A Real Bell-Ringer

We’re in it now, we’re trampling through, we’re trudging as fast we can. This next week is the darkest of the year; each day darker than the day that preceded it. And then we reach the Winter Solstice, December 21, when the earth’s axis is tilted as far from the sun as can be, and that day is the very darkest [...]

I…I.

Short blog this week. Short-ishy, I think.
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On Monday, the Large Hadron Collider became “the world’s highest energy particle accelerator, having accelerated its twin beams of protons to an energy of 1.18 TeV”, which beat the former record of .98 TeV, held by the U.S.A-based Fermi Lab’s collider. 
A TeV is a teraelectron volt. “Teraelectron” is a million million electron [...]

Delight of My Heart

According to WordPress, the tag that people most often click on to reach Wheat, Not Oats, Dear–the tag that calls out to the most people, the tag with the most compelling siren song, the tag that sings, it would seem–is:
I hate Lolcats

When something like this exists in the world, who among us can be surprised?
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On Friday, November [...]

Wa-Wa

This weekend, I learned that the oldest individual tree in the world is a 4,841 year-old Great Basin Bristlecone Pine in California called “Methusaleh”, after the very old personage in The Bible of the same name. Its precise location is a secret.
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GREAT BASIN BRISTLECONE PINE
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THE WORST METHUSELAH JOKE I HAVE EVER SEEN
YOU TRYING DOING A GOOGLE [...]

In Which I Discover That There Is A Great Big World Out There

I spent this past weekend in Milwaukee. I had forgotten–or perhaps I never knew this, and am pretending to myself that I had internalized this knowledge, somewhere along the line, as a scientist does–that autumnal leaf color alters on a sort of “north to south” trajectory. The trees there were a riot of color, comparatively-speaking. There are all sorts [...]

Sisters, Sisters

In the grocery store last week, on the phone with my sister. I’m that guy too often; that guy who talks on the telephone in line, and flaps her hands around like an addlepated scarecrow [what?] when the cashier/registerperson addresses her directly. Anywho, the grocery store. On her end, my sister is feeding my baby [...]

Weathered

On the train, headed home from work, last Friday.
Two men stand behind me, talking. They begin talking about the weather, how it looks as though it’s going to rain; one of the men has even heard that it’s supposed to rain on Monday. They talk about how they should try and look out the windows in [...]

I Am Energy

I don’t really have a good explanation for showing this to you, opening the whole blog with it, even; it was posted on a Livejournal board I was reading this weekend. If’n I’d been drinking something, water or such, I would’ve spat it to the Mississippi.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
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I MEAN COME ON
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Livejournal is such a funny beast [and the [...]

Dearest

What? I can’t call you “dearest”? Dearest dearest dearest. 
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Finally saw “Star Trek” on Saturday. The sequence of events which opens the movie…I mean…
u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-blee-blee-blee-blee
I glanced over at Bridgid, somewhere in there; we were both in tears. I mean…I mean. J.J Abrams played our heartstrings like a fiddle, he did. Like a plaintive outer space fiddle. Carved [...]

It’s What It Is

I learned a new thing.
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There is a type of supernova called a Type Ia supernova. A supernova occurs when a star explodes.  A Type Ia supernova is related to a white dwarf, supernova-wise, and that’s really, really all the further I’m going with that particular line of thought, because then we’re forced into all this na-na-na about “luminosity” and [...]