Night at Echo Lake, New Hampshire - fall foliage and the night sky.

 

Punch Bowl Falls in Oregon.

 

Reykjavik, Iceland.

 

A day at the office in Detroit, 1902.

 

30sec exposure of downtown San Diego, CA.

 

Sigale, Alpes-Maritimes, France.

 

An aurora australis and Milky Way over Lake Ellesmere, Canterbury, New Zealand.

 

Autumnal Slide. Ontario, Canada.

 

Cappadocia, Turkey.

 

Maroon Bells in Colorado.

 

Starry shack, south east Queensland, Australia.

 

Glacier National Park, Montana.

 

Horseshoe Bend, AZ.

 

Stradbroke Island, Queenseland, Australia.

 

Philly skyline from Drexel Park

 

Lake Tahoe Sunset.

 

Chapel at Preston Peak, South East Queensland, Australia.

 

So wrong...

Posted with the caption:  " Boris Blank with the live synth rig now installed at KraftwerkBerlin. About to sound-check through an earth-shaking 80KW surround-sound PA system. Lordy. "

I thought the caption went with this picture and was, like, "Okay, I guess?"

 

A rapid lithium battery induced disassembly incident at NASA. Oops.

That's what happens when you release all the magic smoke at once, kids.

Boo!

 

My own variant of this meme.

 

She's wearing a Danzig jacket.

 

Hideo Kojima at Valve offices.

 

Motala Ström, Sweden.

 

Wallance, Idaho.

 

Village in Austria.

 

This is the world's first picture of the surface of a comet, taken today by the Rosetta space probe shortly before crash-landing into Comet 67P.

 

8PM in Calabasas.

 

Matthes Crest, Yosemite.

 

9 minute exposure in Romania.

 

*fap* *fap* *fap*

 

sunset in Fort McDowell, AZ.

 

Tamolitch Falls, Oregon.

 

Teacup - Thunder Cove, Prince Edward Island.

 

Google autocomplete- "When will [country] ...?"

 

Fall on Boulder Creek, Boulder, CO.

 

Buttermilk falls Ithaca, NY.

 

Between Billing and Baragaram, India.

 

Moonlit Mt. Hood in Oregon.

 

Coast of Northern England. Dunstanburgh Castle.

 

Plus *or minus* 20km??

They're graphic artists not scientists

The funny thing is, they didn't even mean "standard deviation of 20 km", they meant "approximately 20km". 

Yeah - I know what they meant. But if you knew nothing about a subject (which they clearly did not) you'd get someone who knew to check it; well I certainly would. And if they meant approximately, then either write the word, or an abbreviation like approx. Then there is no ambiguity.

But then again, I'm just your regular pedantic asshole 

11 hours ago, Craig Sawyers said:

Yeah - I know what they meant. ...if they meant approximately, then either write the word, or an abbreviation like approx.

Well I didn't.  I had to look up neutron star and spot that it's diameter is approx. 30km.  I thought they just left off the primary measurement.  And/or expected us to just figure out what that was based on the math that was previously presented (because "intuitively obvious"...not).

And:  exactly.

2 hours ago, Craig Sawyers said:

But then again, I'm just your regular pedantic asshole 

Nonsense!  I actually think you're highly IRREGULAR!  

 

Edited November 1, 20169 yr by Wmcmanus

 

That same woman seems to have done a whole lot of you tube vids.

5 hours ago, Dusty Chalk said:

Well I didn't.  I had to look up neutron star and spot that it's diameter is approx. 30km. 

Yeah - they are weird objects. A star has to be greater than about 8 solar masses to gravitationally collapse into a neutron star at the end of its life. Much more than ~30 solar masses and you get a black hole rather than a neutron star. Both these exotic objects are supernova remnants. When a large star runs out of fuel, it collapses bewilderingly quickly - a few seconds - producing a huge amount of exceptionally hot material (mainly as a result of mechanical bounce - first the core collapses, then the outer shells of the star go inwards at about a quarter the speed of light, hits the collapsed core, bounces, and comes out again very hot indeed).

Also, since a star spins (pretty slowly), as it collapses the spin speeds up, like a figure skater spinning on the ice can speed up, due to conservation of angular momentum. A neutron star can spin anywhere from once every few seconds up to about 1kHz, and emit a beam of radiation along its spin axis at the rotation speed. That was discovered in 1967 by a then research student called Jocelyn Bell in Cambridge UK using the radio telescope there. Initially tongue-in-cheek christened LGM for Little Green Men, she later figured out could be a spinning neutron star - now known as a pulsar. Her research supervisor Anthony Hewish won the Nobel prize for her work, and she got diddly squat.

The fate of our star is different - since it is below something called the Chandrasekhar limit for formation of a white dwarf (>~1.44 solar masses; he figured that out aged 19, back in 1930) it will progressively bloat and cool when it runs out of fuel, swallowing up all the planets to earth and beyond, and becomes a red giant. Lucky for us not for quite a while yet, even though our sun destroys 5 million tons of material every second in nuclear fusion. To put that into context, a 10MT thermonuclear bomb destroys 0.05kg.

 

Can I ever forgive you for that vid - I just expelled coffee out my nose.