I love Alan Rickman. Being that Diehard is the best Christmas movie, ’tis the season for this.
StarTalk: now with video on the Nerdist Channel on YouTube!
Dummies messing up common idioms on Twitter, by the incomparable @vinniefranco. A great resource for hilarious cologne typos as well. I’m keeping this open all day. You couldn’t care more.
A few years ago I wrote a little how-to on viewing the International Space Station. It does require a little bit of effort, so in April I made myself a little web app for easily tracking passes in my area from my phone.
Well NASA has gone one better! You can now sign up for email or text message alerts when the ISS is about to make a visible pass over your area.
A possible super–earth–sized planet (between the mass of Earth and a gas giant) has been discovered 40 light years away that orbits its ~4.5 billion year old star in the habitable zone. This is a very good candidate for life if its size pans out.
Super cudos to Reddit user european_douchebag. Owning your mistakes and growing makes you as super cool as Balpreet Kaur.
This is exactly how we all should be doing it. You both just raised the bar for humanity.
When Kristyn sees a cute firefighter, she makes the alarm sound (mp3) from Emergency. Steve Albini’s guitar tone just reached a whole new level for me.
Or mirrors, as it were. And they are smooth!
The figure of each mirror (the technical term for the shape of the surface) is incredibly accurate: the bumps in the surface are on average smaller than 25 nanometers. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter… to give you an idea of how small this is, a typical human hair is 400 times thicker than the deformities in the mirror.
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I’ll add that mirrors like this – the size they are, made of beryllium, figured to this accuracy – has never been accomplished before. And that’s only part of it, since of course all 18 mirrors must act as one once JWST is in orbit.
The James Webb Space Telescope will launch in 2018 if we are lucky. I can’t wait to see what we find!
Tisha is awesome. Of course all of us people with arms want to know how people without arms do everyday things. Does that make us petty? Maybe, but Tisha doesn’t care. She happily indulges our curiosities and answers all the questions we would otherwise be too shy to ask.
It helps that she is also extremely charming.
Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker:
The [anterior cingulate cortex] is typically associated with the perception of errors and contradictions—neuroscientists often refer to it as part of the “Oh shit!” circuit—so it makes sense that it would be turned on when we watch a video of something that seems wrong, even if it’s right.
Spencer Mulesky guest posts on the Friendly Athiest:
The highest respect one can pay to another’s idea is to scrutinize it and explain what might be wrong.
Just writing this down to remember it now.