Today’s Nasty Mathematics Challenge: Watch this video (taken by astronauts on the International Space Station with a camera that picks up low-intensity light, and then edited by Michael König, and sped up), and estimage the number of light bulbs whose light is visible: [vimeo]32001208[/vimeo] HINT: The task is easier (but not much) if you enlarge […]
Tag: orbit
Wassersug and the frogs in space
Jason Goldman, writing in The Guardian, today tells of the long history of frogs being sent (by humans) into space for scientific purposes: “Frogs in space: one giant leap indeed“. Ig Nobel Prize winner Richard Wassersug [pictured here] has an intimate relationship with the history of frogs in space. Among his publications in that realm: “Emesis and […]
Best space music videos: Hadfield/Bowie & Coleman/Anderson/Bach
These are our picks for best space music videos of the past few years. In our view, they qualify as being improbable in all the best senses of that word. Both videos show performances done by musician-astronauts in spacecraft orbiting the earth. Chris Hadfield performs David Bowie‘s “Space Oddity”: Cady Coleman and Ian Anderson (of […]
Tidy Swiss garbage collector up, up in the sky
Just as certain computer scientists and engineers dream of doing better garbage collection in computers (for a dream come true, see Microsoft’s “Fundamentals of Garbage Collection“), scientists and engineers at Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne dream of doing better garbage collection in space. Dead satellites. Detritus from collisions between now-dead satellites and whatever slammed into them. Junk that […]
Earth: A small chance to win a big trip
Adding to our knowledge that the residents of planet earth are unstable, Jacques Laskar (pictured here) and Mickael Gastineau of the Observatoire de Paris calculate that so, too, is our planet’s residency in the solar system. Thanks to an instability in the entire system, we could all win a big trip to far-off places. Details […]