Enlarge. | Via.

Go on, git! Enlarge that pig. It’s an official guide to Battlestar Galactica’s twelve colonies. BSG dork like me? Yeah, this swag is awesome. The map was “designed by writer Jane Espenson and science advisor Kevin Grazier.” I didn’t know BSG had a science advisor, but I wish I was smart off to pull off such a gig. Would be totally swank.

Want more information on how the map was constructed? Go here for an interview with Espenson and Grazier.

Enlarge. | Via.

This new picture of Orion’s Belt is fucking gorgeous. It’s all neat and stuff to stare into the sky and point out Orion’s Belt, but it’s even more dope when you deconstruct what it actually is:

This spectacular photo reveals the beauty of Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, the trio of stars that make up its belt.

This photo was taken last month and captures the three stars that make up Orion’s belt, arguably the most famous part of this particular constellation. The three bright blue stars are incredibly bright, although most of their luminosity is only found in the ultraviolet spectrum, so humans can’t fully appreciate just how unimaginably bright these stars really are.

Alnitak, the leftmost of the three stars, is about 100,000 times the brightness of the Sun when you factor in ultraviolet radiation, while the rightmost star Mintaka clocks in at 90,000 times. Technically, Mintaka isn’t actually a star at all, but rather  two stars orbiting one another, but they’re so close together that they appear to be a single light source at our great distance away, which is thought to be about 1,000 light-years. Alnilam is the brightest of the three, with a luminosity 375,000 times that of the Sun.

Daily space porn. Hittin’ the quotient early for ya’ll, with a TLC reference to boot.

Sometimes the Monday Morning Commute is prefaced with a short story or anecdote. Not today. Instead, I’m going right for the top-turnbuckle so that I can drop the entertainment elbow. You know the drill – I show you what I’m going to do in my free time to avoid insanity (or perhaps induce it). And then you, as a loyal reader of OL, hit up the comments section and do the same.

Let’s dance, Sally.

–-

Rockin’ / OFWGKTA – Radical

[oddfuture]

Keep Reading »

[Search Engine Terms come from an app in the Word Press dashboard. It tells you the terms that people are using in google to lead to your site. Most of ours are ultra depraved and horrible. And amusing to sick people like me.]

If you can’t fap to art, what the fuck is the point? Particularly art featuring set in latex heaven.

Oh shit, Keanu Reeves has dropped that there could be a fourth and fifth Matrix movie coming. The sound you here is my slitting my throat with an old copy of Wizard. Paper cuts hurt man, but not as much as the continual destruction of every childhood Idol that I  worshiped.

Interested? Come in for the deets.

Keep Reading »

If anyone were to describe Bulletstorm as juvenile retarded crap, I would respond by saying, “Seriously, I know. It’s going to be tremendous.” I respect the fuck out of Epic Games and People Can Fly by embracing the retarded juvenile Rob Liefeld wet dream that this game is, and marketing the fuck out of it that way. I don’t know how many trailers I’ve seen where the main character says something like “combos that will make your butthole pucker.”

If I had to guess, I’d say: not enough.

Hit the jump for the trailer.

Keep Reading »

It was announced today that Wizard magazine is closing its doors. For the forever and everything. News broke while I was probably discussing something retarded like editing the manuscripts of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders in class on campus. When I returned I returned to the inter-pipes, I found the world changed.

Keep Reading »

Enlarge. | Via.

See that shit? It’s the center of the galaxy you’re currently living in. Alasdair Wilkins explains how this pig was made:

This amazing image of the center of our galaxy is the work of three different space telescopes – Hubble, which photographs objects in the visual wavelengths, Chandra, which looks at X-rays, and Spitzer, which investigates the infrared.

Gorgeous. Astrophysicist Giovanni Fazio explains in Wilkin’s article that when ” you look at the universe in different wavelengths, you get a completely different picture. They are all pieces of a puzzle.” True dat.

Enlarge.

Up until yesterday, I hadn’t heard of Megan Burns. Thanks to the internets and io9, I am now educated. Knowledge has been acquired. Education implemented. Burns is an artist and is putting on a show this weekend in NYC that celebrates something everyone involved in Omega Level fucking loves: pin-up  space babes art. You live in NYC, unlike me, and could actually check this awesomeness out? Here’s some deets:

Burns’ paintings will be featured alongside the neon alters of Pavel Kraus in “Ancient Sci-Fi Update,” at The Proposition, which is at 2 Extra Place on New York’s Lower East Side. The opening reception is today (Jan. 22) from 6 to 8 PM, and the show runs until Feb. 27.

Enlarge.

Go to the show. Go to her website. Show the love.

[Editor’s Note: Intergalactic Space Cowboy Bonesaw proposed he write a column on space for OL every Saturday. Or thereabouts. The Powers That Be (me) obliged. The following is his madness, not ours. I’d say I vouch for it, but I also vouch for fetish porn and child labor. So take it as you will.]

Time is a dimension. It’s hard to perceive it as a planar dimension given that it is not visually evident as we may find height, width, or depth to be, but it can be explained in a way that may give it relevance to other dimensions despite never exactly emulating one. Spatial relativity dictates time’s expansion with the increase of speed. That is to say that as you travel faster on a planar dimension, you’re experiencing time faster as well.
Another force affecting time is force exerted upon an object. This force that is majorly holding our time in check beyond our speed is gravity. The closer to the gravitational field you are, the slower your time is going to be moving. An easy way to think about this is considering that an accurate clock being held a few feet above you will travel faster, albeit a relatively negligible amount, than a clock on the ground.

This is interesting when considering that if we can alter the speed of an object we can consequentially edit its time path. This is relevant when considering that astronauts experience time at a considerably different pace than us here on earth when factoring in their speed with their distance from large gravitational forces.

Absolute time was the principle in which two good clocks should have an identical time regardless of the events leading up to the time checking. This notion was declared false upon the Theory of Relativity’s supporting realization that the speed of light is seen as the same to all beings irrelevant to their movement. Time has since been considered personal as in this instance each observer would carry an individual clock which wouldn’t agree with each other observer’s clock.

Hawking used the example of a cup sitting on a table versus a cup that has been smashed to pieces by falling off of said table. The cup on the table is in a state of order while the smashed up is in a state of disorder. The chances in which an ordered state diminishes into a disordered state increases with time, however we don’t see cups putting themselves back together and flying up to the table again. This is an example of not only a term known as the Arrow of Time, but also the second law of thermodynamics which Hawking uses to govern time. “In any closed system disorder, or entropy, always increases with time. In other words, it is a form of Murphy’s Law: things always tend to go wrong!”

Keep Reading »