The sky! It is all asparkle!
Tonight is the peak of the Geminid meteor shower. Look to the East between midnight and dawn.
The Geminids is a really good one, but it’s overlooked often on account of it’s cold as a witch’s tata out there in mid-December. It’s also a strange one — most meteor showers come from comet tails, but the Geminids come from this big rock thing which doesn’t seem to shed enough fluff to account for the light show.
Oooo. Mystery.
Also, ASPARKLE is the first Scrabble word Uncle B. spelled that got all his letters out. ASPARKLE. Jesus.
Yep. We’re still all over that Massive Multiplayer Online Scrabble game. We’re got over 60,000 points now (the minimum to hit the leaderboard is 160,000).
If you haven’t checked it out, it’s worth going over just to sightsee. Over 12 million tiles now. On a board 21926 by 18975 squares, which would be 90,685 square feet or just over two acres in the real world. Somebody has made a cool sightseeing guide to all the weird shapes and patterns people have made with spellin’!
I must say, it’s a pleasant thing to do of an evening: sit around in front of a roaring log fire with a drink and a sleepy cat and try to outdo each other spelling the biggest, badassedest words we can dredge up.
I had no idea he knew the word for lady parts in so many obscure dead languages.
December 13, 2010 — 8:59 pm
Comments: 20
Ummm…laughing goat-horned devil pelvis?
I never took the Rorshach inkblot test. My mother took it in college. She did a lot of psych courses. The only thing she remembered was getting the brain freeze when the inkblots went from black and white to color.
It’s a phenomenon known as “color shock” — I don’t know what it means. “Bugshit crazy” at a guess.
Anyhow, Wikipedia has gefuct the Rorshach by publishing the ten classic inkblots along with the most common responses to them. Even though the blots have technically been in the public domain for many years, psychologists have guarded the images carefully. Once they’re out, the test is essentially useless. Assuming it was useful before.
For what it’s worth, I suspect it did have some use as a diagnostic. It ain’t science, but it’s a way for a pshrink to make conversation with a fruitcake without asking him to be insightful about anything.
Anyhow, I advise you to bone up on the ‘normal’ responses. You never know if your next insanity plea might hinge on an Old School psych.
August 2, 2010 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 25
Happy Summer Solstice!
I stole the pic from these people.
It’s the Solstice!
We grabbed a bottle, fired up the chimenea and spent the evening in the garden staring up at the stars. It was light, I swears, at eleven. Magic!
It’s all downhill from here.
In now. Not sober. G’night!
June 22, 2010 — 12:27 am
Comments: 11
The March of Science
I realize most people don’t come to sweasel.com for the latest breakthroughs in science and technology, but sometimes a generalist blogger is lucky enough to find herself perfectly positioned to break a story the specialists blogs have missed.
Such a lucky find is the self-inflating miniature whoopee cushion.
How is this possible? In my lifetime? you ask. The secret is a light polyester sponge inside the cushion.
To operate, place your thumb over the grommet and squeeze, making the expected poo, poo sound. When the cushion is subsequently released, the sponge expands, pulling air in through the vent hole and refilling the item for immediate use.
Whatever little yellow genius at the Ho Lee Fuk Toy and Novelty Company of Shanghai came up with that one, I owe him a beer.
Have a good weekend, everyone. And remember — adult supervision is required. I don’t know what kind of dimwitted rug monkeys y’all are breeding out there, but I bet one of them could put out an eye with a whoopee cushion.
May 7, 2010 — 9:47 pm
Comments: 36
Arachnotoad
Hey, remember back in 1995, those Minnesota schoolkids who found half the frogs in their local pond had extra limbs, leading to the obvious conclusion that ZOMG WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!? Yeah, it turned out to be perfectly natural and not caused by evil Gaia-raping modern chemical corporations.
Scientists discovered all the frogs with deformed limbs were in ponds with a certain snail, which plays intermediate host to a certain fluke. The fluke gets into the developing frog embryo and fucks with its limb-producing buds. Instant mutants, just add water.
Of course, hippies still talk about “high incidences of amphibian deformity in response to environmental degradation” but at least they’re doing it with some cool pictures. New York artist Brandon Ballengée has collected gefukt frog specimens from all over the world, which he dyes in cheerful contrasting colors and scans on his flatbed scanner.
Which is EXACTLY what I do with my eight-legged frogs.
His show opens in London today. Uncle B and I have to go up to London soon, but I think we’ll be giving this one a miss.
March 16, 2010 — 9:48 pm
Comments: 11
Look! Up in the sky!
It’s a huge ass moon!
No, seriously. Tonight’s moon is a “perigee moon” — meaning the moon’s squashed orbit brings it closer to us than it will be for any other full moon during 2010. So it looks about 14% wider and 30% brighter than usual.
And that is a total no shit. We drove home tonight sandwiched between two of the spookiest-looking rainstorms I’ve ever seen — one over the Channel and moving out, one over the hills and moving in. And we got home just in time to see THIS thing hanging over our back garden.
I’ve honestly never seen the moon look so huge and round and close to the earth. I know the photo doesn’t mean much, but you’ve got to go outside and see this thing for yourself, if your local conditions are at all favorable.
Good weekend, everyone!
January 29, 2010 — 5:52 pm
Comments: 35
DPlot thickens
You know how I was bitching in my last post about no longer owning any graphing software? Well, a very nice bloke took notice (he has a Google Alerts set for “graphing software”) and offered me a free license to his graphing software program DPlot.
It’s my policy never to say no to free stuff. It’s my policy now, anyway — I didn’t have to have a policy before, since nobody ever offered me any free stuff. So I downloaded DPlot, followed the simple installation instructions, and in no time at all, I was feeling severely mentally retarded.
Seriously, it’s all math and shit. I know some of you are actual engineers and science type peeps, so you should probably mosey over and check it out. I mean, he’s an awfully nice guy and he’s got testimonials from other nerds saying how great his program is. I know you poindexters don’t dare lie to each other, on account of your huge brains, so it’s probably pretty good at whatever the hell it does.
Look! I made boobies!
January 14, 2010 — 6:30 pm
Comments: 24
If the science were real, they wouldn’t have to be so tricksy
The Associate Press published this interactive map today. You click the little buttons at the top, and you get to see the map turn from cool blues and grays to scary-hot oranges and yellows as average global temperatures get warmer.
Then I read the key.
They are comparing warm seasons (May to October) of four recent periods (1891-1900 to 1945-1954 to 1970-1979 to 1997-2006) to the averages for 1951-1980. Prithee, allow me to inquire — what the fuckity fuck? Here that is on the calendar:
Why those four particular nine-year clusters? And why compare them against that particular overlapping 29 year stretch? And why just the warm seasons? They don’t explain, but we suspect we know why, don’t us?
Comparing four random chunks of time to another random chunk of time may make for a colorful, scary-looking picture, but it sure as shit isn’t science, folks.
But wait! There’s more! Remember our old friend the Greenland ice cores from a while back? Taking the earliest period versus the latest period on their map, this is what their cunning stunt looks like plotted on that:
Pff! Lovely settled science there, guys.
Oh, and the little stars on the map? You’re supposed to click them — all six of them — to learn what adorable, doe-eye animals are endangered by this obvious runaway warmening. Click the star for Sweden and you discover that climate change means filthy, disease-carrying ticks can survive there now.
So it’s getting warmer in Sweden, and the most striking consequence of that is…ticks!?!
December 22, 2009 — 7:47 pm
Comments: 12
Unintended consequences
HAVE you ever noticed a friend or neighbour driving a new hybrid car and felt pressure to trade in your gas guzzler? Or worried about what people might think when you drive up to the office in an SUV?
That’s the question in a New Scientist article on how we could cut down on damage to the environment by making people ‘fess up to what they consume. HotAir ran it under the headline Newest solution to global warming: Shame.
The author studied the way subjects would selfishly abuse shared resources — basically, the tragedy of the commons — but could be persuaded not to if everyone was aware how much everyone else was consuming.
See, this is why the excess of liberals in academia is a problem. You miss subtle data points, like MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT ASHAMED OF HOW MUCH ENERGY THEY USE. We pay for what we get, fair and square. Through the nose, even. What’s to be ashamed?
Energy consumption is a proxy for success. Bigger cars, bigger houses, maybe a boat or motorbike, lots of air travel — the good life is hell on your carbon footprint. Arch warmist and soon-to-be green billionaire Al Gore has a fucking GIGANTIC carbon footprint (I remind you, one of his three mansions uses twenty times the energy of the average American family home). If he’s not ashamed, why would I be?
Only in a leftist’s — or Christian missionary’s — dream world is a thin, dry, gray life of parsimony a status symbol. For the rest of us, we’re pretty proud of our toys. I predict outting the carbon exploiters wouldn’t play out quite the way it did in a university lab.
Say, did you catch yourself thinking, “gosh, I wish there was a range of quality merchandise with this logo or design emblazoned on it?” Well, it’s your lucky day!
November 17, 2009 — 5:04 pm
Comments: 36
You know, that title could be taken another way
We visited friends in Alfriston Sunday, and they were like, “there’s a free screening of the Age of Stupid here today. You should go!” And we’re, like, “oh! Ummm…ha. Yeah. Ah. Mmmm. Heh heh heh.”
Have you heard of this turkey? It’s an indy film about an archivist from 2055 who looks back at footage of our time and wonders, “ZOMG, why didn’t they listen to the hippies about globular warmening????” It’s got all the important scientific issues: Iraq, Nigeria, wind farms, hurricane Katrina. McDonald’s and Wal*Mart (probably. Just guessing here).
It’s less charty and graphy than An Inconvenient Truth; it’s more an attempt to put a human face on pants-peeing alarmism. As one user on IMDB put it, “it’s possible that even Sarah Palin herself could not fail to be affected by the story of Fernand Pareau, an octogenarian French mountain guide, showing us the glacier he loves as it withers away before his eyes.”
Whoof. Excuse me. Just step around that for now and I’ll clean it up in a sec.
The film premiered in New York on September 21 and all the world’s most prominent scientists were there: Kofi Annan, Gillian Anderson. Moby. That freaky-looking dude from Radiohead.
Anyhoo, in case this embarrassing invitation crops up again, I’ve pre-jiggered five reasons I can’t go see your stupid global warmening movie:
1 My mom was so terrified by The Population Bomb, she had an abortion rather than let me be one of the hundreds of millions who starved in the 1970s.
2 In 1983, I went out into the new Ice Age, licked a flagpole and I’ve been stuck to it ever since. Please come get me; I’m cold and lonely.
3 I ate a delicious t-bone steak in a restaurant London in 1998 and was one of the 100,000 to die horribly of Mad Cow disease.
4 Dude! Are you kidding? The grid hasn’t worked around here since the Y2K disaster. I’ve spent the last nine years living in a yurt eating treebark sammiches.
5 I gots de swine flu. Okay, strike that one. The flu pandemic still has time to be an actual catastrophe, for reals this time.
In case I’m being too fucking subtle here the professional catastrophe-mongers are always wrong. Bad scientists and conmen have been trying to sell the apocalypse to a weary public over and over again since…since science overtook Jesus as the main faith of the West.
Man-made global warmening is just the most recent. They’ve gotten clever with this con, though — the deadline is far, far in the future. We must act RIGHT NOW…but we’ll never know for sure how much they’ve played us for chumps. We won’t live that long.
October 5, 2009 — 3:33 pm
Comments: 51