This awesome animation by Alex Parker (whose Kepler-11 Sonata video is also excellent) illustrates the 2299 fast-transiting planets discovered to so far by the Kepler mission and their orbits to-scale around a single star.

There’s a wealth of detail in this rendering like colour/temperature correlation and the white rings representing Mercury, Venus and Earth’s orbits and that’s all elaborated on on it’s vimeo page. But all you need to know is this part of the description:

Watching in full screen + HD is recommended, so you can see even the smallest planets!

Planets. 2299 of them. Up there. And all of them were found in a really short period of time, with still so many more out there yet to discovered.

Fuck yeah, you bet I love this science stuff.

Was going to post and comment on this write up’s ‘counter-arguement’ on Curiosity’s cultural investment/benefits, but then this high resolution footage of the rover’s decent phase from the rover’s point-of-view came out and the thinking is simply: Who care? It’s still goddamn amazing enough that we’ve got a friggin’ Tank of Science on another planetary body.

UPDATE: some reddit user has interpolated the original’s images, creating a ‘smoother’ 25 fps version of the original video. Nice.

• Rolling Stone has a Q&A with David Cross on ‘Arrested Development’
• This elaborates on the politics of The Dark Knight movies
• This’ll make you feel old: For incoming college freshmen, Kurt Cobain has always been dead
• And this, nostalgically older: The need to upgrade computers is coming to a halt
• On business/hiring: The Bozo Event Horizon
• The Googler whose job was to Browse the worst of the internet
• How one NASA scientist’s family Switched over to Martian Time
• Photos from August 22, 1969: The Beatles’ final photo shoot
• And a time capsule was opened and the 25 year-old predictions by some sci-fi writers about ‘what life would be like in 2012’ are read. Some points are fairly on-the-mark, but a few are also depressingly way off.

Mashing up Finding Nemo and Taken. Genius.

Incedental Comics