This is for anyone who has ever doubted that there is magic in the world…
Amazing.
Posts Tagged ‘space’
Magic
Posted in Likes, tagged awesome, Canada, Cape Breton, inspiration, lighthouses, Motivation, Nova Scotia, smile!, space, Thoughts, yay on March 18, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Researching a UFO Tale?
Posted in Writing, tagged aliens, science fiction, sff, space, speculative fiction on January 21, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Want more UFO-logy in your life? Look no further, because almost 130,000 pages of declassified files on UFOs from the U.S. Air Force are now archived and searchable online:
Visit the Black Vault for the Project Blue Book Collection, via io9.com.
Because the truth may still be out there:)
What Lies Beyond
Posted in Entertainment, Likes, Science!, tagged awesome, carl sagan, entertainment, inspiration, NASA, nature, science, space on December 2, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Erik Wernquist’s lovely short film “Wanderers” is making the rounds online, and deservedly so. The piece uses dramatic visualizations of our solar system and is narrated with audio excerpts from Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot. If you have four minutes and a yen for optimistic futurism, let this film help you imagine humanity’s future on the open road, “out there.” And it’s always good to hear Carl Sagan.
Happy Halloween! Love, The Sun
Posted in Holidays, Likes, tagged awesome, Halloween, jack-o-lantern, NASA, science, space on October 31, 2014| Leave a Comment »
To The People of Earth,
You’re welcome.
Happy Halloween!
Love,
The Sun
Jack-o-lantern Sun. Credit: NASA/SDO
Bootstrapping A Solar System Civilization
Posted in Science!, tagged creativity, future of civilization, inspiration, io9, Office of Science and Technology Policy, rocket science, science, science fiction, space, space exploration, Writers on October 27, 2014| Leave a Comment »
via io9, a call for creative new ways to get the heck off this rock:
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is planning ahead — way ahead. The agency wants you to email ideas for how “the Administration, the private sector, philanthropists, the research community and storytellers” can develop “massless” space exploration and a robust civilization beyond Earth.
Tell me that this challenge isn’t exactly in our wheelhouse, people. Hard sci-fi writers, mechanical and other engineers, and practical dreamers of all stripes, your skills are needed!
Supermoon!
Posted in Likes, Science!, tagged awesome, fun after dark, inspiration, perigee, science, space, supermoon on August 10, 2014| Leave a Comment »
I now interrupt my not-at-all-planned blog vacation week (moving stuff, traveling, working, moving more stuff, more working) with this announcement:
Tonight is the best night to see a perigee full moon in 2014! That’s when the moon is not only full, but as close to us (Earth and its -lings, that is) as possible. Sure, supermoons seem to be a dime a dozen this year but tonight the view of our celestial sidekick will truly be Super. Becoming full at the same hour as perigee, the moon will appear 14% larger and 30% brighter than normal. That’s about as impressive as it comes.
“Supermoon comparison” by Marcoaliaslama – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Morning Roundup
Posted in Funny, Likes, Science!, tagged books, coding, computer literacy, cyberscammers, ergonomics, gender parity, genre fiction, Mother Jones, NASA, Octavia Butler, rally driving, science fiction, science!, sff, space, speculative fiction, STEM, sun dragons, SyFy on June 17, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Or, what I read with my morning tea. Entertainment, edification, and associated weirdness? Yep, these articles have it all. Enjoy!
- Staring At Screens All Day Changes Your Eyes, Study Finds This explains a lot, actually:p
- Scammed: Some of America’s poorest people are being targeted by cyber-scammers. Can an errant hacker find the culprits?
- We Can Code It! Why Computer Literacy Is Key to Winning the 21st Century An in-depth article from Mother Jones.
- Domino’s Pizza Customer Info Is Being Held for Ransom by Hackers
And via the good people at io9:
- 10 Scientific Ideas That Scientists Wish You Would Stop Misusing Or, why your proof is not my proof.
- A giant dragon just emerged from the Sun Sun Dragons! I’d be surprised if this movie isn’t already in production at SyFy.
- Archives Reveal What Octavia Butler’s Next Books Would Have Been Like
- Insane rally driver shows that you only need two wheels to take a curve Just, wow.
Orbital Derby
Posted in Science!, Writing, tagged fun, games, gravity, online game, physics, planets, required research, science, smashup derby, solar system, space, Stefano Meschiari, SuperPlanetCrash, writing on June 10, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Mwahaha, now this is fun:) SuperPlanetCrash is a little online game by Stefano Meschiari that lets you build your own solar system and learn something about orbital physics along the way. The goal is to keep your planets orbiting for 500 years. Click to add planets, ice giants, brown dwarfs and stars, then watch as gravity undermines your best intentions! Use the game to simulate that system you sketched out for your epic sci-fi space opera. Ponder the effects of gravity and motion while earning points for the longevity of your system.
And if you just want to add Super-Earths until the whole crazy house of cards comes crashing down? Go for it:)
Planet Boredom?
Posted in Science!, tagged aeon magazine, Andy Weir, autonomy, boredom, creativity, Hawai'i, HI-SEAS, Kate Greene, Mars, Mars training, NASA, nonfiction, persistence, science, science fiction, space, space exploration, The Martian, training missions, trip to Mars on June 5, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Planet boredom
On Mars I learned that boredom has two sides – it can either rot the mind or rocket it to new places…
This essay provides a fascinating look at the HI-SEAS (Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) Mars training mission from the inside. Written by Kate Greene, a science and technology journalist (i.e. not an astronaut), the piece gives a great inside look at what a trip to Mars might be like. For speculative fiction writers, this sort of research provides terrific insight into what life in space would actually feel like to those living it.
Short answer? Boring. Longer answer? Sometimes boring can be a good thing…
Find the full essay at aeon Magazine. For more on the pitfalls of life on Mars, you could also check out Andy Weir’s recent novel The Martian.
If E.T. Does Phone, Then What?
Posted in Likes, Science!, tagged anthropology, archaeology, awesome, e book, extraterrestrial intelligence, extraterrestrial life, extraterrestrials, inspiration, money well spent, NASA, science, science fiction, SETI, sff, space on May 23, 2014| Leave a Comment »
In today’s installment of awesome, NASA has released a book on how to communicate with extraterrestrials. Unlike the Pentagon’s zombie apocalypse scenario, Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication is not meant as an implausible training exercise. With chapters by more than a dozen scholars, this book uses analogues (or at least clues) from archaeology and anthropology in an effort to think about how to communicate with radically different life forms.
As editor Douglas A. Vakoch explains,
The evolutionary path followed by extraterrestrial intelligence will no doubt diverge in significant ways from the one traveled by humans over the course of our history… Like archaeologists who reconstruct temporally distant civilizations from fragmentary evidence, SETI researchers will be expected to reconstruct distant civilizations separated from us by vast expanses of space as well as time. And like anthropologists, who attempt to understand other cultures despite differences in language and social customs, as we attempt to decode and interpret extraterrestrial messages, we will be required to comprehend the mindset of a species that is radically Other.
Also, and let me just put this out there, science fiction might be helpful in this regard as well:)
P.S. The NASA in Your Life site is a fun read as well. NASA’s research and technology spinoffs have played influential roles in moving innovation from Rockets to Racecars and more…
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