Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Yikes!

Via reader Jim M.:


Taken in Alaska.  That whale is a krill feeder, not a killer whale, but still...

Strangeness on Mercury...

The MESSENGER spacecraft has been orbiting Mercury, returning wonderful science data about this little-understood member of our solar system.  Early on the science team spotted strange little “hollows” in numerous places all over the planet's surface.  These hollows appear to indicate relatively recent geologic activity, something nobody really expected.  Their appearances is certainly odd: brightly colored (often bluish), and associated with structures that look a bit like Swiss cheese.  As you might imagine, the science team is working hard to understand exactly what these things might be.  Meanwhile, we can enjoy them for their visual interest (and oddity)...

Four Moons...

The image at right shows four moons of Saturn in a single frame.  It was, of course, taken by the Cassini spacecraft, still collecting bucketloads of science data way out there in the frigid Saturnian system.  This image comes to us courtesy of APOD.  As always, click to enlarge...

User Interfaces...

The battle between Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and Command Line Interfaces (CLIs) rages on.  Usually these verbal battles are more like a religious argument than anything else.  Vivek Haldar (a Google developer) tries a different approach, and makes several interesting observations along the way...

Two Things at Once...

Sometimes I just don't know what to say...


This is definitely one of those times...