2010 was a great year for one reason only. This was the first year to completely take place in the third millennium! 2000-2009 took place in 2 different millennia.
So this is what living in the third millennium is like.
Blogs. No flying cars. No dinners in the form of capsules. I don’t have a robot wife. I don’t have a smart house. I had a blog.
Anyway, thanks for reading and sharing my Smartest Year! Have a good 2011!
I hate facts so much.
Gordy Jenkins
smartestyear@gmail.com
Cell phones cannot cause cancer. Only x-rays, UV light, and gamma rays are strong enough to break the covalent chemical bonds in your body.
But if you use a cell phone will getting x-rayed, or tanning, or floating around near a quasar, yeah, I guess you could get cancer.
The earth is about 4.6 billion years old. The oldest known fossils are approximately 3.5 billion years old. Homo sapiens have existed for about 100,000 years.
Yet, 2012 is the end of it all. We are quite special.
I hope my fossil will last a few billion years. If I ever die, I want someone to tape a bunch of animal bones to my bones, so when I’m fossilized I will totally freak out the future civilizations!
I tried to make it sound less morbid by emphasizing if I die.
The most hilarious planet, Uranus, is named after the Greek god of the sky, Ouranos. On this astronomy website, several astronomers discussed the pronunciation of the planet. Dr. Pamela Gay notes, “The safest way, the way that’s least likely to get us made fun of by any small children is to say Uranus (UR-uh-nis), but there’s also the famous ur-ANUS way of saying it.” I wonder how Dr. Gay pronounces her last name to avoid getting made fun of by the said small children.
I keep getting lost at sea. It’s getting ridiculous. I always forget how to find the North Star. The North Star, or Polaris, is a very useful navigation tool. You can use it to find your direction, and even determine your latitude based on Polaris’s angle of elevation relative to the horizon. The star can be found easily, as it’s the last star on the handle of the Little Dipper. You can also find it by following the line created by the 2 stars on the Big Dipper that are farthest from the handle. The North Star is only visible in the Northern Hemisphere, so if you’re lost in the Southern Hemisphere you’ll probably just die.
Good luck! And hopefully my stranded readers are in the Northern Hemisphere!
This is the crappiest picture I could find! Enjoy!
Located near the lunar north pole, Peary crater exhibits an extremely unusual condition. Four mountainous regions around the rim of the crater appear to be illuminated for the entire lunar day. These “peaks of eternal light” are the only known regions of constant light in our solar system (astronomers speculate that some places in Mercury may share these features, but no direct observations have been made). The phenomenon results from the slightness of the moon’s rotational axis compared to the plane of its and the Earth’s orbit around the sun. Because of this unique feature, the site has become an early favorite to be home to the first moon base. Lunar Santa Claus is about to get his lunar north pole invaded.
The X Prize Foundation is a non-profit organization that oversees public contests intended to create competition which furthers technological advancements. There are several prizes the X Prize Foundation sponsors. Tying in to yesterday’s fact about the ocean’s deepest point (Challenger Deep), the Ocean X Prize of $10 million will be awarded to the first person to make 2 manned descents in a privately-funded craft. There have been several other contests, such as competitions to map 100 human genomes in 10 days, engineer a totally clean car, and put a robot on the moon. The original was the Ansari X Prize, which was a competition to create a private spaceflight vehicle. In 2004, astronaut Mike Melville won $10 million with a spacecraft funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. More than $100 million bucks were spent pursuing this prize, so the $10 mill kind of looks like chump change. I think I am going to stop this website and put more time into winning one of these prizes. Or figuring out how to blackmail Paul Allen.
Black holes are the result of the gravitational collapse of a massive star (at least 10 to 15 times more massive than our sun). When the star is no longer able to create outward energy to balance the strong inward gravitational forces, the star collapses into an infinitely dense black hole. The escape velocity needed to overcome the gravity of the black hole is faster than the speed of light, hence the blackness. One common misconception I hear is that black holes suck things in. Black holes do not suck anymore than any object of similar mass in the universe. If our sun was to magically turn into a black hole of the same mass (although realistically its ultimate fate is to become a white dwarf), the earth’s orbit would not change. The gravitational energy depends on the object’s mass. We would not be pulled into its powerful grasp unless we entered the event horizon, which is the point of no return near a black hole. So everybody quit hating on black holes, saying they suck. You suck. You white dwarf.
Note: A friend just brought this to my attention— as white dwarfs (dwarves?) lose energy and they are no longer able to emit light, they become the hypothetical black dwarfs. There are no known black dwarfs in the universe, because it takes longer than the age of the universe in order for a white dwarf to become a black dwarf. That’s a long time. But it makes sense. Because once you go black, you never go back.
The Greek word basileus means king, and is at the heart of a bunch of words. For example, basilisk (Greek for little king) is the monstrous reptile that long ago was said to wear a crown-shaped crest on its head, basilica (originally, a tribunal chamber for a king), and the herb basil. Basil is said to be the king of all herbs, and may have been an ingredient in some royal perfume. Being the king of herbs doesn’t sound very glamorous. It falls somewhere in between The King of Queens and the king of utensils (the fork, apparently).
As I detailed yesterday, the full moon has been said to incite odd behavior on earth. Although science trumps this myth, the belief was extremely popular in the days of our ignorant ancestors. Yesterday, I touched on the fact that the moon is also linked to women’s periods. The word “menstruation” comes from the Latin mensis (month). Mensis is derived from the Greek mene (moon), which is also the root of our words, moon and month, as the moon takes roughly a month to revolve around the earth. People in the olden days were not big believers in coincidence. The moon had to be making girls bleed in…. you know what, I think I’ve said enough. I’m going to go get some Purell.
Every 29.5 days, we witness a full moon. I remember hearing that the full moon causes various wild phenomena on earth. The Latin word for moon, luna, is the origin of the word “lunatic.” In the 19th century, lawyers could argue “not guilty by reason of the full moon.” But in reality, there is no truth to this. Recent studies have not found any significant evidence supporting the myth that the moon brings about odd behavior, e.g., increased criminal activity, suicides, psychiatric disorders. It should be noted that the full moon exerts just as much gravity as the unseen new moon. It’s all pseudoscience. Period. Speaking of periods, the moon is also linked to the female menstrual cycle. Gross. I will fill you in tomorrow.
A team of astronomers at Johns Hopkins University have determined the color of the universe by averaging the spectral range of light in the universe. The resulting color is a beigeish white. The naming of the color was voted on by the astronomers, and those hilarious scientists chose “Cosmic Latte.” Other suggestions were Cosmic Khaki, Primordial Clam Chowder, Skyvory, and Cosmic Cream. I think they should have just called it “Pasty Astronomer’s Flesh.”
We are so lucky. I mean, just think about it. There are around 100 billion stars in our galaxy and 100 billion galaxies in the universe. It can be assumed that a great majority of the stars have orbiting planets. This means that there are around a billion billion planets in the universe (and that’s a conservative estimate). I just think it’s so fortunate that out of a billion billion planets in the universe we live on the most important one…
Because our orbit around the Sun is elliptical, Earth is closest to the Sun in January (the perihelion) and farthest away in June (the aphelion). This may seem weird, but it’s because of our northern-hemisphere cockiness. January is American for winter. January is Australian for summer. Foster’s is Australian for beer.
