the two faces of the moon

More here!  (Worth reading the whole thing)

manholes

It seems like in Japanese culture everything that's done, is done well.  Even something very everyday like manhole covers.  Life would just be better if we had something like this.

Busting Dams

Maybe you won't even understand this but i thought it was really neat when i found it. There is this lake near a road, called Skilak Lake that occasionally releases a jökulhlaup or whatever they call those sudden glacial floods. When it floods they weather service issues a warning because the lake feeds into a very popular river with a bunch of houses and boaters on it.

I always wondered where the floods came from and i found this weird area on google earth. So in this picture (you might want to download it so it's bigger)  the rocky mountain on the lower left side of the picture is a Nunatek (a mountain completely surrounded by ice). On the right side you see two completely different tounges of ice slam into each other head on. Two lines in the middle make a cross and concentric rings of crevaces emanate outward away from the cross. This is a big bulge in the ice. Above it you can see a lake.

What is interesting is that the main Skilak glacier is on the far left and continues flowing in that direction for miles downhill. The lake and where the the two glaciers meet is in a a natural depression where three valleys meet. I don't know why there would be a depression in that spot but if there was no ice the whole area would be a big lake.

So what happens is that the depression fills with water until the water makes the ice float, which is that bulge you see. Then the water can get all the way under the ice, which you can see on the right edge of the Nunatek. At some point it must fill up and float enough of the glacier that it ruptures some subsurface barrier and then it all violently escapes downhill and out the mouth of the glacier, killing people who may be eating lunch on a rock.

vector racer

This vector racer game is very simple and fun.  I remember playing something similar with my uncle on the beach in Florida when I was a little kid!

they didn't seem terribly concerned about bears on the rafting trip...

You may have noticed I haven't been posting...The lack of response to this made me think no one is paying attention.  This stuff takes some work and isn't worth doing without an audience!

All Askew In the Heavens

It's crazy to think that when Einstein lived newspapers were so primitive. To this day media seems to be in a different age than science.

Tractor

Man, this is incredibly cool.  Imagine we could do something similar with spacetime itself---then we really would have Star Trek-style tractor beams!  Oh, and also this could have real-world applications as is.

If I had time I would like to understand what's different about the physics of water surface waves vs. "body waves" like light waves or sound waves that travel through the whole body rather than just the surface.

Apparently there has been other academic research on tractor-type beams.

more authors?

Do y'all think I should invite some more authors for the blog?  I can think of several people that might have some interesting stuff to add...Please reply in the comments.  We can discuss specific suggestions offline.

If there aren't responses I'm going to assume no one is still reading

simple and cool

More here.