The universe as you’ve never seen it before: Photographer creates incredible pictures of what it would look like if planets were closer

• Former NASA art director Ron Miller created images of it would look like from Earth if planets replaced moon
• Astonishing images show Jupiter and Saturn would fill night sky while Mercury is only slightly bigger than moon

By Rosie Taylor
PUBLISHED: 04:58 EST, 21 June 2013 | UPDATED: 09:39 EST, 21 June 201

An astronomical artist has created eye-opening illustrations imagining what the night sky would look like if the moon was replaced by the other planets in the solar system.
Ron Miller, a former art director for NASA, used digital trickery to superimpose scale drawings of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune over the same landscape, highlighting the sheer size of the planets.
The incredible drawings imagine each planet to be 233,812 miles from Earth - the same distance at which the moon orbits.
Enormous planet Jupiter, around 11 times the size of Earth, would dominate the skies while Mars would appear to be around twice the size of the moon.

Artist: Ron Miller used this view of the moon over Death Valley, California, as the basis for his images

Perspective: The former NASA art director imagined how Neptune would look from earth if it was the same distance away as the moon

Huge: The diameter of Jupiter is 40 times that of the moon and it would dominate the night sky if it were in the same position

Red planet: Mars would appear around twice the size of the moon from 233,812 miles away

Mr Miller, from West Virginia, USA, said: 'We are all familiar with the moon in our skies but many people struggle to appreciate the sheer size of the planets we share our solar system with.
'The planets are just a vague concept to a lot of people and even the moon is just a fuzzy ball in the sky.
'I had a bright idea one morning to create a series of illustrations in which the moon is replaced with other planets, something I don't think has been done before. I wanted the illustrations to be thought-provoking and catch people's imaginations.

 

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• So that's where they got the inspiration from! International Space Station looks more like Star Trek's USS Enterprise in astrophotographer's incredible picture
• Say cheese! Nasa set to capture Earth from SATURN during deep space solar eclipse

'I wanted to show people the effects these planets would have on landscapes, and show them what amazing places the planets are.'
He explained that Jupiter is so large that from Earth we would not be able to see the north and south poles of the planet, as it would fill the sky as far as we can see. While Saturn's rings would stretch nearly from horizon to horizon.
'We would all feel a lot more humble with Jupiter's presence constantly looking over us,' he added.
'The reaction to the illustrations has been fantastic. I'm very pleased because they were created to inspire people. Plus, the only way I get to visit these planets is through my illustrations.'

Orb: Uranus would look a similar size to Neptune, according to Mr Miller, who has created the images to highlight the size of the planets

Night sky: Smallest planet Mercury would look just slightly larger than the moon from the same distance

Massive: Saturn and its rings would cover almost 18 degrees of the night sky, according to Mr Miller's calculations

Neighbour: Venus is only slighter smaller than earth so would appear around the same size as our planet does from the moon

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2345679/Photographer-Ron-Miller-creates-incredible-pictures-look-like-planets-closer.html#ixzz2XS29krPa
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A Wooden Train Set That Lets Kids Compose Tunes

RICARDO SEOLA’S IDEA FOR MUSICAL TRAIN LANGUISHED FOR YEARS UNTIL QUIRKY’S PRODUCT ENGINEERS CAME TO THE RESCUE.

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Pushing a small wooden train around a track with one pudgy toddler hand, the sound of a steam engine choo-choo-ing from your mouth. Winding up a music box and holding it to your ear as a mysterious apparatus within plucks a recognizable series of chords from a steel comb. Whether of the Chugga Chugga Express or of a tiny mechanical orchestra, both a music box and a toy train set cast children in the role of a conductor. But what if these different types of conducting could be merged into a single educational experience?

That’s the idea behind the Sound Track, a mash-up that aims to teach kids how music works while it simultaneously teaches them motor skills. A wooden train set with a music box’s revolving cylinder for an engine, the Sound Track is a fantastic example of a great design that sat on the shelf for years until the right company came along to make it a reality.

The concept of the Sound Track was born back in 2009, when Ricardo Seola, a Brazilian student taking an industrial design course at Scuolda Politecnica di Design, in Milan, was asked to create a toy for children as his final project.

As a musician, Seola knew from the beginning that he wanted to make a toy that promoted the same fascination with music he himself had felt from an early age. "One of the most important aspects of my childhood was playing with musical toys," Seola remembers. "I wanted to come up with an intuitive toy, where every action made while playing it produced a clear musical reaction."

ALL SORTS OF COMPANIES CONTACTED ME LOOKING TO SELL THE SOUND TRACK. BUT NONE OF THEM WANTED TO DEVELOP IT.

To a kid, making music can seem very mysterious, but the fundamental love of playing around with different sounds and listening to how they sound when strung fluidly together is something every musician and composer discovers first in childhood. "I wanted a toy that allowed children to discover for themselves how music was actually made."

At first, Seola chose a train as the vehicle for his concept for symbolic reasons: iI’s a classic kid’s toy with a popular musical heritage in children’s songs. But a train noisily going down a railroad made up of a diverse series of tracks is a satisfying metaphor for the way music itself is played. The concept coalesced itself around the train as a symbol.

Seola’s original design envisioned a wooden train with its cowcatcherreplaced with the tuned teeth of a music box. Whereas a music box plays songs by passing these teeth over a revolving cylinder speckled with upraised notes, Seola wanted his train tracks to accomplish the same task.

His concept completed, Seola uploaded a crude video of what he called "The Original Sound Track" up to YouTube, and soon after went viral on Twitter and various design sites.

Soon offers started pouring in to make the Seola a reality. There was only one problem.

"All sorts of companies contacted me looking to sell the Sound Track," Seola says. "But none of them wanted to develop it, and for a toy like this, engineering is crucial. It started as a design concept, not a mass-market product. If I could make it myself, I would have."

The Internet is full of concept designs that touch the popular imagination for a few days, only to have that imagination go unharvested. After a couple of years of quickening obscurity, Seola’s musical train seemed like it was on track for just that fate.

As one last try to get the Sound Track off the ground, the designer decided to submit the idea to Quirky, a New York–based company that socially develops interesting concepts with the goal of making invention accessible to everyone. Within six months of uploading the project, the Sound Track was on its way to becoming a reality.

"Quirky perfected the Sound Track," Seola says. "They took my concept and made it commercial without compromising what I was trying to create."

Improving upon Seola’s design, Quirky’s product engineers repositioned the Sound Track’s music-making comb and added a killer feature Seola had never thought of: the ability for kids to “reprogram” the train set’s tracks with any song they wanted, just by shifting pegs into different positions. Kids can either set the Sound Track to play classic nursery rhymes like "Mary Had A Little Lamb," or they can write songs of their own, which the train will then play back for them as they push it along the track.

"Kids love to see things happen right in front of their eyes, and hear things happen with their ears," Seola says. "Music is so important for kids: it helps them develop important self-expression skills and improves their self-esteem. Since 2009, I’ve gotten emails from parents around the world asking where they can buy the Sound Track for their kids. And now, thanks to Quirky, I’m finally able to answer them."

The Sound Track should be available for purchase from Quirky later this year.

A Disgusting 9-Patty Burger From A Spoof Ad Is Now Banned From Wendy's

CHARISMA MADARANG, FOODBEAST JUN. 15, 2013, 4:13 PM 4,615 4

• 
• A vigilant Reddit user recently posted an image of a towering 9-patty sandwich spotted at a Wendy’s in Brandon, a city in Manitoba, Canada. 

Huffpo set out to investigate this curiosity and found that the item originated from a fictional ad featured in Sports Illustrated nine years ago.

Although the ad was meant to be a “tongue-in-cheek” play, customers requested the behemoth burger and the lovely employees at Wendy’s Brandon happily entertained the idea.

Thus, the 9-patty, 3000 calorie “T-Rex” burger was born and customers were able to purchase the item for $21.99.

Unfortunately, once the T-Rex burger made national news, upper management got a whiff of this brilliant idea and shut it down.

“For obvious reasons, Wendy’s of Brandon neither condones nor promotes the idea of anyone consuming a nine-patty hamburger in one sitting,” stated Barb Barker, an administrative assistant for the outlet.

Man, way to kill that delicious vibe.

Read more: http://foodbeast.com/content/2013/06/13/wendys-sells-9-patty-t-rex-burger-for-22/#.UbpBJ_b71D5#ixzz2XRJOpl3W

WHY GRUMPY PEOPLE CAN BE SUPER PRODUCTIVE

IF YOU'RE WAITING FOR THE "RIGHT MOOD" TO STRIKE BEFORE YOU ATTACK THAT STACK OF WORK, YOU MIGHT BE WAITING A LOOOOOONNNG TIME.

BY: DRAKE BAER

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When we say that we're "waiting for the right time" to start on something, we tend to mean that we want to feel good about what we're doing--but new research suggests that a pinch of negativity can actually be a creative spark.

How so? Creativity, as we know, is both an emotional and intellectual process: Psychologists have found that positive emotions open up your inventory of possible actions--one of the many reasons that it's good to feel good. But, as new research in the Academy of Management Journal suggests, it's good to feel bad, too--depending on how you roll through the day.

Happy Morning People Get Stuff Done, Too
*What The Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast
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*Happiness Secrets From The Staff Of Delivering Happiness At Work
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*How Morning Rituals Jumpstart Joyous Work Days

To find that conclusion, researchers asked 102 creative folks to rate their moods at the beginning of the day and the end of the day. As to be expected, positive feelings at the end of the day correlated with day-long creativity. But here's the twist: People who felt distressed, hostile, or guilty at the beginning of the day--and then felt good by its end--were more productive than the people who felt positive from morning to night.

The British Psycholical Society's Occupational Digest blog clues us into why:

The narrow, alert focus on issues (that comes from negative emotions) can be useful by focusing on things that are in need of a solution and spurring motivation to act on these ...

Once this focus has been set, allowing the negative emotions to slide away and positive emotions to explore the possibility space is a good recipe for getting to innovative solutions.

As Inc. writer Jessica Stillman suggests, the study has an immediate application to your working life: Instead of waiting for a lily-light "right mood" to descend upon you to get the work done, you can use your grumpiness as a weight to dive into your workflow--powering progress until the end of the day.

In other words, the most creative days are like little metamorphoses: If you start as a curmudgeonly caterpillar--and use that focus to get your work done--you can end as an accomplished butterfly.

Starting negative may help you be creative

Gold Was a Horrible Investment from 1500 to 1965

That sound you hear is the gold bubble popping again

Ron Paul thinks gold could go to "infinity", which would certainly be a lot of dollars. But it won't be an easy ride into Buzz Lightyear territory for the shiny metal: gold has fallen 8.5 percent since Ben Bernanke started talking about tapering the Fed's bond-buying a month ago.
Of course, that's nothing compared to gold's looong bear market from 1500 to 1965. As you can see in the chart below from Goldman Sachs (via Zerohedge), it lost over 80 percent of its value compared to inflation-adjusted British pounds over those four-and-a-half centuries. That's a lot less than infinity.
Why has gold been such an abysmal investment, if you can even call it that? Well, gold doesn't have any earnings; it doesn't pay out any dividends; and it costsmoney to store. As Paul Krugman points out, it's only worth piling money into the shiny metal when the opportunity cost of doing so is low -- when real interest rates are negative. Now, that can happen when rates are high, but inflation is higher still, or when rates are low, and inflation isn't quite as low. Britain didn't have negative inflation-adjusted rates for most of the past millennium, because it was on a silver standard from the mid-1200s through the early 1700s, and a de facto, and later de jure, gold standard up until 1931.

Modest ideas that can change the world. See full coverage

But even in its age of fiat money, Britain has only had two episodes of below-zero real rates: the Great Inflation of the 1970s, and the Great Recession today. The former ended when central banks around the world jacked up interest rates in the 1980s, and the latter might be ending now, as central banks look for any excuse to exit their bond-buying despite low inflation and low growth. Indeed, real rates on 10-year U.S. Treasuries have made a violent move from around -0.3 percent at the end of May to 0.64 percent now. It's the first time those bonds have had a positive inflation-adjusted yield since early 2012, when they only briefly offered a 0.02 percent real return. But if inflation-adjusted keep rising this time around, don't be surprised if gold keeps falling -- all the way back to its recent historical average, just like it did in the 1980s and 1990s.
The "t-word" is Bernanke's Midas touch. It turns gold back into gold. No longer will the shiny metal offer better returns than companies that actually do and make things; instead, it will just be the money-suck it's been for centuries on end.
Sell gold!

Matt Smith’s Goodbye Message For “Doctor Who” Fans

http://nerdapproved.com/misc-weirdness/matt-smiths-goodbye-message-for-doctor-who-fans-video/

Tour Google’s New Dublin Campus, A Playground For Nerds

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672886/tour-googles-new-dublin-campus-a-playground-for-nerds#1

The Literal Meaning Of Every State Name In The U.S.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672882/infographic-the-literal-meaning-of-every-state-name-in-the-us#8

WASHINGTON TRANSLATES TO "MARSH FARM LAND, MISSOURI TO "LAND OF THE PEOPLE WITH DUGOUT CANOES." WHAT DOES YOUR STATE OR CITY NAME MEAN? YOU MAY NOT WANT TO KNOW.

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The New Navel of the Moon. It’s so poetic, isn’t it? (And sure, maybe a bit anatomically confusing.) That’s the real meaning behind the state name New Mexico, and it’s one of many etymological gems uncovered by cartographers Stephan Hormes and Silke Peust while they were creating this U.S. map depicting the original, literal meanings behind the states and cities we know today.

“The inspiration was my interest in etymology and my profession as a cartographer," Hormes tells Co.Design. "I started to exchange real names for rue names and the world became a strange romantic continent. It’s obvious to me that after five years of changing names on maps, I must do it. No map is safe.”

Of course, most state names aren’t nearly as gorgeous as New Mexico’s moon navel. For every Idaho “Light on the Mountains,” there is a Missouri “Land of the People with Dugout Canoes.” Many states, of course, simply describe geography, which works out well for Mississippi “Land of the Great River” but a bit less elegantly for Washington “Marsh Farm Land.”

I ask Hormes if there was a single discovery that was most shocking.

“I found some funny stuff like 'Astrakhan’ in the Wolga delta which means ‘Tax haven for pilgrims,’” he explains. “Once we made a funny map of peculiar place names in German. Place names like ‘Fucking’ or ‘Cats Brain’ changed even my selective perception.”

At the U.S. city level, it’s fascinating to see just how many names have gone unchanged. Green Bay. Cedar Rapids. Oakland. Little Rock. They’re all modern names that, when you take a second look, have an old-world appeal. I just wish I could say the same for my hometown of Chicago, which didn’t age so gracefully. It translates to “stink onions.”

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