Do you know your neighborhood?
Do you know your neighborhood? No, not that neighborhood. I'm asking whether you know the nearby stars. Here's a cool 3D graphic that provides lots of good information about our solar neighbors.
Fluid space
Here you'll see and hear a beautiful Hawaiian evening sky to go with beautiful music. Such a spectacular way end a long day! Strongly consider watching this short video in HD: The vivid fluidity of the star-filled sky in this video is something I'd never before viewed. There is an ocean of stars up there, including the vast edge of the Milky Way galaxy itself. Watching the "movement" of those stars allowed me to feel, like never before, that our own orb is moving through space. I've long known, intellectually, that the Earth is spinning and rotating through space, but this time-lapse video really brings that point home. We are moving too, in a dramatic way, every second of every day. We aren't the stable platform from which one can objectively view the rest of existence. This video seemingly pushed me to an Archimedean point. Bravo!
Why are all the Youtube stars from LA?
Youtube was supposed to be one of Web 2.0's shining examples of user-generated original content. In a world (in 2005) when everything worthwhile was already online and fully consumed, Youtube was supposed to provide us with a new outlet to both create and consume. I know it is hard to recall Youtube's original intent as a creative landscape, but keep in mind that the site's slogan was and is "Broadcast Yourself". Most of us don't broadcast ourselves, or watch broadcasts of other selves. The last time I fired up Youtube, I was looking for a free way to stream James and the Giant Peach. Any cute skits or beautiful shorts I discovered thereafter were barely bonuses; they were just tasty little incidentals to be quickly forgotten. Most people go to Youtube to view unoriginal creations- movie, TV and music clips or mashups thereof. Youtube's most viewed videos of all time are music videos like "7 Things" by Miley Cyrus and Rihanna's "Don't Stop the Music". My little sister uses Youtube as a combination DVR-Itunes-Pandora player. Nothing original seeps in unless I send it to her myself- and then it's usually just a video of a cute animal, not a creative work. Ah, but Youtube does have some high-caliber producers of original goodies! People who put on elaborate comedy skits with costumes, professional lighting and substantial editing. People who pull in millions of views. People with whom Youtube has formed profitable, advertising-driven partnerships. These people are broadcasting themselves. But they aren't like "us". They are all from Hollywood.
Astrophysicist George Smoot explores how the universe congealed into structures.
In this TED video, astrophysicist, cosmologist and Nobel Prize winner George Smoot studies the cosmic microwave background radiation -- the afterglow of the Big Bang. Smoot presents his lecture with the help of dramatic images created through the crunching of massive amounts of real-life data. The bottom line is that…