coolchicksfromhistory:

Sophia Brahe (1556-1643)

Art by Carolyn Bernhard (website, tumblr)

Tycho Brahe was one of the most important astronomers of the sixteenth century.  The last major astronomer to work without the aid of a telescope, Tycho built his own instruments to track the movements of celestial bodies.  His work paved the way for Johannes Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.

Tycho’s younger sister Sophia assisted him in his scientific observations.  Their family was part of Denmark’s high nobility and although the Brahe children were well educated, their parents did not consider science an appropriate field for people of rank.  Nevertheless, Sophia taught herself astronomy and as a teenager helped her brother observe a lunar eclipse.  Throughout their lives, Tycho and Sophia maintained a close correspondence. 

Sophia also studied alchemy, horticulture, and chemistry, but her most lasting individual work is her genealogy of Danish noble families.  Published in 1626, it remains an important source for Danish historians today.  

kqedscience:

Cleared of Charges of Setting Off a School Explosion, Florida Honor Student Heads to Space Camp

“The explosion struck a chord with 18-year NASA veteran Homer Hickam, a former lead astronaut training manager for Spacelab, and later for the International Space Station.

In the late 1950s, Hickam had a brush with law enforcement for allegedly starting a forest fire. State police came to his high school and led him and his friends away in handcuffs, but his high school physics professor and school principal came to the rescue, clearing him of wrongdoing.

Back then, schools did not have zero tolerance rules. Kids could make their mistakes without the threat of a criminal record, or serving time in jail.

“I couldn’t let this go without doing something,” Hickam said. “I’m not a lawyer, but I could give her something that would encourage her. I’ve worked closely with the U.S. Space Academy, and so I purchased a scholarship for her.”

(via theolduvaigorge)

You know it’s going to be a good day when it starts with cleaning poop off of your cat’s butt.

not language but a map: Star Trek Into Darkness: the spoiler review (At io9)

gyzym:

fuck-it-fire-everything:

After making a mere $84 million at the U.S. box office, Star Trek Into Darkness is considered by some to be a disappointment. Perhaps the problem is that it was a touch confusing. To help our readers better understand it, we’ve complied and answered these Frequently Asked Questions about the movie.

Maximum spoilers ahead…

How does the movie start?

Well, with Kirk and Bones fucking with a planet of primitive aliens. They steal some kind of holy scroll, and then get chased through a red jungle.

Seems like kind of a dick move.

Well, it’s not very clear, but ostensibly they’ve stolen the scroll to get chased, in order to draw the aliens away from a volcano that’s about to explode.

Okay, that seems reasonable.

Except that 1) when the volcano erupts, it’s going to kill everybody on the planet, so it hardly matters where they are, and 2) Spock is getting dropped down into the volcano to set off a cold fusion bomb.

Wait, what?

Yeah, he sets off the cold fusion bomb and all the lava freezes.

You know cold fusion isn’t actually cold, right? It’s only “cold” in the sense that opposed to regular fusion it’s not a bazillion degrees hot.

Huh.

And did you say Spock was in the volcano? Why the hell didn’t they just beam the bomb in there?

Um, something about the planet’s magnetic field. Although they do beam Spock out of the volcano just a few minutes later, so…

And why did Spock have to go with the bomb to set it off? Are you telling me in the 23^rd century that people don’t have a way to detonate bombs remotely? That’s stupid.

Well —

And why the fuck is the Enterprise just carrying around a cold fusion suitcase bomb anyways?

Look, you’re getting very upset, and this is just the first scene of the movie.

READ MORE 

(I was going to make a post about how mad Star Trek made me, but this does it better, with bonus tears of laughter. )

oh my god this is actually the best thing

(via ferrific)

You just couldn’t let an opportunity to be critical go by, could you?

ancientpeoples:

Roman Bathroom Habits

The Romans were not shy when it came to doing their “business”. Something that we today regard as an act that demands a certain level of privacy, in ancient Rome, bathroom habits were much more open and, to a great extent, totally lacking in privacy. In a city of over one-million people, ninety-five percent of them did not have access to a private bathroom. Only wealthy Romans could afford the luxury of having a private bathroom by tapping directly into the public aqueducts, which brought running water into their homes. However, for the majority of Romans lacking their own bathroom, there were two options available.

The first option was to go in any ordinary pot that you kept in your home or place of business; moreover, in the city of Rome itself, large urinal pots stood at several street corners. These “piss pots” actually had a very significant role in everyday life. The pots were collected by fullers because the urine functioned as an ancient form of bleach. Stale urine, known as wash, was a source of ammonium salts and assisted in cleansing and whitening cloth; urine made your whites white! In addition, tanners soaked animal skins in urine in order to remove hair fibers before tanning. Oddly enough these pots were eventually taxed by the emperor Vespasian which resulted in the piss pots being nicknamed after him. Flying waste was also a very common problem in Ancient Rome. Ancient writers mention anecdotes involving citizens emptying their pots from third or fourth-story windows on to whoever was walking in the street. There were laws enacted solely for the purpose of protecting those who had been hit by flying waste, “Damages to be paid by throwers of waste into the street if the person hit was injured, no damages paid for clothing or if hit outside of daylight hours.” Nevertheless, the simplest way of disposing of your waste was to throw it into the street, because the streets of Rome were naturally angled towards the center allowing waste to roll into the gutters. Some Insulae,(multi-story apartment buildings), however, could be linked by gravity-fed pipes that led to a main cesspit. Farmers would collect “night-soil” from these cesspits in order to fertilize their fields.

The second option available to the inhabitants of Rome was to head to a public bathroom. Ancient Roman public bathrooms were made out of long rows of massive stone with a hole cut into the stone every few feet. Located in front of the seating area is a channel or elongated basin where your sponge sticks are located. Sponge sticks you say, what the devil for? The Romans obviously did not use toilet paper, but used sponges soaked in water. You would grab a sponge attached to a stick and clean yourself, if you need more cleaning you could plunge the sponge stick back into the little stream and clean some more. Once you are finished with the sponge stick, you scrape the sponge against the side of the stone hole you are seated on and let it fall into the flowing water; quite a logical system reminiscent of modern day bidets. Underneath those Roman derrières flowed a system of plumbing that rivaled modern day cities like New York City. Constant running water flushes away the waste into an enormous sewage systems that runs under the streets of Rome, the Cloaca Maxima (Great Drain). This system is made possible by several aqueducts that flow into the city keeping it supplied with fresh flowing water. The Roman’s effective sewage system was not in place in order to combat the possibility of disease, but more so to combat smell; the role of impure water in causing disease seemed to be little understood by the Romans.

In some ancient bathrooms there is space for one-hundred people at a time. The bathrooms are open to all genders and all ages, so imagine men, women, and children all standing or sitting, doing their business next to one another in an open space. People are discussing business or gossiping to one another while going to the bathroom. Since for most Romans privacy is a unheard of aspect of life, why would it be different in this situation? However, the public bathrooms are not only visited by the common citizen, the wealthy also frequent them. Every location in ancient Rome where large crowds gather is an opportunity for wealthy Romans to pander to their constituents. Most upper-class Romans were running for some sort of political office, so the public bathrooms were a great location for mingling with the Roman people. Therefore, if you wished to hear the local gossip, chat with a friend or stranger, or simply do your business, the public bathrooms are always a good choice. Roman bathroom habits were communal, lacking in privacy, and surprisingly efficient, and they also allowed one to say, “I had a lovely conversation with a few people while sitting on the toilet the other day.”

(via thatlittleegyptologist)

(via colorschanging)

photojojo:

How Street Photography Can Turn into Astrophotography

In his Planet Universe series, Adam Kennedy uses a little editing to transform rusty old fire hydrants into his own celestial bodies. 

We asked Adam about his process. Here’s what he told us!

I normally just photograph the rusty hydrant from several different angles, because many times I can make two to three planets from one.

I try to let each hydrant guide the process, because the thing that makes the planets interesting is the idea that they are reflections of natural processes on earth, making use of digital manipulation simply to highlight that fact.

I have tried this process with many objects other than fire hydrants, but they often do not work very nicely. For example many wooden banisters have round wooden tops, but the rusty metal orbs are just so perfect because there are such clearly defined areas for the land and sea.

The fact that the darker rusty regions lend themselves to deep blue oceans makes me feel fortunate that this city (San Francisco) has such peculiar fire hydrants, and what would seem to be a shortage of white paint.

via Psfk

(via colorschanging)

destroyed-and-abandoned:

Abandoned Hotel in Columbia

(via dinosaurhorrorshow)

lolsofunny:

(lol here!)

(via ladyfabulous)

alphynix:

There’s a trend in paleoart known as “shrink-wrapping”, where dinosaurs and other beasties are drawn as little more than the barest amount of flesh over a skeleton, as if the distant past was entirely populated by bizarrely anorexic wildlife. It was very prevalent in the 90s, although thankfully less so these days.

A recently-released book, All Yesterdays, features some wonderful speculative paleoart, showcasing a few more fanciful and fun depictions of prehistoric life as a reminder that we might still be just as wrong about some of these animals as were the lumbering swamp-monster dinosaurs of the 1950s. It also has a section based around “reconstructing” a few animals of today as they might be seen by a non-human paleontologist in the far future.

And I’ve done something similar here. This is a suitably shrink-wrapped and scalified version of a modern critter — our hypothetical future-scientist only had a skeleton to work from, and no soft-tissue evidence at all for this particular group of animals.

So, let’s have a little interactivity here: what is this thing?

Edit: The answer is here. Thanks for guessing! :D

(via scientificillustration)

(via thatlittleegyptologist)

theoddmentemporium:

Human Head Encased in an Iron Cage

It’s been a while since I posted anything quite so macabre as this but the image of a group of boys making this grim discovery as they played in the sands at Hempstead, L.I., in the mid-1930s, had a grim allure for some reason. Perhaps because of its links with the golden age of piracy. 

According to Corbis Images the cage is ‘evidence of an early pirates’ torture device,’ namely, gibbeting. In the earliest recorded examples of gibbeting from the 17th century, the criminal would be bound in the metal cage and hung from a scaffold until they died of starvation, and it was a popular method of execution for piracy, highwaymen, murderers, and… sheep stealers. The positioning of such a structure next to public roads served as a warning to other potential criminals that they too might suffer the same fate.

historical-nonfiction:

The unbroken seal on King Tut’s tomb.

the-science-llama:

If Earth Had Rings

First off, they would be really pretty to look at. They would also dominate the sky in both night and day at exactly the same place as they would never rise nor set. And at night you would see the Earth’s shadow swing across the rings, like in the 4th photo here.

However, life would be very different on Earth if this were the case. Nocturnal animals would have a hard time being nocturnal, as the light reflecting from the rings would illuminate the night.

Because we are closer to the Sun than Saturn is, the rings would be more rocky than ice, making them less bright but still pretty bright. In fact, you would see far less stars at night (living anywhere other than the equator or the arctic circle) because of the light pollution and not to mention ruin most meteor showers because of that.

During the day the rings would block sunlight in certain regions of the planet creating wild weather cycles and effecting plant life as well. So basically, they would be definitely pretty to look at but they would also make a whole lot of things screwy.

Illustrations by Ron Miller // io9
— Click the photos for captions

(via historyintheworks)