xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language...
Rated • 21 reviews • cartoons • xkcd.com
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TheBlight
Last seen: 33 hours ago
Joe MacDonald is a 35 year old guy from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
As the pattern becomes more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough.
If you want to catch me on IM, try Google Talk. I'm joe.macdonald there.
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Dark Energy's Demise? New Theory Doesn't Use the Force
Rated • 3 reviews • astronomy • nationalgeographic.com
From the page: "The work suggests that our home galaxy sits inside a vast region of space in which there's an unusually low density of matter due to a post-big bang wave that swept through the universe."
Too early to say anything really about this, but this brings into conflict two natural tendencies of scientists. First, any theory which depends on some unidentified force or unprovable basis is inherently flawed and is almost certainly wrong. Second, any theory which depends on unique (or even extremely rare) conditions being present at precisely the origin of the experiment to explain the results is flawed.
But we can't adequately explain dark energy, don't know what it is, don't even know what it might be (without string theory, which is a very sexy theory that I just love but suffers from a *lot* of #1 above), so explaining that there is no dark energy is intellectually very appealing. Except that in order for this theory to work, it depends on us being in a very specific part of a shock wave that happened to pass through the universe following the big bang, which seems kind of unappealing because of #2.
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Square Circle Spiral | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine
Rated • 7 reviews • astronomy • discovermagazine.com
Actually, I'm kind of torn on this one. It's kind of like those other illusions where you either see one picture or the other initially but not both. This one I saw both right away, I can see the spiral pattern but I can tell right away that they're concentric rings but I can also see a clover-leaf shape.
Probably means I'm a psychopath or something.
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GameSpy: Pilotwings Planned for European Virtual Console...
Rated • 1 review • video games • gamespy.com
The Wii's virtual console is probably the best feature of the device. Cheap, easy to find, easy to download, fun games from a huge selection of past generation consoles and coin-ops. Hearing about an impending port of Pilotwings is not surprising, but I'm really happy to hear about it all the same. I spent a lot of time as a kid playing this game with my friends.
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BBC NEWS | Science &Environment | Science ponders zombie...
Rated • 11 reviews • mathematics • bbc.co.uk
From the page: "My understanding of zombie biology is that if you manage to decapitate a zombie then it's dead forever. So perhaps they are being a little over-pessimistic when they conclude that zombies might take over a city in three or four days," he said.
That's not always been my experience, but I suppose lately most of my experience has been with mind-controlling parasites that look like zombies rather than real zombies.
Stupid Resident Evil sequels ... sucking up all my free time ...
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N4G.com : Metroid Metal: Varia Suite is Almost Ready to...
Rated • 1 review • video games, music • n4g.com
I had a listen to the samples here:
originalsoundversion.com [originalsoundversion.com]
And I've got to say, it reminds me a lot of the stuff I loved from Machinae Supremacy from about ten years ago. I think there's a pretty good chance I'm going to go pre-order this.
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N4G.com : Suda 51s New PS3 Exclusive: Kurayami
Rated • 1 review • video games • n4g.com
Suda 51 is the alias of Goichi Suda, a game designer in Japan who has become known for producing bizarre and enthralling games since the early 1990s. His work is usually sufficiently different from everything else that it's at first misunderstood or ridiculed and then emulated a few years later. I can't wait to see this, though I'm worried it'll be like another Fatal Frame IV, released only in Japan.
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"Annoying Habits of College Professors" (c. 1935-1937):...
Rated • 1 review • university • scientificamerican.com
I wouldn't even know how to categorize the most annoying habit one of my profs used to have. He would be working on a 2-3 board proof, reach the end and conclude that some mistake along the way had caused his final conclusion to be incorrect and then would proceed to make fists with his hands, hold them at his temples, suck in a wet-sounding breath through clenched teeth and say "Eeeeeee". After that he'd go back, find the mistake, correct it and not bother redoing the remaining work again, just saying "and the rest falls out".
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First planet found in retrograde orbit - Planetary News |...
Rated • 1 review • astronomy, science, space • planetary.org
From the page: "An international team of scientists has detected the first extrasolar planet orbiting in the "wrong" direction. This means that the planet, designated WASP-17, is circling its star in a direction opposite to the rotation of the star itself. Such a motion, known as a "retrograde orbit," is very unusual since the motions of both star and planet were acquired from the swirling cloud of gas and dust that formed them both. As a result, the planets orbiting the same star almost always move in the same direction, which is the same as the rotation of the star itself."
I hadn't even known there were planets (as in things that formed from the same dust cloud as the parent star, not captured junk that came along later) with retrograde orbits. The article talks mainly about WASP-17 and not so much about this bizarre orbit, but the little bit that is there makes me want to go read about the theories on how something like this could happen. Collision (or near collision) seems the most obvious, but trying to imagine how something like that could occur and not result in an instantly (on a planetary scale) decaying orbit makes my brain hurt.
