Monthly Archives: September 2006

NAM critisices the US

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Over 100 countries, mainly third world, but including some large first world ones such as Venezuela and Malaysia, make up the Non-Aligned Movement, who are neither pro the US or Russia.
They have decided they don’t like the ‘Axis of Evil’ type sayings the US has been making, and that they see no problem with Iran’s enrichment of uranium.
Due to the size of this majority, this is being called a new kind of ‘cold war’ – and that there’s fighting talk, led by President and nutcase Chavez. I somehow doubt that the NAW has the coherence to stick up for each other in a NATO kind of sense, so I don’t see that the US will be seeing this as a somehow credible threat – but who knows, with time it could evolve into one.

Campaigning MMOs

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A presidential hopeful, Dennis McCauley has had a campaign stop in Second Life, to talk to the citizens there. Apparently there is room for improvement, but considering this is the first time it’s been done, I’d say it was a bold move. The political commentary is all about whether this is genius or suicide, which is kind of missing the point IMHO.
The point is that this guy has found a large and hopefully receptive audience which has been untapped politically – most hardcore MMO players don’t do politics at all, and this is a great way to reach them. From the experience they will have learnt lessons, and hopefully will put those into practice next time it’s done.

How Big is the Universe and what does it look like?

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There are loads of ways of visualising the universe – through radiation, dark matter, gravitational fields, distribution of visible light etc. And then there are the times as which the universe is visualised – at the beginning, as it grows, now and projected into the future. String theory makes for even more different ways of looking at it as multiple concurrent universes can be visualised and there are loads of thing you can (thoeretically) do with the fabric of space to visualise it differently yet again. The images obtained are very compelling and diverse indeed.

NASAs WMAP program uses microwave images

and has made a time line of the universe and it’s expansion

They have many more images on their site.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Simply put, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is the most ambitious astronomical survey ever undertaken. When completed, it will provide detailed optical images covering more than a quarter of the sky, and a 3-dimensional map of about a million galaxies and quasars. As the survey progresses, the data are released to the scientific community and the general public in annual increments.

They have a lot of datapoints on their sites and quite a few images.

But Spaceref had the only picture I could find with everything they’d mapped on it in one go.


The San Diego Supercomputer Centre goes about running huge complex models of the evolution of the universe

The Max-Planck-Institut fur Astrophysik has some lovely movies and pictures of large-scale structure simulations. They ran the Millenium Simulation, the largest and most realistic simulation ever developed.

More of their images are to be found here