I Feel Like A Million Dollar…

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Video by Thrown in the Dark Credit: ESA, NASA, cropped, edited. CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/igo/…)

What Hollywood gets wrong (and right!) about protecting the Earth from asteroids

In the 1998 movie, “Armageddon,” an asteroid the width of Texas is about to hit Earth. The heroes who stop it in just the nick of time are a group of orange-suited Americans, all men.

Life isn’t always like the movies.

Not that an asteroid couldn’t slam into Earth, mind you. Asteroids — mostly tiny ones — pass by our planet virtually every second. But the people charged with stopping the big ones aren’t reaching for their spacesuits with mere hours to spare.

And spoiler alert: They also aren’t all men.

“I would say the number one question I get when I tell people what I work on, is ‘Oh, like ‘Armageddon?’’ And it’s nothing like ‘Armageddon,’” says Lawrence Livermore National Lab physicist Kirsten Howley, whose day job includes defending our planet from asteroids.

Howley doesn’t have an orange jumpsuit at hand, but her job is serious business. She and her team of planetary defenders specialize in how we might deflect an asteroid that poses a threat to Earth.

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Williamina Fleming, phaedra0846, (notebook), 1887 [Project PHaEDRA. John G. Wolbach Library, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA]

Ai Weiwei, “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” 1995

An astonishingly irreverent piece of work.  This triptych features the artist dropping a Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD) in three photographs.  

When questioned about the work, he suggested that the piece was about industry: “[The urn] was industry then and is industry now.”  His statement, therefore, was that the urn was just a cheap pot two thousand years ago, and the reverence we feel toward it is artificial.  One critic wrote: “In other words, for all the aura of preciousness acquired by the accretion of time (and skillful marketing), this vessel is the Iron Age equivalent of a flower pot from K-Mart and if one were to smash the latter a few millennia from now, would it be an occasion for tears?”

However, the not-so-subtle political undertone is clear.  This piece was about destroying the notion that everything that is old is good…including the traditions and cultures of China.  For Ai Weiwei, this triptych represents a moment in which culture suddenly shifts (sometimes violently), shattering the old and outdated to make room for the new.  

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The Sun rises over Earth in a postcard illustrated by Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, recalling the 1965 mission when he became the first human to walk in space.

Australia vs Pluto

via reddit

hey i have a favor to ask from astronomers, can y'all put little krakens on the edges of maps of the observable universe to denote that we don't know what's past that

The rings of Saturn, observed by Voyager 2 on this day in 1981.

:-P