Tag: deep space

2200 year-old: the Antikythera computer
Computers: someone or something that calculates something. That would be the general idea. But (machine) computers don't have to be digital. In 1901, divers found the Antikythera mechanism in a shipwreck in the Aegean sea. It is old. Very old. Estimated, in fact, to be from 200-100 BC. That would be 2200 years old. They were ...

Synthetic diamonds are for forever too
– Synthetic diamonds are real. – Of course they are, I can touch them. –No, really real. They ARE diamonds. Geddit? They are structurally, chemically e-x-a-c-t-l-y the same as what comes out of the ground. They are lab-created. Lab "grown"; or nicer: cultivated gemstones. So the ruby IS a ruby, the emerald an emerald, the ...

Scalable geologic timeline II
For the geo-geeks out there, I have finished my geologic timescale brush; now better and more accurate than the previous one. Download the Illustrator file here Download .EPS file here Included is a swatch folder with all the colours as per the instructions of the International Commission on Stratigraphy: You are welcome to use this in ...

Smarties and the shape of the earth
The sphere is, according to Wikipedia, a reasonably correct model for earth. But mathematically the earth is an oblate spheroid. An example of that would be smarties and M&Ms, spheres squished at the poles. As a result of gravitation and the rotation of earth, it is about 21 km longer than the Earth’s polar radius. This is, of course, ...

Control room – custom drawing
As mentioned in the post Mechanical owls – custom drawing, I am not the most efficient at xmas presents. So this is the custom drawing my brother got, a good few weeks after christmas. It is simply called the control room, for obvious reasons. There are some personal hints to my brother, but overall, it ...

Kingdom: mineral
(According to Linnaean taxonomy, there are three kingdoms: vegetable, animal, mineral) After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains. – Walt Whitman The ultimate inspiration. Nature, the largest multivariate network there is ...