Sequiturs

This story is quite ridiculous, from a physical point of view, but it’s still most entertaining.

Why impale yourself on either horn when you can just kiss the ram on the forehead and be done with it?

Fill in the blank: The universe is crazier than _____.

When answering, bear this and this in mind.

There’s nothing quite like sunset before a hurricane. Cirrus laden skies bronze, and 20kt gusts make the trees bow beneath them.

I’ll likely be out of touch for the next couple of days, since power and phone service will be interrupted by Ike. There’s nothing to worry about though, with plenty of food and water stored away, and far enough from the coast to escape the storm surge and any wind damage. I’m actually kinda looking forward to a nice overnight gale, followed by cooking fried rice over a gas stove. See you next week.

UPDATE: What’s as cool as sunset before a hurricane? Tossing a glowing frisbee after sunset before a hurricane.

The National Hurricane Center issued its first advisory on tropical depression seven at 11am EDT this morning. What is interesting is that this depression–with 30 KT maximum winds–already has an eye feature (I’ve saved the image, but haven’t been able to upload it to the server for some reason, so the image you’ll see later today isn’t the same one I’m looking at now). Granted, IR imagery shows the eye isn’t clear at all levels, isn’t centered in the deep convection, and isn’t quite vertically stacked. Still, given its satellite presentation, I’d be very shocked if this new depression doesn’t already have tropical storm force winds. I think it is quite likely to become a hurricane in the next day.

The NHC forecasters are as aware of this as I am, of course, they’re just following the doctrine of preserving continuity with earlier forecasts. Going directly from an area of disturbed weather to a strong tropical storm would be a jarring transition, and the forecaster in charge would be sticking his neck out a bit. I think this situation shows the weakness of the continuity doctrine, though, especially when forecasting dangerous weather conditions. Shipping interests and citizens of the Caribbean would be better served by an accurate forecast than a smoothly changing one. Weather conditions sometimes change suddenly, and we should be prepared to adjust diagnoses and forecasts suddenly in response.

Nothing particular to say about this excerpt that I find it awesome. Here is how Neil Stephenson introduces a main character in his novel Cryptonomicon.

Let’s set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environment with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, Godfrey Waterhouse IV was born in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife of a Congregational preacher named Bunyon Waterhouse. Like every other creature on the face of the Earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo–which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead. As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines went, these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet.

It seems like every other paragraph of the novel starts with something completely out of the blue like this. I think I’ve found another favorite author.

Sci-fi author Stephen Brust has penned a Firefly-based novel entitled My Own Kind of Freedom. You can download it for free at the link I’ve so thoughtfully provided. It’s pretty good; he gets inside of the characters’ heads, and a lot of the lines sound like they could’ve come straight out of the show. If you like Firefly (and you should!), it’s probably worth a read.

UPDATE: By the way, for anyone whose never seen the show, you can find some episodes here. “Serenity (Revised)” is a fair place to start. “Objects in Space” is my favorite episode, but you need some background to understand it. The whole season can be purchased, of course, from Amazon.

Next time your Windows machine crashes, this should give you Dixie to whistle.

Via GeekPress.

One of the funniest things I’ve found online is Chris Onsted’s comic “Achewood.” The latest strip is fairly typical, and a great introduction.

EDIT: I made a new post with the strip I meant to link to. This link points to comic with less comic genius, in my opinion.

The sight of Venus and Jupiter, the two brightest objects besides the Moon in the night sky, within just a couple of degrees of one another, is a spectacle not to miss. The pair will be visible anytime during the last couple of hours before sunrise for the next several days.