Slashdot Mirror
Five Glorious Years of Sun Images In a Four-Minute Video
An anonymous reader writes: In early 2010, NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory. It carried a number of sensors dedicated to watching and measuring various aspects of the Sun. The SDO's team just celebrated its fifth anniversary by going through a half-decade worth of images, pulling out the most amazing ones, and stitching them into an amazing video (YouTube). It includes enormous flares, sunspots, the transit of Venus, and more.
Columbus was probably much smarter than your average lad, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to undertake such a voyage.
He may have been much smarter than your average lad, but at the same time -if you pardon my French- Columbus was an arrogant idiot who went against the common (and correct) knowledge of those days by underestimating the circumference of the Earth by a factor of four. Afterwards he was hailed as the discoverer of America and blabla, but the matter of fact is that he would have drowned if it hadn't been for this random unpredicted piece of land (*) in the middle of the ocean.
(*) Actualy middle-agers made some predictions about undiscovered pieces of land that "should exist" based on some symmetry or whatever religious logic they used. This was not the case for America, though: Columbus really underestimated the voyage and thougt he had arrived in India. The fool!