Spoiler: Hollywood brawls are fake! Gasp!
Monthly Archives: March 2011
Johnny Cash Takes Some Pictures
I fell into a burning ring of fire …
Nyiragongo Crater: Journey to the Center of the World
In June 2010, a team of scientists and intrepid explorers stepped onto the shore of the lava lake boiling in the depths of Nyiragongo Crater, in the heart of the Great Lakes region of Africa. The team had dreamed of this: walking on the shores of the world’s largest lava lake. Members of the team had been dazzled since childhood by the images of the 1960 documentary “The Devil’s Blast” by Haroun Tazieff, who was the first to reveal to the public the glowing red breakers crashing at the bottom of Nyiragongo crater. Photographer Olivier Grunewald was within a meter of the lake itself, giving us a unique glimpse of it’s molten matter.
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15. The goal of the expedition is to reach the rim of the lava lake. Nobody has previously survived such an encounter.
Same photographer who did the burning molten sulfur spread.
Gnome Sweet Gnome
[G]nomes come in two genders, as one might expect. The particles we consider “negatively charged” are male gnomes; positively charged particles are female. Gnomes are simultaneously an intensely homophobic and an intensely sexual species, and two gnomes of the same gender (or “charge,” as some physicists are wont to call it) repel each other strongly. Oppositely-gendered gnomes, however, experience a strong attraction. Given the gnome propensity for drunken orgies, this attractive force increases with the number of gnomes involved.
The behavior of light is best explained through gnome beer. Gnomes are voracious consumers of beer, and under certain conditions gnomes can be made to give up their beer, emitting light. This causes feature such as the photoelectric effect.
They're in it for the Groupies, Too
If climate scientists are in it for the money, they’re doing it wrong
The ridiculousness of the global-warming-scientists-are-corrupted-by-the-money argument. OTOH, if you can’t find all that cash coming from Big Wind and Big Photovoltaic, maybe it’s because they’re really good at covering it up.