JamesSavik

This is fun.

>>The two of them were covered in mud and blood. The shovels were cracked, and the rain washed the tombstone cleaned. They had just buried their friend for the fourth time this week. What was going on? It sounds like they were burying him in Steven King's Pest Cemetery.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster Nebula

Been there. Done that. Wear the scars. They get to walk away when it's over and have a merry old life. If you are gay, you don't. You wasted your time and energy on someone that is only capable of taking, not giving. I'm not saying you are crazy if you do this but... insanity is often defined as repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.

The Pathfinders (preview) ______________________________ “What do you mean, I’m the father?” Tom poured two drinks and slid one across the bar. "Let's see. It was your idea Dan." "But... but... It was just so obvious. Others were suggesting it too." Tom sipped the whiskey and said, " No one with your stature and reputation. Oh sure, lot's of people have been thinking about it but you are the one that got behind and pushed." Dan shook his head, "Well, yeah. I suppose whe

The Pathfinders (preview) ______________________________ “What do you mean, I’m the father?” Tom poured two drinks and slid one across the bar. "Let's see. It was your idea Dan." "But... but... It was so obvious. Others were suggesting it too." Tom sipped the whiskey and said, " No one with your stature and reputation. Oh sure, lot's of people have been thinking about it but you are the one that got behind and pushed." Dan shook his head, "Well, yeah. I suppose when you run your mouth, you've got to put up or shut up." "Whoa there Dan. You did a LOT more than put up. Putting your patents and royalties in one of the largest trusts in history to fund what will be a multi-generational effort counts as putting up." "Even while the war was still going on people were complaining about the stand down on surveys and colonization. A lot of people were thinking about restarting the Alliance Survey Service." Tom laughed and said, "Well at least now it won't have the acronym A.S.S." He raised his glass and said, "To the Pathfinders. This is going to be a lot of fun." >>The Pathfinders

Different things turn on different people. Some people like legs, some like muscles, some like pecs and so forth. To me as a freckled half-ginger, a day-walker if you will, nothing is sexier than really nice skin. *Purrs loudly* 😼 What is really fun is finding out that you and your significant other have complimentary buttons. For instance: while I was struck nearly incoherent by his hot, hot skin, he was in a similar state over my half-ginger attributes. It is this sort of chemistry and reaction that you may have to clean up afterwards with a mop a bucket.

Task Force Hammerhead Checkpoint Point Able Saratoga The pilots and crews of the Saratoga’s embarked squadrons, the VF-122 Diamond Backs, were all crowded into the pilot’s briefing room to hear Admiral Tanaka’s address to the strike wings all across the task force. His image was on the large view screen in the front of the compartment: “We have all trained for this for months. We’ve waited for this moment for years. We do not know what we will be facing soon so remembe

One of Scientific America's stories this month is: New Data: Hurricanes Will Get Worse New data from hurricane Harvey last year gives the author the ideas that hurricanes will be bigger, more frequent and cause tooth decay. OK. I added tooth decay. He might as well add tooth decay because that is as easily inferred from ONE SINGLE DATA SET. If I had turned in this paper, my advisor would have ripped me a new one. HOW are you supposed to make general observations about a phenomenon like hurricanes from one data set??? The ONLY REASON you would do that is because the data set is saying what you want it to say. Down South here we are very familiar with the big, honking hurricane that blow through occasionally and rewrite the map. We have learned something very interesting about them. The killer storms come in years corresponding with the Solar Minimum. It's a cycle the sun goes through every eleven years. Last year when the big storms hit: Harvey, Maria and Irma, do a little math. What was almost ~11 years before? Remember Katrina(? ~Eleven years before that? Hurricane John. 11 years before that? Alice in 1983. Agnes in 1972. Ester and Carla in 1961. In 1950 there were 6. 1939 there were 6. 1928 there were 4 including the Okeechobe Hurricane that killed 4,000. In 1917 there were 7 hurricanes including Nueva Gerona Hurricane- the strongest hurricane to hit Florida until Andrew in 1992 (a year off the tick). What we are being told- climate change is driving bigger storms. Based on Harvey. ONE STORM. What is the data REALLY saying??? Based on 100 years of storm data??? Solar minimums drive bigger storms and clusters of storms. Solar minimum years and their cusps (the year ahead or behind the minimum) have had some of the most devastating storms in history. Remember THAT when you read someone's work when they talk about data gathered from ONE storm.

A couple of years ago I was fat. Not pleasantly plump. Not healthy. Fat. It happens when you get older and don't change diet and exercise more. I got into the work, home, work cycle. I let things go and HOLY CRAP, HOW DID I GET TO BE ALMOST 300 pounds!? No one was more surprised than me. I didn't see myself as fat. Other people saw me as fat and it shows in a lot of ways. People aren't as welcoming. They size you up in a few milliseconds and, what they decide isn't good for you. If its dealing with a bureaucracy, you'll get every possible form and sit in every possible line. At the doctors office, you'll get called last. In line at fast food, they won't really listen to your order. All of these consequences come from that millisecond evaluation. It's different when you aren't fat. In a bureaucracy like the DMV, they'll tell you how to get done quicker. At the doctors office, you get seen quicker. In a fast food joint, they are more attentive. You can really tell the difference when other peoples millisecond evaluation process doesn't pop up, FAT ASS. Oh sure, you can still be an ass but, if you have a nice ass, people don't care nearly as much. Given a choice, it's much preferable to walk around and interact with a world with a nice ass than a fat ass. IT REALLY DOES MAKE A DIFFERENCE. People are more polite. Some people are even differential. People that you saw everyday FAT, treat you differently NOT FAT. It's odd. It shouldn't really matter but, apparently it does. Someone should do a scientific study. The results are really eye opening. I'm not fat shaming anyone. I am just glad I'm not fat anymore because it makes a world of difference.

I've restarted my long stalled story. The end is in sight.

Argus Sigma Puppis System Argus sat serenely moored to a long abandoned mining station. Beside her in the next slip was her sister the Phrixus which was loaded with illegally augmented humans— almost all of them twenty-five years old or younger. It was the next ship over that Mason looked at with dread: the Marine Assault ship Corregidor. At sixty thousand tons, the Cory was many times larger than the freighters. Despite being a forty-year-old veteran of the ConFed War, she was st

That's coming Paul but I've got to finish Operation Hammerhead first. It'll make more sense when I start rolling it out.

Task Force Hammerhead Saratoga 0700 “Now hear this. This is the XO. Begin morning watch. We will be arriving at our replenishment point this morning. Expect a layover of three days as the fleet fuels and loads munitions. I expect our replenishment teams to get us squared away soonest. The carriers are in the front of the line, so the sooner we get it done, the more time we’ll have for rope yarn.” Danny logged into the master navigational console for the morning watch and sent

Rand isn't for everybody. I've heard way too many people criticize her work that have obviously never read it. One thing that she is about that most everyone can appreciate and that's thinking for yourself.

Star Creation --"May Not Be the Same Everywhere in the Milky Way" April 30, 2018 The mass distribution of young stars may not be the same everywhere in our Galaxy, contrary to what is currently assumed. If this turns out to be the case, the scientific community will be forced to re-examine its calculations about star formation and, eventually, any estimates that depend on the number of massive stars, such as the chemical enrichment of the interstellar medium, and the numbers of black holes and supernovas. In space, hidden behind the dusty veils of nebulae, clouds of gas clump together and collapse, forming the structures from which stars are born: star-forming cores. These cluster together, accumulate matter and fragment, eventually giving rise to a cluster of young stars of various masses, whose distribution was described by Edwin Salpeter as an astrophysical law in 1955. Astronomers had already noticed that the ratio of massive objects to non-massive objects was the same in clusters of star-forming cores as in clusters of newly-formed stars. This suggested that the mass distribution of stars at birth, known as the IMF1, was simply the result of the mass distribution of the cores from which they formed, known as the CMF2. However, this conclusion resulted from the study of the molecular clouds closest to our Solar System, which are not very dense and therefore not very representative of the diversity of such clouds in the Galaxy. Is the relationship between the CMF and the IMF universal? What do we observe when we look at denser, more distant clouds? These were the questions asked by researchers at the Grenoble Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics and the Astrophysics, Instrumentation and Modelling Laboratory, when they started to observe the active star-formation region W43-MM1, whose structure is far more typical of molecular clouds in our Galaxy than those observed previously. Thanks to the unprecedented sensitivity and spatial resolution of the ALMA antenna array in Chile, the researchers were able to establish a statistically robust core distribution over an unmatched range of masses, from solar-type stars to stars 100 times more massive. To their surprise, the distribution did not obey Salpeter's 1955 law. It turned out that, in the W43-MM1 cloud, there was an overabundance of massive cores, while less massive cores were under-represented. These findings call into question not only the relationship between the CMF and the IMF, but even the supposedly universal nature of the IMF. The teams will continue their work with ALMA within a consortium of around forty researchers. Their aim is to study 15 regions similar to W43-MM1 in order to compare their CMFs and ascertain whether the characteristics of this cloud can be generalized. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, captured the image at the top of the page of a star-forming cloud of dust and gas located in the constellation of Monoceros. The nebula, commonly referred to as Sh2-284, is relatively isolated at the very end of an outer spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. In the night sky, it's located in the opposite direction from the center of the Milky Way. Perhaps the most interesting features in Sh2-284 are what astronomer call "elephant trunks." Elephant trunks are monstrous pillars of dense gas and dust. The most famous examples of are the "Pillars of Creation," found in an iconic image of the Eagle nebula from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. In this WISE image, the trunks are seen as small columns of gas stretching towards the center of the void in Sh2-284, like little green fingers with yellow fingernails. The most notable one can be seen on the right side of the void at about the 3 o'clock position. It appears as a closed hand with a finger pointing towards the center of the void. That elephant trunk is about 7 light-years long. Deep inside Sh2-284 resides an open star cluster, called Dolidze 25, which is emitting vast amounts of radiation in all directions, along with stellar winds. These stellar winds and radiation are clearing out a cavern inside the surrounding gas and dust, creating the void seen in the center. The bright green wall surrounding the cavern shows how far out the gas has been eroded However, some sections of the original gas cloud were much denser than others, and they were able to resist the erosive power of the radiation and stellar winds. These pockets of dense gas remained and protected the gas "downwind" from them, leaving behind the elephant trunks. These pillars can also be thought of as rising like stalagmites from the cavern walls. The Daily Galaxy via Grenoble Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics (CNRS/Université Grenoble Alpes) ___________________________________________________ Not really a huge surprise of a discovery. Stars form differently in different regions. This is known from observation. Different types of stars form under different conditions.

A number of years ago, I was in a bad place. After a number of set backs, I was beginning to feel like a loser. Note the word FEEL. I was overweight, getting older and feeling like the sun had set on me. I began to look and see what could make me feel like a winner again. To get back to where I wanted to be, FEELING like a winner, I had to get back in the habit of winning. Not just a few wins. Important wins. Life goal wins. So I set some goals. A few rather lofty ones. There are were two fairly big ones that I wanted to accomplish. The first because it was important to me because it was about how I saw myself and the other is about how others see me. First- the one about me was to put anther notch in my education resume. CHECK! I get a second degree in May. Second- the other one is about how others see me. That one is also going well. I'm down to 245 and will eventually go a little lower. 220 is my eventual target but, coming down from nearly 300 pounds, you can forgive me for saying mission accomplished. There have been other goals but these are key: I did what most people can not do or are just not motivated to do. I proved myself to myself after doubting myself for a very long time. I've won something back that I lost a long time ago- self confidence. Now that I'm facing new adversity, that's damn good to have in the bank. I can find a way to win.

Is a truly terrible place. The last Friday in February my 90 year old mother fell and broke her hip. Luckily she broke the femur and not close into the joint so the repair surgery was not complicated and didn't need a replacement. Unluckily, she is 90 and opiate sensitive. Anything they give her for pain is a nightmare of nausea and delirium. She spent a week in the hospital for the surgery, a week in a rehab hospital and six weeks in a rehab care facility and came home Friday the 13th. They sent her home too soon and I must take care of her 24-7. I've got some help but it seems far away during a 4am crisis. The very day that my mother fell, my older brother went into a hospital across country with what has been diagnosed as bone marrow cancer. I am alone with the care of my mother and, I can't get away to see my brother. I'm alone. I am afraid. I must hold the line. Every man is tested and this is my hour. I will stand come what may because to cower and shy away from this is simply not who I am. My worst hour will be my finest hour.

My Azaleas showing off. Clematis

It was just a rock.

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This is the best recipe/how to for red beans and rice on youtube. It takes a while to cook but it is well worth it. Recipe & directions on youtube link.

You guys beat me to it. Here's NPR's article link: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/23/580109007/ursula-le-guin-whose-novels-plucked-truth-from-high-fantasy-dies-at-88