Talk Amongst Yourselves

I need to take a day or two off from the site, as I’m feeling rather burnt out with all this big news that’s been breaking. It’s been a headlong rush into awesome, but it has left me feeling a bit worn down. Regular posting will likely resume on Monday, at which point I will attempt to cut down to size the backlog of links and articles I have been accumulating.

In the meantime, here’s a couple items of interest to stimulate off-topic discussion.

The water-fountain star.

Astronomers have found a star — relatively closeby, too, at a distance of only 750 light years — that shoots geysers of water from its poles, ejecting 100,000,000 times the volume of the Amazon River every second at a velocity of 120,000 MPH.

The stream of gasses is about 180,000 degrees Fahrenheit, so the water is not liquid, but rather atoms of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, the building block of water. When it gets into space and the molecules interact with the dust surrounding the star, however, and the atoms probably combine to form water ice.

[Lars E. Kristensen, a postdoctoral student at the Leiden University in the Netherlands, an author of the paper] and the European astronomers described the jets of being made up of “bullets” of water but that is a bit misleading. The water actually pulses, like a fire hose with an unsteady water supply.

Kristensen says the pulses fly out at 50 kilometers a second, or about 120,000 mph. As a pulse starts to slow, it is rammed from behind by pulses moving faster behind it, producing something like a bow shock wave. Those collisions are what the telescope sees and what he described as bullets.

Okay, so the star doesn’t quite literally shoot water out of its poles. And the ejecta has a temperature in the area of 180,000 Farenheit, so it’s not like it would be liquid water even if it did. Still…very cool.

The Lytro camera.

It’s a bit hard to describe exactly what this “light field camera” does, but basically it captures as much of the inbound light from a scene as it possibly can, from all points in the scene, and leaves aside things like focus and exposure until post-processing.

In other words, you just shoot pictures with the camera…and then worry later — when you’re editing the recorded images on your home computer — about where in the image you want to focus, or what point(s) in the image you want to use to determine exposure.

The possibilities are endless.

Being raised in a city…puts you at greater risk of mental disorder.

Stress, apparently, is again the ultimate culprit here. Not that any of you should be surprised.

Chinese warships playing chicken with Japanese territory.

It’s probably nothing.

Saab is out of money.

As in: they lack even the necessary cash to pay their employees.

What’s Swedish for “boned”?

Tonight’s post brought to you by engineering:

Engineering Prof

Been there!

13 Responses

  1. Dominus says:

    Wtf: as much as I like the Irc channel and was rooting for it, I think that YOU have to be careful to not spend too much time in it. Chats tend to take too much time, distract from the work you want to do. Maybe this added to your burnt out feeling.
    But anyway enjoy a much deserved break.

  2. Dominus says:

    Oh and I hope you don’t read that now. You are supposed to break and we talk among ourselves 😉

  3. The Lytro camera sounds like an impressive piece of tech, but I can’t help but think it takes all the fun out of photography. I guess the days of my youth spent trying to get that perfect shot are over. Too bad, you also make so many close friends in a phonographic dark room. ;D

  4. Corv says:

    Well some of you can jump to the U9 Redemption (Titans of Ether) page meanwhile and check out the new screenshots 🙂

    WTF: Have fun recuperating 🙂

  5. Dino says:

    About the water-fountain star… there are several things that sound fishy about it, such as the high temperature and the fact that stars are generally accepted to be balls of flame. I think what they found is much more likely to be an accretion disc with radiation jets:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accretion_disc
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_jet

    …and the ‘water’ is more likely to be some form of radiation. As far as I know, telescopes can’t see actually see matter at certain distances; but they can find objects by detecting gamma rays, X-rays and the like.

  6. Sergorn says:

    Nice screens Corv 😀

  7. Thepal says:

    Nice screenies, Corv. You’re definately making Morrowind look as good as it can. I’m definately looking forward to Redemption.

    On another note, today is the start of my mid-year holidays, so I have a little over two weeks off (gotta love being a teacher… when holidays arrive at least). Expect some new screenshots (and I’m thinking a video or two since I create getting Youtube subscribers) in the near future.

  8. Corv says:

    @WTF: Yeah they are 🙂

  9. Sanctimonia says:

    Ye olde accretion disk. Despite watching all the espiodes of The Universe I forgot. I do remember the gamma ray blast though…

    I got some good work done, and got away without completely breaking it, but there are still some bugs:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPNUOjH134s

    WtF, please add that to the update when you’re feeling better. I just had my wisdom teeth removed, but am still kicking ass. 🙂

    • WtF Dragon says:

      Sorry to hear about the teeth, glad to hear about the work that got done.

      I’ll try and accumulate all your recent updates into one post today, and post that later. I have also finally gotten around to updating your user account at the site with authorship rights, which means you should be able to submit actual articles for posting in the future.

  10. Sanctimonia says:

    @WtF: I was fueled by a river of brews, so I’ll be doing polishing work on it today. The hard part’s over with thankfully. Now if I can just get the light sources working when it turns night time… The teeth (or lack of teeth I guess) are feeling much better today. Thanks for the article rights. I’ll try to get one up at least every two weeks.

    @Corv: Those new screenshots are totally badass. That’s the best I’ve ever seen the Morrowind engine look by far. Awesome, awesome work. I especially like the tree bark textures. I actually have a lot of those (unedited) that I took myself if you’d like them. I can Zip them up for you, just let me know.

  11. Sanctimonia says:

    Finally got around to writing the report for the last two weeks (20 – 21), which as usual may be found here:

    http://www.eightvirtues.com/sanctimonia/progress/