cinnamon thoughts.

A cool video on YouTube showing the launch of a Saturn V model rocket. Scale 1:10 might sound small but it’s freaking huge for a model rocket!

At space.com you can take a tour of our corner of the cosmos. Like the famous National Geographic poster it gives you a good sense of how small our solar system (and every other) really is. Truly fascinating.

A collection of stunning pictures of Mars’ surface taken by HiRISE onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment website has high resolution versions of most images and also beautiful wallpapers.
(NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

A bird apparently dropped a pice of baguette on a part of the Large Hadron Collider which shut down the whole operation. It had to be a bird from the future preventing the total apocalypse if you believe this article from the New York Times:
[T]he hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with [...]

Fantastic photos of Saturn and its rings and moons at equinox, when the Sun shines directly on the edge of the ten meter thin rings.
Photo: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

NASA has released information on water molecules found on our moon and in unexpected places on Mars. Exciting news! I’m looking forward to see whether LCROSS — the Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite — finds larger quantities of water ice on the Moon. Its impact is on Oct. 9, 2009.

Photos of the 2008 eruption of the Chaiten volcano in Chile—its first eruption in about 9000 years. Be sure to scroll at least down to the sixth picture!
Cases of electrical storms breaking out directly above erupting volcanoes are well documented, although scientists differ on what causes them. Picture taken May 2, 2008.
Full article at boston.com

Until recently I didn’t know of the Viking 1 and Venera 13 missions that took the first pictures on the surface of Mars and Venus.
In 1976 NASA’s Viking 1 took the first photos as a lander on Mars. At the moment Spirit and Opportunity are still working and snapping pictures on Mars.

In 1982 the Soviet [...]

The widely accepted rule of even numbered Star Trek movies being great and odd ones being crap was disrupted after Nemesis and is officially reversed with the 11th iteration simply named Star Trek.
A large portion of all Star Trek films and TV shows was about science and galactic phenomenons the viewer just had to accept [...]

My updated GeoMapLookup — a website to geolocate a host, domain or IP address with Google Maps integration — now sports a newly created iPhone and iPod touch version which was chosen as Apple.com’s Staff Pick and featured web app for February 26th 2008.
GeoMapLookup is a web app to display information about the geographical location [...]

Getting cozy with an Airbus A380 during the first-ever visit of an A380 to San Francisco International Airport. Great close-ups and pictures of the inside of Airbus’ new flagship. (by telstar)
tags: A380, flickr, San Francisco International Airport, SFO, telstar

Prepping a Space Shuttle for launch is a lot of work. “After looking at the pictures you will know why there’s a good period of time between shuttle launches.” (link)
tags: Discovery, pre-flight, Shuttle, Space Shuttle

That’s what I was wondering when I heard about the exploding steam pipe in NYC today. Transportation of heat, granted — but during summer?
Luckily those pesky interwebs have the answer to this question: Why the heck does New York have steam pipes, anyway?
tags: explosion, New York, NYC, steam pipe

An out of the ordinary illusion shows two blurry faces: one grim, the other neutral. Viewed from approximately two meters distance changes the looks on both faces to the opposite. The key to this illusion is the picture’s blurriness. Quite simple, nevertheless amazing.
tags: optical illusion

Retrofuturo — or IL FUTURO VISTO DAL PASSATO as Fabio Feminò puts it — is a 35 page series of mostly pictures and magazine covers from the past (up to 80 years old) showing how the people living then thought our world would look like today.
It includes classics like flying cars, enormous cities, moon bases, [...]

Find the solution at Scientific American: Why are snowflakes symmetrical? How can ice crystallizing on one arm ‘know’ the shape of the other arms on the flake?
tags: ice, snow, snowflakes

This is a follow-up to my previous post Even Our Sun is Tiny but this time a video (via digg) shows you how small we really are and which monstrously large objects are “floating” around in our galaxy.
A size comparison1 of the Sun to VV Cephei A (the supergiant of the binary star system VV [...]

You can solve the Rubik’s Cube from any mixed up position by following the Doing The Cube instructions.

tags: instructions, Rubik’s Cube

I didn’t believe this optical illusion’s effects would really last overnight but they do! First take a look at this grid. It clearly consists of black and white lines. Keep this in mind!
To experience the so called McCollough Effect you now need to stare at two squares consisting of black and colored lines for several [...]

This spectacular “blue marble” image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date says NASA and provides us with very high quality pictures of our planet (up to blazing 21600*10800 pixels); also night shots are available.
If you hadn’t enough download an — also high quality — eight second video of the [...]