Four times a year, the sun sets in exact alignment with the New York City street grid. Yesterday, the half-disc of the sun dropped into place. Today, the whole disc will appear, framed in the canyon of buildings, just before the sun sinks below the horizon.
Astrophysicist Summer Ash caught the scene Sunday.
Earlier: Manhattanhenge explained.
Saw this on Boing Boing this morning and my first thought was, "Dang! Geek week is over!"
My second thought was, "Why not?"
My constant thought is, "Librarians rule."
Watch this:
Four times a year, the sun sets in exact alignment with the Manhattan street grid. It's happening Sunday and Monday, and we like to think it proves that Geek Week just keeps rolling.
Four times a year, the sun sets in exact alignment with the Manhattan street grid. It's happening Sunday and Monday, and we like to think it proves that Geek Week just keeps rolling.
Ali Davis sends a video about the miracle of mirror neurons. Find yours -- do what we're doing and watch this clip.
The git: There's home for the human race, because we're soft-wired for love and companionship and the desire to belong.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Not that there's a connection between those two headlines. Last night on the show, Rachel Maddow showed the world why she always keeps that highlighter on her desk -- it's not for underlining.
Also last night, the House voted to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell by 234 to 194. The Senate Armed Services Committee voted for repeal 16-12, with the full Senate expected to vote next month.
In other unrelated news, Coast Guard Commander Thad Allen tells Good Morning America that the top kill shows signs of stopping the flow of oil from the Deepwater Horizon, though it's too soon to know for sure. May the force be with them.
In honor of Geek Week, I traveled to East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, to talk with paleontology professor Jim Mead about his astonishingly geeky collection of dried animal poop. Thanks to Professor Mead, I now know way more about the, to use his terms, "south end of northbound creatures" than I ever thought possible.
I also got to see a nearby excavation site where a treasure trove of fossils has been uncovered. My take-away? Everything is related. Everything.
A short trip to amazing from The Rachel Maddow Show on Vimeo.
Tonight, for your Geek Week fabulous, Rachel and crew tour the USS Iwo Jima. The amphibious assault ship has been called on for the Iraq war, the Second Liberian Civil War, the war in Lebanon and Hurricane Katrina. It's in New York City this week for the annual Fleet Week celebration.
You'll get a glimpse here of the complex signaling the Iwo Jima crew uses to carry out their work. On the show, they'll decode it and show you around. We'll see you at 9 p.m. Eastern.
(Video by Andrew Dallos)
Interpreted by Jess Idres
Jois Harkness on realizing geekdom was possible:
I was six and I performed speed trials using Barbie and her best friend Midge in their nifty orange plastic convertible on a steep gravelly driveway in Ewa Beach, Hawaii. I wanted to see how fast they could go before their stiff, plastic, but fashion-forward bodies were ejected from their tiny little bucket seats. The beginning of a life of being curious.
Today is not just the second day of Rachel Maddow's Geek Week. No, brainy friends, today is actually Geek Pride Day, when under-sunned types declare their right to stay that way and USA Today wants to know how you're going to celebrate.
Here's how I am going to celebrate, and I invite you to sing along. I'm going to tell you the first thing I ever learned that made me believe I could be a geek. It was this: How to balance a simple algebraic equation.
When you're facing "4 + X = 9," you balance it by subtracting four from each side, so you're left with "X = 5." That example is easy enough that even a very young pre-algebra kid can understand it. But how about "3Y + 34 = 2Y + 89"?
Whatever else I was doing when my regular math teacher explained that, it didn't include paying attention. Enter Mr. Duck, the substitute who stood six-foot-five -- at least -- and who'd spent a life time listening to punks like us calling, "Mister, duck!" The first miracle was that Mr. Duck kept going anyway. The second is that because he didn't know what we didn't know, he returned to the first chapter and taught us what it meant to do the same thing to each side of an equation.
The trick with "3Y + 34 = 2Y + 89" is to isolate the "Y". Start by subtracting 2Y from the left and the right side of the equal sign. You get "Y + 34 = 89," and you're almost home. Subtract 34 from the left and right sides and you've got "Y = 55." Thanks to Mr. Duck and his accidental remedial lesson, I caught up, got into the faster math class with a great teacher, Pat Mowdy Luscomb, and still buy math textbooks at stoop sales.
If America is to get free of foreign oil, then Americans will have to use less oil. That's the message from Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, testifying at his 2009 confirmation hearing:
The more efficient use of energy in United States is the one factor that can most decrease our dependence on foreign oil.
Tonight, as our first Geek Week guest, Chu takes questions on American energy policy, the future of nuclear power, and the unspeakable disaster of BP's Deepwater Horizon spill. A Nobel laureate for his physics work on cooling and trapping atoms with lasers, Chu is a longtime advocate for developing alternatives to fossil fuels.
Several years back, at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Chu gave a talk on a sustainable, carbon-neutral energy source, "Solar to Chemical Energy." Chu's passion for the issue is on full display, and for a Powerpoint presentation by a future Nobel prize-winner, it's a fairly quick read.
What's next on Geek Week, after the jump.
[Solar to Chemical Energy, Powerpoint version]
[Solar to Chemical Energy, inferior HTML version]
(Photo: Roy Kaltschmidt/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Our very own Geek Week starts on Monday, May 24. Meanwhile, our very own in-house astrophysicist, Summer Ash, is already living her personal geek life. She's in Cape Canaveral, Fla., for the final launch of NASA's space shuttle Atlantis.
"Unbelievable to be this close in person!" Summer writes. "Lift-off scheduled for 2:20pm with currently a 70% chance of launch. If low clouds come in over the launch and recover area, they might put in a hold. We shall see!"
