American Madness

Calling it ‘art’ is a bit of a cheat I guess. I mean, is it really art if it is just a picture taken from a satellite doing its job? There is no eye for the artistic behind the taking of these pictures and it just so happens that some one was smart enough to put the pretty ones together.

None the less, the pictures are pretty striking with some amazing colors so I figured I’d toss them up here for all to see. From EnvironmentalGraffiti we get the “30 Most Incredible Abstract Satellite Images of Earth.” These photos are all from 2000, when NASA went through over 400,000 pictures snapped by the satellite Landsat 7 and chose what they felt were the most beautiful for display at the Library of Congress.

Are they art? Maybe not, but they sure are pretty. You can see the other 29 here. You can even download them to use as desktop wallpaper.

Travelex took a bold step into the future the other day and announced that they have developed currency for use in space. An interesting step, since we currently don’t have any commercial space flights, but with companies like Virgin working on developing commercial space flights (and I believe already selling tickets for them) and a Spaceport being built in New Mexico, this currency could meet a demand that hasn’t yet sprung into being.

The Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination (QUID) was developed to answer the problems of using our current currency in space According to Professor George Fraser from the University of Leicester:

“None of the existing payment systems we use on earth – like cash, credit or debit cards – could be used in space for a variety of different reasons. Anything with sharp edges, like coins, would be a risk to astronauts while the chips and magnetic strips used in our cards on Earth would be damaged beyond repair by cosmic radiation. What’s more, because of the distances involved, it is more than 230,000 miles from the Earth to the moon, chip and pin technology is also out of the question.”

So to solve this we have an all new currency. 1 QUID will be equal to £6.25 or $12.5. Travelex predicts that by 2050 there will be tourist trips to the moon and has already requested to open the first currency exchange location there. I guess which such advanced planning they will be the number one space travel currency converter.

As I type this I know my computer is headed for a crash, so I am going to make this brief, to the point and save it before I reach the point of impending doom where I actually loose data.

Anyway, I came across this article the other day about… well, the title kind of explains it: “Peruvians get sick from apparent meteorite crater,” of course, you guessed it, this is another one from Reuter’s “Oddly Enough” section of the paper meaning they don’t really see it as news, but more of a fluff piece that people will enjoy reading and maybe even have a nice little chuckle over.

Well, I read the article, the gist of it being that over 100 Peruvians who have visited the site of an apparent meteorite crater (that crashed down over the weekend of the 15th) have been vomiting and experiencing massive headaches. After some researchers had a chance to check it out they said, yes, it probably was a meteorite and that folks were probably getting sick from the gases it had released.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t exactly find that to be very comforting, nor would I think the sick Peruvians would either. I’d want a much more detailed explanation of what these so-called gases were and an explanation of how long these symptoms were going to last (as of the writing of the article folks were sick for as many as 3 days already). A mysterious meteorite falls to Earth and folks near it start getting massively sick- this sounds like the start of a comibook or Sci-Fi monster movie, not something to be written off and tossed into the “Oddly Enough” bin.

Also, I guess there is a moral to this story- Don’t go visiting random craters that mysteriously appear over the weekend, you never know what they might contain or what might happen to you.

When Monsterous Peruvians infect with some space virus come attacking your town, don’t say I didn’t warn you…

Okay, time to restart.

Neatorama has a posting today of the 5 videos you have to see from Videosift, a site that, at least theoretically, sifts through the videos on YouTube and gets rid of all the crap. Of the top 5 that Neatorama claims you need to see I am passing on only one of them- A NASA experiment involving space and a sphere of water. I could explain how mesmerizing it is to watch waves travel back and forth through the sphere, or the reaction when Alka Seltzer is added to it, but I really wouldn’t be able to get the idea across which is why I have embedded the video. While this is all terribly fascinating it does raise the question: Why is NASA doing this? What purpose does it actually serve to see how Alka-Seltzer reacts with water in space? Anyway, try not to ponder that too much while you watch the video (there is another similar video you can dig around for that is just clips of Alka-Seltzer being introduced to a sphere of water in space).

via videosift.com