Science
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Opposites distract
Just discovered by Antipodr that Bermuda and Perth are antipodes: located at the exact other ends of the Earth from each other. I’m in Melbourne, Australia, which is the antipode of a spot on the h of North Atlantic Ocean on Antipodr’s map. By the end of tomorrow I’ll be back in New York, a couple thousand… Continue reading
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And Earth is a bigger target
A comet is headed for Mars. Now approaching at 125,000 miles per hour, it will explode with the force of 35 million megatons of TNT if it hits. That’s a third the size of the collision that caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which famously erased the dinosaurs and ended the Mesozoic, around 66 Million B.C. It… Continue reading
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The biggest picture
I want to plug something I am very much looking forward to, and encourage you strongly to attend. It’s called The Overview Effect, and it’s the premiere of a film by that title. Here are the details: Friday, December 7, 2012 – 5:30pm – 7:00pm Askwith Lecture Hall Longfellow Hall 13 Appian Way Harvard University Cambridge, MA The world-premiere… Continue reading
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Let’s name the crossover point
Over dinner in Amsterdam recently, George Dyson — who knows a thing or two about the history of computing — told me that a crossover of sorts has happened, or is happening now. The crossover is between a time when we erased storage media to make room for fresh data and a time when we… Continue reading
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The Northern Lights in the Window
When it got bumpy on the red-eye from Newark to Amsterdam two Fridays ago, I looked out the window, hoping to see auroral activity such as I’d seen a couple times before on trips like this. And sure enough, there it was. Not as spectacular as the other two, but plenty visible. I watched it… Continue reading
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The only issue that matters
Geologists have an informal name for the history of human influence on the Earth. They call it the Anthropocene. It makes sense. We have been raiding the earth for its contents, and polluting its atmosphere, land and oceans for as long as we’ve been here, and it shows. By any objective perspective other than our… Continue reading
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Adaptive myopia
When I was a kid I had near-perfect vision. I remember being able to read street signs and license plates at a distance, and feeling good about that. But I don’t think that was exceptional. Unless we are damaged in some way, the eyes we are born with tend to be optically correct. Until… what?… Continue reading
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One of the world’s great craters
When I visited the Upheaval Dome in 1987, I was sure it was an impact crater. But roadside displays and printed literature from Canyonlands National Park said otherwise. Clearly, they reported, this was collapsed salt dome. Since then German researchers have found evidence, through shocked quartz, of an impact. That now appears to be the prevailing theory. The… Continue reading
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Aerial map mashing
Thanks to Jeff Warren (also here) of GrassRootsMapping and Public Laboratory, I now know — and am highly turned on by — the possibilities of mapping in the wild. That is, mapping by the 99.xxx+% of us who are not in the mapping business, and are in the best multiple positions to map the world(s)… Continue reading
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Storm over Boston
So here’s the storm happening right now over Boston: Also watching lightning strikes on Lightning Finder, as well as out my window, before I go outside for a better view. Check out FlightAware‘s view of KBOS (Logan airport) flight activity map: You can see flights avoiding the storm as it approaches the airport, which is… Continue reading
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Been there, still doing that
One hundred and fifty years ago yesterday, the scene above had no water in it, besides the Santa Ynez river, which barely flowed most of the year. Looking down on that scene was William Brewer, who led a survey sent out by Josiah D. Whitney, who had recently been named California’s state geologist, and… Continue reading
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Here comes a plasma bullet
SpaceWeather.com says we’re overdue for a plasma bullet from the Sun. In Saturday issue (at that last link) they have a movie of a plasma blast coming out of sunspot 1147, on the eastern (left) edge of our nearest star. Yesterday they reported this: SOLAR FLARE: Sunspot 1158 has just unleashed the strongest solar flare… Continue reading
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Accidental Lessons: Reflections on the Challenger Tragedy
[This piece was written for Triangle Business (in Raleigh, North Carolina ) and published twenty-five years ago, on February 10, 1986. Since it might be worth re-visiting some of the points I made, as well as the event itself, I decided to dust off the piece and put up here. Except for a few spelling… Continue reading
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Northeastern lights
As you can tell, if you read the small print in this StrikeStar map, we’re being hit by lightning (and therefore thunder) here in the Boston area, right now. After nothing but snow, over and over, for a month and a half, we get a day of rain with a Summer encore. Very strange. Continue reading
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Geology by plane
I’ve been looking gratefully and often, over the past few years, at Louis J. Maher, Jr.’s Geology by Lightplane. The shots themselves date from 1956-1966, and he put the page up in 2001; but their subjects are the sort that don’t change much over a span of time so short as the last thirty-five years.… Continue reading
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Geography forever
When I was walking to school in the second grade, I found myself behind a group of older kids, arguing about what subjects they hated most. The consensus was geography. At the time I didn’t know what geography was, but I became determined to find out. When I did, two things happened. First, I realized… Continue reading
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What does cognitive science say about privacy and the Net?
Here’s what one dictionary says: World English Dictionary privacy (ˈpraɪvəsɪ, ˈprɪvəsɪ) — n 1. the condition of being private or withdrawn; seclusion 2. the condition of being secret; secrecy 3. philosophy the condition of being necessarily restricted to a single person Collins English Dictionary – Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition 2009 © William Collins Sons… Continue reading
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Food for re-thought
The summary paragraph of a great column by Tom Friedman: A dysfunctional political system is one that knows the right answers but can’t even discuss them rationally, let alone act on them, and one that devotes vastly more attention to cable TV preachers than to recommendations by its best scientists and engineers. Here’s a link… Continue reading
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Bomb sights
Last week I flew back and forth from Boston to Reno by way of Phoenix. Both PHX-RNO legs took me past parts of Nevada I hadn’t had a good look at before. One item stood out: a dry lake that looked, literally, like a town had been built on it and blown up. In fact,… Continue reading