This is absolutely fantastic:
Archive for the ‘ Awesome ’ Category
This artist’s impression from the ESA shows the 50,000 or so bits of space debris currently in low-earth orbit that are large enough to do damage to space craft or satellites. That’s right – this huge cloud is only a part of the flotsam that’s been put into space in the last 50 years.
Over 6000 satellites have been launched since the dawn of the space age. Some of them have come back to earth or continued on into the depths of the universe, but the vast majority are still wandering around up there. Over 4500 are not operational – they’re just slowly breaking up and forming a dangerous obstacle course for current missions into space.
Sometimes space debris falls back to earth, and each time a new rocket is launched bits of it come down without even reaching orbit.
I’m not sure who took these pictures, but I found them here. They’re evocative images – maybe they’ll remind us to look up every once in a while.
Check out these images of the earth’s gravitational field taken by a couple of satellites from the GRACE project:
This information will let scientists get a better idea of the earth’s internal structure, in turn helping them to model things like weather patterns and geographic change more accurately. Plus, it looks awesome.
(Via)
Check out these pictures of an old-school supercomputer – this is the Cray X-MP 48, installed in the Chilton Computing Lab in 1986. This behemoth had 64 Mb of RAM and came with a free sofa.
The snazzy seating area provided somewhere to sit, relax, chat with friends and compute things…
Is it me or does it feel like the Cray is watching you?
For more unhappy kitties, visit Maria Konstantinov’s Saddest Cat.
In Japan, cats are treated as gods and the Japanese have come up with the ‘cat house’ so that our feline friends can dominate us in our own homes. I for one would have this installed in my house…if I owned it. And if I had a cat…
Finally, the folk over at Webomatica have discovered what technology is really for…
Cat Recognition Software!
It seems that iPhoto 09 recognises cat’s faces just like peoples’. Thus proving that cats ARE people. I for one welcome our feline colleagues and look forward to them being elected to positions of power under the equality and diversity legislation.
Thomas Harriot, a 17th century graduate of St. Mary’s (now Oriel College) Oxford, appears to be the first person ever to draw a picture of the moon. Papers attributed to early 1609 show that he beat Galileo by several months.
Thomas made some pretty awesome drawings of the moon’s surface, which are going on display at the London Science Museum on the 23rd July. I love old-school maps so here’s his moon-drawing for your delectation:
Credit: © Lord Egremont
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