Meteor over Chelyabinsk!

Fantastic and spooky stuff....check out the Bad Astronomy entry on it, with numerous video feeds of the meteor which passed over the Russian city of Chalyabinsk. Injuries from the effects of the sonic boom, which set off car alarms and rocked the city, causing glass damage and possibly worse. And it's not even related to the 2012 DA14 asteroid....anyway, Bad astronomy has a good selection of videos, as does google (not many I can find set for imbedding, however).

Mercury Mystery Rising

The story is here, and it's rather interesting; one might expect an easy explanation of liquid cores and incredible solar tidal effects, but in fact it's not so cut and dry.

I, however, have two words to offer:

It's Hatching...

Random Musings

Some random thoughts for today:

Real Steel is out, and I have learned an important thing (about myself). Specifically, that dressing up a boxing movie with giant robots and (presumably) a vague sci-fi gimmick is still not enough to make me want to see a boxing movie.

Someone is taking a crack at solving the Riemann hypothesis, and is attempting to make a bit of money on it in the process. On the one hand it seems a bit...crass?.....but on the other hand, its nice to live in an era where even mathematicians can turn something as obscure as this into a money-making media circus. Thank goodness for the internet!

It turns out that old Hubble data is proving useful in locating exoplanets. The Bad Astronomer has a good writeup on it here.

Check out this unveiling of the Pathfinder Starter Box. I have to say, this looks very much like the kind of decent entry product to the hobby that should have been on the shelves a decade ago. I don't really understand why Wizards of the Coast has such a problem with making decent starter boxes. I felt the Red Box for Essentials was basically a paid tutorial, but it lacked all the essential features necessary to a decent introductory set, as have all the prior intro sets WotC has produced for the last eleven years. Specifically, a good introductory RPG should offer choices, not limits (such as providing decent but basic character creation rules, that let the players make their own characters instead of a preset selection or no selection at all), enough content that the game provides ample opportunity to be enjoyed...for months or longer....on its own, suggesting to the purchaser (or purchaser's parents) that further investment in the big rulebooks will payoff, and all the material needed to enjoy the game for many months all right there, in the box. I think this new Pathfinder set has all that and more.



Tomorrow! Part one of a four part presentation of one of the oldest dungeon delves in my campaign world....a reimagining of the Caves of Chaos I did back in the mid 80's, and recently reconstituted for a short campaign last year using 4th edition.

Mercury's curious Blue Hollows

Check out the color-enhanced pictures here at National Geographic. High-res snapshots coming back from MESSENGER in orbit around Mercury are changing perceptions on what Mercury looks like, and giving consideration to what sort of active geological forces are at work on the First Planet.

Superluminal Neutrinos

I have been away for a bit, thanks to a busy work schedule and the need to prepare for the imminent B-Day arrival of Marcus Torbin in early November (I'm guessing November 9th, the doctor thinks November 17th, and Jody's hoping for October 31st because...well...we could have a proper Witching Hour Baby!) but I have lots of stuff I want to post, so maybe I'll take some time to schedule some more posts this weekend.

Some interesting news has prompted me to get posting again. This article was posted over on Slash Dot, along with the accompanying link to the actual experiment here. The short version: after approximately 16,000 tests, the scientists broadcasting particles from the particle accelerator at CERN to Gran Sasso Labs in Italy approximately 732 km away have found that there is a 60 nanosecond discrepancy between the arrival of detected neutrinos and light broadcast at the same instant. The neutrinos have been consistently arriving ahead of the light, which is either suggesting an undiscovered anomaly with the test itself (that has not been accounted for or discovered in the course of the 16,000 tests) or...much, much bigger, the neutrinos are gaining marginally faster superluminal speeds. Reading about reactions and speculation to this is proving fascinating. If there really is something here, it could cause an unbelievable upheaval of the Standard Model. If there isn't, then it could be a valuable lesson in how proper science is vetted and analyzed (as by all accounts the researchers behind this test are being very careful not to make any extraordinary claims).

Worth noting in the course of sifting through all this information is that this phenomenon has been detected (albeit regarded as indicative of a flaw in the testing process) at Fermilabs before. This article talks about it here.

Finally, for fun, one of the links I found is from the Anderson Institute, talking about what superlimunal travel would mean in terms of our current understanding of physics.

And now for something completely different!

Because I haven't provided you with enough cat pictures this year, I offer up Ayel Cat, our youngest feline in the house, and the most photogenic, sitting upon his Throne of Power:

Scale Model Page of the Solar System

I just had to share this scale model of the solar system I stumbled across while perusing Reddit. It's a great way to demonstrate in visually truncated form just what kinds of distances we're looking at on an astronomical scale...