Snowy Screen (Let It Snow)

Go to www.google.com, then type "let it snow", and press enter.

At the start, you can notice the snowflakes falling from the top of the screen.

 The screen is then slowly filled with snowy sight. ;)

After a few minutes, you can hardly read some parts on the screen especially on the sides.

The unique part is there is a "defrost" button. ;)

Click the defrost button, and it will look like the picture above, with little snowflakes. ;)

Have fun! ;)

December 2011 Lunar Eclipse

The world is now watching the Earth's sole satellite - the moon.
The lunar eclipse on December of 2011.

Image courtesy to @haselemon

These are the only nice shots I have found as of this moment. ;)

Image courtesy to @haselemon

Source: @haselemon
Special thanks to: @AtoZyoU for retweeting
Links: first photo     second photo

Image courtesy to Ilovejks

Notice, the moon turned red. Why is this so?
When light from the Sun goes by the side of the Earth, it passes through a long and thick layer of Earth's atmosphere. Shorter wavelengths of sunlight, like blue, are scattered by the atmosphere. So by the time the light has finished its trip to the moon, more of the longer wavelengths, like red, are left over.
Source: NASA

read more about this at NASA's website

Steve Jobs: a Wizard, Not a College Dropout

It's impossible to begin to understand the sources of Jobs's success without looking to his unusual life story. Both his heroic posture as an inspired crusader striving to change the world and his famed passion for thinking differently sprang from the circumstances of his upbringing: like the fictional Harry Potter, he was a misfit, raised by adoptive parents who ultimately discovered that he was a wizard among the muggles. Jobs was born out of wedlock to two wizards, a.k.a. graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, Madison: Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian immigrant pursuing his doctorate in political science, and Joanne Simpson, who was studying for her master's in speech. He was adopted at birth by Paul and Clara Jobs of San Francisco. Unlike Harry Potter's guardians, the Jobses were loving, supportive parents, but they were muggles nonetheless-working-class folks rather than the rarefied breed of intellectuals and artists that the teenage Steve envisioned as his own true identity.
Four of the hallmarks of Jobs's future business career --- his extraordinary persuasiveness, his constant risk taking, his rare deal-making ability, and his fierce perfectionism --- can be traced to his teenage years. The first three are sharply illustrated by his brief episode as a college student: Jobs would become known as one of the most famous college dropouts of our times, along with Microsoft's Bill Gates and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.
But in Jobs's case the "dropout" image is all wrong. He was actually a "drop-in": he matriculated at Portland's Reed College, a bastion of the counterculture and leftist artsy intellectualism, even though he knew his parents couldn't--and wouldn't--pick up the tab. When the first bill came due and went unpaid, Jobs talked the dean of students into letting him stay in the dorms and attend classes for free. That's how strongly he wanted to be at an elite school and obtain its validation that he was indeed a wizard rather than a muggle. And that's how good he was at persuasion and deal-making --- and how open to real risk...


Source: Newsweek Magazine
September 5, 2011 issue

"Can You Crack It?" Wanted: Spies

Britain's GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) is looking for web-savvy cyber-sleuths-to-be.
Enter the correct keyword, and there is a countdown timer at the lower left side of the screen.
Here's the official website:
http://canyoucrackit.co.uk/


Read these articles:
1) http://news.yahoo.com/crack-spies-wanted-174506903.html
2) http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2011/12/can-you-crack-it-uk-agencys-website-seeks-new-spies/

Decode and be a spy. ;)

The Fascinating Force of Black Holes

image courtesy NASA

For the first time, scientists spotted a black hole devouring a star in a distant galaxy. One of the rarest astronomical events, it's believed to happen only about once per 100,000 years per galaxy.


"Earlier this year, scientists caught the first ever glimpse of 'one of the rarest of all astronomical events': a black hole gobbling up a star in a distant galaxy. Black holes are the Cookie Monsters of the universe, consuming everything in their path. The unfortunate star called Swift J 1644+57 actually met its demise 3.9 billion years ago..."


Here's the link to it:
http://whoknew.news.yahoo.com/who-knew/black-holes-27425876.html


Related articles:
http://www.euronews.net/2011/09/19/black-hole-caught-gobbling-up-a-star/
especially this one (from NASA):
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/draco-blasts.html

North Korean Refugee Adoption Act

If you are an American citizen, please help. These children have no family. And imagine, North Korea. Think about how they do things in there.
Please go to www.THINKchildren.org

I'm just sharing the information. ;)

credits to: Taeyeon Kim (@t89kim)

The 2010 Antarctic Ozone Hole

Each August, as sunlight begins to pierce the winter-long Antarctic night, UV radiation splits apart diatomic chlorine molecules that have formed on stratospheric clouds above the South Pole, and the freed radicals catalyze the breakup of ozone. For the part two and a half decades, increased chlorine concentrations from anthropogenic chlorofluorocarbons and related chemicals have led to extensive ozone depletion - the "Antarctic ozone hole".

The ozone hole reaches its greatest horizontal extent in late September or early October. This false-color image of ozone concentrations, based on UV and IR measurements by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shows the ozone hole on 26 September 2010, at its maximal extent for the year. At roughly 20 million square kilometers, its area is larger than that of Russia.
Ozone concentrations are measured in Dobson units (DU). One DU of ozone would form a layer 10 micrometer thick at standard temperature ad pressure. The average ozone concentration planetwide is approximately 300 DU. Prior to 1979, ozone measurements over Antarctica were always above 220 DU, so 220 has emerged as the threshold for defining the hole.
Many factors, including weather and atmospheric dynamics, influence the size of the ozone hole. Thanks to the Montreal Protocol and subsequent agreements, stratospheric chlorine concentrations have declined from their peak in the early 2000s, but they remain higher than in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and ozone depletion will continue for several decades more. The World Meteorological Organization and United Nations Environment Programme recently released the executive summary of their 2010 report on the world's ozone layer; it is available at http://www.unep.ch/ozone.


Source: Physics Today magazine
www.physicstoday.org