I once heard an interesting story about a group of scientists that had written some improbably small thing on a metal platter, something like the IBM logo written in individual xenon atoms. And here’s what they learned: it was easy enough to write something tiny, but having written it, it took them several hours to find it again so they could image it for their press release. I love the idea of something being lost at the nano scale. It may be just at the tip of my tongue, but if it’s only a few angstroms wide, it’s as good as gone.
There’s a similar problem with astronomy research. We have, via programs like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, imagery that packs 120 megapixels into 1.5 square degrees of sky. How do you find the good stuff? If you can teach a computer to find good stuff, that’s great, but if not, you’ve got a real problem. That’s where the Galaxy Zoo project comes in. Web-organized volunteers are helping to classify galaxies, something that is, apparently, still very difficult for computers to get right. And every now and then people like the Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel find weird stuff that you can’t tell a computer to look for anyway, precisely because it’s unexpected. This is Hanny’s Voorwerp
I love the fact that there’s a green goblin in the sky named after a Dutch schoolteacher and volunteer astronomer. Also, it’s fun to learn what voorwerp means in Dutch.
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 