respublica

A click bait story

This rather ridiculous story comes from CNN.

"If you drive an expensive car you're probably a jerk, scientists say."

The science is looking pretty unanimous on this one: Drivers of expensive cars are the worst.

A new study has found that drivers of flashy vehicles are less likely to stop and allow pedestrians to cross the road -- with the likelihood they'll slow down decreasing by 3% for every extra $1,000 that their vehicle is worth.

 

Science. How did they come to this conclusion? They came to this conclusion after asking volunteers to cross a sidewalk hundreds of times, filming and analyzing the responses by car drivers.

 

I don't know if this is true or not, but plenty of drivers in all sorts of vehicles no matter the price don't slow down for pedestrians..in my non-scientific experience.  I might be better if scientists spent more time looking into this Carona Virus thing. On an other note, is it spelled Caronavirus, or Coronavirus? I see both throughout the day.

 

I also saw this last night. The virus is not funny, but this is kind of clever.

A momentous day for Christian

Our oldest grandson Christian and his class at the Lutheran Church of Webster Gardens had their first communion today. They've had an intensive study on the meaning of the sacrament of communion from the Catechism and the Scriptures. Christian has been reading the catechism and other church history books since he was 3, he's been a church guy.

Which lead us to today.

A bit of news from NPR that I just don't need today. "News you can use: How to tell if your pet rat is happy"

The gist of the story is that scientists are tickled pink because they've learned what a happy rat looks like. I wonder how the happy rat stories were funded.

Got up at 2:45

And went out to see the much advertised Perseid Meteor showers. I didn't see a thing except stars so I went back to bed. Got up a little before 5 since the weather people claimed the best time to see these things would be between midnight and 5 a m. Went outside again and again I saw nothing.  Kind of disappointed.

 

The dynamics of dogs and other mammals shaking themselves dry

A very interesting study on why wet animals shake the water off themselves and how dramatic an action it really is.  In 4 seconds 70 percent of the dog's water will fly off and the amount of force involved in shaking is 10 to 70 times greater than the force of gravity. 

This video is cute, but the information is given in a very understandable and interesting way. If you have ever been next to a wet dog who begins to shake it off, you'll like this.

 

Super Moon This Weekend

Tonight at 10:35 CST, a super moon, the biggest and brightest full moon of the year will begin to rise climb to its highest point.  It will be 31,000 miles closer to the earth than any other full moon this year which will make for some spectacular viewing as it reaches its closest point at around 11 tonight, CST. 

It will be 16 percent brighter than normal and cause some dramatic high and low tides along the coasts. Not only that, but it may interfer with a meteor shower from Haley's comet.

What a night to be outside and watching the sky. The moon will begin its rise in east at around 6:45 CST, being closest to the horizon and providing the most astounding view.

Inventive Founding Fathers

The five best inventions by our country's founders.

Coronal Mass Ejection heading right at us today

That's right.

On Sunday NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory observed a complex magnetic eruption on the sun which unleashed a large coronal mass ejection (CME) blasting in the direction of Earth.

Today some huge magnetic eruption is headed right at us.

Sounds like a movie made for those 3-D glasses. 

Eclipse

Tomorrow morning, we'll see a lunar eclipse beginning at 5:17 and at its greatest at 6:30.

The sun coming up at around those same times might make it a bit difficult to see the entire eclipse.

The question is, do you want to get up at 5:15 on a Saturday morning?

The hottest place in the world

Believe it or not, the hottest place is inside a Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider housed in the Department of Energy's Brookhaven Laboratory in New York state.

What are scientists doing with this Collider?  They hope to gain insight into what occurred in the first microseconds after the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago.

Oh no.  Please tell us our tax money isn't being used to support this work.