Kurt Starnes

Now it's bedtime. - Kurt Starnes

Wish we could launch people into space in any weather planes could fly in. - Matt M (inactive)

Yup. Is the reason we don't just because of extreme caution? *Edit: I recall something about the Shuttle being able to create lightning as it flies through clouds. - Kurt Starnes

I'm not sure what the weather requirements for the shuttle are. I suppose that a lightning strike on a big chemical explosive is not something you want to risk. :) - Matt M (inactive)

"Ice cubes are so passé. We’ve already seen them challenged in their drink cooling duties by Sippin’ Rocks and now there's a new threat looming. The Ice Ball Mold transforms an irregular shaped chunk of ice into an icy sphere, which its proponents say are more desirable than cubes because they melt more slowly due to their smaller surface area - thereby keeping your drink cooler and less diluted for longer." - Kurt Starnes

""A moonbow is just like a rainbow but is caused by the moon reflecting off rain mist at a certain angle," says Pacholka. "I was very fortunate to see this. But in a sense I created this fortune as I was always out there: I drove up the crater mountain that night but also about every night, even going twice the night before – early evening to shoot the evening sky then back again in early morning to shoot the morning sky." As to that mysterious star rising above the horizon, it turns out to be the planet Mars which is currently making one of its closest approaches to Earth." - Kurt Starnes

"This data suggests that people who achieve greater social status are more likely to be able to experience life as rewarding and stimulating because they have more targets for dopamine to act upon within the striatum. Dr. Martinez explains their findings: "We showed that low levels of dopamine receptors were associated with low social status and that high levels of dopamine receptors were associated with higher social status. The same type of association was seen with the volunteer's reports of social support they experience from their friends, family, or significant other."" - Kurt Starnes

Just found a calorie estimate on the Farrell's Zoo. "It will take a more precise armchair scientist than me, but, using my scribbled-on-the-yellow-legal-pad calculations, I came up with 5,815 calories and 215 grams of fat." - Kurt Starnes

Source for above: http://healthyliving.freedomblogging.com/2009... - Kurt Starnes

SciFi today. - Kurt Starnes

VU 1968. Image source: http://www.rollingstone.com/artists... - Kurt Starnes

"Is the solar-system sized bubble in the Consellation Cygnus a planetary nebulae or could it be an "AC" or astroengineering construction, also known as a Dyson sphere, named after Freeman Dyson of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study who proposed the theory? Dyson's thought experiment suggested that in our search for advanced extraterrrestrial civilizations that Instead of radio signals we should look for spheres, which are artificial mega structures that enclose the orbit of a star, fabricated from the material of that solar system. The key is to distinguish a Dyson sphere from natural dust components. The Dyson sphere is the marker of what Kardashev calls a Type 2 civilization, which is capable of using up all the energy produced by a star. A Type three civilization uses up all the energy produced by a galaxy."" - Kurt Starnes

"Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have built an enhanced version of an experimental atomic clock based on a single aluminum atom that is now the world’s most precise clock, more than twice as precise as the previous pacesetter based on a mercury atom. The new aluminum clock would neither gain nor lose one second in about 3.7 billion years, according to measurements to be reported in Physical Review Letters.* The new clock is the second version of NIST’s “quantum logic clock,” so called because it borrows the logical processing used for atoms storing data in experimental quantum computing, another major focus of the same NIST research group. (The logic process is described at http://www.nist.gov/public_....) The second version of the logic clock offers more than twice the precision of the original." - Kurt Starnes

I thought one of the YouTube comments was interesting (imagine that!): "One of my all time favorites too... I used to listen to it in College and try to figure it out while doing homework. It took me awhile to figure out as Overandoveture says, the entire song is filled with palindromes. Pretty impressive. (A palindrome is obviously something that reads the same from left to right or right to left), like the line "Egad, a base tone denotes a bad age". Even the The 27-word bridge is word-symmetrical. Classic." - Kurt Starnes

"Today I found out that the 7-11 Double Big Gulp holds about twice the amount of fluid than the average adult human’s stomach. The average adult human’s stomach can hold reasonably comfortably approximately 32 ounces at any given time. The Double Big Gulp holds about 64 ounces of soda or Slurpee." - Kurt Starnes

"This isn't your first close-up of another planet's biosphere... it's actually the Maldives islands on Earth, as viewed from the International Space Station. A couple of ISS astronauts have been twittering amazing pictures of our planet." - Kurt Starnes

"Darwin had a big one. As did Plato and Aristotle. Pythagoras most certainly had one, a long one judging from his statue. Leonardo da Vinci’s grew to illustrious lengths later in life. So why, if all these famous scientists had beards to stroke when being clever and contemplative, is sporting facial hair in the lab a big no-no? Well, it appears that facial hair provides a massive substrate on which bacteria can frolic and play. So much so that a bearded man wearing a face mask sheds significantly much more bacteria than a non-bearded man or woman. In fact the risk posed by the facial hair bacterial fallout is such that the authors of the February 2000 paper in Anaesthesia end their abstract with this line: Bearded males may also consider removing their beards. So it appears that a responsible doctor in this day and age should be sure to shave." - Kurt Starnes