What’s Up? 06/18/10

I awoke to day two of sunshine! Well, it was a shock of course, and I don’t want you to get too excited, for the forecast (I know, why bother?) is not good.

Decidedly not good. The heavens are scheduled to spew! later today, and perhaps dangerously so.

I’m trying to be stoic and not spew here.

So, hopefully there is a thing or two out there that we can find that will enlighten our souls and raise us all to a higher plane of contemplation. Yep.

Science takes a look at figuring out why we like what we like. It’s a long, but thoughtful review in part of Paul Bloom’s book, How Pleasure Works.

Emory University studies chimpanzees to help learn when and how humans developed the valued empathy behavior. These nearest cousins of ours regularly sympathize and comfort members who have been victimized by aggression from others.  

Ever since South Carolina was placed on the terminally stupid state list, well we expect about anything. Senator DeMint, (the one running against the fake Democrat Greene, who barely knows that he lives in South Carolina), is helping out pal Sharron Angle ( the uber nut case running as an uber teabagger in Utah against Harry Reid), by getting the uber crazy right wing American Vision (who wants Merika governed by the bible as they interpret it), to help raise funds for said Angle’s campaign. Crazy is as crazy does.

Everybody knows that education in this country is pure crap. D-Cap via BMT makes a good case that it went off the trolley with the Reagan administration (you know the ONLY freakin’ Rethug administration in modern history that they can cling to [and they do] as something to tout?). He makes a good argument. Read Bob Bennett is a jackass.

Idiocy rules in Rethunglian land as we know. Butthead Joe Barton, (R-TX) saw fit to apologize to BP for the terrible treatment they had received at the hands of the Obama administration. Guess Joe figures the oil won’t come to Texas and that his constituency are unlike the rest of the Gulf residents who patently dispise the company. Par for the course since so many Rethuglicans are back to drill baby drill rhetoric. No shame and no brains. I simply cannot wait to see what kinds of money Barton gets from oil interests. Oops, gee. what a surprise. Turns out Barton gets more money from the oil industry THAN ANY OTHER HOUSE MEMBER. Read it!

Andrew Sullivan wrote a good piece on Obama and what he has done. Blame the media for focusing usually on the wrong stuff, and the progressives wanting too much, and the right just crying non-stop, Sullivan argues that Obama has and is taking the right tone and tack. See what you think.

For the first time, a significant Jewish history site, centering on Eastern Europe,  has been created. It is supposed to be friendly to both the casual reader and the reseacher and student alike. Take a look.

A commentor left a lovely link to a great article on Chance, Choice and God. A thoughtful post.

For chuckles, read Liberals Hate Palin Because She’s  Beautiful. The writer seriously claims that this is behind the media’s and general populations dislike of  the Palinator (that woman is an idiot). It’s kinda sad to think that conservative thinking is so shallow, and if you don’t believe me, read to the end and see that the author just wants to paint as “ugly” all liberal women. Dude you are so superficial it’s pathetic.

Best not to miss D-Caps great parody of our Sarah (that woman is an idiot) gettin’ in touch with the Prez with advice on how to handle the oil spill. Pricelessly hilarious as always.

hope you find sumpin’ to read here! lol…

More Astronomical Insanity

I know a lot about black holes. An awfully lot if you pit me against the human race at large. I’m practically a genius if you do that.

Actually, I don’t understand the things at all. I can regurgitate a lot of “facts” but they could all be false for all I know. They sound crazy.

I look with wonder at the people who spend their time thinking about black holes.

“What do you do for a living?”

“I think about black holes.”

Kinda puny doncha think?

The more I “learn” about black holes, the nuttier they get. Kinda like Republicans in that way. They just get more bizarre. Stephen Hawking is the king of theoretical physics these days. He thinks a lot. And well, maybe the guy is bonkers, or a Republican, but people pay attention when he talks.

He talks about black holes not being black. Now that will set your teeth on edge. Why call them black if they aren’t? He says there are some particles that form, run into each other, and annihilate each other in short order. He says that if one of those buggers should get too close to the event horizon of a black hole, it couldn’t meet up with its twin and suicide itself. So it would I guess give off some light or something.

I don’t understand this, as you can tell. Anyway, some guy is doing his best to look for the tell-tale sign of that happening. It’s all magic and mirrors and smoke if you ask me.

Another dude is trying to create a black hole in his computer. No, it won’t eat up his computer or anything, it’s just a simulation. But he can’t make the “star” collapse right. Stars collapsing and then exploding (super novas) are what they thought caused black holes to form. His model just never stops collapsing, so he posits that maybe some black holes (which may not be black remember) are caused by non-novas.

Non-novas? Physicists aren’t very creative in terms of names it seems. But then neither are Republicans (tea party? neo-con? see? lazy Republicans). They name stuff like quarks as being strange and up and down? No creative spirit in naming.

They are creative in making up these strange ideas of how things work however.

Things get strange around a black hole. So they tell me. I don’t know, I’ve never been around one myself. Neither have they, but they claim they know this by voodoo mathematics. To one observing something falling into a black hole, the thing starts slowing down as it enters the event horizon, and eventually it stops and pretty much looks stuck. Time stops you see, and if you can explain how that happens, well, I’ll become a Republican. (I know you can’t, so I’m not worried.)

To the poor thing that is being sucked in, they are stretched and torn and well, they die, an ugly death. Again, we don’t know a single soul who has had this happen, so it’s all supposition.

It’s called a paradox, and paradoxes are things that fry the brain if you think about them too long.

Okay, so then Hawking says that based on a bunch of his magical dust formulae, he thinks (actually thought) that the stuff that fell into the black hole actually disappeared, and was annihilated, meaning ceased to exist.

This, apparently is a huge no-no in physics. Energy/matter, whatever you call it, your hair, your grass, your ugliest sweater, exist forever. Not necessarily as your identifiable “stuff” but in some form or other. A house burns, and turns into ash, and smoke and well, you get this surely.

If the whole universe has 1 million cubic centimeters of matter (which is silly of course–it has gazillions more), it will always have that amount, it just changes form. Today’s Toyota is tomorrows filet mignon. Tomorrow may be a few hundred thousand or millions of years, but trust me, it will turn into something else.

There is this other physicist, who is called the plumber, (No he is not Joe the plumber, and he may or may not be a Republican. I don’t know). Anyway, that idea bothered the bejeesus out of him, so he devoted his physics career (he quit being a plumber) to proving Stephen wrong.

He never could figure out a mathematical way to do it, but he created weird pictures in his mind. They consisted of the propeller of a plane, which grew its own propellers and somewhere in this purely insane thought image, he thought it (the plane) resembled a hologram. (Holograms you will remember are quite prominent in science fiction to get around anything that you can’t make up a logical explanation of.)

So he says all the “lost energy” is displayed like a outdoor movie theatre screen around the outskirts of the universe. Everything is. Course, he knows that nobody is going to get out there any time soon and prove him wrong, so it was a safe thing to claim.

Anyway, Hawkings liked the idea so much that he agreed that the plumber was right and he was wrong. And if somebody as huge as Stephen Hawkings admits he’s wrong, well it’s a really big deal. We should all take notice. Not like me admitting that I’m wrong about who was in the cast of Hair back in the 60′s or anything. Big Big stuff.

Which all goes to show you that Republicans should never be put in charge of anything, because they believe mostly that everything was better in the good old days, and they like to keep things from changing. And well, as you can see, things keep changing.

And that’s all I gotta say on that subject.