Tag: Recently Read

Posted on

There Are Twelve Different Kinds of Rainbows

There Are Twelve Different Kinds of Rainbows

The science of rainbows: it’s something we’re all taught in grade school. Airborne water droplets act like little prisms, bending and splitting light. Mix enough water and sunshine, and you get a brilliant bow of color.

The reality is quite a bit more complicated.

Some rainbows have a second, inverted bow, caused by the reflection of light off the primary. Occasionally, we’ll see a darker band of sky between the two arcs. Sometimes, we even witness bright fringes—so called “supernumerary bows”—on the top and bottom of the rainbow.

And when the sun draws low in the sky, rainbows start to lose colors. As light travels a longer distance through the atmosphere to reach our eyes, the shorter wavelengths get scattered away. Eventually, we’re left with nothing but a lovely red smear.

There Are Twelve Different Kinds of Rainbows

A brilliant double rainbow after a rainstorm. Image via Peggy/Flickr

For decades, rainbows have been classified in textbooks based on the average size of their water droplets. But water droplet size alone can’t explain the diversity of rainbows we see in nature.

By sorting hundreds of pictures of rainbows based on the visibility of the six colors and the presence of accessory bands, a team of atmospheric scientists has now come up with 12 different classes—including a rainbow that lacks green, a red-and-blue rainbow, a yellow and orange/red rainbow, and a monochromatic red. They presented their findings at the American Geophysical Union meeting this week.

So, if you’re ever lucky enough to spot a strange, partially-colored rainbow, there’s now a classification scheme that’ll tell you exactly what’s going on. Diffuse red rainbows, for instance, only occur near sunrise or sunset, when the sky is filled with tiny water droplets.

As with many other natural phenomena, the truth about rainbows is turning out to be far more beautiful than we imagined.

[National Geographic]

[Science News]

Follow the author @themadstone

Top: Rainbow at sunset, via Steve Jurvetson / Flickr

via Gizmodo
There Are Twelve Different Kinds of Rainbows

Posted on

The Funniest Star Wars Parodies of All Time

Everyone from Family Guy to Robot Chicken, from Saturday Night Live to independent filmmakers have all skewered Star Wars to great comedic effect. Out of the literally hundreds of parodies out there, these are our faves:

Shorter Bits:

Lando Learns Never to Make a Deal with Darth Vader

Princess Leia Attempts to Record Video Plea for Help

Star Wars Toy Commercial

Death Star Napkin Design Sketch

Kevin Spacey Playing Christopher Walken Blowing the Han Solo Audition

Death Star Architectural Standards Not Up to Code

Emperor Gets the Phone Call After Death Star Destruction

Kevin Spacey Playing Jack Lemmon Auditioning for Chewbacca

"The Force Awakens" Auditions

Longer Bits:

George Lucas in Love (i.e. The True Inspirations for Star Wars)

"Troops" ("Cops" Parody)

Auralnauts: Kenobi Visits Kamino, Part 1 – "Larry"

Auralnauts: Kenobi Visits Kamino, Part 2 – Bass Wars

Excerpt from Clerks: "Death Star Contractors"

Got any favorites that we missed? (I’m sure we’ve overlooked a bunch in the Robot Chicken library alone.) If you’ve got a good one, please link to it in the comments!


via Core77
The Funniest Star Wars Parodies of All Time

Posted on

Guns Save Life Sues Cook County Over Ammunition, Gun Taxes

ToniPreckwinkle_podium

Guns Save Life, Inc. has filed suit against Cook County’s blatantly unconstitutional new ammunition tax, and along with that, the recently passed firearms tax in Guns Save Life v. Ali. The suit relies in part on the United States … Read More

The post Guns Save Life Sues Cook County Over Ammunition, Gun Taxes appeared first on The Truth About Guns.

via The Truth About Guns
Guns Save Life Sues Cook County Over Ammunition, Gun Taxes

Posted on

Backblaze B2 Offers Dirt-Cheap Cloud Storage for Half a Penny Per GB a Month

Backblaze B2 Offers Dirt-Cheap Cloud Storage for Half a Penny Per GB a Month

There isn’t much you can buy for less than one cent these days, but you can store a whole lot of files in the “cloud” for $0.005 a month with Backblaze’s new B2 storage service. It’ll even give you 10GB for free.

Backblaze B2 is similar to Amazon S3 (which starts at $0.022 a month) or Amazon Glacier (which costs a penny per GB). It’s pay-for-what-you-use online storage—petabytes of space, even—that you can use as a backup solution (like you can with Glacier) or to host files on the web. B2 seems to be built with developers in mind, in fact, since there’s an API for it and you can upload or download data using the command line (CLI).

Like Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, you pay for both storage and retrieval (downloads). Downloads cost $0.05 per GB, so this isn’t really a Dropbox replacement or for frequently accessing files. But you could store 100GB of photos or videos there for safekeeping for just $0.50 a month, which is pretty cool.

The service comes with a web interface to upload or download files into your buckets, as well as alerts for when you’re reaching a storage limit you said. If you need to download a big bunch of files at once, you can get a flash drive with your files sent to you (128 GB) for $99 or a USB hard drive (3 TB) for $189.

In any case, if you sign up you’ll get 10GB of storage to try B2 out for free.

B2 Cloud Storage | Backblaze


via Lifehacker
Backblaze B2 Offers Dirt-Cheap Cloud Storage for Half a Penny Per GB a Month