Link Banana

Like Kevin Kelly, I feel that “This is the first flag I feel I could fly with unalloyed pride”. The story:

It is intended to be used for ANY purpose that is representative of Humankind as a whole, and not connected to any country, organization, or individual. James made it his life’s work to promote and distribute this flag everywhere. He and his wife made the flags on their kitchen table, and sold them for what it cost to make and distribute them.

Here it is.

Is awsome. (Yes, this is another Big Picture post.)

Closer to home, today’s Daily Dose of Imagery is pretty awesome too.

Neatorama points to some interesting maps. Basically: the total area of the moon covered by the Apollo 11 astronauts was smaller than a soccer field. Or, if they landed on a baseball diamond, they hardly left the infield.

Two interesting tidbits:

• Primordial Mars was like primordial Earth.
• The European Space Agency offers some beautiful photos the Echus Chasm. The chasm was made by liquid water at some point in the past. (via Wired Science)

…of the heart. But aside from my irrationational affinity for cheesy 80s songs, there was a solar eclipse today. And not a mini one. Wired Science pulls some great photos of it.

A picture of the International Space Station transiting the sun. It’s like a mini solar eclipse.

(via Wired Science)

Ten things the New York Times think you’re worrying about, but shouldn’t be:

1. Killer hot dogs.
2. Planet-destroying A/C. (This is only vehicular.)
3. The carbon footprint of exotic fruits.
4. Cellphones giving you brain cancer.
5. Evil plastic bags.
6. Bisphenol-A.
7. Killer sharks!
8. Declining Arctic Ice. (With this caveat: “You can still fret about long-term trends in the Arctic.”)
9. The unverse’s missing mass. (This boys and girls, is what is known as padding.)
10. Unmarked wormholes. (This boys and girls, is what is known as padding.)

I’m pretty sure this is at least the third time this week, but I can’t help myself. The Big Picture’s series on Jupiter is quite awesome.

Though I’m not quite sure what makes these satellite images “abstract,” I do think they’re pretty neat. (Seperately, some of these pictures were linked to in this post.)

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Announced with less than a tenth the fanfare of the ice on Mars, scientists now believe there is water on the moon. Add this to the near-invisible announcement of water in Mercury’s atmosphere, and it’s beginning to look like water’s far more prevalent in the solar system than we’d thought.

For The Atlantic, Gregg Easterbrook will try to scare you about how astroids will kill us. The title links to the video (because I have “reader’s block”), but the text of the story is also online.

Are we obligated to protect any life forms we find on Mars? One thought:

All of a sudden, it’s a judgement call. And that really hadn’t occurred to me until I heard Randolph talk of protecting extraterrestrial life — and though his arguments invoke religious parables, it doesn’t really require religious beliefs. He strikes the same vein as Methodist environmentalist Bill McKibben, who’s found a secular audience among more old-fashioned progressives.

“Fundamentally, the question is what it means to be a space-traveling species, and what counts as being an ethical space traveler. What sort of obligations if any do we owe to any extraterrestrial life that we encounter, whether it’s intelligent or not?” he asked.

• Because they give us pictures like this.
• And also some like this.

(both via kottke)

Though I have no idea what these photos are doing on a forum called “BMWSportTouring,” there’s no denying that they’re very cool. They show how the space shuttle is assembled, from the hauling in of parts to liftoff. Well worth a look.

(via kottke)

io9 put together an alarmingly uncomprehensive report card for the physics and space movies. It’s still entertaining though.

(via Boing Boing)

Interesting evidence that Einstein’s theory of gravitation might not be exactly right:

Even Einstein, however, may not have got it right. Modern instruments have shown a departure from his predictions, too. In 1990 mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, which operates America’s unmanned interplanetary space probes, noticed something odd happen to a Jupiter-bound craft, called Galileo. As it was flung around the Earth in what is known as a slingshot manoeuvre (designed to speed it on its way to the outer solar system), Galileo picked up more velocity than expected. Not much. Four millimetres a second, to be precise. But well within the range that can reliably be detected.

Once might be happenstance. But this strange extra acceleration was seen subsequently with two other craft. That, as Goldfinger would have put it, looks like enemy action. So a team from JPL has got together to analyse all of the slingshot manoeuvres that have been carried out over the years, to see if they really do involve a small but systematic extra boost. The answer is that they do.