Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is a video of a moonrise by Mark Gee from Wellington, New Zealand: Full Moon Silhouettes.
Category Archives: Physics
Physics and fantasy
Minute Physics: How far can Legolas see?
This might come in handy at school when we’re talking about diffraction and resolving capacity.
Feynman
RichardFeynman.com has launched. It includes his biography, selected scientific works, a historic photo gallery as well as notable works. His most famous textbooks, the Feynman Lectures on Physics, have their own website at Caltech.
Link via Tuva / Feynman News.
Chernobyl
New York Times: Chernobyl: Capping a Catastrophe. By Henry Fountain. Photographs by William Daniels.
“Against the decaying skyline here, a one-of-a-kind engineering project is rising near the remains of the world’s worst civilian nuclear disaster.
An army of workers, shielded from radiation by thick concrete slabs, is constructing a huge arch, sheathed in acres of gleaming stainless steel and vast enough to cover the Statue of Liberty. The structure is so otherworldly it looks like it could have been dropped by aliens onto this Soviet-era industrial landscape.”
Link via dangerousmeta!.
Update: There’s a related thread on MetaFilter now: “What’s been the biggest challenge? Every single thing,“ he said.
Related, but from last year: The Engineer: Building Chernobyl’s New Safe Confinement. By Jon Excell.
Good old times…
Back in the late 1980s my father bought his first computer, a Commodore PC20-III. I remember playing “Reflections” on it, a game in which you had to direct a laser beam using mirrors, splitters etc. to hit several light bulbs. I just found a flash version of the game: Laser Reflections. Of course, back then there was no cheating by looking up the passwords and solutions for each level on the internet because there was no internet, but at least it was one of the games where it didn’t matter much that the monitor was just black and white. ;-)