it."
fishead ...*∞º˙

mental_floss Blog » Extreme Weirdness: Antarctica's "Blood Falls" - 0 views

www.mentalfloss.com/...45981

weirdness out of the ordinary interesting

shared by fishead ...*∞º˙ on 30 Jan 10 - Cached
  • There is a glacier in Antarctica that seems to be weeping a river of blood. It’s one of the continent’s strangest features, and it’s located in one of the continent’s strangest places — the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a huge, ice-free zone and one of the world’s harshest deserts. So imagine you’re hiking through this – – which has been kept ice-less since God was a child because of something called the katabatic winds, which sweep over the valleys at up to 200 mph and suck all the moisture out of them. Anyway, you’re hiking along, passing dessicated penguin carcasses and such, and you come to this. A bleeding glacier. Discovered in 1911 by a member of Robert Scott’s ill-fated expedition team, its rusty color was at first theorized to be caused by some sort of algae growth. Later, however, it was proven to be due to iron oxidation. Every so often, the glacier spews forth a clear, iron-rich liquid that quickly oxidizes and turns a deep shade of red. According to Discover Magazine – The source of that water is an intensely salty lake trapped beneath 1,300 feet of ice, and a new study has now found that microbes have carved out a niche for themselves in that inhospitable environment, living on sulfur and iron compounds. The bacteria colony has been isolated there for about 1.5 million years, researchers say, ever since the glacier rolled over the lake and created a cold, dark, oxygen-poor ecosystem. Even weirder: scientists think that the bacteria responsible for Blood Falls might be an Earth-bound approximation of the kind of alien life that might exist elsewhere in the solar system, like beneath the polar ice caps of Mars and Europa.
Skeptical Debunker

Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia | Beautiful Places to Visit - 1 views

beautifulplacestovisit.com/...ce-lakes-national-park-croatia

Lakes Croatia beautiful

shared by Skeptical Debunker on 11 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Skeptical Debunker on 11 Mar 10
     
    The stunning Plitvice Lakes National Park lies in the Lika region of Croatia. The park is surrounded by the mountains Plješevica, Mala Kapela, and Medveđak, which are part of the Dinaric Alps. The 16 blue-green Plitvice Lakes, which are separated by natural dams of travertine, are situated on the Plitvice plateau. Waterfalls connect the lakes, and the tallest waterfall is Veliki Slap at 70 meters (230 feet) tall. The Plitvice lakes area boasts a large variety of interesting and colorful flora and fauna. Visitors can enjoy walking and hiking the many pathways and trails, or exploring the lakes by boat. The park itself has 3 hotels and a campsite, otherwise visitors can find accommodation at any of the number of villages and cities nearby.
fishead ...*∞º˙

Favorite colors test shows CEOs are different; take the test - USATODAY.com - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...010-02-08-ceocolors08_ST_N.htm

makes you think

shared by fishead ...*∞º˙ on 09 Feb 10 - No Cached
  • Ask CEOs to pick their favorite color and what they select will often be very different than what most people would pick. For example, when 877 members of USA TODAY's CEO panel took an online personality color test, they were three times more likely to favor magenta than the public at large, three times less likely to select red, and 3½ times less likely to choose yellow.
fishead ...*∞º˙

Groaners « Bits & Pieces - 0 views

bitsandpieces.us/...groaners

groaners

shared by fishead ...*∞º˙ on 22 Jan 10 - Cached
  • 1. The roundest knight at King Arthur ’s round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi. 2. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian. 3. She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still. 4. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class because it was a weapon of math disruption. 5. The butcher backed into the meat grinder and got a little behind in his work. 6. No matter how much you push the envelope, it’ll still be stationery. 7. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering. 8. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart. 9. Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie. 10. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. 11. A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it. 12. Atheism is a non-prophet organization. 13. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other, “You stay here; I’ll go on ahead.” 14. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me. 15. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: “Keep off the Grass.” 16. A small boy swallowed some coins and was taken to a hospital. When his grandmother telephoned to ask how he was, a nurse said, “No change yet.” 17. A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion. 18. The short fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large. 19. The man who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran. 20. A backward poet writes inverse. 21. In democracy it’s your vote that counts. In feudalism it’s your count that votes. 22. When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion. 23. Don’t join dangerous cults: Practice safe sects.
fishead ...*∞º˙

Amazing Sand Painting - 3 views

<object width=

video painting sand art

shared by fishead ...*∞º˙ on 15 Jan 10 - No Cached
  • fishead ...*∞º˙ on 15 Jan 10
     
  • ...1 more comment...
  • fishead ...*∞º˙ on 15 Jan 10
     
    Dont dare to miss this amazing Video Clip . . first read it properly.. This video shows the winner of "Ukraine's Got Talent", Kseniya Simonova, 24, drawing a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table showing how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II. Her talent, which admittedly is a strange one, is mesmeric to watch. The images, projected onto a large screen, moved many in the audience to tears and she won the top prize of about £75,000. She begins by creating a scene showing a couple sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky, but then warplanes appear and the happy scene is obliterated. It is replaced by a woman's face crying, but then a baby arrives and the woman smiles again. Once again war returns and Miss Simonova throws the sand into chaos from which a young woman's face appears. She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier. This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house. In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye. The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine, resulted in one in four of the population being killed with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million. Kseniya Simonova says: "I find it difficult enough to create art using paper and pencils or paintbrushes, but using sand and fingers is beyond me. The art, especially when the war is used as the subject matter, even brings some audience members to tears. And there's surely no bigger compliment."
  • Jack Logan on 15 Jan 10
     
    This is so amazing - a rare and wonderful talent! Reminds me of Stravinsky's L'histoire du soldat, which is a chamber ballet from the same period; but, this version is so similar - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jhOIDmtCcs - you'll love this!
  • fishead ...*∞º˙ on 16 Jan 10
     
    that's really cool! wondering how they did the illustrations--stop action animation? I don't know why, but it sorta reminds me of this... http://ablestmage.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/1958-era-disney-predicts-transportations-future
Skeptical Debunker

'Hella' Proposed as Official Big Number - Yahoo! News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/...llaproposedasofficialbignumber

hellla large number proposal

shared by Skeptical Debunker on 07 Mar 10 - Cached
  • To become official, "hella" would have to jump through quite a few bureaucratic hoops. It would have to pass through the Consultative Committee for Units (CCU), one of 10 advisory committees of the International Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM). If the CCU recommends it the CIPM, that board must then decide whether to advance the cause to the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM), the official authority that can make changes to the SI system. That international organization, based in France, includes members from 81 countries. "I think that for a number of reasons it's a long shot," said Ben Stein, a spokesperson for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the U.S. organization that handles measurements. "The types of things they would consider are is it needed, does it add or reduce confusion, are the names consistent with other names associated with the prefixes?" Sendek argues that the name would honor the scientific contributions of Northern Californians, who have famously popularized the phrase "hella" to mean "a whole lot."
  • Skeptical Debunker on 07 Mar 10
     
    Soon the word "hella" may not be associated with California surfers as much as with scientists in lab coats. A physics student is petitioning to add "hella" to the International System of Units (SI) as the official designation of 10 to the 27th power, or a trillion trillions.
1 - 9 of 9
Showing 20▼ items per page