An oasis of bespoke holistic wellness, The Banjaran Hotsprings Retreat is situated amidst the natural hot springs and verdant tropical valleys of Perak, Malaysia. Complementing its magnificent setting are a fabulous spa and wellness center, a lovely restaurant focused on healthy, organic cuisine, and 27 luxurious garden and water villas with private plunge pools, outdoor showers, and Jacuzzis filled with natural geothermal water. All properties are elegantly designed and what mostly differentiates them is the backdrop, which ranges from wild jungle rainforests and natural caves to a quaint vegetation-lined canal. In addition to the outstanding spa menu and facilities, the resort boasts a one-of-a-kind cave wine bar where you can indulge in rare, organic wines.
Stefano Boeri’s 'Bosco Verticale' towers have opened in Milan, with each of the 113 apartments featuring its own beautifully landscaped balcony irrigated by greywater recycled through the building.
I love this image of James Franco, but he’ll probably look a bit more dignified when he travels back in time to stop the killing of John F. Kennedy. The pic above is from the last time the actor was involved in an assassination story, when he was the one potentially doing the killing. Now he’s changing sides. Franco is now set to star in the 11/22/63 TV series, which Hulu will air as an adaptation of the novel by Stephen King, produced by J.J. Abrams’ company Bad Robot.
In the 2011 novel by King, a Maine-based high school teacher is shown a time portal hidden in the back of a diner. The man who shows him this portal — which always sends anyone who travels through it back to 1958 — had planned to use it to prevent the assassination of JFK.
But that first guy’s poor health made the job impossible, and so he passes the responsibility on to the teacher. But there are problems with the plan, not least with the fact that time doesn’t really want to be altered.
The Wrap reports Franco’s starring gig as the teacher Jake Epping, and says he’s a producer on the nine-hour “event series.”
The 11/22/63 TV series will air on Hulu, but as a production is based at J.J. Abrams‘ Bad Robot Productions. Bridget Carpenter (The Red Road, Friday Night Lights”), who will write and executive produce the series.
An anonymous reader writes: Nim is a young, statically typed programming language that has been getting more attention recently. See these articles for an introduction: What is special about Nim?, What makes Nim practical? and How I Start: Nim. The language offers a syntax inspired by Python and Pascal, great performance and C interfacing, and powerful metaprogramming capabilities. The author of "Unix in Rust" just abandoned Rust in favor of Nim and some early-adopter companies are starting to use it as well.
What would happen if the Moon were replaced with an equivalently-massed black hole? If it's possible, what would a lunar ("holar"?) eclipse look like?
—Matt
"Not much" and "not much."
A black hole the mass of the Moon would have an event horizon about the size of a sand grain. Specifically, according to one of my favorite charts, a black hole moon would be a grain of fine to medium-fine sand, and could pass through a sieve of size ASTM No. 70 or larger. I mean, I guess a black hole with the mass of the Moon would pass right through any sieve, destroying it in the process, but that's neither here nor there.[1]The expression "that's neither here nor there" can be kind of confusing and ambiguous, but I guess that's neither here nor there.
Since the Moon's mass and position wouldn't change, the tides on Earth wouldn't change, either. When you're floating outside a spherical mass, its pull on you is the same regardless of whether the mass is concentrated at the center of the sphere or spread out throughout it. If the Sun were replaced by a black hole of the same mass, the Earth's orbit wouldn't change, although life on Earth might.
With the Moon gathered into a point, there'd be no moonlight, which would affect the life cycles of all kinds of nocturnal animals. But compared to a lot of the other things we've done, that would be fairly minor. The Earth's orbit is stabilized by the Moon, but the lunar-mass black hole would probably serve the same role.
This black hole Moon would be pretty low-profile. If it were much smaller, it would evaporate through Hawking radiation, but a black hole the size of the Moon actually absorbs more energy from the cosmic background radiation than it emits through the Hawking mechanism. Our black hole would really be black.
At least, if it didn't eat anything. If the black hole devoured any objects, it would let off a tremendous blast of radiation. Black holes burn brightly as they devour things; the whirlpool of matter heats up as it falls inward, causing it to glow brightly.[2]A black hole can't devour matter too fast, though, because at some point it would be producing so much radiation that it would blast its own "food" away. This is called the Eddington limit. If our black hole were devouring matter at the Eddington limit, it would be hot enough to sterilize the Earth.
Fortunately, there's not a lot out there for it to eat, so it wouldn't glow very brightly for now. It would spend most of its time drastically altering the orbits of nearby dust particles—one sand grain pushing other sand grains around.[3]Even if it sucked in matter at the rate the Earth—with its much larger "collecting area"—sucks in interplanetary dust, it wouldn't necessarily be a problem for us.
But there would be one interesting effect: In addition to getting darker, Earth would get colder, because moonlight warms the Earth. It's a very tiny contributor to our global energy balance; the Moon is five or six orders of magnitude dimmer than the Sun. But it's there.
Measurements show that global temperature varies with a 28-day cycle; all else being equal, the Earth is hottest during the full moon. It's a tiny difference—small fractions of a degree—but it's there.
But it turns out most of this effect is not due to moonlight. The largest contributor is the fact that the Earth is slightly closer to the Sun during a full Moon:
Calculating the amount of energy radiated back to Earth by the Moon is deceptively tricky. The Moon reflects sunlight, but with some surprising twists. When the Moon is half-illuminated, you might think it would be half as bright as when full—but it's much less bright than that. And once you account for that, there are even trickier effects to deal with, because science is the worst.[4]Like the fact that the waxing Moon is 20% brighter than the waning Moon, or that the Moon is a mild retroreflector. Then, on top of all the weird visible-light effects, the Moon also heats up under the Sun, then radiates that heat as infrared light.
There's a great discussion of the Moon's effect on the Earth's energy budget in this article by Robert Knox. The upshot is that the Moon's infrared heat radiation turns out to affect Earth's temperature about 10 times more than the visible moonlight, but still about 10 times less than the effect from gravity moving Earth closer and farther from the Sun. Knox even quantifies the effect this has on Earth's radiation balance—the presence of infrared moonlight warms the planet by 1.2 milli-degrees Fahrenheit (m°F).
Without moonlight, the planet would cool down slightly. But given the accelerating rate at which we're adding CO2 to the atmosphere—which changes the Earth's energy balance—we'd make up the difference in a couple of weeks.
So all in all, the conversion of the Moon to a black hole might not even be that big of a deal.
Unless, of course, it happened on certain days between 1969 and 1972, in which case Nixon would've needed yet another one of those speeches.
Valentine’s Day is just three days away. So let’s talk about love — true love, the real thing. Recently, Beagle Street, a life insurance company, conducted a poll to determine the greatest love letter of all-time. The winner was a letter handwritten by Johnny Cash to his wife June Carter on her 65th birthday in 1994.
Sadly, nine years later she died after complications during heart surgery in May 2003. Johnny Cash died less than four months later. Many say that his health deteriorated quickly after she passed away because he was suffering from a broken heart.
We get old and get use to each other. We think alike. We read each others minds. We know what the other wants without asking. Sometimes we irritate each other a little bit. Maybe sometimes take each other for granted.
But once in awhile, like today, I meditate on it and realize how lucky I am to share my life with the greatest woman I ever met. You still fascinate and inspire me. You influence me for the better. You’re the object of my desire, the #1 Earthly reason for my existence. I love you very much.
Happy Birthday Princess.
John
June Carter Cash and Johnny Cash (Photo by KMazur/WireImage)
Other letters in the top 10 include a letter from Winston Churchill to his wife Clementine and a letter from Ernest Hemingway to Marlene Dietrich. Check out the rest of the letters at BeagleStreet.com.
Vor ein paar Wochen erst wurde der Random Darknet Shopper, ein Kunstprojekt mit einem Bot, der zufällige Dinge im Darkweb bestellt (u.a. Drogen und gefälschte Sneaker), von der Polizei hochgenommen wurde und jetzt hat ein Coder Besuch von den Cops bekommen, weil sein Algo-Poetry-Bot (ein Remix seiner eigenen Tweets) einem anderen Bot eine Todesdrohung schickte.
Van der Goot’s bot used his own tweets as fodder, taking random chunks of them and trying to recombine them into new sentences that made sense. According to van der Goot, the bot tweeted something that sounded like a threat which mentioned an upcoming event in Amsterdam. Best of all, the bot was responding to another bot, according to van der Goot. He is not identifying the bot and says he has deleted it, per the request of the police. If this is not a hoax, this may be the first time police had to respond because of a robot-on-robot threat of violence.
Tolle Story auf Fusion von einem der wenigen, die bei dem Netflix-Hickup vor ein paar Tagen die Gelegenheit hatten, die neue House of Cards-Folge zwei Wochen vor Start zu sehen:
I hit CAPS LOCK and told every single person I knew.
I called, I texted, I updated Facebook, I posted all over Twitter. So did other folks. Word was spreading, fast. And soon everyone was talking about it. It started trending! Little ole me — ahead of the social media storm.
Vor ein paar Wochen erst wurde der Random Darknet Shopper, ein Kunstprojekt mit einem Bot, der zufällige Dinge im Darkweb bestellt (u.a. Drogen und gefälschte Sneaker), von der Polizei hochgenommen wurde und jetzt hat ein Coder Besuch von den Cops bekommen, weil sein Algo-Poetry-Bot (ein Remix seiner eigenen Tweets) einem anderen Bot eine Todesdrohung schickte.
I hit CAPS LOCK and told every single person I knew.