Sometime last week:
Today's:
They got Rat! THEY GOT RAT!!
* * *
Went to read a Mark Steyn column at the Orange County Register site, and got this survey thingy that I couldn't close; the best option was "bug me later" and I never trust them when they say that kind of thing. As I usually do when presented with this sort of horseshit, I simply made stuff up--and got this:
Apparently the Orange County Register thinks that old people don't use computers. "Aren't they all, like, senile or something?"
My Mom was 84 when she died and she used a computer regularly. (Admittedly 90% of what she did on the thing was play Solitaire and write letters to her sister. Still.)
* * *
As the reality of "global warming" comes to light we see people pushing back against the fake science.
NASA is one of the big pushers of AGW, because NASA's top priority is to employ bureaucrats and AGW provides a fantastic way of doing that.
* * *
The word used to be "homonyms" and now is "homophones", and regardless of which it is these days the idiots that Bluesun is quoting used the wrong damn one.
You have a hoard of ammunition. A horde is a large, unruly group. You can be attacked by a horde of zombies, but you can't have a horde of bullets unless you live in the world of Beauty and the Beast, where inanimate objects come to life.
People who fill their houses with useless crap are called "hoarders".
And yeah, .22 LR ammo comes in a 500-round box, usually for under $20. If 500 bullets is a HOARD of ammunition, we're all fucked.
* * *
Raciss white woman is afraid of what a rap club will do to her neighborhood.
Now, why might this devoutly anti-racist woman imagine that having an establishment devoted to "hip-hop and urban entertainment" would not be compatible with families or white spinsters like herself? What could the problem possibly be?She doesn't want the rap club in her neighborhood--though at least she recognizes that the people who want to establish the place there actually have a right to do it--and then contorts herself into a pretzel trying to explain why in a non-raciss fashion.
The only difference between white "racists" like John Derbyshire and avowedly anti-racist whites like Ms McMillen is that the latter completely lacks self-awareness.
* * *
The scale of the universe.
...at ten to the minus 24th, we see a neutrino. You then go eleven orders of magnitude smaller before you see anything else in the chart: the Planck length.
The Planck length is (theoretically) the smallest useful length--nothing in the universe can be, it is thought, shorter than a Planck length.
The chart starts at one meter, and can be zoomed in or out; it goes all the way in to the Planck length (as stated) and all the way out to the approximate diameter of the universe (both observable and actual-estimated).
It's Yet Another Scale-of-the-Universe Thingy, but it's kind of cool.
* * *
I woke up this morning to an odd dream, one which was similar to a dream I had in February.
It was a holiday of some kind. Not like Christmas or even Independence Day, but something SF-y, like "Equinox Day" or something. The exact name of it was not stated in the dream and I had no reason to think of it, but it surrounded the change of seasons.
...because they changed abruptly and violently.
In the dream my sister and brother-in-law were here from Louisiana, and Mom and Dad were still alive; and for some reason I was sleeping in the family room and Mom was sleeping on the sofa, the way things were in the 1970s.
Mom always read a lot, and Dad couldn't sleep if she was sitting up in bed reading. Likewise, Dad snored like a steam-powered lumber mill, and Mom couldn't sleep with all that noise going on. So Mom frequently (usually) slept on the sofa. She'd be up past midnight reading or doing crossword puzzles.
Me, I had a honey of a nightmare when I was a single-digit age and got out of the habit of sleeping in my bed, and would sleep on the floor in the family room (where Mom was) rather than risk having another nightmare like that one. (What do you want? I wasn't even ten years old at the time.)
So this dream was like that; but I was an adult, my brother-in-law was still recovering from his stroke last December, etc.
I woke up early in the morning, after sunrise; everyone else was asleep. I pulled aside the patio door curtain to see that the season change had come; the south winds were blowing.
And man, were they blowing hard. The highest wind velocity ever recorded on Earth is 231 miles per hour--well, in reality, anyway; I think these winds were faster. And it was still getting worse; the longer I watched, the faster the wind blew. The trees were bending and the noise was incredible, and as the back door was open a crack I felt myself being pulled towards it. (Even in my dreams, I'm a physics nerd.)
I watched the wind blow, anticipating branches breaking--and I noticed then that not so much as a single leaf was being blown down by that wind. There was no damage being done by these extreme winds--none at all. The high winds were making me a little nervous--or maybe "excited" is a better way to explain it. But at the same time I realized that I was perfectly safe and nothing bad was going to happen, not to me, the house, or anyone for that matter.
Woke up somewhere about there.
This is the second time I've had a dream like this one, and the first time was earlier this year (perhaps February). In that dream I was looking out the front door and the winds were coming from the north--and like reality I lived alone here--but it was otherwise the same: extreme high winds, no damage, and I was perfectly safe.
I'm sure that speaks volumes about how screwed up my psychology is. *sigh*