Hulleye Comes By!

not sure if any of you noticed, but i’ve updated my blogroll, added a weird news of the day feed below the blogroll and also you still have the pakpositive newsfeed coming in along with the science stories of the day right below it. also added the quotes of the day up on the top right. just below the quotes gives you the top five most clicked on links from the day before as well. i’ve also gone ahead and switched my primary rss reader from feedreader to sharpreader. and i’ll be sharing some weird files as soon as adeel fixes up apache. (hear that biatch!)

i think formatting in internet explorer is a bit weird. the sidebar shows up all the way at the bottom right of the page and you have to scroll forever to get to it. if you find this to be the case, i highly recommend switching to firefox forever.

oh and even google think’s paris hilton is a ho!

feel free to throw some suggestions this way. i’ll see what i can do about formatting and fonts. i believe jammie was having some problems with it earlier so will try working on that. anyone else have legibility issues?

WHY IS THE SKY BLUE, AND NOT VIOLET? The hues that we see in the sky are not only determined by the laws of physics, but are also colored by the human visual system, shows a new paper in the American Journal of Physics. On a clear day when the sun is well above the horizon, the analysis demonstrates, we perceive the complex spectrum of colors in the sky as a mixture of white light and pure blue. When sunlight enters the earth’s atmosphere, it scatters (ricochets) mainly from oxygen and nitrogen molecules that make up most of our air. What scatters the most is the light with the shortest wavelengths, towards the blue end of the spectrum, so more of that light will reach our eyes than other colors. But according to the 19th-century physics equations introduced by Lord Rayleigh, as well as actual measurements, our eyes get hit with peak amounts of energy in violet as well as blue. So what is happening? Combining physics with quantitative data on the responsiveness of the human visual system, Glenn Smith of Georgia Tech (glenn.smith@ece.gatech.edu) points to the way in which our eye’s three different types of cones detect color. As Smith shows, the sky’s complex multichromatic rainbow of colors tickles our eye’s cones in the same way as does a specific mixture of pure blue and white light. This is similar to how the human visual system will perceive the right mixture of pure red and pure green as being equivalent to pure yellow. The cones that allow us to see color cannot identify the actual wavelengths that hit them, but if they are stimulated by the right combination of wavelengths, then it will appear the same to our eyes as a single pure color, or a mixture of a pure color and white light. (Smith, American Journal of Physics, July 2005)

courtesy aip

it’s bizzarre. the man who brought us, eraserhead, twin peaks and blue velvet, now reads the weather for LA on a daily basis for his website. (quicktime reqd.) it’s rather amusing really.

from dawn.