Space… the final frontier

What you see on the left is the surface of planet Venus. On its surface it features as much atmospheric pressure as you’d feel 910m underwater, an atmosphere 50 times thicker then air and consisting mainly of carbon dioxide, temperatures of around 460°C and a view of beautiful sulfuric acid clouds in the sky.  Russia is planning to return to the Morning Star with the first (unmanned) mission since 1985, launching a “multi-front scientific assault on the mysteries of Venus with an orbiting spacecraft, multiple air balloons, a surface lander and – possibly – an innovative ‘wind-flyer’” [BBC News].

And since we’re talking space, something a little more far out: hyperdrive propulsion. The proposed spaceship drive uses particles flying at more than half the speed of light, which “deliver a specific impulse that is greater than [their] specific momentum”. Do I look like I could make this up? The MIT says so!

TinEye

The best thing in internet search since 1998. You give it a picture (or a link to one), and it finds similar or identical pics on the net. 1,121,525,514 pictures are indexed so far.

Say you have this image and would really like to know where it was taken and what the hell it’s showing; or you have a photo of a painting and no idea about title or painter. TinEye will give you a couple sites where you can look for background information, related pictures etc. Finally a search engine that really does something Google doesn’t do better already.

The Beatles Remastered

This serves both to remind you that the Beatles’ studio back catalogue has been re-released in remastered mono and stereo form across two CD box sets: The Beatles In Mono, and The Beatles Box Set: Remastered In Stereo—and to present www.musicradar.com. In this two-part article: Detailed, song-by-song comparisons of the two box sets with each other and previous CD releases. After reading this, I’d sure love to have 400 Euro lying around for The Beatles in Mono…

Kill Bill 3

Probably gonna be about the revenge of Vernita Green’s daughter… At least that’s what every second guy on the net thinks.

“”When you’re all grown up, if you’re still sore – I’ll be waiting for you.”

And since I know you love comics…

…here’s one you can all relate to.

Singular “they”

Interesting… The amount of views is approximately the same whether I add new content or not. Conclusion: You’re all coming from Google and looking for something completely different… Yeay! My whole blog is spam.

Anyway, I’m not gonna let you down or anything, here’s a new dose of spam. The linguist in me found it interesting (and just a little bit horrible) when I first stumbled upon the use of “they” referring to a single person – or, at least, to an unspecified number. “A person can’t help their birth.” Huh?

Wikipedia’s got more information.

List of common misconceptions

I learned today: (A) Napoleon was not short, and (B) air does not take the same time to travel above and below an aircraft’s wing, and (C) people believe a lot of hilarious stuff. The belief that specific tastes only correspond to specific mapped sites on the tongue is psychologically very interesting, as generations after generations of little kids conduct small experiments at school – fail to get any results – and still shut up and follow authority until years later, they’ve internalized the myth so much they even think they proved it in school.

So you like games, huh?

OK, one more then. This one is seriously addictive though. Share your scores in the comments if you like! (Some may like one of the older versions better which are still available on the page.)

This Is the Only Level

15 minutes of platforming, puzzling fun. (Well, 17:48 for me… I should’ve used the pause button to think.)

Video Lectures

Videolectures.net provides an excellent selection of (who would’ve thought) video lectures, mainly (but not exclusively) about computer science topics, especially machine learning and related fields. The best feature is the presentation of the slides alongside the actual video, which focuses on the professor. Good audio quality in the videos I’ve seen; highly recommended.