My first professional art job was working on the Washington, DC underground paper the Quicksilver Times in 1970-71.
I drew headlines (we couldn’t afford PressType), I reduced or increased photo sizes by hand (we couldn’t afford the photo lab fees), and I illustrated ads.
I spotted this on ebay today and I still remember drawing it. I was given the first bong I’d ever seen. It was created by a Vietnam veteran based on a style of pipe used there.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B. F. Williams, L. C. Johnson (U. Washington), PHAT team, R. Gendler
To better understand what stars compose the Andromeda galaxy, a group of researchers studied the nearby spiral by composing the largest image ever taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. The result, called the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT), involved thousands of observations, hundreds of fields, spanned about a third of the galaxy, and resolved over 100 million stars. In the featured composite image, the central part of the galaxy is seen on the far left, while a blue spiral arm is prominent on the right. The brightest stars, scattered over the frame, are actually Milky Way foreground stars. The PHAT data is being analyzed to better understand where and how stars have formed in M31 in contrast to our Milky Way Galaxy, and to identify and characterize Andromeda’s stellar clusters and obscuring dust.
A quick jump into a low earth orbit might be good enough for some people. But if you want real space tourism, one of the 1,000 earth-like exoplanets discovered by the Kepler Space Telescope is for you.
Twice as big in volume as the Earth, HD 40307g straddles the line between “Super-Earth” and “mini-Neptune” and scientists aren’t sure if it has a rocky surface or one that’s buried beneath thick layers of gas and ice. One thing is certain though: at eight time the Earth’s mass, its gravitational pull is much, much stronger.
Like Luke Skywalker’s planet “Tatooine” in Star Wars, Kepler-16b orbits a pair of stars. Depicted here as a terrestrial planet, Kepler-16b might also be a gas giant like Saturn. Prospects for life on this unusual world aren’t good, as it has a temperature similar to that of dry ice. But the discovery indicates that the movie’s iconic double-sunset is anything but science fiction.
Kepler-186f is the first Earth-size planet discovered in the potentially ‘habitable zone’ around another star, where liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface. Its star is much cooler and redder than our Sun. If plant life does exist on a planet like Kepler-186f, its photosynthesis could have been influenced by the star’s red-wavelength photons, making for a color palette that’s very different than the greens on Earth. This discovery was made by Kepler, NASA’s planet hunting telescope.
My black velvet portrait of Dr Hawking.
Gomez and Pugsley Addams would love this!
My business card includes ‘Media Whore’ among my self-descriptions. Here are a few examples of why:
On Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? with Regis Philbin:
Interviewed by a couple of Stanford University students:
Interviewed by my friend Melissa Burman for a class project:
These snowless dry luges look like they’d be a great way to spend a day. You can race in groups, pass people, even crash and it appears that each location offers several courses to choose from.
Queenstown, NZ:
Sentosa Island, Singapore:
Mont Tremblant, Quebec City, Canada:
Canada Olympic Park, Calgary, AB:
Rotorua, NZ (crash!):
These have been around since 1966 but they’re new to me and added to my (ever-growing) bucket list.
http://www.skylineluge.com
The Truthiness Shall Set You Freak
Stannous Flouride's Book of Truthiness 