Name: Norman Anthony Aguero
Currently a student at FIU. My major is chemistry and my minor is physics. My goal is to hopefully earn a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry.
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What's Vacuum? - More amazing video clips are a click away
Well, this morning I was thinking about the process of thinking and.......
Mudslide in Japan
Happy Birthday, Hubble!
In celebration of the 17th anniversary of the launch and deployment of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, this, one of the largest panoramic images ever taken with Hubble's cameras, is being released. It is a 50-light-year-wide view of the central region of the Carina Nebula where a maelstrom of star birth - and death - is taking place.
This image is a mosaic of the nebula assembled from 48 frames taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The images were taken in the light of neutral hydrogen. Color information was added using data from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Red corresponds to sulfur, green to hydrogen, and blue to oxygen emission.
The fantasy-like landscape of the nebula is sculpted by the action of outflowing winds and scorching ultraviolet radiation from the monster stars that inhabit this inferno. In the process, these stars are shredding the surrounding material that is the last vestige of the giant cloud from which the stars were born.
The immense nebula contains at least a dozen brilliant stars that are estimated to be 50 to 100 times the mass of our sun. The most unique and opulent inhabitant is the star Eta Carinae, which is in the final stages of its brief and eruptive lifespan, as evidenced by two billowing lobes of gas and dust that presage its upcoming explosion as a titanic supernova.
The fireworks in the Carina region started three million years ago when the nebula's first generation of newborn stars condensed and ignited in the middle of a huge cloud of cold molecular hydrogen. Radiation from these stars carved out an expanding bubble of hot gas. The island-like clumps of dark clouds scattered across the nebula are nodules of dust and gas that are resisting being eaten away by photoionization.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
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Repost, with a slight twist to it. Dedicated to all out there studying for their chemisrty finals.
X-Ray An Egg
I am reposting this video because of two reasons. Last year, I performed this experiment in my physics lab and also because this experiment happens to be one of my favorites. The conclusion borders on the paranormal or spiritual, as if there is a differance between them.
Every Rose Has a Thorn
This image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Rosette Nebula, a pretty star-forming region more than 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. In optical light, the nebula looks like a rosebud, or the "rosette" adornments that date back to antiquity.
Lurking inside this delicate cosmic rosebud are so-called planetary "danger zones," surround super hot stars, called O-stars (blue stars inside spheres), which give off intense winds and radiation. Young, cooler stars that happen to reside within one of these zones are in danger of having their dusty planet-forming materials stripped away.
While scientists have known about O-star danger zones, their parameters were among science's mysteries. Astronomers used Spitzer's infrared vision to survey the extent of the five danger zones shown here. The results showed that young stars lying beyond 1.6 light-years, or 10 trillion miles, of any O-stars are safe, while those within this zone are likely to have their potential planets blasted into space.
Radiation and winds from the super hot stars have collectively blown layers of dust (green) and gas away, revealing the cavity of cooler dust (red). The largest two blue stars in this picture are in the foreground, and not in the nebula itself.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ.of Ariz.
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The Tsar Bomba detonated at 11:32 a.m., located approximately at [2], over the Mityushikha Bay nuclear testing range (Sukhoy Nos Zone C), north of the Arctic Circle on Novaya Zemlya Island in the Arctic Sea. The bomb was dropped from an altitude of 10,500 m; it was designed to detonate at a height of 4,000 m over the land surface (4,200 m over sea level) by barometric sensors.
The original U.S. estimate of the yield was 57 Mt, but since 1991 all Russian sources have stated its yield as 50 Mt. Nonetheless, Khrushchev warned in a filmed speech to the Communist parliament of the existence of a 100 Mt bomb (technically the design was capable of this yield). The fireball touched the ground, reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane, and was seen 1,000 km away. The heat could have caused third degree burns at a distance of 100 km (62.1 miles). The subsequent mushroom cloud was about 60 km high and 30–40 km wide. The explosion could be seen and felt in Finland, even breaking windows there[citation needed]. Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage up to 1,000 km away. The seismic shock created by the detonation was measurable even on its third passage around the Earth.
Since 50 Mt is 2.1×1017 joules, the average power produced during the entire fission-fusion process, lasting around 39 nanoseconds, was a power of about 5.4×1024 watts or 5.4 yottawatts. This is equivalent to approximately 1% of the power output of the Sun. The detonation of Tsar Bomba therefore qualifies as being the single most powerful device ever utilized throughout the history of humanity. By contrast, the largest weapon ever produced by the United States, the now-decommissioned B41, had a predicted maximum yield of 25 Mt, and the largest nuclear device ever tested by the U.S. (Castle Bravo) yielded 15 Mt (an accident due to a runaway reaction; the design yield was approximately 5 Mt). Note the recent comparison with the asteroid impact which may have formed the Chicxulub Crater, an event larger by some six orders of magnitude, released an estimated 500 zettajoules (5.0×1023 joules) of energy, approximately 100 teratons of TNT, on impact.
Power of water. This storm drain is out of control and caused an automobile accident, notice how far the man- hole cover was blown by the water.
The Speed of Sound - The best bloopers are a click away
The Seven Sisters
The Seven Sisters, also known as the Pleiades, seem to float on a bed of feathers in a new infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Clouds of dust sweep around the stars, swaddling them in a cushiony veil.
The view is quite different from the usual observation of these stars in the western sky. Right now, the famous family of stars is "stepping out" in the evening skies with a very bright and dazzling Venus. During the period from around April 10 to 13, the Pleiades shine like a cluster of diamonds just above Venus. On April 19, the crescent moon will join the party, sliding between Venus and the Pleiades for a special viewing.
For more information, read The Seven Sisters Pose for Spitzer - and for You!
Image credit: NASA
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Minivan Struck By Lightning
Tadpole's Tidal Tail
In this stunning vista recorded with the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys, distant galaxies form a dramatic backdrop for disrupted spiral galaxy Arp 188, the Tadpole Galaxy. The cosmic tadpole is a mere 420 million light-years distant toward the northern constellation Draco. Its eye-catching tail is about 280 thousand light-years long and features massive, bright blue star clusters.
Scientists believe that a more compact intruder galaxy crossed in front of Arp 188 - from left to right in this view - and was slung around behind the Tadpole via gravitational attraction. During the close encounter, tidal forces drew out the galaxy’s stars, gas, and dust forming the spectacular tail. The intruder galaxy itself, estimated to lie about 300 thousand light-years behind the Tadpole, can be seen through foreground spiral arms at the upper left. Like its terrestrial namesake, the Tadpole Galaxy will likely lose it tail as it grows older, the tail's star clusters forming smaller satellites of the large spiral galaxy.
Image Credit: NASA
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The Colors of Saturn
This delightfully detailed color image of Saturn is a combination of three images taken in January 1998 by the Hubble Space Telescope and shows the ringed planet in reflected infrared light. Different colors indicated varying heights and compositions of cloud layers generally thought to consist of ammonia ice crystals. The eye-catching rings cast a shadow on Saturn's upper hemisphere, while the bright stripe seen within the left portion of the shadow is infrared sunlight streaming through the large gap in the rings known as the Cassini Division.
Two of Saturn's many moons have also put in an appearance (in the full resolution version), Tethys just beyond the planet's disk at the upper right, and Dione at the lower left.
Image credit: NASA/E. Karkoschka (University of Arizona)
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Very Large Hail
7162
Wind powered sculptures or vehicles.
Nessie:
A true couch potato!
Linear algebra is the branch of mathematics concerned with the study of vectors, vector spaces (also called linear spaces), linear maps (also called linear transformations), and systems of linear equations. Vector spaces are a central theme in modern mathematics; thus, linear algebra is widely used in both abstract algebra and functional analysis. Linear algebra also has a concrete representation in analytic geometry and it is generalized in operator theory. It has extensive applications in the natural sciences and the social sciences, since nonlinear models can often be approximated by a linear one.
The history of modern linear algebra dates back to the years 1843 and 1844. In 1843, William Rowan Hamilton (from whom the term vector stems) introduced the quaternions. In 1844, Hermann Grassmann published his book Die lineale Ausdehnungslehre (see References). Arthur Cayley introduced matrices, one of the most fundamental linear algebraic ideas, in 1857. These early references belie the fact that linear algebra is mainly a development of the twentieth century: the number-like objects called matrices were hard to place before the development of ring theory in abstract algebra. With the coming of special relativity many practitioners gained appreciation of the subtleties of linear algebra. Furthermore, the routine application of Cramer's rule to solve partial differential equations led to inclusion of linear algebra in standard coursework at universities. For instance, E.T. Copson wrote:
| “ | When I went to Edinburgh as a young lecturer in 1922, I was surprised to find how different the curriculum was from that at Oxford. It included topics such as Lebesgue integration, matrix theory, numerical analysis, Riemannian geometry, of which I knew nothing... | ” |
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—E.T. Copson, Preface to Partial Differential Equations, 1973 |
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Francis Galton initiated the use of correlation coefficients in 1888. Often more than one random variable is in play and they may be cross-correlated. In statistical analysis of multivariate random variables the correlation matrix is a natural tool. Thus statistical study of such random vectors helped develop matrix usage.
Linear algebra had its beginnings in the study of vectors in Cartesian 2-space and 3-space. A vector, here, is a directed line segment, characterized by both its magnitude, represented by length, and its direction. Vectors can be used to represent physical entities such as forces, and they can be added to each other and multiplied with scalars, thus forming the first example of a real vector space.
Modern linear algebra has been extended to consider spaces of arbitrary or infinite dimension. A vector space of dimension n is called an n-space. Most of the useful results from 2 and 3-space can be extended to these higher dimensional spaces. Although many people cannot easily visualize vectors in n-space, such vectors or n-tuples are useful in representing data. Since vectors, as n-tuples, are ordered lists of n components, it is possible to summarize and manipulate data efficiently in this framework. For example, in economics, one can create and use, say, 8-dimensional vectors or 8-tuples to represent the Gross National Product of 8 countries. One can decide to display the GNP of 8 countries for a particular year, where the countries' order is specified, for example, (United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, India, Japan, Australia), by using a vector (v1, v2, v3, v4, v5, v6, v7, v8) where each country's GNP is in its respective position.
A vector space (or linear space), as a purely abstract concept about which theorems are proved, is part of abstract algebra, and is well integrated into this discipline. Some striking examples of this are the group of invertible linear maps or matrices, and the ring of linear maps of a vector space. Linear algebra also plays an important part in analysis, notably, in the description of higher order derivatives in vector analysis and the study of tensor products and alternating maps.
In this abstract setting, the scalars with which an element of a vector space can be multiplied need not be numbers. The only requirement is that the scalars form a mathematical structure, called a field. In applications, this field is usually the field of real numbers or the field of complex numbers. Linear maps take elements from a linear space to another (or to itself), in a manner that is compatible with the addition and scalar multiplication given on the vector space(s). The set of all such transformations is itself a vector space. If a basis for a vector space is fixed, every linear transform can be represented by a table of numbers called a matrix. The detailed study of the properties of and algorithms acting on matrices, including determinants and eigenvectors, is considered to be part of linear algebra.
One can say quite simply that the linear problems of mathematics - those that exhibit linearity in their behavior - are those most likely to be solved. For example differential calculus does a great deal with linear approximation to functions. The difference from nonlinear problems is very important in practice.
The general method of finding a linear way to look at a problem, expressing this in terms of linear algebra, and solving it, if need be by matrix calculations, is one of the most generally applicable in mathematics.
Since linear algebra is a successful theory, its methods have been developed in other parts of mathematics. In module theory one replaces the field of scalars by a ring. In multilinear algebra one deals with the 'several variables' problem of mappings linear in each of a number of different variables, inevitably leading to the tensor concept. In the spectral theory of operators control of infinite-dimensional matrices is gained, by applying mathematical analysis in a theory that is not purely algebraic. In all these cases the technical difficulties are much greater.
I'm convinced love is the glue that holds the universe together. Check out
what happens when these two separate towards the end of this clip.
I use my fingers, but:
