June 21, 2015
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown
Art by Sumashi
One of The Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes takes a break from the heat to point us to a piece by Michael Flynn, who gives an interesting analysis of the scientific process by which geocentricism was discarded. It bears reading in full because one important fact, often overlooked is that we only have 20/20 hindsight going backwards. Things which seem blindingly obvious in retrospect were not nearly so at the time.
UPDATE: an excerpt:
Before you laugh at your ancestors, TOF invites you to prove that the earth is, contrary to your senses, in wild and careening double motion: spinning like a top and whipping around the sun without (somehow) leaving the Moon and Air behind, and without everyone stumbling around like dunkards. You are not allowed to appeal to authority or to the success of NASA, or suchlike things. You've got eyeballs and armillaries, and that's pretty much it. Go. TOF will wait here
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12:09 AM
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June 09, 2015
Space Stuff
One of the Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes brings us up to date on planetoid summer!
'Science Babe' by Moriyama Yuuki
With a probe in orbit around Ceres and another rapidly approaching Pluto, this summer promises to teach us a lot about Dwarf Planets (or planetoids, which just sounds better to those of us at Brickmuppet Blog).
First off, regarding Ceres, NASA has put together this retouched animation of the innermost Dwarf Planet.
I had NO idea hard vacuum sounded like that!
Ceres has the potential to be quite important in the future, since it is hypothesized to have more fresh water than the Earth. (This assumes that the two bright spots are not exhaust vents of course.)
MUCH farther afield. Pluto's system is going to be visited by New Horizons in July when that probe does a fairly precarious flyby. In the process communications will be cut and hopefully resumed so it can beam the info back at 1 KBps. In the meantime thanks to Hubble, some neat things have been discovered about Pluto, which is actually a dual planetoid system with its moon Charon.
The other moons in the system are really weird! They're elongated and rotate chaotically. They're also vastly different colors.
This video is an interesting talk by DR. Mark Shoalwater on, amongst that and many other fascinating things, how his team discovered the "new" moons Styx and Kerberos.
Its an unusual story of bucking the bureaucracy, as his proposal was not just rejected, it was rejected with prejudice.
Father afield still, in the vanishingly unlikely event this is not a mistake, it is significant!
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06:43 PM
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