6829 – snippets and bites

Well, no dice getting together with the oneeyed and the gang… one of their number wanted to return home once the power was on, so it’ll have to be next time. Maybe I’ll take a day-trip north to see the Edison / Ford Estates and lunch their neck of the woods! I’m glad they made it home ok, and that there was very little personal damage waiting for them.


Bro scammed the Mother out of about $150, claiming it was court costs. Lawyer said there were none, and Bro claims there wasn’t any receipt. Liar. That dumbass burned that bridge, now, too.


I convinced the PR department to not do Donkey Basketball as a fund raiser. Plenty of other fun ways to bring people together and donate money… no need to bring any animal cruelty or PETA picketers to the table.


Apparently T-Mobile was giving away free service all hurricane weekend. Good for you guys! You deserve some praise for that!


I fell asleep far too early last night, something like seven or so… I think I was fatigued from all of the stress over the missing Alabama boy. We were really scrambling the whole time I was at the office

I woke up at about 2:30am, got a drink of water and puttered for about an hour before trying to go back to bed. I really am a night person at heart… That was one of the nice things about IMT – the 4pm to midnight schedule.


how to make a scale model of a city


*really* nice tutorial on how to write tile-based games in flash. via


I’m in the mood for some really good Tandoori Indian food lately… something better than . This bears some research. I’ll have to sniff out my local sources and see what they prefer.


I’ve got to focus more on more than just these little bits and pieces… the journal’s been scattered lately, and I could stand more writing practice. flying_blind‘s recent excellent entry reminded me of this.


Dear Lenny Kravitz – Don’t help the gap. You don’t want to be in there with SJP.


My entry about the Lumbee Indians is still getting activity, over two years after the first casting about for information about Roanoke. Until that research arc, I thought that the colonists had been massacred.


LiveJournal Haiku!
Your name: scottobear
Your haiku: her under in the
old west I’ve nibbled on those
things off and on since
Username:
Created by Grahame

I still have the itch to do a cemetery stroll and look up Miguelito Loveless.


It’s true, I live inside the spread of one of the corners of the Bermuda Triangle. (Usually, the points are Bermuda, Puerto Rico and Miami, but they’ve been known to vary.) I wonder what major areas of supernatural repute are near folks on my friend’s list? Transylvanians? Amity? I know there’s a “stonehenger” or two.


Saturn has 33 verified moons, now.

The moons are about 3km (2 miles) and 4km (2.5 miles) across and located 194,000km (120,000 miles) and 211,000 km (131,000 miles) from Saturn’s center.

They are provisionally named S/2004 S1 and S/2004 S2 though one of the new moons may have been spotted before in a single image from the Voyager probe.

Officials said they may be the smallest bodies yet seen orbiting the gas giant.

The new satellites are between the orbits of two other Saturnian moons, Mimas and Enceladus.

S/2004 S1 and S/2004 S2 were first seen by Dr Sebastien Charnoz, a colleague of Cassini imaging team member Andre Brahic at the University of Paris, France.

“Discovering these faint satellites was an exciting experience, especially the feeling of being the first person to see a new body of our Solar System,” said Dr Charnoz.

“I had looked for such objects for weeks while at my office in Paris, but it was only once on holiday, using my laptop, that my code eventually detected them. This tells me I should take more holidays.”

‘Gratifying discovery’

Imaging team leader Dr Carolyn Porco commented: “It’s really gratifying to know that among all the other fantastic discoveries we will make over the next four years, we can now add the confirmation of two new moons.”

Scientists expected moons as small as S/2004 S1 and S/2004 S2 might be found within gaps in Saturn’s rings and perhaps near the F ring.

But they were surprised these small bodies are between two major moons.

The smallest previously known moons around Saturn are about 20km (12 miles) across.

Small comets speeding around the outer Solar System would be expected to collide with small moons and pulverize them. The fact that these moons exist where they do might place limits on the number of small comets in the outer Solar System.

This is vital for understanding the zone beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt, which is filled with small, icy bodies and is thought to be a source for comets.

It also sheds light on the cratering histories of the moons around giant planets such as Saturn. Cratering is used by some scientists as an indicator of the age of planetary surfaces.

“If small comets are rare, as they seem to be in the Jupiter system, the new [Saturn] moons might have survived since the early days of the Solar System,” said Dr Luke Dones, an imaging team member from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, US.

Moons surrounding the giant planets are not generally found where they formed because tidal forces from the planet can cause them to drift from their original locations.

In drifting, they may sweep through locations where other moons disturb them, making their orbits eccentric or inclined relative to the planet’s equator. One of the new moons might have undergone such an evolution.

S/2004 S1 could be an object spotted in a single image taken by Nasa’s Voyager spacecraft 23 years ago, which was at the time given the name S/1981 S14.

Aww.. 2 baby moons!

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