On our recent trip to Florida, Melissa and I were lucky enough to get to see the launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery on STS-120, a mission to the International Space Station. I have wanted to watch a shuttle launch for nearly as long as I can remember, so it was a fantastic stroke of [...]

On Wednesday night we had a brief storm that came through in the early evening and cleared the atmosphere of most of the haze we’ve had recently. This made for a great view of the moon, one day past full. I grabbed my camera and snapped a few pictures. Here’s one of the better ones: [...]

Last night we watched the first episode of Planet Earth, a documentary series co-produced by the BBC and the Discovery Channel. It features some absolutely stunning nature photography created with some cutting edge technology. Planet Earth was the first program of its kind filmed with high-definition cameras, and the results are spectacular. The producers also [...]

Lately I’ve been playing around with Processing, an environment for writing quick, simple programs to do computer graphics (among other things). To learn how it works, I wrote a few simple scripts to calculate some of the more famous examples from the field of complex dynamics (inspired by a book I’m reading). Lorenz Attractor The [...]

A team of paleontologists has discovered soft tissue inside a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex femur bone found in Montana. So far the scientists have identified “what looked like blood vessels, bone cells and perhaps even blood cells.” They haven’t yet come up with an explanation for how soft tissue could have remained so for 70 million [...]