Archives for category: I must retire to my nerdery

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

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.

kazran: are you really a babysitter?

the doctor: I think you’ll find I’m universally recognized as a mature and responsible adult. [flourishes psychic paper]

kazran: it’s…just a lot of wavy lines.

the doctor: …yeah, it shorted out; finally a lie too big.

amazing article on national geographic about what is possibly the world’s largest cave, hang song doong in phong nha-ke bang national park, vietnam.

by justin majeczky

via buzzfeed

via popsci

first of all, I had no idea the 80s version of this song was by george harrison. probably because I was five when it came out, and I was not really paying attention to who sang the songs I liked (not that I pay a lot of attention now either). second, this lesser-aired music video stars alexis denisof! behold: a sampling of photos of alexis denisof during his super-hot run on ‘angel’:



read about it over at scientific american

bernadette might be my new favorite character on ‘the big bang theory’:

penny: no, it was great; he just didn’t challenge me on an intellectual level.

bernadette: couldn’t you just fool around with him then listen to npr?

* ha! I didn’t even mean to make a pun.