Dammit Jim!

There things sure are easy and kind of fun to put together so I’ll try another one.

Camera Tips from an Engineer

I’ve been wondering if companies (and consumers) have been concentrating too much on megapixels. This engineer thinks yes.

Explorer 1

It was the 50th anniversary of the US’s first satellite. I didn’t know they sent a Geiger counter up in it.

Happy Face on Mars

Not a whole lot more to it just a pretty cute picture.

Asteroid Almost Hits Mars

An asteroid almost hit Mars but didn’t. Now we don’t know where it is (although this was expected).

More Mercury Images

Some new pictures from the MESSENGER flyby. I especially like the annotated image to help out people (like me) that can never seem to find what people are talking about.

Henry Rollins on Evolution

Nice to see the Liar Liar guy seems to have his head on straight.

18′ Shark Surprise

Pretty cool video of a big six-gill shark.

Potential Presidential Science Debate

Sounds like a good idea and it’d be in Philadelphia so maybe I could go.

Evolving Virtual Creatures

Interesting examples of applying evolution to create virtual creatures that fulfill tasks like fast movement, grabbing a ball and fighting each other.

I think it’s supposed to be some sort of blogging shortcut but I kind of like when a blog I read posts interesting links they’ve found recently. So I thought I would start doing a few posts like that of my own. I’ll gather up links I think are especially interesting and once I get five or so dump them in to a post. Feel free to read or delete as you please.

MESSENGER Images of Mercury

The Messenger space probe passed by Mercury recently. I hadn’t realized that most of Mercury has never been seen. It’s pretty cool that we get to see images of a new world almost as quickly as the scientists working on it.

That Stupid Bigfoot on Mars

This one has been going around the internet. If you missed it, there’s a rock on Mars near one of the rovers that looks like Bigfoot. The “Bigfoot” thing is pretty silly (although Sasquatch was the first thing I thought when I saw the picture) but that post shows the really cool and huge panorama it came from.

Donald Knuth and LaTeX

I like LaTeX so I found this bit of history about Donald Knuth coming up with the software pretty interesting.

Bioluminescence and Squid Video

I just found out about all these TED talks being online. Pretty handy when you don’t have a TV. This one is about five minutes long and has a bunch of videos of squid, octopuses and things that glow in the depths.

Pulgasari: The North Korean Godzilla

This is another one resulting from not having a TV. Definitely a less than B grade monster movie but it does provide a good comparison to Cloverfield. The story of Kim Jong-Il kidnapping the director and his wife and forcing them to make the thing sounds like a better story than the movie itself (not that it’d take much). For the impatient, there’s decent monster bits around 27:30, 47:30 and 1:03:00.

Soldering Tiny Components

This is a great video tutorial on how to solder tiny electronic components. Really nicely filmed and very closeup. You can really see what’s going on and the guy sure makes it look easy.

NerdKits

A nice idea by a couple college students to sell kits for learning how to use microcontrollers. They “guarantee that you’ll get your first program written and running”. Unfortunately they don’t have a USB version yet. Sort of a homegrown alternative to EasyPic4.

That’s it for now. That was pretty quick and fun to put together so I’ll probably do some more of these in the future. I hope something on there is interesting for other people too.