Bartender Geek

Okay. So, apparently, a black hole does not actually need to be super-dense. It's just, the less dense it is, the bigger its radius has to be in order for it to be a black hole.

A solar-system-sized black hole would only need to be about as dense as air. If you made a big sphere the size of the orbit of Neptune, and filled it with air -- that'd be a black hole.

Here's the weird thought. Um. Not that that previous thing ISN'T a weird thought. But here's a weirder one:

The density of the intergalactic medium is probably something like one hydrogen atom per cubic meter. Not very dense.

But nonetheless, a density.

That means that there exists a radius such that the entire universe is a black hole. And it's calculable.

Which puts an upper bound on the size of the universe. And leaves the possibility that our entire universe is, in fact, on the black hole side of an event horizon.

I can think of several people on my flist who might like this music video. My sister is one of them, but a lot of other people, too.

When you ask how long a project will take, divide the answer in half, and bump up to the next significant unit of time.

If a programmer tells you that he or she can get that to you in ten minutes, that means five hours. If a contractor says it's a one-day process, that means half a week.

This rule of thumb has served me well in general.

1. Grey foxes can get hairballs. Or, at least, that's what it looked like. As a cat person, I recognize that particular hacking sound. . .

2. Snow leopards in a zoo couldn't really care less about humans nearby staring at them -- but the dog walking by on the sidewalk outside the zoo was VERY interesting. The leopard looked rather alert, and perhaps even a little jumpy, even after the dog was out of sight. The body language was more or less the same as Boopsie's when she would see another cat walk by outside the house. Boopsie didn't like other cats, and I suspect the snow leopard isn't a big fan of other carnivores of its approximate weight class.

3. A meerkat can pick a fight with a stick and lose. Twice. Same stick both times.

Look, I suppose that if you are an XKCD reader (RSS feed at xkcd_rss), there's a chance that you'd understand this, too.

But, see, as I was walking home from the store, I started wondering: if you spin Magneto around reasonably fast, does he turn into Static from Static Shock?

(Because, see, Static has control over electricity, and Magneto has control over magnetism, and magnetic fields and electrical fields are the same thing transformed through rotation. . . oh, forget it, it wasn't important anyway.)

I often don't leave the house for days at a time, but I just walked outside to get something from the car.

It's autumn. I walked outside and it smelled like autumn.

The first day of the year that smells like autumn doesn't just smell like autumn, it smells like every autumn. You smell that, and you don't just smell now, you smell the autumn of every year of your life, past and future. And possibly every autumn before you were born, and after you die, too.

Whenever the seasons change, you get that. Four times a year, you can smell time.

If the TSA was going to ban an entire phase of matter from the cabins of their planes, couldn't they have started with plasmas? I mean, not allowing passengers to bring plasmas onto a plane would be a reasonable security measure in my opinion.

So, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has come out with a 60-second television spot about how greenhouse gas emissions aren't important. It's called "CO2 -- We Call It Life", and is all about how you need carbon dioxide to live, and therefore it can't possibly be dangerous.

I'm looking forward to the other spots they will be producing soon, "You'll Die Without Water, So Shut The Fuck Up Already, New Orleans," and "Plants Grow Buried In Dirt: Why Mine Safety Standards Are Bad."

Right down the hill, the parking lot of the supermarket has eight inches of water in it. In the parking lot of the condominiums next to it, there are cars in water over their tires. Apartment buildings nearby are being evacuated, and there have been sporadic reports of plumbing backing up in disgusting ways.

None of this has, however, directly affected our home, baruch Hashem, and knock on wood. We're at the top of the hill where all this is happening at the bottom. We may be the only people in Massachusetts on my friends list who don't need a sump pump. If anyone is flooded out, bring over a sleeping bag -- we can probably give you a dry spot to sleep in.

First, if relatively friendly questioning about her husband claiming to be a member of a bigoted organization is going to be so hard on Mrs. Alito that it causes her emotional distress, it behooves Sam Alito to remove his name from consideration for the Supreme Court. Because what he's going through now is NOTHING compared to how people talk about people who already ARE on the Supreme Court. If she can't deal with THIS, she won't be able to deal with what is going to be said about her husband constantly for the rest of their lives. That's just part of being a very public judge.

Lis, if, G-d forbid, I ever end up in public hearings for some position like Supreme Court justice, and it gets difficult to hear people savage me, please fake checking your watch or something, and leave BEFORE you lose your composure. You don't have to listen to it, but don't ever let 'em see ya sweat.

Second, you know what would be my ideal way to deal with Daylight Saving Time, time zones, and all that malarkey?

It would be if everybody who needed a standard time to work with just used GMT, universally, across the globe. As 24 hour military time.

So Lis would start work at like 0330 and get off at about 1200, House would be on at something like 1600 or something like that (I'm probably off by an hour or two one way or the other). Television schedules, work schedules, train schedules, and the like would all use 24-hour GMT.

Everything else would use local noon. So, for instance, right now, for me, would be 0643, but would also be, um, (lesse, right now, our local noon is about seven minutes before EST noon, so we're about seven minutes later in general), "ten minutes of 12 o'clock".

I could call that 11:50 to distinguish it from 1150, for instance. Or just use "o'clock", "half past", and all those other terms like that.

Digital clocks would generally use 24 hour GMT, and not have colons in them. Analogue clocks would generally be set such that 12 o'clock was local noon, and would use AM and PM.

I think that would allow both the universal time that you need for worldwide commerce, and yet still have a sense that "time" was in some sense tied to the real, physical world.

Plus, it'd be cool.