This is one of the best I’ve seen in a while:
World’s Biggest Snake Ate New Prehistoric Croc Species
Whats not to like? You’ve got the world’s biggest snake, a prehistoric croc — and not just one of those tired old prehistoric crocs, but apparently a new one!
A good headline, to be sure, but probably not among the all-time greats.
All the ink and pixels spent in recent years on the question of whether Pluto ought or ought not be considered a planet missed the most interesting development in the story of this distant rock (or whatever it is.) Astronomer Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology puts it this way:
“You’re looking at the surface in the solar system where there are the biggest changes we’ve ever seen,†Brown said.
The color of the surface of Pluto changed so markedly, particularly between 2000 and 2002, that Buie has spent years checking and rechecking his work, just to make sure the differences weren’t an artifact of faulty equipment or calculations.
“I got that result years ago but it’s just so hard to understand and believe that I’ve been checking everything that I can think of,†he said. “I’m still nervous about it. It could be that I’ve just completely screwed this up, but I can’t find where.â€Â
Until someone can provide a plausible reason why a planet (dwarf or otherwise) would just up and change color like that, I have to lean in the “he screwed up” direction.
But it’s intriguing…
Check out this composite video of Pluto rotating.
This apparently shows Pluto post-color-change. I wonder what it looked like before?
Speaking of Harvey’s contributions to the culinary world, we were talking in the chat room after last week’s podcast and everyone agreed that he has summed up the coming economy very well with the technology he has been predicting: the sandwich printer.
Quantum Computing Leap Forward: Altering a Lone Electron Without Disturbing Its Neighbors
This is huge because the qbits that drive this particular design of quantum computer are electrons. Isolating individual electrons gets us much closer to finding out if it will work.
In honor of the prognosticating rodent, Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon give their own thoughts on when Spring will arrive, along with other upcoming positive developments.
Click “Continue Reading” for the show notes:
Always a valuable thing to do…
Via Alex Tabarrok.
Stephen is still recovering from a major case of the crud — get well soon, buddy! — and I am more than usually busy with the day job right now, as evidenced by the light blogging the last couple of weeks. So no FastForward Radio tonight but we plan to be back up and running next Tuesday.
How does the future happen? How do we get one future vs. a different future? Phil Bowermaster and guest co-host Michael Darling discuss.
Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon welcome author (The Universe: Solved!) and futurist Jim Elvidge back to FastForward Radio. Just how real is the real world, anyway?
The Universe: Solved!, covers a lot of scientific and philosophical ground, including the idea that we live in a computer simulation. If so, are there Easter Eggs in the cosmos?
About Our Guest:
Elvidge is a Cornell-educated entrepreneur and inventor who holds four patents in digital signal processing. His love of music inspired him to develop one of the first PC-based digital music samplers and to co-found RadioAMP, which was the first private-label online streaming radio company. In recent years he has turned his attention to the ultimate question of existence and, drawing on a broad and eclectic base of knowledge and interests, has come up with a unique explanation for…pretty much everything.
Check this out. The disk isn’t big enough to contain that little, dull picture of it.
Back in the day, a file that size was something of an extravagance — too big to fit on a floppy! Now how many hundreds, thousand of files this size do we all have?
A more important question — how long before the principles that have made us all rich in storage of image files can be applied to material goods? Or is it happening already?