Stupidfool.org

I'm also sad about the loss of my friend, Pluto.

From Geekologie, via .tiff.

Omega

The deal with fish oil, I found out, is that a considerable portion of it comes from a creature upon which the entire Atlantic coastal ecosystem relies, a big-headed, smelly, foot-long member of the herring family called menhaden, which a recent book identifies in its title as “The Most Important Fish in the Sea.”

via www.nytimes.com

I wish this Times article would've ended here, because I like thinking about this proud & helpful fish.

But instead, no. Why is the ocean always so depressing?

Ares I-X

The Big Picture collects some lovely photos of the recent Ares I-X launch, including this one:

Also: there's a NASA Railroad! Neat! I wish this were a thing, instead of, you know, that Thomas the train.

I'm putting on my bulletproof vest.

Oh, this is wonderful: some physicists have suggested that the Large Hadron Collider was broken intentionally by a subatomic particle sent back from the future. Or... something.

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Robots

Giant robot dinosaurs? Does that really seem like a good idea?

Kepler

Tonight, I've been keeping an eye on the launch of the Kepler satellite, which is heading out in search of Earth-like planets. (Well, to be fair--I'm mostly just looking for pretty pictures, like the one below.)

Extending your life

Today, I read this Michael Kinsley piece in a recent New Yorker, the premise of which being that longevity is essentially the last competition that you'll ever have, and that after arriving at sixty years old, it's totally up for grabs whether you'll die tomorrow or live until ninety. Fun!

Oh, and, I certainly wasn't aware of the state of surgery/repair w/r/t Parkinson's:

[The symptoms] got even milder after I had an operation, a couple of years ago, to implant wires in my brain and two pacemaker-type batteries in my chest ... During the operation, your head is screwed into a metal frame and the frame is screwed into the operating table. My surgery lasted nine hours, and for most of it I had to be awake, so that the doctors could test the connection, like asking somebody to go upstairs and see if the light in the bedroom comes back on while you fiddle with the circuit-breaker box in the basement.

It's the future! And it's pretty fascinating.