Theidlerhour - Bricolage Brain

Art museum priorities are in order.

my math homework: using Lagrange multipliers, safety goggles, rubber gloves, a pair of tongs, and a maniacal laugh, determine that...

friend: I don't particularly like Sappho's poetry--

me: But you will lie dead, nor will there be any memory of you, now or in the future, for you will have no share in the Pierian roses, but invisible, in the house of Hades, you will wander to and fro, fluttering with the shadowy ghosts,

26,500 meals, 180 spacewalks and 1,200 scientific results publications later, we celebrate 15 years of continuous human presence aboard the International Space Station. 

An infographic from NASA.  

Credit: NASA’s Website

Do math majors graduate with degrees or radians?

calculus gothic

-The limits keep getting farther and farther away. Where are they going? Where did they start? Will they ever stop?

-The unit circle tells us to bow before it. All hail the unit circle. All hail.

-You have been scribbling the integral symbol and the summation symbol for so long. You can’t write 3′s or capital S’s normally anymore. It is a reflex, muscle memory.

-Piles of math homework surround you as you become a machine, cranking out more math problems as you hone your skills. You build your own castle out of math homework. It is never-ending.

-Trigonometry rids us of our sins. and cosines. and tangents.

This is what happens when Two Black Holes Collide.

This is the animation of the final stages of a merger between two black holes. What is particularly interesting about this animation is that it highlights a phenomenon known as Gravitational Lensing.

What is Gravitational Lensing?

Mass bends Light. What? 

Yeah, mass can bend Light. The gravitational field of a really massive object is super strong. And this causes light rays passing close to that object to be bent and refocused somewhere else.

The more massive the object, the stronger its gravitational field and hence the greater the bending of light rays - just like using denser materials to make optical lenses results in a greater amount of refraction.

Here’s an animation showing a black hole going past a background galaxy.

This effect is one of the predictions of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity 

PC: cfhtlens, Urbane Legend

"To paraphrase Walt Whitman: 'You are vast. You contain multitudes. Now let them live.'"