Ages ago, in film days, Sky and Telescope addressed this issue. The Orion Nebula is easy to see in a small telescope and looks faintly greenish. That’s because our eyes are most sensitive to green, and because one of the dominant emissions of the nebula is oxygen, which emits green. There’s nearly as much hydrogen,…

“Every” means EVERY. Your eye has three types of color-sensitive cones. Each one sees a mere dot of light - a pixel. (Some people have four types of cones, and they tend to be female. So if your female SO says two absolutely identical colors are different, she may be tetrachromatic. Then again, you may just be another…

No, but don’t worry. I signed you up.

Many a geologist’s baby photo has included a hammer for scale.

I’m a geologist. “A billion years is a long time” is like saying “Bill Gates is affluent”or “Hugh Hefner had girl friends.” A billion seconds is 31 years. If you started counting one number per second when they drove the Golden Spike in 1869, you would just be counting off the age of the Earth about now. A billion…

Nope. There are no errors. No extraneous lines, nothing scribbled over or repurposed. And the “coloring outside the lines” is just enough to be noticeable but no more.

Cities need rail and bike paths. Got some kind of plan for delivery and emergency vehicles to run on light rail? Otherwise you still need cars. Is your rail net going to be dense enough so I can walk from home to a stop, and from the last stop to my destination easily? If you use buses (which don’t require dedicated…

When my family moved to California in 1960 it was still somewhat gauche to refer to the San Francisco Earthquake. Well-mannered folk still called it the San Francisco FIRE. You can put out a fire. You can’t put out an earthquake. So given the climate of denial, I seriously doubt fear of earthquakes was a problem for…

As cool as urban railroads were, they earned abysmal profits. Less than 1% was common, and many lines sought to augment ridership by opening amusement parks or housing developments at the end of the line. As the map shows, Los Angeles doesn’t sprawl because it has freeways, it has freeways because it sprawled. Berlin…

Okay, so they have faster than light travel and the ability to build bases hundreds of kilometers in diameter in space. Plus force fields (that’s what the big dish was doing on Endor - even the Trade Federation can do that). But they can’t make adaptive armor that changes color, can’t make personal size force fields…

Think of polarized light. In circularly polarized light, the electric field vector sweeps out a helix. In elliptically polarized light, it’s an elliptical vector. When sperm are swimming freely, their flagella sweep out a helix. When the space is constricted, it probably compresses to an ellipse.

If Anonymous wants to do something useful for a change, dump all the court records where a gag order was part of the settlement. Also I bet everyone would love to know the names of chronic juvenile offenders in their neighborhood.

Wait staff people: memorize this Bible Verse.

Drop a probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere only this time, don’t waste it like they did Galileo’s. Include a camera. Save weight by leaving the magnetometer home.

The killer is that solid state electronics are extremely susceptible to heat. That’s why your computer needs a fan. The pressure and sulfuric acid in the atmosphere are not that much of an obstacle. It won’t rain on the surface anyway. It will evaporate long before then. We’ll either need to invent ultra-high…

Nope. Thoroughly documented in a U.S. Geological Survey report. The photo shows thick forest cleared right down to bedrock. Look at the left hand far end of the bay in the photo below. It wasn’t a seiche, but a wave created by a large landslide in a very small confined bay.

Conservatism bias is failing to learn that no informed person in the Western world for the last 2500 years believed the earth was flat. Ptolemy, the guy who supposedly locked Western science in a strait-jacket until Copernicus, explicity stated in his Almages that the earth was a sphere. Also, compared to the distance…

The pre-eminent case of a family scoring big through lucky connections was the Hapsburgs. They started off small in Switzerland and increased their holdings gradually for a couple of centuries. One was elected Holy Roman Emperor in the 15th century. But their real score came when one of them married the heiress of…

The Amish are just fine with technology, but only if it doesn’t interfere with their idea of a holy life. They’ll use electricity for work, but not TV. They’ll ride in an ambulance but not use a car for personal convenience. And there are many sects that draw the lines in different ways, but it’s carefully thought…

One thing that absolutely pi$$eth me off, as a Christian, are those religious tracts disguised as a $20 bill. Something about