NanoThoughts 1.0

Three random things that I came across in Wikipedia recently that probably only interest me:

X&Y - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The album's cryptic cover art was designed by Tappin Gofton (aka Mark Tappin and Simon Gofton), who created the cover for The Chemical Brothers' latest release, Push the Button. The blocks are the Baudot code-encoding (ITA2, a 5-bit alphanumeric encoding used by telegraphs) of the title of the album, X&Y (although due to an error in the coding process, the cover code actually translates as 'X96');"

Terminal velocity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "On August 16th, 1960 U.S. Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger came close to breaking the sound barrier during a free-fall from the high altitude balloon Excelsior III, at an altitude of 102,800 feet (approximately 20 miles), hitting a speed of 614 mph (274 m/s) as reported by National Geographic. This made Captain Kittinger the fastest human on the planet."

Solar eclipse - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Final totality: Due to tidal acceleration, the orbit of the Moon around the Earth becomes approximately 3.8 cm more distant each year. It is estimated that in 600 million years, the distance from the Earth to the Moon will have increased by 23,500 km, meaning that it will no longer be able to completely cover the Sun's disk. This will be true even when the Moon is at perigee, and the Earth at aphelion.

A complicating factor is that the Sun will increase in size over this timescale. This makes it even more unlikely that the Moon will be able to cause a total eclipse. We can therefore say that the last total solar eclipse on Earth will occur in slightly less than 600 million years.[13]"