Starship Asterisk*

Almost a minute video of one thing that bears do in the woods. The video starts automatically, after it throws a commercial at you.
http://www.wfsb.com/video?clipId=9134712&autostart=true

Here's another short video with a mamma bear missing one of her cubs. http://www.wfsb.com/video?clipId=9122896&autostart=true

Here's a brief close encounter with whales. http://www.wfsb.com/video?clipId=9120231&autostart=true

All this time I've looked at Chris's avatar and thought the trail behind the meteor was a rainbow. On a whim I did an image-based google search and found a larger version and now I realize I've been seeing it wrong the whole time.

Yeah, things can look different when they're bigger.

geckzilla wrote:All this time I've looked at Chris's avatar and thought the trail behind the meteor was a rainbow. On a whim I did an image-based google search and found a larger version and now I realize I've been seeing it wrong the whole time.

I wonder what you'd make of the one pixel version of the avatar?

I'd be very tempted to use admin powers to delete it for being too similar to a speck of dust or a dead pixel.

Messing around with one of my favorite Hubble hidden treasures I found some new data from 2012 thinking I could fill in a rather large hole of missing data. Besides that, though, I noticed there is actually a really fast moving puff of gas or dust presumably emitted from and flying away from the hidden star. It's moving much faster than any of the other dust in the scene.

http://www.geckzilla.com/astro/HH_909A_30mo_anim.gif (It's a 500k animated gif so I'm not putting it in an img tag)

As you probably gathered from the file name, the first and second frames are only 30 months apart. Zoom! Note that it's not getting brighter, as far as I know. The two different frames were also taken with two different filters and the puff shows up brighter in one of them because of that.

I wonder if there is another "puff" going the other way?

Why Teleportation Could Be Far Slower Than Walking
Universe Today | Elizabeth Howell | 2013 Jul 31

... A new analysis says the teleportation process wouldn’t take a few seconds. It could, in fact, stretch longer than the history of the universe! “It would probably be quicker to walk,” a press release said laconically. ...

bystander wrote:Why Teleportation Could Be Far Slower Than Walking
Universe Today | Elizabeth Howell | 2013 Jul 31

... A new analysis says the teleportation process wouldn’t take a few seconds. It could, in fact, stretch longer than the history of the universe! “It would probably be quicker to walk,” a press release said laconically. ...

I think it's ridiculous that Charlie seems to imply that "infinite Charlies" thing is backed by any scientific evidence at all. What prevailing theory states that the universe is most likely infinite? He states that there are a finite number of particles so he is saying the universe has infinite time to do an infinite number of things and not that there are simultaneously an infinite number of possibilities in an infinite volume of universe. Is the universe infinitely old? Will it continue to exist forever? Those are philosophical questions. Whether or not we are in a closed, open, or flat universe is important and I've read that it's probably open due to the presence of dark energy but now reading Wikipedia there is evidence for both an open and a flat universe. Which is it? Who knows? What about entropy? I guess I should be agnostic about that question for now. It seems like something that is truly unknowable.

The idea that arrangements of matter repeats also bothers me. It goes back to the infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters. They're going to mash randomly and create a lot of the same gibberish over and over. If they were methodical and given certain restrictions (not random at all), they would eventually write all possible combinations of words that could be contained in a given set of characters and they could repeat that method over and over. But they're not methodical, so they go on writing indecipherable gibberish over and over instead of deliberate combinations which would still be gibberish most of the time but would also definitely eventually not be gibberish. The random monkeys may always make gibberish or they may write a beautiful poem but the latter is not certain.

Or was Charlie joking? Did I take him too seriously? Is this another embarrassing diatribe?

geckzilla wrote:
Or was Charlie joking? Did I take him too seriously? Is this another embarrassing diatribe?

The UK has fat sewers. http://www.wfsb.com/story/23054250/wate ... ndon-sewer

Tonight a saw a dance performance in the park. Not his performance, and not this park, but still.














I was munching strawberries as I watched the performance.












Afterwards I was still hungry, so I had a hot dog.










And as I was sitting on a park bench, eating my hot dog, enjoying the mild sweet evening, looking and listening to people laughing and talking and milling about, I thought, <expletive>, how can this be? How can these things exist? Warm summer nights, free outdoor dance performances, strawberries, hot dogs? Happy people enjoying themselves? Where in the job description of the universe does it say that it has to come up with these things? Come on, hot dogs? How can they be part of the same universe that produces galaxies and quasars and black holes and supernovae and barren planets all over the place?

And yet, and yet... the hot dogs must have been there from the beginning, in the Big Bang, as an incredibly, unfathomably remote future possibility. Even in the Big Bang, the first ingredients of hot dogs were cooked up. The first ingredients of free dance performances were cooked up too, and mild sweet summer nights, and happy people milling about, and strawberries. In the Big Bang.

It is <expletive> incredible.

Ann

Ann... nice school teacher Ann, with two <expletives> Shazam That must have been a really deep revelatory experience you had
Everything comes from the same thing. Everything returns to the same thing. In the case of strawberries and hot dogs, it's nice to catch them before they start the return trip.

Ann wrote:And yet, and yet... the hot dogs must have been there from the beginning, in the Big Bang, as an incredibly, unfathomably remote future possibility. Even in the Big Bang, the first ingredients of hot dogs were cooked up. The first ingredients of free dance performances were cooked up too, and mild sweet summer nights, and happy people milling about, and strawberries. In the Big Bang.

Not to rain on your parade, but what about the other things that were there from the beginning? Ebola, HIV, atomic bombs, miserable people in concentration camps.

Your happy evening was a choice made by you and your culture, not the Universe. Others have made less wise choices.

Chris Peterson wrote:Isn't it a <bleep> miracle???

Who says Abominable Snowmen have no sense of humor

Beyond wrote:Who says Abominable Snowmen have no sense of humor :?: :?:

I don't know, who says that?

Chris Peterson wrote:

Ann wrote:And yet, and yet... the hot dogs must have been there from the beginning, in the Big Bang, as an incredibly, unfathomably remote future possibility. Even in the Big Bang, the first ingredients of hot dogs were cooked up. The first ingredients of free dance performances were cooked up too, and mild sweet summer nights, and happy people milling about, and strawberries. In the Big Bang.

Not to rain on your parade, but what about the other things that were there from the beginning? Ebola, HIV, atomic bombs, miserable people in concentration camps.

Your happy evening was a choice made by you and your culture, not the Universe. Others have made less wise choices.

That's Chris, the eternal optomist

Chris Peterson wrote:

Beyond wrote:Who says Abominable Snowmen have no sense of humor

I don't know, who says that?

I don't really know, as i avoid them.

Censorship is stupid (NSFW URL). I just deleted all the word filters which just get in the way on occasion anyway. We know what's behind the censorship replacement anyway. It's better to maintain decorum without resorting to it.