A Fated Collision

Most galaxies are hurtling away from each other as the universe expands, but some were formed so close together that gravity is actually pulling them together. The Hubble Space Telescope has observed that our Milky Way galaxy and its closest neighbour, Andromeda (2.5 million lightyears away), are being pulled towards each other at speeds of 100–140 kilometres per second—or 400 lightyears every million years. Only recently have we confidently been able to estimate when they’ll crash head-on: in 4 billion years. Our sun will be flung into a new galactic region, along with one hundred billion other stars that will scatter and occasionally be ripped away and driven into interstellar space. Earth and our solar system, however, aren’t in much danger of being destroyed—there’s so much empty space between each star that the likelihood of stars actually crashing into each other is pretty slim. Rather, their gravitational forces will cause them to swirl around each other in a gravitational maelstrom, slowly merging to form the core of a new galaxy around 6 billion years from now. Andromeda’s close companion, the Triangulum galaxy, might merge with them later too. A suggested name for the new galaxy? Milkomeda.

Check out a simulation at NASA

(Source: Science in a Can)

Credit: This Isn’t Happiness

Rest in space, Neil Armstrong. With a footprint on the Moon you made a permanent mark on Earth. Thank you for every single one of your small steps.

Love,
Jane

It all started, ostensibly, with a post on The Badass of the Week way back in 2009, then a comic from The Oatmeal appeared earlier this year and before anyone could say “mad genius,” Nikola Tesla had been catapulted to stardom. Here’s a brief timeline of Tesla’s posthumous rise to fame:

January 9, 2009 Nikola Tesla is The Badass of the Week.

“Of course, much like many other eccentric giga-geniuses and diabolical masterminds, Tesla was also completely insane.  He was prone to nervous breakdowns, claimed to receive weird visions in the middle of the night, spoke to pigeons, and occasionally thought he was receiving electromagnetic signals from extraterrestrials on Mars.  He was also obsessive-compulsive and hated round objects, human hair, jewelry, and anything that wasn’t divisible by three. He was also asexual and celibate for his entire life.  Basically, Nikola Tesla was the ultimate mad scientist, which is seriously awesome.”

April 11, 2012 Untitled Nikola Tesla Project appears on IMDb.

Rumor has it that crazy actors Christian Bale and Nicholas Cage will play crazy people Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison.¹

May 14, 2012 Matthew Inman, creator of The Oatmeal, writes the comic Why Nikola Tesla was the Greatest Geek who Ever Lived. It goes viral.

July 10, 2012 Nikola Tesla Day.

Matthew Inman suggests editing WikiPedia:

August 9, 2012 Will Cashen launches a Kickstarter campaign for Electricity: The Story and Life of Nikola Tesla, a docudrama that is currently up for funding.

August 15, 2012 Matthew Inman launches an IndieGogo campaign, Let’s Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum, to buy back Tesla’s old factory — Wardenclyffe Tower — in Shoreham, NY and turn it into a museum. The campaign needs $850,000 to secure a matching grant from New York State.

Within 20 minutes the campaign raises $13,000; Elon Musk (my favorite, who has a company named after our favorite geek) pledges to support the project; within 24 hours the campaign reaches the half-way mark; the campaign breaks IndieGogo.

August 21, 2012 The Tesla Museum campaign passes its $850,000 goal in less than a week, securing a matching grant from New York State.

August 24, 2012 The Tesla Museum campaing passes $1million.

I’m just going to let this screen grab, taken today at 2:00pm, speak for itself:

Today voices are being raised all over the world to rectify the injustice that is Tesla’s almost complete absence in electrical science history education.  In the Smithsonian Book of Invention, Tesla isn’t mentioned once, nor is he mentioned in the Smithsonian Visual Timeline of Invention. In Lighting a Revolution, a book written by the curator of the Smithsonian Institution, a picture of Tesla’s AC generators finally makes an appearance, but again, he is never mentioned. Everywhere you look, Edison is glorified while Tesla is omitted.

His absence is unpardonable, a scheme orchestrated by that douchebag Thomas Edison to wrap powerhouses like the Smithsonian Institution, the Henry Ford Museum, and the Society for the History of Technology , and his own General Electric Company around his finger and keep Tesla from the recognition he more than deserved.

In sourcing material for this post, I came across this video, posted last year by an elementary school teacher who took on this gross injustice with his 3rd grade class. They made and sold Nikola Tesla t-shirts to raise money to build busts of Tesla to donate to major universities across the country. Today, they have busts at 19 colleges and universities across the country, including Harvard, Princeton, MIT, U of M, Yale, and CalTech.

On my birthday this year my cousin is getting married at the Henry Ford Museum. I will go, but I will stamp my feet the whole way and probably get colossally drunk and go on a rant about Tesla. I have also decided that I’m going to get married just so I can get married in the Tesla Museum. Any takers?

Also, just a side/personal note: if Nikola Tesla was celibate his whole life, why is he giving sexy eyes in nearly every single photo? Just a question…

__________

¹ Christian Bale really likes Nikola Tesla, or he really likes being in movies with Nikola Tesla characters in them. In 2006, Christian Bale Starred in The Prestige in which David Bowie played our favorite geek. It could be argued that this was the beginning of the Nikola Tesla Phenomenon.

“An international team of astronomers has discovered the first evidence of a planet’s destruction by its aging star. The evidence indicates that the missing planet was devoured as the star began expanding into a ‘red giant’—the stellar equivalent of advanced age.”

…

“Catching a planet in the act of being devoured by a star is an almost improbable feat to accomplish because of the comparative swiftness of the process, but the occurrence of such a collision can be deduced from the way it affects the stellar chemistry,” [one researcher] explained. “The highly elongated orbit of the massive planet we discovered around this lithium-polluted red giant star is exactly the kind of evidence that would point to the star’s recent destruction of its now-missing planet.”

The same thing could happen to the inner planets of our solar system and our sun becomes a red giant and expands out to Earth’s orbit. But don’t sweat, that won’t happen for another 5 billion years.

(Source: Astronomy)

Anyway. Artificial neural networks are touted as programs that think like brains, except better. What does that mean? It means they are capable of processing and interpreting huge amounts of data and finding patterns that are too complex for us mere mortals to find. This is sort of what the brain does (and I’m reducing big time here): it receives sensory input and processes that data, identifying and categorizing and pattern-recognizing all over those sensory inputs to make sense of them. In other words: it decides what to tell you to do based on the information it pulls out of the data. Wenger “taught the computer how to diagnose breast cancer,” meaning she built it to take an input and give a “right answer”–namely, benign or malignant tumor–as output.

This is what’s called a classification problem: to produce a discrete output–for example 0 or 1, yes or no, or benign or malignant–from the input. The program is first fed a huge data set with the “correct answers.” The program analyzes the data set, assesses the features, and fits a line to the data to use as a guide for future predictions. Then it is fed a new data set and uses what it learned from the first data set to make its own predictions. By receiving feedback on when it gets the answer right or wrong, the program’s accuracy increases with each prediction. This is classic supervised machine learning.

To achieve the accuracy that Wenger achieved requires really stellar programming.

I do need to say one thing: artificial neural networks do not artificial brains make. They are a major step in the development of AI, as are many advances in machine learning, but we still need to know more about what the brain does. For instance, how do we write an algorithm that will draw a line of equal finesse and flexibility to that of the brain? We’re not there yet but we’re getting there!

I’d really done it this time. The thing is, my sober self likes to put great books on my Amazon wish list and my drunk self likes to execute the one click that will buy them all. Half of me hates this habit; the other half loves it.

This preamble is, to be honest, completely beside the point of this post. Today I came across this Q&A with Space.com from last week in which Kip Thorne (author of the above book, in case you didn’t notice) talks about a few of my favorite things: black holes.

To give some background, Kip Thorne is one of the country’s leading theoretical physicists, and he has made major contributors to the fields of astrophysics and gravitation. He’s also among the handful of people who understand Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

These are my favorite questions and answers from the Q&A:

SPACE.com: What happens to space-time when two black holes collide?

Thorne: Each black hole spins on its axis like the Earth spins. That spin creates two vortexes of twisting space, somewhat like vortexes in a bathtub or a whirlpool. There’s one vortex of twisting space that sticks out of the north pole of the black hole, and one vortex that sticks out of the south pole. That’s one aspect of a black hole’s warped space-time. There are others, but let’s just talk about that one.

When two black holes orbit around each other and collide and merge, those vortexes then start sweeping around and around the merged black holes. They get deposited onto the surface, what we call the horizon, of the merged black holes, so you now have four of these vortexes on the horizon. And as the black hole turns, these vortexes sweep back like the spiral arms of a galaxy, or like water from a whirling sprinkler; they reach outward and backwards and they become these gravitational waves.

…

SPACE.com: When people talk about black holes, they talk about singularities at their centers. Is a singularity really a spot of infinite density and zero volume?

Thorne: That’s one way to describe it, but the singularity, like the black hole itself, we believe is quite rich in its structure.

As you near the singularity, we expect that it stretches and squeezes you in a chaotic way that ultimately kills you and destroys the matter of which you’re made. And when you get right to the singularity itself, the laws of physics as we know them break down and the laws of quantum gravity take hold. Since we don’t understand those laws very well yet, we can’t say what the nature of the very core of the singularity is.

You can read the entire Q&A here. Great questions and great answers!

(Source: Space.com)

Infinitely more badass than me, “[Russian] cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Yuri Malenchenko will conduct a 6.5 hour spacewalk to complete maintenance and repairs on the exterior of the space station.” They’ll be installing new micrometeoroid debris shields to protect the Russian Zvezda service module and moving a hand-operated crane to make room for a new laboratory module.

If they manage to finish early, Padalka and Malenchenko will be able to collect two experiments that have been placed outside of the station to see how different materials respond to a vacuum of space. And if they’re really ahead of schedule, “the cosmonauts may also ‘launch’ a small spherical satellite [...]” And all I did on my walk was find a few pretty rocks on the beach.

You can watch the spacewalk live on NASA TV and on channel 101 for most cable and satellite providers. The spacewalk started at 10:40 EST this morning and is scheduled to end at 5:10pm, so make sure you catch a few minutes before it’s over!

(Source: Space.com)

Luckily, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (the guys that brought you the Mars Curiosity Rover; remember them?) have been using a Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope to get a better picture of these flying rocks based on the heat they emit. WISE scans the entire sky using infrared light, picking up the glow and taking images of hundreds of millions of objects that are next to impossible to see otherwise, “including the coolest stars, the universe’s most luminous galaxies, and some of the darkest near-Earth asteroids and comets.” The result is the most detailed map we’ve ever had of the location and orbital path of potentially hazardous asteroids, meaning we can track these suckers and blast them to smithereens before they get us.

Here’s what JPL says about the project:

“The closest of WISE’s finds will be near-Earth objects, both asteroids and comets, with orbits that come close to crossing Earth’s path. The mission is expected to find hundreds of these bodies, and hundreds of thousands of additional asteroids in our solar system’s main asteroid belt. By measuring the objects’ infrared light, astronomers will get the first good estimate of the size distribution of the asteroid population. This information will tell us approximately how often Earth can expect an encounter with a potentially hazardous asteroid. WISE data will also reveal new information about the composition of near-Earth objects and asteroids — are they fluffy like snow or hard like rocks, or both?”

We can still blast them to smithereens, right?

Source: WISE Overview

The Elderwand gets credit for this one. Thanks!

Thanks to Ben for sending this my way. Here’s what Karl Sims (the guy who built this bad boy) has to say about it:

“A harmonograph is a mechanical device that uses swinging pendulums to draw pictures, believed to be originally invented in 1844 by Scottish mathematician Hugh Blackburn. There are other types of harmonographs, but this 3-pendulum rotary type gives a wide variety of pleasant results, and is fairly easy to build once you’ve settled on a design and have acquired the appropriate materials and tools. This is a great project to do with kids and can result in endless experiments creating new types of geometric designs.”

If you want to make your own, check out Karl Sims’s site for instructions.

The other day, my uncle asked me if my other uncle was “inventing yottabytes.” I took the question more literally than I should have and replied with some snide remark about it making no sense to say that anyone is “inventing yottabytes.” What he was getting at, obviously, is this: is my uncle working on the technology to handle that amount of information? The name of my uncle’s company is, in fact, Yottabyte, and in terms of far-reaching goals sure, he’d love to be the one to harness (or just store) that amount of data, but so far it’s just a name. The fact is, no one has yet coined a term for any amount of data larger than a yottabyte because there’s nowhere close to that much information waiting to be stored.

Let’s get some perspective: 1 yottabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes = 10²⁴ bytes. If printed out, it would be something like 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text. Currently, the largest packets of data that are being thrown around are exabytes, and only by big guns like the NSA.¹ 1 exabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes = 10¹⁸ bytes; that’s 1 quintillion bytes. A yottabyte is 1 septillion bytes. In other words, it’s a whole hell of a lot bigger.²

Storing this much data requires massive databases, and I mean massive. The NSA’s Utah Data Center will cover 1 million square feet and include four 25,000 square foot facilities housing rows and rows of servers, not to mention the 60,000 tons of cooling equipment needed to keep the servers from overheating and the huge electrical substation charged with meting the center’s estimated 65 megawatt demand. To put it simply: big data is super high maintenance.

This is why “we wouldn’t dream of blanketing every square meter of Earth with cameras, and recording every moment for all eternity/human posterity — we simply don’t have the storage capacity.”³ The question is: will we ever? The solution, it turns out, may be in our very own DNA.

(Continued on Girl Meets Whiskey.)

“Watch the universe unfold…in 1.5 minutes.” - The Atlantic

This video from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is part of an ongoing project that will eventually capture images from over 1.5 million galaxies. Officially called “Data Release 9,” the map released by SDSS this week is the largest 3D map of the universe ever. From the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, SDSS has been using Apache Point’s telescope to survey the universe since 2000. The telescope captures images using drift scanning–also known as time-delay integration–which records images of single strips of the sky by taking advantage of the Earth’s rotation. So far, the project has generated data that accounts for some 7 billion years’ worth of cosmic movement.

Massive galaxies and distant black holes. Eat. It. Up.

Great video from TEDEd. A few things to keep in mind:

- The Continuum Hypothesis (CH) actually states: there is no set whose cardinality is strictly between that of the integers and that of the real numbers.
- Two sets have the same cardinality or cardinal number if there is a one-to-one correlation between them (ie. they match up).

On Monday a friend posted this link on my wall: Jonah Lehrer Resigns from New Yorker After Making Up Quotes for His Book.¹ My jaw hit the floor, my stomach contracted, and I probably stopped breathing. Jonah Lehrer was my idol, my hero, a paragon of excellence in science and in science writing. He had my dream life, my dream career, and he was handsome and charming to boot. I was crushed; I just couldn’t believe it.

But after a few days of thinking about the whole thing, I kind of can believe it. And I still really like Jonah Lehrer.

(Continued on Girl Meets Whiskey)

What was the nature of the “Holden Caulfield symbol” in J. D. Salinger’s brain during the period when he was writing Catcher in the Rye? That structure was all there ever was to Holden Caulfield — but it was so, so rich. Perhaps that symbol wasn’t as rich as a full human soul, but Holden Caulfield seems like so much of a person, with a true core, a true soul, a true personal gemma, even if only a “miniature” one. You couldn’t ask for a richer representation, a richer mirroring, of one person inside another person, than whatever constituted the Holden Caulfield symbol inside Salinger’s brain.

– Douglas Hofstadter, I Am A Strange Loop

As my friend Ally once casually remarked: “hey, look at all that wind.”

(Source: Humans Since 1982)

Landing Curiosity: Seven Minutes of Terror

(Source: NASA JPL)

Source: Jay B Sauceda, Public School

Honey counterfeiters beware. Vaughn Bryant, the Texas A&M University anthropology professor that moonlights as a honey detective, is determined to keep counterfeit honey off the shelf. Testing hundreds of samples each year at his lab, Bryant can match the pollen grains in a given sample to a specific region. “Because flowering plants vary from region to region and bees rarely stray far from the hive, the pollen print provides a sort of geocode.” This means that he can tell if that Alaskan fireweed honey you paid a premium price for is actually just re-bottled Blue Sky Bee (you know, the stuff that comes in the awesome plastic bear bottle? Yeah.)

(Source: The Hive Minder, WIRED Magazine)

The documentary was adapted into this wonderful book, which I don’t yet own in case anyone was wondering. *hint*

NOISY JELLY from Raphaël Pluvinage on Vimeo.

Noisy Jelly is a game created by Raphaël Pluvinage and Marianne Cauvard in which players cook their own musical instruments — jelly, made with water, a few grams of agar agar powder, and some coloring — that are then placed on the game board and, when touched, will activate different sounds.

“Technically, the game board is a capacitive sensor, and the variations of the shape and their salt concentration, the distance and the strength of the finger contact are detected and transform into an audio signal.”

Which is all just a complicated way of saying it’s just really really awesome.