I watched a TED video recently by George Smoot entitled “The design of the universe”. Smoot is an astrophysicist who gave a talk about the overall structure of the expanding universe with special attention paid to the interplay of dark matter and the visible matter that we observe today. He had a number of interesting visualizations especially one that let you see the distribution of dark matter throughout the universe (simulation of course). What struck me was the overall amount of dark matter vs. visible matter, and more interestingly the lattice structure of the dark matter. It was interesting to see that something on a macro scale that is beyond my imagination looks almost identical to a microscopic scale (fractals ahoy!) The video is about 18 mins long and well worth it.
It’s a sad day when a Mercedes SUV runs faster than an Audi RS4 Avant. Who knows if the RS4 guys is a good driver or not, but he got schooled by the ML63 which had three passengers in it. Ah well . . .
Winding Road magazine has this wonderful video about a 267mph Maglev train in Shanghai. The video is fascinating to me for a handful of reasons. On the technology side, it’s seems like a really amazing experience. Nice, clean and pristine train going so smoothly that the video doesn’t even shake that much anywhere over 100mph. Imagine going that fast on Amtrak and how violent it seems (maybe besides the Acela trains on the East coast). Also, the economic development that is evident in the video is also fascinating. You can see the outside view go from being highly urban, to mostly suburban to quickly agrarian. You always read about the economic development in China and India, it’s neat to see the whole thing flash by in a 10 minute video about a train!
I read about this video by an active duty Army specialist via the Very Short List. Hard to imagine facing these situations on a daily basis. Our troops are making difficult decisions every day and having to live with the consequences.
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