planets y'all

[planetsyall]

Jamaica Kincaid's piece synthesized well my kind of white-and-western guilt on the subject of tourism to non-Western countries. A few of my friends went on a school-funded trip to Mexico (read: our school had the money for this) during our Junior year as part of our Spanish program. You had to write an essay and the like to prove you somehow warranted a plane ticket more than everyone else wanting a free trip for site-seeing, cultural and otherwise. They came back tan, of course, but some of them showed a little uneasiness with their old surroundings. The schools they had visited paled in comparison to ours, the neighborhoods totally different, and yet everyone there was totally happy and content, while us Northerners (or rather, Westerners) were missing our facebook and our tweets with the extreme wifi drought. Coming back to enjoy those same privileges just didn't seem right. They got over it. I went to the Bahamas for eight hours (maybe a few minutes less) and felt guilty. I got over it. I lied, no one got over it. You bury it in the back of your mind just like how we are all paying thousands of dollars to go to college to do something we might not even like and yet there are people within thirty miles of the university we all attend who very well struggle making ends meet to get food on the table. Perhaps our collective money would be better spent there. Both are investments, yes?

[planetsyall]

I truly appreciate what Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey is doing for science and space science awareness. This clip is from my favorite episode so far, well, actually, "The Clean Room" is also quite excellent. Either way, this is from, "A Sky Full of Ghosts," an episode which made my girlfriend and I cry. So good.

[shotokanandscience-blog]

[planetsyall]

Newt Gingrich could have been the president, and if I hadn't disagreed with him on every other issue and hadn't been too young to vote, I'd have totally maybe considered him. #moonmen #moonmen run our country

[planetsyall]

MOOOOOOOORE REMIX-ing

ANOTHER TRANSLATION PARTY REMIX: I wrote a response to "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" a month or three ago. I picked a paragraph near the center of the response where I started to question a point I had tried to emphasize earlier.

The internet may very well be the Kid A of technology; it is both super odd and also in a strange way exactly what it needs to be. However, will we ever actually reach the breaking point and have a technology change us very badly?. Is our generation reacting correctly to our surroundings and adapting advantageously or will we one day be shown the error of our ways, and is there any way to tell? Perhaps the seeds of our own demise are written as hover text on a webcomic somewhere.

 and now the TP version:

How many children the same Internet technology to both very strange odd supermarket. This change in technology really badly, reach the breaking point. Cannot generate the positive support that knows how to adapt to the environment to show us in how to deal properly with 1? Perhaps written as hover text for the collapse of the Web comic, our own species.

[planetsyall]

re-re-re-reeeeeeeemix

I love translationparty.com - a lot. I want to see which one of my assignments translates the best, whether it be scientific or personal. First up to the bat: the first paragraph of my research paper. Here's the original.

  When I was a kid, my elementary school teachers all had their little model solar systems near the window, right next to the fish that was about to die a death from malnutrition or ant farm that would get smashed. We learned that there were eight* (Rest in peace, my tiny dwarf-planet friend) planets and a star which we called the sun, as well as two belts of rocks. I always noticed that some were rocky and some were all cloudy, and Earth was just right in the middle. I always assumed we stood out like that - and that stayed in the back of my head all those years, that fundamental assumption about the only part of the universe I’ll ever be in.

 and here's the translation party version, 

Is called the elementary school teacher Windows Ali 8 drinks death model planets and soon discovered all the fish of the malnourished children: * (partially my friend ） rest admit most peaceful dwarf planets Sun 2 belt buckle. Almost all the rocks of Middle Earth. Two years ago, he stands behind the basic premise of the head of the only part of the universe.

[spaceexp]

The artist’s concept depicts Kepler-186f, the first validated Earth-size planet orbiting a distant star in the habitable zone, a range of distances from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet. The discovery of Kepler-186f confirms...

[cleowho]

"You have a weakness…"

Genesis of the Daleks - season 12 - 1975

[planetsyall]

more reason to care about planetary weather, amirite guys?

[itsleviosahnotleviosar-deactiva]

[anfael]

[cooldragons]

A really especially cool dragon

[hickeybickeyboo]

Rock on

[spaceexp]

Sunset over Gale Crater.

[planetsyall]

recently followed space blogs!

spaceexp.tumblr.com , gravitationalbeauty.tumblr.com , and fuckyeah-stars.tumblr.com are all awesome photo/caption blogs for space pictures and facts. The post I've recently reblogged about a rogue planet orbiting our galaxy's center was something I originally saw on one of them and actually influenced my paper a little.

[kny111]

First ‘Exomoon’ Around Alien Planet Possibly Found

For the first time ever, astronomers may have spotted a moon circling an alien planet — though they’ll probably never know for sure exactly what they’ve found.

A team of scientists detected a pair of faraway objects that could be a giant Jupiter-like alien planet and a rocky exomoon flying freely through space, or a small dim star hosting a planet about 18 times more massive than Earth.

The astronomers used a technique called gravitational microlensing, watching what happens a big foreground object passes in front of a star from our perspective on Earth. The nearby body’s gravitational field bends and magnifies the light from the distant star, acting like a lens.

Analyzing lensing events can reveal a great deal about the foreground object — for example, in the case of a star, whether it hosts a planet and, if so, how massive that world is compared to the star.

In the new study, the team observed one intriguing lensing event using telescopes in New Zealand and the Australian state of Tasmania. They determined that the foreground object has an orbiting companion about 0.05 percent as massive as itself.

"One possibility is for the lensing system to be a planet and its moon, which if true, would be a spectacular discovery of a totally new type of system," Wes Traub, chief scientist for NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement.

"The researchers’ models point to the moon solution, but if you simply look at what scenario is more likely in nature, the star solution wins," added Traub, who was not involved in the study.

[planetsyall]

THE HIVEMIND PROTESTS TO MY LACK OF BLOGGING

[kqedscience]

What You Post On Yelp Says More About You Than About The Food

“Like meth, but in a good way.” “Seriously, the Bacon Maple is like heroin.” “These cupcakes are like crack.” 

When people review cheap restaurants in particular on Yelp, they often use drug metaphors, and speak in the language of addiction. This is but one of the interesting findings of a linguistic study of 900,000 restaurant reviews on Yelp.com. The researchers found that these reviews offered a unique look into the human psyche… and how much people love references to drugs and sex.”

Learn about other takeaways from the Stanford University study at popsci: http://goo.gl/saocrm

[planetsyall]

hello world

[sci-universe]

A strange lonely planet found without a star An international team of astronomers has discovered an exotic young planet that is not orbiting a star. This free-floating planet, dubbed PSO J318.5-22, is just 80 light-years away from Earth and has a mass only six times that of Jupiter. The planet formed a mere 12 million years ago, a newborn in planet lifetimes.

"We have never before seen an object free-floating in space that that looks like this. It has all the characteristics of young planets found around other stars, but it is drifting out there all alone," explained team leader Dr. Michael Liu of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “I had often wondered if such solitary objects exist, and now we know they do.” The discovery paper of PSO J318.5-22 is being published by Astrophysical Journal Letters and is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.0457. Image: Artist’s conception of PSO J318.5-22. Credit: MPIA/V. Ch. Quetz

[planetsyall]

this is a blog and I am a worker drone

[gravitationalbeauty]

Pin by Rhonda C. on Universe

[planetsyall]

what it do jupiter

[planetsyall]

obligatory hivemind about me post

I'm Teddy, a freshman at UMass Amherst. I study physics and Astronomy and I am writing a paper about planets, their weather, and their atmospheres. It's less dry than you'd think.