Get ready for Solar Flare TV — The sun is entering an 11 year flare cycle, (we had an early example last week) and flares have everything a newsroom loves: first, enormous ropes of flame leap off the sun, then torrents of "charged particles" hurtle to Earth at a million miles an hour, then newscasters look worried, then there may (or may not) be problems with your TV or your airline reservation, and finally there's a fantastic light display in our magnetosphere. That's three days of "uh oh," followed by a quick sigh. Wait a few months, we do it again. Will people get bored with solar flares? I don't think so. There's something about magnetic forces that spooks people. We've all held a magnet ... Continue reading →
I'm going to show you two kinds of nothing. The first is a small patch of space, way, way out in the universe, remote from everything, with nothing in it, no stars, no planets, no bits of dust, no debris, no atoms, not even one. It's as empty as empty can be. And next, I'm going to show you a painting. Except it isn't a painting, it's a canvas, on which you see...absolutely nothing. No marks, no paint, no human gesture. It, too, is totally empty. It was made by the American artist Robert Rauschenberg. Now comes the riddle. A Patch Of Space If you showed that patch of empty space to a physicist, he or she would tell you, "It isn't empty." No matter ... Continue reading →
What can I say? Except that it's the weekend, there's not a whole lot's going on, I saw this, and I thought you should see it too, because it's...well, beautiful. Don't worry that it starts sideways. This couple is just madly in love and things will right themselves. And I'll admit, it's not about anything sciencey; it's about love, absence and longing. Peeping Tom is a Brussels-based dance/theater company co-directed by Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier. Their work, says their homepage, "explores the idiosyncratic behaviour experienced in close relationships." I'll say. I'm going to assume no little girls were harmed in the making of this dance. Not so sure about lips. Continue reading →
You remember the three little pigs, right? The ones who get chased by a huffing, puffing big, bad wolf? You may recall that story ends when the wolf, unable to flatten the brick house, slides down the chimney, hoping to snatch the piggy brothers huddling inside. The third little pig, however, has placed a scalding pot of water at the chimney bottom turning B.B. Wolf, alas, into Hairy Wolf Soup. That's the traditional version. It's simple and clear. The wolf is bad. The three pigs are innocent. Two are lazy. But the third, a hard-working, brick-laying, water-boiling pig — he triumphs. Hooray for industry! For cleverness! End of story. This week I saw a new version of this tale, it's a video produced, strangely enough, ... Continue reading →
Look what Kent Rogowski did. He took a bunch of stuffed animals, kids' playthings, unstitched them, removed their insides, and turned them inside out. This masked red thing, I presume, is an inside-out, hmmm, I dunno, rag doll? This one, I'm guessing, was (no, "is") a monkey in reverse... And because this one has a duckbill, I figure it's a duck, wearing a pink skirt, but the inside part of the skirt is now...outside. I had never imagined, never even conjured, what a stuffed doll would look like inside out. And now that I see them, I'm thinking two things: that they are gross, slightly unsettling, and for the next month or two, anytime I see a teddy bear or a cuddly baby toy I'm ... Continue reading →
Pluto isn't a planet anymore. It's been demoted. Now it's pink's turn. I'm talking about the color pink. It turns out (and this is not a new development, it's just something I didn't know), there is no pink in a rainbow. It isn't there. Red is there. Violet is there. Green is there. Blue, too. They are bands of light that scientists can measure. So they are out there. They exist. Curiously, however, when you look at a rainbow, you will notice that red is on one side, violet on the opposite side. This is a problem. Because pink happens when the red and violet sides get together, but they don't get together — which makes pink an act of wishful thinking, or, to put ... Continue reading →
No, this isn't a make-believe place. It's real. They call it "Ball's Pyramid." It's what's left of an old volcano that emerged from the sea about 7 million years ago. A British naval officer named Ball was the first European to see it in 1788. It sits off Australia, in the South Pacific. It is extremely narrow, 1,844 feet high, and it sits alone. What's more, for years this place had a secret. About half way up, at 225 feet above sea level, hanging on the rock surface, there is a small, spindly little bush and under that bush, a few years ago, two climbers, working in the dark, found something totally improbable hiding in the soil below. How it got there, we still don't ... Continue reading →
What do Google's computers and Facebook's, and Amazon's, and Verizon's, and all the other Internet servers know about me? They know a lot, says Mark Rigely of San Francisco. His strangely beautiful video shows how emails, ISP data, weblogs and voice data are being used to paint our portraits, and how, with time, those portraits become dense with detail, pattern and personality. It's almost like there's an image of us accumulating in that Cloud that will become an ever more vivid copy, with information we wouldn't tell our best friends, our family or our spouse. But the Cloud knows. "The average user will have 736 pieces of this personal information collected every day," Rigeley says. What a specific number! I don't know enough about information ... Continue reading →
This Is Yesica, the tipsy one on the right. She's a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model from Argentina. She is very nice to look at. John Sciulli/WireImage for Bragman Nyman Cafa But if you live in Argentina, you can't look at her. Put Yesica's name in Yahoo! Argentina and what do you get? You get nothing. A blank. She's not there. Yesica and her lawyers have exercised a legal right now dubbed "The Right to Be Forgotten" that allows you to remove embarrassing pictures or information you put on the web — and do it permanently, totally. Which means you can tell Yahoo! or Google or Facebook, "I don't want that there anymore. I want this to be forgotten. You have the image or the email ... Continue reading →
Bill Watterson stopped drawing "Calvin and Hobbes" in late 1995. Everybody noticed. Dan and Tom Heyerman stopped drawing "Pants are Overrated" late in 2011. I noticed. The Heyermans' online comic strip was about two brothers who know much too much about each other (not surprising, since Dan and Tom are in fact, brothers), who get comfortable by throwing off their office clothes — especially pants — and spend time having wonderfully meaningless, insignificant adventures. Dan, for example, would fall in love not with a girl, but with his Canon camera and try to kiss it on the lens when his brother isn't looking. That kind of thing. The strip was fun — actually pretty good — and then one day, out of the blue, they ... Continue reading →
