Hexed

TIL about the Saturn Hexagon:


It's an entirely natural but freakishly symmetrical storm cloud at the exact north pole of Saturn. Each side is about 15,000 km long (a bit more than the diameter of our planet).

I have read so much Arthur C Clarke stuff over the years and I can't believe I never came across this until I listened to the Economist's science podcast yesterday.

---

Another cool thing from the same podcast that I was only extremely vaguely aware of:


This is a picture of comet upon which the vehicle that took the picture, Rosetta, landed after a 12 year journey. Though the landing was successful in that it wasn't a crash, it did bounce around more than expected and ended up in a shadow where it couldn't get any sun by which to charge its solar panels; thus it's useful life unexpectedly ended a couple of days later.

This project cost about $2 billion, less than the US military spends (wastes?) every day.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Change of Venue

Well, I have my doubts that ANYBODY will read this, but here I am: my old blog at progressdeveloper.wordpress.com has become "read only" for reasons that are beyond my control and that I will not bore you with. I might try to scrape it all and stick it somewhere else, but I doubt it. I will probably just let it live in the never-never land of 99.999999% useless information content until someone at Wordpress decides to retire it. (OK, I will bore you just a little. No, I did not lose the password. But they won't let me in anymore because I don't have access to it's registered email address anymore. I am annoyed at Wordpress, enough to try this platform instead [it's part of Google], but not enough to rant about it. These things happen).
Read more

Arrived

 Touchdown in YZP, quick shopping trip in a small Super Valu adjacent to YZP, 20 minute ferry ride (we were 2nd last car on - ferry is tiny and only runs 1x/hour). AirBnb is about 30 seconds drive from Skidegate ferry and is super nice. 3 BR and I think just 1 bath. Huge kitchen. Great view. I think we will be very comfortable. David H is, as expected, unbelievably pleasant and quite fun, but on top of that, seems to know about all sorts of topics that I barely know about and interest me to a greater or lesser extent. How UK's time in India ended. India v Pakistan. Supreme Court in the UK. Whether judges should be elected. He has lived in Africa. He also is super into art as both an observer and a creator. I think the trip will be at least quite good based solely on his involvement!
Read more

Haida Gwaii Part 2

Here I am at YVR Gate C32, waiting for our flight to Sandspit. We're spending 9 nights (7 on HG, one on a ferry, and one in Port Hardy); we being my oldest sister Janet, and a family friend, David (yet another David! Good grief). As you might recall, I went to HG with ex-work-David in May or so of last year. On that trip we were only on the north (Graham) island. I wasn't able to accompany ex-work-David on his zodiac tour of the south (Moresby) island, where, apparently, resides all the "indigenous stuff". (The north island is pleasant but not all that different from "our" gulf islands, at least in my opinion). So I'm going back to fill in the gap of my HG experience with the south island. I'm not hugely interested in Haida art (I think David is, and Janet for sure is), but I'm somewhat interested in FN topics and trying to do my bit to improve my knowledge / empathy towards "them".
Read more