Technology Drives Exploration And We're Building On The Apollo Program's Accomplishments To Test And

When the last living thing dies, death dies too.

If Young Wizards characters had Tumblr Blogs:

Nita: A “hipster blog” of sorts with flawless color coordination and all sorts of cheerful posts: beautiful landscapes, inspiring quotes, book reviews, and so on. The pictures of cats, whales, and birds are tagged like they’re the selfies of her close friends. Because they are.

Kit: The geekiest and most exhaustive space blog you’ll ever see. If Mars were to be blown up, it could be rebuilt with perfect accuracy with nothing but the posts about it on his blog. Also reblogs a lot of Dairine’s science-fiction-related posts, and he and Nita are one of those Cute Couples On Tumblr.

Dairine: A fandom blog devoted to Star Wars, Star Trek, and all other things science fiction. Very passionate and argumentative about everything; strongly held opinions get her into a lot of protracted Tumblr debates. Gets into arguments with Roshaun a lot, especially.

Carmela: A glorious, thoroughly disorganized mess of recipes, fashion, NSFW posts, anime, and life advice. Sends Kit a lot of deliberately weird asks.

S’reee: Friendly reblogs of her friends’ posts, interspersed with long, incomprehensible audio posts like remixed whalesong (which they are). And discussion of conservation issues.

Filif: Primarily devoted to very colorful fashion photosets, with the occasional picture of a flower tagged “nsfw.”

Sker’ret: One of those people who reblogs just about everything he comes across, with great enthusiasm. All of those legs lend themselves well to some truly epic keysmashing when he’s excited about something.

Roshaun: Exhaustingly long rants (never, ever put behind read-mores, either), occasionally interrupted by food porn posts, fashion, and impromptu lectures on stellar dynamics. And failed attempts to comprehend memes (“Imagine how is touch the sky” reduced him to nothing but rows of question marks eventually. It doesn’t translate to the Speech well).

I think this one might be my favorite book in the series...

Chapter Titles: Deep Wizardry

There was a point where, whenever I ran into my stalker...

…I wanted to greet her with “Fairest and fallen, greeting and defiance, now and always.”

Not because I thought she was literally the Lone Power.  But because she was clearly one of those people the Lone Power was acting through and loving it.  And because dealing with her seemed to be part of my Ordeal.

And honestly because remembering that there are malevolent forces in the universe that use people like her to hurt people (and that she would willingly hand herself over to such forces if she believed in them, she was that kind of person), and that those malevolent forces of the universe can be named, greeted, and resisted, even resisted politely, was very important.

If you ever hear me say anything starting with “Fairest and fallen…” you know I’m serious.  I may be wry, I may be half-joking, but some part of me is deadly serious if you hear those words come out of my mouth.  It means “I know you.  I know what I’m looking at.  I know where your evil comes from, even if you don’t.  And I won’t put up with it, and I won’t stand by and let this happen.”

The Young Wizards books are among a type of books I’ve read that hide deep and meaningful truths about the universe in the guise of ordinary children’s books.  That’s my favorite type of book, ever.

I once read someone on dduane’s tumblr saying that when she was a kid, she would repeat the Wizard’s Oath over and over again, hoping it would make her a wizard.

I wrote to dduane telling her that I hadn’t read them as a kid.  But when I grew up, I found that the Wizard’s Oath had already somehow become etched onto my heart, and it only took reading the words to remember how it happened.  She said she gets that response from adults now and again.

There are many versions of the Wizard’s Oath, and some fans (including me) have made our own recensions.  Each person gets the version they need.  But here’s the one from the first book:

In Life’s name and for Life’s sake, I say that I will use the Art for nothing but the service of that Life. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; and I will change no object or creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so — till Universe’s end.

Here’s a version written for a dinosaur who had been living underground in a dystopian city:

“The Fire is at the heart, and the Fire is the heart; for its sake, all fires whatever are sacred to me. I shall kindle them small and safe where there are none, for the wayfinding of those who come after: I will breathe on those fires about to die in dark places, and in passing, feed those that burn without harm to any; the fire that burns and warms those who gather about it, in no wise shall I meddle with it save that it seems about to consume its cofocals, or to die. To these ends, as the Kindling requireth, I shall ever thrust my claw into the flames to shift the darkening ember or feed the failing coal, looking always toward that inmost Hearth from which all flames rise together, and all fires burn undevouring, in and of That Which first set light to the world, and burns in it ever more…”

And my personal recension:

In the soil, we are all growing, together.  I will moisten the roots of those who need water.  I will never allow the soil to dry out.  I will make room for seeds to grow into plants.  I will allow the soil to consume the parts of me that are no longer needed, and I will reach towards the sun.  I will not touch leaves that may die at my touch, unless it is necessary to prevent some greater harm.  I will love sorrel and tree, fungus and slug, alike.  I will live inside of love, and let love guide me, to the best of my ability.  I will look always to the place where all of our roots reach down as one.  

ORBITAL MECHANICS

Complexity Graphics by Tatiana Plakhova

9 things to seriously make you re-consider the entire existence of mankind

Source: buzzfeed.com

This is literally my favorite ever. Best post. Good.

King Arthur: I actually think he was probably not a wizard. But he definitely knew about wizardry and did his best to support it.

Gawain: Definitely a wizard. DEFINITELY a wizard. Specializes in liaising with nonhuman species living on earth, go-to diplomat when aliens show up.

Kay: Nope, Kay’s...

Reasons the Young Wizards series is wonderful: there’s a scene that can be described as “Tiny kitten Roasts Satan” and it’s the best thing ever

New observations of a ‘dust trap’ around a young star solve long-standing planet formation mystery Astronomers using the new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array have imaged a region around a young star where dust particles can grow by clumping together. This is the first time that such a dust trap has been clearly observed and modeled. It solves a long-standing mystery about how dust particles in discs grow to larger sizes so that they can eventually form comets, planets and other rocky bodies.

Astronomers now know that planets around other stars are plentiful. But they do not fully understand how they form and there are many aspects of the formation of comets, planets and other rocky bodies that remain a mystery. However, new observations exploiting the power of ALMA are now answering one of the biggest questions: how do tiny grains of dust in the disc around a young star grow bigger and bigger—to eventually become rubble, and even boulders well beyond a metre in size?

Computer models suggest that dust grains grow when they collide and stick together. However, when these bigger grains collide again at high speed they are often smashed to pieces and sent back to square one. Even when this does not happen, the models show that the larger grains would quickly move inwards because of friction between the dust and gas and fall onto their parent star, leaving no chance that they could grow even further.

Somehow the dust needs a safe haven where the particles can continue growing until they are big enough to survive on their own. Such “dust traps” have been proposed, but there was no observational proof of their existence up to now.

Bottom left image: Artist’s impression of the proposed disk structure of Oph IRS 48. The brown spots represent the large and small grains. The larger grains detected by ALMA are concentrated in the dust trap at the bottom of the image. The blue represents the distribution of carbon monoxide gas. The gap in the disk is shown with the proposed planetary body that is sweeping the area clear and providing the conditions necessary to form the dust trap. Credit: Nienke van der Marel

Nienke van der Marel, a PhD student at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, and lead author of the article, was using ALMA along with her co-workers, to study the disc in a system called Oph-IRS 48. They found that the star was circled by a ring of gas with a central hole that was probably created by an unseen planet or companion star. Earlier observations using ESO’s Very Large Telescope had already shown that the small dust particles also formed a similar ring structure. But the new ALMA view of where the larger millimetre-sized dust particles were found was very different!

“At first the shape of the dust in the image came as a complete surprise to us,” says van der Marel. “Instead of the ring we had expected to see, we found a very clear cashew-nut shape! We had to convince ourselves that this feature was real, but the strong signal and sharpness of the ALMA observations left no doubt about the structure. Then we realised what we had found.”

What had been discovered was a region where bigger dust grains were trapped and could grow much larger by colliding and sticking together. This was a dust trap—just what the theorists were looking for.

Bottom right image: ALMA image of the dust trap around Oph IRS 48. The distinctive crescent-shaped feature comes from the accumulation of larger dust grains in the outer regions of the disk. This provides the safe haven dust grains need to grow into larger and larger objects. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO) / Nienke van der Marel

As van der Marel explains: “It’s likely that we are looking at a kind of comet factory as the conditions are right for the particles to grow from millimetre to comet size. The dust is not likely to form full-sized planets at this distance from the star. But in the near future ALMA will be able to observe dust traps closer to their parent stars, where the same mechanisms are at work. Such dust traps really would be the cradles for new-born planets.”

The dust trap forms as bigger dust particles move in the direction of regions of higher pressure. Computer modelling has shown that such a high pressure region can originate from the motions of the gas at the edge of a gas hole—just like the one found in this disc.

“The combination of modelling work and high quality observations of ALMA makes this a unique project”, says Cornelis Dullemond from the Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Heidelberg, Germany, who is an expert on dust evolution and disc modelling, and a member of the team. “Around the time that these observations were obtained, we were working on models predicting exactly these kinds of structures: a very lucky coincidence.”

The observations were made while the ALMA array was still being constructed. They made use of the ALMA Band 9 receivers—European-made devices that allow ALMA to create its so far sharpest images.

“These observations show that ALMA is capable of delivering transformational science, even with less than half of the full array in use,” says Ewine van Dishoeck of the Leiden Observatory, who has been a major contributor to the ALMA project for more than 20 years. “The incredible jump in both sensitivity and image sharpness in Band 9 gives us the opportunity to study basic aspects of planet formation in ways that were simply not possible before.”

‘fairest and fallen, greetings and defiance’ is still the best Stock Greeting For Our Ancient Enemy ever. it’s got everything. (1) you’re hot (2) you’re evil (3) respect tho (4) anyway i’m here to kick your ass