Monday, March 31, 2014

Logos Vegas

Carmi's Thematic Photographic 288 is Logos.





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Sunday, March 30, 2014

Master Blister Beetle

This is a beetle I found wandering (unhappily) around in the parking lot. I gave he/she/it/Master Blister Beetle a ride to the nearest shrub with a napkin. You can read all about them here.


And here's another view of the large archway fish tank at MGM Grand.

These are Desert Globemallow:

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Friday, March 28, 2014

Big Ol' Jet Plane

The window had a lot of vertical scratches in it. But it was the only window I had.





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Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Currently Enjoying Red Currant

Carmi's Thematic Photographic 287 is Liquidity.




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Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Ripples In The Fabric Of Space-Time

Carmi's Thematic Photographic 286 is Technological. I'm not including any of my own pictures for this one because the science news is more spectacular than anything I could come up with. Here are the SPT and BICEP-2 telescopes in Antarctica:

Detection of Waves in Space Buttresses Landmark Theory of Big Bang
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — One night late in 1979, an itinerant young physicist named Alan Guth, with a new son and a year’s appointment at Stanford, stayed up late with his notebook and equations, venturing far beyond the world of known physics.

He was trying to understand why there was no trace of some exotic particles that should have been created in the Big Bang. Instead he discovered what might have made the universe bang to begin with. A potential hitch in the presumed course of cosmic evolution could have infused space itself with a special energy that exerted a repulsive force, causing the universe to swell faster than the speed of light for a prodigiously violent instant.
...
On Monday, Dr. Guth’s starship came in. Radio astronomers reported that they had seen the beginning of the Big Bang, and that his hypothesis, known undramatically as inflation, looked right.

Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct.
If the above article isn't clear, I'm sure this one will straighten everybody out.

UPDATE: A link for mikey, and a graphic suggested by feesh:

Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.
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Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Up in the Air

Carmi's Thematic Photographic 285 is Look way up





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Saturday, March 1, 2014

German Village Sparrow Society

It's been a while, but here they are again.

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