Cancer

Re: The Last Word FWIW, there's a nice whacking strong neutral iron line at 4920A.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER In this case, I think he's saying that Gramma has a potentially valid reason to run over the reindeer herself.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Hm, my office hour starts in 20 minutes. Better go get coffee now.

Re: The Last Word Such vehemence!

Re: Hard Science Help So far, relativity, both special and general, has passed every experimental and observational test we've been able to put to it. That includes a broader regime than you might guess. We lack the tech to get macroscopic objects up to relativistic speeds, but subatomic particles are another thing entirely. One of the problems in particle physics is that the standard model does pretty well in those energy regimes we can access....

Re: The Last Word 5708 has a nice line of neutral silicon. (FWIW, these are wavelengths of spectral lines in the solar spectrum, tabulated in ftp://ftp.noao.edu/fts/linelist/Moore ... Charlotte Moore's old table of lines in the visible part of the solar spectrum. Some numbers are more significant than others. (5708 isn't terrible important. Not like, say, 5007, or 6300, or 6707, or 10830, or 6141, or....)

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat The cat throwing up a hairball. Though, I admit, not by much. And if he's hacking it up on the carpet rather than the tile, that'll get my attention in a hurry.

Re: The Last Word There's an otherwise nice line of neutral manganese with buttloads of hyperfine splitting at 5537.8A.

Re: The Last Word Sometimes I can guess. That day I let a handful of lemon drops fuse in there, for instance.

Re: The Last Word Multitasking is as simple as realizing that in some circumstances it's not polite to chew gum, while being perceptive enough to note that if you're careful, you can take your used gum back out of your pocket and it's still just about as good.

Re: The Last Word You compartmentalize your life far more neatly than I do.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Indeed. The plants are stuck. The reindeer could move, but choose not to.

Re: The Last Word You imply by that that there was a time, at least, where you considered yourself done with it. That's the part which seems unlikely.

Re: The Last Word You mean you put it away?

Re: Musings on Random Musings IIRC there was a great writer who described more as, Howl, gargle, howl, gargle, .....

Re: The Last Word * Cancer watches lemming do his Mephistopheles schtick *

Re: Answers & Questions Q: Why isn't your mom making special plans for the Easter Bunny? A: You are NOT touching Presidents' Day!

Re: The Last Word UW Bookstore's parking situation is not very good. They have their own lot, but it's small, and getting into and out of it can be ugly with U District traffic as it is. Most of the time I go there, I have gone to the District via bus (this was especially true when I worked in the U District) and sidestepped the parking issue entirely.

Re: The Last Word That's a much bigger store than UW's. I should probably confess up front that I have odd criteria for my assessment scale, things that give high weight to technical nonfiction, and definite negative weight to cheap paperback trade fiction. Many, many places never get above water purely due to their shelfspace spent on Danielle Steele volumes alone, for example. And if I find a book on horoscopes in the astronomy section, well, the place is not a bookstore, it is a satanic propaganda outpost for whom the firebombing of Dresden is inadequate retribution.

Re: The Last Word I haven't been to Powell's. Heard good things about it, but I haven't spent enough time in Portland to have made it there.

Re: Musings on Random Musings 1000 pages of second-order random musings, 1000 pages of drivel, You quote some crud and reply again, 1001 pages of second-order random musings. ((Repeat until zero pages.))

Re: The Last Word Here in Seattle, the best brick-and-mortar bookstore in town, without any ghost of real competition, is the University of Washington Bookstore in the U District. Their only downside is parking. I have never, ever, been in another bookstore that was in the same league. That said, the bookstore I was referring to above was not the U of W one, because I not with the U of W now.

Re: The Last Word Actually, ordinarily it's the quickest place to get a cheap sandwich.

Re: The Last Word Hm. Second day of classes. Still impossible to get out of the bookstore with anything in less than two hours. We'll try again Thursday.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Certainly at least two my cats are stupid. Affectionate, cute, and stupid.