Moon Landing Sites

Nasa has an article about pictures recently sent back by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. In some of the pictures you can see things left behind by the Apollo astronauts and in one you can see a path they wore into the lunar surface.

Swimming with Whales

National Geographic has a picture of a swimmer and a sperm whale. I'm not sure I've ever seen a sperm whale from that angle before.

Find your next solar eclipse

If you want to find out when the next solar eclipse is in your area, you can just ask Wolfram Alpha.

For example if you type:

next solar eclipse ottawa

into the search box on Wolfram Alpha you'll learn that the next solar eclipse visible from Ottawa will be on 20 May 2012 at 7:52pm. It even gives you a nice map showing what areas the eclipse will cover.

Launch Years of Popular Websites

Pingdom.com has an article showing the original launch dates of various popular websites.

Some interesting stats:

• 43% of today’s top sites were started in 1996 or earlier.
• The three “biggest” launch years, from largest to smallest: 1996, 1995, 2005.

Richard Feynman: Why Trains Stay on the Rails

Kottke.org links to a YouTube video of Richard Feynman explaining why trains stay on the tracks. The answer is not as obvious as you think.

Cat Ladders

In case you doubted that there was a blog for every conceivable topic, this one is about cat ladders.

Krakatoa Pictures

The Daily Mail has an article with a series of nice photos of the volcano Krakatoa erupting.

DropBox

I am probably a bit late in recommending DropBox (found at the slightly hard to remember getDropBox.com) but I will do it anyway.

DropBox is essentially an online file storage service that appears like a normal directory on your computer - the key feature is that you can access a local copy of the files when you aren't connected to the net and they will automatically update on your other machines when you reconnect.

I have been using it lately on my little Dell netbook. I have had problems in the past with files that live on the laptop. I often forget to back them up to the main system and sometimes I update a file on the main computer and then forget to copy it onto the laptop. Now I just keep any files that I might want on the laptop in my DropBox directory.

As an added bonus, if you sign up using this link then both you and I get an extra 250MB of storage.