Oakfairy

[video] [h/t: sizvideos]

It's good to know the proper way to thaw foods , but when it comes to fish, save yourself the time and effort and just cook it straight from the freezer.

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Note: A version of this article originally appeared on my Google Plus page, but rumor has it G+ may be going the way of phlogiston and N-rays. I didn’t want to lose this article, since it’s one of the coolest facts about our solar system, so I figured I’d update it and put it here on the blog. That way I can link to it when I talk about Saturn’s rings.

The planet Saturn is beyond question the jewel of the solar system. Its magnificent system of rings is awe-inspiring, composed of countless tiny particles of water ice, each orbiting the gas giant planet individually. Sculpted by the gravity of the planet and the orbital dances of dozens of moons, the rings are divided into a few major rings and thousands of narrower ringlets.

They’re also huge: The main ring system spans 300,000 kilometers (180,000 miles), and some fainter rings are cast even wider! But they're also amazingly flat. Seriously, truly flat: Observations indicate they are only 10 meters (32 feet) thick in some places, up to as much as a kilometer (0.6 miles) in others.

That’s more than just flat. That’s practically two-dimensional! Let me show you why.

Let’s take the bigger number, and assume the rings are a kilometer thick. If the main rings are 300,000 kilometers across, that makes the thickness-to-width ratio 1 in 300,000, or 0.0000033.

How thin is that? Well, a common simile used for thinness is a sheet of paper (i.e., “paper thin”). But how thin is that? A standard sheet of US writing paper has dimensions of 8.5 x 11 inches (about 22 x 28 cm) in width and height, and (for 20 pound paper) only about 0.004 inches (0.1 mm) in thickness.

Even if we use the larger dimension of 11 inches, the thickness-to-width ratio of a piece of paper is then 0.00036, over 100 times the ratio of Saturn’s rings!

In other words, to scale, a piece of paper is 100 times thicker than Saturn’s rings. And that’s using the thicker number for the rings, 1 km instead of 10 meters. If we go with the thinner number, the ratio jumps another factor of 100, so a piece of paper is 10,000 times thicker than Saturn’s ring, to scale!

Want to think of it another way? If you wanted to make a scale model of Saturn’s rings using paper, you’d have to use a sheet 10,000 x 11 inches = 1.7 miles across!

We’re using the wrong phrase. We should say something is “Saturn’s rings thin.”

It’s truly astonishing that a structure so huge, so vast—it stretches more than three-fourths of the distance from the Earth to the Moon!—can be so ethereally thin. But that’s physics at work. The particles forming the rings may have once had all different tilts as they orbited Saturn, but if they did, they would have collided with each other. The details are a bit complicated, but collisions would steal angular momentum from the particles, and their orbits would tend to flatten out. This kept happening until the particles were spread out so thinly that collisions stopped occurring, which happens when the rings were only a few times thicker than the size of the biggest particles in them—a few meters across. That’s why the rings are so thin.

Once again, processes in physics are both vast and subtle, and what seems surprising to our intuition is actually inevitable in reality. That’s one of the many reasons I rely more on science than in our own easily fooled human brains!

Science is a way of helping you understand the Universe, but it’s also a way of helping you trust it. It always follows its own rules.

[Geek Universe]

You wouldn’t accept lag offline, so why do it online? ume.net, a fiber broadband provider, performed an experiment. Four volunteers got to experience internet’s biggest disturbance in real life – lag.

[umeaenergi]

[video]

[video]

Clearly, I’m in the minority of folks who watched Almost Human on Fox, because the network has announced that there will be no second season.

The “buddy cop” show starred Karl Urban and Michael Ealy as “a human and lifelike robot partnered together as detectives in the year 2048,” according to Cinema Blend.

Was the show perfect? No, but it showed promise, and the chemistry between Urban and Ealy was refreshing and yes, adorable. But — like Firefly — Fox aired the show’s 13 episodes completely out of order which possibly aided in its demise.

According to Geek Tyrant:

Fox followed Almost Human‘s pilot with Episodes 5-8, then aired Episode 3, then jumped to Episode 10, then finally got around to airing the intended second episode of the series. They closed out the series with episodes 4, 11, 12 and 13.

Even though each episode technically, sort of “stood alone,” there was a larger subplot that ran through many of them, so it’s no surprise the show had even more trouble gaining traction if the episodes jumped around so severely. (Now, I’ll have to go back and re-watch them IN ORDER, as the show creators intended!)

But as my friend Adam put it, no second season may have its bright side: Maybe now Urban will be free to do a Dredd sequel.

It’s book release day for Valour and Vanity! So I have a small present for you. It’s about the Doctor Who cameo that I hid in the book.

When I was researching the novel, I was looking for historical stuff I could include. The book is set in 1817 in Venice. It turns out that Lord Byron was actually living in Venice at the time. The interesting thing about Lord Byron is that he had a travelling companion that he frequently referred to in letters and journals as simply “the doctor.”

I think you can see where this is going.

Doctor Polidori was with Byron the night that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. As part of that same challenge, the doctor wrote  The Vampyre, which is regarded as the first vampire story. Now… To those of you who watch the series, I think it’s pretty clear what happened that night. Am I right? And then there’s the fact that Byron, who was an inveterate letter writer and journaler, has a two week period in which he is pretty much unaccounted for.

And then the doctor mysteriously “dies.” So, you know. It  seems obvious.

Oh, and Lord Byron’s father? Captain “Mad” Jack. See? SEE!

So, clearly, I needed to include The Doctor in the novel. And then I was talking with my friend, Paul Cornell, who has written for the actual Doctor Who television show (and I love that I get to say that sentence) and joked about handing him the pages and having him adjust the dialogue.

And Paul said, “yes.”

It is wonderful, and so unmistakeably the Doctor that I had to tone it down a little. But for you, if you want to read the full on version in all its Doctoral splendor, just click through to read the Doctor Who cameo.

I warn you  though, if you haven’t finished Chapter 7, wait. There are massive spoilers.

The post About the Doctor Who cameo in VALOUR AND VANITY appeared first on Mary Robinette Kowal.

textsfromthetardis:

Submitted by karlimeaghan.

The TARDIS and the starship Enterprise feel like enchanted places that we visit in our imaginations. But the reality of working on a TV show involves long hours in a studio, and the magic takes a lot of work. Just check out these revealing behind-the-scenes photos from our favorite fantasy and science fiction shows.

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Now you know, thanks to the folks over at the “art of manliness“.

[Source: Art of Manliness | Via LS]

Here it is is, the official cast to Star Wars Episode VII.

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[vine] [h/t: literallysame]

According to a confirmation by Microsoft late last night, a new zero day vulnerability has been found to affect every version of Internet Explorer. In other words—over a quarter of the entire browser market.

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[Source: bigbrandbeds.co.uk]

Don’t let her go, Sub-Zero!

[Via GT]

Polar bears are no longer my favorite. 

This was last week’s Animal Facts.

This week check out an extra special Animal Facts. THE FIRST EVER!

SEE A VINTAGE ANIMAL FACTS! CLICK HERE!

[GAS] Reader Bliss sent this in earlier today:

There’s a magician/balloon artist that created worlds largest balloon sculpture by a single person recently at Salt Lake Comic Con and it was a friggin huge robot.

Thanks Bliss!

[Source: Epic Balloons (@epic_balloons)]

pleatedjeans:

[watch the video]

IFTTT (If This Then That) är en app som tidigare bara funnits på webben och för IOS, men som nu även hittat fram till Android. Användare kan låta IFTTT utföra uppgifter automatiskt, baserat på enkla IF-satser – om det här händer, gör det här.

Tjänstens devis är ”låt internet jobba åt dig”. IFTTT bjuder på en lång rad så kallade recept, vilka är färdiga uppsättningar IF-satser som redan skapats av andra. Appen kan användas till att utföra ungefär samma typer av automatisering som Tasker.

Du kan exempelvis säga åt IFTTT att använda ditt senaste foto på Instagram som bakgrundsbild, automatiskt sätta mobilen i ljudlöst läge när du kommer till jobbet, skapa SMS-backups på Google Drive, eller skicka ett SMS till din partner varje gång du kommit hem.

IFTTT finns gratis i Google Play för de som vill testa.

Inlägget Nyttoprogrammet IFTTT släpps för Android dök först upp på Swedroid.

pir8crabs:

Some people theorize that one extra factor that made the Titanic sink was added weight from loads and loads of time-travelers attempting to prevent it from sinking.

sci-universe:

Estonian astrophotographer Raivo Hein captured Moon with Jupiter and its moons!

[video] [h/t: dpaf]