{"id":8025,"date":"2012-03-05T07:31:45","date_gmt":"2012-03-05T15:31:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=8025"},"modified":"2012-03-05T07:31:45","modified_gmt":"2012-03-05T15:31:45","slug":"journey-to-the-exoplanets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/05\/journey-to-the-exoplanets\/","title":{"rendered":"Journey to the Exoplanets"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.downloadtheuniverse.com\/dtu\/2012\/03\/worlds-without-end.html\">My first contribution to Download the Universe<\/a>, our collaborative site that <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2012\/02\/21\/books-made-from-electrons\/\">reviews ebooks on science<\/a>, is now up.  It&#8217;s a review of <em>Journey to the Exoplanets<\/em>, a snazzy and fun iPad app from <em>Scientific American<\/em>.  Teaser:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>When I was your age, we didn&#8217;t have any of these fancy hand-held portable ebook readers. We didn&#8217;t have any such thing as extrasolar planets, either.  Planets orbited the Sun, and books were printed on paper. And we liked it that way.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m assuming here I was about your age in 1992 or maybe earlier, because that&#8217;s when the world changed forever.  Sony introduced a &#8220;portable&#8221; device called the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Data_Discman\">Data Discman<\/a>, arguably the first hand-held ebook reader. That same year, Alex Wolszczan and Dale Frail made the first discovery of extrasolar planets, orbiting a pulsar with the romantic name of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/PSR_B1257%2B12\">PSR 1257+12<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s been a busy twenty years.  Everyone and their dog is reading ebooks, and astronomers are discovering planets around other stars (<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Extrasolar_planet\">exoplanets<\/a> for short) by the bushelful &#8212; 760 as of this writing, if we go by the <a href=\"http:\/\/exoplanet.eu\/\">Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia<\/a>.  Which is why it seems perfectly appropriate that one of the first and snazziest ebooks devoted to science is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.the-exoplanets.com\/\"><em>Journey to the Exoplanets<\/em><\/a>, written by Edward Bell and illustrated by Ron Miller.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.downloadtheuniverse.com\/dtu\/2012\/03\/worlds-without-end.html\">Check it out<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My first contribution to Download the Universe, our collaborative site that reviews ebooks on science, is now up. It&#8217;s a review of Journey to the Exoplanets, a snazzy and fun iPad app from Scientific American. Teaser: When I was your age, we didn&#8217;t have any of these fancy hand-held portable ebook readers. We didn&#8217;t have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,34,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-and-the-media","category-technology","category-words"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}