The kind folks behind StackOverflow, a free Question/Answers website for programming questions, recently decided to open new Q/A websites for many additional interesting topics, from wine tasting and cooking to mathematics. The fundamental requisite for such new sites to be opened is a rather strict community review and development of a critical mass of contributors [...]
The McNaught comet, or C/2009 R1, is likely to be visible in the night sky starting tonight, for a week. You should be able to spot it near the constellation of Perseus as a fuzzy streak of light.
The comet should be visible with a small binocular, or just with the naked eye. In particular, I [...]
December 10, 2009 – 5:23 pm
On a dark, clear night, if you walk far away from the city lights, you will be probably able to see a magnificent strike of light we call “the milky way”, our galaxy. It looks like this:
Our sun is a small, insignificant star, sitting on one of the arms of this magnificent spiral of stars [...]
October 30, 2009 – 9:34 am
This is a very interesting application that should convey you an idea of the size of small things: from a coffee bean down to a small carbon atom. It pairs with this movie about the size of planets and stars. Fascinating and humbling.
I found a very interesting commentary by Nick Bostrom, about the existence of extraterrestrial life and the so-called Fermi Paradox.
The point Nick Bostrom presents is sensible: the current evidence is that life is apparently not very frequent in the Universe. Despite all efforts we did toward finding life, intelligent or not, we failed. Moreover, the [...]
According to recent results from WMAP, the universe is 13.73 ± 0.12 billion years old. Moreover, the ordinary matter accounts less than 5% of the constituents of the universe (energy and matter), and the universe is practically flat, in the sense that the geometrical rules are those of an euclidean geometry.
This seems to provide even [...]
