billion
esiegel | July 18, 2012"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." -Stephen Hawking
The Universe is a vast, seemingly unending marvel of existence. Over the past century, we've learned that the Universe stretches out beyond the billions of stars in our Milky Way, out across billions of light years, containing close to a trillion galaxies all told.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team.
And yet, that's just the observable Universe! There are good reasons to believe that the Universe continues on and on beyond the limits of what we can see; the…
esiegel | January 28, 2010We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time. -T.S. Eliot
Yesterday, President Obama delivered his first State of the Union Address, and talked about a number of things that ranged from inspiring to disappointing. But one thing that didn't make it into the address was the rumor that NASA's Constellation program (including the Ares Rocket designed to launch crews) will lose their government funding.
(Please note: what follows is my opinion, and I take responsibility for it.) If this actually…
sciencepunk | February 22, 2009A: No.
Although many news outlets (including the BBC) are claiming that a billion people will tune in to the 81st Academy Awards, the figure turns out to have little grounding in reality. The billion-strong audience claim has been knocking around for a long time - Daniel Radosh recounts in an article for the New Yorker that the figure was first touted way back in 1985. Although no supporting evidence has ever been provided to verify the claim, Radosh makes the reasoned guess that someone must extrapolated the 43.5 million domestic audience (15% of the US population) to 15% of the global…