Lego paper airplane folding machine.
(via LikeCool)
A redditor who works at a paint store, posted pictures of some pre-mixed colors. It’s awesome.
(via Reddit)
The Apollo 15 Hammer-Feather Drop:
At the end of the last Apollo 15 moon walk, Commander David Scott (pictured above) performed a live demonstration for the television cameras. He held out a geologic hammer and a feather and dropped them at the same time. Because they were essentially in a vacuum, there was no air resistance and the feather fell at the same rate as the hammer, as Galileo had concluded hundreds of years before - all objects released together fall at the same rate regardless of mass. Mission Controller Joe Allen described the demonstration in the “Apollo 15 Preliminary Science Report”:
During the final minutes of the third extravehicular activity, a short demonstration experiment was conducted. A heavy object (a 1.32-kg aluminum geological hammer) and a light object (a 0.03-kg falcon feather) were released simultaneously from approximately the same height (approximately 1.6 m) and were allowed to fall to the surface. Within the accuracy of the simultaneous release, the objects were observed to undergo the same acceleration and strike the lunar surface simultaneously, which was a result predicted by well-established theory, but a result nonetheless reassuring considering both the number of viewers that witnessed the experiment and the fact that the homeward journey was based critically on the validity of the particular theory being tested.
(Source: thekidshouldseethis)
Well fellas, looks like we’re one step closer to having Warp Drive (or FTL Drive, depending on your universe). Check it out:
“[Some badass physicists] worked out that under string theory, a warp drive would no longer require exotic matter, and the required energy would be roughly 100kg of antimatter (1019J) to warp the space around a ship the size of the space shuttle…. These physicists found that the ultimate warp speed limit is 1032C – or roughly 3.3 trillion trillion light years per second, and would require 1031J of energy. This speed is so fast, you could travel to the edge of the visible universe (14 billion light years) in 4.4 femtoseconds.”
Unfortunately, if we do that, we’ll turn into big lizards.
Well, Time Travel Awareness Month has come to an end. But what did we learn?
For starters, I learned that for as much as I think about time travel, its pitfalls, and its possibilities, there are quite a few of you out there who are thinking about it just as much. Fans of Back to the Future, fans of Doctor Who, fans of Star Trek orJourneyman - we’re all drawn to this idea that we can revisit the past, or avoid the slow path and see the future. But why?
If you look back at some of the time travel fiction we’ve talked about this month, almost none of it revolves around personal gain. So many of these stories have themes of altruism (Quantum Leap), or personal improvement (Groundhog Day), or unavoidable consequences (Lost). If time travel is a means to an end, that end is almost always for the greater good. But even in stories about the fatalism of time travel, where what happens happens, there is still good that comes from the journey: insight.
And maybe that is the appeal that time travel offers. The closest any of us mere mortals ever come to time travel is when we reflect on our memories, or hypothesize about our futures. We want to know that our plans for the future will come true. We want to relive our happiest day in all its glory. We wonder how our saddest days could have been avoided. We struggle every day to understand our lives, and the consequences of our actions. We crave insight. But insight, like our lives, is only available in one speed: from moment to moment.
Happy Time Travel Awareness Month.
Overthinkingit.com brings you Back to the Future week where (as you might have guessed) they take ideas or concepts from Back to the Future and over think them. The one that really caught my eye was The Science of Back To The Future. Not because its the most interesting, but because the…
What better way to wrap up Time Travel Awareness Month than with the awesome dudes that started it all, just 31 short days in the past, 25 years in the future.
(Source: philt)
