16 year old girl Hacks the Tube almost into space to get into MIT

Via Boing Boing, this is absolutely awesome. As part of their Early Action Admits, MIT challenges prospective students to hack the tube the enrollment letter came in into something cool. So one 16-year-old girl put a camera, a GPS, and two Ham radio transmitters, strapped it to an 800 gram helium balloon, and sent it nearly 91,000ft from Earth’s surface. That’s well into the stratosphere. 90% of the mass of the atmosphere is below the 52,000ft mark, and very nearly 100% below the 330,000ft mark, so that’s above a significant proportion of the atmosphere — as good as into space, as far as I’m concerned.

She’s of course been admitted. And she’s going to make one damn fine engineer, I expect.

16 year old girl Hacks the Tube almost into space to get into MIT
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Real genuine proof the moon landing (simulation) was a hoax!

What do you get when you stitch together footage from NASA’s moon landing simulations prior to the Apollo project, with footage from the actual moon landing, with an audio track meant to make you pee with laughter?

Well, you get a Youtube comments thread so full of facepalmingly poor logic and conspiracy theory that you just have to weep for humanity. While laughing. It’s a very painful emotion.

We’ve been to the moon. There’s a mirror up there, planted by us at the Apollo landing site, that we can bounce lasers off of, to accurately measure Earth’s distance to the moon. This is evidence. That, and Buzz Aldrin will sock you one if you’re still a ridiculous conspiracy theorist.

Real genuine proof the moon landing (simulation) was a hoax!

NASA engineer humours the 2012 doomsayer crowd

No Nibiru/Planet X, no planetary alignments, no predicted magnetic pole reversals (and even if they happened they wouldn’t harm us), no solar flares, and the Mayans only predicted a calendar roll-over, so big whoop.

“Folks have to be very careful when they get information on the web.” Yeah, if you have not a scrap of scientific knowledge to lean on, and have no functional bullshit detector, what you find on the web is going to be… well, hearsay at best.

So on December 21, party like it’s the day before the 14th B’ak’tun and the start of Long Count 2..

NASA engineer humours the 2012 doomsayer crowd

The Birth of the Moon

An intriguing documentary has caught my eye with its slick teaser trailer.

We like the moon. Because it is close to us.

I can’t wait to see this doc when it’s out. I’ve had a long-standing love affair with the moon and its effects on our planet. I’ve posted quite a bit about it in the past, a number of times in fact.

Apparently, Cosmic Journeys has a number of such documentaries online, each about half an hour minus commercial time, making it ripe for syndication to a real network. Why nobody’s picked this up to fill a time slot somewhere is completely beyond me. They’re slickly produced, engaging, have an excellent narrator, and are completely free. And they’re about one of the most engaging and important topics we as humans could ever study: the universe itself, on a macroscopic scale far beyond our transient and provincial lives.

The Birth of the Moon

Newt’s new windmill: a moon base by 2020

That’s right, Newt Gingrich wants a permanent American-controlled moon base by the end of his second term in office. Don’t worry Republicans, he’s not suggesting, you know, actual funding by the government or anything — just that private enterprise will, somehow, for some inexplicable reason, become motivated to find ways to do it.

Speaking in Florida, hit hard by the loss of a large number of space-affiliated jobs, Mr. Gingrich said Wednesday that if elected, “By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.”

He said he believed such a project was possible with commercial and private efforts. According to USA Today, Mr. Gingrich said he had “a romantic belief it is really part of our destiny,” adding that the current state of the space program was a “tragedy.”

Continue reading “Newt’s new windmill: a moon base by 2020”

Newt’s new windmill: a moon base by 2020

RCimT: Spacey particle physicsey sciencey catch-up Friday

Some random science bits and bobs to clear out a bunch of tabs.

Scientists have discovered the speed limit for quantum interactions, and it is much, much slower than the speed of light. It is a little faster than twice the speed of sound in the medium in question, in fact. Yes, apparently also for entangled particles. This effectively hamstrings any woo-peddlers’ attempts to suggest that quantum effects explain things like the imagined effect of the planets’ positions on a person’s fate (I’m looking at you, astrologers).
Continue reading “RCimT: Spacey particle physicsey sciencey catch-up Friday”

RCimT: Spacey particle physicsey sciencey catch-up Friday

Birth of a new Obama delusion: Marserism

The “Obama is secretly a Kenyan” conspiracy apparently just wasn’t loony enough for some people, so they had to do Orly Taitz et al one better. Universe Today reports that two self-proclaimed time travellers have leveled Very Serious Allegations about the President of the United States — specifically, that they were all involved in secret missions to teleport to Mars. Back when Barack was known as “Barry Soetero”.
Continue reading “Birth of a new Obama delusion: Marserism”

Birth of a new Obama delusion: Marserism

Time lapse video of aurora borealis from Norway

Via Phil Plait, another absolutely incredible time-lapse video by Terje Sorgjerd.

And one of the neatest parts of the video: a cameo appearance by Vega.

The video was shot at Kirkenes and Pas National Park in northern Norway — yes, northern Norway, around 70° north latitude. As an example, down here at more temperate latitudes, Vega gets pretty high in the sky, almost directly overhead. But that far north it doesn’t; in fact, that far north Vega never sets! It’s a circumpolar star, like Polaris itself. You can see that for yourself in the video: Vega is the bright star near the center of the frame starting at 21 seconds in. It’s in the video for about 10 seconds, and you can see it’s moving downward in a slow arc, but clearly won’t get anywhere near the horizon.

Unbelievable beauty. Just unbelievable. Hell of a way to start the year.

Time lapse video of aurora borealis from Norway