Neat Stuff

Head Like an Orange: GIFs to cheer you

I've just discovered a lovely Dutch blog: Head Like an Orange. It's just a collection of GIFs...but what GIFs! They're moving images, very simple, but you can watch each one indefinitely, like watching a campfire. And one of them is a campfire. 

NASA's Own Supercut of Amazing Footage of Earth From Space

Via The Atlantic: NASA's Own Supercut of Amazing Footage of Earth From Space. Click through for the video and a minute-by-minute description of what you're seeing. Excerpt:

Because looking down on our beautiful planet from the lofty height of the International Space Station never gets old, here is just one more breathtaking time-lapse video to check out. When NASA made the raw images and videos available a few months ago, filmmakers of all stripes assembled stunning videos set to music. We even made our own version, here at the Atlantic Video channel. In this latest video, below, NASA gives it their own spin, choosing a dramatic song, fittingly called  "Walking in the Air," by Howard Blake.

Make word clouds with Wordle

By chance I've just discovered Wordle, a free application that converts a chunk of text or (part of) a website into a word cloud. Once you've done that, hit the Randomize button to see the cloud in various colours and fonts. It's great fun, sometimes surprising, and you can save a cloud as a jpeg.

The Manahatta Project

Click on Mannahatta » Home and you'll find yourself exploring the Manhattan Island of four centuries ago. This is a fascinating playground—especially for New Yorkers.

A Journey into Time Immemorial

A Journey into Time Immemorial is a remarkable evocation of a Sto:lo village on British Columbia's Fraser River before the arrival of the Europeans. It's fascinating to explore.

Best new atlas yet

Via Spiegel Online: City of Boatmen, France?: Map Reveals the Secrets Behind Place Names. Excerpt:

It is difficult to find anyone these days who is not familiar with Middle Earth, J.R.R. Tolkien's fantastical world of orcs, hobbits and dwarves. A whole generation of film-goers is familiar with such place names like "Dead Marshes" and "Mount Doom."

But this peculiar nomenclature isn't unique to Middle Earth. In fact, such names are everywhere. In France, for example, youl'll find the City of Boatmen. The Caucasus plays host to the Land of the Fire Keepers. And who hasn't dreamed of vacationing in the Land of Calves? But to get to these places, you'll need a new map, which should be hitting bookstores in the Great Land of the Tattooed -- Great Britain -- by the end of the month.

The story contains a photo gallery of map excerpts with place names in English. It's fascinating.

Carbon Footprint Calculator - What's Your Carbon Footprint?

Via The Nature Conservancy: Carbon Footprint Calculator.

The Sky Is Falling

Here's a good article in the June 2008 issue of The Atlantic: The Sky Is Falling. The link also takes you to a video in which the article's author, Gregg Easterbrook, talks about the issue of forestalling an asteroid collision with the earth.

The Phoenix Has Landed

Here's the link to: NASA -
Phoenix.

These are great days that we live in.

Escher's "Relativity" in LEGO®

This is lots of fun: Escher's "Relativity" in LEGO®.

The official M.C. Escher site is here.

Rome Reborn

Now you can visit a digitally reconstructed RomeReborn1.0.

Amazing Views of Saturn

Cassini has been taking some amazing shots of Saturn from angles never seen before, and they're now available on the CICLOPS Public Website.

What's Your Carbon Footprint?

Find out at the BP - Carbon Calculator. Apparently my wife and I are producing about 18 tons of CO2 a year, when the Canadian average is 11.71 tons. Not good!

Mose Allison

When he was a young jazz/blues musician in the 1950s and 60s, he was cool beyond all measure. He still is: Mose Allison is among the great ones.

The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006

Via Bad Astronomy, some astounding photos: The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006. Hard to say which is the best; they're all beyond anything Chesley Bonestell ever imagined.

Bound for Glory: America in Colour, 1939-1943

By all means visit Bound for glory at the Guardian Unlimited. It's a slide show of a dozen colour photographs taken in rural America long ago. It's amazing how colour makes the people and scenes seem vivid and immediate, even when that world has vanished.

And here is the entire collection of colour photos from the Farm Security Administration.

Worldmapper

The University of Sheffield has a great site. Worldmapper: The world as you've never seen it before shows the nations of the world displayed in proportion to their importance by a given standard—metal imports or exports, for example. Great fun, and literally an eye-opener.

Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Home

I'm reading Roving Mars, by Stephen Squyres, the Principal Investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. It's a fine book, and it made me go looking for information on the Web. Here's the Mars Exploration Rover Mission Home Page. Absolutely amazing stuff—not least the fact that both rovers are still in operation, over two years after arriving on Mars.

Click on the Payson Panorama to see the picture fill your computer screen. Then scroll sideways or down to see the rest of the panorama. It's an experience.

Google Mars

Fascinating: Google Mars.

What time is it?

Here's a very useful site where you can create a personalized clock showing the time in various cities all over the world: timeanddate.com.

Virtual Globes

Declan Butler, a reporter for Nature, has an article on Virtual Globes: The Web-Wide World. If you've discovered Google Earth, you'll find it's more than just a toy.

BasicFeynman.com

If you don't know who Richard P. Feynman was, you're going to have mixed feelings when you learn about him: Scientific genius, raconteur, wit, and safecracker. I've just finished the collected letters edited by his daughter, and that in turn led me to BasicFeynman.com.

Why the mixed feelings? Because he was one of the great figures of the 20th century, you'll fall in love with him, and you'll be mortified that it's taken you this long.

Flying

This is a pretty good way to see how Superman feels as he flies through the sky. Thanks to Tod Maffin's techno blog.

Cassini at Saturn

Here are some amazing and beautiful photos of Cassini at Saturn.

Spirit reaches Martian hilltop

Still moving after all these months, Spirit reaches a Martian hilltop and provides a great view of the landscape—complete with a dust devil. You can also watch a video of Martian dust devils.

More About Planet X

Fascinating: 2003 EL61.

An Ice Lake on Mars

Yet another astronomical surprise: BBC News reports (with a great photo) the discovery of an ice lake on the Red Planet. Great days we live in!

Astronomers detect 10th planet

BBC News Online reports that BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | astronomers have detected a "10th planet"—larger than Pluto, but twice as far away, with a strongly inclined orbit. Like extrasolar planets, we may find a lot more companions in the far reaches of our own solar system. Now we'll have a big controversy over what to name it.

Meet Your Great Big Cousin

A rocky, earthlike planet has been detected circling another star. It's 7.5 times as massive as Earth and twice our diameter, so it's probably not a congenial vacation spot. But it's the smallest extrasolar planet yet discovered, and you can read about it on CNN.com.

How We've Changed!

A new atlas using satellite photos shows how dramatically, and swiftly, the surface of the earth has changed in the past quarter-century or so. You can see some examples in the BBC News feature Changing planet revealed in atlas.