Monday, 29 April 2024
Life, the universe, pies, hot-pink bunnies, world domination, and everything
We haven’t had a new one of these threads since v. 2011.2. With elections coming up in three months, we’ll probably need one for 2012.
Description:
A place for careful, clear, respectful discussions of difficult topics. No flame wars, please. This isn’t the rest of the Internet (as you may have noticed).
We can’t stop talking about it, so here’s a special place to continue the conversation that started on the Random thread.
This is the second and final Friday the 13th of 2012. (The first one was in January.) Let’s hear your good-luck stories from the day.
As before, Robert takes on the world (or at least the world of logged-in MuseBloggers). The twist is that he will keep all of his pieces on “his” side of the board, the first four rows, unless forced across because it’s the only move available. White will be hunkered down for trench warfare; Black will have to go in and dig him out. Ready? Let’s go!
This morning, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland announced that they have all-but-discovered a new particle that behaves a lot like the long-predicted Higgs boson.
Paul Baker announced it to the blog, and Robert’s magazine tells all about it here.
Ever get the feeling that the whole world was against you? That’s the idea behind this chess game. In a desperate ploy scientific experiment designed to see whether it’s possible to keep a game here moving forward to a conclusion, GAPA Robert Coontz is taking the black pieces and allowing anybody on MuseBlog to move for White. Trash talk, taunts, and analysis are encouraged. Let’s see if this works.
First move, anybody?
The summer solstice, the official astronomical start of summer, is today, June 20. Here’s a thread for summery facts and fancies.
Confusingly, midsummer night falls just three days from now, on June 23 — a magical, dreamy time, we need hardly explain.
(Of course, that’s assuming you live in the Northern Hemisphere. For MBers south of the equator, this is the winter solstice, and we beg your pardon.)
Jadestone and Dodecahedron have finished sewing their space squids and have sent us pictures of the celestial cephalopods.
Cat’s Eye sent it with the note:
I was recently surfing the Internet and I happened to stumble upon this photo. Shortly afterwards, I found out that it was taken in my area; the statue/mural in question is in San Francisco. In light of this, I thought I would send it in to be observed and recorded by the general MuseBlog community, and perhaps ask for a small prayer on my behalf.
By request. The description on the original thread:
You know what we’re talking about: things that, for no good reason, you enjoy having around, being around, or doing.
The gentlest and most poetic of the classic science-fiction writers lived in the October Country:
“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.â€
Editors work behind the scenes, but every now and then we accidentally catch a piece of spotlight. One of Robert’s recent projects is getting a little attention this week. It’s called Mysteries of Astronomy, and you can read about it here:
www. msnbc. msn. com/id/47637714/ns/technology_and_science-space/
In the United States, at least, National Doughnut Day is the first Friday in June. If you check your usual sources, maybe you can get a free one. (See? Some of what you learn here is useful.)
This seems like a perfect occasion to reprise the Feather-y Valentine that Cskia sent to the blog a few months ago.
The self-heckling is likely to be the best part of this game.
Ratings at start of game: Agent Lightning 100, L 100.
Ratings at end of game: Agent Lightning 50, L 150.
This time capsule was inspired by Choklit Orange’s recent encounter with sculptures by the French artist Auguste Rodin, which she said she would like to pie. As it happens, Robert also had a Rodin experience once upon a time — one that involved a different kind of food. Over to him:
It was when I was in my 20s and sharing a house with some high-school buddies near Washington, D.C. My friend J. J. Martindale, whose name some of the older MBers will recognize, was working in New York and came down for a weekend to sleep on our couch and see some sights. She was feeling mischievous, as usual, and I was delighted when she and my housemate John agreed to try something I’d been pondering for a while.
It involved “The Burghers of Calais,” a bronze sculpture by Rodin, one cast of which stands in the sculpture garden of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. The sculpture, a larger-than-life representation of half a dozen mournful-looking men with ropes around their necks, commemorates something that happened in France during the Hundred Years War. When the city of Calais surrendered after a long and miserable siege, the victorious English army demanded that six prominent citizens come out in their underwear, with nooses, to be executed. The English changed their minds at the last minute and spared them, but it was a close call.
J. J. and John and I went to an upholstery store and bought some large cylinders and thin sheets of foam rubber, which we took home and carved into the shapes of oversized buns, meat patties, and leaves of lettuce. We glued them together to look like hamburgers, stuck some watermelon seeds on top to approximate scaled-up sesame seeds, and spray-painted the foam murky green and black to resemble weathered bronze. Once the hamburgers were dry, we stuffed them into knapsacks and drove to the Hirshhorn.
J. J., who hailed from Surrey, England, by way of Cambridge, distracted the guard by pretending to be a confused tourist. (“Excuse me, could you tell me whether that large building over there is the White House? Oh, it’s not? Are you sure? The Capitol, you say? What do they do there?”) Once we were in the clear, John and I unzipped our own foam mini-sculptures and slotted them into place. Voilà :
Date: May 19, 2012
Categories: Life, Nonrandom Craziness, Sound and images, The Universe, Time Capsules
Swedes, it appears, love to tinker with their language. A few decades ago, they decided that their formal pronoun Ni (the equivalent of Spanish usted, German singular Sie, and French singular vous) sounded too stuffy, so they abolished it. Just like that, the Swedes became knights who formerly said “Ni.”
Now reformers there are trying to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun to supplement the standard han (he) and hon (she). A couple of writers have produced a children’s book that uses it exclusively to refer to all the characters.
The pronoun is hen.
Hm… Why does that sound familiar? Have the Swedes been reading MuseBlog?
Matthew Arnold was suitably awed:
Read more »
It’s spring, for those who live in the Northern Hemisphere and hadn’t noticed. Autumn in the antipodes. Pleasant seasons, both.
KaiYves sent this illustrated report on her spring break:
I wanted to go to a lot of space-related places in the New York area over Spring Break, but the problem is that my parents still had work and my brothers still had school, so my dad told me I could go see them all, as long as I did it all in one day, I woke up at 4 AM to drive into Manhattan with him, and I took cabs in-between all the sites and paid for my own cab fare.
Naturally, I agreed.
