Tag: science

Artemis I: Scrubbed

I’m pretty disappointed. NASA was supposed to launch it’s first Artemis mission today. It was going to test the Orion capsule and the SLS rocket (I think I have those titles correct, but I could be off somewhere) by launching it into lunar orbit and bringing it home. It is an unmanned mission, apart from a few mannequins, but it’s the first big test for the setup that should eventually put people back on the surface of the moon.

No dice though. No launch today. Hopefully they’ll have their issue (something to do with fueling, I think) sorted out soon and we’ll get our test. Fingers crossed, NASA.

The Downside of Blocking People

I think I just found the downside of blocking people on Twitter.

A couple of weeks ago I was being very petty and picking on a creationist who was insisting that the Big Bang and Evolution were fantasies because the sky daddy who is his own father told him so. I got into the discussion because he claimed that no one could tell where rocks came from and I responded that every high school kid who takes a basic science course will get a Geology segment that will clearly teach them where rocks come from. I asked him why he didn’t take that class in high school and, predictably, he said he went to a christian school that taught the truth.

After having fun with the idiot for a little while I did the smart thing and blocked his idiot ass.

Now today I am suddenly getting mentioned in posts that I don’t seem to have anything to do with. A little digging shows that apparently the blocked idiot user has fired up the conversation again and other non-creationists are getting involved and tearing him a scientific new one and including me in the replies.

Well… it’s nice to be mentioned and all, but I can’t really follow along unless I unblock the idiot. There’s a little part of me that wants to do it. There’s a much bigger part of me that thinks better of it. Let the ignorant-by-choice fool stay blocked.

Chef Lardo

The chicken is in the oven, the veggies are all prepped. I have about 7.5 minutes before I have to start prepping the quinoa, and I typo’d the word “the” twice in the first sentence.

Yup, it’s time for bed.

It’s December 6th today and the weather is weird. It was raining and blah all day, but it was also warm. The temps were in the high 50’s. I actually thought about opening up some windows, and I had my little desktop fan on for a while. How crazy is that?

Today at lunch I read about a mini-galaxy with a black hole at the center that is almost as big as ours. That does not compute, but it is also awesomely cool. There was a lot of online buzz about the two Walking Dead shows from last night. Well… not Fear, that show was atrocious and pretty much everyone agrees. No, the item of interest happened a couple hours after the episode aired when they announced the original lead character, who was supposed to have been killed off three years ago, is coming back. Oh good. I sure the writing they use to pull that off will be stellar. Yes.

Also, lots of buzz about the end of World Beyond. Specifically the post credit scene where we visit another country for the first time, and a tie in to the original show’s season one finale. It’s interesting and all, but it seems odd to give us a cliff hanger at the end of a show that literally no longer exists. I mean, it would have worked better if they told us where we could expect the pay off to come from. As it is we know there’s a road trip spin off from the main show coming, an anthology show which seems like a convenient excuse to bring back dead characters without retconning the way the morons at Fear are about to, and a set of hypothetical, near mythical movies. Safe to assume any payoff would be in the theaters, but who the hell knows. Whatever, the end of World Beyond was pretty satisfying and on the whole the two seasons ended in a way that makes me happy I stuck with it.

Okay. Time to prep the quinoa. Enough of this TV recap bullshit. It’s time for Chef Lard Ass to get-a-cookin’!

I Don’t Want to Live on This Planet Anymore

I guess questioning evolution and the shape of the Earth isn’t enough for the twitterati anymore. Today I came across two people who seemed to insist that rocks somehow needed god to create them. I was in ninth grade when I took Freshmen Earth Science and we studied how rocks are formed and how the Earth’s crust slides around and pieces bump into each other and how over a shit load of time that can cause things like mountains. I guess that’s some kind of liberal conspiracy now. Oh well. I just wish some people had paid a little more attention in ninth grade science, that’s all.

To make matters worse, the Bruins are losing to the friggin’ Red Wings. 1-0, late in the second. As if stupid humans aren’t bad enough, now I have to see my team lose to the friggin’ Red Wings?

I’ve mixed two of the last four songs for the November music project. Both songs utterly suck.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Dr Farnsworth was dead right when he said I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

Now I Have to Worry About This Too?

Climate Change. You hate it. You actually hate it more than you hate the people who pretend it isn’t happening, but only by a little.

As we watch the west coast burn, and the Northeast drown, and last month the Northwest melt, and all of the awful things they warned us about 10-20 years ago start happening… it’s scary, right?

Well now there’s this.

Back story, earlier today I took a shower. Also this morning, Harry left after a brief stop over (long enough to watch the Loki finale). He’s spending the weekend visiting Bellana in Vermont. I hope it doesn’t rain as much for him as it did for us. Anyway. I took a shower before he left, and after he left I asked Jen for a hug cause I was feeling sad about him leaving and once the hug started I told her it wasn’t going to stop. She laughed at me and told me I was too sweaty. Yup. It’s summer, it’s humid, I’m fat, I sweat a lot.

Fast forward about an hour and a half and I am wrapping up my morning car music. The sports radio station I was listening to was starting a segment talking about MMA. Once I stopped vomiting I plugged in my iPhone and picked the podcast episode at the top of my latest episodes list. It was a podcast called Cyber from a podcast network called Vice. It’s in my subscriptions list (Apple’s podcast doesn’t use the word subscribe anymore. It uses follow instead. I guess it’s because subscribe is too complicated a word to understand) but I don’t think I’ve listened to a whole hell of a lot of their content. I listened to this one though.

The episode was called “It’s Not The Heat, It’s The Humidity That’s Killing Us”. Sounds like fun.

The topic dealt with something called “wet bulb conditions“. Never heard of it. Apparently it’s a point where the temperature and humidity levels combine TO KILL YOU. You sweat in order to cool down your body. Apparently there is a point where there is too much moisture in the air for your sweat to evaporate so your body doesn’t cool and you spontaneously die.

LOVELY.

Now, as a fat guy who sweats a lot I have this shit to worry about too? Wonderful.

Merry christmas, everyone.

From the Air

This morning I saw a tweet from someone who claimed that it was a fact that Mars does not have an atmosphere. A few minutes ago, while eating my PB&J lunch, I saw this:

Yes, Virginia, there is air on Mars. You will die if you breath it, and there isn’t a whole lot of it, but it’s there and there is enough to fly a drone.

Suck it, science deniers.