Daily science stuff

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Solar eclipse, from space!

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

The naked beauty of 6 spiral galaxies

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Earth-sized planets might be a dime a dozen

[enterprikayak]

Cool Kevin! I just read some of the comments for that article (about the earth sized planets) and my favourite comment was this one:

As my grandmother always said, "It's not size that matters, it's whether or not you spiral towards your immense ball of fire because of interactions with the gas in the disk."

And this is awesome:

http://www.globaltvbc.com/Lego+city+wil ... story.html

Those engineers were obviously having waaay too much fun here. But a neat idea, especially to get people to go and see it. The usual "town planning display" is pretty lame, at least where we live.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Calculate your own asteroid impact:

Impact Earth

[enterprikayak]

creepy

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Beer may have lubricated the rise of civilization

[Kotik]

Beer may have lubricated the rise of civilization

Finally I have a good excuse for guzzling a beer or twelve after coming home from work. You's ma hero man

[Silverbullet]

Kotik "im himmel der gibts kein Beer" or something like that. In my younger days I could have bathed in Beer. I loved it. Germany has so many great Beers. One of the best I ever had was in a small town which had its own brewery. Great draft Beer. My all time favorite was Becks. bottle or draft. Also Flensburger Pilsner. I remember seeing grown men cry when the Flensburger brewery burned down.

[Kotik]

Kotik "im himmel der gibts kein Beer" or something like that. In my younger days I could have bathed in Beer. I loved it. Germany has so many great Beers. One of the best I ever had was in a small town which had its own brewery. Great draft Beer. My all time favorite was Becks. bottle or draft. Also Flensburger Pilsner. I remember seeing grown men cry when the Flensburger brewery burned down.

Well, "Flens" - as the Flensburger Pilsner is referred to, is a legend among beer drinkers. One part of the fascination is the swing stopper bottle cap, which you can open with only one thumb and emits that "PHUMP" sound, the other one is that the brewery made the legendary "Bölkstoff" ("burp stuff") beer. The best beer actually is made by the Czech, like Staropramen or Pilžner Urquell - the latter was the first lager as we know it know and is the origin for the Pilsner moniker.

[Silverbullet]

Kotik, I loved Pilsner Urquel in Draft. I understand that the Czechs still use the original caves to age the Beer in.

Never saw Flensburger in the swing caps. Only beer I have ever seen the swing caps on was Grolsch in Holland.

The Flensburger Brewery I am talking about was located near the Danish border in Flensburg.

Prosit

[justTripn]

Beer may have lubricated the rise of civilization

I like this. It is plausible. It helps explain a number of paradoxes, one being that it turns out that farming is a real drag compared to hunting/gathering. Turns out, it takes ALOT more work (in terms of time), it's boring, and you end up with something that isn't as good (grain) compared to meat and fruit, so why would the first farmers switch to farming? This beer theory also fits with another empirical surprise in economics. One would think that very poor people would spend all their money on cheep food items if they are not getting enough calories. In fact people living on less than a dollar a day, from all around the world, spend a surprisingly large percentage of their income (10 percent) on festivals. http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.21.1.141 (pgs 145-147) They go hungry on a daily basis, but they celebrate the festivals with a feast. I believe it is part of human nature that we need to throw a party.

I also found an article recently that said that surprisingly, heavy drinkers live longer than tea totalers, even after controlling for things like income. Moderate drinkers live the longest. Heavy drinkers were also happier than tea totalers. The researchers were completely at a lost to explain the results except to guess that alchohol is a social lubricant and so maybe heavy drinkers tend to have alot of friends, which somehow helps them live longer. (I should find references for all this).

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

^ Interesting, jT, and it does sound plausible to me too. And I think that if you're poor and life in general is hard, it's actually healthy to try and have fun sometimes. Hence the festivals and things like that. Always being miserable won't help you.

*****

Pluto is once again the solar system's biggest dwarf planet

[Enerdhil]

Well, for any communications engineer, it appears the lobes of a classical dipole-antenna... But it would be extremely small, due to the wavelength of the gamma's... Maybe will give some support to fiction subspace-radio (although gamma's are still limited by the velocity of light).

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/new-structure.html

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Triceratops 'Never Existed'