Quiddities and quandries from my quintessential quest

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Minimize Commitments, but Still Fail

Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator… I’m suspecting that this is part of my problem:  I have minimized [...]

Remove Purple Fringing From Photographs

I can’t believe I never thought to look for advice on how to Remove Purple Fringing From Your Photographs until today!  My good old Canon Powershot A75 has only a few flaws, and one is that it is susceptible to purple fringing.  Now that I know how easy it is to remove it from photos, [...]

Phoenix Tracks the Midnight Sun

Yesterday, Mars Phoenix shared another gorgeous image with the world: the Midnight Sun on Mars.  (I can’t help but think of Phoenix as having a personality, because of the first-person perspective tweets I follow on twitter!)

Big Earth, Little Moon

“HOLY FRAK! Moon transits Earth!” So says Phil Plait, famed “Bad Astronomy” debunker. This video is indeed awe-inspiring, and even though his article prepared me for awesomeness, I still found myself with my breath caught in my throat.  The moon really looks like such a little rock orbiting the earth, and just the visual impact [...]

Quote on Mathematical Beauty

To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature … If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in. — Richard Phillips Feynman

What is “Now”?

“Now” is the name of the place we inhabit. The Inevitable Dilemma of Now at HaveMacWillBlog (aka Robin Bloor’s Blog)

Perspective of Age

Anything invented before you were 18 has been there forever, anything that turns up before you’re 30 is new and exciting, and anything after that is a threat to the world and must be destroyed. Jim Griffin (via tneilen) I really hope this isn’t true, because I’m gonna be thirty soon.  (Shhhhh, don’t tell anyone!  [...]

Science Hierarchy

xkcd comic #435 – “Purity” Strangely, I’ve been thinking of this very notion a lot recently.  It’s neat how the different sciences operate on different scopes, and how they’re related by this hierarchy.  Awesome! NOTE: There is more to this comic than meets the eye… you must go to the site to hover over the [...]

How Physicists Solve Research Problems

“To solve a physics research problem involves assumption after assumption, approximation after approximation, and those great leaps of imagination people call thinking outside the box. It involves the ability to move forward, follow your intuition, and accept that you don’t fully understand what you are doing. And most of all, it entails believing in yourself.” [...]

The Flash of a Supernova

“…[T]he X-ray flash from the supernova only lasted about five minutes. If Swift had not been looking right at the spot at right at that moment, this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity would have been lost. That’s how cool this is.” Bad Astronomy Blog » Birth cry of a supernova I, personally, have been rooting for astronomers to catch [...]