mostly posting this because it seems really ridiculous to me that something like this could be possible. it’s almost like why bother being an artist anymore – or at least a photographic one? i mean at the end of the road this video seems to be traveling down, you could imagine taking a photo and then using the “make good” tool to turn it into a classically balanced or artistic photograph. i’ve never been one to balk or fear any brave-new-world shit, so it’s not that i think this is bad. it just sort of gives you pause when you get a glimpse of something that’s basically commercially available when 30 seconds prior you would have snorted at even the possibility of something like that being created. any other thoughts?

shamelessly ripped from corey lewis’ livejournal:

not a bad song but is it just me or does autotuned carl sagan sound just like kermit the frog?

you can also listen to a pretty deep tribute to sagan by tarentel: “for carl sagan.”

in typical fashion, here i am again to offer up some stupid, silly fluff video content to divert attention from the actually worthwhile posts (the great Drago/Hearne interview and the subsequent discussion, in this case).

Unfortunately it now seems to have mostly faded from the Rochester sky, but early this morning on my way to work I managed to snap a picture of a nice 22-degree halo. Very similar to the rainbow effect, the light from the sun passes through ice crystals in the atmosphere and are deviated by some minimum amount that varies slightly with wavelength, causing a prism effect where the colors separate. The minimum deviation angle is 22 degrees for red light in ice, which is why the halo begins to appear at an angular separation of 22 degrees from the sun (which is being blocked by my hand in the image to prevent it from saturating the camera).

Supposedly the 22 degree halo is orders of magnitude more commonplace than the rainbow, but is much less commonly observed since it occurs in a part of the sky we are conditioned since birth to avoid looking at.

Black Mountain – Tyrants.

You can hear the full song via NPR song of the day here.

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I was recently going through some old bookmarks and happened upon this site. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was lucky enough to have one of The Yes Men (Igor Vamos AKA Mike Bonanno) as a professor during my all too brief stint at RPI. I only hope I’m ever as brilliant…

this has been making the rounds today, but there’s a preprint up on arxiv where a physics ph.d. turned surfer/snowboarder has formulated a new unified theory using lie algebras. i can’t really claim to understand it, i’ll leave that to mark. but just noting yet another application of lie groups that can be added to “Lie Groups, Lie Algebras, and Some of Their Applications.”

full telegraph uk article here.

A cool article in Physics Today talking about some scientists at UCSD getting involved in knot theory and applying it to research in DNA-enzyme interactions. Basically they took a bunch of pieces of string and shook them around in a box and found they formed several different simple and complex knots and analyzed them using some computer software and the Jones polynomial.

full PNAS article here.