Crack the Code!

Here's a fun one that I just saw on Twitter. Can you "crack the code"?

Find the Perimeter!

Note: the lines on the drawing are not to scale.

MAX 2019: A Space Festival

Heading out to California in just a few days for MAX 2019: A Space Festival from Media Art Exploration. The festival will take place at the California Academy of the Sciences, The Exploratorium, and the Z Space theater in San Francisco from the 16th through 18th. There will be live performances, displays of artwork, panels of scientists and artists, booths from various groups sharing their art and their science, and more!

We'll be running a booth for SAGANet.org at the California Academy of Sciences on Friday, the 17th. Come find our booth and we can chat about astrobiology, space exploration, and more. We'll also have stickers and comic books to give out, scifi books and our book of astrobiology classic literature for sale, and I'll also have some of my meteorites there to show off (including a little piece of the Moon!). Hoping to see you there!

On a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

Blue Marble Space Video

Space exploration begins at home.

Earthrise: "Riders on the Earth Together"

The words in the image above were written by the American poet Archibald MacLeish upon seeing the imagery coming from the Apollo 8 mission (the famous Earthrise image, accompanying the quote above, was taken just the day before MacLeish's quote was published).

Seeing our world from space, seeing that there are no national boundaries, no grand positions for monarchs and rulers to claim, seeing that we are all connected by sharing our beautiful little Blue Marble in the vastness of space... comes with an existential awareness that could be gained in no other way. 

Seeing ourselves as "riders on the Earth together" brings us together in our shared experience as members of our world, participants in our biosphere. 

---

Below, you can read the entire text from MacLeish's 1968 New York Times article:

A Reflection: Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold
by Archibald MacLeish
New York Times, December 25, 1968

"Men's conception of themselves and of each other has always depended on their notion of the earth. When the earth was the World -- all the world there was -- and the stars were lights in Dante's heaven, and the ground beneath men's feet roofed Hell, they saw themselves as creatures at the center of the universe, the sole, particular concern of God -- and from that high place they ruled and killed and conquered as they pleased.

And when, centuries later, the earth was no longer the World but a small, wet spinning planet in the solar system of a minor star off at the edge of an inconsiderable galaxy in the immeasurable distances of space -- when Dante's heaven had disappeared and there was no Hell (at least no Hell beneath the feet) -- men began to see themselves not as God-directed actors at the center of a noble drama, but as helpless victims of a senseless farce where all the rest were helpless victims also and millions could be killed in world-wide wars or in blasted cities or in concentration camps without a thought or reason but the reason -- if we call it one -- of force.

Now, in the last few hours, the notion may have changed again. For the first time in all of time men have seen it not as continents or oceans from the little distance of a hundred miles or two or three, but seen it from the depth of space; seen it whole and round and beautiful and small as even Dante -- that "first imagination of Christendom" -- had never dreamed of seeing it; as the Twentieth Century philosophers of absurdity and despair were incapable of guessing that it might be seen. And seeing it so, one question came to the minds of those who looked at it. "Is it inhabited?" they said to each other and laughed -- and then they did not laugh. What came to their minds a hundred thousand miles and more into space -- "half way to the moon" they put it -- what came to their minds was the life on that little, lonely, floating planet; that tiny raft in the enormous, empty night. "Is it inhabited?"

The medieval notion of the earth put man at the center of everything. The nuclear notion of the earth put him nowhere -- beyond the range of reason even -- lost in absurdity and war. This latest notion may have other consequences. Formed as it was in the minds of heroic voyagers who were also men, it may remake our image of mankind. No longer that preposterous figure at the center, no longer that degraded and degrading victim off at the margins of reality and blind with blood, man may at last become himself.

To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold -- brothers who know now they are truly brothers." 

8k Wallpaper of Images from HST and ESO

Dr. Stuart Robbins created this wallpaper graphic from images from the public archives of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the European Southern Observatory (ESO). Pretty darned incredible! I think I'll be using it for a while on my own desktop. You can find an 8k version on his website.

Calculus Made Easy, 1910: All the little bits

Calculus Made Easy is a book on introductory calculus originally written in 1910 by Silvanus P. Thompson. It was such a well-received text for teaching calculus, that it can still be found in print today (it's now in the public domain and also freely available online).

The first bit of text from the first chapter is fairly intriguing. So much so, that I thought you might like to read it here:

Thinking of the integral of dx as an easy way of saying "the sum of all the little bits of x" is a really intriguing approach to explaining some of the most basic ideas of calculus. 

If you've struggled at all with learning calculus, then you may want to give Calculus Made Easy a read. It may be over 100 years old, but much of the writing is still of great value for the interested student.

Raising Some Funds for the Humane Society

My husky Darwin is decked out in some Humane Society of Boulder Valley gear in this picture for the upcoming Doggie Dash 2018! 

The huskies are raising some moolah to support our local Humane Society. If you have a moment and might be able to give, check out the fundraiser at this link:

Help the huskies raise money

for the Humane Society of Boulder Valley!

Love these silly doggos!

From Mike Rowe Regarding the Fake Hurricane Reporting

By now you've probably seen (or at least heard of) the video of Weather Channel correspondent Mike Seidel in Wilmington, North Carolina, trying to "fight heavy winds" of Hurricane Florence as he reported live on Friday, only to shortly after have the camera catch two people walking behind him with no troubles with the wind at all. The video is yet another reminder that we can't necessarily trust what we see in the media and a sign of bogus journalism. I just came across Mike Rowe's comments regarding the clip and thought I'd share them here:


"Gale-Farce Winds!!!

Typically, I don't share videos that have already been viewed millions of times. Feels like old news. But old news is better than fake news, and here, we have an example of fake news so perfectly personified I can't help but bring it to your attention.

Watch this clip. Ironically, it's one of the most honest things I've seen in a long time. But not because The Weather Channel is committed to honesty. No, the truth here is accidental, and comes courtesy of the people in the background. Two guys, casually strolling through what the reporter would have us believe are gale force winds.

Or "gale-farce," if you will.

This is the problem with television today. No one can tell the difference between a commercial and a documentary. There's no line between reality and non-fiction, news and entertainment, or in this case, a weather report and a skit on SNL. No one knows whom to trust anymore, because the landscape is littered with hosts and reporters and correspondents so desperate to hold our attention that they'll do or say anything. And still, in the midst of so much pretense and pandering, they beg us to trust them! They literally beg us, with a level of earnestness that defies credulity. And then, they pretend. They perform. They act.

Do yourself a favor - if you're looking for the truth, look behind the scenes. That's where authenticity lives. That's why I've always insisted on hiring a behind-the-scenes camera to document every show I've ever worked on. That's why I'm insistent about incorporating that footage into whatever makes it on the air. Because it shows the truth, in a far more persuasive way than I could ever describe it.

Travis McGee, my favorite fictional character, once said, "Be wary of all earnestness." He was right. Earnestness and truth have nothing to do with one another. Consider that the next time you see a news story or a weather report that's preceded by a lurid graphic, dramatic music, and urgent sounding narration, and then ask yourself if the network is trying to inform you, or simply keep you from turning the channel. And remember this too - if a network or a reporter or the host of non-fiction TV show is asking for your trust, it's only because they're too lazy to earn it.

Be wary of all earnestness..."


You can watch the video here: