Poor Pluto. Once a planet, now demoted to dwarf planet status.

I’m not a “Pluto is a planet” partisan, but when NASA’s New Horizon mission took this close-up photo of Pluto, I knew I had to have this shirt. Now you can have one too:

NASA did all the real work sending a spacecraft 3 billion miles to take the picture, so I’m publishing this with a Creative Commons license. Go ahead and make your own T-shirt, stickers, coffee mug, whatever.

If you are too lazy to make your own, I have T-Shirt, Stickers, and Coffee Mugs available for pre-order on CafePress.

I Heart Pluto by Jason Morrison is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/pluto-is-dominated-by-the-feature-informally-named-the-heart.

The post I Heart Pluto first appeared on JasonMorrison.net.

You should never look at a solar eclipse directly, but building a simple eclipse viewer is easy. It’s also a fun project to do with your kids.

Step 1. Get a long box.

I got a really long square box from the UPS store for ~$10. The longer the better – the more distance between the end pointed at the sun and the viewing end, the larger the image of the sun will be.

By the way, this picture is just showing off how long the box is – you won’t actually be looking through the box when we’re done.

Step 2. Decorate the box.

This might be the most important part of the project if you’re doing it with kids. Kids love to draw planets, comets, rocket ships, and all sorts of fun things. This is also a good place to illustrate exactly what’s going on when the sun starts to disappear.

Step 3. Close the box and cut a hole in one end.

This end will be pointed toward the sun.

Step 4. Cover the hole with foil and put a tiny pinprick in the middle.

You want to block out all the light except the pin prick. It will cast an image of the sun on the other end of the box.

Step 5. Cut open a small section of the side near the bottom.

The picture illustrates this pretty well. You want a small section open so you can see the image in the bottom of the box. I also put a piece of white paper in the bottom, that shows off the image better than cardboard:

You’ll need to find something to use to prop up the box and aim it toward the sun. I used a tripod, but a chair will work as well. You’ll need to keep moving the viewer as the day goes on to keep the image in place.

Caught in an eclipse without a viewer? No worries! Anything with a hole in it that can cast a shadow will show the eclipse – even your fingers or the leaves on the trees!

The post How to build an eclipse viewing box with your kid first appeared on JasonMorrison.net.

I’m on paternity leave with my 5-month-old, Finn. Halloween is coming soon, and while thinking about costumes I noticed that Finn’s hair was starting to fill in. I realized that this was my last chance to take advantage of his relative baldness for costume purposes.

So, over the past couple weeks I’ve been working on a fun project to photograph my kid in as many geeky costumes as I can before we hit Halloween. Or before his hair grows too much. Whichever comes first.

The rules I’ve set for myself are:

1. Bald or nearly-bald fictional characters only. The geekier the better.
2. No spending any serious amount of money each costume.
3. No spending any serious time on each costume.

Here are the ones I’ve done so far:

1. Avatar Aang:

2. Captain Picard:

3. Krillin from Dragon Ball Z:

4. Professor Xavier from the X-Men:

5. Charlie Brown:

6. Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD:

7. Morpheus from The Matrix:

8. Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen:

9. Korben Dallas from The Fifth Element:

These were all put together pretty quickly, and as I get time I’ll try to create some tutorials on how. Mostly I’ve been using double-sided fabric tape, onesies, cheap kid T-shirts, and post-it notes.

Follow me on G+ to see what’s next.

The post Making geeky baby Halloween costumes first appeared on JasonMorrison.net.

When you ask the Internet to vote on the name of your baby, you should expect something like this. Over the past few days we saw a huge surge of votes for the name Stannis, as in Stannis Baratheon, Lord of Dragonstone in Game of Thrones.

In fact, Stannis has even surpassed one of our pre-selected names, Sidney. Here’s a chart of the top 15 suggestions, showing the huge push for Stannis:

I can’t feel too bad about all the votes for a fictional character – after all, this is a fund raiser, and Googlers are donating $1 to Save the Children for every vote. We still have a ways to go before we reach our goal, so please vote.

I’m just surprised it’s all Stannis… where’s the love for Tyrion Lannnister?

The post Name of Thrones first appeared on JasonMorrison.net.

We’re letting the whole Internet vote on the name for our baby, so it might seem a little strange that I’m posting about picking a name that’s unique. Why bother with a poll if you don’t want a popular name? What does uniquely popular mean, anyway?

Looking at the data right now, Alexander is comfortably in the lead. But Alexander is also a very popular name in general right now – it was the 9th most popular name for boys in 2012 according to the U.S. SSA. So, I’d like to see if some names are getting more votes in our poll than you would expect just by general popularity.

I did a similar analysis when we did this for my daughter five years ago. Back then I used SPSS and a little more statistical rigor, but I haven’t had a chance to play around with R to do something similar yet. For now I’ll stick to what I can do in Google Spreadsheets.

Here’s a plot of each name, showing the number of votes in our poll vs the number of babies with that name in 2012:

So what does this tell us? First off, the names seem to line up more or less on a line going up and to the right. This means there’s probably a correlation between our poll and popularity in the U.S. Google Spreadsheets has a function to give you the correlation coefficient called CORREL(). Right now this is 0.69, which is a pretty strong correlation.

Second, if we guesstimate where we would have to put a straight line to best fit these points, we can see which names are above the line – right now, it’s Nikola, Luka, and Finn, with Soren maybe just peeking over the top. If we want to pick names that are uniquely popular in our poll, those are good choices.

I’ve plotted the U.S. Babies in 2012 totals on a log scale for two reasons – first, it’s much easier to read this way, and second, it doesn’t look like baby names are distributed very evenly:

This is from U.S. SSA data again. In this chart you can see that a very small number of the most popular names (at the left side of the graph) are given to a very large number of babies. Looking toward the right of the graph, there’s a very long tail of many names given to much smaller numbers of babies.

This looks like it might be a Zipf distribution, which is a pretty common distribution for data like wordcounts and website popularity. If we shift that graph to a log scale it starts to look more like a straight line.

By the way, if you haven’t voted on our baby name poll yet, go ahead and vote now – this baby is coming soon!

The post Picking a Baby Name That’s Uniquely Popular first appeared on JasonMorrison.net.