Skyehaven’s Cool Thing of the Day

*ding* Second floor: small appliances, electronics, and keyboards that reposition your wrists for you.

The American Museum of Natural History and NASA have joined forces to produce a planetarium show about the amazing variety of stars that dot our cosmos–exploding stars, giant stars, dwarf stars, neutron stars, even our own star!

You can order your free (yes, FREE) copy here.

* I’ve posted before about Galaxy Zoo. Since the last time I mentioned it on this blog, there have been some huge and exciting changes. The mission of the main Galaxy Zoo site has moved on from the images provided by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and on to images from Hubble. You can also participate in Moon Zoo, helping scientists to provide accurate crater counts from the moon’s surface.

* Send your face to space.

* Last week SpaceX successfully launched their Falcon 9 rocket and achieved low earth orbit. Since it looks like U.S. service to the ISS will be handled by private corporations for the near future, at any rate, this is a huge step.

* Here’s some high school students who figured out a way to take their very own pictures from space.

The Linux Multimedia Sprint project has released it’s first batch of content, consisting of various openly licensed sounds, images, and other assorted multimedia goodness. Read all about it and browse the archive here.

So I’ll let them speak for themselves.

…if you wanted — let’s just say — to read the original account of Newton and the falling apple, you’d have to research which museum, school, or library had the manuscript, arrange a costly visit overseas (if you were not already located in Europe), and try to convince a librarian that you had good reason to look at the original and that you’d be ever so careful with it. If you were lucky, you might be allowed into the collection to see it — look, but don’t touch!

No longer. Turning the Pages has placed some — admittedly few, to date — manuscripts online. Now you can look at the fragile paper manuscript from the 18th century which tells the story of Newton’s development of his theory of gravity from the comfort of your own home. No, you can’t actually handle the manuscripts at Turning the Pages, but it’s unlikely you’d have been allowed to do so had you made that theoretical trip, either.

We’ll call this one more entry into the list of reasons that I’m glad to live in the Internet age.

Keep an eye on the Madeira Islands. They’re aiming to set a new world record for the world’s largest fireworks display. They took the prize with their 2006/2007 New Year’s display and this year are attempting to re-break their own record. It should be a party!

Update: If you missed seeing it live, here’s the show from YouTube.

Folks, you may want to start next year’s Christmas wish list early.

(Thanks to Suki at Reason.com for the link)

Judging from the number of views this has on YouTube, I’m coming late to the party. But I do love some good stop animation, and this is some of the best I’ve seen.

Have a go at Combine from Mind Jolt Games. At first it looks like just another three ball match game. The twist is that combining three balls of one color creates a new ball of the next color up the line. It’s not a button masher. It takes some ability to think ahead logically — and allows ample time to do so — to position new balls in the best place for clearing them later. It’s pretty nifty. Hope you enjoy it as much as I have.