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POPSCould Jupiter wreck the solar system?
"So what's the likelihood Mercury could crash into the Earth? If it did, the asteroid that most likely wiped out the dinosaurs will seem like a drop in the ocean compared with a planet 4880 km in diameter slamming into us. There will be very little left after this wrecking ball impact. But here's the kicker: There is only a 1% chance that these gravitational instabilities of the inner Solar System are likely to cause any kind of chaos before the Sun turns into a Red Giant and swallows Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars in 7 billion years time. So, no need to look out for death-wish Mercury quite yet… there's a very low chance that any of this will happen. But some good news for Mars; the researchers have also found that if the chaos does ensue, the Red Planet may be flung out of the Solar System, possibly escaping our expanding Sun. So, let's get those Mars colonies started! Well, within the next few billions of years anyhow…" Good stuff for the next science-fiction movie :-)
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POPSMysterious people who appeared in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, UK, in the 12th century. The children were brother and sister and they had green colored skin. Their appearance was normal in all other areas. They spoke an unrecognized language and refused to eat anything other than pitch from bean pods. Eventually their skin lost its green color. When they learned English they explained that they were from the ‘Land of St Martin’ which was a dark place because the sun never rose far above the horizon. They claimed that they were tending their father’s herd and followed a river of light when they heard the sounds of bells - finding themselves in Woolpit.Some of the more unusual theories proposed for the origin of the children are that they were Hollow Earth children, parallel dimension children, or Extraterrestrial children.
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POPS7 Writing Habits of Amazing Writers This extremely prolific writer has won numerous awards, including the National Book Award. She writes in longhand, and while she doesn’t have a formal schedule, she says she prefers to write in the morning, before breakfast . She’s a creative writing professor, and on the days she teaches, she says she writes for an hour or 45 minutes before leaving for her first class. On other days, when the writing is going well, she can work for hours without a break — and has breakfast at 2 or 3 in the afternoon!
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POPSAwesome Innovations from the Underdeveloped Male Mind Hesh says that “the curtain may contain appropriately placed openings to allow for communication by or to the user”, which will allow for interaction like this: Man without Portable Rain Covering: “Dude, that’s really a sweet little device you’ve got there.” Man wearing Portable Rain Covering: “Thanks. I’ve had it for about a month now and I …..” Man without Portable Rain Covering: “Dude, that was sarcasm.”
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POPSThe Last Victorian Leviathan Steam Ship Alas, the end of the Eastern came with more of a whimper than bang. After suffering far too many accidents, and far too many money troubles, the Eastern passed from one hand to another until eventually the largest ship in the Victorian world came to a humiliating end, first as a floating billboard in Liverpool and then finally broken up and sold as scrap. - It took two full years just to dismantle this ship (gives you an idea how big it was). - A mysterious dead body was found inside the special double hull (one can only imagine the desperate story of that stowaway...) At least Brunel didn't see the sad and pathetic end to his magnificent Great Eastern, though he didn't live to see its majesty either. Brunel died only four days after the great ship's first sea trial.
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POPSAribeth Aribeth appeared on CM the other day. Hiya, Aribeth!
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POPSRobin Hanson on the "Great Filter" there is a "Great Filter" along the path between simple dead stuff and explosive life. The vast vast majority of stuff that starts along this path never makes it. In fact, so far nothing among the billion trillion stars in our whole past universe has made it all the way along this path.... ne or more of these steps is much more improbable than it otherwise looks. If it is one of our past steps, such as the development of single-cell life, then we shouldn't expect to see such independently evolved life anywhere within billions of light years from us. But if it is a step between here and a choice to explode that is very improbable, we should fear for our future.... Optimism (as defined here) regarding our future is directly pitted against optimism regarding the ease of previous evolutionary steps. To the extent those successes were easy, our future failure to explode is almost certain...
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POPSAnimal senses humans don't have You might think you're smart, but none of your senses rival the keenest abilities in the animal world. Animals see in the dark, sniff prey miles away, and detect electrical output from muscle twitches in hidden meals. Read on, so you don't become one of those meals.<<
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POPS6 Micronations You Can Join Would be unfair not to point to some close to mine, here are the links: Farthingdown http://clipmarks.com/tags/micronations/ http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sealand&oldid=107619578 alnocu http://clipmarks.com/tags/micronations/ http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/32D78F32-A044-48E6-BDB0-C35894D311B3/ Aribeth http://weburbanist.com/2008/03/09/5-floating-utopia-and-ocean-city-projects-from-seafaring-condos-to-to-oceanic-micronations/ http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/8DE7616D-D1A4-4741-A240-79F833A33F95/
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POPSYou walk wrong “It took 4 million years to develop our unique human foot and our consequent distinctive form of gait, a remarkable feat of bioengineering. Yet, in only a few thousand years, and with one carelessly designed instrument, our shoes, we have warped the pure anatomical form of human gait, obstructing its engineering efficiency, afflicting it with strains and stresses and denying it its natural grace of form and ease of movement head to foot.”
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POPSYou Bet Your Tintype, Buckaroo Mr. Kendrick belongs to a growing group of commercial and art photographers who have retreated in recent years from the ease and exactitude of the digital age and taken up the difficult, ethereal techniques of early photography, including the ambrotype (in which a unique image is created on a glass plate), daguerreotype (on polished silver) and tintype (usually on tin-plated iron ). The pictures — made by exposing and developing the metal plates after they have been coated with a light-sensitive solution of silver nitrate — are a kind of ideal meeting of subject and style. Mr. Kendrick, like most cowboys, is much happier when doing things the hard way.“Making these kinds of pictures, you don’t need the mental skills that you have to have a Ph.D. for,” he said. “It’s more like learning to be a carpenter. It’s work and it’s satisfying. What you get is unique, not mass-produced. You can’t repeat the process. So it’s the antithesis of digital.”
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POPSMen aren't all from Mars Taken together, the findings provide a much more nuanced picture of men's sexuality than is promoted by men's magazines, Janssen pointed out. "There's huge variability among men in how easily they're turned on or turned off, how easily they experience sexual desire and arousal," he explained. "The differences among men and the differences among women are much larger than the average difference between the sexes in almost anything sexual."In fact, the researcher added, as many as 30 percent of women may be more easily sexually aroused than most men. "This study's challenging the idea that men are simple," he said.
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POPSFloating Utopia and Ocean City Projects So where did this all start? As with many present utopian ideals and building strategies a surprising number of philosophical ideas, building strategies and ecological approaches embodied in the aforementioned floating utopian concepts date back to the famous environmentalist, scientist, designer, philosopher and visionary Buckminster Fuller. In the 1960s he developed a design for something known as Triton City which was to be a floating place of residence for up to 5,000 inhabitants and designed to be resistant to tsunamis and other natural forces that floating cities might encounter on the water. Somewhat amazingly, these designs were approved by the Navy as well as the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the United States. In fact, Baltimore even planned at one point to construct one of these and install it in Chesapeake Bay until governments changed and plans fell through.
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POPSAnaïs Nin From being a cult figure of the early feminist movement, Anais later rose to international prominence with her writing. She is best known for her diaries but also produced a number of novels and a prose poem in surrealistic style as well as wonderful erotic short stories, published posthumously. Characterized by the use of powerful and, at times, disquieting imagery, her work reveals great sensitivity and perception. In 1973 she received an honorary doctorate from Philadelphia College of Art. She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974.<<
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POPSBrain 'imaging' in the Renaissance So were these master artists of the Renaissance trying to hide images of anatomically correct brains in their religious work? Why would they do it? Were they trying to put science into religion without getting caught? Or is this just one big coincidence? Maybe the four scientists that wrote the article need to take a break from the neurosciences. What do you think?<<
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POPSSpam reaches 30 "It was the first really bad thing that people started doing on the internet, in terms of letting the small town rules break down and start abusing people."
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POPSLife on the edge That throws up a tricky problem for engineers sending space craft to explore these alien worlds. What if the craft were to carry its own cargo of Earth microbes which set up home there?One major problem for any accidental interplanetary microbe would be how to survive the punishing radiation bombardment in space. Most would be rapidly frazzled en route. Most, but not all. Deinococcus radiodurans, nicknamed "Conan the Bacterium", is listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the "world's toughest bacterium". By rapidly replacing its DNA, it can survive cold, dehydration, vacuum, acid and a hefty radiation dose. Its Latin name means "terrifying berry that withstands radiation".
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POPSNaturmobil: Cart runs on "horse power" "My friends and relatives thought of me as a somewhat eccentric half-mad inventor attempting the impossible," said Mirhejazi who has brought his invention to Dubai. Nevertheless, one friend was prepared to rustle up enough cash to put the project under starter’s orders. "It took me 26 months to build the vehicle in my workshop in Tehran. I got it patented by a special department in Iran after professors at universities there attested that it was a scientific invention."
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POPSThe man who invented Mars It is Lowell's vision of Mars that has enthralled and inspired earthlings ever since.In 1895, Lowell published a book about what he believed he saw.He became famous and immensely popular.Lowell was born at 131 Tremont Street in Boston on March 13,1855,into a family at the pinnacle of what passed for American aristocracy. The appearance of Lowell's book about Mars in 1895 came at a time of canal-building on earth. The Suez had recently been constructed; the Panama was in the works. For both Lowell and his adoring public, the prospect of canals on a neighboring planet was too captivating to dismiss. He published his second book about the Red Planet, Mars and Its Canals, in 1906.In 1908, he published his third and final book on the planet, Mars as the Abode of Life. Back at his observatory on Mars Hill, Lowell renewed his attention to another matter: the possibility of a ninth planet beyond Neptune, which he called "Planet X."
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POPSsmart kids vs popular kids Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better.But I think the main reason is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy. It's important for nerds to realize that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.<< Interesting read.Written by someone who was considered to be a "nerd" at school.
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POPSCreative ways to recycle ordinary objects Recycling doesn’t have to be limited to helping the environment: it can also be a challenge and opportunity to ingenious designers who work with materials most people would consider waste to create amazing things. Some of the above designs serve multiple purposes: illustrating the material possibilities of what most would consider trash while also maximizing the aesthetic potential of what would otherwise be considered waste objects. Clothes become rugs, airline trolleys become furniture, cardboard becomes bridges and sewage turns into building blocks!
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POPSCity road networks grow like biological systems "Beyond the economic, demographic and geographic "forces" that shape a town, there are a myriad of small "accidents" that contribute",says Marc Barthélemy of the French Atomic Energy Commission in Bruyères-le-Châtel."Although these are unpredictable, they can be understood in terms of statistics and simple modelling." The researchers will now study how road networks developed over time in old cities, such as London and Paris. They hope to unearth other possible universal features that might be present to refine their model.
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