Well of course, being a tail-end child of The Sixties (“the part that went over the fence last,” as they used to say) you’d assume that I might like something quite so trippy as this marvellous short piece by Beryl Allee. This is not, however, some pharmaceutical double-entendre lead-in to a few minutes of visual drug paraphernalia. No! No! No! Don’t mistake the sizzle for the steak. There is so much more here. We are all frogs; it is a parable for our times:
Frogs and boiling water.
it’s nonsense! nonsense i tell you: utter bunkum!
the force fields are fully engaged
to send any and all
circling a wormhole drain
around a realm of imagination
where nothing and everything
is down the drain
including the drain
Photo / graphic by Roman.
Photo by Roman.
Is that a cheap trick? It may not be precisely the same image that I posted several weeks ago but here again is a gas burner gussied-up as something far more dramatic and fanciful.
To be fair, sometimes doing this can be fun. Label a what-am-i-looking-at and the suggestion pops to the top amid a cloud of alternate possibilities, almost like a chord.
Did this do that for you? Well, whatever turns you on… I do like the image, as mundane as it may be. But twice may be too much and aliens too obvious.
Whatever. My alternate idea, discussing my humble opinion on the future prospects for human space travel, would have been seriously depressing.
Though maybe as fanciful.
People say we’ll muddle through but in truth we muddle ’till we’re through.
Photo by Roman.
…not really, but it’s fun to pretend.
I visit Professor David Kipping’s Cool Worlds Lab YouTube channel regularly, despite the clouds of commercials that swarm like mosquitoes or maybe midges. The channel satisfies a slightly geeky fascination with exoplanet research.
This particular video is a retrospective on the data returned by the Kepler space telescope. It’s political in the sense that what Kepler has found, or hasn’t found, has implications for the design of any follow-on missions, one of which is already in the planning stages.
“Twelve years ago, NASA predicted around 50 Earth-like planets would be discovered by the Kepler telescope. And yet, we’re left essentially none. What happened? Why did those predictions not match reality? And what can we learn from these 50 lost dreams…”
Written & presented by Prof David Kipping
The United States Geological Service (USGS) has come out with its latest video of Earth, imaged from space, presented as art. It really is an incredible series of beautiful images. It is, however, just that: a slide show with a music soundtrack. It proceeds too quickly to properly appreciate any of the images or even to finish reading the accompanying text. There are many images, however.
SUGGESTION: watch it the first time straight through, hands off the pause button. Full screen and headphones are highly recommended; altered state is optional. Then watch it the second time with the sound muted and your finger on the pause button.
“The Earth As Art project began in the early 2000s, and its original intent remains the same: to produce images that do not look like satellite images at first glance.
“Earth As Art shows not only what satellites capture in the visible wavelengths of light you and I can see, but also what’s hiding in the invisible wavelengths that Landsat sensors can detect in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Those combinations can bring out much more scientific value, but also can produce imagery of breathtaking beauty.”
Earth as Art 3 can be found HERE.
Earth as Art 2 can be found HERE.
Earth as Art 1 can be found HERE.
Photo / Graphic by Roman.
Note: I haven’t checked to see if there actually is such a thing as the “Hieroglyph Nebula”.
Yip in space!
Photo / Graphic by Roman.
Subtitled “The Astronaut’s Perspective”, this is a lovely half-hour infomercial from NASA about serving aboard the International Space Station and low Earth orbit generally. You like space? This is worth a view:
Graphic by Roman.
Yip Abides 