Why am I compelled to write this story? It’s embarrassing. Not to me, but to popular culture.
Yahoo picked it up (and I love the fact the picture associated with the pregnant man wasn’t the pregnant man, but Oprah). It was an exclusive in People. And the “pregnant man”, one Thomas Beatie, was on Oprah yesterday.
I’m going to go into the story, but I want to post a content advisory here because I’m talking about reproduction. So you’ve been warned.
The eMotion EM-SOL1GIG is pretty chunky as media players go: at five inches across, an inch thick, and a hefty 10 ounces, you won’t be putting this sucker in your jeans pocket anytime soon. Open it up, however, and you’ll find a pair of solar panels that’ll charge the player’s lithium-ion battery in about three or four hours (good for 17 hours of music playback). Even better, the player comes with a set of six connectors for charging laptops, cell phones, and other portable devices.
Specs-wise, the EM-SOL1GIG holds its own quite nicely. It can handle MP3, WMA, and WAV audio files, along with AVI and MPEG-4 video; the 3.5-inch, 320-by-240-pixel display was decent enough, if a little short of eye-popping. The player also has a photo viewer and a TXT file reader, along with a game emulator that’ll run NES, GameBoy, and Sega game ROMs. Oh, and if you get lost in the woods, the built-in LED flashlight can help you find your way back to the tent.
It’s cheaper than the Gamerator. But beer & video games trumps portability, video games, but no beer.
Scientists think they’ve nailed down where “natural” antimatter occurs in the universe.
It’s a good article. But someone should really clue that journalist into beta decay.
You’ve heard the famous postulate, “If a tree falls in the woods, and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
Guess what. It’s got a real world application in quantum mechanics.
“If the universe is sustained by dark energy, and nobody is around to observe the dark energy, it will not decrease.” That’s the news from the New Scientist and authors Lawrence Krauss and James Dent.
It’s based on the multiple worlds of quantum mechanics. It’s hard to grasp, but it all has to do with randomness and the lack of randomness associated with observation.
Let me explain it like this: if you have a kettle of water on the stove, and you don’t observe it, it can act randomly. It can boil, stop boiling, turn to ice, spontaneously turn to steam and then back into water– you’ll never know what it’s doing unless you’re actually looking at it. But if you stand there and watch the kettle, the only thing it can do is warm up and boil. All of the randomness of that particular system is removed because you’re observing it. So the randomness of the universe is removed so long as a system is kept under constant observation!
What does this mean? In the world of Dark Energy, the energy in between the galaxies that continues to push clusters of star groups apart (and keep some together), that energy is fluctuating at a random interval that, until recently, has gone unmeasured. Now that humanity is observing Dark Energy, the randomness is removed, which means the Dark Energy is no longer random but finite, and that limits the randomness it can do– all because we’re looking at it!
Of course, the weirdness of this science is in the uncertainty. Does it have to be humans observing this change, or could it be the universe itself which is noticing the change, and that means the observations by humans are moot as there has been an observing force for eons before we could even understand how to make fire. And if the universe observes itself, it means the universe has ultimately condemned itself to destruction through self-realization!
In other words, ignorance is bliss!
The more we understand about Dark Matter and Dark Energy, the less we seem to understand about the universe as a whole. Given that there seems to be spontaneous decay of electrons in the vastness of the space between galaxies, I think our physicist friends are missing something fundamental– how can we have spontaneous decay of matter in a void? I know some believe that Dark Energy is spontaneously converting to Dark Matter and back again, but I find that hard to understand in the cold void between galaxies. What I do think is that there are nother neighboring dimensions which “leak” into our universe at weak points– points where there is no matter to define the universe. Because there’s a null-property reach without gravity, temperature or matter in significant amounts, the reality of the universe, quantumly, is dispersed and weakened, giving rise to bleed from other universes of real material, while at the same time leeching energy and mass that exists in those zones.
We know all energy and mass, when in motion, travel in waves. We know that space and time are interconnected (just ask Einstein). If space has definitive value, as it does if it’s a membrane between dimensions, then it stands to reason it travels in waves as well, and that would mean time travels in waves too. And if everything in the universe travels in waves, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the continuity of the universe we live in is itself a wave. And if our universe is a wave amongst waves, alternative dimensions could easily be other waves which are adjacent to or intersect our universe.
Fascinating stuff.
Harry Reid takes credit for the Rush Limbaugh letter.
Congrats to Rush for pulling down 2 Mil for a worthy charity. And a 2 Mil match from El Rushbo himself.
Unlike this guy who’s heading to Marine boot camp.
A defendant dropped down and performed 50 push-ups in court Friday, and a prosecutor dropped the charges against him. The dismissal of Chase C. Allen’s misdemeanor trespassing and disorderly conduct charges apparently helped smooth the way for the 20-year-old Marine recruit to report to boot camp.
Pretty cool. But his original arrest was pretty weird.
The charges stemmed from Allen’s April 28 arrest inside Wishard Memorial Hospital’s emergency room. After his discharge, he refused to leave his hospital bed and repeatedly told an off-duty sheriff’s deputy to arrest him, saying he was homeless, according to a police report.
I hope the Marines straighten him out. If not, he’s sure to end up in a Michael Moore documentary.
It may be amusing, but it might also be reality. Very cool, especially the candid nature by which it was discovered.
And note to administrators everywhere– he had the results confirmed before going public.
…Space Shuttles. According to a survey, it looks as if some astronauts have gone up into space a little boozed.
So let me get this straight. We put people in a suit, tell them to sit tight for two or three hours, then ignite a few thousand pounds of fuel to fire them into space so they can float around in an enclosed space, make repairs on really expensive space junk, and run experiments such as the effects of weightlessness on cabbage, and we expect them to stay sober?!
By all means, they should have a minibar on the shuttle, not a few hundred packages of Tang.
This story promoted the worst phrase ever uttered by a politician. Ever.
“That’s not the ‘right stuff’ as far as I’m concerned,” said Bart Gordon, D-Tenn.
See, told you it sucked.
The 111-year old Japanese man Tomoji Tanabe has revealed his secret to longevity:
“I don’t drink alcohol — that is the biggest reason for my good health,” Tomoji Tanabe told reporters on Monday.
I’ll drink to that!
Tanabe also attributes his good health to chasing pigeons, yelling at teenagers, and attending a weekly lunch with friends at “Luby’s”.
“When I turned 110, they doubled my senior discount!” he said*.
*- The unquoted portions may not be directly attributed to Tanabe but to two cases of warm Sake imbibed by the blogger.
“Well, my son is an alcoholic. But I least I have hot water.”
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