Category: Out there

I’ve always been fascinated by the way branching systems reveal similar structures and layouts throughout the universe. An x-ray of your lungs looks much like a tree and its roots, hanging upside down. A systems of bifurcating creeks, streams, and rivers looks a lot like a social network. I’ve heard the term “chreodic theory” applied to the study of bifurcating systems, though Wikipedia doesn’t have much on the topic, and points out that the study is more descriptive than predictive – interesting but not terribly useful. This image above shows a brain cell on the left, a few micrometers wide. On the right, a simulated view of how the universe grew and evolved. Full-size view.

As if bottled water for humans wasn’t already one of the most successful hoaxes in the history of capitalism, there’s now apparently a cottage industry in selling bottled water for dogs (and cats).

Mark Morford, Dog Water, Tastes Like Chicken:

Yes, it is meat-scented water. Even your dog is right now going, WTF? Like Britney Spears to new moms, like Dubya to presidential integrity, like Hot Pockets to actual food, they make all sensible dog lovers look bad. It’s also just sort of embarrassingly unnecessary. As if quenching his sheer dumb animal thirst at the garden hose wasn’t enough to make your dog blissfully happy. As if a world teeming with roughly 1 billion unclassifiable odors wasn’t already a wondrous canine olfactory buffet. Did you know that dogs have over 200 million scent cells? And that humans have a mere 5 million? The last thing dogs need is for their water to smell like synthetic cow. I’m just guessing.

It’s big. It’s fluffy. And it’s circling its sun once every 4.5 earth days.

“The largest planet ever found orbiting another star is so puffy it would float on water, astronomers said Thursday.”

As Roger suggests, HAT-P-1 is probably where Claes Oldenburg came from. I’m thinking it might be where The Orb spends its winters.

Since we apparently have decided not to dump nuclear waste into volcanoes, we’re busy stuffing it into the earth. Thousands of tons of radioactive sludge, equipment, tools, and chemicals we just don’t know what else to do with are being interred in permanent burial sites such as the one in the New Mexico desert. The stuff may be safe for now, but some of this stuff has a half-life of 10,000 years. How do we ensure that future generations will know the area is dangerous? Even if all intelligent life is wiped out and humanity gets rebooted, so we can’t assume any kind of evolved linguistic comprehension? Wired:

The waste site will be surrounded by a four-mile outer fence of dozens of 25-foot, 20-ton granite markers engraved with multi-lingual and pictographic warnings. Inside that perimeter will be a massive earthen berm 33 feet high, forming a rectangle matching the footprint of the underground site. The berm will be implanted with magnets and radar reflectors to make it obvious that it’s not a natural formation. A structure in the center of the space and two subterranean rooms will hold detailed information on the facility, and hundreds of super-hard disks printed with pictographic danger signs will be scattered throughout its 120 acres.