Monthly Archive for June, 2006
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“Where is the Earth-shattering kaboom?”
The Moon has a brand new crater.
Meteoroids hit the Moon all the time, but on May 2, 2006, two NASA engineers managed to get this best-ever-video of an impact in progress:
Note the flash in the upper right of the image
The explosion released 17 billion joules of kinetic energy. To put that into perspective, when you hit a nail with a hammer, the impact releases about 150 joules. The impact shown above released one hundred million times more energy than that! That’s almost enough energy to run the electricity in your house for two years.
Which sounds impressive enough, until I tell you that the object was only 10 inches across… moving at 85,000 mph.
Image credit & copyright McNamara and Moser, MSFC.
Link
The awesome rate of innovation continues over at MadCap Software. Not resting on the initial success of Flare, the team has revealed yet another product, called Blaze.
Just like Flare is a 21st century replacement for the behemoth RoboHelp, (you have made the switch, haven’t you?), Blaze is intended to replace FrameMaker. FrameMaker users who have been patient and loyal for the past decade are finally about to have another choice.
When MadCap revealed Mimic, (a software simulation and e-learning development tool), Adobe suddenly got very interested in reminding people that the forgotten 2.0 version of Captivate was on its way. I expect the same will happen with FrameMaker.
However, the software marvel that is Flare has set a high bar. If Blaze achieves that same level - and more importantly, if it converts FrameMaker projects with the same ease that Flare converts old RoboHelp files - then Adobe will have a hard time keeping FrameMaker alive.
It seems clear that MadCap is targeting the entire workflow of the technical communication professional:
- Flare - native XML-based online documentation
- Mimic - software demonstrations and simulations
- Capture - screen captures
- Blaze - comprehensive printed documentation
The most exciting part is the potential integration these tools might have. Imagine having a Blaze project and a Flare project work seamlessly together, pulling content from the same XML source files. Yes, I know you can do that now, but not with products that were (potentially) designed from scratch to play well together.
UPDATE:
6 July 2006
I have received some good feedback on this article, and have continued the discussion in this post.
Housecat chases a black bear up a tree. Priceless.
Image credit Suzanne Giovanetti, AP. Click to embiggenate.
Link
After years of debate and controversy, the International Astronomical Union is finally going to “officially” define what a “planet” is.
It sounds odd that the astronomical community has never got around to doing this… but until recently, the need for an official description was not needed. Was it large enough to see in telescopes, forced spherical under its own weight, and was it orbiting the Sun in a non-cometary fashion? Then it was called a planet.
However, many objects found in the past few years have been the same size as Pluto, perhaps even larger, but these have not been designated “planets.” So the debate raged on… if you call these new objects “planets,” then the Sun certainly has tens of thousands of such objects orbiting it. If you refuse to bless these objects with the “planet” moniker, then Pluto must be demoted from its lofty position, and cast down to mingle with the lowly comets and asteroids hurtling through the inky blackness.
What will the definition be? We’ll find out later this summer. Stay tuned…
Link
Shortly after 2am on Wednesday, a hillside in northern Norway was struck by what appears to have been a very large meteorite.
It appears that the energy released was comparable to that from a small atomic bomb.
The news is just now starting to trickle in (it is rural Norway, for crying out loud). The only eyewitness of the event (so far) is a farmer who - I kid you not - was only out because his mare Virika was about to foal for the first time.
No decent link yet… only a few online Norwegian news sites that I won’t bother linking to. If any major newswire picks it up, I’ll post an update here.
Image credit & copyright: Peter Bruvold (the Norwegian mare/foal/farmer dude)
UPDATE:Here’s a pic of the impact site.
I have discovered the secret of the universe. As I suspected all along, the answer can be found using donut theory.
Vhat? De Donut tery? Fascinating. Proceed.
It came to me suddenly, while watching someone eat a double-chocolate glazed pastry at Tim Horton’s. I noticed something… she didn’t eat the donut’s hole. She simply ate around the hole, and left the hole on the table, right beside her crumpled-up napkin.
Ah… yes. A vaste, no? But I sink you are on to somesing.
Now, it has been determined that the holes in the donuts do not decay. Most people only eat the ‘accretion disk’ pastry around the hole - just like she did - leaving the hole to float away afterwards. Hawking predicts that the energy of these floating holes must be conserved somehow, and is usually returned to spacetime via quantum forces.
…yes… yes…
Of course, this results in a standard ‘vacuum energy’ effect, which produces a negative acceleration in response to a gravitational field. Hence, the rate of expansion of spacetime increases with each donut consumed.
Eureka! Quite ze elegant tery. Unt delicious, as vell. Aha! Mein krapfen! Do you realize vaht this implies?
What?
Zat ze rate of expansion of spacetime is directly proportional to ze expansion of one’s vaistline!
