(via Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayj4p3WFxGk)

Star Wars IV: A new hope - Binary Sunset (Force Theme)

Most flows vary in three spatial dimensions and time. In experimental fluid dynamics, the challenge is measuring as much of this information as possible. For those who use computational fluid dynamics to study flows, their simulations provide massive amounts of data and the challenge comes in visualizing and processing that data in a useful way. Unless you can find and analyze the important aspects of the simulation results, they’re just a bunch of numbers. As computers have advanced, the size and complexity of simulation results has increased, too, making the task even more difficult. Using technologies like virtual reality projections (above) or 3D printing (below) allow researchers to interact with flow information in completely new but intuitive ways, hopefully leading to new insights into the data. 

(Video credit: M. Stock; photo credit: 2013 Gallery of Fluid Motion**)

** The 3D-printed vortices are an image I took of a poster at the APS DFD Gallery of Fluid Motion in 2013, but I’m missing the researchers’ names. If you know whose poster these were from, please let me know (fyfluids [at] gmail [dot] com) so that I can update the credits accordingly. Thanks!

VisioNys

There will always be those who mean to do us harm. To stop them, we risk awakening the same evil within ourselves. Our first instinct is to seek revenge when those we love are taken from us. But that’s not who we are… When Christopher Pike first gave me his ship, he had me recite the Captain’s Oath. Words I didn’t appreciate at the time. But now I see them as a call for us to remember who we once were and who we must be again. And those words: Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), dir. J. J. Abrams.

what Old Married Spirk really is

Spock and Jim growing old together. Spock getting more lines in his face, Jim getting a tummy. graying hair, walking more slowly, taking more time to have sex, Spock getting cold more easily, Jim forgetting where he set his house keys. numerous kisses with familiar lips, celebrating anniversaries quietly, hands aging, muscles fading, planting gardens and stargazing together, attending the funerals of enemies and friends, becoming distant to the action of the world, spooning in bed for hours, new and different forms of sadness, new and different forms of happiness, same smiles, same hearts, same minds. 

"There’s nothing holy anymore, nothing sane nor sensible. The world’s turned bad, and so have I." (Electra)

“I ask you again / You who watch / How can there ever be any ending but this? First silence / Then darkness.” (Medea)

Electra with Kristin Scott Thomas and Medea with Helen McCrory are the best stage productions I’ve ever seen. So powerful, moving  and heartbreaking. I adore British actresses.

In Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? Susannah Gibson argues that, for millennia, humans have tried to classify and categorise the world around them. One of the oldest, and most enduring, classifications is the simple troika of “animal, vegetable, mineral”. Though scientists are no longer completely reliant on this simple three-part system to divide the natural world into workable groups, it has become an essential part of our pop culture and is referenced everywhere from art to games, comic books to computer programming, literature to hip hop.

For example, it is mentioned in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There:

The Lion had joined …‘What’s this!’ he said, blinking lazily at Alice, and speaking in a deep hollow tone that sounded like the tolling of a great bell.

'Ah, what is it, now?’ the Unicorn cried eagerly. 'You’ll never guess! I couldn’t.’

The Lion looked at Alice wearily. 'Are you animal — or vegetable — or mineral?’ he said, yawning at every other word.

'It’s a fabulous monster!’ the Unicorn cried out, before Alice could reply.

Image: Alice, the Lion, and the Unicorn, by John Tenniel. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.