Cancer

Re: The cranky thread I hate it when I set up a circular reference, because the error messages generated by a circular reference are both voluminous and non-specific.

Re: Why horses? And, when the army's in short supply, they taste like chicken!

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Do so in an expensive hotel in a room overlooking the pool. They'll throw you out the window into the pool, but you should probably survive that.

Re: The Last Word

Re: The cranky thread My pick-up has a slow water leak into the passenger compartment, I suspect around the old CB antenna mount on the cab roof. When it rains hard here, there's lots of dampness in the truck. And after that, if it gets cold ... well, let's just say it's more difficult to de-ice the inside of your windshield than the outside. Most scrapers come with a mild concave curvature that doesn't work well in the inner, concave surface.

Re: The Last Word Na I 6160.753A is one of a very small number of neutral sodium lines that can be used for deriving an abundance of this element in solar-type and cooler stars. The D lines (5889, 5895 A) are immensely strong (they are the spectral lines that give flames in nearly all sources their strong orange color), meaning that most of the abundance information in the spectral line is submerged in favor of line-damping processes that tell you more about the thermal structure of the stellar atmosphere rather than the abundance of sodium. So the weak lines at 6154 and 6160 A are among the better choices remaining, although the former has a weak but annoying Cr I line blending with it that compromises its utility somewhat. The abundance of sodium, it is found, turns out to vary in the red giants of globular clusters much like the CNO nuclides do, with some stars having elevated sodium and nitrogen abundances and lowered oxygen abundances relative to most of the others. It is well known (Hans Bethe won the Nobel Prize in physics for realizing this) that oxygen participates in the CNO cycle, which results in it being converted to nitrogen. Standard stellar structure models don't predict the mixing of such fully CNO-cycled material to the stellar surface, but it seems to happen in some stars. That sodium participates also was something of a surprise, and the only reaction cycle that works is with the isotopes of neon being cycled to sodium, which again is not predicted to be mixed to the surface of globular cluster giants, but it clearly must happen. Details of the mixing process are hard to work out, given that it's hydrodynamics in a nasty, turbulent regime.

Re: The Last Word See, there's the difference. In Sweden everyone goes to parties. Here in the US, we only get rich farts BSing at each other and us. Ptui.

Re: The Last Word And if they can't find anything else, they'll make stuff up and repeat it often, See "Swift Boating".

Re: The Last Word Fluids, oscillators, waves, and sound.

Re: The Last Word Speaking of evil, immoral things, I need to start whomping up the exam I'm giving next Monday,

Re: The Last Word Well, that's true for all politicians. The hypocrisy index is just a little higher for the prominent social conservative ones, that's all.

Re: The Last Word Either you're trying to insult me, or I failed to parse that correctly.

Re: The Last Word No, the GM persists in allowing only the version of that with no 't' in it.

Re: Why horses? Remember too that old wild-strain horses are a far cry from the breeds we have now. Heavy shock cavalry requires very large and heavy horses, which you only get after a few thousand years of domestication and selective breeding. Me, I liked to speculate on war mammoths, especially of that race of dwarf mammoths (one of my favorite oxymorons) that survived isolated on their island by going down to about horse size before finally succumbing to extinction.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

Re: The Last Word Actually, being a RL DEX 6 means I blow off all the DEX-based skills and go for LOTS of worthless INT-based junk. Being Age 40+ just adds on top of that.

Re: The Last Word Heh. I think I built myself generously with a 30 + 60 point allotment.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat He's the cushion Elizabeth Taylor is reclining on when she first meets Caesar in Cleopatra.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat The one that follows, "It has BIG NASTY TEETH!!"

Re: The Last Word A little Megascale Telepathy with an INT-based RSR roll.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings We went up to the Skagit Valley today, and found a couple of flocks of snow geese. Those birds are LOUD. The phrase "big honking flock of 'em" is literally accurate. Took a couple of video clips.

Re: The Last Word That makes sense, but you can see what I mean.

Re: The Last Word Singly ionized barium, Ba II 6141.727A Barium is one of the so-called "s-process" elements, produced by slow neutron capture in certain phases of red giant star evolution. The line tends to be stringer than you'd like for analysis, but with that element you don't have many choices.

Re: The Last Word Actually, I have neither in my pick-up. I don't keep anything that valuable in it.

Re: The Last Word