A funny fact about the sun is that it is a very slow nuclear reactor.

It's power comes from it's mass, any particular square inch of the Sun's core does not produce enough energy to power a TV, but the sun is huge and all that energy adds up

And that slowness is a good thing, it's why it's been chugging along for 4.6 billion years and will keep chugging for another 5 billion.

To give some perspective, any one proton in the sun's core has only a 50% of being fused into a helium nucleus over the Sun's entire lifetime.

Red dwarfs are even slower, and the whole star is convective, so it has to go through ALL of it's hydrogen before it dies, that will take over a TRILLION years, Proxima Centauri will be burning hydrogen long after the Sun and Alpha Centauri have died.

The great mass of the big blue stars means that they burn very quickly and the most massive like the bright blue stars in the Orion Nebula, live for only a few million years despite weighing up to 130 times more than the Sun.

UGH! my Iraq vet cousin is turning into a Teabagger.

I posted this toon on Facebook:



and my cousin responded by saying:

I'm trying to reduce how much meat I eat. One problem: meat cravings.

No matter how much I read about the horrible conditions inside feedlots and slaughterhouses it just won't break my craving for meat. Would trying those veggie-burgers and other faux-meat products work?

God, I wish they would hurry up with the meat grown in a lab thing...

Schizotypal personality and Religious nuttiness.

I have been musing for a while that a lot of people who are into "Charismatic" Christian denominations or New Age craziness have some degree of Schizotypy. They do not have the full-blown psychotism and break from reality of Schizophrenia, but still have bizarre perceptions of "paranormal" things and visions of a Jungian Archetypal nature. Among the Christian nuts one can also see this in their obsession with the Book of Revelation.

Schizotypal personality and Religious nuttiness.

I have been musing for a while that a lot of people who are into "Charismatic" Christian denominations or New Age craziness have some degree of Schizotypy. They do not have the full-blown psychotism and break from reality of Schizophrenia, but still have bizarre perceptions of "paranormal" things and visions of a Jungian Archetypal nature. Among the Christian nuts one can also see this in their obsession with the Book of Revelation.

Note to woo-woos, St. Johns Wort is just another SSRI!

I picked up a wonderful book from the thrift store I work at on herbal medicines written by a toxicologist who talks about the active compounds in the herbs and legitimate scientific studies involving the herbs and their side effects. No woo about the wisdom of nature and similar crap, just science.

I was floored when he says that the active compound in St. John's Wort functions just like any other SSRI, and it has the exact same side effects as Prozac.

4 people on this jury apparently does not get sarcasm.

Somebody tell the radio-causes-cancer nuts some basic physics.

Good lord, radio wave photons are the least energetic photons there are, visible light is much more energetic, and yet these nuts seriously think that radio waves damage DNA???

GRRRR!!! fruit flies have made a home around my kitchen sink.

I have cleaned the area obsessively and yet the annoying little bastards keep on reproducing as fast as I kill them. they disappeared over the winter and I thought they were gone for good, but now with the warm spring they have returned! UGHH!!!

Any suggestions?

Anyone else play emulated console video games on their computer?

I love playing old games I haven't seen in YEARS. I'm currently on a Final Fantasy 6 kick, right now!

There is a very good Japanese-to-English translated ROM of Final Fantasy 5 out there, where I can't remember. The game was never released in the US, but it's awesome.