Space is so hard to fathom, but thanks to this image, painstakingly compiled and combined by a musician and artist, one get start to get a sense of it within a single visual frame.

Pablo Carlos Budassi used photos from NASA rovers, orbiting satellites and other astronomical footage, then combined them into a singular shot of the known universe, using Earth as a center point.

The key to the image’s success is the use of a logarithmic scale, which helps viewers understand large numbers and distances more easily, each ring covering vastly greater space than the last. Our world and solar system look relatively large, a helpful jumping off point as the rings expand. The trick works somewhat like the classic Powers of 10 video, a classic educational device for understanding universal and microscopic scales, executed by zooming way out and way in, but with time frames likewise set in a log scale (film shown below, and well worth watching!).

From Colossal: “Budassi was aided by similar (though less visually stunning) logarithmic maps produced by astronomers at Princeton back in 2005. In this map, our sun and solar system are seen in the middle, followed by the Milky Way Galaxy, another ring of nearby galaxies like Andromeda, all the way out to cosmic radiation and plasma generated by the big bang on the furthest outskirts of the image.”

The post Logarithmic Map of the Entire Universe in a Single Image first appeared on Gajitz.

Ever asked for a mixed drink at a party and gotten back a bland, weird, just plain awful cup of swill from your buddy the non-bartender? Inventor John Gallagher wants to make sure that never happens again. He’s created a countertop device he calls The Barman. It looks a lot like a kitchen scale (and works like one, too), but with one big difference:  it helps you perfect your cocktails, not your chocolate chip cookies.

The small, glossy block of wood features an LED screen on the front. The associated proprietary app has you choose the cocktail you want to make. You set a glass of ice on the Barman (it’s smart enough not to count that weight) and the display tells you which ingredient to pour in first. A progress bar on the screen and a blue LED under the glass let you know to keep going. When you’ve poured enough of that, the screen and under-glass LED will switch to red.

The process of adding ingredients is repeated until you have the perfect cocktail. The app lets you choose between different sizes of drinks, so the relative measurements of ingredients will always be just right. The app comes with hundreds of pre-loaded drinks and friends can share their own cocktail recipes, ensuring that you’ll always have just the right thing to drink and it will always taste just right. The project is raising funds on Kickstarter, so if you want your own get over there and pledge some dough for this truly awesome invention.

The post The Barman: Your Countertop Guide to the Perfect Cocktail first appeared on Gajitz.