A collection of thoughts

A very good evening with friends over dinner tonight, as usual our talks cover a wide variety of topics. I mentioned that I would post some of the links to the TED talks that I mentioned tonight. So as promised here they are.

All of these will make you think.

Michael Pritchard’s water filter turns filthy water drinkable

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/michael_pritchard_invents_a_water_filter.html

Eric Giler demos wireless electricity

http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_giler_demos_wireless_electricity.html

Cary Fowler: One seed at a time, protecting the future of food

http://www.ted.com/talks/cary_fowler_one_seed_at_a_time_protecting_the_future_of_food.html

Bailout Costs vs Big Historical Events

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/06/bailout-costs-vs-big-historical-events/

2 Shuttles on the pad.

From Tom’s Astronomy Blog are these nice shots showing Shuttle Atlantis and Endeavour both on the launch pads at the same time. Endeavour is on the pad just in case a rescue mission is needed for Atlantis’ mission in October to service the Hubble Space Telescope. Normally the International Space Station could be used as a ‘space lifeboat’ but because Hubble and the ISS are in very different orbits this is not possible.

Photo A including a rainbow.

Photo B

Amazing Mental Math

From Alan over at Ufies.org comes this amazing display of Mental Math at TED this year.
Arthur Benjamin solves math problems faster in his head then people entering them in a calculator. As his finale he gets 5 single digits from random audience members, and the proceeds to figure out the square of the number, quite amazing.

Phoenix on Mars

The Phoenix lander touched down safely on Mars yesterday with no problem. Phoenix is a probe designed to explore the martian arctic, in particular the polar ice cap that is located near the Martian North Pole. Among it’s experiments it will dig into the surface and attempt to collect some soil and ice into the lander for analysis. Doing this will help scientists determine if life ever did exist on Mars.

There are images already coming in from Phoenix available on the mission website but one of the most striking images comes from another spacecraft in orbit around Mars. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been in Martian orbit since 2006 and has been providing very good data and images itself. Yesterday it managed to take a photo of the Phoenix lander descending into the atmosphere.

What should boggle the mind about this picture is this. We are looking at a probe descending to the surface of another world, being photographed by another probe orbiting the same planet, which is 100′s of millions of miles away.