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POPSOur world a giant hologram? - New theory, new questions, new possibilities... 'If space-time is a grainy hologram, then you can think of the universe as a sphere whose outer surface is papered in Planck length-sized squares, each containing one bit of information. The holographic principle says that the amount of information papering the outside must match the number of bits contained inside the volume of the universe. Since the volume of the spherical universe is much bigger than its outer surface, how could this be true? Hogan realised that in order to have the same number of bits inside the universe as on the boundary, the world inside must be made up of grains bigger than the Planck length. "Or, to put it another way, a holographic universe is blurry," says Hogan. "Contrary to all expectations, it brings its microscopic quantum structure within reach of current experiments" "If you lived inside a hologram, you could tell by measuring the blurring,"
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POPSMapping Kerouac: The Grammatical Artwork of Stefanie Posavec Posavec dissects every word, phrase, sentence, and subject of Kerouac's On the Road to invent new ways of looking at the familiar masterpiece. The diagrams make for beautiful art in their own right. (See source for high-res pictures.) In her structure analysis, each chapter explodes in a color-coded starburst of topical breakdowns. At a glance, you can see Kerouac's focus wander from the sketches of local life in the beginning, to depictions of work and travel in the middle, with women and the subject of love dominating the latter chapters. The comparative sentence diagrams are what really drew me in. It's fascinating to behold an entire literary work all at once on one page. What's more, Kerouac's casual prose style can be differentiated immediately from the stately, grandiose writing of Faulkner, not to mention the terse, claustrophobic style of Orwell's fiction. Literary reductionism at its most fun and beautiful.
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POPSSpitzer Space Telescope I saw a story where scientists thought they'd found out where cosmic dust came from. There were no pictures, so I followed the link to the telescope. There was much more to see, so I clipped the telescope. I think it's more of an infra red
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POPSVoyager 2 probe reaches solar system boundary From the article: Instead of seeing a very abrupt drop, the spacecraft saw a gradual slowing of the solar wind ahead of each crossing, followed by a relatively small drop at the termination shock itself. "It's taken the Voyagers 30-odd years to get to this region of space," he told New Scientist. "It's a completely new regime. For the very first time we're really beginning to study how winds interact with the interstellar medium, and we're doing it in situ."
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