“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” — Albert Einstein”
npr:
Bees could build flat honeycombs from just three shapes: squares, triangles or hexagons. But for some reason, bees choose hexagons. Always “perfect” hexagons. Why?
— What Is It About Bees And Hexagons? : Krulwich Wonders…
Illustration: Robert Krulwich/NPR
At NPR headquarters, our green roof — covered with soil and plants — houses two small wooden hives with more than 20,000 bees. No honey yet, but they are buzzz-y over on twitter @NPRBees. — tanya b.
#420 Black matter – A new minimal geometric composition each day
There’s a lot of debris floating around in space, and researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab are using supercomputers, optical sensors and other technology to track even small objects that could damage important satellites.
John Henderson, a space scientist at LLNL, explains:
“Everybody uses GPS to get from here to there. We have satellite television, we have weather reports, farmers use satellite data for monitoring crops. If you have a piece of satellite debris whacking into a satellite, in the worst case you now lose that capability. In February of 2009, that actually happened where there was an Iridium communications satellite that collided with a dead Russian Kosmos satellite and so that basically took out a $100 million dollar satellite.
There’s somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 pieces of debris that we would like to be tracking. And so the supercomputing capabilities that we have here at Livermore are one way to keep track of that.”
Can this idea be scaled way, way back to illustrate a simpler question: When do two objects moving in intersecting circular paths collide, or when will two clocks, one which runs faster than the other, both tell the same time?
Lenticular Street Art by Roa | Colossal
Are there good questions here?
Add to Teaching Mantras list.
The Art of Ofey: Richard Feynman's Sketches and Drawings | Brain Pickings
Learning Target #1: Playfulness. [Discovery via Curiosity via Play]
