ideas about science and the cosmos
Interesting Stuff
A stunning view of the Earth from the ISS
Sep 23rd
It’s been difficult balancing free time to update this blog in the past couple months, but I have a few things planned.
A view from space
Sep 7th
Ever wonder what it actually looks like from aboard the International Space Station? Don Pettit took some great time lapse videos showing you the view from up there. Not bad for photography at 17,000 miles per hour.
Time Lapse Videos from space
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Time lapse footage taken by Oregon State University alum Don Pettit during his time on the International Space Station.
Did you know?
Sep 3rd
Sorry, it’s been a while folks, so here’s a great video with some facts you may just simply not now of. There will be a full update to some of the sections of the site in a few days here, including resources for keeping up to date with all your favorite scientists and cosmologists.
Fibonacci and Nature by Numbers
Jun 15th
If you’ve watched the movie Pi, you probably remember hearing about Fibonacci’s number, related to the golden ratio. It’s a sequence of numbers that when graphed, creates a pattern, often spiral structures, found in nature at a surprising frequency. Math is often thought to be a boring and repetitive process of reciting formulas and algorithms just to produce more numbers. While that does hold true to some extent, there are some pretty amazing things that mathematics, and especially their application to geometry, reveal. As creatures with a strong innate ability to seek patterns, revealing them in often simplistic geometry of mathematic patterns can be quite intriguing.
The nautilus shell above illustrates the golden ration as found within a natural construct. If you were to graph the parts of the shell in boxes, you’d find that each part nearly perfectly is a ratio of the other greater parts.
To further illustrate this effect, the following video “Nature by Numbers” very beautifully shows just how stunning the geometry in nature is, despite our preconceptions that most of nature is random and difficult to measure.
Neat Stuff
May 13th
Haven’t been able to keep this updated as much as usual lately, so heres a post of some of the more interesting research and development and other just interesting videos I’ve found around the intarwebs. I’m always looking for suggestions for this stuff, so feel free to comment if you know anything I should add.
Powers of Ten
May 7th
This video gives a really neat sense of size and the music is incredibly good. The music is by Mat Jarvis of Microscopics. Would be cool to see an updated version of this with more modern graphics for the stuff we do know (like when we get way out there).
Here’s the original dialog :