Travis Is My Name

“Do you realize that the $850 billion dollar bank bailout - the sum of money - is greater than the entire 50 year running budget of NASA. So when someone says we don’t have enough money for this space probe, I’m asking, it’s not that you don’t have enough money, it’s that the distribution of the money that you’re spending is warped in some way, that you’re removing the only thing that gives people something to dream about tomorrow. So I worry that the decisions that Congress makes doesn’t factor in the consequences of those decisions on tomorrow. They’re playing for the quarterly report, they’re playing for the next election cycle, and that is mortgaging the actual future of this nation. Tomorrow’s gone.”  

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

No doubt these Space Cowboys, were they around today, would agree with Neil wholeheartedly. 

Carl Sagan

HG Wells

Galileo

Let’s just fix our goddamned currency

"Sketching Fractals" by Music: Fractals are a treat for your eyes, but what about your ears?

Fractals are geometric constructs that exhibit similar or identical characteristics at every level of magnitude. They provide new tools for geometers to describe objects of extreme intricacy, such as clouds, ferns, snowflakes, mountain ranges, stock-market fluctuations, the human circulatory and nervous system, etc.. The geometry of Fractals brings us a new appreciation for the natural world and the beauty of mathematics. Some of the most popular examples are: The Sierpinski triangle  and the Von Koch snowflake.

Fractals are a treat for your eyes, but what about your ears?. Dmitry Kormann, a composer/keyboardist from São Paulo, Brazil, explains how he brings fractal-like patterns to the very structure of his music, to obtain beautiful results. See more at:  [http://plus.maths.org/issue55/features/Kormann]

Images: Snow winter at Datspiff on Tumblr & Snowflakes and snow crystals on Flickr & The Koch Snowflake (Formulas).

References:

[Fractal Dimensions of Geometric Objects on Fractalfoundation.org]

[https://dorchard.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/the-koch-snowflake]

Comets have been in the news a lot lately but did you know their relationship to meteor showers?

When a comet gets close to the Sun and debris start getting blown off it, the comet grows two tails. The debris coming off the comet like to hang around in the wake of the comet’s path.

As Earth orbits around the Sun, sometimes it will orbit through a field of debris that got blown off the comet, this material burns up in the atmosphere: a meteor shower.

November 17th and the 18th (after midnight) there’s going to be a wonderful meteor shower. The Leonids. If you sit and watch the constellation of Leo in the sky, it will seem like the meteor shower is raining from the lion.

I don’t see how this can’t possibly fail