JamesSavik

Dom- You did the right thing. My old friend Booger the cat got dreadfully sick from kidney failure in Nov 2002. The kidney failure killed him. I had him put to sleep to save him the misery. I still miss Booger, he was great. He was a wise old cat at 16. I named him after the character from Revenge of the Nerds. Unlike many cats, Booger was one of the guys. He would hang out and cut up with us. He had seasonal allergies and sneezed mighty wet, snotty sneezes during the spring. One of my favorite memories of Booger is when two cute Mormon guys came to the door. I went to the door and Booger went to investigate our visitors who pet him and commented on what a nice cat he was. Booger then hauled off and sneezed blowing chunky boogers on their navy blue slacks. I'm going to have to work that into a story somehow. JS

Jeez- Cheese-heads are sensitive.

This movie has GLBT content. The female lead *may* be a lesbian. When the female lead was being held in a camp, she read a letter from a lesbian that had been killed in the camps that provided a description of how things had changed and tyranny came in small increments.

Is America Punch-Drunk? American history is lousy with them. The twentieth century started with one. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the 50 year Cold War, the Gulf War, Somalia, a hundred other conflicts that only historians remember and finally rounding out the nineties, we just couldn

I run into this problem sometimes. I solve it by smuggling in a one liter drink and nachos into the theater. It doesn't solve the problem of not having a companion at the movie, but you do get to see the movie of your choice. James the Nacho smuggler.

I just watched it three times in a row!!! This is a movie you must see to believe!

I recently got hold of two programs that I love dearly: Mathematica and Delphi 2006. Niether are cheap- both run about $100 if you are a student or teacher. If not, they'll run 10 times that. Delphi 2006 is the latest incarnation of Borlands Object Pascal and C++. It is a industrial strength programming environment with debugger and lots of bells & whistles. It produces lightning fast executable code. While I am not the worlds greatest C++ programmer, I am a competent Pascal programmer. The Delphi environment lets you mix & match. Mathematica is absolutely awesome. It is an environment that allows you to do higher math. What makes it so cool for me is that I was never a good math student. I always knew the concepts but I have problems with my vision that makes things really difficult. BAM! Along come Mathmatica and I can put the problems on the screen and I don't have to draw (which I can not do). It also gives you confidence to explore math that might have sounded entirely too scary to mess with. There is a series of 5 differential equations that I needed to learn. After putting them in mathmatica and running them through their paces, I ain't skeered of a few little differential equations anymore. I sure wish I had this stuff when I was an undergrad. I really envy you guys that are in or starting college now. You've got some of the neatest toys in world history to play with. Jump on that wave and ride! New technologies like Delphi and Mathematica make new worlds open up; worlds that are accessable to all- not just a few ivory tower coneheads. Just think what Einstein or Schrodinger might have accomplished with a tool like Mathematica! JS

A variation on this one: Drunk Guy (slurring): Hey baby, guess my sign and I'll buy you a drink. gender-neutral disinterested party*: You are definitly a feces. *- trying to be politically correct for Kitty.

Her behind was sooo fat that during aftermath of Hurricane Katrina helicopters started landing on it. She had to quit going to the beach. People kept pouring water on her and trying to roll her back out to sea. She tried to fly once but the only planes she could get on were flown by UPS. She is required by law to always use the freight elevator. She has so many rolls of fat that every time she moves, another roll is exposed creating a new oder.

She had a face that launched a thousand suicides. He had the kind of voice that that made you want to kick his ass and then kick his daddy's ass. She was so ugly as a child that her mother kept her on a leash because vultures kept mistaking her for carrion and trying to carry her off. After reviewing the casefile on the Hanson murder, the only mystery left for Detective Carson was why it took so long for for someone to wack the miserable SOB. The only use I could think of for Carol was to put her at reception to scare off anyone who wasn't serious.

Cats are a lot like people in that they have very distinctive personalities. Some are good natured and friendly, skitish and fearful or grouchy and mean. If you know cats well, you can tell that some cats are smarter than others. Some are very sensitive and you can hurt their feelings or make them angry and they don't forget easily. My cat Boo is dumb as a rock. He's afraid of everything. He used to get lost in the house. He is skitish to the point of being hysterical. My mother once told me only you would have a retarded cat. I scolded her for using the "R" word and told her that he's special. When I first got this cat, I though I was going to hate him. He wasn't fond of me either. It took an enormus amount of attention and affection but he's turned out to be a pretty good cat.

The right-wankers, those who would restrict the rights of others, have all the warmth and charm of used car salemen. "Trust us, just sign here."

Where are the supermassive black holes hiding? 26 July 2006 ESA Press Release Source Link This artist's impression shows the thick dust torus that astronomers believe surrounds many supermassive black holes and their accretion discs. When the torus is seen edge-on as in this case, much of the light emitted by the accretion disc is blocked, creating a "hidden" black hole. However, the sharp gamma-ray and X-ray eyes of Integral can peer through the thick dust and identify the black hole within. An Integral survey of the local universe found few hidden black holes, implying that they must have existed earlier (deeper) in the universe. Credits: ESA / V. Beckmann (NASA-GSFC) ____________________________________________________________________ European and American scientists, on a quest to find super-massive black holes hiding in nearby galaxies, have found surprisingly few. Either the black holes are better hidden than scientists realised or they are lurking only in the more distant universe. Scientists are convinced that some super-massive black holes must be hiding behind thick clouds of dust. These dusty shrouds allow only the highest energy X-rays to shine through. Once in space, the X-rays combine into a cosmic background of X-rays that permeates the whole of space. The search for hidden black holes is part of the first census of the highest-energy part of the X-ray sky. Led by Loredana Bassani, IASF, Italy, a team of astronomers published results in The Astrophysical Journal Letters in January this year. They show the fraction of hidden black holes in the nearby Universe to be around 15 percent, using data from ESA

Just a thought: If you have Japanese or Chinese characters done- make good and sure you know what they say. I don't know if the is urban legend or not but there a story about some US marines & sailors who got some tats done at Okinawa. The characters that they got were supposed to be strength, Tiger or Dragon turned out to be "little bitch", "sloppy bottom" and "needle dick".

77 books is a few? Like fantasy a bit do you? There is a 200 book limit for free accounts. I ran into the wall and trimmed back. My entries are all from my professional library. The best thing about the site is that it simplifies creating the data for you.

I don't want a tat or piercing. That being said, I wouldn't disrespect anyone for getting inked or pierced. I'm all about freedom of expression The idea that tats aren't aceptable to polite society makes me think that I just may have to rethink tats. I rather enjoy giving polite society the rude finger but I usually go about it in different ways. Polite society shats on anything that is strange, unusual or different. Since I am strange, unusual and different, Polite Society and I have a fundamental disagreement. JS

Free space on LibraryThing.com is limited to 200 entries. I went back to cull some things out like certification test prep books. The whole database is a little short of 1,000 entries. Think I might spring for a paid account. Let's see- about organization: I organize my working library into hiearchies. The top level is: writing, technology, math, reference, science, etc. My recreational reading stuff is not organized. As I use the tech stuff professionally, it's useful to have a catalog for tax purposes. Then under these broad catagories, more specialties: Science: Astronomy & Astrophysics, Quantum Mechanics, Chemistry Math: Handbooks, Basics, Calculus, Multivariable Cal, Advanced Cal, DE, Integrals Technology: Programming, networks, Operating Systems, DBMS, applications Physically I put these "clumps" together. House Guests I would love to have house guests! However at the moment I am the primary caregiver for my elderly parents. My Dad has Parkinstons and my Mom just had cataract surgery. Needless to say, its a handful. When she is better, it will free me up. ADA ADA is a pretty good language. It's a structured language similar to Pascal with some OO features. Unfortunately there just aren't that many compilers for it and it's not getting much use. It's a shame as ADA was designed to be embedded software and it does very well in that role. Most companies are using C for that.

If it can read the ISBN number off the barcode then I don't see why not. I use my database and paste the ISBN number in the right place and LibraryThing finds the right book.

If you are a book person, and who here on a literary web site isn't, you've probably got stack or two of books lying around. Not long after I moved the last time, I decided to create a database of my books for a number of reasons. One- to get a handle on what I have. My idea of a nice day out shopping is a visit to all of the book shops [and maybe a hardware store ]. The second reason I did the project was to physically locate everything after the move. Last- as I use my books constantly, I can now look at my database to see if I have anything that might address a particular problem or plan to add a new book(s) to meet a specific need. This was a *Huge* undertaking. I designed and wrote the database from scratch. Tested it of course- made a cool linky thing so an ISBN# could look up stuff at the push of a button. Then I spent days entering the actual data. After writing code and doing data entry, it was a couple of weeks work [not all in a row]. So I have this database for about 4 months and what do I diiscover? Someone has the nerve to offer the same service for free. The site can be found at LibraryThing. You can log in, create an account and get to work. It's WAY easier than the application that I wrote. All you have to do is enter the books ISBN number (on modern books it on the barcode on the back and title page. The site then looks up all the relevent information about your book and then you can add it to your personal catalog. You can then rate and review books in your holdings and see the ratings and reviews that other users have posted. If you are going to sink a bunch of cash into a book these days, it really pays to make sure that its worth it. If you want to take a look at my library, check out >> James Library (I don't have all of my books entered yet). It's really worth creating your own catalog and this site's tools make it a lot easier than a DIY project.

Perish the thought. Nor would I expect Ben to wear such a plain night shirt.

New Life in Dead Star: Supernova 'Changing Right Before Our Eyes' Ker Than for Space.com July 24, 2006 Source Link This image of SN 1987A combines data from NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory and the 8-meter Gemini South infrared telescope in Chile. The X-ray light detected by Chandra is colored blue. The infrared light detected by Gemini South is shown as green and red. The ring is produced by hot gas (largely the X-ray light) and cold dust (largely the infrared light) from the exploded star interacting with the interstellar region. Credit: Gemini/NASA _________________________________________________________________ Newly detected dust found around the burst remains of a dead star could help reveal how planets and stars formed and how life began. About 160,000 years ago, a star 20 times more massive than our sun erupted in a fiery explosion called a supernova. The star was located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy. In 1987, the first light from that catastrophic event reached Earth and for several months, the supernova, dubbed SN 1987A, blazed as brightly as 100 million suns before fading again. Now, nearly two decades later, astronomers have detected dust particles around the supernova that they think formed before the star exploded. The new finding is the first evidence that star dust can survive a supernova explosion. It is also providing a rare glimpse into a process called "sputtering," in which dust is eroded by interactions with superheated gas. "Supernova 1987A is changing right before our eyes," said Eli Dwek, a cosmic dust expert at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland who was involved in the finding. "What we are seeing is a milestone in the evolution of a supernova." Cosmic building blocks Finer than grains of beach sand, stellar dust is a constant source of frustration for astronomers because it can obscure observations from distant stars. Yet the troublesome dust is also a prime ingredient in the construction of planets and of all living things. The dust is made in the fiery furnaces of stars as they burn and is scattered across space either by stellar winds or by supernova explosions. Despite its importance, scientists still know very little about star dust. How much dust does a star produce throughout its lifetime? How much survives a star's death? And how do rings of dust coalesce to form stars and planets? 1987A's newly detected stardust, found using an infrared telescope at the Gemini South Observatory in Chile, could help astronomers answer these questions. The dust particles are intermixed with superheated, X-ray emitting gas and found within an equatorial ring around SN 1987A. About a light-year across, the ring of gas and dust is expanding very slowly. This suggests that the ring was created about 600,000 years before the star exploded, the researchers say. It is therefore unlikely that the ring was created by a supernova blast during the star's death, but rather by stellar winds when the star was still alive. Made visible The ring of dust and gas remained invisible for nearly twenty years until shockwaves from the supernova blast caught up with it. As the shockwaves expanded, they passed through the ring, heating up its gas and normally cool dust until they glowed in the infrared. "This much was expected," said study team member Patrice Bouchet of the Observatoire de Paris. "The collision between the ejecta of supernova 1987A and the equatorial ring was predicted to occur sometime in the interval of 1995 to 2007, and it is now underway." What was surprising, however, was the composition of the dust, which followup observations with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope revealed to be almost pure silicate. Also, far less dust than expected was detected. A star as massive as the one that created SN 1987A was thought to produce much more dust. The dearth of dust could mean that shockwaves from the supernova blast destroyed more dust than originally thought. This could have broad implications for determining dust origins throughout the universe if confirmed, the researchers say. A spate of new infrared, optical and X-ray observations of SN 1987A are now planned to follow up on the new findings. ___________________________________________________________________ Core of Supernova Goes Missing Michael Schirber for Space.com June 6, 2005 Source Link The remnant of supernova 1987A shows no sign of the neutron star scientists believe is lurking at its heart. The Hubble Space Telescope took this image in December 2004. Credit: P. Challis & R. Kirshner, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics ____________________________________________________________________ A search for the remains of a nearby stellar explosion has come up empty. Astronomers observed the blast site of the supernova, SN 1987A, with the Hubble Space Telescope, but could not find any sign of the dense stellar core. "We think a neutron star was formed. The question is: Why don't we see it?" astronomer Genevieve Graves of UC Santa Cruz said today. A neutron star is an extremely dense ball of subatomic particles, which theory says can form as the core of a massive star collapses after exploding. This is what is believed to have happened in 1987, when a star with 20 times the mass of our Sun blew up, 165,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. "Therein lies the mystery -- where is that missing neutron star?" said Robert Kirshner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Neutron stars are often detected as pulsars when they emit intense beams of radio waves, like a lighthouse. It may be too soon to see radio flashes from the remnant of SN 1987A, since theory predicts that pulsars take between 100 to 100,000 years to develop after a supernova. A young neutron star could, however, be seen if it is swallowing up nearby gas and debris from the explosion. This accreted material would heat up and emit light. But when the team of astronomers scoured the area of SN 1987A, they found no signature of this accretion. "A neutron star could just be sitting there inside SN 1987A, not accreting matter and not emitting enough light for us to see," said Peter Challis from the CfA. Future observations may uncover this quiet remnant by studying the infrared emission from dust clouds in the vicinity, which may be reprocessing the weak ultraviolet and visible light coming from the neutron star. A supernova from a more massive star can form a black hole, instead of a neutron star. The progenitor of SN 1987A is right near the dividing line, so it may have created a black hole. Still, a black hole would be indirectly detectable by the same accretion mechanism that was not seen in these latest results. _______________________________________________________________ Hubble Reveals Dramatic New Phase of a Supernova Explosion Robert Roy Britt for Space.com 19 February 2004 Source Link A sequence of Hubble images of supernova 1987A taken from 1994 through late 2003 shows the central star has faded while bright spots in the outer ring are enhanced. ________________________________________________________________ The most dramatic stellar explosion witnessed in centuries just got more interesting. New images from the Hubble Space Telescope show a dying star's "ring of fire" entering a new phase of brightness. The remarkable event is the only one of its kind ever recorded by telescopes. Astronomers first saw the star explode -- an event called a supernova -- in 1987. It shone as bright as 100 million suns for several months. Robert Kirshner of Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics led the latest observations. He explained what's going on around the star named 1987A. When the star first exploded, ultraviolet light raced outward and lit up a previously unknown ring of gaseous debris that the star had presumably spat out about 20,000 years prior. "Then there's a blast wave going out from the supernova to the ring," Kirshner said in a telephone interview. "We all knew it was going to hit in a decade or so." Shock wave hits In 1996, that shock wave began to plow into the debris ring, which is about a light-year in diameter. It heated the ring material -- gas and dust -- in spots, created an increasing number of bright areas that Hubble has been documenting over the years. In the latest image, the spots nearly cover the ring like pearls on a necklace. The star, meanwhile, is a million times dimmer than when it first exploded. The fact that the ring did not light up all at once suggests it is not perfectly round but instead is unstable, with parts of the inner ring closer to the central star than other parts, Kirshner said. He described it as a corrugated structure, or a wall with stalactites sticking inward. Inside the ring, an amorphous purplish blob surrounds the central, dying star. That blob glows because it's made of radioactive elements forged in the supernova explosion. It is probably radioactive titanium, Kirshner explained, "shredded bits of the star going out at about 3,000 kilometers per second," or 6.7 million mph. "Looking at the expansion of that [blob] we get a clue to what was happening in first couple of minutes of the explosion of the star," he said. Scientists have seen no other supernova evolve over time with anything approaching this sort of detail. Show continues The ring around 1987A should continue to brighten for a couple of decades, Kirshner said. The bright spots will merge as the debris is engulfed by the shock wave until it creates a "ring of fire," he said. Watching the evolution should help theorists understand how and why stars explode. "There's going to be plenty to see," Kirshner said. But its uncertain whether 1987A will be monitored continuously. Like many astronomers, Kirshner said he's disappointed that under NASA's current plans, Hubble won't be around to record 1987A's progress in the latter years of this decade. The activity can be studied by X-ray and radio observatories, but valuable visible-light data would go uncollected. "The value of the data keeps getting bigger as we get a longer series," Kirshner said. He added that it could be a long time before a similar event is available to astronomers and Hubble "is one of our chief instruments for doing this." The last supernova to shine so brightly in Earth's skies was spotted by Johannes Kepler 400 years ago. 1987A was generated by a star 20 times more massive than the Sun. It resides in a nearby galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Because of the time it takes light from the event to reach Hubble, the explosion actually occurred 160,000 years ago, in the time frame of its origin. _______________________________________________________________ This is a wide field image from the Hubble taken of the remnant of SN 1987A. The background is the Large Magellanic Cloud-- a nearby galaxy observable from the southern hemisphere. This image of SN 1987A was voted #6 of the Hubble's top 10 most valuable science images.

Is this what the Brits mean when they say "cheeky bugger"?

We had a friend that decided to go bald like that. People kept asking him how long he had had cancer so he grew it back.

My apologies again to the Mac legions Ryan. I should have thought of a "Mac" option when I set up the poll. I thought I was being progressive when I included Linux.

Here lately it has either been storming (not just raining) or 100+ degrees.