Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 213
November 1, 2019
NANO NANO and odds and ends
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Sorry this is so late. The Odds and Ends first:
Mom’s term for Odds and ends was useless things. When you couldn’t find a screw or a bolt or some specialized part you knew you’d left somewhere you looked in the box of the useless things. Digression over.
Frank Flemming has ordered me to put out an urgent request. Would two gentlemen who commented on his blog: Paul who suggested that he carve Hellbender ont he moon with nukes, and Steven Stolarz either ping me (or him) on facebook or send me an emai...
October 31, 2019
Incoming: The Chicxulub Impactor, Part 3 ― The Impactor & Effects By Stephanie Osborn
http://www.stephanie-osborn.com
The ImpactorBased on the evidence at the impact site, there are quite a few things that can be fairly readily extrapolated about the impactor.
Impactor’s estimated velocity: 12.6-73km/s (4,500-26,000km/hr or 2,800-16,300mph) Impactor’s estimated diameter: 9-11km (~5.5-6.8mi) up to 81km (50mi) Impactor’s estimated mass: 0x1015-4.6×1017kg (2.2×1015-1.0×1018lb)The generally held view is that the impactor was an asteroid about 10km (6mi) in diameter, traveling at 16-32 km/sec (10-20 miles/sec, o...
(2.2×100x10kgOctober 30, 2019
How To Fly
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Shortly after I got married, I ended up babysitting my nephew who was then two and a half or so. It went okay, until I decided to show him a Dumbo cartoon.
He really, really, really liked the elephant flying. And when the elephant landed, he started screaming and crying “Elephant fly. Elephant fly.”
He was pretty disappointed when I couldn’t make the elephant fly.
What I was talking about: when your imagined future is suddenly yanked away, by changes in your industry, or illness, or a move is much like what...
October 29, 2019
The Hope of Immortality
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This is not a post about All Saints or what in Portugal gets called “Dia dos Fieis” — day of the faithful — when everyone, of any belief or none seemingly, makes a bee line for the cemetery and lights candles and cleans graves and talks about those who lie there, who left, long gone.
My first memories of it were of going to the children’s cemetery to put candles on the grave of the cousin, my age, whom I don’t remember at all, who died at 3 in what appears (according to databases) to have been a...
October 28, 2019
Fraying
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Have you ever been in a tug of war? One with a fraying rope? Probably not. I suspect most tugs of war in the US would be supervised contexts, either at school or in other circumstances.
But I’ve had tugs of war with rotting rope. It looks fine, and suddenly it parts. And both sides fall. Hard. Sometimes there are injuries.
I wonder how many people out there are oblivious to the fact that we’re in a cold civil war.
I’d known it for over a decade, back when I was reading at Classical Values and saw the situation fram...
October 27, 2019
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike and Book Promo
*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog. Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so. As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste. If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months. One book per au...
October 26, 2019
Comfort
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Fall was always my favorite season. I suspect partly because of poetic affectations of my adolescent self, partly because in Portugal, in the North, if you grow up in a house with neither heating nor air conditioning, it is the most comfortable season, (spring, too, but spring has more mosquitos,) and partly because my birthday was in fall. When a half dozen box of colored pencils is a luxury and you’re a little kid who likes to draw, your birthday assumes magical qualities. Also in Portuga...
October 25, 2019
Teaching Offense
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Sometimes I think 99% of the trouble with current society is the state of education, and the way we arrange to have people teach kids who have never experienced any real trouble or problem what to be offended at.
In historical terms, we live incredibly safe lives in the US. In historical terms, women live incredibly safe, incredibly equal lives.
And yet women here talk about the patriarchy, and are never done with how much they are being oppressed and kept down.
Dates are rape, bad sex is rape, being loo...
October 24, 2019
Incoming: The Chicxulub Impactor, Part 2 ― Evidence By Stephanie Osborn
http://www.stephanie-osborn.com
Why would anyone even think about an asteroid impact? Let alone killing the dinos?
Well, it turns out that there’s really quite a bit of evidence to indicate exactly that.
Remember that series of arcs that Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo-Zanoguera found in the gravity and magnetic analysis on and around the Yucatan Peninsula? Well, it’s definitely there, and it forms at least one complete and nigh-perfect circle. SO circular that it almost doe...
October 23, 2019
Beware Moving Cheese
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Somewhere, possibly here in the comments, someone referred to Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock as “we failed to die of future shock.”
I read the book when I was fourteen and last re-read it in my late twenties. We’ve all passed a lot of water since then. So I’m not going to claim I have a perfect recollection, but I don’t even remember his predicting social disintegration. Just that some people would get profoundly uncomfortable and maybe be unable to cope with societal change.
I also do know it’s popular,...
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