this is my design

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Thu, 23 May 2013 00:13:43 +0100

tragers: vikings 1.09 + scenery

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:13:14 +0100

tragers:

vikings 1.09 + scenery

Ragnar’s just like, “Oh yeah? Watch me motherfucker.”

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:01:21 +0100

Ragnar’s just like, “Oh yeah? Watch me motherfucker.”

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Thu, 23 May 2013 00:01:00 +0100

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Wed, 22 May 2013 23:52:59 +0100

mirkwoodling: Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring...

Wed, 22 May 2013 23:44:25 +0100

mirkwoodling:

Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring Scenery (requested by robbharington)

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Wed, 22 May 2013 23:39:57 +0100

m-oonblaze: everyone’s getting into relationships and you know what im getting? some more food brb

Wed, 22 May 2013 23:39:16 +0100

m-oonblaze:

everyone’s getting into relationships and you know what im getting? some more food brb

naturemetaltolkien: I can’t take Star Trek: Into Darkness seriously as there are several new sky...

Wed, 22 May 2013 23:37:28 +0100

naturemetaltolkien:

I can’t take Star Trek: Into Darkness seriously as there are several new sky scrapers surrounding St. Paul’s cathedral in the film, despite the fact that the view of the cathedral from various locations, such as Alexandra Palace and the summit of Parliament Hill, are legally preserved as Protected Vistas. Their future London skyline completely disregards UK urban planning policy.

abrams you hack

worldofmythology: Will-o’-the-Wisp Will-o’-the-Wisps are...

Wed, 22 May 2013 23:31:42 +0100

worldofmythology:

Will-o’-the-Wisp

Will-o’-the-Wisps are spirits in British/Celtic mythology that create little lantern-like lights off paths and roads to trick those that travel at night. If the travelers follow the lights they disappear into the bog, never to be seen again.

Source: Spirits, Fairies, Gnomes, and Goblins: An Encyclopedia of the Little People by Carol Rose

Image: Artist unknown. Source: Mudie, A Popular Guide to the Observation of Nature (1836, p.144)

This is a part of the World Mythology Challenge. Day 6 - Celtic Myth.

sixsagesandthelight: リンク＆シエラ＆ラインバック！ | ましゅー [pixiv]

Wed, 22 May 2013 23:29:25 +0100

sixsagesandthelight:

リンク＆シエラ＆ラインバック！ | ましゅー [pixiv]

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Wed, 22 May 2013 23:28:08 +0100

thenewenlightenmentage: What is a Magnetar? A magnetar is a...

Wed, 22 May 2013 17:35:16 +0100

thenewenlightenmentage:

What is a Magnetar?

A magnetar is a type of neutron star with an extremely powerful magnetic field, the decay of which powers the emission of high-energy electromagnetic radiation, particularly X-rays and gamma rays.¹

History

On March 5, 1979, several months after dropping probes into the toxic atmosphere of Venus, two Soviet spacecraft, Venera 11 and 12, were drifting through the inner solar system on an elliptical orbit. It had been an uneventful cruise. The radiation readings on board both probes hovered around a nominal 100 counts per second. But at 10:51AM EST, a pulse of gamma radiation hit them. Within a fraction of a millisecond, the radiation level shot above 200,000 counts per second and quickly went off scale.

Eleven seconds later gamma rays swamped the NASA space probe Helios 2, also orbiting the sun. A plane wave front of high-energy radiation was evidently sweeping through the solar system. It soon reached Venus and saturated the Pioneer Venus Orbiter’s detector. Within seconds the gamma rays reached Earth. They flooded detectors on three U.S. Department of Defense Vela satellites, the Soviet Prognoz 7 satellite, and the Einstein Observatory. Finally, on its way out of the solar system, the wave also blitzed the International Sun-Earth Explorer.

The pulse of highly energetic, or “hard,” gamma rays was 100 times as intense as any previous burst of gamma rays detected from beyond the solar system, and it lasted just two tenths of a second. At the time, nobody noticed; life continued calmly beneath our planet’s protective atmosphere. Fortunately, all 10 spacecraft survived the trauma without permanent damage. The hard pulse was followed by a fainter glow of lower-energy, or “soft,” gamma rays, as well as x-rays, which steadily faded over the subsequent three minutes. As it faded away, the signal oscillated gently, with a period of eight seconds. Fourteen and a half hours later, at 1:17AM on March 6, another, fainter burst of x-rays came from the same spot on the sky. Over the ensuing four years, Evgeny P. Mazets of the Ioffe Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, and his collaborators detected 16 bursts coming from the same direction. They varied in intensity, but all were fainter and shorter than the March 5 burst.

Astronomers had never seen anything like this. For want of a better idea, they initially listed these bursts in catalogues alongside the better-known gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), even though they clearly differed in several ways. In the mid-1980s Kevin C. Hurley of the University of California at Berkeley realized that similar outbursts were coming from two other areas of the sky. Evidently these sources were all repeating unlike GRBs, which are one-shot events [see “The Brightest Explosions in the Universe,” by Neil Gehrels, Luigi Piro and Peter J. T. Leonard; Scientific American, December 2002]. At a July 1986 meeting in Toulouse, France, astronomers agreed on the approximate locations of the three sources and dubbed them “soft gamma repeaters” (SGRs). The alphabet soup of astronomy had gained a new ingredient.

Another seven years passed before two of us (Duncan and Thompson) devised an explanation for these strange objects, and only in 1998 did one of us (Kouveliotou) and her team find remains of a star that exploded 5,000 years ago. Unless this overlap was pure coincidence, it put the source 1,000 times as far away as theorists had thought—and thus made it a million times brighter than the Eddington limit. In 0.2 second the March 1979 event released as much energy as the sun radiates in roughly 10,000 years, and it concentrated that energy in gamma rays rather than spreading it across the electromagnetic spectrum.²

About 26 magnetars are known (see here).

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar

2 http://solomon.as.utexas.edu/~duncan/sciam.pdf

xcgirl08: shoujofeels: becausetheinternet: A 2500 year old...

Wed, 22 May 2013 17:31:58 +0100

xcgirl08:

shoujofeels:

becausetheinternet:

A 2500 year old mummy that had some amazing tattoos.

WHAT.

NO FUCKING WAY.

YO HOLD ON.

IT GETS BETTER.

This mummy, found in the Altai mountains of Siberia, is actually that of a young woman who died at about the age of twenty-five; she is thought to have been a member of the Pazyryk tribe.

She was buried with six horses and two similarly-tattooed men (the horned griffon that decorates her shoulder also appears on the man buried closest to her, covering most of his right side), possibly escorts. She was also wearing a horse-hair wig, silk, and elaborate boots, which is all a level of ceremony that would have likely only been accorded to a woman of high rank. You didn’t get inked like this unless you were very important, and had worked your way up to that importance.

…Hence, of course, the references to her by researchers as ‘The Ukok Princess,’ although due to the lack of weapons in her grave they have concluded that the woman was in fact a healer or a storyteller.

And now I’m all consumed with curiosity: Who was she? What amazing things did she accomplish? Why these symbols, and what did they mean? Who were the two men alongside her?

The most informative article about it can be found here, although I would completely eat up any other information you guys could find.

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Wed, 22 May 2013 17:29:03 +0100

ikenbot: Aeon Rising The Milky Way rises beyond Utah’s iconic...

Tue, 21 May 2013 23:33:08 +0100

ikenbot:

Aeon Rising

The Milky Way rises beyond Utah’s iconic Delicate Arch. — Brad Goldpaint

the-science-llama: If Earth Had Rings First off, they would be...

Tue, 21 May 2013 23:32:45 +0100

Guatamala

Washington, DC

Quito, Ecuador

Polynesia The Earth's Shadow appears on the Rings at night

Arctic Circle The Rings are barely visible

the-science-llama:

If Earth Had Rings

First off, they would be really pretty to look at. They would also dominate the sky in both night and day at exactly the same place as they would never rise nor set. And at night you would see the Earth’s shadow swing across the rings, like in the 4th photo here.

However, life would be very different on Earth if this were the case. Nocturnal animals would have a hard time being nocturnal, as the light reflecting from the rings would illuminate the night.

Because we are closer to the Sun than Saturn is, the rings would be more rocky than ice, making them less bright but still pretty bright. In fact, you would see far less stars at night (living anywhere other than the equator or the arctic circle) because of the light pollution and not to mention ruin most meteor showers because of that.

During the day the rings would block sunlight in certain regions of the planet creating wild weather cycles and effecting plant life as well. So basically, they would be definitely pretty to look at but they would also make a whole lot of things screwy.

Illustrations by Ron Miller // io9
— Click the photos for captions

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Tue, 21 May 2013 23:16:10 +0100

naturemetaltolkien: -

Tue, 21 May 2013 23:03:34 +0100

naturemetaltolkien:

-

innuendium: This may or may not allude to the Night King...

Tue, 21 May 2013 22:50:12 +0100

innuendium:

This may or may not allude to the Night King theory, but regardless, have a quick badass Stannis. I love him so much it hurts.