Category Archives: Science

Space at SXSW

By Nathan | March 18, 2010

I was lucky enough this past week to be a part of the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference in Austin TX. For the uninitiated SXSW is a film and music festival plus a conference about internet business and culture. It’s a mecca for all things cool and new on the web. There is so [...]

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Distance and Scale

By Nathan | March 12, 2010

I was thinking about the scale of the universe the other day (not an unusual activity for me) when I noticed that an “o” and a period are usually about the right size to be the Earth and the Moon respectively. Then I realized that one could write a sentence such that an o would [...]

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Space Shuttle Mystery

By Nathan | February 15, 2010

Last week space shuttle Endeavour launched on a mission to add one of the last pieces of the International Space Station. It was one of the last space shuttle launches and likely the last ever night launches. Among the people watching the launch was James Vernacotola who had his camera ready and waiting on a [...]

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Maps of the Sky

By Nathan | January 23, 2010

The other day I came across a very awesome graph of the entire universe. It shows more-or-less every object in space we know about on a logarithmic scale from the center of the earth to the edge of the visible universe. It got me thinking about what you can do with large datasets so I [...]

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Solar System Center of Mass

By Nathan | August 17, 2009

Right now scientists are searching for new planets. They have telescopes pointed at distant stars carefully measuring how fast they move and looking for tiny deviations—or wobble—in their speed. This wobble tells us that something must be orbiting the star. When two objects are in orbit, they both orbit their respective center or mass, called [...]

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