Can I Just Pretend This Is The Plot Of BOTFA?

Massachusetts Driving Gothic

You don’t know what street you’re on.  Every intersection, there’s a street sign, but it only tells you the name of the other street.  Perhaps your street has no name.  Perhaps it doesn’t exist.

The road has two lanes.  You thought it had three, but suddenly there are two.  Now three again.  Now one.

Construction workers close down a street.  They work for years.  No one says what they’re doing, but machinery moves back and forth and great clouds of smoke go up into the sky.  When they finally leave, the street looks as if they were never there.

Roads were named, back in the old times, by the city they went to.  A road that went to Boston was Boston Road.  But many roads lead to Boston.  So there are many Boston Roads.  They do not connect to each other.  They are all Boston Road.

You have forgotten what a parking space looks like.  You have forgotten what it means to park.  You simply drive forever, in circles.  It feels natural enough.

Blue lights flash in front of you, the street swarms with police; an accident?  A crime?  Some kind of disaster?  But at the heart of the blue-clad swarm there is nothing but a single man in a yellow vest, digging a small hole by the side of the road.

You have to be in the left lane to turn right, the sign says.  You have to be in the right lane to turn left.  The sign that explains this is hung directly over the intersection.

The pedestrians lurch out in front of your car, heedless of the danger, of their own soft bodies and the hardness of steel.  They may think your car would simply pass through them.  They may be right.

You are on I-93, at rush hour, going one mile an hour.  You have always been, and will always be, on I-93, at rush hour, going one mile an hour.  In the neighboring cars, babies are born, old people are dying, small tribes are forming.

You are on Storrow Drive.  Somehow, you do not die.

Plus one more...

Supernova remnants imaged with the Chandra X-Ray space telescope.

My 5-year-old insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl. The first time she made this claim, I protested. Part of the fun of reading to your kids, after all, is in sharing the stories you loved as a child. And in the story I knew, Bilbo was a boy. A boy hobbit. (Whatever that entails.) But my daughter was determined. She liked the story pretty well so far, but Bilbo was definitely a girl. So would I please start reading the book the right way? I hesitated. I imagined Tolkien spinning in his grave. I imagined mean letters from his testy estate. I imagined the story getting as lost in gender distinctions as dwarves in the Mirkwood. Then I thought: What the hell, it’s just a pronoun. My daughter wants Bilbo to be a girl, so a girl she will be. And you know what? The switch was easy. Bilbo, it turns out, makes a terrific heroine. She’s tough, resourceful, humble, funny, and uses her wits to make off with a spectacular piece of jewelry. Perhaps most importantly, she never makes an issue of her gender—and neither does anyone else.

Bilbo Baggins is a girl: Until children’s books catch up to our daughters, rewrite them. (via sashimigrade)

The Special Ingredients…of Earth!

With its blue skies, puffy white clouds, warm beaches and abundant life, planet Earth is a pretty special place. A quick survey of the solar system reveals nothing else like it. But how special is Earth, really?

One way to find out is to look for other worlds like ours elsewhere in the galaxy. Astronomers using our Kepler Space Telescope and other observatories have been doing just that! 

In recent years they’ve been finding other planets increasingly similar to Earth, but still none that appear as hospitable as our home world. For those researchers, the search goes on.

Another group of researchers have taken on an entirely different approach. Instead of looking for Earth-like planets, they’ve been looking for Earth-like ingredients. Consider the following:

Our planet is rich in elements such as carbon, oxygen, iron, magnesium, silicon and sulfur…the stuff of rocks, air, oceans and life. Are these elements widespread elsewhere in the universe? 

To find out, a team of astronomers led by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), with our participation, used Suzaku. This Japanese X-ray satellite was used to survey a cluster of galaxies located in the direction of the constellation Virgo.

The Virgo cluster is a massive swarm of more than 2,000 galaxies, many similar in appearance to our own Milky Way, located about 54 million light years away. The space between the member galaxies is filled with a diffuse gas, so hot that it glows in X-rays. Instruments onboard Suzaku were able to look at that gas and determine which elements it’s made of.

Reporting their findings in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, they reported findings of iron, magnesium, silicon and sulfur throughout the Virgo galaxy cluster. The elemental ratios are constant throughout the entire volume of the cluster, and roughly consistent with the composition of the sun and most of the stars in our own galaxy.

When the Universe was born in the Big Bang 13.8 billon years ago, elements heavier than carbon were rare. These elements are present today, mainly because of supernova explosions. 

Massive stars cook elements such as, carbon, oxygen, iron, magnesium, silicon and sulfur in their hot cores and then spew them far and wide when the stars explode.

According to the observations of Suzaku, the ingredients for making sun-like stars and Earth-like planets have been scattered far and wide by these explosions. Indeed, they appear to be widespread in the cosmos. The elements so important to life on Earth are available on average and in similar relative proportions throughout the bulk of the universe. In other words, the chemical requirements for life are common.

Earth is still special, but according to Suzaku, there might be other special places too. Suzaku recently completed its highly successful mission.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

A little penguin encouragement to support you when you need some motivation. :D <3

I'm going to pretend I didn't see this.  

Mother nature really has it out for MA in 2013.

There’s this one scene in the book, that didn’t make it into the movie and it’s a huge shame, because it’s a fanservice straight from the author:

After that they stopped pleading. Then they took off their clothes and bathed in the river, which was shallow and clear and stony at the ford. When they had dried in the sun, which was now strong and warm, they were refreshed, if still sore and a little hungry.

- The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien

So I tried to at least make a pic of it. I’m sorry, I suck at colours, composition, perspective and having more than two characters on a pic. u__u

And if I ever mention anything even vaguely resembling something along the lines of “I want to make a huge, multi-character and colourful pic with full background!”, feel free to kick me in the head.

Now you've guaranteed that I DO want to read your Big Bang.  Like NOW.  Off to go reread An Ideal Grace in the meantime....

So pretty much

If you hated An Ideal Grace, you probably don’t want to read my Big Bang.