Posted almost without comment:

From here via here. Rumor has it this was done by Gary Lyons, but I cannot seem to confirm this or find an email address for him. In my defense, though, I didn’t try very hard. I leave it to my devoted minions if the interest motivates you. My friend Fred Bremmer tells me that Gary Lyons did indeed make this. The original is on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150651175025753&set=a.476615725752.248737.562230752&type=1.

Also? Neil would win. He’s like 15 cm taller and has 20 kilos on me.

[Edited to add: Hmmm. When that picture was taken I was holding, and using, a 1/2 Watt green laser that was powerful enough to ignite a pack of matches and pop balloons. That might even the odds.]

I write a (very semi) monthly column for Blastr, the online portal for the SyFy Channel, and my latest article strikes close to my geeky heart.

When I was a kid I loved loved loved the TV show "Space: 1999". The premise of the show is that a nuclear waste accident blasts the Moon out of Earth orbit and into deep space, where weird unexplained hijinks ensue. Back then the scientific basis of the show didn’t bother me, but when I became a high-falutin’ science type, I wondered: how much energy would it take to hurl the Moon away from the solar system? And what would happen if it did?

The answer would not have made 13-year-old me happy. But as an adult I love playing with the physics and math, and you might as well admit you’re dying to know. So go read my article, and be glad our Moon has a nice, stable orbit right here around good ol’ planet Earth.

- Blastr: Invasion Earth!
- Blastr: So, you wanna blow up the Earth?
- Blastr: My Favorite TV Scientists
- Blastroid
- Blastr: Other than that, Spock, how was the movie?
- Blastr: I Was A Zombie For Science
- Big budget movies that got their science right
- Master of Blastr

How much money would I pay to attend this? It would need exponential notation to express it.

SciFi Airshow is the brainchild of artist Bill George, who I’m guessing is almost exactly the same age as me, since I recognize every single spaceship he’s created (I wrote about this a couple of years ago, but this video is new). It’s all based on TV shows from the 70s (and some movies, too), and the pictures of the Eagle and Hawk from Space:1999 nearly break my heart. But the good news? The show’s gonna be revived. I know the original got a lot of grief, and reboots can be frowned upon, but I really like some of them, and I refuse to judge something before I give it a chance.

And man, I’m willing to give this a chance. As long as they keep the Eagles looking even close to the same, I will sit and watch them fly all day long. They’re still pretty much my favorite scifi spaceship ever made.

Last week, I was interviewed by my friend Ken Plume for his "A Bit of a Chat" series (which has a pretty stellar list of geeky guests, I must say). That interview is online for your earball pleasure. We talked Dragon*Con, quiz shows, being a little dirty, Bill Corbett (hi Bill!), and then NASA. Oh boy, and then NASA. I spouted off pretty good on that particular topic.

And if hearing me blather for way over an hour isn’t enough, you can also listen to the time he interviewed me back in May 2010.

On March 2, 2012, I was the guest on the live Nerdist podcast recorded in Boulder, my hometown. We did the show to a full house (700+ folks) and had a lot of fun. And now, for your brain-melty pleasure, the episode is now online!

Now listen — and I’m serious here — this podcast is Not Safe For Work. I mean seriously and holy cow really really NSFW. There is much swearing, and much humor that would not be fit for primetime TV, say. I’m only marginally sweary, but Chris, Matt Mira, and Jonah Ray — the Nerdist crew — are very much so. And before anyone calls child services on me, in the podcast Jonah misspoke: my daughter is in fact older than 14, and she’s a big fan of the podcast.

Anyway, it was a great experience. I’ve known Chris for a few years now, and finally got a chance to meet Matt and Jonah, who were funny and lovely. And the audience! They were amazing. I could tell they were having a good time, and afterwards the line to talk to the Nerdist folks was so long we were there until nearly 2:00 a.m. And man, do they love Chris — they brought presents, drawings, Dalek cupcakes… it was amazing.

If you’re curious about the topics we covered, we went over marijuana, living in Boulder, conspiracy theories, the Transformers movies, the Moon Hoax, my work on Hubble, poop jokes, life as a nerd, supernovae, quantum superposition, colors in Hubble pictures, Fiske planetarium, and much more. Come to think of it, I’m surprised in hindsight we didn’t totally dork out over Star Trek and Doctor Who! That’s actually pretty shocking.

So, if you’re not easily offended, gird your ears and give it a listen. And I hope, given the caveats, you enjoy your burrito.

Today, Apple announced the new iPad 3, which has a bunch of new features and improvements over the iPad2. One of the new features is a much higher resolution display: 2048 x 1536 pixels, which they advertise as a "retina" display: ad-speak for pixels so small your eye can’t see them. The display looks smooth and unpixellated.

But is that really the case? I did a little math and found this claim to be true, more or less. But there are some caveats, and they’re interesting.

[By the way: I've done the math here in imperial units, and not metric, because that's the standard the industry uses for pixels and such. Silly, but it's one of the last holdouts you'll see used this way.]

iBalling the numbers

First, you should really read my post Resolving the iPhone resolution, where I first dissected the "retina display" claim for when the iPhone 4 came out. My conclusion then was that yes, the iPhone 4 display has pixels so small you can’t see them under normal circumstances. But in that post I did a bit of math to prove it.

What I found was that if you hold a device about a foot away from your face and have normal vision, the pixels need to be smaller than 0.0035 inches in size for them to be unresolved; in other words, pixels at this size or smaller give you a "retina display". The iPhone 4 has pixels about 0.0031 inches in size, so it wins.

But what about the new iPad?

Ah, iSee

The new iPad is reported to be the same size as the iPad 2, with a display of 7.75 x 5.8 inches. But it does have smaller pixels than the old version! Dividing the size of the display by the number of pixels (2048 x 1536) we get a pixel size of 0.0038 inches (or 264 dots per inch, if you prefer).

Uh oh. That’s actually a bit bigger than what your eye can see! So is this truly a "retina display"?

Well, let’s not be too hasty to poo-poo this new tech. For one thing, the iPad display is only resolved if you hold it a foot or closer to your eyes. After a little testing, I found that I tend to hold my own iPad 2 about 15 – 17 inches from my face. From that distance (let’s call it 16 inches), pixels need to be smaller than 0.0047 inches to be unresolved (again, see my old post about how that works and where that number comes from), and the iPad 3′s pixels are certainly smaller than that!

If you do happen to have perfect eyes, under ideal circumstances you’ll probably be able to see the pixellation in the screen, but it won’t be that big a deal, I’d wager — and if you hold the iPad 3 about 18 inches from your face, the pixels are too small to see in any case. So, for the majority of people, the claim of a "retina display" is probably accurate.

I’ll note, though, that the iPad 3 pixels are larger than those for the iPhone 4. But that’s OK; I tend to hold the iPhone a little closer to my eyes than I do the iPad. In either case, I’m unlikely to see the pixels.

I imagine there will be a lot of writing about the display for the iPad 3, with some people loving it and others hating it — that’s inevitable when new tech comes out, especially when Apple is behind it (I’ll note my original resolution post was in response to what I thought was an unfair denigration of the iPhone 4′s display). Incidentally, Boing Boing reports the new iPad will have 40% more color saturation. A display with more colors can trick the eye into thinking the resolution is better, so this will also help the "retina display" claim.

And yes, duh, of course I want one! But I tend not to jump into new tech, and besides, I got the iPad 2 just a few months ago. I like it, and it’s fine for me; the new features are not anywhere near enough for me to want to spend the money to upgrade. Hopefully, my iPad 2 will last long enough that when the iPad 4 comes out, by then I’ll be ready.

Image credits: Apple; wikipedia. Note: I had incorrectly called this a "retinal display", so I have corrected the text. Thx to huggyb for pointing this out.

- Resolving the iPhone resolution
- Moon Hoax: Why not use telescopes to look at the landers?
- My New Years Resolution

More shameless self-promotion…

A quick reminder: if you’re in the Boulder area and you’re a geek, you want to come to megaultrasupduperstar Chris Hardwick’s live Nerdist podcast being recorded at the Boulder Theater on Friday, March 2, at 8:00 p.m. (doors open at 7). Tickets are on sale now.

Oh, and did I mention the super-A-list celebrity guest is… me? OK, maybe those adjectives don’t exactly fit, but still, I’m the guest. And knowing Chris — and me — I expect this will be a nerd-out of epic proportions, mixed with juvenile humor. Count on it.

You can get more info at my earlier post about this. I am way, way excited about this!

I hope to see some local BABloggees there! Enjoy your burrito.