A Walk in Edwards Gardens

My wife and I went for a little bit of walk through Edwards Gardens this late afternoon. Here are some photos I took. Click the thumbnails above to see the larger version hosted at Webshots.

Dark Sun Sizzling

A picture of the Sun from Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Is this our Sun? Yes. Even on a normal day, our Sun is sizzling ball of seething hot gas. Unpredictably, regions of strong and tangled magnetic fields arise, causing sunspots and bright active regions. The Sun's surface bubbles as hot hydrogen gas streams along looping magnetic fields. These active regions channel gas along magnetic loops, usually falling back but sometimes escaping into the solar corona or out into space as the solar wind. Pictured above is our Sun in three colors of ultraviolet light. Since only active regions emit significant amounts of energetic ultraviolet light, most of the Sun appears dark. The colorful portions glow spectacularly, pinpointing the Sun's hottest and most violent regions. Although the Sun is constantly changing, the rate of visible light it emits has been relatively stable over the past five billion years, allowing life to emerge on Earth.

From the Ashes of the First Stars

From NASA Image of the Day:

What did the first quasars look like? The nearest quasars are now known to be supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. Gas and dust that falls toward a quasar glows brightly, sometimes outglowing the entire home galaxy. The quasars that formed in the first billion years of the universe are more mysterious, though, with even the nature of the surrounding gas still unknown.

Above, an artist's impression shows a primordial quasar as it might have been, surrounded by sheets of gas, dust, stars and early star clusters. Exacting observations of three distant quasars now indicate emission of very specific colors of the element iron. These Hubble Space Telescope observations, which bolster recent results from the WMAP mission, indicate that a whole complete cycle of stars was born, created this iron, and died within the first few hundred million years of the universe.

Geek Impresses the Girls

There was a time, before the commoditization of computer technology, when a computer geek could really impress a girl by carrying around his laptop. These days, just about everybody can be seen carrying around laptops.

End of the World

What does the end of the world look like? Click the thumbnail, and don't drive off the edge!

Daniel Edwards

There's something very much wrong with Daniel Edwards. He's a sculptor with an unusual interest. His topics tend to be on one extreme, controversial, and at other, simply sick. You decide where his pieces fall. Sampling of his subjects:

• 25-foot bust of Fidel Castro
• Provocative bust of Hillary Clinton
• A pregnant Britney Spears on all fours, giving birth
• The autopsy of Paris Hilton
• The bronzed poop of Suri Cruise

Documentary on Hillary Clinton's Busy

Documentary on Fidel Castro's Bust

Racism?

Going back a little to when Hurricane Katrina descended on New Orleans. The Associated Press had many photographs of the disaster, none told the story of racism in the disaster like these two however. When a black person salvages food from a grocery store, it's looting. When a white person does it, it's finding.

Stick-figure animation

Stick-figure animation.

The day before ...

What will tomorrow bring? [Source: Cherryflava.]

Infinity

Want to see something truly amazing? Click the image to the right. It's an example of an infinite animated gif.

It's a Wal-Mart World

Every wonder what the world would look like if was shaped by Wal-Mart's sourcing strategy? Not surprisingly, it's very much so Chinese. This is probably not much different for most retailers.

Nixon vs. Bush

Nixon vs. Bush -- the similarities, and the stark difference between the 70s and today.