Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
NASA

NASA To Investigate Mysterious 'Space Ball' 192

Posted by Soulskill from the that's-gonna-leave-a-mark dept.
redletterdave writes "In mid-November, a hollow space ball fell from the sky and crashed into the earth in Namibia, the African nation situated above South Africa and west of Botswana and Zimbabwe. Authorities recovered the sphere in a grassy village north of Windhoek, the country's capital. The hollow ball, which appears to be made of 'two halves welded together,' has a rough surface, a 14-inch diameter and measures 43 inches around. The strange globe created a crater 13 inches deep and almost 12.5 feet wide, but was found almost 60 feet from the landing spot. Paul Ludik, the police forensics director investigating the case, says the dense ball weighs 13 pounds and is made of a 'metal alloy known to man.' NASA and the European Space Agency will both help investigate the strange occurrence."
NASA

Comet Lovejoy Plunges Into the Sun and Survives 209

Posted by timothy from the part-of-brian-aker's-career-path dept.
boldie writes with a link to NASA's account of comet Lovejoy's close encounter with the sun. Excerpting: "This morning, an armada of spacecraft witnessed something that many experts thought impossible. Comet Lovejoy flew through the hot atmosphere of the sun and emerged intact. ... The comet's close encounter was recorded by at least five spacecraft: NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and twin STEREO probes, Europe's Proba2 microsatellite, and the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. The most dramatic footage so far comes from SDO, which saw the comet go in (movie) and then come back out again (movie)." Here are larger QuickTime versions of the comet's entrance (22MB) and exit (26MB).

Comment Re:And the numbers are... (Score 1) 326

by hvm2hvm (#38212262) Attached to: Physicist Uses Laser Light As Fast, True-Random Number Generator
Not correct - do this in python:

import random

random.seed(5)

f = open("dump", "wb")
for x in range(1000000):
f.write('%s\n' % (random.randint(1000000))

f.close()

By selecting different seeds you can create millions or billions of sequences with a tiny piece of code, even if you include the random number generator.

Comment Re:Minecraft is proof... (Score 1) 272

by hvm2hvm (#38066846) Attached to: Minecraft Is Finished
It's a game because unless you're using creativity mode you can't build anything you want or at least not easily. That is, you need to gather the resources for the design you are making and fight the monsters in the meantime.

Even so, if you *are* using creativity mode there are some limitations on the way you can construct and the materials you can use.

So I think it's kind of a creativity game, you express yourself but according to a set of rules. Maybe the equivalent of haikus in gaming?
Image

Pancake Flipping Is Hard — NP Hard Screenshot-sm 260

Posted by samzenpus from the sorting-a-large-stack dept.
mikejuk writes "French computer scientists have finally proved that sorting pancakes is hard — NP hard. No really — this isn't a joke. Well, it is slightly amusing but that's just because it is being presented as pancake flipping. The algorithm in question is sorting a permutation using prefix reversal — which is much easier to understand in terms of pancakes. Basically you have to sort a pancake stack by simply inserting your spatula and flipping the top part of the stack. We now know that if you can do the this in polynomial time then you have proved that P=NP."

Slashdot Top Deals

"I've seen it. It's rubbish." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android

Close