via io9
Archives for category: I must retire to my nerdery
sometimes it’s fun to fantasize about a distant world of beings you’ll never understand, like in a campaign of h&h. good thing no one actually ever really dies forever. what a weird game mechanic, so the game just stops at that point? and you don’t get to play anymore? i wonder if they did that to class-balance or something
And, ‘Cthulhu Cheats’:
next time you invite cthulhu over for a little 4e make sure you check out what he’s working with over there
none of his dice remotely meet the standards for what you and i would call closed solids, let alone a good old d20
he rolls in here with stats you’ve never even heard of. since when do you rank atrocity up there with dexterity and wisdom, what class even uses that
what a doucher, he’s barred from my games ever since he imprisoned me on the plateau of leng for telling him he already used his daily
via Eric
You can watch the first 17 minutes of Jamie Benning’s amazing documentary online. I can’t wait to see the whole thing.
Raiding the Lost Ark is an in-depth insight into the making of the 1981 collaboration between Spielberg and Lucas. This fan made Filmumentary contains behind the scenes video, rare interviews with cast and crew, reconstructed deleted scenes and subtitled facts.
This is a preliminary version of part 1. It’s pre-QC and pre-audio mix.
*sigh* Amazing. Check out the thunderstorms, too. I highly recommend watching full-screen.
Time lapse sequences of photographs taken with a special low-light 4K-camera
by the crew of expedition 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from
August to October, 2011.HD, refurbished, smoothed, retimed, denoised, deflickered, cut, etc.
Music: Jan Jelinek | Do Dekor, faitiche back2001
w+p by Jan Jelinek, published by Betke Edition
janjelinek.com | faitiche.deEditing: Michael König | koenigm.com
Image Courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory,
NASA Johnson Space Center, The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth
eol.jsc.nasa.govShooting locations in order of appearance:
- Aurora Borealis Pass over the United States at Night
- Aurora Borealis and eastern United States at Night
- Aurora Australis from Madagascar to southwest of Australia
- Aurora Australis south of Australia
- Northwest coast of United States to Central South America at Night
- Aurora Australis from the Southern to the Northern Pacific Ocean
- Halfway around the World
- Night Pass over Central Africa and the Middle East
- Evening Pass over the Sahara Desert and the Middle East
- Pass over Canada and Central United States at Night
- Pass over Southern California to Hudson Bay
- Islands in the Philippine Sea at Night
- Pass over Eastern Asia to Philippine Sea and Guam
- Views of the Mideast at Night
- Night Pass over Mediterranean Sea
- Aurora Borealis and the United States at Night
- Aurora Australis over Indian Ocean
- Eastern Europe to Southeastern Asia at Night
The most delightful thing I’ve seen in a long time. io9 calls it “a delightfully weird cartoon about a trigonometry-loving T-Rex” and that about sums it up.
Ellen sent me this, and I’m pleased to say that the first couple paths I chose – I’d read all of the books on them. But this basically makes for one huge checklist, and I still have a ways to go before I close this one out. After I finish ‘Never Let Me Go’ I’m going to be looking for a new series since I previously completed Louise Penny’s fantastic Inspector Gamache series. I really loved ‘A Game of Thrones’, but since the series follows the books so closely, I think I’ll hold off on the next book until after season 2 airs. I haven’t read ‘Watership Down’ or ‘the Once and Future King’ or ‘Anathem’. I also haven’t read many of the classics: Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, LeGuin, Dick, Vonnegut, Clarke. Suggestions?
click to embiggen, then click that image to super-embiggen
A dad made his son a Rocketeer costume! Fantastic – maybe for next year? This kid is the cutest ever. If he came to my door at Halloween I’d give him all my candy and probably some cash.
more photos over at Sweet Juniper – click any photo to go to the gallery
Studying hard for my astronomy midterm, and finally got to watch the Astronomy Picture of the Day video for September 20 – Kepler 16b: A Planet with Two Suns.
This artist’s movie illustrates Kepler-16b, the first directly detected circumbinary planet, which is a planet that orbits two stars. The movie begins by showing the gaseous surface of the rotating planet then pans out to show the stars it orbits.
The two orbiting stars regularly eclipse each other, as seen from our point of view on Earth. The planet also eclipses, or transits, each star, and Kepler data from these planetary transits allowed the size, density and mass of the planet to be extremely well determined. The fact that the orbits of the stars and the planet align within a degree of each other indicate that the planet formed within the same circumbinary disk that the stars formed within, rather than being captured later by the two stars.
NASA’s Kepler telescope discovered the planet by observing it cross in front of, or transit, the pair of stars from our point of view on Earth. The stars can also be detected eclipsing each other. Stellar eclipses are shown here, as well as the transits of the planet across both stars.
Such events allow astronomers to measure the sizes of the stars and the planet with extreme accuracy. Kepler-16b is one of the most accurately measured planets outside our solar system, with a size (radius) of 0.7538 that of Jupiter; a mass of 0.333 that of Jupiter (about the mass of Saturn), and a density of 0.964 grams per cubic centimeter. The planet is cold, lying just beyond the “habitable zone” of its star, and is made up of about half gaseous material with a rocky core.
The largest star in the Kepler-16b system is a bit smaller than our sun (about 69 percent of its mass), and the smaller star, called a red dwarf, is even lower in mass (about 20 percent of the sun’s mass).
NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle
