29 August, 2010

Hoag's Object: A Strange Ring Galaxy

From Astronomy Picture of the Day 22/8/2010:

Hoag's Object - a ring galaxy: On the outside is a ring dominated by bright blue stars, while near the center lies a ball of much redder stars that are likely much older. Between the two is a gap that appears almost completely dark. Coincidentally, visible in the gap (at about one o'clock) is yet another ring galaxy that likely lies far in the distance.
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24 August, 2010

Master Yoda was an idiot

Found in the comment thread of a Slashdot post:
Master Yoda was an idiot:
  • Didn't see the fall of the Jedi. *
  • None of his "visions of the future" ever came true.
  • In order to do, you must try. Frankly at this point he might as well be sitting in a senile home reading fortune cookies.
  • Taught children the force using real light sabers.
* Not just with his "vision" but through common sense he should have seen it coming.
I mean really, when Samuel Jackson is on your side, some serious shit is going to happen... mother fucker.
by geekoid

08 August, 2010

Full-fat dairy not all bad for health

From www.abc.net.au:
Scientists from the Queensland Institute of Medical Research surveyed more than 1,000 people on their eating habits over 16 years. They found those who had the highest intake of full-fat dairy had the lowest risk of death from heart disease or stroke... While more research is needed, there may be nutrients in full-fat dairy products that balance their saturated fat content.
And this is just two weeks after I finally worked up the strength to abandon full cream milk and drink the more expensive, watery Trim milk.

I give up. I just give up. I'm eating butter for lunch and you can't stop me.

07 August, 2010

The Moon Hoax - Darryl Cunningham Investigates

An excellent, easy to understand debunking of many of the moon-hoax-believers main arguments.



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Monocle: an in-browser eBook reader

From inventivelabs.com.au:
Monocle is an ebook reader. It works in modern web browsers, using standard technologies. It runs in desktop browsers and on mobile devices. It's awesome in Safari and Chrome (the browsers used on iPhone OS and Android devices), increasingly awesome in Firefox, and workable in more standards-fearing browsers like Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

We've open-sourced it under the MIT licence, which is the most liberal of the mainstream software licences.

Monocle is drop-in. You can embed a "book" on any webpage with two lines of code - one to include the library, one to initialize the reader. Monocle is approximately 25kb and has no dependencies on external JavaScript libraries.

Monocle is as you like it. Out of the box it simply lets you turn the pages. It's lean. But you can add controls - page numbers, tables of contents, scrubbers (to jump to a different place in the book), font-size magnifiers - or you can code your own. The reader is rendered in CSS3; it can be made to look like pretty much anything.
Read more   and more, including sample eBooks