After holding out for so long, a friend of mine finally convinced me to get on Instagram.... So after giving it a try I thought I would post (on Flickr!) about the experience so far.... Read more over at Flickr
More Posts from Krillion and Others
Octopuses
Octopus slips out of aquarium tank, crawls across floor, escapes down pipe to ocean
Swarms of Octopus Are Taking Over the Oceans
Octopuses may indeed be your new overlords
Deep Intellect
Wikipedia says the public, not the photojournalist, owns the rights to ape's pic.
Copyright Brouhaha!!! Even when monkeys are involved copyright is a headache!
Our Galaxy is Caught Up in a Giant Cosmic Cobweb! 🕸️
If we could zoom waaaay out, we would see that galaxies and galaxy clusters make up large, fuzzy threads, like the strands of a giant cobweb. But we'll work our way out to that. First let's start at home and look at our planet's different cosmic communities.
Our home star system
Earth is one of eight planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — that orbit the Sun. But our solar system is more than just planets; it also has a lot of smaller objects.
An asteroid belt circles the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Beyond Neptune is a doughnut-shaped region of icy objects called the Kuiper Belt. This is where dwarf planets like Pluto and Makemake are found and is likely the source of short-period comets (like Haley’s comet), which orbit the Sun in less than 200 years.
Scientists think that even farther out lies the Oort Cloud, also a likely source of comets. This most distant region of our solar system is a giant spherical shell storing additional icy space debris the size of mountains, or larger! The outer edge of the Oort Cloud extends to about 1.5 light-years from the Sun — that’s the distance light travels in a year and a half (over 9 trillion miles).
Sometimes asteroids or comets get ejected from these regions and end up sharing an orbit with planets like Jupiter or even crossing Earth’s orbit. There are even interstellar objects that have entered the inner solar system from even farther than the Oort Cloud, perhaps coming all the way from another star!
Our home galaxy
Let's zoom out to look at the whole Milky Way galaxy, which contains more than 100 billion stars. Many are found in the galaxy’s disk — the pancake-shaped part of a spiral galaxy where the spiral arms lie. The brightest and most massive stars are found in the spiral arms, close to their birth places. Dimmer, less massive stars can be found sprinkled throughout the disk. Also found throughout the spiral arms are dense clouds of gas and dust called nebulae. The Sun lies in a small spiral arm called the Orion Spur.
The Milky Way’s disk is embedded in a spherical “halo” about 120,000 light-years across. The halo is dotted with globular clusters of old stars and filled with dark matter. Dark matter doesn’t emit enough light for us to directly detect it, but we know it’s there because without its mass our galaxy doesn’t have enough gravity to hold together!
Our galaxy also has several orbiting companion galaxies ranging from about 25,000 to 1.4 million light-years away. The best known of these are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which are visible to the unaided eye from Earth’s Southern Hemisphere.
Our galactic neighborhood
The Milky Way and Andromeda, our nearest neighboring spiral galaxy, are just two members of a small group of galaxies called the Local Group. They and the other members of the group, 50 to 80 smaller galaxies, spread across about 10 million light-years.
The Local Group lies at the outskirts of an even larger structure. It is just one of at least 100 groups and clusters of galaxies that make up the Virgo Supercluster. This cluster of clusters spans about 110 million light-years!
Galaxies aren’t the only thing found in a galaxy cluster, though. We also find hot gas, as shown above in the bright X-ray light (in pink) that surrounds the galaxies (in optical light) of cluster Abell 1413, which is a picturesque member of a different supercluster. Plus, there is dark matter throughout the cluster that is only detectable through its gravitational interactions with other objects.
The Cosmic Web
The Virgo Supercluster is just one of many, many other groups of galaxies. But the universe’s structure is more than just galaxies, clusters, and the stuff contained within them.
For more than two decades, astronomers have been mapping out the locations of galaxies, revealing a filamentary, web-like structure. This large-scale backbone of the cosmos consists of dark matter laced with gas. Galaxies and clusters form along this structure, and there are large voids in between.
The scientific visualizations of this “cosmic web” look a little like a spider web, but that would be one colossal spider! <shudder>
And there you have the different communities that define Earth’s place in the universe. Our tiny planet is a small speck on a crumb of that giant cosmic web!
Want to learn even more about the structures in the universe? Check out our Cosmic Distance Scale!
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space.
DR: Diminished Reality
XR technologies [Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR)] have been called the internet of experience or empathy as opposed to the World Wide Web being the internet of information. Well now there's a new game in town.
"You already own a device with this terrifying/ magical technology built-in: noise cancelling headphones. Unlike augmented reality, where your real-world environment is digitally enhanced with visual elements, sounds or other sensory inputs, diminished reality takes your unwanted stimuli away. Soon, wearable devices will let you block sounds, sights, and even smells from your everyday existence."
Future Today Institute, Issue 201
For someone who is hypersensitive to outside stimuli, devices like noise cancelling headphones are a godsend. I never leave home without them. But as helpful as this technology can be, just as with any tool there is a potential downside too.
Explore this up and coming trend
Open Remarks by Sir Tim Berners-Lee on Panel Discussion on Building a World Wide Human Rights Web: human rights and the free flow of information
How many times did you use the word awesome today? Five, ten, fifteen times? We use the word awesome so often and, most of the time, so incorrectly that the term has lost its original sense— maybe forever. Comedian Jill Shargaa explains why in this AWESOME TED talk.
“ According to a group of fancy Oxford University scientists, listening to the third movement of Beethoven's No. 9 might actually lower your blood pressure and help fight heart disease. In real life. Music therapy has been a thing for a while. But British researchers just hit upon some of the first concrete evidence that it's actually, like, a thing.”
Netflix party of 1
Decided to splurge and buy Galaxy Quest (Amazon) for $2- I had a $3 credit and the sale price was $5. Good deal either way! It’s a fun movie!
Zoom Projects
I’m working on a couple of projects. One of them is to organize some zoom lunches, dinners, netflixparties, art nights, and other fun social activities on zoom. I need to fix the survey on the new page of my website, stay tuned.
Zoom Art Night: 4-5 people, 60 minutes, theme #1 Collage Night Collect papers you like, or magazines More directions to follow
Some thoughts
If you write it down you are more likely to do it
Community, Care, and Communication
New workshops coming in April
Working on an AI bot to support scalable, effective online learning
Teachers touch tomorrow today
Wikipedia updates soon
#WOL
The night before, I reflect on what are my top three goals the next day, and before starting to work, take 10 minutes to reflect on what I need to do and when I need to do it by. Work in order of priorities.
Fake it until you make it
These are difficult times, but in time of crisis is also a time of great opportunity. The field of education, and of education technology, has a lot of change in a short amount of time through the ages.
link to full size map by Vicky Earl
link to full size image from tweet by @justintarte
And here is a timeline I created based off of an article on EDUCAUSE that highlights one new technology or trend.
link to full size image from Flickr
I have a set of slides I use at the beginning of most of my presentations. It starts with a timeline that gives an overview of the information ages, and puts into context, just how new the age of the Internet is. This is the Wild, Wild West. As an instructional technologist I help guide faculty through their own explorations of leveraging tech.
link to larger image from Flickr
Note, I plan to use this and other updated graphics in the sequel to the Tech Trends talk (fordham.edu/techtrends) I gave last year. Working title: A New Information Age.
I’ll also be talking about things like growing your PLN, using curation tools, the history of online learning at Fordham, effective pedagogy, hybrid/online learning, and more.
One more teaser.... YouTube channel launch coming soon...
Recent Recipe
I made during the last Zoom Dinner I had and it was delicious! Can’t wait to make it again.
Fish, adobo light, cracked lemon pepper, garlic olive oil spray, garlic powder in the nuwave Toasted, with a little melted butter Light mayo/sour cream + lots of relish Lemon juice
Optional: With a raw pepper in place of cheese
I’ll leave you with a quote from Galaxy Quest
Never give up. Never surrender.
be well, k
Some of what I come across on the web... Also check out my Content & Curation site: kristentreglia.com
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