Added 1 new A* page:I've got a ridiculous backlog of blog topics! My bookmark list is over two screens high now and I have to wait for it to scroll up and down to find stuff, that's how ridiculous it is--and I'm not even trying to think about the whole other pile of topics I accumulated a year or two ago and just had to mothball because I was falling farther and farther behind in talking about stuff in the daily A* news. Oy!
Obviously I've got to face the fact that the increased time I've been putting into the artwork has been sucking up my old A* blogging time, and I won't be able to do the hugely verbose, bandwidth-heavy blog posts I did in the carefree ol' days--not if I want to get a decent page drawn, anyway. So you know what time I think it is? Blogdozin' time! Yeah, instead of writing a whole photo essay about them--alas, time, etc--I'm just gonna start throwing mad news topic blurbs and links at you, and it's up to you if you wanna go check 'em out! *I* think they're all pretty interesting, and I'm not able to do them real justice myself, which is awful, but I think it's better to get them to you some way than no way. And I NEED to be able to start paring down my bookmark list, ugh. :P So let's start!
• Did you know we're in an ice age? It's true! You can tell because there are still year-round ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica--the current ice age started about 2.6 million years ago, at the start of the Pleistocene epoch, with a series of glacial periods that killed off megafauna like mastadons, sabre-toothed tigers, and neanderthals; at their maximum extent, ice sheets up to four or so kilometers thick covered 30% of the Earth's surface, and global sea level dropped by as much as 100 meters. Fortunately for us there are warmer and cooler cycles in the midst of an ice age; the last glacial--or cool--period ended about 10,000 years ago, and we're currently in an inter-glacial period in this ice age, during which temperatures are relatively warm. According to some scientists who study the complex cycles of glacial and interglacial periods, we're just about due for this interglacial period to end, and some even posit that man-made global warming is helping prevent the onset of the next glacial period--which would probably be a good thing for us in the medium-long term, you know (probably not in the short term :P). Of course, that's just a theory.
• The Event Horizon Telescope is a project coordinating radio telescopes worldwide into a cooperative network targeted toward one very special subject of study: the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sgr A*--their ultimate goal being to capture an image of A*'s event horizon! They perhaps optimistically think that this can be achieved in this decade with refinement and increasing resolving power and coordination of radio telescopes. Well, that would certainly be cool to see!
• One of the telescopes involved in that project is the South Pole Telescope--a 10-meter radio telescope located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, which is precisely at Earth's south pole. It's the best place on Earth for radio observations, because the atmosphere is very thin, and the air, thanks to the freezing temperatures and distance from the ocean, is very dry, which means there's less water moisture to interfere with incoming radio waves from space; also, you've got months and months where the Sun never rises, making the atmospheric conditions very stable. You can't view the northern sky from there, admittedly, but fortunately for our purposes, A* is in the southern sky, so the South Pole is perfect! In an interesting coincidence, the telescope, which began making observations in 2007, is run by my alma mater! (Not that I can take any credit whatsoever--I was an art major :P.)
• The Findings section of the Large Hadron Collider Wikipedia page is an interesting spot to watch, what with all the excitement about CERN's gigantic Swiss-based particle accelerator looking for the Higgs boson (supposed to explain gravity) and all that. You'll find the "quark-gluon plasma" I mentioned yesterday in there, but the one I thought was really funny was bottomonium, a new particle or particle state observed at the LHC in December. Bottomonium is an example of "quarkonium," which Wikipedia defines as "a flavorless meson whose constituents are a quark and its own antiquark." Yes I have no idea what that means really, my brain just can't take these names seriously. Tragically, "toponium" does not exist, "since the top quark decays through the electroweak interaction before a bound state can form." Well, dang.
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