A Big Ole F You From Space

Posted on November 23, 2010 by Joel

I’ve slowly been working through the archives of the Astronomy Picture of the Day and recently found a rather humorous image of a breakaway section of the Keyhole Nebula (a subsection of the Carina Nebula). This image was taken by the Hubble Telescope in 1999 and spans nearly 2 lightyears (about 11 trillion miles). The gas cloud shown is aptly nicknamed “God’s Birdie” because it is slowly being destroyed by the sheer intensity of light from nearby stars. In a few million years it will cease to exist; a fate similar to being munched on by a Sarlaac.

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Kryptos Clue Announced!

Posted on November 22, 2010 by Joel

Berlin. That was the clue released in the New York Times this past Saturday by sculptor, Jim Sanborn. Berlin is depicted by the letters NYPVTT and comprises the 64th through 69th letters of the remaining 97 unsolved letters in Sanborn’s famous piece, Kryptos, which was installed outside the CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia in 1990.

The three solved pieces of Kryptos are:

K1:

BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION

K2:

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Open Source Drivers for the Xbox Kinect

Posted on November 20, 2010 by Joel

I’m pretty sure everyone’s heard of Microsoft’s recently released Xbox Kinect. What most people may not know is that on November 4th, Adafruit Industries offered a bounty for the first person to prove their ability to create open source drivers for the Kinect. Surprisingly enough it only took 6 days before Adafruit announced they had a winner, Hector, who released drivers for Linux utilizing OpenGL. If you’d like an incredibly in depth view at how the drivers were created or just want to learn how to reverse engineer a usb, take a gander at Lady Ada’s DIY Kinect Hacking Article. Then head over to the Open Kinect wiki for even more information to keep you going. Now I’m sure some of you were wondering what Microsoft was thinking during all of this.

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Ever wonder what happens in a microwave?

Posted on November 19, 2010 by Joel

When the microwave oven was released in the 1950s, it revolutionized the cooking world. Microwaves work by sending microwave radiation through the food. Various elements in the food (mainly water and fat) absorb this radiation causing their molecules to constantly move around to realign themselves. This process is known as dieletric heating. The only issue with this is that different types of molecules move at different rates causing foods to heat at varying rates.

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In which Google writes a book to teach about the Internet

Posted on November 19, 2010 by Joel

We live in a world where it’s pretty difficult to do anything without interacting with the internet. The only problem with this is that the vast majority of people either don’t know how it works or are mistaken about the knowledge they do have. Google, as the vast purveyor of knowledge they are, has decided to fix this by releasing a book entitled 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web. Running 61 pages and featuring illustrations by Christoph Niemann, the book covers topics including TCP/IP, HTML, CSS, javascript, browser cookies, malware, IP addresses and DNS.

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