Friday, 3 May 2024
Life, the universe, pies, hot-pink bunnies, world domination, and everything
WARNING! Will definitely contain spoilers!
To spare MBers reading the “Recent Comments” columns, please paste the following message in at the beginning of your posts:
SPOILER MUSE SPOILER MUSE SPOILER MUSE SPOILER MUSE SPOILER.
Date: April 23, 2010
Categories: The magazine
FIRST POST!!!!!!!!!
SPOILER MUSE SPOILER MUSE SPOILER MUSE SPOILER MUSE SPOILER
((sorry i just wanted first post.))
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Good for you. Please report to the Neophytes thread, located on the home page. Thank you and average day.
-PointlessPostPolice
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( I AM NOT A NEOPHYTE!! i am just puff puff, with a serious wariors cats obsession. )
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That post made me laugh, just so you know. *pays choklit to Jakob Wonkychair*
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hey- why don’t I get choklit? *pouts*
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Because he was part of the Pointless Post Police, and they fine people in choklit. Because post 2.1 was kind of pointless, I paid him choklit. But you can have some too 
*hugs bluestarrox and gives en choklit*
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create website called princess_magnolia is awesome!
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Nay, a fine of choklit is owed to the PoPoPo for a pointless post.
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If I may, it was because you were the one being warned for a PoPo while Jakob was doing his job and warning you. Princess_M paid him choklit because he had already established himself on this thread as a member of the PointlessPostPolice and she was afraid her post would also be seen as pointless. I believe, though she may correct me on this, that she did not bother to pay you choklit because you not only are not a PoPoPo officer, but you had a PoPo yourself.
*also pays choklit to Jakob Wonkychair*
Now, to make this sort of related, I will never get my May/June Muse because I no longer have a subscription *cries*.
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My apologies. I had not seen you before, and you reminded me of someone else. Additionally, you have had three name changes, so that threw me off a bit.
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Could we discuss the magazine maybe…?
SPOILER MUSE SPOILER MUSE SPOILER MUSE SPOILER MUSE SPOILER.
Personally, I thought it was the best in a while. I’m still in the process of reading it, but I’m much more hopeful. I liked the folk taxonomy article, that was awesome, and the one about the effects kid’s names have on them was interesting as well.
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SPOILER MUSE SPOILER MUSE SPOILER MUSE SPOILER MUSE SPOILER.
I actually loved this issue, and not just because it combined my two of my recent interests (language and biological) in one wonderful magazine. The articles were all good, and I don’t think I had heard abut anything in there, which I always love from Muse. The folk taxonomy article is the one that I definitely remember (I got 80% on the bird/fish examples). Excellent, overall. 
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I liked the folk taxonomy article, the one about 30 hours without eating, and the dream house that one boy submitted for the “Thinking in Pictures” contest.
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The May/June 2010 Q&A, which POSOC asked but was never able to read. Reprinted with permission.
Q&A, by Robert J. Coontz
Q: How would an electromagnetic pulse–say, from a nuclear detonation–work in an atmosphere stronger than Earth’s–say, Jupiter’s?
–Aaron D., age 15, California
A: Aaron’s question is more complicated than usual for Q&A. (He explained that he needs the answer for a science-fiction story he is writing.) To understand it, you have to understand two things: what an electromagnetic pulse is, and what the magnetosphere is.
First, the pulse. When a nuclear bomb explodes, it gives off a huge blast of heat, light, and noise. It also spews out electrons, the particles that make up electricity.
When physicists first tested nuclear bombs in the mid-1940s, they noticed that something was messing up some of their measuring and recording equipment. In 1962, scientists exploded a nuclear bomb in space over the Pacific Ocean. Burglar alarms went off and streetlights went out in Hawaii, 900 miles away.
The researchers quickly figured out what was happening: Earth is like an enormous magnet, surrounded by a magnetic field that can make some objects, including electrons, move in certain directions. That field comes from Earth’s core and wraps around the planet to form an invisible shell called the magnetosphere (mag-NEE-to-sphere). After the explosion in space, Earth’s magnetic field trapped electrons from the blast and whipped them back and forth over thousands of miles. That “oscillating current” of electrons gave off forces that made electrical equipment on the ground go crazy. Those forces, called an electromagnetic pulse (or EMP for short), can damage telephones, radios, and computers far away from a nuclear blast.
Not all planets have magnetospheres. On Venus or Mars, for example, a science-fiction writer could set off a (fictional) nuclear bomb without worrying about a long-range EMP. Jupiter, however, has an enormous magnetosphere with fields much more powerful than Earth’s. Would that make the EMP bigger too? I asked two top experts on planetary magnetospheres, Ralph McNutt of Johns Hopkins University and Raymond Walker of the University of California, Los Angeles.
“My guess is that it will not be a bigger effect,” McNutt wrote back. “One would need a bigger explosive device.” The important thing, he explained, isn’t the strength of the magnetic field, but the number of electrons in the pulse–and that depends on the size of the explosion. Walker agreed, and added that Jupiter’s magnetosphere would trap most of the electrons in orbit around the planet. There they would drift around and around, slowly escaping into the atmosphere.
In short, the EMP in Aaron’s story will cause problems for orbiting spacecraft, but it will not blow up Jupiter. He’ll need to try something else if he wants to do that.
—Robert
text © 2010 by Robert J. Coontz
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Thanks, Piggy!
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Thanks, Piggy.
(FYI, blowing up Jupiter was not what I had in mind. Jupiter’s a beautiful planet.)
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