[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]
- Longest Eclipse Ever: Airplane Chases the Moon’s Shadow
- [Wired: Science]
Eclipse hunters set a new record on July 11 for the longest eclipse ever observed by civilians chasing the moon in an airplane. While hundreds of eclipse enthusiasts flocked to islands in the South Pacific to watch the moon blot out the sun, astronomer Glenn Schneider and colleagues climbed to 39,000 feet to spend 9 minutes, 23 seconds in the moon’s shadow….
Theoretically, the longest total solar eclipse that can be viewed from the ground is 7 minutes, 32 seconds long, a limit set by the geometry of celestial mechanics.
- The hunt for the Franklin Expedition ships
- [A Blog About History]
Archaeologists in Canada are en route to the Arctic in an attempt to find the lost ships of the doomed Franklin Expedition 150 years ago.
- Drupal Gardens
- [Pressography]
Frankly I’m surprised it took so long, but finally there’s a ‘automatic Drupal’ site, which operates in a similar way to which WordPress.com does for WordPress, called Drupal Gardens.
See if you can stay awake long enough through this truly uninspiring video they have on their front page if you want a quick tour :)
[video]
Yeh, thought not, so, here’s a quick rundown…
First up it’s not, in any way, a competitor to WordPress.com or other blogging services, and that’s not because of the ‘Drupal is more fully featured’ myth but because their plans have been conceived by, presumably, a box full of screaming monkeys…
- Oil spill in Dalian, China
- [The Big Picture]
Five days ago, in the northeastern port city of Dalian, China, two oil pipelines exploded, sending flames hundreds of feet into the air and burning for over 15 hours, destroying several structures – the cause of the explosion is under investigation. The damaged pipes released thousands of gallons of oil, which flowed into the nearby harbor and the Yellow Sea. The total amount of oil spilled is still not clear, though China Central Television earlier reported an estimate of 1,500 tons (400,000 gallons), as compared to the estimated 94 – 184 million gallons in the BP oil spill off the Louisiana coast. The oil slick has now grown to at least 430 square kilometers (165 sq mi), forcing beaches and port facilities to close while government workers and local fishermen work to contain and clean up the spill. (29 photos total)
- Graphene organic photovoltaics may let your t-shirt power your cell phone
- [Science News]
A University of Southern California team has produced flexible transparent carbon atom films that the researchers say have great potential for a new breed of solar cells.
- ‘Corpse flower’ bloom could stink up Texas wedding
- [Science News]
“Lois”, a rare “corpse” flower that is blooming at the Houston Museum of Natural Science is shown Thursday, July 22, 2010 in Houston.
[Talk about bad timing... -L]
- The Animal Connection
- [NeuroLogica Blog]
Anthropologist Pat Shipman has written a paper and an upcoming book hypothesizing that our relationship with animals was a key component of recent human evolution…
The advantage to our ancestors of using animals is clear. It is easy to imagine the extreme advantages to early tribes of humans if they had large hunting dogs at their sides, or horses to ride, or farm animals as a convenient food source, or even just cats to keep away the vermin.
But Shipman is making a further argument – the advantage of communicating knowledge about animals was significant enough to become an important factor in our own evolution. As evidence for this she writes…
- Largest Space Molecules Found; Buckyball Mystery Solved
- [National Geographic News]
…scientists using the Spitzer Space Telescope (and possibly the Schwartz) have discovered real spaceballs, aka buckyballs, the mysterious form of pure carbon they’ve sought in space for some 40 years, according to a new study.
Sporting a soccer ball-like pattern, a buckyball is a molecule whose 60 carbon atoms form a stable, hollow sphere. Even at just a billionth of a meter wide, it’s the largest type of molecule yet seen in space.
Buckyballs are the spherical versions of so-called fullerene carbon molecules, which were first theorized in 1970. The molecules were first spotted in a laboratory in 1985 during experiments that simulated the atmospheric conditions of carbon-rich, aging stars.
- 7 Basic Rules for Making Charts and Graphs
- [FlowingData]
- History of The Beatles as told by their hair
- [FlowingData]
- Keep it down up there!
- [I Can Has Cheezburger]
- Glitch in America Speaks Tabulation Artificially Inflated Support for Raising Retirement Age
- [Firedoglake]
When America Speaks, the organization bankrolled by deficit scold Pete Peterson, held its series of meetings last month, the results basically showed that the public favored progressive options to lower the deficit and stabilize the budget. But a couple anomalous results were included in there, allowing America Speaks to say that Americans preferred balanced solutions. A review of the data shows that a technical error led America Speaks to initially promote that a majority of their participants favored raising the Social Security eligibility age, when in actuality a far smaller minority approved of that solution.
- The Intersection of Election Law and Constitutional Law
- [Media Law Prof Blog]
Heather Gerken, Yale University Law School, has published Keynote Address: What Election Law Has to Say to Constitutional Law (forthcoming in the Indiana Law Journal). Here is the abstract…
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