Tag: science

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.

THE STIR CRAZY FILES – EPISODE 74

Today is the magical day.

Back story: I’ve been working from home for over 11 months now and there hasn’t been a single instant, not even a nanosecond, when I’ve missed commuting. Not one. I do not miss cramming my fat ass into a metal box for 80 minutes or so, working 8.5 hours, and then getting back into the metal box for another 80 minutes. I don’t miss it even one tiny little bit.

However… When I was commuting there was one day of each year that was sort of magical. It was sort of a light at the end of the tunnel. The tunnel of which I speak is winter. It does not involve a groundhog or anything like that, it only involves the sun.

My shift ends at 5:30 PM. That’s 1730 for you military time folks. During the winter, when I left the building to go home it was dark. During the summer it’s light. You know how the sun works and seasons and all of that, right? You know what I’m talking about.

The one special, magic day each year was the first day when the sun set at the same time my shift ended. 5:30 PM. The sun would, of course, be down by the time I actually go out the door, but that’s not the point. The point is from that day forward, the days were not only getting longer but I could actually perceive them getting longer. Does that make sense? Sunset at 4:30 or 5:00 didn’t affect me at all because I was inside the whole time and I didn’t actually get to experience the extra minute or so of light each day. Once the sun started setting after 5:30, I did get to experience the extra light.

So every year I would check the times of the sunset and quietly celebrate the symbolic moment when the sunset started happening after my work day.

Today is that day. It’s Friday February 25, 2021 and the sunset in Methuen, MA today will happen at 5:30 PM Eastern Standard Time.

Happy 5:30 day, everyone. Enjoy.

OSIRIS-REx

NASA put a probe onto the ground on an asteroid and vacuumed up some samples to bring home.

Can you believe what humanity can do when it applies science?

Yup, looking at you climate deniers, antivaxers, flat earthers, etc, etc.

Life on Venus? Hell Yes!

Is there life on Venus? You wouldn’t think so…

UNTIL NOW!!!

Well… it’s probably not life. I haven’t read the article yet, but I’ve read the author’s tweet storm where he talks it through. It’s probably just something that on Earth is biological, but elsewhere is just some goofy chemistry that we haven’t seen in these parts yet.

Still… even though this isn’t even close to evidence that there is life on another planet, I am going to choose to error on the side of massive overreaction and say, WOOOHOOO! Life on Venus, babie!

Distant Vacation Home?

Did you read this? They found what is probably a rocky planet inside a star’s habitable zone!

What do they know about it? It orbits a red dwarf, so I would guess the year would be much shorter than Earth’s. They know it’s size is comparable to Earth. They don’t know jack else except that it’s something like 500 light years away, so don’t be planning your vacation quite yet. Even the Millennium Falcon would need hundreds of years to get there (as she only makes 0.5 past light speed).

What they do know, is that if the atmosphere (assuming [hoping] there is an atmosphere) and the pressure play nicely water could exist as a liquid on the surface. They’ve found planets in the habitable zone before, but none of them had a size similar to Earth. Some of the others might be rocky, but they were all big enough that there was a good chance they’d be gas.

So what does this mean? Honestly? For your every day life it means squat. For the potential of finding a second planet to live on if we somehow manage to create a propulsion system that wouldn’t require 1000 years of travel? It’s pretty freakin’ huge news.

Now they need to try and figure out what it’s made of, what it has for an atmosphere, and if maybe it might have some water on the surface, and if there might be some algae living in the water.

Science RULES!