Deep Fried Puppies

Bad Day

If anyone is interested, this is basically what’s going on with the OPERA project, the people who got data that may imply FLT neutrinos. Notice how cagily I put that?

There is a great furor over matters, and no consensus has been reached. The purpose of OPERA was never to measure neutrino speed, but rather a transition of one set of neutrinos to another. Of the 16k+ data points they’ve obtained, 1 of those was the transition they were looking for. That’s being overwhelmed by the importance of this FLT thing. Within the next few weeks, they’re going to redo the experiment with a specific eye towards neutrino speeds. This should be complete before the end of the month. The holy grail of science is repeat-ability, and this should do much to confirm or deny the odd results.

Fermilab, outside Chicago, is trying to get in on the action. I wish them the best of luck. T2K is trying to get in on the excitement as well. They’re located in Japan.

If further experiment gets more traditional results, ie speeds not in excess of c, this will likely be relegated to the physics ghetto. There just isn’t enough money to run down all these anomalies. If there is some confirmation and some denial, this is going to be argued about in great detail. Basically, there will be more of what’s going on now. If evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the OPERA conclusion, then something’s about to get wild.

Also, reports of cold fusion are floating around. I am taking bets on it. I’ll back ‘not-going-to-happen’ against anyone who wants some of this action.

The problem with political discussions on Facebook is that people don’t really seem to want to have them. They’ve just got this Facebook account looking at them and want to post something. But life is boring, and posting, “Eating muffins. Yay! Muffins,” isn’t really that significant. So people post random bits of meaningful nonsense, two words that converge in art and politics.

Furthermore, condensing complicated issues down to soundbites is not only a worrisome trend, but something I (usually) oppose. I forget the maximum length of a status, if indeed I ever knew it, but the medium doesn’t lend itself to complex introspection on multifaceted topics. Taxes are, in general, bad for the economy, and pretty much everyone agrees on this. The number of exceptions to this rule is astronomical, though, and the number of situations where encouraging the economy isn’t the primary concern are equally prolific. You can’t analyse that in a Facebook post.

There’s also something about internet postings that makes everything inherently combative. I’m not sure why this is, but people seem inclined to take offense online much more than in person. Bring politics or religion into the mix, and it all comes down to nerd-rage and fandom hate. Make no mistake, many members of the Dems or Repubs are every bit as much enmeshed in their fandoms as Twihards and Potterkids.

Vote Cthulhu in 2012: Why Choose the Lesser of Two Evils?

Willem Dafoe does a questionable southern redneck.

This is a bad movie, but it’s passably decent for a vampire movie. I’d say it’s in the top five percent of the 90% crap.

Note: Still very much crap. Just less bad crap.

Our Cosplay. 

Just, sweet Jesus, we need to keep in mind we cannot be our favorite characters.  Mia as Cammy, I don’t care how much running you’re doing, I don’t want to see you in that thong.  Google image “Baltimore Cammy Cosplay”–Edy saw her I think–leave that blonde in blue to do the job.