Enceladus’ plume and a poem

To get a better of what is in the plume that’s spews out of Saturn’s moon Enceladus (it’s known to contain water vapor, sodium, and organic molecules), they sent Cassini through it on November 2, 2009. Here’s a picture of the plume (Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute–click on it to see it better):

And since today [...]

Friday 13 and a poem

I’m incredibly lazy today, so here’s a random 13 in celebration of Friday the 13th:
She Sings Songs Without Words Harry Chapin
Does She Talk? Matthew Sweet
Fame David Bowie
Skrautvål Hedningarna
Unchain My Heart Ray Charles
Sweet Addiction Deb Pasternak
Blame It On Cain Elvis Costello
Big Mess Devo
Corner Soul The Clash
Fun World Mission Of Burma
Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey Little Richard
What’s Going On Hüsker Dü
Final Say Sambassadeur
Yup, not even a link to a video–you can find them [...]

Views from windows and a poem

I’m still testing my camera, so here’s a picture looking out my office window towards the Prudential

and here’s a picture from the meeting room down the hall looking at part of the West Village here at NU with the Museum of Fine Arts in the background.

 Here’s a better picture of the Museum which is going [...]

State ideology and a poem

Via Kevin Drum, Boris Shor has put up a graph that:
has performed some analysis (jointly with Nolan McCarty) on the ideological positions of state legislators. The estimates are based on state legislative voting, which might make you wonder how you could possibly compare legislators in one state with those in another. The trick is that [...]

War against the moon commences and a poem

It’s begun:
NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, created twin impacts on the moon’s surface early Friday in a search for water ice. Scientists will analyze data from the spacecraft’s instruments to assess whether water ice is present.
The satellite traveled 5.6 million miles during an historic 113-day mission that ended in the Cabeus [...]

LCROSS and a poem

This seems interesting:
LCROSS launched with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on June 18, 2009 at 2:32 p.m. PDT. The LCROSS shepherding spacecraft and the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage rocket executed a fly-by of the moon on June 23, 2009  and entered into an elongated Earth [...]

Water on the moon, the milky way, and a poem

A new report says water has been found on the moon:
From its perch in lunar orbit, M3’s state-of-the-art spectrometer measured light reflecting off the moon’s surface at infrared wavelengths, splitting the spectral colors of the lunar surface into small enough bits to reveal a new level of detail in surface composition. When the M3 science team [...]

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and a poem

I finished reading ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’, the reworked classic of Jane Austen (by Seth Grahame-Smith). I liked the idea of the book, but not the actual product.
The reason ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is a classic is that it works at two levels. The first level is a love story where the characters fall in [...]

Math and a new poem

Ok, I’m really just linking to a post by Krugman:
What I objected to in the mag article was the tendency to identify good math with good work. CAPM is a beautiful model; that doesn’t mean it’s right. The math of real business cycle models is much more elegant than that of New Keynesian models, let [...]

Part 3 of a story and a poem

Today my soon to be epic movie moves on, the start of the story is here (no pictures in this part, so find a picture of a mountain range before you start to read):
Still they looked around. They seemed to be on a plateau near a large body of water. There were a few trees, but [...]

Green Day and a Monday poem

I was up in NH for a while and didn’t put up anything on Friday, so today I’ve decided to give a trillion dollars to the first person who can write a song based on one of my poems (ok, more like $3). To get you in the mood, here are a couple videos by [...]

Galaxies, a black hole, and a poem

This week, I present (via NASA) two pictures of galaxies. The first is a coiled galaxy around a black hole (the area around the black hole is in the middle, coded a light blue, Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech):

The second is really a nebula, the Cat’s Eye Nebula, taken by the Chandra and Hubble telescopes (Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/UIUC/Y.Chu [...]

Stars, planets, and a poem

It’s Friday, so let’s get to some pictures. The first is really more of a chart, it gives the size and orbital distance of planets that have been discovered. It includes a span for ‘habitable’ planets. I’m not quite sure how they decided this, but the only one in that region right now is Earth [...]

40 years ago, a landing

40 years ago the first people who had landed on the moon came back to Earth. I already put up pictures of the trip here, so today all that’s new is a poem (if you want to make it topical, replace the first two lines with: With a moon behind, There’s a world in front):
With [...]

The start of a story and a poem

This will be the first of x posts (with x yet to be determined, but at least one) trying to put together some form of story. I will update it at some intervals (once a week perhaps–it will partially depend on whether anyone reads this and/or comments) and put the current extent on the story [...]

Enceladus, water, and a poem

It seems that a moon of Saturn has salt water in it:
For the first time, scientists working on NASA’s Cassini mission have detected sodium salts in ice grains of Saturn’s outermost ring. Detecting salty ice indicates that Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which primarily replenishes the ring with material from discharging jets, could harbor a reservoir of [...]

Venus and … wait look over there

I noticed I haven’t looked at Venus yet, so today I will. The first picture was taken by the Magellan probe using cloud penetrating radar (Credit: SSV, MIPL, Magellan Team, NASA):

A second picture showing the clouds of Venus (Credit: NASA):
 
and a picture with all the planets of the Solar System showing their relative size (Credit: [...]

Jupiter and a poem

Today I look at Jupiter. The first picture is in pastely colors because it was taken in near-infared light. The two colored dots are the moons Io and Ganymede, while the three dark dots are their shadows (Callisto is not seen in the picture, but its shadow is–Credit: NASA, ESA, and E. Karkoschka (University of [...]

Just a poem today

I’m trying to finish up my dissertation (supposedly I’m defending on June 18), so no pictures or random songs or 980 page story on the meaning of an encounter between Joe and Jane that almost caused the ant apocalypse.
Just a poem:
Pencil me in for Thursday
The time is right for fireworks
In never ascending order
Towards the rink [...]

Neptune, Triton, and a poem

Hmm, Scary Go Round has a story on Atlantis (it starts here) so I think this week I’ll look at Neptune. Both of the following pictures were taken by Voyager 2 (that’s V’ger to you Star Trek people) back in 1989 or so and the credit is NASA/JPL. The first is of the planet itself [...]