(Note: this is taken from an FB post by Rick Boatright, one of the more science-oriented Barflies I know ( Read more... )

via the ever-nifty Astronomy Photo of the Day:


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me: http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20100516000057data_trunc_sys.shtml interesting....war on drugs is really a war on casual sex by proxy?
Altaz: I thought it was a war on hippies and minorities
me: well, them, too, I guess.
Altaz: Maybe hippies are having too much casual sex with minorities?
Guess who's coming to the orgy?

On the one hand, ( Read more... )

Waaaaaaaaay back in 1936, Alan Turing proposed a thought experiment in a paper on computable numbers. Let us imagine a machine, with an infinite feed of printout tape and the ability to write, read and alter the symbols on that printout. Turing proved that with a minimal set of instructions, this machine could compute anything computable, and to ( Read more... )

130 years ago, Thomas Alva Edison made the first electric light bulb. Here's a scan of the original NYT coverage.

in case you needed a bit of perspective, here's a single-frame shot from Mars orbit, showing Earth and its moon in the top, with Jupiter and its moons in the bottom:

Is BIG friggin pic

About 3 years ago, the robotic space probe Cassini spent 12 hours in Saturn's shadow and managed to capture this spectacular image of the gas giant eclipsing the Sun:

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to quote from unixronin's post for today:
"Houston, ah . . . Tranquillity base here. The Eagle has landed."

For those interested, the JFK Library has an interactive site here commemorating the event.

Michael O'Muircheartaigh's quote is highly appropriate for (yesterday's) Astronomy Picture of the Day:


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82 years ago today, Erwin Schrödinger may (or may not) have proposed the concept of quantum wave mechanics in a letter to Albert Einstein.


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