Quantcast
Channel: Playing in the World Game
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 649

Sometimes the Universe smiles, and sometimes it doesn’t

$
0
0

Karma. Everyone wants good Karma.

Over at reddit, it’s measured in orangered or periwinkle (props to the author of this gif, whoever you are):

upvote downvote

In other locations, one doesn’t accrue upvotes and downvotes, but there is still a certain intangible karma that people collect for creating / sharing “cool” images, so we often see things like this:

smileinthesky

or this:

sunset_smile

The two images above are almost certainly photoshopped, and I’ve seen them in my inbox more times than I can count. Not that they’re not really cute, but on occasion nature can one-up the photoshoppers.

Smiley-Philippines_1124654c

AP Photo

In December of 2008, a beautiful conjunction of Venus, Jupiter, and a crescent moon created a lovely “smile” in the night sky, although depending on where you were in the world, it probably didn’t appear straight-up like this.

More recently, however, the Hubble telescope captured a lovely smiley face created by gravitational lensing:

A smiling lens

You can read the science behind the capture at spacetelescope.org.

The Old Wolf has spoken.



Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 649

Trending Articles