Achille C. Varzi, who is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, New York, is interested in the philosophical implications of holes and voids, prompting a unique investigation into a special subset of hole-bearing entities – namely doughnuts (that’s ‘donuts’ US). “A doughnut always comes with a hole. If you think you can come up with […]
Tag: space
A Brief History of Fridge Magnets [video]
The Tripe Marketing Board presents A Brief History of Fridge Magnets: BONUS: The history continues past that point, of course. Part of it is documented in this study: “Design, manufacture, and test of an adiabatic demagnetization Refrigerator Magnet for use in space,” Steve Milward, Stephen Harrison, Robin Stafford Allen, Ian D. Hepburn, Christine Brockley-Blatt [pictured […]
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 […]
Worm-generated wormholes record history in space and time
Wormholes — what are they good for? This study suggests one possible answer: “Wormholes record species history in space and time,” S. Blair Hedges, Biology Letters, vol. 9, no. 1. February 2013. The author, at Penn State University, reports: “I show that printed wormholes in rare books and artwork are trace fossils of wood-boring species […]
Eminent space-dinosaurs self-plagiarism headline
Today’s Headline of the Day appears in the Nature newsblog: Eminent chemist denies self-plagiarism in ‘space dinosaurs’ paper (HT Ed Yong)
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 […]
Getting a LEGO up, on a dime
This video comes from a camera attached to a homebuilt device that rose to great heights. The Guardian describes it in a short paragraph (and also, elsewhere, in more detail): Two teenagers from Toronto sent a Lego man carrying a Canadian flag into the stratosphere. Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, both 17, attached four cameras […]
Semiotics Exercise: Fat Ladies in Spaaaaace
This month’s Semiotics Exercise is to write a 50-word semiotic interpretation of the imagery and title of the book Fat Ladies in Spaaaaace. It must be exactly 50 words long, but can be in the language of your choice. Here is a photo of the book cover: [via @KateHarding] BONUS EXERCISE: Write a 55-word semiotic interpretation […]
Happily stuck in time and space
En route from Vancouver to Australia on Dec. 30, 1899, the captain of the S.S. Warrimoo spotted a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. At midnight, he stopped the ship at the intersection of the international date line and the equator. At that moment, the ship was straddling two different hemispheres, days, months, years, seasons, and centuries, all at […]