The winter in Cleveland has been relatively mild so far, and the last two weeks in particular saw warm temperatures and no snow at all. The forecasts seemed to indicate that this would continue but just yesterday the forecast changed suddenly because of the emergence of a storm in the northeast and we had a major snowstorm last night that dumped a large amount of snow on the ground as we slept.
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Last October, I had a post that looked at the units known as the Planck length, Planck time, and Planck mass and discussed the question of whether these were just a universal set of standards that replaced the traditional ones of meter, second, and kilogram or foot, second, and pound, or whether they had a more fundamental significance. I pointed to a paper that suggested that the Planck length might represent a fundamental limit to the continuity of space, that at that level space ceased to be continuously divisible and became like a foam.
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That was my first thought when I saw this BBC news headline today: “Vultures avoid Portugal because of carrion ban”.
I really am thinking too much about puns these days.
It is bad enough to have Donald Trump wallowing in military grandiosity, talking about his ‘big button’ and military parades, now Russian president Vladimir Putin is making grandiose claims about having an ‘invincible nuclear weapon’.
Mr Putin made the claims as he laid out his key policies for a fourth presidential term, ahead of an election he is expected to win in 17 days’ time.
The weapons he boasted of included a cruise missile that he said could “reach anywhere in the world”.
He said of the West: “They need to take account of a new reality and understand … [this]… is not a bluff.”
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The Shaolin order of monks in China is noted for its rigorous training that enables them to perform quite incredible feats of strength and endurance. They are also known for being fierce kung fu warriors, strange for Buddhist monks who are supposed to be pacifist. So how did that happen? Kallie Szczepanski provides a brief summary of the turbulent 1,500 year old history of the order that mixes legend with facts.
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Following the initial Big Bang, the universe was at incredibly high temperatures but then underwent a period of rapid expansion and cooling and largely became a cold gas of hydrogen. The universe could be considered to be dark at this time since there was no source of light. But at some point, matter started to clump together under the force of gravity and form embryonic stars and the hydrogen atoms started to fuse into helium, releasing energy, some of it in the form of visible light. This moment is referred to as the ‘cosmic dawn’ of the universe.
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Since some readers here seem to share my appreciation for puns that require elaborate set-ups, here is one of my favorite pun strips from Pearls Before Swine that appeared back in 2009.
I wrote before about how to become more aware that you are about to say something obnoxious so that you can avoid doing so. But if you happen to be the kind of person who cannot help himself, reader flex sent me this clip from a Canadian sketch comedy show with comedian Rick Mercer about an alert system that warns people around you that you are going to give them your opinion even if it is not wanted.
One of the things that always bugs me is the waste of food. This is especially the case with grocery stores that throw out tons of food because they have reached or are approaching the ‘sell by’ or vague ‘best used by’ dates stamped on them, even though the items may be perfectly usable. So I was interested to hear on last Saturday’s episode of All Things Considered a story about how France has passed a law that requires grocery stores to donate such items to food banks or face fines.
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We all know that so-called ‘reality shows’ are anything but, that they are as spontaneous as professional wrestling. But we never get to go behind the scenes to see what actually goes on because all the contestants are required to sign extremely restrictive and punitive non-disclosure agreements. Jessie Glenn, however, can write of her experience of being a contestant on the reality cooking show Master Chef with Gordon Ramsay because she did not send back the signed contract as she was expected to before being signed on, but the producers of the show seemed to have not noticed its absence. So she spills the beans and it is pretty ugly.
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