I.. Just... Love this:

New record for unassisted freediving: 100m!

Yesterday the Kiwi William Trubridge dove to 100m (328ft) unassisted (without weights or fins) at the Dean's Blue Hole in The Bahamas. It took him 4min 10s to complete the round trip. Incredible! Well done! Note the video above is of his previous record dive at the same location.

Hyperion Flyby (moon of Saturn)

Today's Math Joke: Evaluate

Action at the Center of Our Galaxy

If the image above doesn't animate for you go to the source website here. I think its pretty amazing that we can track the motion of stars around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

Benoit Mandelbrot passes away at 85, RIP

From the New York Times,

"In the 1950s, Dr. Mandelbrot proposed a simple but radical way to quantify the crookedness of such an object by assigning it a “fractal dimension,” an insight that has proved useful well beyond the field of cartography.

Over nearly seven decades, working with dozens of scientists, Dr. Mandelbrot contributed to the fields of geology, medicine, cosmology and engineering. He used the geometry of fractals to explain how galaxies cluster, how wheat prices change over time and how mammalian brains fold as they grow, among other phenomena.

His influence has also been felt within the field of geometry, where he was one of the first to use computer graphics to study mathematical objects like the Mandelbrot set, which was named in his honor.

“He doesn’t spend months or years proving what he has observed,” said Heinz-Otto Peitgen, a professor of mathematics and biomedical sciences at the University of Bremen. And for that, he said, Dr. Mandelbrot “has received quite a bit of criticism.”

“But if we talk about impact inside mathematics, and applications in the sciences,” Professor Peitgen said, “he is one of the most important figures of the last 50 years.” "

See also "The Thumbprint of God".

I'm not the only one who doesn't like Big Bang theory