Archives for the month of: January, 2011

The Tiniest Polar Bear

(but sadly, it’s not a real bear)

via Things That Are Tiny via Buzzfeed

more here

Canyon Convergence

by Konstantin Nikolaev

Reid Gower:

I got frustrated with NASA and made this video. NASA is the most fascinating, adventurous, epic institution ever devised by human beings, and their media sucks. Seriously. None of their brilliant scientists appear to know how to connect with the social media crowd, which is now more important than ever. In fact, NASA is an institution whose funding directly depends on how the public views them.

In all of their brilliance, NASA seems to have forgotten to share their hopes and dreams in a way the public can relate to, leaving one of humanities grandest projects with terrible PR and massive funding cuts. I have a lot of ideas for a NASA marketing campaign, but I doubt they’d pay me even minimum wage to work for them. I literally have an MSWord document entitled NASAideas.doc full of ideas waiting to share. I thought maybe, just maybe someone might be able to work their magic for me on that. But the primary point of this post is to vent my frustration with NASA. Sure, they’ve fallen victim to budget cuts but I honestly think cutting media will seal NASA’s own fate. Unless they can find a way to relate to the general public, support for their projects will always be minimal, and their funding will follow suit. A social media department would easily pay for itself in government grants because it could rekindle the public interest in the space program.

via eric

via mom

via cameron

NASA’s Kepler mission confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Measuring 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system.

[…]

“This planet is unequivocally rocky, with a surface you could stand on,” commented team member Dimitar Sasselov, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge and a Kepler co-investigator.

Read more at NASA.

Voilà! A poster is born. Illustration and layout by Lindsay Mound

poster by Lindsay Mound

This brilliant little video has been accepted to the Sundance Film Festival.

You probably all know that I’m a huge fan of ‘Band of Brothers’ and have seen it…well, many times. Sadly, Dick Winters has died.

Film major disclaimer: This is by no means a list of the movies I thought were the best in a scholarly way – just the ones that I liked the most, or really hit me for some reason.

In no particular order:

  • Blue Valentine
  • Inception
  • Easy A
  • How to Train Your Dragon
  • Kick-Ass
  • Splice
  • Black Swan
  • Rabbit Hole
  • the Switch
  • the Romantics