april fool's
esiegel | April 1, 2013"It is the highest form of self-respect to admit our errors and mistakes and make amends for them. To make a mistake is only an error in judgment, but to adhere to it when it is discovered shows infirmity of character." -Dale Turner
This April Fools' day, even though the rest of the internet revels in trickery, happens to fall on a Monday. Over here at Starts With A Bang, that means it's time for Messier Monday, an in-depth look at one of the 110 deep-sky objects catalogued by Charles Messier in the 18th Century to help comet-hunters avoid confusion. Today, the catalogue boasts 107…
amillikan | April 1, 2009Animal control units are flocking to North Carolina's Research Triangle Park to aide in the struggle to contain a herd of approximately 50 'Dinochickens,' the dinosaur-like creatures constructed using chicken embryos and reverse evolution techniques. According to one of the researchers in the facility, one of the dinochickens was able to manipulate the locking mechanism on the master containment room by entering a number on a keypad, subsequently overpowering the researchers and allowing the herd to escape through a plate-glass window. The creation of the dinochickens was part of a project…
esiegel | April 1, 2008There are a number of parameters that we deal with in cosmology that have no dimensions; that is, they're just numbers. And yet, there are a remarkable number of coincidences that just "happen to be that way" in our Universe.
Douglas Scott, in this paper, points out some of the more puzzling ones, including:
The age of the Universe (13.7 billion years) is exactly three times the age of the Solar System (4.5 to 4.6 billion years).
The dark matter fraction of the Universe (OmegaDM=0.23 +/- 0.02) is equal to the Helium mass fraction (Yp=0.238 +/- 0.010) of the baryons.
The Hubble constant (H0…