Strange Maps today has a post with an interesting graphic comparing the planets of the solar system to various countries around the world.
If Jupiter = Russia, then Mars = Switzerland! (Din't Piers Anthony have a series, back in the '80s, with a very similar premise?)
Everyone else is linking to this -- I think I saw it at SF Signal first -- so I'll join the horde.
It's a big image, with "All (known) Bodies in the Solar System Larger Than 200 Miles in Diameter."
From it, I was reminded (I'm going to pretend I already knew this) that Ganymede and Titan are larger than Mercury, that five other moons and the new dwarf planet Eris are larger than Pluto, and that there are a heck of a lot of "Trans-Neptunian Objects."
Yesterday the Jet Propulasion Laboratory released several images, and a long article, about an odd rotating hexagonal feature that the Cassini probe witnessed at Saturn's north pole. The feature was also seen in images from Voyager 1 and 2, twenty years ago.
It's a good thing we're not living in a SF novel, or something would be coming out to kick our butts right about now...
Technology Review has an article looking at several proposals to arrest global warming by cooling the earth -- including one proposed by SF writer and physicist Gregory Benford.
[via Locus Online]
Gregory Benford explains to Cosmos magazine’s readers how to “write an awesome scientific paper.”
Charles Stross has a radical but ingenious suggestion: our solar system only contains four planets, and Earth isn't one of them.
John Scalzi, on the other hand, is perfectly happy with a solar system with hundreds of planets, most of them tiny, dark rocks.
(I know and I'm sorry, but I just couldn't resist.)
John Scalzi and Scott Westerfeld have been battling -- to the entertaiment of all onlookers -- about whether that odd Kuiper belt object Pluto should be considered a "real" planet or not. Scalzi started it all here, and the comments led Westerfeld to reply here. Scalzi posted two quick responses, and then a longer one.
As for me? Well, I like things to be tidy, and I like them to stay the way they've always been, so I'm torn. Pluto is already untidy (what with its bizarre orbit and teensy-tiny size), but it's been a planet my whole life. I guess I want the astronomers to go off and do whatever it is they do -- keep discovering cool stuff and so on -- but never mention the p-word again.
The (UK) Mail & Guardian reports that a team of scientists from Albany, New York (my birthplace -- go Albany!) have demonstrated, in a Paris exhibition, technology for direct brain control of a computer.
Good news: a scientist in India thinks he has discovered alien life.
Bad news: it's a bunch of single-cell red stuff that fell like rain in 2001, so, even if it is alien, it's not terribly exciting.