Theidlerhour - Bricolage Brain

A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer were in a hotel for a convention.

Then, in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, a fire breaks out in the engineer’s wastebasket. The engineer rushes over to the bathroom, empties out the ice bucket, fills it with water and pours it into the trash can, dousing the fire. Satisfied that the problem was solved, the engineer goes back to sleep.

Shortly thereafter, a fire broke out in the physicist’s wastebasket. The physicist rushes to the bathroom, whips out his calculator, frantically does a few computations, pulls out a cup, fills it to a precisely measured level, and rushes back to the wastebasket, pouring the water onto the fire. As the last drop hits the flame, the fire goes out. Satisfied that the problem was solved, the physicist goes back to sleep.

Finally, a fire breaks out in the mathematician’s room. The mathematician rushes to the bathroom, sees the ice bucket, sees a cup, sees the water faucet. Satisfied that the problem could be solved, he goes back to sleep.

We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world.

Haruki Murakami, in an interview with the Paris Review (via bookishmadness)

What is human existence? It turns out it’s pretty simple: We are dead stars, looking back up at the sky.

Dr. Michelle Thaller, NASA astronomer  (via psych-facts)

NASA Completes Space Launch System Design Review:

Well, that’s it folks. The extensive and complicated review process NASA had to undergo is over and they’ll move into “cutting metal and fabricating”.

What does this mean? It means that NASA is going back to space and they’ll definitely be doing it on this rocket.

So what’s the big deal with this rocket exactly?

The Space Launch System is going to be the most powerful launch vehicle ever made and will be the first exploration class vehicle NASA’s made since the Apollo era.

The rocket will be the size of a small skyscraper: 320.9 feet in height.

Could we go to Mars on it?

Yes. In fact that’s the ultimate goal of the program.

It will also likely take astronauts back to the Moon, to asteroids, the moons of other planets etc.

The first launch will be in 2018, without astronauts, to complete final tests and make sure it’s ready to carry humans into space.

The new era of human exploration and discovery is finally before us.

(Image credit: NASA and MSFC)

The pride

When your little sister can reiterate the jist of Millikan, Rutherford, and Daltons models of the atom.

“And then there was this oil, and these charged plates, and he shot xrays at it, and the drops floated…. ”

“And then there was this gold foil, real gold, and they shot it, and some of the particles shot back, and everyone was like, whoa….DENSELY PACKED NUCLEUS”

Talk with people who make you see the world differently.

(via thategyptianqueen)

I honestly don't mean for this to come across as ignorant or anything like that but I just seen your post about learning kanji's and they're Chinese characters? I didn't know Japanese used Chinese characters? I've only started learning mandarin but I never knew that Japanese used the same characters?

It’s not ignorant at all, please don’t feel that way! Years and years ago in Japan there was no comprehension of such characters, but some Japanese people were sent to China as scholars to basically learn everything about Classical Chinese and due to this there was a sudden (but still rather small) increase in Chinese literacy. It still took a while for Kanji to be fully incorporated into the Japanese language, and even the two other alphabets (hiragana and katakana) are said to be based off of the way in which Chinese was written during this time, in attempt to break down the language barriers between the two nations. Until these alphabets were used the Japanese didn’t have a writing system at all! This means that immigration and visitors from China and Korea in particular have had an influence on the way in which the Japanese language has evolved, and this is most likely why there are some similarities between Japanese and other languages you may study. Chinese and Japanese characters still have particular differences, so somebody who speaks Japanese/Chinese may briefly understand a text based on characters from their original tongue, but in general the strokes are sometimes varied and the pronunciation is completely different so they wouldn’t be able to read it fluently like one might expect (even if the character looks nearly identical.) Sorry if any of my information is wrong- this is just some general knowledge that I’ve picked up from my own research and studies!

Mt. Fuji and Sekiyadojo castle at dusk, Chiba, Japan via GANREF

Is it possible to have a spacesuit that is skin tight? My logic on this is that space wants to separate your bodies atoms but can the pressure be neutralized by having a tight enough skin suit? Am I even making sense?

Meet Dava Newman:

Now NASA’s Deputy Administrator (second-in-command). She’s spent years at MIT developing what’s known as the “BioSuit” - basically a skintight spacesuit that would use mechanical counter-pressure to apply about a third of an atmosphere on the body, enabling exploration with full range of motion, minimizing the energy spent fighting your own bubble-boy-of-a-suit.

There were a couple of problems remaining when she left to work for NASA:

The design so far still includes a pressurized helmet that has a seal issue with the rest of the suit. Also certain parts of the suit (the hands as you can see above) are difficult to get quite right.

The second problem is going to be returned to in a few years. The last I heard the research group was going to let material science develop carbon nanotubes and graphene a bit more and then try using those two materials somehow in the design.

It’s a super promising design and I hope they get it down pat! As is, it stands to benefit the medical community as well as to open astronaut qualifications to people shorter than 5′5″ (or somewhere around there) - below which apparently they can’t even apply to be an astronaut due to the spacesuits not being made small enough.

(Image credit: Professor Dava Newman: Inventor, Science Engineering; Guillermo Trotti, A.I.A., Trotti and Associates, Inc. (Cambridge, MA): Design; Dainese (Vincenca, Italy): Fabrication; Douglas Sonders: Photography)

Great physicists and their blackboards.