schwarzschild radius

Sometime early this year, lensing the entire Earth as the aperture for the telescopic array and enlisting the help of dozens of observatories, a project called Event Horizon will peer across twenty-five thousand light years into the centre of the Milky Way to catch a glimpse of the super massive black hole—Sagittarius A*, or at least it the gas and dust heated to millions of degrees falling into it.
Since famously and captivatingly not even light can escape the singularity, only indirect observation is possible and researchers are reaching across time and space to find something invisible and containing the mass of a billion stars but compacted into an area much less than an astronomical unit—that is, the Earth’s distance from the Sun. These run-away reactive structures are thought to anchor all sizable galaxies and the experiment has an extensive list of stated objectives, including verifying General Relativity but perhaps first demonstrating that black holes are not some scientific figment.

comet and cupid

NASA intends to make good on a 2014 proposal and launch a pair of missions within the six years to two very exotic locations.
One destination is the massive metallic asteroid 16 Psyche (named for the mythological tale of Cupid and Psyche, which astronomers believe to be the nickel-iron core of a proto-planet that was destroyed in the early stages of the formation of the Solar System. The other mission, Lucy—named after the hominid female discovered in Africa and recognised as the missing-link (herself named after “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”), will explore the so called Trojan asteroids, pulled away from the main belt by Jupiter’s gravity. While not much is not known about the nature of the Trojans, researchers believe that they represent the fossil remnants of planet formation. Aside from the pure exploratory value, the projects also will look at the feasibility of conducting mining operations, whose wealth make the notion of scarcity seem ridiculous.

anisotrophy or 45-rpm

I can vaguely recall how about five years ago it was the done thing to suggest that the Universe might be rotating—about what axis and relative to what being unanswerable questions—although I was never sure to what ends exactly, what individuals hoped to accomplish by sticking a reference point on the Cosmos.
Perhaps it was to preserve the symmetry of rotation from atoms to planets and galaxies or perhaps it was sort of to explain the Doppler effect—I could never quite tell though it always struck me as intriguing if not impossible to test, and reminded me of the story in the Middle Earth’s legendarium how it went in the Third Age from a flat planet to a globe so the Undying Lands would become inaccessible to mortals. Now revisiting the question, we find that astrophysicists can reasonably infer that the Universe is indeed directionless, uniform (from a sufficiently broad perspective) and stationary thanks to a recent battery of tests and observations that preserves our present understanding of cosmology, but it makes me wonder if we postulated a spinning Universe what might be different and supercilious. Would we need dark matter and dark energy (for which there’s little in the way of a satisfactory explanation) if the ability to hold it all together could be accounted for by angular momentum—that is, the Universe keeping itself balanced, like a ice-skater spinning and bringing her arms inward to twirl faster, or like a phonographic record on a turntable whose edge is sweeping out greater spaces at a faster rate than at its centre? Would the background of spacetime be something else entirely if not immobile?

a question of scale

Internet caretaker Messy Nessy Chic admittedly comes across more historical images worth saving whilst making the rounds but it’s sometimes a challenge to associate them to an appropriate article. To clear out some of that backlog, she shares a gallery of images that revolve around the theme of magnitude that illustrate the larger than life. By turns haunting and hopeful, these vintage photographs are well-worth the look and will linger in the form of reflection that challenges one’s perspective.

cibo, gente, e spasso

Despite vocal protests by residents and officials—though cosmetically, probably not raising much ire as other fast-food franchises and tourist-tat already saturate the corridors radiating out from the tiny nation-state, another outlet of a much maligned nutritional hegemony-monger opened for business near the Holy See and for the first time, occupying real estate owned (but without being accorded extra-territorial status) by the Vatican.
We’ve been known to patronise this establishment in the past but I think it’s really too much to suffer the Golden Arches within sight of Saint Peter’s—or anywhere else not keeping with character of its host neighbourhood, and resolve to be a little bit more finicky going forward. No matter how architecturally sensitive or neutral the façade might be made, it’s hard to imagine fitting, deserving locales other than newer subdivisions or buried within the catacombs of an airport or shopping centre, not even considering how such fare assaults local culinary tradition. It seems a little disgraceful and one would think that the property-owner would have more say about its tenants and isn’t so cash-strapped as to have no choice in the matter. What do you think? Just like quarters and communities, there’s no group so culturally impoverished that there’s no cooking heritage to displace.

shazbot or new beginnings

In this season of uncertainties and resolve screwed to the sticking place, Jason Kottke shares a few encouraging lines, attributed to novelist F Scott Fitzgerald.

For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.

It’s inspiring but wholly the product of a screenwriter who worked on the film adaptation of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (which Fitzgerald originally authored as a short-story) and reminds me of the most famous unquote by Abraham Lincoln, propelled to popularity and probably imprinted on an entire generation similarly by a film reference and a marketing campaign.

7x7

condominium: uninhabited islet switches sovereignty on a semi-annual basis

bright lights, big city: breath-taking nocturnal aerial photography from Vincent LaForet

bless this mess: encouraging, compassionate steps to take for better house-keeping

mid-west world: a small Iowa town is a draw for Chinese tourists wanting to experience the authentic American bread-basket, via the always brilliant Super Punch

cosmogram: an assortment of some of NASA’s best photographs of the past year, via the forever marvellous Nag on the Lake

brooding: long incubation periods may have contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs

bodensee: the international borders of Lake Constance mean different things to each nation that shares it

bellwether and bookworm

Boing Boing features the story of a couple of librarians who conspire to fabricate patrons in order to thwart an automated book-culling algorithm that has been deployed to reduce clutter and optimise circulation.
To save important but perhaps low circulating titles from the robot biblioclasm, the pair invented an avid reader to check out the threatened books but were eventually caught and punished for their transgression—not restricted to countermanding the computer but also for the fraudulent act of creating a fake registrant on the public-record and thus opening the floodgates of “check-out fraud” and trust in civic institutions. What do you think?  With finite space and withering resources, space and selection do of course come at a premium and weeding is a sometimes regrettable course of action, but this case really illustrates the limits of unbiased, objective automation foisted upon very human activities—how it can fall prey to the same decision-trees that fell human logic and invites itself to be gamed, employing mechanical Turks, like the article suggests, as a work-around for that which is above our administrative-rights to change.