Another amazing photo to set your mind spinning over the scale of the universe. Every object in the photo above is an entire galaxy each of which contains billions of stars! To quote the site…
The image shows a rich tapestry of 7,500 galaxies stretching back through most of the universe’s history. The closest galaxies seen in the foreground emitted their observed light about a billion years ago. The farthest galaxies, a few of the very faint red specks, are seen as they appeared more than 13 billion years ago, or roughly 650 million years after the Big Bang. This mosaic spans a slice of space that is equal to about a third of the diameter of the full Moon (10 arcminutes).
I’ve been a big fan of the RSA Podcast for several years now. All of these talks are worth listening too, and many are true gems! The best have been rendered in the brilliant “animated whiteboard” style of CognitiveMediaUK. I finally figured out how to create a “channel” for them on YouTube. Here is a sample by Daniel Pink, author of the book Drive.
It blew me away the first time I viewed it. Enjoy!
I recently made it back to my “homestead” in extreme Northern Minnesota to visit my friend Peter. One of our projects was to rehab the old sauna on our original property. It took us half a day to cut down trees, brush out the chimney, and clean up after the critters who had been using it as winter quarters for the past ten years. But it was worth it to have a real wood-fired Finnish bath!
Here’s a nice parallel from man to nature and back again.
The Incas worshiped mountains as deities. But directly visiting far away peaks was very difficult. So they used nearby rocks to stand in for the mountains. Here is one such “Picture Rock” from Machu Picchu…
I recently took this photo of natural picture rocks in the BWCA…
Wrens are one of my favorite bird families. Our local representative is the Carolina Wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus) whose song resembles a pleasant car alarm [listen]. In a recent paper by Eric Fortune at al published in Science there are several recordings of Plain-Tailed Wrens (Pheugopedius euophrys) from South America singing what are obviously coordinated duets. I’d love to have these in my backyard!
DST is an ill-conceived anachronism and a bumbling attempt at social engineering. It’s major raison d’être is energy conservation, but there is growing evidence it has just the opposite effect. In their 2008 study of DST in Indiana, Kotchen and Grant concluded…
Our main finding is that—contrary to the policy’s intent—DST results is an overall increase in residential electricity demand.
Times have changed and it is time to stop messing with the clock twice a year!
A few years ago I was looking for a clean way to embed mp4 video into my blog. Prior to HTML5 the best approach was a Flash-based video player. Of course there is no Flash on iPhones and similar devices. Plus many people avoid Flash because of bugs and security concerns. So I modified this script so it defaults to JWPlayer when Flash is present…
…but degrades gracefully into a screen shot linked to the mp4 when Flash is absent…
…and displays the video in a separate window or helper app…
The code appears below. You must replace all the “V_” placeholders with specific information about the video. The path to the player software should be adjusted to match your configuration. The <div> ID should be unique on your site to prevent collisions. This setup assumes there is a jpg key frame file with the same V_NAME as the mp4. Make sure you adjust the size to suit your needs. I find that 320×240 works well embedded in a content area 500-600 pixels wide. The actual mp4 is 640×480, which looks pretty good even when expanded to full screen.
How does it work? Basically the script attempts to load the player and write the display code into the <div> container. If it fails, the default <div> contents are displayed instead (key frame and link). <smile>
<script src="/jw/swfobject.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<div id="V_DIV" style="text-align: center;">
<a href="/wp-content/videos/V_NAME.mp4" target="_blank">
<img src="/wp-content/videos/V_NAME.jpg" alt="" />
</a><br />V_SIZE Mb Video
</div>
<script type="text/javascript"> var so = new SWFObject('/jw/player.swf','mpl','320','240','9');
so.addParam('allowfullscreen','true');
so.addParam('allowscriptaccess','never');
so.addParam('wmode','opaque');
so.addVariable('controlbar','over');
so.addVariable('autostart','false');
so.addVariable('file','/wp-content/videos/V_NAME.mp4');
so.addVariable('image','/wp-content/videos/V_NAME.jpg');
so.addVariable('title','V_TITLE');
so.addVariable('author','V_AUTHOR');
so.write('V_DIV');
</script>
[Note that if you cut and paste the code above you should remove most of the line breaks I added to make it display properly.]
“How do we listen to music? What do we want from it? ... Music is a kind of ambient grace, which blocks out the cellphone jabber on the train, the honking horn on the walk to the grocery store.”
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