Here’re some items that don’t get their own individual posts, but are still cool:
1) The Onion takes on Hubble. In a related story, I used to work with a woman for whom English was her second language. She was playing with a kaleidoscope one day, holding it up to her eye and shutting the other one. I told her they were originally named kaleidoscopes because people would walk around with them up to their eyes and bump into each other all the time. She looked at me, amazed, and said “Really?” and I laughed and laughed. I’m evil. But funny.
2) Emily has another cool image from HiRISE showing Phoenix on the surface of Mars. She fiddled with the raw data and produced amazing color results. The details are astonishing!
3) Darth Mojo – who works on Battlestar Galactica – has thoughts on the wane of scifi cons. I don’t disagree with him, but it seems to me a lot of cons are doing really well right now (I can think of others besides the ones he mentions) as well as many dying off. Are cons going extinct? I’m only just now getting back into them after a 20 year hiatus, so I can’t really say. I wonder if mismanagement is to blame; I see a lot of that too.
4) What to do if you meet your future time-traveling self. Good advice, though slightly NSFW. Thanks to Dan Durda for sending this!
5) NASA head Mike Griffin talks China and the Moon. I’m not sure what to think about this, except the idea of a space race scares me. It makes it too easy to think of the goal as beating the other guy, and look where that got us: an early death to Apollo, the Space Shuttle, the Space Station, and thirty years of low-Earth orbit. I’d prefer we took a slightly longer view than this.
