A Hole in Mars What created this unusual hole in Mars? The hole was discovered by chance on images of the dusty slopes of Mars’…

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A Hole in Mars

What created this unusual hole in Mars? The hole was discovered by chance on images of the dusty slopes of Mars’ Pavonis Mons volcano taken by the HiRISE instrument aboard the robotic Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter currently circling Mars.

The hole appears to be an opening to an underground cavern, partly illuminated on the image right. Analysis of this and follow-up images revealed the opening to be about 35 meters across, while the interior shadow angle indicates that the underlying cavern is roughly 20 meters deep.

Why there is a circular crater surrounding this hole remains a topic of speculation, as is the full extent of the underlying cavern. Holes such as this are of particular interest because their interior caves are relatively protected from the harsh surface of Mars, making them relatively good candidates to contain Martian life.

These pits are therefore prime targets for possible future spacecraft, robots, and even human interplanetary explorers.

Somali “Pirate leader” on trial in Bruges

pirates, somalia, somali pirates, Belgium, piracy, film, duplicity, films that should be made

Mohamed Abdi Hassan is seen as the leader of a group of pirates responsible for hi-jacking countless vessels off the coast of Somalia. Belgian prosecutors are taking him to court for the hi-jacking of the Pompei, a vessel operated by the Belgian dredging company Jan De Nul. The crew of the vessel was only released after a ransom of two million euros was paid. Abdi Hassan was enticed to come to Belgium in 2013 after he was convinced that a film was to be made about his life as a pirate. The chief defendant was also active in Somali politics and when he was detained a high-ranking Somali official who was accompanying him was also arrested. Both men now face charges in Bruges.

http://deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws.english/News/1.2443558

“The post-photographic is not a style, not a tendency or artistic movement. It’s a kind of attitude towards photography. How are…

“The post-photographic is not a style, not a tendency or artistic movement. It’s a kind of attitude towards photography. How are people using photographs, cellphones, how do they react to this cascade of pictures on the internet?” Or, put another way, Robert Pellegrinuzzi’s cloud-like sculpture of 250 000 photos asks: “Do we, in fact, produce images, or do images produce us?”

–Mois de la Photo: making sense of the photograph in the web era | Art and design | The Guardian (viaphotographsonthebrain)

We isolated the 3 products (Coca-Cola Company’s Coca-Cola Classic™, Fanta Orange™ and Sprite™) and were able to reproduce…

“We isolated the 3 products (Coca-Cola Company’s Coca-Cola Classic™, Fanta Orange™ and Sprite™) and were able to reproduce coefficients between 0.94 and 0.96 in subsequent experiments. Checking the spectrum footprint against our existing databases revealed that the missing 0.06 to 0.04 could be closed significantly with the addition of a fourth source: Monosodium Glutamate (MSG)11. The resulting pool (further referred to as CFS(m)) was ranked at up to 0.984 correlation coefficient by our model (fig. 3). Given the 0.15 error margin generally accepted by the flavor industry this is equivalent to a confident match with the full flavor spectrum.”

–CFS(m): universal paradigm for computational flavor synthesis. | Method (viaiamdanw)

Slavoj Žižek · The Non-Existence of Norway

Žižek, Europe, utopianism, migration, refugia, refugees, Norway, There is No Norway

There is something enigmatically utopian in this demand: as if it were the duty of Europe to realise their dreams – dreams which, incidentally, are out of reach of most Europeans (surely a good number of Southern and Eastern Europeans would prefer to live in Norway too?). It is precisely when people find themselves in poverty, distress and danger – when we’d expect them to settle for a minimum of safety and wellbeing – that their utopianism becomes most intransigent. But the hard truth to be faced by the refugees is that ‘there is no Norway,’ even in Norway.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n18/slavoj-zizek/the-non-existence-of-norway