It’s hard to make a true-color family portrait of the solar system. It turns out that most photos of planets aren’t true colors! Here's my attempt, using the best NASA photos I could find.
We've been watching the dramatic New Horizons flyby of Pluto over the past few weeks, and many people are saying, "Come on, REALLY. That's a PLANET!"
Here's a tutorial for creating animated GIFs from your videos, using VLC media player and Photoshop on Mac OSX.
No, I do NOT want a phone book, directory, white pages or yellow pages. So how do I stop delivery of phone books to my doorstep? Here's what works...mostly.
Here's an easy guide to a few online tools and apps that I use to tell me when the International Space Station is over my location and where to look to see it!
Black holes are invisible, but matter caught in their death spiral glows brightly. NASA and other telescopes have snapped amazing photos of these monsters at the heart of other galaxies and our own.
Laika the dog was the first living creature from Earth to reach outer space. Her story was tragic.
Photos and fun information about some of the coolest moons in our solar system besides our own Moon.
Have you ever wondered what the Elvish runes mean on the title page of "The Lord of the Rings"? Let's take a look, and I'll translate them for you!
My edition of a beloved anonymous poem, "Carmen Possum," circulated among Latin students for over a hundred years. (Includes vocabulary list for those whose Latin is rusty.)
Curious what Bellatrix means? How about Karkaroff? Let's take a look at the meanings and origins of some of the character names in "Harry Potter!"
Here are four reasons why homes in Texas and nearby tornado-prone states lack basements and storm cellars.
Android technology is farther along than we realize. In addition to the ethical and practical concerns raised by humanlike robots, they reveal and challenge our unconscious impulses, instincts, psychological hangups and kinks.
I experimented with shade and square foot planting in my southern California patio garden.
Abject lesson or object lesson? Which is correct? Learn the meaning of the phrase "object lesson" and why you should shun "abject lessons."
Introduction and mini-quizzes on the Latin first declension and the basic uses of the six Latin cases.
Amazing videos of animals using tools, communicating, and exhibiting simple reasoning that is more than just imitation or learned tricks.
Learn how Pinterest encourages unintentional copyright violations that have real, harmful consequences for artists and photographers.
In Dorothy Sayers' "Gaudy Night," Latin quotations carry important subtexts that are inaccessible to modern readers. Here are my translations and interpretations of these phrases, to help you discover nuances that dictionaries and online translators cannot give you.
My translation of the Latin spells in Harry Potter: not what they do, but what the Latin words mean. Includes a trivia quiz for those studying for their OWLs.
Okay, class, put down your wands! Let's have a little Latin language lesson so we can better understand Harry Potter.
How a volcanic eruption in 726 AD off the coast of Greece had a major impact on the history of eastern and western Europe, Christianity, and the spread of Islam.
Three Iceland volcanoes of past, present, and future: the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, the possibly imminent eruption of Katla, and the exceptional eruption of Laki in 1783 that was perhaps the worst natural disaster in the last 1000 years.
The amazing story of a 3600-year-old Minoan wall painting, the civilization that created it, and the incredible catastrophe that preserved it.
Hubpages tags are NOT the same thing as the "keywords" used in SEO. Learn the difference and how to pick good tags.
Could ancient Egypt teach us about sustainability? Let's explore the difference between ancient Egypt's paradigm of cyclic stability and our current paradigm of continuous growth.
A solar flare in 1859 caused power spikes and disrupted the world's telegraph system. How much damage could a massive solar flare do to power and communications today?
Keyword research and on-page search optimization is an art akin to poetry. The trouble is, there are a lot of people out there who write doggerel.