Yet Another Place for Luca to Not Post Things

I have a blog or two. I have Twitter. I have Buzz and whichever other microblogging sites still exist. The media count exceeds the content.

[inkhat]

Here’s my theory. The Harry Potter trio are actually representations of the other houses. Hermione is Ravenclaw. Ron is Hufflepuff. Harry is Slytheryn. They’re all in Gryffindor because they asked. In fact, everyone in that house could have been in another house if they hadn’t asked to be in Gryffindor. You have be ask to be in Gryffindor because their most defining feature is bravery and anyone can choose to be brave.

[lkbm]

Alternative theory: Ron abandons his friends every damn book and blows-off his homework all the time, and thus is the least Hufflepuffy of the lot. You want loyal and hard-working, look to Hermione.

[echoboots]

Please do me a favor and reblog or like this post if you are a cis person who feels 100% okay about sharing restrooms, changing rooms, and other public spaces with folks who are trans.

(Sometimes I don’t know how to help the folks in my life who are trans and have to put up with bigoted shit like this all the time, but I thought seeing lots of notes on this post might help at least a tiny bit.)

[wasbella102]

[pyrrhiccomedy]

Astronomers have discovered the largest known structure in the universe, a clump of active galactic cores that stretch 4 billion light-years from end to end. The structure is a light quasar group (LQG), a collection of extremely luminous Galactic Nulcei powered by supermassive central black holes.

So that’s cool and everything, but maybe some of you would be interested to know why this is a significant find? Beyond just its record-setting bigness.

Since Einstein, physicists have accepted something called the Cosmological Principle, which states that the universe looks the same everywhere if you view it on a large enough scale. You might find some weird shit over here, and some other freaky shit over there, but if you pull back the camera far enough, you’ll find that same weird and/or freaky shit cropping up over and over again in a fairly regular distribution. This is because the universe is (probably) infinite in size and (we are pretty darn sure) has, and has always had, the same forces acting on it everywhere.

So why is this new LQG so radical? (It stands for ‘Large Quasar Group,’ btw, not ‘Light Quasar Group.’)

Well, let’s try to comprehend the scale we’re dealing with. A ‘megaparsec,’ written Mpc, is about 3.2 million light years long. The Milky Way is about 0.03 Mpc across (or 100,000 light years). The distance between our galaxy and Andromeda, our closest galactic neighbor, is 0.75 Mpc, or 2.5 million light years. LQGs are usually about 200 Mpc across. Assuming a logarithmic distribution of weird shit outliers (if you don’t know how logarithmic distribution curves work, don’t worry about it), cosmologists predicted that nothing in the universe should be more than 370 Mpc across.

This new LQG is 1200 Mpc long. That’s four billion light years. Four BILLION LIGHT YEARS. Just to travel from one side to the other of this one thing. I mean for fuck’s sake, the universe is only about 14 billion years old! How many of these things could there be? 

Right now it looks like the Cosmological Principle might be out the window, unless physicists can find some way to make the existence of this new LQG work with the math (and boy, are they trying). And that’s totally baffling. It would mean—well, we don’t have any idea what it would mean. That the universe isn’t essentially uniform? That some ‘special’ physics apply/applied in some places but not in others? That Something Happened that is totally outside our current ability to understand or quantify stuff happening?

By the way, no one lives there. The radiation from so many quasars would sterilize rock.

Sources: 1 2 3

[lkbm]

Okay, so I think what everyone here is talking about is the "Huge-LQG" that was discovered last year. A paper published two weeks ago details the discovered one some 2.5 times the size: http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.1104

[wasbella102]

[pyrrhiccomedy]

Astronomers have discovered the largest known structure in the universe, a clump of active galactic cores that stretch 4 billion light-years from end to end. The structure is a light quasar group (LQG), a collection of extremely luminous Galactic Nulcei powered by supermassive central black holes.

So that’s cool and everything, but maybe some of you would be interested to know why this is a significant find? Beyond just its record-setting bigness.

Since Einstein, physicists have accepted something called the Cosmological Principle, which states that the universe looks the same everywhere if you view it on a large enough scale. You might find some weird shit over here, and some other freaky shit over there, but if you pull back the camera far enough, you’ll find that same weird and/or freaky shit cropping up over and over again in a fairly regular distribution. This is because the universe is (probably) infinite in size and (we are pretty darn sure) has, and has always had, the same forces acting on it everywhere.

So why is this new LQG so radical? (It stands for ‘Large Quasar Group,’ btw, not ‘Light Quasar Group.’)

Well, let’s try to comprehend the scale we’re dealing with. A ‘megaparsec,’ written Mpc, is about 3.2 million light years long. The Milky Way is about 0.03 Mpc across (or 100,000 light years). The distance between our galaxy and Andromeda, our closest galactic neighbor, is 0.75 Mpc, or 2.5 million light years. LQGs are usually about 200 Mpc across. Assuming a logarithmic distribution of weird shit outliers (if you don’t know how logarithmic distribution curves work, don’t worry about it), cosmologists predicted that nothing in the universe should be more than 370 Mpc across.

This new LQG is 1200 Mpc long. That’s four billion light years. Four BILLION LIGHT YEARS. Just to travel from one side to the other of this one thing. I mean for fuck’s sake, the universe is only about 14 billion years old! How many of these things could there be? 

Right now it looks like the Cosmological Principle might be out the window, unless physicists can find some way to make the existence of this new LQG work with the math (and boy, are they trying). And that’s totally baffling. It would mean—well, we don’t have any idea what it would mean. That the universe isn’t essentially uniform? That some ‘special’ physics apply/applied in some places but not in others? That Something Happened that is totally outside our current ability to understand or quantify stuff happening?

By the way, no one lives there. The radiation from so many quasars would sterilize rock.

Sources: 1 2 3

[lkbm]

Okay, so I think what everyone here is talking about is the "Huge-LQG" that was discovered last year. A paper published two weeks ago details the discovered one some 2.5 times the size: http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.1104

[finalellipsis-deactivated201807]

[betterbooktitles]

Timely.

[lkbm]

Mr. Snicket had nothing on Mr. Martin.

[thatironstring]

IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW.

And then I realized, OH MY GOD, THEY ARE PANTOMIMING THEIR INDIVIDUAL EVENTS.

SAILING (ROWING A BOAT?!) edit: NO WAIT, THE BOYS ARE THE WIND IN HER SAILS.

MARATHON

JUDO

HOLY SHIT THESE GUYS ARE BRILLIANT SAKJHLJKFSHSF LOOOOVE.

[darkjez-blog]

I’d like to go out for drinks with the independent athletes.

[thedayilikedthebears]

I want to be friends with them.

[edwardspoonhands]

So last night I posted this picture on Twitter and there was some significant interest. To be clear, it’s just a mockup, not something that exists. 

I have, several times in my life, found people’s phones and then called or texted people in their contacts to get in touch with the person who owns the phone. There’s nothing more horrible than losing a phone. It’s expensive, inconvenient, and potentially dangerous (if you don’t have a lock on it, passwords are easy to find.)

But if you do have a lock on it, the occasional good Samaritan will be stumped for ways to get the phone back to you. 

I’d much rather there just be a feature that you can turn on to allow someone who found your phone to get in touch with you immediately. Strictly optional, of course, but you can set it up to allow the nice person to send you an email, text your mom, call your house…whatever. 

I once knocked on a stranger’s door to let them know that their headlights were on. The car was in the driveway, headlights blaring into the street. I knocked, and they came to the door, but they were too scared to open it because we now live in a world where everyone is seen immediately as a villain. I imagine that person woke up to a dead battery the next morning, but I did what I could.

That was that person’s choice. But as a person with Toby Turner’s phone number in my phone, I need to have a passcode for his privacy, not to mention mine. But I also don’t want to eliminate the possibility that, if I lose my phone, the person who finds it will, in fact, be a good person and spend a little bit of time reaching out to me to save me hours of headache and hundreds of dollars. 

I believe people are good, and I think this little piece of screen real estate conveys that faith. And maybe if someone finds a phone and sees that, yes, in fact, kindness is expected of them, kindness is what we’ll get.

Please reblog and RT so that developers and phone companies can implement the idea if they agree that it’s a good one.

[lkbm]

There might be things more horrible than losing your phone, but this is still a good idea.

[most-awkward-moments]

Get your crazy cat lady starter kit here. 

[lkbm]

The way ReCAPTCHA works is they take two scanned words, one of which has been properly identified, and one of which hasn't, and they ask you to enter both of them. Obviously, they can only check your answer for the one they know, so 'uertion math_formula_I-can't_unerstand', 'weird_Asian_characters Booption', 'bar_chart dstiv', and 'problem? theresnothingthereomgfsqtqteuf' would work in each of these cases.

...As you'd know if you tried entering the CAPTCHA rather than just demanding a new one each time it looks hard.

[lyingrock]

[lkbm]

Get your crazy cat lady starter kit here. 

If you've ever had to sort dates, you should know that "year", "month", and "day" are not atoms. They are strings of digits of decreasing significance:

Europe: 2 0 - 0 5 - 1 9 8 2

Japan: 1 9 8 2 - 0 5 - 2 0

America: 0 5 - 2 0 - 1 9 8 2

Let's be clear: only one of these makes any sense, which is why it's been made the ISO standard. Well done, Japan.

[lkbm]

On Spoilers

So, The Hunger Games (film) came out a few days ago, and people are getting upset about spoilers being posted.

I'm generally very unconcerned about spoilers, so maybe I'm missing stuff, but...were people this was when Harry Potter films came out? This lovely lady wrote an entire novel of spoilers some time ago--long enough ago that we're all discussing spoilerific details of it in the open, because there's generally accepted to be a statute of limitations on spoilers. (The movie does differ in some important ways, but I don't know that it differs in any SPOILABLE ways.)

Maybe there shouldn't be a limit on how long we have to respect spoilability. New people are being born and learning to read (or watch films) so spoilers still effect them. Will (has?) Harry Potter turned into a Romeo and Juliet, where everyone knows they both die years before ever reading the play? Will the comic pages happily publish that Harry was his horcruz? Am I supposed to tag this post with "Harry Potter spoilers", "Citizen Kane spoilers", "Star Wars spoilers", and "Romeo and Juliet spoilers"?

Of course, even if we do identify and segregate spoilers, some things won't be the same. You won't grow up discovering who the Half-Blood Prince was the same time as everyone else, and you probably won't read the child-oriented Philosopher's Stone ten years before you read the more mature Hallows. But things that can be spoiled today can be spoiled in a hundred years.

[chloemorets-blog]

um

are you seeing what i’m seeing or

[lethallovers]

For the implied to be naked part, I remember in an interview Leven said that her an Alex were told to spice up the sexual chemistry. GUYS.

Or it could just be Katniss washing up in a stream. IDEK.

[lkbm]

You're ignoring the worst part: two teenagers HOLD HANDS! For god's sake, CHILDREN are going to be watching this FILTH! NONMATURE MINDS WILL BE CORRUPTED!

[lkbm]

Post-Happy Dance high-five.

[lkbm]

John Green:

So, Hank, as a project, I propose that you and I over the next week give several gifts to Kiva.org--maybe the Nerdfighters will join us.

Maybe, John. Maybe over 15 000 Nerdfighters will join you, especially when it's really free.

[nrdc]

Good News for Consumers: Fuel Economy on the Rise

New cars and trucks are getting better fuel economy and saving consumers money at the pump. Recent reports are showing an on-going upward trend, one which is expected to accelerate as new standards ramp up.

According to researcher Michael Sivak and his colleagues at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, U.S. automobile sales in February hit their highest mark—23.7 mpg—since they started collecting in October 2007.

Read more.

[lkbm]

Average mpg is up to 23.7 mpg? Um....my brother drives a twenty-year-old standard Tercel and gets around 40 mpg. My dad drives a ~5yo standard Corolla and gets close to 40 mpg. My mom drives a ~3yo Prius and probably gets close to 40mpg. (I bike and take the bus, so my marginal fuel consumption approaches zero.)

Seems like average mpg in 2012 should be able to beat twenty-year-old cars, maybe? No?

It has done way the hell up, though. Nice. But let's try to do reasonably well, not just less terribly.

[wesleh]

[lkbm]

Here you go my children, learn the actual facts before you go around blindly listening to whatever someone says, and acting on it. -- Wesley Ssushicatt

From the video: "And [the LRA] haven't struck again in six years. ...what's going on in Syria is way more extreme than what's going on, or what has went on, excuse me, when Kony was striking."

From Human Rights Watch, probably the most credible entity with regard to human rights issues around the word:

Between December 14 and 17, 2009, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan rebel group, carried out a horrific attack in the Makombo area of Haut Uele district in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, near the border with Sudan. In a well-planned operation, the LRA killed more than 321 civilians and abducted more than 250 others, including at least 80 children. The vast majority of those killed were adult men who were first tied up before LRA combatants hacked them to death with machetes or crushed their skulls with axes or heavy wooden sticks. Family members and local authorities later found battered bodies tied to trees; other bodies were found in the forest or brush land all along the 105-kilometer round journey made by the LRA group during the operation.

And 2010 if you want something more recent.

So, yes, the LRA isn't going so strong in Uganda right now, and yes we shouldn't be propping up Uganda's asshole government, and shouldn't be giving money to Invisible Children, but to claim that, because the LRA is largely out of Uganda, they must no longer doing anything bad is dangerously false. While the US is sending a lot of help to the evil Ugandan government (partly because they fight evil extremists in Somalia), the the military advisers Obama sent over to fight the LRA are largely intended to operate in South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with approval of those nations.

Syria and Uganda are not the only two countries in the world.

If you're getting your news from the TV, you're doing it as wrong as if you're getting it from random YouTube videos.

Side notes: There is no credible evidence that Kony is dead, and the KONY 2012 video does eventually mention that the war is not in Uganda.

And because making fun of Rush is in vogue right now:

"Obama Invades Uganda, Targets Christians." -- Everybody's favorite political commentator

Sometimes you just gotta beat up a few Christians. Isn't that why we elected a Muslim in the first place? ;-)

[russian-tribute]

» Hunger Games girls for Seventeen Magazine

[lkbm]

I keep seeing Jacqueline Emerson(?) and thinking it's Kayley Hyde. Instead of Foxface, I'ma call her Owlface, because it amuses me.

[cumb3rbatched-deactivated201406]

[lolripbyebye]

seriously.

[lkbm]

I always investigate. Someone needs to deal with the scary noises, and as a male in my twenties, I necessarily consider myself invincible and therefore the best choice.

People occasionally knock on my door in the middle of the night. My solution is to go out and talk to them. Sometimes they're looking for some random guy. Sometimes they want a light. Sometimes they want a hug. So far, none has wanted to murder me in the night. So that's nice.