1) The Guardian has a nice little article on the future of NASA, including a quote by a guy you may know.
2) Speaking of newspapers with funny accents, The Globe and Mail has the history of a perfectly cromulent word I use a lot here on the BA Blog. (Thanks PharmacistScott!)
3) The Carnival of Space #96 is up and running at Cheap Astronomy. As usual, you can spend a whole lot of time perusing outer space at the carnival.
4) Someone playing the Star Formation game thinks they are the Sean Connery to my Alex Trebek:
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Nice. I can only assume they are talking about the formation of black holes after the high-mass stars explode as supernovae. In that case: well-played, sir!
Also, #9 must be an MST3K fan. Awesome. But don’t order the pizza.
Tip o’ the electron degenerate gas to Xavier Onassis for pointing this out to me.
April 5th, 2009 at 9:23 am
The master would not approve!
April 5th, 2009 at 9:23 am
I’m a big fan of embiggenation!
April 5th, 2009 at 9:28 am
I’ve got to think Rebecca is playing this game.
April 5th, 2009 at 9:43 am
Seeing you give a shout out to Manos: Hands of Fate, has increased my respect for you. I award you +50 nerd experience points (NXP) sir!
April 5th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Ugh. How can that horrible movie go away unless we all try to forget it existed? Our collective unconscious needs to be purged!
April 5th, 2009 at 10:24 am
“I can only assume they are talking about the formation of black holes after the high-mass stars explode as supernovae. In that case: well-played, sir!”
Oh, Phil. Don’t you know that black holes don’t suck?
http://astro.airynothing.com/2006/02/black_holes_do_not_suck.html
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/07/23/2312355.htm
http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/q1682.html
April 5th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Now I have the haunting Torgo theme in my head. Dang.
April 5th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
If one can embolden, one should thus be able to embiggen. The author of the globeandmail article (a thumbs up, btw) missed a good chance to use “Embiggen Image” under the print edition thumbnail on the left side. It was likely put there automatically due to the site’s design; but still, that would have been lulzinating.
The Star Formation is a bit of fun (not quite addicting, though). I’ve maxed out at ~24250 with a ×67 chain.
April 5th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
But even after two hours the pizza’s still war– …Hey wait
April 5th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Gotta like how that article on “Embiggen” started: Two commonly used expressions happened to be used in two popular entertainment forms. Anyhoo, now let’s talk about made up words that have nothing to do with either …
April 5th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
level20monkey Says: “Seeing you give a shout out to Manos: Hands of Fate, has increased my respect for you. I award you +50 nerd experience points (NXP) sir!”
How many do I get for actually mentioning it in “The Saucer Fleet?”
- Jack
April 5th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
I will have you know, sir, that with 107 stars occupying the same point in space, it is a supermassive black hole. That’s just how I roll.
April 5th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
I aM tOrGo… I tAkE cArE oF tHe PlAcE wHiLe ThE mAsTeR iS aWaY…
No seriously, that’s me, I put “Torgo” on that list when I got an 84 star cluster in the first level!
My internet celebritude has jumped up about 7 notches.
April 5th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
My, my, here I thought I’d be the only one who noticed the Torgo thing. Should have known better. (‘Manos’ has my vote for worst movie ever made, EVER, but it’s almost palatable in its MST3K version.)
April 6th, 2009 at 1:07 am
Bah! I can barely get over 1000 points. What’s the trick? And everything novas, should I be able to make a stable star?
April 6th, 2009 at 6:03 am
Are you sure about quote in that article? I didn’t see Neil Tysons’ name mentioned anywhere!
April 6th, 2009 at 7:11 am
Well, he’s around here somewhere. I can hear his theme music.
April 6th, 2009 at 8:38 am
As a still active albeit veteran planetary scientist, I would like to comment that what is not needed is more manned flight circuses, but real science done by robots. Mars is a great example and I can say from experience that Voyager, Galileo and Cassini are doing more for science than all the manned flights together. We also need to get DSCOVR into orbit and that apparently is going to happen.
April 6th, 2009 at 8:38 am
“suck it, phil”–
i hope this refers to phil collins.
April 6th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Aharon Eviatar Says:
April 6th, 2009 at 8:38 am
As a still active albeit veteran planetary scientist, I would like to comment that what is not needed is more manned flight circuses, but real science done by robots.
Are you saying that science would not get done if we sent people to Mars?
I think better science would be done. A person there would see things that could be missed by scientists looking through a monitor a couple hundred million kilometers away.
We are explorers by nature and some day we will be able to explore the solar system the way our ancestors were able to explore this planet a few hundred years ago. And to call the manned space program a “circus” belittles what they do and the contributions that they make.
April 6th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
I figured out the trick, just keep the gas moving. Slowly as first then spiral just far enough away and fast enough with dozones of supernova(e?) until the gas is pressed into an uber tiny dot. As long as the gas is still moving it won’t create any stars. Once it stops moving, the little dot will form into a chain of 80 or more stars.
Not exactly real world stuff, I think a chain of 60 or so massive explosions like that compressing all that gas wouldn’t make a chain of stars, more likely a really big black hole
Hmmm StarFormation 2?
April 6th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Two cents incoming!
Even if the science coming from manned and unmanned missions were equal, I’d say we should still send people to Mars, for the exact reason Phil gave in the article. People need inspiration. For instance, we, as a nation, are hurting for aerospace engineers. All the people who grew up watching Sputnik and Apollo are getting ready to retire now, and there just aren’t enough new people to take their place. Manned missions can capture the public’s imagination in a way that robots can’t, and when the loss of a $1-mil tool bag can grab more headlines than anything else from that mission, I’d say we need to step it up a bit.
April 7th, 2009 at 10:36 pm
Zero Kelvin (0Kelvin) is the high score.