Mohawks making a comeback. I have 10 days off and 2 concerts to play. I just gotta be meeeeeee!
Always worth it.
Mitosis
Phytoplankton Bloom Forms Enormous Figure 8
Plankton blooming off the Falkland Islands creates bright blue swirls in the Atlantic.
Geeky Math Equation Creates Beautiful 3-D World
This article was published by Wired on December 9, 2009. This is not a new news but I still find it amazing. The first time I saw this, I was like, “WHOOAAH! These are beautiful!”
This article was about the Mandelbulb. A group of math geeks created a three-dimensional analogue for the mesmerizing Mandelbrot fractal. The 3-D renderings were generated by applying an iterative algorithm to a sphere. The same calculation is applied over and over to the sphere’s points in three dimensions. In spirit, that’s similar to how the original 2-D Mandelbrot set generates its infinite and self-repeating complexity.
cwnl:
MagnetoAstrocoolness
How Cosmic Magnetic Fields Shape Planetary Systems
Side Note: For those of you whom like myself, can’t get enough exoplanet news. Here’s a wonderfully informative SciAm news article getting into how some of these extremely hot exoplanets become so heated. The implications state that it may not just be the proximity of the planet to their star, but also electromagnetism playing a part:
Astrophysicists have a funny attitude toward magnetic fields. You might say they feel both repelled and attracted. Gravitation is assumed to rule the cosmos, so models typically neglect magnetism, which for most researchers is just as well, because the theory of magnetism has a forbidding reputation. The basic equations are simple enough, solving them less so.
Electromagnetism is a standard weeder course in graduate school, and magnetohydrodynamics ranks up there with quantum field theory as the hardest subject known to mortal minds.
That said, when astrophysicists don’t understand something, they often invoke the m-word. “When all else fails, introduce a magnetic field,” exoplanet theorist Dimitar Sasselov of Harvard University told an audience at the American Astronomical Society meeting this week.
Judging from his and others’ talks, all else has been failing a lot lately. One of the many mysteries about the Jupiter-like planets being found around other stars is why their density is so low—some are as fluffy as styrofoam or balsa wood. Orbiting so close to their stars, these planets are baked by stellar radiation, but even that’s not enough to puff them up, at least not directly.
Sasselov described a new model by Konstantin Batygin of Caltech and his colleagues in which the planet acts like a giant induction stove. Magnetic fields set up electric currents in the ionized gases of the planet, further heating and bloating it (see above diagram).
(via marlee-the-adventurer)
Downey Cat :1
(Source: awesomehellyeah)
whoaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
What it feels like on business trips in Asia.
Random guy in the thai restaurant.
yup
(Source: sweet-and-stuttered-breaths)
gordon freeman