Categories
Old

Things 2: Acoustic standing waves, Aurora Sounds, Mammatus Clouds

(Originally sent in November 2007)

This week’s film, one line review
Unfortunately the story in Sleuth (2007) was changed from the original, so it was a bad story badly told.

I also saw the anime film “5 centimeters per second“, which was insanely beautiful.

Next week’s film
I’m going to see The Golden Compass some time next week. It’s too soon for ratings to appear on imdb or rotten tomatoes, although I am keen to see it just to boycott this boycott:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/compass.asp

Golden Compass Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vMmf8YALbc

Prognosis: The weakest of an otherwise amazing trilogy, it’s worth going to see this just to make sure the rest get made.

A Puzzle
If you forget to turn off your away notifier in Outlook and then send an email to someone that also has an away notifier on, does this cause an infinite loop? And if not, why not? Do you get an away notifier if you email yourself?

A Quote
LaPlace: “An intelligence that, at a given instant, could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings that make it up, if moreover it were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, would encompass in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atoms. For such an intelligence nothing would be uncertain, and the future, like the past, would be open to its eyes.”

A Link
The Golden Compass was called Northern Lights when it was first published.

These days there is not much left in the realm of human experience that science cannot explain, and I find myself extremely fascinated by the few things that are left.

Here’s an interesting link that relates to both of these things:
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=923

Perhaps needless to say, there’s a lot of other interesting stuff there.

A video
Continuing the audio science theme, here’s a beautiful demonstration of acoustic standing waves:

A picture
Mammatus clouds are extremely rare. They also look extremely photoshopped. See below and judge for yourself.

There’s lots more over at Dark Roasted Blend.