23 September 2002

If you'd like to hear the earthquake we had last night, people who have a working soundcard can go here. Not me, then. 10:04:22 PM    comment()

Extreme Programming / Extreme Mowing. Neat article.  Recommended.  From The Perl Review.[The FuzzyBlog!] 9:05:47 PM    comment()

If you were thrown into the vacuum of space with no space suit, would you explode? [The Straight Dope] For more on this see New Scientist, and also quotes from a NASA document. And here, too. Small point: One of the contributors to the New Scientist page says that radiation of heat is not really a problem as "In a vacuum, there is nothing to radiate our heat into." This is not the case. He would be correct if he said that "there is nothing to conduct or convect heat away from the body". There certainly is something to radiate heat into - it's called the Universe. The rate that heat would be radiated would probably be small, though, as the rate of radiative heat loss is not affected by temperature differences, just the absolute temperature of the radiating body. It gets complicated by the fact that we are talking about a  multidirectional flow of radiated heat to and from the body (there could be objects nearby also radiating heat). These effects would be trivial compared with the pressure effects, so this doesn't really affect the answer unless the person is very close to a star or something similar. 8:22:08 AM    comment()

Men know this. They know in their bones that before you can get a woman to do anything sexy with you, that you have to attract and hold her attention. Our near relatives the great apes handle this little problem by throwing handfuls of vegetation up in the air like confetti, and hooting. Humans in their own way do something very similar: they become rock stars. [Laura Goodwin] 7:50:02 AM    comment()

We had an earthquake! Well, OK, more of an earth tremor. I slept right through it. Of all the nights to get to bed at a reasonable time... 7:31:52 AM    comment()