Mike McClenathan

bob:doctor doctor i need a new but.
doctor:what is it bob.
bob:it has a crack in it
doctor:that is normal bob

A MAN ALWAYS LAUGHING HIS NAME IS WILLSON.
1 DAY A FREIND OF WILLSON ASK HIM:WHY YOU ALWAYS HAPPY?
WILLSON LOOK HIM FREIND AND SLAP HIM FREIND
AND THAT DAY WILLSON NEVER LAUGH BECAUSE WILLSON IS GHOST NOW

crocodiles might be vegitarians because when they open their mouths, we could easily put  in vegetables!

thefrogman:

[video]

randomtumblrthingy:

Has anyone seen this video of a corgi reacting to John Lennon’s voice? If not, do take 55 seconds of your day to witness this adorableness  

The boneless, skinless chicken breast is the totemic foodstuff of the health-obsessed, because of the nutritional potency of chicken, because of the relatively low fat content of the boneless, skinless breast relative to other nutrient-dense animal proteins, and because in 99 percent of its preparations, the boneless, skinless breast's taste and texture are utterly indistinguishable from biting through and chewing a black-and-white composition notebook. This satisfies our culture's stupid Puritanical inheritance of deprivation as virtue: that the things that are good for us can be identified by how much jaw-clenching willpower is required to take advantage of them; that that which does not kill us ought at least to have the decency to make us wish that it would. This demand for the almost always miserable boneless, skinless chicken breast explains why the fuckers both A) take up three-quarters of the space in your local supermarket's meat section, and B) cost exactly as much per unit as a new luxury automobile.

That's odd and counterintuitive, isn't it? The whole rest of the supermarket is a shrine to easy, cheap, preposterously unhealthful indulgence—Where can I find the Doritos Jacked, my good man? Oh, Aisle 19 is the Doritos Jacked aisle, right between the Double Stuf Oreos aisle and the Just A Bunch Of Giant Ziploc Bags Filled With Cake Frosting And Bacon Bits aisle—and then you get to the meat section and suddenly your hat has a fucking buckle on it, and you weren't even wearing a hat to begin with. Can you get some cured pork backfat? No. You cannot. But you can get 567,000 wads of soul-killing self-denial in poultry form, that's for damn sure.

Well, look. You're gonna eat these fucking things no matter what I say, and really, that's fine. Do what you want. But, please: Don't give in to the notion that doing so must be a grim, hateful experience in order to be any good for you. You can enjoy boneless, skinless chicken breasts. You can even enjoy grilled boneless, skinless chicken breasts. More than that, you may enjoy them. You just have to brine them first.

And, hey, if the story of your pursuit of healthfulness can't satisfy you without also doubling as a narrative of grim willpower triumphing over the abject misery of self-denial, hell, brining your chicken breasts involves more work. Is that harsh enough for you, Cotton Mather? Let's get started.

* * *

The first thing to do is to get your chicken breasts ready for brining. In a big tupperware or casserole dish or some other vessel large enough for four boneless, skinless chicken breasts to lie side by side without overlapping, um, lay out four boneless, skinless chicken breasts side by side. Look at them all cute and pink and snug, like adorable slimy alien slugs! Who's a good slug? Who's my good slug! Yes, you are!

(A note here: If you wanted to pound your big, rubbery wads of chicken into uniform thickness before brining them, that's not the worst idea in the world. Doing so will ensure more even doneness in the end, which, hey, that's great. On the other hand, if you didn't want to spend the rest of your life hammering away at a bunch of big, gross, pink disembodied chicken boobs like a really very deeply confused misogynist, and then hosing down your entire home in antibacterial disinfectant afterward to ward off the five gallons of pure salmonella spattered across its every square inch, that's OK too. Your boneless, skinless chicken breasts are still going to taste good. You really don't need to pound them flat.)

Next, add some flavor, because boneless, skinless chicken breasts contain none of that. You can play around with your own spice and aromatic combinations (remembering to be very generous with them, since they're going to be diffused into water); today, I'm going to recommend lots and lots of powdered turmeric, a modest amount of powdered cinnamon and ginger, some chopped garlic, and, most crucially, a bunch of chopped red onion or shallot. Just go ahead and dump all that stuff directly onto the chicken in the vessel. Add enough cold water to the vessel to just barely cover the chicken, then add a double-fistful of ice on top of all that.

Now you're going to prepare the briny part of the brine. To do this, grab a small saucepot and fill it with: one cup of water, three heaping tablespoons of sea salt, and three-quarters or so of a cup of sugar. (If the proportions of salt and sugar in the preceding sentence have caused you to worry that I am tricking you into making candied chicken, don't fret, although that would be pretty funny. The sugar is not going to make your chicken taste like candy. It is going to counter the salt a bit, and it is also going to do something downright neat-o when you cook the chicken, which we will get to in a bit.) Bring this to a boil on your stovetop and stir it a bit until all the salt and sugar have dissolved, then remove it from the heat, let it sit and cool for just a couple of minutes, and pour it over the ice in your big vessel full of wet bird tits.

Congratulations. Your chicken is now brining. If you were preparing an entire chicken, or a whole turkey, you would let the thing soak in the brine for a long time, hours and hours and hours, for as long as you could stomach the notion of a large decapitated bird-corpse slowly dissolving in a vat of tepid water somewhere inside your home. Thankfully, you are not doing that. These chicken breasts are a lot smaller than a whole chicken, so you'll be able to get them out of the brine long before they have a chance to make you feel like the Jeffrey Dahmer of barnyard fowl. Give them a half-hour or so; they're not going to turn into chicken pudding if you leave them in the brine longer than that, but they shouldn't spend more than an hour in there.

This gives you at least a half-hour to work with. It's now time to build an unreasonably, frighteningly hot fire in your shitty charcoal grill. Here is how you are going to do that. First, you are going to shut up about your chimney starter and your Big Green Egg and your but I never use anything but the finest hand-chopped mesquite chips!, and you are going to purchase a very enormous bag of lump (not briquette) charcoal. The reason you are using lump and not briquette charcoal in this preparation is not ideological: The shit simply burns hotter, and while that quality might be superfluous to the cooking of, say, cheeseburgers or grilled fish or whatever the hell, it's perfect for the cooking of chicken breasts, because chicken breasts need to be cooked over a fire precisely as hot as hell.

So. Fill your shitty charcoal grill halfway with your lump charcoal. Don't pile the charcoal into a pyramid; don't arrange it into spiraling tiers around a tent of aged hardwood sticks you picked yourself down t'yonder holler; just pour the shit into your shitty charcoal grill and soak it the fuck down with a scary amount of lighter fluid. Pause to delight in the echoing cries of impotent rage from the weenie grilling purists crapping their jorts over your use of lighter fluid. Now, fill up the rest of the available space in your shitty charcoal grill with ... more lump charcoal! That's right! Fill 'er up right to the top, so that when you set the grate in place, it is flush with the surface of the great black ocean of lump charcoal. Put on your best set of deranged spiral-eyes and soak that bad boy down with yet more lighter fluid, then strike a match, step back, and light that fucker on fire.

You were a child once. You enjoyed playing with fire. You went to a bonfire in the autumn, and a stern-faced adult gave you a hard time for tossing a plastic fork and a styrofoam plate into the fire and watching them curl up and burn away (and also for then going in search of the family cat). There are few opportunities in the dreary, haggard, rushed, joy-starved life of a grownup to do something as innocent and pleasant as making a furious, towering fire and then stepping back and watching it and experiencing some genuine worry that it might ignite the earth's atmosphere and incinerate all life. By God, if you are going to eat fucking boneless, skinless chicken breasts, which is about the most depressingly grownup activity a person can undertake short of doing the exact same thing while filling out a tax return on an elliptical machine, you might as well scorch the surface of the fucking moon to make it worthwhile.

This is a really big fire you have made. It's going to take a few minutes to retreat to its new digs inside your immoderate pile of lump charcoal. Turn and walk away in slow motion, a badass silhouette illuminated from behind by The End Of The World, to go back inside and complete the somewhat less badass step of slicing some eggplant into discs. About a half-inch thick, each.

So, at some point your fire will have calmed down and settled in a bit; the mushroom cloud is visible from space, but it's safe to venture outside again, and the coals in your grill are ash-covered and glowing a fierce, brilliant orange. You can measure whether your grill is hot enough to cook your chicken breasts by holding your hand 18 inches or so above the coals, and paying careful attention: If you are able to scream all the air out of your lungs before you complete your transformation into a blackened skeleton, try to wave your arms at a neighbor or passerby to indicate that it is time to cook the chicken.

Do not dry the chicken when you remove it from the brine; do not set it aside to drain or wipe away any onion bits or spice powder on the individual breasts. Carry the vessel with the brine and chicken in it out to the grill, and, using your trusty tongs, yank the chicken directly from the brine to the surface of the grill. Each breast has a smooth side and a gnarly-looking one; put the smooth side down first. Do not clamp the lid on. Just step back for maybe three or four minutes or so.

Three or four minutes later, grab your tongs, lift up one of those chicken breasts, and look at its underside. Ooooooh. So sexy and dark and grilled-looking. The sugar did that. Neat-o, huh? No? Well, fuck you! Flip the chicken breasts over and give them another, oh, three or four minutes to cook on the gnarly-looking side.

At the end of those three or four minutes, give the breasts a few forceful prods with your tongs. Are they soft? Pendulous? Retreating hastily? Apologize to your grandmother and check the chicken breasts on the fucking hot grill instead, you pervert. They should be firm and, if they exude any liquid when you prod them, that liquid should be clear. They're done. Get 'em off there and onto a plate. They could benefit from a couple of minutes of alone time.

Now you've got those eggplant discs just sitting there. Spritz 'em generously on both sides with some spray oil and grill the eggplant for a minute or two per side until the discs are darkened and grilled-looking, then haul them off the grill and sprinkle them with some salt. Your grill will still be hot enough to smelt iron ore for the next several hours, but you're done cooking. Time to eat.

* * *

Serve your chicken breasts and eggplant with a tasty salad, as well as the sense of personal satisfaction that comes with knowing that you have simultaneously attended to your physiological wellness and defied the Puritanical dictate that you must suffer while doing so. And, fuggit, lots and lots of very-bad-for-you cold beer. You're still coming out ahead: Not only is that juicy, flavorful, succulent chicken breast good for you on its own, but on top of that, you probably lost at least a couple of ounces of weight already today, when your grill-fire burned off all of your hair.

Here's to health.

Albert Burneko is an eating enthusiast and father of two. His work can be found destroying everything of value in his crumbling home. Peevishly correct his foolishness at albertburneko@gmail.com. Image by Devin Rochford. You can find the full Foodspin archive at foodspin.deadspin.com.

flcl-julie:

onlylolgifs:

Have you ever been this worried?

He fucking paws at the water and pulls him toward the edge and fucking jumps in to save him! I love dogs so much. We don’t deserve them.

Alarm bells are ringing all over the world. He can hear them. He can hear the frantic commotion of signals. Maydays bounced from satellites. SOS. SOS. Airwaves jammed with cries for help.

They need him.

They need the Justice League.

(dog 690)

Dog, (n). A mechanism for measuring the contours and capacity of the standard-issue human soul.

(dog 683)

Step one is hiring a sinister shifty-eyed fellow with a pencil mustache to remove the bacon from your refrigerator and hide it somewhere in your home where you cannot find it. OK, so he does not have to have a pencil mustache. But it will be awesomer if he does.

Read more...

Remember ice cream? Oh man, ice cream. There are so many wonderful things to remember about ice cream, but first and foremost—more than the carnival of flavors and colors; the various zany, luxurious toppings and swirls; the fun presentations (Sundae! Banana split! Ice cream cone! Ice cream cake! Root beer float!); the twinkle-eyed fun of a mild, mostly harmless transgression against dietary discipline, the balm to a searing summer's afternoon—is the bitter grief and weeping.

Read more...

Anywhere I want? 

AS LONG AS IT’S NOT INSIDE A HOUSE IT’S FAIR GAME. THAT’S HOW I’VE COME TO UNDERSTAND IT.

What about cleanup?

NOT YOUR CONCERN. SOMEONE COMES ALONG WITH A BAG. 

You’re kidding.

I KNOW, IT SOUNDS CRAZY, BUT I SWEAR IT’S TRUE.

FINALLY. FROM CHURNING MAGMA AND BILLOWING GASES I HAVE SHAPED AND MOLDED THIS PARADISE. ALL THAT REMAINS IS TO POPULATE IT WITH CREATURES MADE IN MY IMAGE. I DON’T WANT THEM TO HAVE TO WORK OR FORAGE FOR FOOD, THOUGH, SO I SHOULD PROBABLY MAKE SOME KIND OF ANNOYING, IGNORANT, SELF DESTRUCTIVE AND NEUROTIC BIPEDAL ASSHOLES WHOSE INTENSE LONELINESS EVEN IN THE MIDST OF THEIR OWN KIND WILL COMPEL THEM TO SHELTER, FEED, ADORE AND PAMPER MY PRECIOUS CHILDREN.

thefrogman:

A photo study of nope. 

Physicist: There’s a long history of big things in the solar system slamming into each other.  Recently (the last 4.5 billion years or so) there haven’t been a lot of planetary collisions, but there are still lots of “minor” collisions like the Chicxulub asteroid 65 million years ago that caused that whole kerfuffle (65,000,000 years is practically this morning compared to the age of the solar system), or comet Shoemaker Levy 9 which uglied up Jupiter back in 1994.

Jupiter after a run-in with Shoemaker Levy 9. Each of those black clouds on the lower right is caused by the impact of a different chunk of the same comet, and each is bigger than Earth.

So while planets slamming or nearly slamming into each other isn’t a serious concern today, it was at one time.  Of course, in solar systems where this is still a serious concern, there’s unlikely to be anything alive to do the concerning.

For the sake of this post, let’s say there’s another planet, “Htrae”, that is the same size and approximate composition of Earth (but possibly populated entirely with evil goatee-having doppelgangers with reversed names).

A direct impact, or even a glancing impact, is more or less what you might expect: you start with two planets and end with lots of hot dust.  We’re used to impacts that dent or punch through the crust of the Earth, but really big impacts treat both planets like water droplets.  Rather than crushing together like lumps of clay, Earth and Htrae would “splash” off of each other.  A direct impact of two like-masses tends to destroy them both.  A glancing, well-off-center, impact will “stir” both planets, leaving no none of the original surface on either.  A glancing impact like this is the best modern theory of the origin of the Moon.

If Htrae were to fall out of the sky, it would probably hit the Earth with a speed that’s on the same scale as Earth’s escape velocity: 11 km/s (Probably more).  The time between when Htrae appears to be about the same size as the Sun or Moon, to when it physically hits the surface, would be a couple of weeks (give or take a lot).  The time between hitting the top of the atmosphere and hitting the bottom would be a few seconds.  If you were around, you would see Htrae spanning from one horizon to the other.  A few moments before impact the collective atmospheres of both planets would glow brightly as they are suddenly compressed.  It’s more likely that in those last few seconds/moments you would be vaporized from a distance by the heat and light released by the by the impact, and less likely that you would be crushed.  People on the far side of Earth wouldn’t get much warning and wouldn’t fare much better.  They’d get very little warning, and would have to suddenly deal with the ground, and everything on it, suddenly being given a big enough kick from below to go flying into space.

Generally speaking, being slapped by the ground so hard that you find yourself in deep space a few minutes later is seriously fatal.

A near miss is a lot less flashy, but you really wouldn’t want to be around for that either.  When you’re between two equal masses, you’re pulled equally by both.  You may be standing on the surface of Earth, but most of it is still a long way away (about 4,000 miles on average).  So if Htrae’s surface was within spitting distance, then you’d be about 4,000 miles from most of it as well.  Nothing on the surface of Earth has any special “Earth-gravity-solidarity”, so if you were “lucky” enough to be standing right under Htrae as it passed overhead, you’d find yourself in nearly zero gravity.

Earth and Htrae have an extremely near miss. Which way does the gravity between them point?

Of course, there’s nothing special about stuff that’s on the surface either.  The surface itself would also start floating around, and the local atmosphere would certainly take the opportunity to wander off.  On a large scale this is described by the planets being well within each others’ Roche limit, which means that they literally just kinda fall apart.  It’s not just that the region between the planets is in free fall, it’s that halfway around the worlds gravity will suddenly be pointing a sideways quite a bit.  So, what does a land-slide the size of a planet look like?  From a distance it’s likely to be amazing, but you’re gonna want that distance to be pretty big.

Even a near miss, with the planets never quite coming into contact, does a colossal amount of damage.  There would be cloud of debris between and orbiting around both planets (or rather around both “roiling molten masses”) as well as long streamers of what used to be ocean, crust, and mantle extending between them as they move apart.  This has never been seen on a planetary scale, since all the things doing the impacting these days barely have their own gravity.  The highest vertical leap on a comet would be infinity (if anyone were to try).

But the news gets worse.  Unless both planets have a good reason to be really screaming past each other (maybe they were counter-orbiting or Htrae fell inward from the outer solar system or something), a near miss is usually just a preamble for a direct impact.  All of the damage and scrambling that Earth and Htrae did do each other took energy.  That energy is taken mostly from the kinetic energy, so after a near miss the average speed of the two planets would be less than it was before.  And that means that the planets often can’t escape from each other (at least not forever).  In fact, this is why Shoemaker Levy 9 impacted Jupiter a dozen times instead of all at once.  Before impacting, the comet had passed within Jupiter’s Roche limit (probably several times), been pulled into a streamer of rocks, and slowed down.

What, your best friend can’t have a best friend too? Friendship is recursive, people. Like the tower of turtles in that one story: it’s friends all the way down.

(dog 667)

5truefacts:

5 Facts: Cats

The original question was:  Why is it when we multiply fractions we multiply the numerators across  and the denominators across?  Whereas when we divide we don’t do the same?  Who came up with these rules and why do they work the way they do?

Physicist: For all of these rules, start with addition and then extend and extend and extend, while doing the least damage possible.  At first blush I thought this would be a short and straightforward question, but it really isn’t.  There are wrong ways to construct the rules of arithmetic, but if you get technical there’s not necessarily a right way.  That said, as far as basic arithmetic goes (no highfalutin calculus, or set theory, or anything) there’s really just one “right” way.

Rational numbers (“fractions”) have been in use for thousands of years and they, and their rules, have been independently invented at least dozens of times.  More recently (19th century) a bunch of really A-type mathematicians got together to “put mathematics on a more rigorous footing“.  Those mathematicians (there were many) are responsible for unpleasant statements like “there are exactly as many prime numbers as rational numbers“, and are a big reason behind why modern mathematicians always look just a little pained when they speak.  It was these paragons of compulsivity that established how the rules are stated, and gave everything definite names like “associative”, “commutative”, etc.

Constructing the rational numbers and all of their behavior starts with an innocent statement; that “ is the unique number such that “.  This one definition is the headwaters for all of the properties of rational numbers that follow.  If ever you’re totally stuck, and don’t know how to handle fractions, keep this single and tremendously important definition in mind.  Everything else follows (but maybe not immediately).  Just a quick warning for those of you expecting any of the rest of this post be about history or something interesting; everything that follows is a dry-as-bones, utterly literal, derivation of the arithmetic rules for fractions and rational numbers from the ground up.  Definitely boring, but worth seeing once.

Starting with integers, along with regular addition, subtraction, and multiplication (basic arithmetic tools), and the definition of ““, you’ll find that all of the weird properties of rational numbers come tumbling out.

Often will be multiplied by another integer.  To save room we write: .  This is strictly a convention; a standard defined notation that’s agreed upon.

For example: .

For example: .

Already we can say things like: .  We can even do a little better and say .

For example: .

How do fractions multiply?  It would be nice to know: .  But check this out: .  This means that does the exact same thing that does, and (since this is all there is in the definition) in fact is the same.  So, .

For example: .  But keep in mind that “ is the unique number such that “, and since has been shown to have the same property we know that .  This may seem anal-retentive and unnecessary, but that’s how math is done.

Now we’ve got the tools to define multiplication in general: .  In other words “fractions multiply across”.

For example: .  Deriving the rules is often complex, but using them isn’t.

Now, again using nothing new, .  This means two things: fractions can be reduced, and multiplying the top and the bottom by the same thing does nothing.

For example: .

It would be great if the addition and subtraction of fractions follow all of the same rules that hold for integers.  As a mathematician, the way you make this happen is to declare that it’s true, and then check for inconsistencies.  The rule most important for defining addition and subtraction of fractions is the “distributive law”, which says that “A(B+C) = AB+AC” (this doesn’t lead to any new inconsistencies).

First, .  So now, if the fractions have the same denominator, then they can be added together.

For example:

But what about fractions with different denominators?  The trick is to not have them:

For example:

Huzzah!  We can multiply, add, and reduce fractions with ease and impunity!

But what about dividing fractions?  Well, here we have to tread lightly and describe exactly what is meant by “dividing by a fraction”.  So, in a perfectly reasonable extension of the original definition, “ is the unique number such that “.

But check this out: .  Since does exactly what is defined to do, we can say that .

Another way to see this is to say

For example: .

Just a quick note on behalf of whoever grades your tests or homework: Please reduce fractions, .

For example:

What about subtraction and negative numbers? In general, in every case, without exception of any kind, whenever you see “-A” you can exchange it with “(-1)A” and exchange “B-A” with “B+(-1)A”.  After that, treat “(-1)” just like any other number or variable*.

So (still using no new rules!), we can say

For example:

For those of you who’ve read this far, you can show using the same definitions and tricks above that:

.

Using the fact that , you can get .

Similarly, you can show that .

There are big issues with , because it’s defined as the number that, when multiplied by 0, gives 1.  But of course that number doesn’t exist*.  In practice, if you ever see a “1/0″, stop mathing.  And every time you divide by something that could be zero, make a note on the side of the paper.  The short answer to almost every question about “1/0″ is “doesn’t”.

For example: If , then and by the way only when .

It’s also worth pointing out that when things are added in the denominator, there’s not much that can be done with it.  So, if you’ve got something like , then you’re stuck.  That’s as simplified as it can get.  The one and only thing you can say about  is that (so long as ).

Also, for those of you wondering (this is a bit technical), the rational numbers also inherit their positions in the number line very naturally.  Using only the fact that “if A<B and C>0, then AC<BC” and the fact that we know how to order integers, you can figure out which rational number is bigger than which other rational numbers.  Since , if you can figure out which of AD and BC is bigger (they’re both integers), then you can figure out which of and is bigger.

For example:

Even better, we can describe exactly where the rational numbers are!

For example: You can show that is just as far from 1 as it is from 0.  and .

Just to get ahead of the most obvious follow up questions:  There’s a lot of weird emphasis on how exactly mathematical notation is used in text.  The first key to dealing with complicated text-based notation is: don’t.  Writing equations using the symbols found only on a keyboard is something our unfortunate and sadly limited ancestors had to consider.  If you’re reading this now, then you’re in a bigger and better-notated world.

In general, you can always write A/B = A(1/B), and A/B/C = A(1/B)(1/C), and so on.  A little fancier: .  If for some horrifying, bizarre reason you find yourself looking at a string of numbers or variables being multiplied together, with no parentheses in sight, just replace “A/B” with “” and go*.

For example: .

That (way too long of a post) all said, if you’re reading this because you’re presently panic-studying the night before a test, and actually needed a short answer, memorize this:

“A/B is A times 1/B.  1/B times B is one.  There’s nothing else to say about 1/B.”

and go to sleep sooner rather than later.

*If your math background is extensive enough to know some exceptions, then… be cool, you know what I mean.

fluent-in-lesbianism:

walnuthouse:

cineraria:

Sheep teaches young bull to head butt, Terceira Azores - YouTube

lessons in friendship

HE RUNS SO SO FAST THEN SLOWS AND *boop* I’M DYING

tysolna:

tastefullyoffensive:

Animals Jumping on Trampolines

Oh god the last one…

Physicist: This question has had a lot of forms, from questions about hot air balloons, to “just hovering in the air”, to weather.  But the common thread boils down to “what keeps the atmosphere moving with the surface of the Earth?”.

The short answer is “the ground has drag”, and the slightly longer answer is “sometimes it doesn’t completely”.

First, it’s useful to know what the atmosphere is like (as if you haven’t been breathing it practically all day).  It’s a little surprising how much air there isn’t.  Although you’ll hear about the atmosphere extending to a hundred miles or more above our heads, it becomes so thin, so fast, that almost none of that “counts”.  If all of the atmosphere were as dense as it is at sea level, then it would only be about 7 km tall.  People in eight countries could literally walk to space!

Left: the atmosphere (out to 100 km) compared to the Earth. Right: if our atmosphere wasn’t so fluffy and was instead only 7.3 km thick..

The point is that the atmosphere, rather than being a heavenly swath of lung-food, is a tiny puddle of gas, thinly painted on the surface of our world.  The Earth for its part is covered in bumps and wrinkles, like mountains, valleys, tress, and whatnot.

The stuff on the surface of the Earth pushes on the wind exactly as hard as the wind pushes on it.  So, overall, the air moves with the ground.

These “bumps” catch the atmosphere and keep it moving with the surface.  Even if a stationary, non-rotating atmosphere were to suddenly replace ours, it would find itself moving with the rest of the Earth in short order (after the worst storm ever, by far).  In physics (reality) there’s no difference between moving and not moving, so a stationary fan is just as good at stopping moving air, as a moving fan is at moving stationary air.  Once air is moving with the Earth it’s got momentum, and that’s what keeps it moving (or “what keeps it still”, if you happen to live on Earth).

It turns out that the overwhelming majority of the movement of the atmosphere is tied up in rotating with (and so sitting still relative to) the Earth.  The highest wind speed ever verified was 253 mph (that’s gust speed) as measured at Barrow Island.  That immediately sounds less impressive when you consider that the wind was measured relative to Barrow Island, which at the time was traveling east at about 940 mph.  Still is.

That all said, if you go high enough you find that the surface of the wold starts to look pretty smooth.  Mountains and seas and whatnot all start to look like the same, fairly smooth surface.  As a result, high altitude winds take the turning of the Earth as more of a strong suggestion than as a rule, the way air near the surface does (20 mph gusts!  Howsoever shall my hat stay on?).  High altitude winds routinely blow at well over 100 mph.

Speaking of which, wind is powered mostly by convection: one region of the world gets warmer, a bubble of hot air rises, nearby air rushes in to take its place, that sort of thing.  Wind isn’t caused by the rotation of the Earth, but it is affected by it.

Hurricanes: powered by warm water, pushed into a loop by the Earth.

Everything in space wants to travel in a straight line, so when air from sunny Barrow Island (traveling east at 940 mph) drifts south to also-sunny Perth (traveling east at a mere 850 mph), it finds itself traveling east 90 mph faster than the ground.  Usually the difference in eastward speed between two points on the globe gets broken down by the ground, by the time the air has breezed from one to the other.  When that east-speed-difference doesn’t get broken down, usually because the air covered the distance too fast, you get a big swirl of air.  But keep in mind, ultimately the wind doesn’t get its energy from the Earth, it gets it from heat, which mostly comes from the Sun (“mostly” because warm water and dirt does a lot).

It’s been hard not to feel a deepening of the soul as the palette of online emotion signifiers has expanded from sparse typographic emoticons to colorful and animated emoji. Some cynics believe that emotions have no place in the realtime stream, but in fact the stream is full of feels, graphically expressed, fully machine-readable, and entailing minimal latency drain. Evan Selinger puts the emoji trend into perspective:

The mood graph has arrived, taking its place alongside the social graph (most commonly associated with Facebook), citation-link graph and knowledge graph (associated with Google), work graph (LinkedIn and others), and interest graph (Pinterest and others). Like all these other graphs, the mood graph will enable relevance, customization, targeting; search, discovery, structuring; advertising, purchasing behaviors, and more.

The arrival of the mood graph comes at the same time that facial-recognition and eye-tracking apps are beginning to blossom. The camera, having looked outward so long, is finally turning inward. Vanessa Wong notes the release, by the online training firm Mindflash, of FocusAssist for the iPad, which

uses the tablet’s camera to track a user’s eye movements. When it senses that you’ve been looking away for more than a few seconds (because you were sending e-mails, or just fell asleep), it pauses the [training] course, forcing you to pay attention—or at least look like you are—in order to complete it.

The next step is obvious: automating the feels. Whenever you write a message or update, the camera in your smartphone or tablet will “read” your eyes and your facial expression, precisely calculate your mood, and append the appropriate emoji. Not only does this speed up the process immensely, but it removes the requirement for subjective self-examination and possible obfuscation. Automatically feeding objective mood readings into the mood graph helps purify and enrich the data even as it enhances the efficiency of the realtime stream. For the three parties involved in online messaging—sender, receiver, and tracker—it’s a win-win-win.

Some people feel a certain existential nausea when contemplating these trends. Selinger, for one, is wary of some of the implications of the mood graph:

The more we rely on finishing ideas with the same limited words (feeling happy) and images (smiley face) available to everyone on a platform, the more those pre-fabricated symbols structure and limit the ideas we express. … [And] drop-down expression makes us one-dimensional, living caricatures of G-mail’s canned responses — a style of speech better suited to emotionless computers than flesh-and-blood humans. As Marshall McLuhan observed, just as we shape our tools, they shape us too. It’s a two-way street.

Robinson Meyer, meanwhile, finds himself “creeped out” by FocusAssist:

FocusAssist forces people to perform a very specific action with their eyeballs, on behalf of “remote organizations,” so that they may learn what the organization wants them to learn. Forcing a human’s attention through algorithmic surveillance: It’s the stuff of A Clockwork Orange. …

How long until a feature like FocusAssist is rebranded as AttentionMonitor and included in a MOOC, or a University of Phoenix course? How long until an advertiser forces you to pay attention to its ad before you can watch the video that follows? And how long, too, until FocusAssist itself is used outside of the context it was designed for?

All worthy concerns, I’m sure, but I sense they arrive too late. We need to remember what Norbert Wiener wrote more than sixty years ago:

I have spoken of machines, but not only of machines having brains of brass and thews of iron. When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood. What is used as an element in a machine, is in fact an element in the machine.

The raw material now encompasses emotion as well as flesh and blood. If you have an emotion that is unencapsulated in an emoji and unread by an eye-tracking app—that fails to  become an element of the machine—did you really feel it? Probably not. At least by automating this stuff, you’ll always know you felt something.

This post is an installment in Rough Type’s ongoing series “The Realtime Chronicles,” which began here. A full listing of posts can be found here.

Listen. Life is hard. You're tired all the time, you're overworked and underpaid, you never have enough time for anything and no one loves you and your hair, seriously, what are you even going for with that look, because it is not working. Most evenings, it's all you can do to doze off into a bowl of cereal and hope to absorb some caloric energy through osmosis in the nine minutes between the time you get home and the time the alarm clock sends you back out again. And then some internet asshole is all, Hey yeah! Buy some stupid clams and mussels and put effort into sustaining their lives and clean them and debeard them and cook them to death and eat them, because that's not at all a big, metaphorically horrifying waste of time just like everything else! and you literally cannot imagine how or why that would be better than just closing your eyes and leaping right the hell into the Grand Canyon.

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