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[Via Jon U.]

The annual American Geophysical Union conference is in town this week and I’ve been fielding a bunch of questions about the strange creatures (known as earth scientists) that are inhabiting downtown San Francisco.

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but Uncyclopedia nails the description of a geologist.

Geologists are ‘scientists’ with unnatural obsessions with beer and rocks. Often too intelligent to do monotonous sciences like biology, chemistry, or physics, geologists devote their time to mud-worrying, volcano poking, fault finding, bouldering, dust-collecting, and high-risk colouring. One of the main difficulties in communicating with geologists is their belief that a million years is a short amount of time and their heads are harder than rocks. Consequently, such abstract concepts as “Tuesday Morning” and Lunchtime are completely beyond their comprehension.

The section on alcohol consumption is pretty amusing (and somewhat apt) as well.

If you ever encounter a geologist who is sober after 6pm, this person is an imposter: possibly an alien; probably a geophysicist or engineer, marine geographer or hydrologist etc. Alcoholism is an acceptable, even socially beneficial, disease for an active geologist.

The whole article is a fun read though, especially if you are or know any geologists.

This stuff is so trippy to think about.

Now Stephen Feeney at University College London and a few pals say they’ve found tentative evidence of this bruising in the form of circular patterns in cosmic microwave background. In fact, they’ve found four bruises, implying that our universe must have smashed into other bubbles at least four times in the past.

Again, this is an extraordinary result: the first evidence of universes beyond our own.

So, what to make of these discoveries. First, these effects could easily be a trick of the eye. As Feeney and co acknowledge: “it is rather easy to fifind all sorts of statistically unlikely properties in a large dataset like the CMB.” That’s for sure!

Crazy!

[Via Kottke]

Apparently, I’m on a physics kick as of late.

Artist unknown

[Via Science Punk]

This is a pretty great video, featuring a high speed camera on a train, looking at a passenger platform as it passes by. More info here.

It could be one of the coolest visual examples of special relativity that I’ve seen!

[Via Kottke]

April 11, 1954

April 11, 1954 was the most uneventful and boring day of the 20th century. Every day something of significance occurs, but nothing remarkable had happened on the said day in 1954, according to experts who inserted over 300 million important events of the century into a computer search programme to calculate.

This is kind of amazing. I’d love to see this parsed based on specific dates — for example, what was the most boring day (according to this algorithm) during my life? I’m sure there are a few dates in high school or college that come to mind.

[Via Daily Dish]

NPR’s science and culture blog has an interesting post up about why Pluto isn’t a planet and we should get over it. It’s something that I’ve been arguing about for a long time.

There are an estimated 70,000 KPOs (Kuiper Belt Objects) out there larger than 100 meters. More importantly, at least 3 KPOs are large enough for gravity to work its symmetric magic and pull rock and ice into a sphere. These are the newest class of solar system’s inhabitants the Dwarf Planets: Huamea, Makemake and, yes, Pluto.

With the discovery of the KPOs and, in particular, the KPO Dwarf Planets, Pluto lost any claim to being special. It was just one cinder-block in a field of cinder-blocks left over from building our solar system. It wasn’t even the biggest cinder block. In 2005 the dwarf planet Eris was found orbiting the Sun at distances beyond the Kuiper Belt in yet another new region of the solar system that astronomers call the Scattered Disk.

Face it, Pluto isn’t special.

[via Daily Dish]

Incredible video of a jökulhlaup (volcanic induced flood by melting of a glacier) from the eruption beneath the Eyjafjallajökull glacier in Iceland.

[Via Brian Romans]

Hah! Apparently, the American Museum of Natural History gets a lot of unhappy letters from children, unhappy that Pluto is no longer considered a planet.

As my friend Chris Town pointed out, Eris is actually larger than Pluto. If people are adamant that Pluto is a planet, they should be fighting even more for Eris to be included.

Interestingly enough, the IAU has had a definition for what should be considered a planet that has been used since 2006:

The definition of “planet” set in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) states that in the Solar System a planet is a celestial body that:

1. is in orbit around the Sun,
2. has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape), and
3. has “cleared the neighborhood” around its orbit.

[Via Kottke]

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Oh man, a physics student at UC Davis has proposed that the number 10²⁷ carry the prefix of “hella-“. As in a hellawatt, a hellagram, or a hellameter.

From the Urban Dictionary:

Hella

Originated from the streets of San Francisco in the Hunters Point neighborhood. It is commonly used in place of “really” or “very” when describing something.

The Fillmore is hella better than the Mission.

It’s amusing, but as someone who’s always found this distinctly Northern Californian word annoying, I can’t help but shake my head.

Regardless, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, you can join the group on Facebook.

(Via Cosmic Variance.)