Asteroids and comets to scale, Hacker ethic, Nostromics mobile

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Nostromics Newsletter

Nostromics science gifts product news, educational resources & science tidbits

Nostromics Newsletter, 8 December 2010 - You are welcome to share this mail

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Asteroids and comets to scale

Minor Solar System bodies like asteroids and comets usually have irregular shapes and come in a wide range of sizes, from a few hundred meters to a few hundred km. Emily Lakdawalla of Planetary Society created and maintains Asteroids and comets to scale, a composite image showing to scale all such bodies visited by a spacecraft.

The bodies included in the montage image range in size from 0.5 km of asteroid Itokawa to 132 km of asteroid Lutetia. The largest space structure ever built, the International Space Station, is about 5 times smaller than Itokawa. A human being, in turn, is about 50 times smaller than the space station, or 250 times less than tiny Itokawa on the montage. A humbling comparison.

Hacker ethic

HACKERS ARE NOT CRACKERS, says text on our Hackers vs Crackers Dark Hoodie and related products, such as the women's T-shirt and others in the Computing section of Nostromics Store. Indeed, the media often confuses computer criminals, who should more accurately be called crackers or black hat hackers, with hackers, i.e. persons who enjoy exploring computing systems and pushing their capabilities. Some of the most well known and respected hackers are Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Here are the main principles of hacker ethic, which originated in the hacker culture since the 1950s and 1960s:

• unlimited sharing and access to computing resources
• openness, i.e. information should be free
• mistrust of authority and promotion of decentralization
• free access to computers
• world improvement

More science gifts and products at Nostromics Store.

Nostromics mobile

We are happy to announce that our Nostromics web site now also has a version for mobile devices. To access the mobile version, just visit www.nostromics.com with your iPhone, Android, Windows Phone or other smartphone. In this version, content is optimized for the small displays and limited connection speeds of typical smartphones.

Give Nostromics mobile a try!

-- Paolo Amoroso & Mauro Arpino (Nostromics), science educators - Milan, Italy