Friday, October 9, 2009

My mind is completely blown by this. We're REALLY small.

I've been watching Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" special lately, and I must say that while I thought there were lots of stars(suns) out there, I had no idea the magnitude of what I was about to learn.

We live on the outskirts of one of the Milky Way galaxy's spiral arms. The Milky Way galaxy alone has about 400 BILLION other suns. All could have planets, some might be like ours.

To blow my mind even further, with the update of the Hubble Space Telescope's latest camera, it has spotted THREE THOUSAND other VISIBLE galaxies. If each of those galaxies had about the same amount of suns,that equals out to be 1.2 QUADRILLION suns. That's just how many are VISIBLE to a camera. Estimates are that there are up to 500 billion other galaxies. How many suns is that? 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 200 sextillion SUNS.

Damn we're small.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Scientists have discovered a new massive ring around Saturn

Scientists at NASA have discovered a new ring around Saturn. This ring is thought to be composed of ice crystals and fine dust particles, so it's not immediately visible to the naked eye. It does, however, radiate some heat, and one of NASA's telescopes picked up the heat signature and created this photo of it. As you can see, Saturn is in the middle of the photo, and this ring is friggin HUGE!

They say it would take a billion Earths to fill this ring. How's that for feeling small?? :)

On a related note, I just learned recently about Carl Sagan, and have started watching his 13 part TV special called "The Cosmos." He was incredibly intelligent, and his words just ring true. It's amazing to me that his story has had to be modified very little since that first broadcast in 1980. He truly had a great grasp for what's out there. How inspiring and at the same time humbling.

One thing I learned from him is that every star you see at night, every twinkling light in the sky, is a Sun not that much unlike ours. It may dwarf our Sun in size, or be hundreds of times bigger, but it's a sun in its own group of planets. There's billions of them. Wow.

Google Android OS to take the number #2 mobileOS spot by 2012

This just in, people are starting to agree with my prediction it seems. has released an article today saying that the mobile Google Android OS that is just starting to make appearances on other cell providers besides T-Mobile will be the #2 OS in the world by 2012. Guess who #1 is? It's not Apple, but rather Symbian OS, which is used on Nokia phones, popular overseas more so than in the US.

Why is this? It's partly because the OS is open source, it's partly because it's backed by Google, it's in part due to the fact that the Android OS runs on a multitude of cell phones and other devices made by different manufacturers. However, mostly, it's due to the fact that the OS is so heavily integrated with Google's "cloud" computing apps that it is releasing and will continue to release over the next few years, such as the upcoming collaborative team based working tool, Google Wave.

It's projected that there will be 40 devices released next year that will run Google Android. There will still be only one iPhone.

As I said before, some big changes are coming!