Cosmos Computed

I have some crazy news! I was radiated by some radiation, and became radioactive. Over time, my radioactiveness decreased, and as it decreased, my mass decreased as well. I am now a foot shorter than I used to be, and weigh 50 pounds less! At the top of this post, you can see a picture which proves it. In the photo, I'm sitting on a weird box that materialized in the middle of the road... Okay, so you probably know what's going on here. I didn't really shrink; I'm obviously sitting on a chalk drawing. I designed the chalk drawing to look 3-dimensional when viewed from a certain angle. From other angles, it looks totally different; some of the lines that appear parallel in the photo aren't actually parallel at all. It only looks that way because it's an illusion. Here's another example: This was a little more complicated to draw. Not only were there parallel lines, but there were also circular shapes and hidden areas. And here's my best chalk drawing so f...

A few days ago I found a field full of bright yellow flowers. It looked kind of nice, so I started taking pictures. My main goal was to get a photo which showed the vast number of flowers, without any extra information that might distract the mind. I ended up with this: There are probably a couple thousand flowers in that photo. I was amazed at how many flowers there were. Anyway, as I was photographing the flowers (probably Perky Sue), I noticed that there were a lot of bees in the field, buzzing from flower to flower and (presumably) collecting nectar and pollen. So I took some photos of the bees. Of course, I didn't stop at that. Among other photos, I got a photo of a giant dandelion (actually called a Salsify, although "Goliath Puffweed" would suit it way better): A cactus flower: A flowering yucca ( not to be confused with yuca, also known as cassava, which is toxic when raw, and grows in South America): And daisy fleabane, which is a weird name for a cool flower: Y...

You may have noticed that my blog background changed a couple days ago. I've been meaning to change it for quite a while, but I didn't get around to it. Then, a few days ago, I had some free time on my hands. Why not create a 3D model of Earth, I wondered? So I pulled up Blender (a free computer graphics program I use) and got to work. I actually wasn't entirely sure where to begin, but I had an idea of the basics. I needed to: Map some terrain onto a sphere Make an atmosphere Create clouds Prevent the clouds from looking like a weird shell around the planet I'm not fully fluent in all the different techniques and features for Blender, so I looked for a planet Earth tutorial online. I soon found a BlenderGuru tutorial describing how to create and render a model of the planet Earth. The problem with the tutorial is that it was for a different version of Blender, and as a result didn't do everything I wanted to do. I watched most of the tutorial, did some more Google ...