December 14, 2014
Kid: "Mortal Kombat, on Sega Genesis, is the best video game ever."
Billy Madison: "I disagree, it's a very good game, but I think Donkey Kong is the best game ever."
Kid: "Donkey Kong sucks."
Billy Madison: "You know something? YOU SUCK!" -Billy Madison, 1995
Every week brings with it something…
December 12, 2014
“Time takes it all whether you want it to or not, time takes it all. Time bares it away, and in the end there is only darkness.” -Stephen King
This story seems to come up every few months. Someone detects a possibly unexpected signal somewhere in the sky -- normally correlated to the centers of…
December 11, 2014
“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.” -Robert Frost
Sure, it's getting colder and colder…
December 10, 2014
“You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.” -Rabindranath Tagore
And you can't answer a hypothetical question for certain, at least in science, without doing the experiment for yourself. Here on Earth, liquid water is plentiful; our planet has the stable temperatures and…
December 9, 2014
“Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Sure, sure, and they're not even big, impressive stones. But like any real estate agent will tell you, location is everything.
Image credit: NASA /…
December 8, 2014
“You may have heard the world is made up of atoms and molecules, but it’s really made up of stories. When you sit with an individual that’s been here, you can give quantitative data a qualitative overlay.” -William Turner
This blog has always been about the cosmic story common to us all: the story…
December 7, 2014
“The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search the chance of success is zero.” -Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison
Although, for many various reasons, most of us may find the prospect of journeying into deep space beyond our physical grasp, that doesn't means we can…
December 6, 2014
“In that little party there was not one who would desert another; yet we were of different countries, different colours, different races, different religions--and one of us was of a different world.” -Edgar Rice Burroughs
It's the end of yet another week, and so it's time to look back on all we've…
December 5, 2014
“Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.” -Michael Faraday
And yet, it's often incredibly difficult to use those laws of nature -- even if they're as simple as can be -- to actually measure and quantitatively understand the Universe around us. Perhaps one…
December 4, 2014
“Mars once was wet and fertile. It’s now bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it from happening here on Earth.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson
No, what happened on Mars isn't in any danger of happening here on Earth, despite what your sci-fi…
December 3, 2014
“I have announced this star as a comet, but since it is not accompanied by any nebulosity and, further, since its movement is so slow and rather uniform, it has occurred to me several times that it might be something better than a comet.” -Giuseppe Piazzi
Shakespeare said a rose by any other name…
December 2, 2014
“The paradigm of physics — with its interplay of data, theory and prediction — is the most powerful in science.” -Geoffrey West
So earlier this year, the BICEP2 team shook up the world by announcing the discovery of primordial gravitational waves: a signal from the earliest stages of the Universe,…
December 1, 2014
“If you keep your eyes open enough, oh, the stuff you will learn. Oh, the most wonderful stuff.” -Dr. Seuss
It's been more than two years in the making; we started Messier Monday way back in October of 2012, and after 110 consecutive weeks, we finally arrived at our final entry last week. What…
November 30, 2014
“Devote yourself, but do not lose who you are!” -Marvel vs. Capcom
With Thanksgiving behind us, it's officially the holiday season here in the USA (and in many other places across the world), and so it's time to kick that off with a great holiday song by Calexico,
Gift X-change,
and to check out…
November 29, 2014
“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every week brings a new set of challenges, but also a…
November 28, 2014
“The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.” -Molière
So if the Universe is expanding and cooling, what does that mean for the matter in it? Sure, it's easy to visualize how radiation cools: it has a wavelength, space expands, and so as the wavelength gets stretched, the energy drops.…
November 27, 2014
“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.” -George Bernard Shaw
And despite all of that, when we pause…
November 26, 2014
“We… are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.” -Jill Tarter
But that doesn't mean we can't also look to the hydrogen itself, and use its information to learn about where other things may have come from!
Image…
November 25, 2014
When you think about cosmology and the fundamental questions scientists are trying to address, you inevitably wind up thinking about dark matter, dark energy and black holes as the three biggest topics that shape our view of the Universe.
Image credit: NASA/WMAP science team.
But there are…
November 25, 2014
When you think of the origin of life, you probably think about the atoms coming together to make molecules, the molecules coming together to make self-replicating, information-encoded strands, and how all that took place here on Earth. But you might want to consider a different point of view!
A…
November 24, 2014
“Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.” -William Shakespeare
But in the case of Orion, it's great because of not only how it was born, but where and when: recently, and so close to us! And that makes our views of not…
November 22, 2014
“We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.” -W. Somerset Maugham
There are so many things out there in this world to marvel at, that it's important to remember to appreciate all that's out there…
November 22, 2014
"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living." -Omar N. Bradley
There are some words that, seemingly, you can't utter without inflaming people's passions in one way or another, and nuclear seems…
November 22, 2014
“You can try to lie to yourself. You can try to tell yourself that you put in the time. But you know — and so do I.” -J.J. Watt
Before there was the Universe we know and love today, there were many epochs and eras that came before, including one before there were galaxies and stars, one before…
November 20, 2014
“I am undecided whether or not the Milky Way is but one of countless others all of which form an entire system. Perhaps the light from these infinitely distant galaxies is so faint that we cannot see them.” -Johann Lambert
There's a problem with our view of the night sky: beautiful though it is, we…
November 19, 2014
“Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.” -Judith Thurman
You'd think that landing on a comet for the first time, with all ten instruments functioning, and collecting more than two full Earth-…
November 18, 2014
The particles of the standard model, some type of dark matter and dark energy, and the four fundamental forces. That's all there is, right?
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user MissMJ, with info from PBS Nova, FNAL, DOE and PDG.
What if that isn't true? What if dark energy, for example, isn't…
November 17, 2014
“Derive happiness in oneself from a good day’s work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.” -Henri Matisse
But the surrounding fog might not come from our minds nor from our world, but rather from the plane of the galaxy itself. Nevertheless, the brightest clusters -- the ones placed…
November 16, 2014
“I didn’t know any successful actors in Kenya, so I felt like I could get away with going to college to study film more easily than I could with saying, ‘I want to be an actor.’ That’s what I did.” -Lupita Nyong’o
There's nothing that gets me excited quite like... completely fabricated, unnecessary…
November 16, 2014
"It's a tad easier to be proud when you come in first than it is when you finish further back. But there's no reason to hide when you don't do as well as you'd hoped. You can't run away from your problems." -My Little Pony
It's been two weeks since our last edition of Comments of the Week here on…
