Just in time for the weekend. Thanks science.

On genetics, how we’re all related and good ol’ incest.

• So Long Judy Freudberg, Sesame Street Veteran; Writer Behind Land Before Time and American Tail
• Goddamnit… 35mm Film is About to Die – Studios Plan to Go With All Digital Projection by 2014
• Oh please fucking yes: HBO Considering Bored to Death Movie
• Video: a very brief online peek at upcoming Life of Pi adaptation
• The Evolution of Aesthetics: The Origins Of Music And Visual Art
• Bad astronomer on Will we ever… live on the Moon?
• Concerned Scientists Fight Back Against Ignorance in Washington DC by building a Center for Science and Democracy
• Opinion: Obama Might Lose (And He Might Win)
• Why Are Traffic Lights Red and Green? (sorta explained)

And today’s trailer is Julie Delpy’s sequel to 2 Days in Paris, now with more glasses…

• 6 Filmmaking Tips From Stanley Kubrick
• Did The Events Of ‘Inglourious Basterds’ Change The Rest of Quentin Tarantino’s Film Universe?
• You probably shouldn’t Google how to kill someone before killing someone
• Photograph 51 and the Pursuit of Balance
• They Wear Nike on Mars, Right?
• Will immortality be bad for the soul

Also, lunchtime game of the day: linescape

• Interview: Elon Musk on what’s next for SpaceX
• ‘Fair and square’ pricing? That’ll never work, JC Penney. We like being shafted
• In Seoul, retailer uses 3D QR codes and the sun to deliver discounts only during its quiet times
• What the Bible Says about Abortion
• Talking to Yourself: Not So Crazy After All
• The roar of the crowd: Crowdsourcing is transforming the science of psychology
• The Death of Method Acting

• Wes Anderson Bingo!
• The ‘New Yorker’ Is Going To Tweet Out An 8,500 Word Jennifer Egan Short Story, For Some Reason
• Brian Cox on the Heart of Science
• Physicists Build the First Quantum Interface
• Ex-POTUS Pic of the Day

• Cloak of invisibility: Engineers use plasmonics to create an invisible photodetector
• How Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice, once by technology and again for its own good
• Read Every Line of Dialogue Rihanna Says in Battleship
• Scarlett Johansson On The Ridiculous, Sexist Portrayals Of Superheroines
• The end of drug discovery?
• This INSANE Graphic Shows How Ludicrously Complicated Social Media Marketing Is Now
• SpaceX Dragon, first private ship to the ISS, launched successfully
• How do you cook a unicorn? Chef Anthony Bourdain’s got the recipe
• Andre the Giant: The Greatest Drunk on Earth

Professor Brian Cox hosts a lecture and guests include Jonathan Ross, Jim Al-Khalili, Charlie Brooker and Simon Pegg to name a few? Definitely relevant to my interests.

Over the years I’ve accumulated heroes; people I look up to and admire both for their work and their conviction to what they believed in and worked for.  Foremost of these for me w0uld be Carl Sagan whose visionary belief, not just in science, but in mankind itself, gave voice to the historical achievement of humans as a species and a beautiful, reconnecting position for all of us to take on this planet and amongst the stars.

Today (or rather, yesterday…  time zones and relativity and what not aside) marks what would have been his 77th birthday; and his wisdom, insight and love is still missed.

My brother sent me a video this week of a 3D render of the galaxies imaged in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (wikipedia entry): a series of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope between 2003 and 2004 that looks back approximately 13 billion years ago and images about 10,000 galaxies.

Not stars mind you. Galaxies. Each one possible of holding billions or trillions of star systems.

And this wasn’t through a big patch of the sky either, but in a tiny region of space the size of a square millimeter held a metre away from your eye. That leaves out 12.7 million single cubic millimetre patches of sky that possibly yields some similar results.

Like the following video says, all those figures are too huge of a figure to just compute in the human brain. And I’d agree.

I read of this image being taken some years ago, but it wasn’t till about a year ago when I stumbled across this image file that compares the scale of our solar system to that of the known universe and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field itself, that I had the pleasure of properly getting my brain’s nutsacks blown off.

It’s a big file (approx 1.5megs), so I’m not gonna post it here directly, but check it out and scroll through from the top and It’ll be sure to put some decent insignificance spice into your food for thought soup. Trivial things happen every day and our lives continually shift because of it, but with a little science, it’s pretty easy to put things into perspective of how tiny we all really are and blah, blah, blah, the existential thinking, just check out what I’m talking about here.

Anyway, going back to the original point of it, here’s the video and a full in depth examination article of the Ultra Field worth checking out here.