Bears! Everyone agrees that they need to be put in their place. But only one woman in America is brave enough to do so: Brooke Collins of Juneau, Alaska, who punched a bear in the face to save her dog.
The black bear approached Collins' yard on Sunday and seized her dachshund, Fudge, whom she'd let out for the evening. Most people would have been all Oh, you want that dog? No, go ahead! Heh! Didn't like it very much anyway! Please don't remove my face with your paw!
But this wasn't just any bear, and it wasn't just any dogowner. Collins, like Charles Bronson in Death Wish, had seen this bear before—had watched it "around her house many times before"—and she was fed up:
"That bear was carrying her like a salmon," she said.
She said she almost instinctively went up and did the first thing she thought of. She punched the bear's face and scooped away her dog when it let go.
It all happened too fast to really think about but she had flashes of hearing about how some animals will back off from a punch to the nose, she said.
The bear, "startled," quickly left the premises; Collins and Fudge were treated for minor injuries. She says she'd "never think of doing it again." Come on, Brooke! We need a hero! Against the bear menace!
Faster Than Light Particles Could Wreck Einstein’s Relativity Theory
This is extremely shocking: CERN scientists using a 1300-ton particle detector have measured particles travelling faster than the speed of light. If confirmed, this discovery could invalidate Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity and revolutionize physics.
Einstein's theory says that there's nothing in the universe that could travel faster than light. Now, CERN scientists believe this may be wrong according to their latest experiment.
The 3-year experiment timed about 16,000 neutrino packets launched from CERN facilities in Geneva, travelling through Earth and arriving 2.43 milliseconds later to the subterranean facilities of Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory. There, the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (the OPERA particle detector) recorded the hits.
When scientists discovered that the particles were arriving 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light—with only a 10 nanosecond error margin—they freaked out. I don't blame them. Imagine someone comes to you to tell you that a new observation shows that planet Earth is actually flat.
But University of Bern's Antonio Ereditato—spokesperson for the 160-member OPERA team—says that the experiment is "a straightforward time-of-flight measurement." It was repeatable, so they couldn't ignore it because that would be dishonest: "[T]he consequences can be very serious [...] We are forced to say something [...] We have high confidence in our results. But we need other colleagues to do their tests and confirm them."
The news are so extraordinary that other physicists are already saying this is impossible. Chang Kee Jung—a neutrino physicist at Stony Brook University in New York—believes it's a systematic error. Jung is the spokesperson for a similar project in Japan. Indiana University's physicist Alan Kostelecky believes that, while it may be possible that neutrinos can travel faster than light, the experiment needs to be repeated "by at least one and preferably several experiments." There are other facilities that could be used to run the same test, one of them is Fermilab in Chicago. The other one is the T2K experiment in Japan, the one in which Jung participates.
Still, Kostelecky confesses that he "would be delighted if it were true." I would be delighted too. I love when the world goes crazy.
Pretty much every science blogger is implementing the world's biggest wait-and-see policy. They still need to write their paper and go through a crapton of peer review and repeat experimentation.
But yes! Throwing out everything we know about physics will be… awesome?
I have no formal training in physics, but I think that if there is verified and agreed upon proof that something can travel faster than life, it would be a Pretty Big Deal. Einstein's relativity laws would have to be reconsidered, for one. We have taken measurements and we know that they work (GPS satellites, for example), but then that would suggest that we're measuring only part of the puzzle. It would be akin to when we started studying quantum physics and discovered that Newton's laws only work at certain times, but not at the quantum level.
The big question though would be regarding the new speed limit. If neutrinos can go faster than light, can anything else? And... how much faster can things go? Does this mean we have to reconsider what it means to have mass? Can technology create solutions for manmade machines to go faster than light as well?
But yes, right now this is just a big wait and see. It is very interesting, to say the least. SCIENCE!
Well, it would be good because it would help bridge the gap between quantum physics and special relativity. It doesn't make any sense because as far as we've seen up til now special relativity is dead on when it can be applied. and it says that to accelerate an object with mass to C would require infinite energy, and so to have something with mass go faster than C doesn't make any sense. I'm leaning towards they got it wrong at CERN. Now, I came up with a completely original idea from my own horribly ill-informed brain. We know from a recent experiment (little balls orbiting the earth taking very accurate measurements) that Einstein was right and a moving object actually has a drag on space. So it warps it and creates a drag as it moves. The more energy you put into something, the greater its mass and so the greater its effect on the space around it. So, what if the neutrino was going so fast, and had so much energy, that it caused the space in front of it to fold over and it actually warped. So it didn't travel faster than light, but it did get from point A to point B faster than light could. Since light has no mass, it wouldn't affect space the way something with mass could. Since nobody else has said anything like this yet, I'm assuming there is an obvious flaw in my thinking that any freshman in physics 101 would spot. But I still like it.
From Pravda, the story of a Moscow woman who was stabbed in the heart by her husband, but whose silicone breast implants absorbed the blade, preventing her from dying. Fake tits save lives.
Because the implants — inserted five years prior, at the request of the husband — were so large, the knife "did not even reach the thorax."
Perhaps what we've stumbled upon here is a game-changing form of bionic armor. It could have interesting, cleavage-enhancing ramifications for our men in blue!
I'm flying to Seattle today to see a Star Trek-themed improv show, "Where No Man Has Gone Before"! The audience suggests elements of the sketch and the actors Star Trek-ify it!
Incidentally, this means I probably won't sign onto the forums much for the next few days (get back on Saturday), but I'll squash any spambot bugs that might show up upon my return.
Holy shit, mario, I know the guy who plays Kirk. He's actually a really good old friend of mine. We went to high school together, and we went to college in the same town. I haven't talked to him in ages, I knew he was doing improv in Seattle but had no idea on the specifics.
This totally made my day. I have to visit the 'Belt more.
Whu-BWAH?! That's amazing! He played an absolutely amazing Kirk, got all the character mannerisms down perfectly. I met Cheryl at Comic-Con last year (she plays the alien love interest) and had to go check this show out when it started up again. Everyone in the cast was a delight!
Comments
It sounds a little bit sketchy, but either way this girl is a BAMF!
http://gawker.com/5836393/meet-the-woman-who-punched-a-bear-to-save-her-dog
http://gizmodo.com/5843006/faster-than-light-particles-could-wreck-einsteins-relativity-theory
But yes! Throwing out everything we know about physics will be… awesome?
Oh great, now we need to wait for the Havok engine to be re-built. I'm pretty sure Half Life Episode 3 will never come out.
The big question though would be regarding the new speed limit. If neutrinos can go faster than light, can anything else? And... how much faster can things go? Does this mean we have to reconsider what it means to have mass? Can technology create solutions for manmade machines to go faster than light as well?
But yes, right now this is just a big wait and see. It is very interesting, to say the least. SCIENCE!
Trailer:
Porcupine Clip (audience suggestion for object of worship):
Incidentally, this means I probably won't sign onto the forums much for the next few days (get back on Saturday), but I'll squash any spambot bugs that might show up upon my return.
This totally made my day. I have to visit the 'Belt more.