by bbyrd
Archives for category: I must retire to my nerdery
Over at McSweeney’s: In Which I Fix My Girlfriend’s Grandparents’ WiFi and Am Hailed as a Conquering Hero.
[The warrior] accepted the quest and strode bravely across the beige shag carpet of the living room.
Deep, deep behind the recliner did the warrior crawl, over great mountains of National Geographic magazines and deep chasms of TV Guides. At last he reached a gnarled thicket of cords, a terrifying knot of gray and white and black and blue threatening to ensnare all who ventured further. The warrior charged ahead. Weaker men would have lost their minds in the madness: telephone cords plugged into Ethernet jacks, AC adapters plugged into phone jacks, a lone VGA cable wrapped in a firm knot around an Ethernet cord. But the warrior bested the thicket, ripping away the vestigial cords and swiftly untangling the deadly trap.
via Eric
via New York Public Library Digital Gallery via Retronaut via io9 via Tiffany
So many amazing things in this io9 post. Highlights below:
Worf and Data with Spot the cat – custom-painted Little Fatty figures from FatCatStudio.com
My Little Worf Pony by Kipperfrog
eric: jack* forwarded me some email from a guy rambling about [our awesome iPhone/iPad app] last week, as i guess it is my job to follow up with all potential biz-dev contacts even if they are kind of insane
kara: oh great
eric: anyway, this guy’s name was patrick stewart
kara: !
eric: so i just wrote back to jack and said “make it so”
kara: HAHAHAHHAA
eric: but i don’t think he got it
kara: I just cackled so loud my neighbors are probably scared
kara: still laughing
eric: anyway i guess i’ll have to write back to this guy
eric: maybe i can work some more star trek talk in there
kara: oh my god
kara: yes
kara: please bcc me
eric: “you must have set your email on stun because i am speechless!”
*not his real name
The spiral Antennae galaxies are one of the nearest and youngest examples of a pair of colliding galaxies.
NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team, STScI/AURA-ESA/Hubble Collaboration – click to embiggen
During the course of the collision, billions of stars will be formed. […] Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae image are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. The orange blobs to the left and right of image center are the two cores of the original galaxies and consist mainly of old stars criss-crossed by filaments of dust, which appears brown in the image. The two galaxies are dotted with brilliant blue star-forming regions surrounded by glowing hydrogen gas, appearing in the image in pink. The Antennae galaxies take their name from the long antenna-like “arms” extending far out from the nuclei of the two galaxies, best seen by ground-based telescopes.
via the Atlantic’s Hubble Telescope Advent Calendar. More info about the Antennae Galaxies
If you enjoy Perez Hilton, or have heard of him, and also enjoy early American history, boy do I have a site for you. Making the rounds on Facebook and the rest of the blogosphere this week (crap I can’t believe I used the word ‘blogosphere’; I am such a cliché): Perez Hamilton. A (clean) example:
So FUNgasmic!! We’re already really smart, but can we go too?!?!
Now men in the New World have a place to go in Massachusetts if they want to formally learn. John Harvard donated his whole entire book collection and half of his fortune to the new college so the founders named it after him.
We could donate our favorite feather quill if they want to name it after us instead. Hamilton College sounds sooooo much better!
Just a thought!
My friend Lacey pointed me toward the Atlantic’s Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, which I’m loving. Every day, Alan Taylor posts a beautiful photo taken by the Hubble space telescope. Yesterday’s image is of the Retina Nebula, a dying star.
click to embiggen, click again to super-embiggen
A dying star, IC 4406, dubbed the “Retina Nebula” exhibits a high degree of symmetry; the left and right halves of the Hubble image are nearly mirror images of the other. If we could fly around IC 4406 in a starship, we would see that the gas and dust form a vast donut of material streaming outward from the dying star. From Earth, we are viewing the donut from the side. This side view allows us to see the intricate tendrils of dust that have been compared to the eye’s retina. In other planetary nebulae, like the Ring Nebula (NGC 6720), we view the donut from the top. The donut of material confines the intense radiation coming from the remnant of the dying star. Gas on the inside of the donut is ionized by light from the central star and glows. Light from oxygen atoms is rendered blue in this image; hydrogen is shown as green, and nitrogen as red. The range of color in the final image shows the differences in concentration of these three gases in the nebula. Unseen in the Hubble image is a larger zone of neutral gas that is not emitting visible light, but which can be seen by radio telescopes. One of the most interesting features of IC 4406 is the irregular lattice of dark lanes that criss-cross the center of the nebula. These lanes are about 160 astronomical units wide (1 astronomical unit is the distance between the Earth and Sun). They are located right at the boundary between the hot glowing gas that produces the visual light imaged here and the neutral gas seen with radio telescopes. We see the lanes in silhouette because they have a density of dust and gas that is a thousand times higher than the rest of the nebula. The dust lanes are like a rather open mesh veil that has been wrapped around the bright donut. The fate of these dense knots of material is unknown. Will they survive the nebula’s expansion and become dark denizens of the space between the stars or simply dissipate?
More info about the nebula at HubbleSite
I want.
via Eric