I Need a Name, A Theme.

jaymug:

Lamborghini Ankonian.

wired:

The Ultimate Counterfeiter isn’t a crook - he’s an artist.

More @ Threat Level.

(Source: Wired)

badesaba:

Calculation of solar and lunar eclipses

from: Marvels of Creatures and Strange Things Existing, by al-Qazwini 

(copy manuscript, 14th century) 

Zakariya’ ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini (1203 -1283), was a Persian physician, astronomer, geographer and proto-science fiction writer. Born in the Persian town of Qazvin, he served as legal expert and judge (qadhi) in several localities in Persia and at Baghdad. He travelled around in Mesopotamia and Syria, and finally entered the circle patronized by the governor of Baghdad.

he also wrote a futuristic proto-science fiction tale entitled Awaj bin Anfaq, about a man who travelled to Earth from a distant planet

(via scientificillustration)

manchannel:

Studio, Brazil. 

(Source: whereisthecoool, via audiophilephotography)

the-star-stuff:

NASA’s 10 Greatest Science Missions

10. Pioneer

Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, launched in 1972 and 1973, respectively, were the first spacecraft to visit the solar system’s most photogenic gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn. Pioneer 10 was the first probe to travel through the solar system’s asteroid belt, a field of orbiting rocks between Mars and Jupiter. 

9. Voyager

Shortly after the Pioneers made their flybys, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes followed. They made many important discoveries about Jupiter and Saturn, including rings around Jupiter and the presence of volcanism on Jupiter’s moon, Io. Voyager went on to make the first flybys of Uranus, where it discovered 10 new moons, and Neptune, where it found that Neptune actually weighs less than astronomers thought.

8. WMAP

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), launched in 2001, may not be as well-known, but it measures with unprecedented accuracy the temperature of the radiation left over from the Big Bang.

7. Spitzer

Another spacecraft with a profound effect on cosmology and astrophysics is the Spitzer Space Telescope, which observed the heavens through infrared light. This light, which has a longer wavelength than visual light, is mostly blocked by Earth’s atmosphere.

6.Spirit & Opportunity

Intended for just a 90-day mission, these workhorse Mars rovers have far outdone themselves, and are still chugging away on the red planet more than five years after landing. Spirit and Opportunity, the twin Mars Exploration Rovers, landed on opposite sides of the planet in January 2004. 

5. Cassini-Huygens

This joint NASA/ESA spacecraft, launched in 1997, reached its destination, Saturn, in 2004. Since then it has been in orbit around the ringed world, taking one stunning snapshot after another of the planets rings, moons and weather.

4. Chandra

Since 1999, the Chandra X-ray Observatory has been scanning the skies in X-ray light, looking at some of the most distant and bizarre astronomical events. Because Earth’s pesky atmosphere blocks out most X-rays, astronomers couldn’t view the universe in this high-energy, short-wavelength light until they sent Chandra up to space. 

3. Viking

When NASA’s Viking 1 probe touched-down on Mars in July 1976, it was the first time a man-made object had soft-landed on the red planet. (Though the Soviet Mars 2 and 3 probes did land on the surface, they failed upon landing). The Viking 1 lander also holds the title of longest-running Mars surface mission, with a total duration of 6 years and 116 days. The spacecraft also sent the first color pictures back from the Martian surface, showing us what that mysterious red dot looks like from the ground for the first time.

2. Hubble

The most-loved of all NASA spacecraft, the Hubble Space Telescope has name recognition around the world. Its photos have changed the way everyday people figure themselves into the cosmos. The observatory has also radically changed science, making breakthroughs on astronomical issues too numerous to count. 

1. Apollo

NASA’s best space science mission? The one humans got to tag along on, of course! Not only was sending a man to the moon monumental for human history, but the Apollo trips were the first to bring celestial stuff back to Earth and greatly advanced our scientific understanding of the moon. 

(via n-a-s-a)

mondonoir:

“The hand-drawn diagram of the earth’s structure in Plate IX represents one of the stages in which there is The Universal conflagration or final Dissolution of the Earth by Fire.” – Matthew D. Eddy [read the rest here]

Thomas Wright of Durham, A New Theory of the Earth Founded upon and More Fully Explaining the Universal Phenomenon of Earthquakes (Plate IX); the Magnet and Doctrine of Tides (circa. 1773)

(via scientificillustration)

helloyoucreatives:

Carved Book Landscape by Guy Laramee

(Source: uneviecreative)

unknownskywalker:

Inside the Dragon

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station take a look inside the Dragon spacecraft docked to Harmony module. The hatch was opened last Saturday beginning four days of operations to unload more than 1,000 pounds of cargo from Dragon and reload it with experiments and cargo for a return trip to Earth. It is scheduled for splashdown several hundred miles west of California on May 31.

unknownskywalker:

Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, Oak Park, Illinois by Frank Lloyd Wright

(Source: wandrlust)

Full disclosure: reposted from Reddit.

Can he do nothing that isn’t interesting? I’ve never seen a talk quite like this one before. 

unknownskywalker:

Grappling Dragon

SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft is seen grappled to the station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm during docking maneuvers on May 25, 2012 around 10:00 AM EDT. The feat came 3 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 23 seconds after the mission’s launch. The station was 251 miles over northwest Australia when capture occurred.

wired:

fastcodesign:

And now, a look at some really terrifying antique tools for brain surgery

Eeep.

proofmathisbeautiful:

Saddle up for maximum snack satisfaction (mathematically speaking)

Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic is a Bay Area writer and editor. Her first book Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate, a humorous non-fiction narrative and exposé on the lives of picky eaters, will be released by Perigee Books on July 3.

My husband is a calculus professor and one who brings food items into the classroom with surprising regularity. No, he doesn’t bring pies on Pi day - though he can recite the string up to a couple dozen digits - but he does bring Pringles. As a teaching aid.

This afternoon when I walked into his study, I nearly tripped over a plastic Safeway bag filled with six red cans of Pringles. “Is it Pringles Day already?” I asked, nudging the bag. Pringles Day is the day Dr. Mathra lectures on the classification of critical points in multivariable calculus, and he uses the saddle-shaped Pringles to illustrate his points.

After class, the students get to eat his illustrations. It’s their favorite day.

However, this Pringles Eve, Dr. Mathra is kicking himself because in addition to stocking up on Pringles, which were invented by Proctor & Gamble & heaven in the 1960s, he also got an oblong can of Lays Stax, the parvenu potato chip that’s only been around since 2003.

Personally, I’ve never been turned on by Lays Stax. Not only are they covered with the stink of being the unoriginal upstart that is so obviously trying to rip-off the adored-for-decades potato chip, but they’re not thin and delicate enough, they’re not oily enough, and they’re not addictive enough. However, none of the above is Dr. Mathra’s complaint with them.

“It’s ridiculous!” he fumed, “They set themselves up as a Pringles competitor, but it’s an entirely different curvature!”

The shape of the Lays Stax - known as a parabolic cylinder - is way less mathematically interesting than the hyperbolic paraboloid of a Pringles, which is also known as a saddle. In math, the Pringles saddle shape exemplifies how you can stand at the flat point of a surface and not be at the highest point of your surroundings or at the lowest point of your surroundings.

Basically, you could call the saddle “the taint” of critical points. T’aint the highest point, t’aint the lowest. “Um, sure. If you wanted to be crass about it,” Dr. Mathra mumbles.

The big three types of critical points in multivariable calculus are the bottom of a bowl (aka the local min), the top of a dome (the local max), or in the middle of a saddle (saddle point).

“The Lays Stax shape isn’t even as interesting as a bowl - it’s a wishy-washy bowl. I mean, you can make the Lays shape with a piece of paper,” Dr. Mathra explains. (In my twelve years of being married to him, I have frequently found that being able to make something with paper is met with derision.) See, you can’t replicate the Pringles saddle shape with a piece of paper without cutting the paper and actually adding more paper to it and that makes it more mathematically desirable.

Sensing he has my attention throughout all of this raving, Dr. Mathra continues, “They’ve got these Lays Stax right next to the Pringles as though they are equivalent. How can they do that? One is a positive semi-definite quadratic form and the other is an indefinite quadratic form - they’re not even the same definiteness!”

When I don’t react, he insists, “Oh, come on - that will KILL in class tomorrow!”

And why should you, the non-calculus student, care about the Pringles saddle form? The principal application of calculus is optimizing, or determining whether you are at a maximum. You use calculus whenever you want to optimize, well, anything. “If you are at a local max (the top of a dome), everywhere you go moves you down. If you’re at a saddle, there’s a way you can go that will take you up.” Knowing this is important when thinking about increasing filthy lucre, precious time, diminishing resources, or a supply of Pringles.

And that, my friends, is why Pringles will always, always beat Lays Stax.

Flavor is subjective. Math is irrefutable.