Mike Elgan posts (on G+) “Google+ is one of the 15 best blogging platforms, according to The Next Web.”
LOL! What’s funny about this statement is that I can’t even think of five blogging plaforms. At least that are still relevant, e.g., leaving out Movable Type (which I really enjoyed) and LiveJournal.
Further, after looking at the article on The Next Web, I think the above headline overstates their case.
Usually when you see a blue nebula in an image, it’s a reflection nebula where primarily dust is reflecting star light. In this case NGC 2020 is apparently an emission nebula with ionized hydrogen causing most of the blue glow.
The pink-tinged cloud on the right, NGC 2014, is a glowing cloud of mostly hydrogen gas. It contains a cluster of hot young stars. The energetic radiation from these new stars strips electrons from the atoms within the surrounding hydrogen gas, ionising it and producing a characteristic red glow.
In addition to this strong radiation, massive young stars also produce powerful stellar winds that eventually cause the gas around them to disperse and stream away. To the left of the main cluster, a single brilliant and very hot star [2] seems to have started this process, creating a cavity that appears encircled by a bubble-like structure called NGC 2020. The distinctive blueish colour of this rather mysterious object is again created by radiation from the hot star — this time by ionising oxygen instead of hydrogen.
Image credit: European Southern Observatory CC-BY-3.0.
John E. Vincent on blog dot lusi talks about trying out Go.
Chrome has gotten so slow and uses so much memory. I downloaded the lastest Opera this morning and tried it on Gmail and Picasaweb. It was much faster and left a lot more free memory! When composing a message in Gmail I didn’t notice any loss of functionality.
Chrome was so fast and a joy to use when it was new. What has happened to Chrome? And why?
[Update Sat 2013-08-17 05:19:34 -0400: Just to be clear, I haven’t actually switched to using Opera. I still use Chrome as my primary browser. However, as a minimalist, I like simple, clean and fast. I’ll give Chrome a “clean,” but I don’t think it’s simple or fast now.]
The MOOC That Roared How Georgia Tech’s new, super-cheap online master’s degree could radically change American higher education. By Gabriel Kahn at Slate.
Image credit: Steam engine at Georgia Tech with the Tech Tower in the background by Max Veers, 2007. CC-BY-SA 2.5.
As storage grows exponentially, it’s getting harder to keep up with the specification of data capacity and other big numbers. Even with kilobytes (KB), megabytes (MB), terabytes (TB), etc., by the time we get to petabytes (PB), exabytes (EB), zettabytes (ZB), and yottabytes (YB), we’ve long lost any sense of relative size.
I’m proposing a notation called K-Factor (KF), which is a size converted to base-1024, i.e., it represents how many factors of 1024, factors of K, are multiplied together. The K-Factor of a value is just the integer part of it’s log-base-1024 value. It’s easier than it sounds.
With such a notation in hand, we can cruise on beyond to 9 KF, 10 KF, etc.
Using KF, you might specify a 2-TB disk as a 2-4KF disk and 4 GB of RAM as 4 3KF. Storage space of 16 petabytes would be 16 5KF.
As usual, one would have to recall that a difference between two sizes of 1 KF would mean a factor of 1024 larger, a difference of 2 KF would be roughly a factor of a million (10242), 3 KF approximately a billion, etc.
I have yet to find a similar scheme in the searching I’ve done so far.
Via @universetoday
Behind the Scenes at Kitt Peak Observatory: What is an Observing Run Really Like? by Shannon Hall
Kitt Peak used to be the premier US observatory. Even though there are much larger telescopes and sites now, yet it remains an impressive place.
This is my third trip to Kitt Peak, but my first chance to observe on the Mayall 4-meter telescope. The first thing to know about the 4-meter is that it is a colossal maze. Literally. There are 16 stories of rooms, now obsolete and out of date, before reaching the base of the telescope itself.
Via @universetoday
David Dickinson does an excellent job of explaining the so-called super moon along with a nice bit of lunar orbital mechanics and effects.
The bottom line is that it’s not that big a deal. You probably can’t tell the difference by looking at the moon. The weather and other local conditions, along with whether the moon is rising or high in the sky, have a much greater effect on what you see.
The news buzz of the “super moon” also causes more people to stop and take a moment to look at the moon. Then they notice, “Wow! That thing really is big and bright in the sky!” That’s a nice thing that astronomers generally just to more often anyway.
Welcome to the Unix Tree. Here you can browse the source code and manuals of various old versions of Unix. For every file, you can also find related files from other versions: this can help show how the different versions of Unix are related. Most of the Unix versions below come from the Unix Archive.
Image: Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at a pretty well maxed out DEC PDP11 computer and two Teletype model 33 terminals. PanelSwitchman at Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
