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ISS in transit

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Romanian photographer Maximilian Teodorescu recently caught the International Space Station in transit across the Sun.

ISS Sun

Teodorescu has also taken photos of the ISS in transit across the Moon.

ISS Moon

These photos make the ISS seem tiny and huge all at the same time. And be sure to click through on the links to see the full-sized photos.

Tags: ISSMaximilian TeodorescuMoonphotographyspaceSun
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antgiant
4135 days ago
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Oviedo, Florida
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The Pace of Modern Life

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'Unfortunately, the notion of marriage which prevails ... at the present time ... regards the institution as simply a convenient arrangement or formal contract ... This disregard of the sanctity of marriage and contempt for its restrictions is one of the most alarming tendencies of the present age.' --John Harvey Kellogg, Ladies' guide in health and disease (1883)
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antgiant
4171 days ago
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"Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things." -- Douglas Adams
Oviedo, Florida
bloodvayne
4170 days ago
Society will be society, what's interesting is how inherently the "nostalgia fallacy" is simply society's self-preservation against seemingly "hostile" undercurrent. Reminds me of this article from Art of Manliness, also a very thorugh read http://www.artofmanliness.com/2012/07/12/the-generations-of-men-how-the-cycles-of-history-have-shaped-your-values-your-place-in-the-world-and-your-idea-of-manhood/
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19 public comments
chrisamico
4159 days ago
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All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
Boston, MA
oliverzip
4162 days ago
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Has twitter wrecked modern communcation?
Sydney, Balmain, Hornsby.
izogi
4171 days ago
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Fortunately, as I'm informed, it had all calmed down again by the time of my parents' generation.
stsquad
4171 days ago
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Nice commentary on modern commentary.
Cambridge, UK
bscherrer
4172 days ago
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@mahea50 Word.
San Diego, California
iridesce
4172 days ago
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now let's make one for "damn kids are spoiled and have no respect for their elders these days"
DC
iridesce
4172 days ago
whoops, nevermind, i see you 1906.
rgsunico
4172 days ago
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Brilliant.
marcrichter
4171 days ago
tl;dnr :P
redson
4172 days ago
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The Golden Age Fallacy in action.
claysmith
4172 days ago
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“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” — Ecclesiastes 1:9
Escondido, CA
dcwarwick
4172 days ago
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And on it goes.
Edmonton, AB, Canada
taddevries
4172 days ago
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Get off my internet lawn you free loaders.
mscholes
4172 days ago
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The summary is beautiful ;-)
benmurray
4172 days ago
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Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things. -- Douglas Adams
adamgurri
4172 days ago
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the public comments on this comic seem to imply everyone swallows the premise of the letters...I had though Munroe's point was more that we keep hearing the same arguments over and over again in each age.
New York, NY
btomhave
4172 days ago
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Those who fail to learn from history... yada yada yada...
Michdevilish
4172 days ago
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Definitive proof that human faculties have been dwindling since at least 1871, and show no signs of abating in their sad dwindleMent...
Canada
the7roy
4172 days ago
1871? Try ~360 BCE when Plato wrote, "they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."
PaulPritchard
4172 days ago
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Nostalgia isn't as good as it used to be.
Belgium
internetionals
4172 days ago
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Nice to see it spelled out to people that "nostalgia" is of all times. And the that troubles of today were often already there earlier, but people just remember them differently.
Netherlands
Ludwig
4172 days ago
Consider the possibility that the authors of these quotes were correct (well, except the divorce and nudity one,) like that Aristotle quote where he bitches about “kids these days,” instead of resigning it to “ah, it was ever thus.”

David Chang cooks space food for Chris Hadfield

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Momofuku's David Chang cooks up some gourmet space food for celeb astronaut Chris Hadfield.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work out so well. Who knew that gravity was so useful? But stay for the best part of the whole thing...right at the end, Hadfield feeds himself asparagus like a fish.

Tags: Chris HadfieldDavid Chang foodNASAspace NASAfoodspace
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antgiant
4194 days ago
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Oviedo, Florida
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1 public comment
sredfern
4205 days ago
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This is pretty cool.
Sydney Australia

TraceGL: JavaScript code flow visualisation in WebGL (trace.gl)

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antgiant
4224 days ago
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For all you JavaScript Devs.
Oviedo, Florida
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Experience the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing (firstmenonthemoon.com)

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antgiant
4240 days ago
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Oviedo, Florida
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Ships

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Ships

How much would the sea level fall if every ship were removed all at once from the Earth's waters?

—Michael Toje

About six microns—slightly more than the diameter of a strand of spider silk.

a diagram showing that if you remove all the ships from the ocean the water will uncover spider silk and bacteria

Archimedes’ principle tells us that the water displaced by a ship weighs as much as the ship itself. If we can figure out the total weight of all the world’s ships, we can figure out how much water they’re displacing, then divide that volume by the surface area of the ocean to figure out how much the water level would drop.

Weighing ships is confusing. There are a bunch of different measurements of the size of a ship, and many of them, like gross tonnage, are actually measures of the volume of the ship’s rooms and other internal spaces, not its weight.

The UN Conference on Trade and Development publishes estimatesof the size of the world shipping fleet.

What the UNCTD publishes is “deadweight tonnage”, which is the maximum weight of the ship’s fuel, cargo, and crew. What we wantis “displacement”. Unfortunately, comprehensive numbers for displacement are harder to find.

Fortunately, we can estimate it. Brian Barrass’s book Ship Design and Performance for Masters and Matesgives a table of ratios of deadweight tonnage to displacement for different types of ships.

Extrapolating from the last few years of UNCTD data, and using the coefficients from the book, suggests that the world fleet weighs about 2.15 billion tons when fully loaded. The main component of the fleet by weight is oil tankers and bulk ore-carrying ships, which make up over two-thirds of the total. (The UNCTD data doesn’t include small recreational boats or naval fleets. However, based on some numbers for naval fleetsand recreational boats, neither one contributes much to the total.)

A ton of water is about a cubic meter. 2.15 billion cubic meters divided by the surface area of the oceans equals about 6 microns (0.006 mm).

But you don’t have to worry about that six-micron sea level drop. The oceans are currently rising at about 3.3 millimeters centimeters per year due to global warming (through both glacial melting and thermal expansion of seawater).

At that rate (normalized for seasonal variation and short-term fluctations), if you removed every ship from the ocean, the water would be back up to its original average level in 16 hours.

a graph showing that you can't fix sea-level rise by putting a bunch of boats on a mountain

Sea levels will likely rise a few feet by the year 2100. Current fish wet biomass is about 2 billion tons, so removing them won’t make a dent either. (Marine fish biomass dropped by 80% over the last century, which—taking into consideration the growth rate of the world’s shipping fleet—leads to an odd conclusion: Sometime in the last few years, we reached a point where there are, by weight, more ships in the ocean than fish.)

And what about the old joke about how much deeper the ocean would be without sponges? While estimates of sponge biomass are hard to come by, the answer is probably that if you removed all the sponges, sea level would drop by no more than a few microns ... and much less if you squeezed them out first. do you know how much deeper the ocean would be if we dropped in everyone who repeats that sponge joke? D do you know how much deeper the ocean would be if we dropped in everyone who repeats that sponge joke?

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antgiant
4291 days ago
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How sad "Sometime in the last few years, we reached a point where there are, by weight, more ships in the ocean than fish."
Oviedo, Florida
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llucax
4291 days ago
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"Marine fish biomass dropped by 80% over the last century, which—taking into consideration the growth rate of the world’s shipping fleet—leads to an odd conclusion: Sometime in the last few years, we reached a point where there are, by weight, more ships in the ocean than fish."
Wow!
Berlin
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