Sunday Things - miscellaneous edition
posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday July 8 2012
First, we celebrate CERN's discovery of the Higgs boson and their gloriously inappropriate use of Comic Sans! At last, the world of physics has cast aside the dreadfully tedious Computer Modern and replaced it with the idiot's font of choice.
RP FLIP - FLoating Instrument Platform - ludicrous research vessel which upends itself, turning from a long and skinny ship to a hugely stable vertical platform. Extra: Wikipedia article, video.
Stanley Kubrick was a photographer - seriously, watch his films as photography. Visually they make perfect sense. He's undoubtedly spinning in his grave at the use of this font, too.
Exposure Render - extremely fancy GPU-powered renderer, available for download - complete with CT scans for maximum offal-exploration. Needs a beast of a GPU to work quickly, but gives surprisingly decent results on my old 8800 GTX.
ESA Astronaut with a Flickr account - annoyingly, I only discovered it after he returned to Earth. Extra: his NASA crewmate was doing educational physics experiments on YouTube too...
Bonus Horrifying Biology corner
- Symbion pandora - tiny parasite of Norway lobsters' mouthparts with a fantastically complex life-cycle. It even includes a Prometheus larva. Thought the xenomorphs were complicated? Think again! Also, New Scientist has an entire blog of similarly peculiar beasts.
- Facetotecta - crustacean known only by its common larval stage, nobody knows what the adult form is. "In 2008, a juvenile form was produced by treating y-larvae with the hormone 20-hydroxyecdysone, which stimulated ecdysis and the transition to the next life phase. The resulting animal, named the ypsigon, was slug-like, apparently unsegmented, and limbless." Possibly another parasite, similar to...
- Sacculina - a barnacle that foregoes the usual immobile, armoured lifestyle and instead lives as a parasitic castrator of crabs, growing as a tendril-like mass through the host crab's body. Extra: gratuitously high-resolution shots of a related barnacle's protruding gonad - 1, 2, 3 - via LOLRhizocephalans.
Now, has all that biology dislodged this particularly hideous parasite, that of Comic Sans? We can only hope so. ... Wait, we're free! At last! The agony is finally over! Oh crap.
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2. Space Zucchini
Posted by Cargo Cult at 9:30PM, Wednesday July 11 2012
The man's a lunatic! Good stuff.
Mars rover? Try the Soviet Prop-M rover, part of the ill-fated Mars 2 expedition. Barely even a robot!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_2#Prop-M_Rover
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1. stuff
Posted by phuzz at 2:36PM, Sunday July 8 2012
I'd recommend Don Pettit's blog 'Diary of a space zucchini' for more cool space pictures:
http://www.fragileoasis.org/bloggernauts/donpettit/posts/
Actually, I'm thinking of getting a new tattoo, maybe of one of the Mars rovers? Anyone got any good ideas?