Don't forget, Friday
September 19 is Talk Like A Pirate Day!Ah, wonderful!
"You are sire to 72 other vampires, including: LdySaphyre (7040 pints), MissV (2613 pints), Liliana (2570 pints), gilbella (1266 pints), mixedresults (1246 pints), Morgoth (564 pints), Nathanael (302 pints), night_flyer (300 pints), wchmum (281 pints), King of Ice (222 pints)." Well on my way to having a gang of 100 by Halloween.
Care to be a part of my gang of vampires? I can tell every time the lemmiwinks episode of South Park comes on, because I get massive hits looking for
the lyrics. Via
mskaren911 -
Any Photo on Playing cards Deal yourself in for fun with this pack of photo playing cards in a tin! Your favorite photo is featured on the back of every card in this standard, 52 card deck (plus 2 jokers). You also get a matching tin to hold your cards in! Makes a uniquely personal gift for card playing friends or family members. That's a pretty cool idea, although a wee bit pricey for what you get.
I took an hour nap this afternoon, and I feel pretty good, even after yesterday's poor night's sleep. Only
Ok, I worked out what was partly fubar with my system...
MSIE had a lot of damaged items. If your system is being naughty, feel free to try the following. (I take no responsibility for your system, so go at your own risk.) I still need to replace my power supply and add, confirm the rest of my hardware. Yanking out and reinstalling Java runtimes seems to have helped a lot.
( RESOLUTION )Something that may dismay ol' Danny when I tell him... or maybe not -
MOND - (Modified Newtonian Dynamics)Mordehai Milgrom started looking at dark matter and galactic revolutions. The dark matter/energy thing has some flaws and problems. He starts doing math, discovers a relatively simple mathematical adjustment to gravity that fits all known galactic weirdness.
There are several esthetic problems, the major one of which is there is no theoretical basis for MOND. It's observational. This has most other astronomers leery or dismissive about it. But, well... it works.
MOND works as follows... gravity is not always the same, and behaves differently under low accelerations. Essentially, gravity at low accelerations is stronger than would be determined by regular gravity laws.
Below this acceleration, called a0, acceleration becomes the square root of gravitational force. A0 x age of the universe (as far as people guess) happens to be around the speed of light. There is apparently something relating a0 and the cosmological constant.
As goofy as this sounds, there are several points that support the idea... one, it fits galactic observations better than dark matter. Two... Pioneer 10 and 11.
Both left the solar system and, before shutting down, mysteriously showed deceleration that did not fit what people were expecting. Engineers frantically looked for gas leaks, possible other bodies, etc... nothing. It is still a mystery why this happened. However... it fits MOND. Farther than about .1 light year from the sun you hit a0 levels.
It also explains why we never observe it here... everything in the solar system is under acceleration of the sun, well above a0.
If MOND is true, it means inertial and gravitational mass are not tied strictly. Which is f-ing weird.
But there are a lot of puzzles right now... perhaps MOND will uncover why the expansion of the universe is accelerating (which makes no sense).
For more fun physics, try -
Amusement park physics: Design your own roller coaster online and see why you design succeed or failed.
Zombie City in 3-D (The Zombie simulation is now an exe, and you can get a better feel of how the city looks at an isometric tilt. C++ Source in the Zip)