Hot SF Chick of the Week: Week 2

Salma Hayek in Wild Wild West

Wild Wild West was a steampunk action movie starring Wil Smith and you-know-who. There was some other guy in it too, but nobody cares about him. The movie was a fairly uninteresting summer action movie that was memorable only for a brief shot of Salma's tail feathers (I couldn't find a picture of that, and believe me I looked).

Google Earth In-flight Refueling

Google Earth is a program developed by Google that allows you to see satellite photographs of nearly the entire Earth. People have used it for all kinds of fun things. A few weeks ago I posted about people who use it to find old meteor impact sites. Well, some guy has found a photo of an Air Force KC-135 tanker refueling a C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft in flight. Sweet. Check out the full story here.

Pluto's Moons Get Names

Pluto's newly discovered moons get names: Nix and Hydra.

Hot SF Chick of the Week: Week 1

In an effort to make this blog more relevant to guys and lesbians, I'm starting a new series in which each week I'll post a photo of a hot science fiction chick. First off, of course, is the lovely and talented Salma Hayek playing the part of vampire Santanico Pandemonium in From Dusk Till Dawn. Some might argue that vampires aren't SF, but I think SF, fantasy, and horror can be lumped together in the same general genre. Besides, it's Salma!

Fermat's Last Homer

In that Simpsons episode where Homer is sucked into a 3-dimensional world, a mathematical equation appears briefly on the screen. The equation, 1782¹² + 1841¹² = 1922¹² is just shown for an instant. If you enter the equation into your calculator, it turns out to be correct. This means that Fermat's Last Theorem, which states that for n > 2 there are no non-zero whole numbers a,b, and c that satisfy the equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ , has been disproved! The "proof" however relies on the calculator's rounding error, and it turns out the equation is not really true after all. Simpsons writer David X. Cohen put the equation in the episode. Apparently he has a MS in computer science and searched for numbers that came close to disproving the theorem. So, all you budding mathematicians out there, be sure to keep an eye on the Simpsons.

On the Menu

On this weekend's menu: The Spanglish Sandwich.

Deep Impact

Science Daily brings us the news that a giant (~200 mile diameter) impact crater has been found (maybe) buried deep beneath the Antarctic ice. They theorize that this impact could have caused the Permian-Triassic extinction. This extinction is believed to be Earth's largest, with more than 70 percent of all species dying off, and cleared the plate, so to speak, for the rise of the dinosaurs.

The article also mentions the Vredefort crater in South Africa. The 2-billion year old crater is still officially the largest impact crater found on Earth. It can be seen pretty clearly here using Google maps. Amateur geologists have found perviously unknown impact craters using Google Earth. That seems like a pretty fun hobby to me.