Gravity, a mere nuisance to Christian, was a terror to Pope, Pagan, and Despair. To the mouse and any smaller animal it presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.
As I kid I used to imagine what Deinocheirus looked like, I’m sure my books and cards had this thing looking like a T-Rex sized Deinonychus, either way it was the most badass looking dino ever.
Yeah it’s pretty weird lookin.
Scans of a Children’s Encyclopedia from 1959 USSR.
Modelling black holes for Interstellar lead to most accurate simulations yet:
“Chris really wanted us to sell the idea that the black hole is spherical,” Franklin says. “I said, ‘You know, it’s going to look like a disk.’ The only thing you can see is the way it warps starlight.” Then Franklin started reading about accretion disks, agglomerations of matter that orbit some black holes. Franklin figured that he could use this ring of orbiting detritus to define the sphere.
Von Tunzelmann tried a tricky demo. She generated a flat, multicolored ring—a stand-in for the accretion disk—and positioned it around their spinning black hole. Something very, very weird happened. “We found that warping space around the black hole also warps the accretion disk,” Franklin says. “So rather than looking like Saturn’s rings around a black sphere, the light creates this extraordinary halo.”
That’s what led Thorne to his “why, of course” moment when he first saw the final effect. The Double Negative team thought it must be a bug in the renderer. But Thorne realized that they had correctly modeled a phenomenon inherent in the math he’d supplied.
A Summer spent visiting museums has left me a little hooked on historical natural illustration (amongst many, many other things).
The American Museum of Natural History are posting images from their archives on a few pinterest boards, the Vertebrate Zoology Anatomy Illustrations board is probably the pick of the bunch.
It looks like they rotate the images they have up on the board periodically. The Natural Histories board also has a few nice pics.
Also worth mentioning, you can pick up Art of Nature by the Natural History Museum (London) for £4 here. The illustrations are grouped by continent and it’s a good mix of people, plants and animals (certainly worth £4!).
Currently in my Amazon basket I’ve also got Curious Beasts, a collection of animal illustrations from the 15th-19th centuries produced by the British Museum. I missed the exhibition when it came to the Midlands though I was lucky enough to catch a similarly themed exhibition in Copenhagen a few years ago (complete with mermaid skeleton), I imagine I’ll know a few of the prints already but even if not I’m fairly sure it’ll be up my street.
As the articles states at the outset, this is about modelling capabilities rather than likely doom: If the Earth stopped spinning.
If the earth’s gravity alone was responsible for creating a new geography, the huge bulge of oceanic water—which is now about 8 km high at the equator—would migrate to where a stationary earth’s gravity would be the strongest.
Interesting point from towards the end:
Most scientists agree that the solar day (related to the speed of rotation) is continuously getting longer. This minimal increase of the day length is due mainly to the oceanic tidal friction. When the estimated rate of the slowdown was projected back to past geologic eons, it showed that the length of a day was several hours shorter than today.
(via Kottke)