Quotation – February 27, 2013

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end … but not necessarily in that order.

Jean Luc Godard

Quotation – February 24, 2013

A man performs but one duty — the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.

Mark Twain

Quotation – February 20, 2013

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths.  No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.

Mark Twain

Google’s Interactive Starmap Will Eat Your Day Whole

DATE: FEB 12, 2013 | AUTHOR: DAVID WHARTON | CATEGORY: SCI-FI IN REAL LIFE

 via GiantFreakinRobot.com

Want to wave goodbye to any chance of productivity for the rest of the day? Then step right up to 100,000 Stars, an interactive starmap from those mad geniuses at Google’s Creative Lab team. The map allows you to click, scroll, and otherwise explore a (mostly) accurate representation of our cosmic “neck of the woods.” It’s gorgeous, it’s fascinating, and it will absolutely force you to cancel any meetings you had planned for the rest of the day.

Here’s Google’s official description of the map:

Visualizing the exact location of every star in the galaxy is a problem of, well, galactic proportions. With over 200 billion stars, capturing every detail of the Milky Way currently defies scientists and laptops alike. However, using imagery and data from a range of sources, including NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), we were recently able to take one small step in that direction by plotting the location of the stars closest to our sun . . . The experiment makes use of Google Chrome’s support for WebGL, CSS3D, and Web Audio. Music was generously provided by Sam Hulick, who video game fans may recognize as a composer for the popular space adventure series, Mass Effect.

Oh Google, you already would have won my heart with the starmap alone. But then you have to take things a step further and hire the brilliant Sam Hulick to write an accompanying score? That’s just dirty pool, sir, but I love you for it.

Aside from giving you a jaw-dropping sense of scale by allowing you to zoom from an overall galactic view all the way down to our own little blue marble, 100,000 stars also provides detailed information about our interstellar neighbors. Going back to the Mass Effect tie-in again, it’s basically a way, way more detailed — and accurate — version of that game’s beautiful starmap. Just keep an eye out for Reapers while you’re seeing what’s out there.

Really, there’s nothing else I can tell you about 100,000 Stars that the map itself can’t do much more elegantly, so click on over there already. One proviso, though: you’ll need to have the Chrome browser to use the map, so click over and grab it if you haven’t already.

Quotation – February 19, 2013

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

Mark Twain

Ancient Temple Discovered in Peru

via LifeScience.com

by LiveScience Staff

Date: 14 February 2013 Time: 02:58 PM ET

Archaeologists in Peru have uncovered what they believe is a temple, estimated to be up to 5,000 years old, at the site of El Paraíso, north of Lima.

Inside the ruins of the ancient room, which measures about 23 feet by 26 feet (7 meters by 8 meters), there’s evidence of a ceremonial hearth, where offerings may have been burned, archaeologists say. The temple also had a narrow entrance and stone walls covered with yellow clay, on which traces of red paint were found, according to a statement from Peru’s Ministry of Culture.

El Paraíso, located on the central coast of Peru, just north of Lima, is a site made up of 10 buildings stretching over 123 acres (50 hectares). It’s one of the earliest known examples of monumental stone architecture in the Americas, dating back to the Late Preceramic period (3500-1800 B.C.). The newly found building is thought to date back to 3000 B.C., which should be confirmed with a radiocarbon analysis.

 

 

The ruins of El Paraíso in Peru
CREDIT: Peru Ministry of Culture

View full size image

Rafael Varón, Peru’s deputy minister for culture, said in a statement that the discovery of the temple “has particular importance because it is the first structure of this type found on the central coast.” It suggests that the Lima region had more religious, economic and political importance during this early period than previously thought, Varón added.

Previously, man-made mounds shaped like orcas, condors and even a duck were discovered in Peru’s coastal valleys, including at El Paraíso, by anthropologist Robert Benfer, professor emeritus of the University of Missouri, who spotted the mounds in satellite photos. One curious mound found in El Paraíso in the Chillón Valley was of a condor head whose burned-charcoal eye was likely the place where offerings were once burned. The condor was also positioned to line up with the most extreme orientation of the Milky Way as seen from the Chillón Valley. [See Photos of the Animal Mounds]

A second mound, right next to the condor, looked like a combination of a puma and alligatorlike cayman, Benfer said. That one was oriented toward the spot where the sun rises on the day of the June solstice, the start of summer.

Dating to more than 4,000 years ago, the structures may be the oldest evidence of animal mounds outside of North America, Benfer said last year. The previous oldest animal structures date to about 2,000 years ago, part of the Nazca Lines. These lines are simple stone outlines of animals decorating the Nazca Desert in Peru.

Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience . We’re also on Facebook & Google+.

Quotation – February 16, 2013

In the garden I tend to drop my thoughts here and there.  To the flowers I whisper the secrets I keep and the hopes I breathe.  I know they are there to eavesdrop for the angels.

Dodinsky

Quotation – February 15, 2013

I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.

Mark Twain

Quotation – February 14, 2013

A science is an discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.

Max Gluckman
“Politics, Law and Ritual”, 1965

Monster Black Holes Grow Surprisingly Fast

by Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer

Date: 12 February 2013 Time: 07:01 PM ET

This image depicts three hot blobs of matter orbiting a black hole. If placed in our Solar System, this black hole would appear like a dark abyss spread out nearly as wide as Mercury’s orbit. And the three blobs (each as large as the Sun) would be as far out as Jupiter. They orbit the black hole in a lightning-quick 20,000 miles per second, over a tenth of the speed of light. CREDIT: NASA/Dana Berry, SkyWorks Digital

Giant black holes are famous for their appetites, but these matter-munching monsters are even greedier than scientists once thought, a new study suggests.

The supermassive black holes that lurk at the center of most (if not all) galaxies are growing surprisingly quickly, the study found. The result implies that these cosmic behemoths are sustained primarily by frequent small meals rather than rare and dramatic galactic mergers, as was previously believed.

Supermassive black holes are almost incomprehensibly huge, with some containing 10 billion or more times the mass of our own sun. The research team used computer simulations to investigate how such black holes grow, especially in spiral galaxies like the Earth’s Milky Way.

The astronomers found that, contrary to prevailing theory, central black holes can grow quite rapidly in quiet, merger-free spirals simply by sucking up galactic gas and other matter.

“These simulations show that it is no longer possible to argue that black holes in spiral galaxies do not grow efficiently,” study lead author Victor Debattista, of the University of Central Lancashire in England, said in a statement. “Our simulations will allow us to refine our understanding of how black holes grew in different types of galaxies.”

 

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The new study further bolsters the emerging view that gigantic galactic smashups are responsible for just a small portion of supermassive black holes’ growth, researchers said.

And such growth can be prodigious. The black hole at the heart of the famous Sombrero Galaxy, also known as M104 or NGC 4594, has swallowed the equivalent of one sun every 20 years and now contains at least 500 million solar masses, researchers said.

The supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way Galaxy appears far less greedy, growing at a rate of one solar mass every 3,000 years, researchers said. Scientists estimate that this black hole, also known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced “Sagittarius A-star”), has the mass of about 4 million suns.

The new study was published today (Feb. 12) by The Astrophysical Journal.

Follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall  or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom . We’re also on Facebook and Google+.