Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Tidbits

Today work was fine--boring until Brian went out, and then ridiculously busy, as usual. Junior stopped by, and that was nice. Really my only plans today were to take a nap. I considered going to the park because the weather was so nice, but I thought, "no, I haven't slept well for two nights. I need to catch up on some sleep today."

Any guesses as to whether I took a nap?

Any guesses as to whether I went to the park?

Answers: no; no. wtf, fml.

I did get to talk to Daniel though, which was nice. It has been a very long time. Incidentally, I also discovered that one can make biodegradable plastic (at home, no less!*) out of potatoes. I have also decided to try making frozen yogurt, hopefully with my theoretical mentee. We'll see whether that actually happens. I mean, I hope we'll be able to get together and I especially hope that the yogurt turns out, but our track record thus far hasn't been so great.

In other news, I was reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything today during lulls at work--I use this as a sort of palate-cleanser between other books, and I've been "reading it" for years--and I learned some interesting stuff. For instance, evidently we have near misses with asteroids/planetoids with some regularity, and there is essentially nothing to be done about it. Not that it matters, because no one ever notices them until they're past us, if they notice at all. The good news is that an asteroid (even one the size of a house would be catastrophic) striking the surface of the earth would do so much damage so quickly that many or most of us, depending on the size, would be dead before we knew what was happening. It would enter the atmosphere at such high speed that the air beneath it would be unable to move out of the way, and would be supercompressed and superheated enough to vaporize anything beneath it. It would strike with the force of millions of nuclear bombs, and the shockwave would move outward far faster than the speed of sound, silently and instantly killing anyone lucky enough to be within the 'blast radius.' For those unlucky enough to be  outside the radius, life would quite quickly become rather unpleasant. The air worldwide would be filled within hours with ash, and the earth would be covered with it, polluting water and air, blocking sun, and killing plant life.

On that note, I hope you all have a very restful night.





*That is, there was a "DIY potato plasic" link on one of the pages I read, but I didn't click on it as I was not feeling like making plastic out of potatoes at the time.

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