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Destin from Smarter Every Day has just made a video on one of my favorite fluids brain teasers: what happens to a helium balloon when you accelerate in a car? Take a moment to think about the answer before watching or reading further…

Okay, so what happens? Contrary to what you may expect, hitting the accelerator with a balloon in the car will make it shift forward. This is a matter of buoyancy. As Destin demonstrates with the water bottle, when two fluids are accelerated forward, the denser one will shift backwards, which pushes the lighter one forward. Because the helium is lighter than the air filling the car, accelerating pushes the air backward (just as it does the pendulum and the car’s inhabitants) and that shifting of the air pushes the helium in the balloon forward. (Video credit: Smarter Every Day)

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You might think that big data would sound like so many binary beeps, but a project manager at Géant in the UK has turned 320,000 measurements from NASA Voyager equipment into a classically-inspired track. The company describes it as “an up-tempo string and piano orchestral piece.

via Motherboard Beta

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La ville de Philadelphie à la recherche de l’homme qui se masturbe avec du fromage suisse

La Province ( à cause de Issey Lelay & Labbai)

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▲  A 100-second recording of the sound of the Big Bang, created by University of Washington physicist John Cramer.

Here’s What the Big Bang Sounded Like

In the beginning, there was a righteous bass.

So says physicist John Cramer, who has not only found evidence of the sound created during the Big Bang, but has also created a simulation of the low, deep noise emitted as the universe came into being.

After the Big Bang, the universe expanded so rapidly that matter itself resonated to create a deep bass noise, and sound waves themselves became stretched and warped. “As the early universe expanded, sound waves propagated through the dense medium that closed back on itself, so that the hypersphere of the universe rang like a bell,” Cramer, a professor of physics at the University of Washington, explained.

The effect would have been similar to that of a magnitude-9 earthquake that caused the entire planet to actually ring, Cramer said. However, in this case, the ringing covered the entire universe.

That sound is long gone, of course, but it left its imprint on the cosmic microwave background, which is a thermal echo of the energy released during the Big Bang.

In 2003, NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite gave scientists an unprecedented picture of the cosmic microwave background. In an article for science-fiction magazine Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Cramer wrote how this thermal data could be extrapolated into wavelengths of sound.

In other words, the universe’s cosmic microwave background is kind of like a recording of the Big Bang’s phat beat.

Two years after Cramer published his findings, the mother of an 11-year-old elementary school student wrote to Cramer, asking if there was an actual recording of the sound that her son could use for his school science-fair project. Cramer responded that there wasn’t — but there could be.

To recreate the Big Bang’s sound, Cramer converted WMAP’s wavelength data into sound using a computational program called Mathematica.

The resulting sound is low, creaky, and almost unassuming.

Recently, more precise data from the European Space Agency’s Planck telescope has allowed Cramer to create an even more accurate sound profile, which he has exported as audio files. The files are, of course, a simulation: the true sound is so deep that Cramer had to boost the frequency 100 septillion times to put it within the range of human hearing.

The sounds are available on Cramer’s website at the University of Washington. So remixers, have at it!

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Independently of the beauty and magnificence it adds to the face of nature, the cumulus serves to skreen the earth from the direct rays of the sun, by its multiplied reflections to diffuse, and, as it were, economize the light, and also to convey the product of evaporation to a distance from the place of its origin.

Luke Howard - <i>On the modifications of clouds</i>

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While the world talks about Isaac ... Typhoon Tembin ; or "FUCK-YEAH-TAIWAN!! Hurricane".

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Let's play "where is the cold front ?" !

Difficulty : Easy || Round : Training || Obvious : ON

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En voilà un joli thalweg "très dynamique" :) !

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Aujourd'hui, Keraunos prévoit une dégradation orageuse sur la majeur partie de la France cet après-midi et ce soir.

Sur la zone B, allant de la Haute-Normandie aux Midi-Pyrénées en passant par IdF, Bourgogne, Auvergne et Rhône-Alpes, les orages pourront devenir localement forts avec des précipitations intenses et de la grêle > 2cm, et notamment des rafales ~90 km/h. Sur la zone C, longeant la frontière du Bénélux du Nord-Pas-de-Calais à la Champagne-Ardennes passant par l'est de la Picardie, puis sur les régions Lorraine, Alsace et Franche-Comté, on attend la formation d'un système orageux linéaire (possible QLCS [Quasi Linear Convective System]) : celui-ci pourra alors engendrer des rafales > 120 km/h, des précipitations intenses et de fortes chutes de grêle.

Consultez le bulletin complet de Keraunos.

La prévision de Météo France concorde avec cette prévision.

La prévision d'Estofex comprend une légère différence, à savoir qu'ils établissent un risque de niveau 2/3 uniquement sur le Bénélux, sans concerner le Nord-Est de la France.

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Il y a 1 semaine, on a enregistré en Tasmanie une vague qui a atteint 20 mètres de hauteur. Le plus amusant, c'est que sur twitter, l'Organisation Météorologique Mondiale, pour se figurer ce que peut représenter cette hauteur, choisit de comparer ça à ... 6 bus à étage londoniens empilés :D.

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Un bateau a transféré ses données ce matin sur météoalerte, donnant un petit air de rainbow flag à la carte :).

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Yesterday, Europe's latest weather satellite MSG-3 delivered its first (visible) image of the Earth ! Read more at Eumetsat website.

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Stunning visualization of 56 years of tornadoes in the US

Using information from data.gov, tech blogger John Nelson has created this spectacular image of tornado paths in the US over a 56 year period. The graphic categorizes the storms by F-scale with the brighter neon lines representing more violent storms. While tornadoes don’t travel in straight lines, Nelson explains that based on the data, the vectors were created using touchdown points and liftoff points.

He got the data from this Data.gov page doing a “tornado tracks” search.

See Nelson’s original post.

(via: PhysOrg)

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When atmosphere is stable for a too long time, weatherfreaks sneak up into weather offices in the middle of the night, and try to make the radiosonde soundings they've always wanted.

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Shelf Cloud. Location: South Texas

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Lightning iz because nyan cats.

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Ce moment où tu te retiens de crisser des dents quand l'autre te dit "ça se refroidit demain parce que c'est les saints de glace qui arrivent".