Ok, I did not know this, and it’s blowing my mind: we have been imaging exoplanets for such a long time that scientists have made time lapse movies of their motion around their stars. This one is a 12-year time lapse of four planets orbiting a star called HR 8799 (images from 2009-2021):
And this one of Beta Pictoris b covers a time period of 17 years (2003-2020):
HR 8799 is 133.3 light-years away from Earth and Beta Pictoris is 63.4 light-years away. That’s amazing! (via @philplait.bsky.social)
Tags: astronomy · planets · science · time lapse · video
On her birthday, US Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian-American, wore a keffiyeh & held up a “Guilty of Genocide” sign during Netanyahu’s Congressional address. “It’s shameful that members of Congress would give a standing ovation to genocide.”
Fun little browser game: What Beats Rock?
Laura Dern was forced to drop out of UCLA’s film school to star in Blue Velvet and the head of dept. called her “insane” for doing so. Now, the film is a requirement at the school. Dern: “Pisses me off.”
A recent book, Van Gogh and the End of Nature, is a “radical revisioning” of van Gogh’s work “in relation to industrial pollution and climate change”.
“In supposedly affluent Western nations, the dire state or absence of public toilets has become a universal nightmare, impacting the health and quality of life of all of us, but particularly for marginalised groups.”
Some good climate news: the pace of decarbonization in the US is increasing (due in part to Biden policies); we’re on track to “reduce GHG emissions by 38-56% below 2005 levels in 2035”, which is 2-4X the pace from 2005 to 2023.
If you’re feeling nostalgic, here’s a version of MS Paint that works in the browser.
Song Exploder
• Hrishikesh Hirway
Sam Smith is a Grammy and Oscar-winning singer and songwriter from London, England. Their first album, In the Lonely Hour, came out in 2014. It went quintuple platinum in the US, and the biggest hit from that album is the song “Stay With Me,” which has over 2 billion streams on Spotify alone. For this episode, in honor of the song’s 10th anniversary, I talked to Sam about how “Stay With Me” was made. I also talked to Sam’s frequent collaborator, Jimmy Napes, who is an award-winning producer and songwriter as well. The two of them tell the story of how the song began, and how it turned into the hit that it became. And then, years later, how it changed again.
For more, visit songexploder.net/sam-smith.
In the latest data release, the UN’s global population peak projection was revised downward to 10.3 billion people in 2084. “The global fertility rate has more than halved since the 1960s, from over 5 children per woman to 2.3.”
