Category: Videnskab

Artikler vedr. videnskab

Categories
Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Rumforskning Technology Videnskab

NASA Space Telescopes Find ‘Lego-Block’ Galaxies in Early Universe

Hubble-20070906-BrowseJPL.NASA.GOV: News Releases

NASA has just issued a press release regarding a new discovery. What the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have discovered are small, dense galaxies in the distant universe (meaning we’re looking WAY back in time), that are considered to be building blocks of the Universe, and it contributes to, and confirms, our understanding of the evolution of the Universe.

This press release caught my interest, in part, due to the mentioning of ‘Lego’ the BEST toy EVER, but behind the headline lies yet another important discovery, that, to me, really demonstrates why we need to invest in Space Telescopes, there’s so much to learn.

“OH MY GOD! IT’S FULL OF STARS!”.

This is a quote from the NASA press release:

A NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have joined forces to discover nine of the smallest, faintest, most compact galaxies ever observed in the distant universe. Blazing with the brilliance of millions of stars, each of the newly discovered galaxies is 100 to 1,000 times smaller than our Milky Way galaxy.

“These are among the lowest mass galaxies ever directly observed in the early universe,” said Nor Pirzkal of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md.

The conventional model for galaxy evolution predicts that small galaxies in the early universe evolved into the massive galaxies of today by coalescing. These nine Lego-like “building block” galaxies initially detected by Hubble likely contributed to the construction of the universe as we know it.

JPL is the NASA body that manages the majority of the robotic missions to the planets and the solar system, this includes the highly successful Mars Rovers, Voyager, Cassini. You can subscribe to the NASA JPL newsletter by visiting this link

Categories
Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Rumforskning Videnskab

NASA JPL – The long tail of the star Mira

Long tail of the star Mira 185517Main A-516
Speeding-Bullet Star Leaves Enormous Streak Across Sky

NASA has just released this amazing picture of the star Mira, taken by NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer space telescope. Mira is a red giant, that is travelling fast through space, the surprising new discovery is that Mira has a comet like tail, that stretches for 13 light years.

From NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) press release:

NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer has spotted an amazingly long
comet-like tail behind a star streaking through space at
supersonic speeds. The star, named Mira after the Latin word for
“wonderful,” has been a favorite of astronomers for about 400 years.
It is a fast-moving, older star called a red giant that sheds massive
amounts of surface material.

From the NASA Main Website:

Mira appears as a small white dot in the bulb-shaped structure at right, and is moving from left to right in this view. The shed material can be seen in light blue. The dots in the picture are stars and distant galaxies. The large blue dot at left is a star that is closer to us than Mira.

The Galaxy Evolution Explorer discovered Mira’s strange comet-like tail during part of its routine survey of the entire sky at ultraviolet wavelengths. When astronomers first saw the picture, they were shocked because Mira has been studied for over 400 years yet nothing like this has ever been documented before.

Mira’s comet-like tail stretches a startling 13 light-years across the sky. For comparison, the nearest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri, is only about 4 light-years away. Mira’s tail also tells a tale of its history – the material making it up has been slowly blown off over time, with the oldest material at the end of the tail having been released about 30,000 years ago.

JPL is the NASA body that manages the majority of the robotic missions to the planets and the solar system, this includes the highly successful Mars Rovers, Voyager, Cassini. You can subscribe to the NASA JPL newsletter by visiting this link.

Categories
Blogs Bookmarks Computere og Internet Education/Undervisning Kim Blog (English) Resources Technology Undervisning Videnskab

iTunes U: “e-Learning” done right?

iTunes U: the campus that never sleeps

I just discovered that Apple has launched a new section of the iTunes Store, called iTunes U – the U must be short for University.

Promising and FREE

My first impression is that iTunes U looks very, very promising.

iTunes U features video and audio lectures, lecture notes etc. from major US universities, like MIT; for instance an entire course on “Electromagnetism” from MIT with titles like “What holds our world together?…”, all organised in the familiar iTunes Store.

And the best is that the content is FREE – yes FREE.

Where are the Danish Us?

So when will we get content from Danish Universities on iTunes U? I’m not optimistic!

The reason I’m pessimistic, is the ongoing debate over “e-Learning” in Denmark. As usually, when it comes to anything remotely related to ICT, the debate is mostly about technology and ICT-skills.

STOP TALKING! Get producing!

I say: STOP TALKING: Get the infrastructure in place, and you can immediately begin producing and distributing lecture notes, audio and video content. It requires almost no ICT-skills to use an application like iTunes – all students has the skills to do so today.

Later on, more advanced e-Learning applications could be made, even though I doubt that they’ll ever work – I’m a firm believer in the fact that you’ll never be able to replace the teacher, and with the infrastructure in place, we can all become teachers as well as students.

Benefits of partnering with a commercial infrastructure provider

A major benefit of partnering with a commercial infrastructure provider like iTunes Store, is that it removes the hassles of making the technology work from the institutions, leaving them to worry about what they do best, producing content.

I’m sure that the content offered on iTunes U is available elsewhere, and that there are downsides to trust Apple with distributing the content, most likely in their proprietary formats, but the convenience of having it all show up in iTunes, which makes it so easy to access the content, and have it synced to the iPod, means that I can live with it – for now.

Despite concerns iTunes U is a wake-up call

I realise that Apple also is doing this to draw traffic to the iTunes Store, and to sell more iPods, Macs and Apple TVs, iTunes U is actually one of the biggest selling points for Apple TV I’ve seen so far.

Despite my concerns over iTunes U, it remains a great initiative – they’re getting so many things right – and it’s my hope that it will serve as an inspiration to the Danish Educational System: WAKE UP!

Categories
Blogs Bookmarks Computere og Internet Computerspil Design Education/Undervisning Hackers Kim Blog (English) Kunst Macintosh Mactopia Music Open Source Photography Resources Technology Undervisning Videnskab

Reboot9: BBC “caught” using the “two-dot-O-M-G” word

BBC News Logoreboot 9 logoAs you might have noticed, I attended the reboot “(un)conference” in Copenhagen last week, and it was great.

I’d like to draw your attention to the feature “Rebooting the Web 2.0 age” on reboot 9 that BBC ran during the “(un)conference”.

Here’s a quote from the article:

The future of the web is being debated at Reboot 9.0, a leading European grassroots technology and design conference in Copenhagen.

But…”oh-my-two-dot-oh-NO” they’re using the “two-dot-O-M-G” dreaded “two-dot-oh-YEAH” word…

The big question here for the start-ups and opinion formers is how to use Web 2.0’s focus on community to build the next generation of web tools and become Europe’s Web 2.0 poster child.

I guess I can forgive the BBC, since the feature is “more than decent” ;-), and they capture some of the spirit of reboot in this quote:

This year’s conference theme is Human? with many speakers grappling with such deep philosophical queries as what it means to be human. One session was called Humanism 101.

Understanding human behaviour and how to adapt those behaviours to technology and the web rather than the reverse is rare for technology devotees.

Last.fm LogoAnd Last.fm deserves all the love in the world, iTunes might never know what hit them.

However, it is no surprise as the big subject in the bars and on the grass outside was this week’s sale of London social software music service Last.fm.

Its creator Martin Stiskel, explaining why US broadcaster CBS would want to buy a music preference tool said: “They want to move from a content company to an audience company, giving the audiences control and learning from this and that’s why Last.fm was their choice.”

I’m nominating Last.fm for the price of being the “greatest service on the planet”, even though it makes it look like I have absolutely no taste in music – is it about time to get more discriminating, and start “acting my age, not my shoesize” – nah some people have actually expressed love for my personal radiostation ;-), and I get shouts like this:

Du er på alder med min far, men jeres musiksmag ligger usandsynligt langt fra hinanden. Det er meget godt klaret! Respekt herfra 🙂

(translation from Danish: You’re the age of my father, but your taste in music is unbelievably far from each others. That’s well done! Respect :)).

Categories
Blogs Bookmarks Computerspil Design Education/Undervisning Hackers IT Guruer Kunst Mactopia Open Source Resources Technology Undervisning Videnskab

Reboot9 (un)conference “spinoff”: the conversation continues @ the “rebooters” mailing list

The great reboot 9.0 Jaiku backchannel posterI just joined the new google groups (e.g. mailinglist), called rebooters.

The purpose of the group, is to have a “permanent backchannel” for the reboot (un)conference, since backchannels, like the Jaiku backchannel from reboot9, has a tendency to “die”.

The mailing list has the following description:

Missing the brainshift experienced from talking to all the brilliant rebooters? Keep the conversation going between reboots here…

It’s a good idea – that would have been even better, if it was set up, officially, through the reboot website, but because website technologies change all the time, the use of a relatively low-tech solution, like a mailing-list, is a not as bad an idea as it sounds – e-mail still is “the lowest common denominator”.

This might help to avoid the frustrations I experienced, when I learned that the “reboot 8” site had it’s URLs changed, making it appear that a lot of information from 2006, had either been lost, or, at best, made (too) difficult to locate.

“I want my Permalinks”, and I’m looking forward to the continued discussions and next year, where I suggest that the organisers make away with the “Wired style dot-oh-NO” numbering scheme, and just calls the event “reboot”!

Some background

“Reboot” is, according to the website:

[…]a community event for the practical visionaries who are at the intersection of digital technology and change all around us[…]

Reboot usually takes place end May/start June, in Copenhagen Denmark.

Categories
Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Rumforskning Technology Videnskab

Charles Simonyi – It’s the closest yet to a Dane in space

Soyuz Tma-10 PatchCharles Simonyi is now in space…

It’s almost like a Dane is going to space, since Charles Simonyi lived and worked in Denmark before being hired by Microsoft. He frequently visits Denmark in his Yacht Skat, and it’s impressive. I’ve seen Skat – docked at The Copenhagen Royal Castle – Amalienborg, like pictured in the link above. Skat is Danish for “treasure”, but “Skat” is normally used to express affection for your significant other, and it roughly translates to “darling” – it’s also a play on words, since “Skat” also means “Tax”.

Simonyi is best known – at least by g33k5 like me – for inventing the Hungarian notation – a special style of coding, where you indicate the datatype by prefixing the variable name with a type indicator, eg. nCount and intCount to indicate that Count is a variable that is declared as a number or an integer, szTitle to indicate that the variable szTitle is a zero-terminated string.

I’ve been using Hungarian notation since 1987, I believe that the Hungarian notation actually made C a usable language, and it has saved us from many bugs.

These days I still use Hungarian notation, even though it should not be nescessary in object oriented languages, and even Microsoft, that was instrumental in the spread of Hungarian notation, now discourages it’s use.

It’s an inspiration that someone working in my field can do these things, Charles Simonyi seems to be living my dream.

Godspeed Charles.

Categories
Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Rumforskning Technology Videnskab

Dawn Community

Asteroid Belt 1

Dawn Community

Send your name to the asteroid belt on the Dawn spacecraft. Your name will be recorded onto a microchip that will be placed aboard the spacecraft accompanying it on its mission to the asteroid belt. After entering your name below, you will have the opportunity to print a document that verifies your journey aboard the spacecraft.

My name is travelling on the Dawn mission, a fitting birthday gift. Thank you to NASA.

Categories
Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Rumforskning Technology Videnskab

JPL.NASA.GOV: Feature Stories: The Spark of a New Era

JPL 70th anniversary banner

JPL.NASA.GOV: Feature Stories: The Spark of a New Era

The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is celebrating it’s 70th birthday.

In this feature the early history of JPL is described.

I consider the JPL to be the most succesful NASA subdivision, as the true pioneeers of planetary exploration.

70 years ago my own mother was born and my father was 7. Back then, the things we do today would have been considered so far into the future, that you might have been committed to a closed ward, if you had suggested that humanity could, for instance, visit all the planets in the solar system within a lifetime. Just try to imagine where we can be in another 70 years, what put’s it into perspective is that it might be so amazing, that we can’t even begin to imagine it.

Congratulations to the JPL.

Categories
Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Rumforskning Technology Videnskab

NASA – ‘McMurdo’ Panorama from Spirit’s ‘Winter Haven’

NASA Spirt Mars Rover banner
NASA – ‘McMurdo’ Panorama from Spirit’s ‘Winter Haven’

To celebrate the 1,000th sol of the Spirit rover Mars mission, NASA has released a panorama.

Congratulations to NASA with this amazing success, makes you wonder what the next generation of rovers will achieve.

Oct. 26, 2006, marks Spirit’s 1,000th sol of what was planned as a 90-sol mission. (A sol is a Martian day, which lasts 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds). The rover has lived through the most challenging part of its second Martian winter. Its solar power levels are rising again. Spring in the southern hemisphere of Mars will begin in early 2007. Before that, the rover team hopes to start driving Spirit again toward scientifically interesting places in the “Inner Basin” and “Columbia Hills” inside Gusev crater. The McMurdo panorama is providing team members with key pieces of scientific and topographic information for choosing where to continue Spirit’s exploration adventure.

Categories
'i dag' (Danish) Blogs Bookmarks Historier/Stories Kim Blog (English) Videnskab

Den første fugl var en and

Den første fugl var en andDen første fugl var en and (Originally uploaded by K.Job).

Hmm…Illuderet (ahem Illustreret) Videnskab skulle nok overveje at læse det de selv skriver…

For the people with limited grasp of the Danish language…

“And” means “duck” AND “hoax” in Danish…So the first oiseaux (bird, fugl) was a duck (and=hoax)

LOL