Theme Week, Part Sun

Jeremy’s Sametime Status Proudly Presents:   

Music Fact Check Week!   

The sun does not have enough mass to go Supernova and become a black hole

We wrap up Music Fact Check Week with a little trip through a Garden of Sound.  And science!  Don't forget science! 

We never forget science here at Jeremy Is In The Office, do we?  Let's look into the creation of black holes.

Stars are amazing things.  They spend their lives generating unfathomably powerful nuclear reactions, converting hydrogen into helium at temperatures somewhere in the 4-10 million degree mark.  Officially, I'm presenting that temperature in terms of Kelvin degrees, but once you get that high, it doesn't much matter what units you use.  It's really really hot.  That said, certain types of Blue Giant stars can reach temperatures of up to 50 million degrees, so it's a complete ballpark anyway.  For reference, our sun is in the main sequence of yellow stars, hovering just a little south of 6 million degrees.  

Once all of the hydrogen in a star is used up, (a process which takes a couple billion years) various things happen.  The outward pressure of constant nuclear explosions is no longer greater than the force of gravity keeping the star together, so the core of the star begins to collapse in on itself.  In most cases, these forces equillibrate over time, and the star ends its life as a white dwarf, slowly cooling adrift in space.  

In the case of especially large stars, the force of the star's core collapse causes the outer layers to be violently expelled into surrounding space in a phenomenon called a Supernova (there is no champagne involved).  Supernovae are unbelievably powerful.  One of my favorite physics facts to come from the whimsical webcomic xkcd shows that a supernova viewed at 1 AU (The distance from the earth to the sun) would appear over a billion times brighter than an exploding hydrogen bomb pressed directly against your eye.  ( Citation Needed )  If the star core remaining after all this supernova activity is sufficiently massive (we're talking multiple times more massive than the sun is now), then no force within the core can resist the force of gravity, and the entire core collapses into an infinitesimally small point of effectively infinite density.  The gravitational escape velocity of this singularity is greater than the speed of light, meaning anything caught within its gravity well has no chance of escape...even light.  This is what is referred to as a "Black Hole." 

In order to pull this all off, a star has to be remarkably larger than our sun in order to explode into a supernova and have its core collapse into a black hole.  Fortunately or otherwise, our sun will never do this, so Soundgarden's claim of a Black Hole Sun will never come true.  Also fortunately, we won't have to find this out for certain for another 7 billion years or so. 

Now I Want To Watch That Episode Of Scrubs

It’s Password Day!  My email password is no longer “t1nybubb13z”

Everybody loves a Don Ho Classic!

For some reason, Don Ho doesn't look like I expected him to.    I guess I was expecting something more like a Israel Kamakawiwoʻole look.  Don't know why.  Anyway, I suppose that's not exactly relevant to anything. 

What is important is that my productivity will be slightly impacted for the next month or so while I have to type my password twice all the time because I enter the old one first every friggin' time.  I wish I was exaggerating that, but I'm sadly not.  I've already done that at least half a dozen times today.

I guess what's also important is that I note here that neither this nor any of the passwords listed in my famous Password Day posts have ever been my actual email password.  Not that it matters, because they would have been replaced anyway, but in case you wanted to discern some kind of pattern to them and guess what the next one will be.  At least I didn't use some strangely common password like correct horse battery staple or anything...that would be silly...or maybe better?  

Moved On To Action Figures

It’s Password Day!  My email password is no longer MyL1ttl3P0ny

Password Day again?  That seems to happen quite a bit.

I tend to agree, but at the same time,  the company I work for believes this is the way to maintain IT security and thus will lock me out of my accounts if I don't change the passwords on occasion.  It goes without saying that if I don't bother accessing any of my accounts, then I'll be fired.  Therefore, in the interests of keeping my job, I'll go ahead and change the passwords.

Of course, it's at this point that I feel obligated to announce that none of the passwords featured in my "Password Day" posts have ever actually been used as my email password, nor will they.  They're just amusing little bits that I make up on Password Day to make a little fun of myself and entertain all of you.  

I also feel obligated to link you all to This Episode of the whimsical webcomic xkcd.  You'll be interested to know that it's the first thing to come up in the Google Auto-Complete when you type in "Correct H," so that's something too. 

F, That's Cold

It’s Geography Awareness Week!  The warmest temperature ever recorded on Antarctica was 3 degrees F

 Ooo..toasty warm.

Yeah, not so much.  I don't really have any other interesting facts about Antarctica, so this is about all you're going to get today.  I hope you've enjoyed Geography Awareness Week.  To cap it all off, I think I'll leave you with monday's edition of the whimsical webcomic xkcd, which deals with geography and maps.  See you after Thanksgiving!

This is the part where I tell you that Jeremy Is In The Office will be out of the office next week, returning November 28th.  Enjoy the holiday, stuff yourself with Turducken or Tofurkey, or old-skool Turkey...whatever floats your boat.  We'll be back in a week with all sorts of frivolity. 

And my user name is "Admin"

It's Password Day! My email password is no longer "password"


But that's still the password to your bank account, right?


Oh absolutely. That one doesn't have to be changed as often as the one for my email. That's just annoying.


Jeremy would like to point out here that like all of the "Password Day" Sametime Statuses, neither this nor any of the displayed passwords have ever been used as his email password.


Very true. I would like to use "Correct Horse Battery Staple" as my password, but that wouldn't be allowed with our current system. Also, that might be easily decoded by any other xkcd fan.

On a more serious note, you might actually be surprised to know just how many people's routers you can hack into using "admin" and "password" as the login credentials. It's a little scary.

My Martini Was Perfect

Still trying to deal with the aftermath of yesterday's terrifying earthquake


Aftermath? The epicenter was like 400 miles away from you.


That's hardly the point. We still felt the effects of the tremor in New York.


You felt your desk wiggling.


In fairness, my office is on the third floor of a slightly mushroom-shaped building. The consequences could have been disastrous.


If there was an earthquake larger than the tiny little tremor that happened this far away.


Okay, so the effects at work weren't especially substantial. What about the damage caused at home?


The sand in your mini zen garden was out of place?


I actually didn't think to check there.

What I did think to check out was Facebook, which immediately exploded with comments from people about the earthquake. This, of course, is a flimsy pretext to link you all to This Edition of the whimsical webcomic XKCD. It seemed to be quite appropriate during and immediately after yesterday's events. Hope everyone made it through okay.

Am I missing something?

I'm still trying to figure out how "Double Vision" is hockey music


Hockey music is an interesting thing. Depending on the timing, hockey music takes on various forms. From hard rock during times when the home team needs a boost to "Come Out And Play" during a fight to jaunty omnipresent organ cheers. I'm also one of about 4 people I know who would be amused by the fact that the LA Kings' organist played "Brass Bonanza" during the game against the Carolina Hurricanes. All that said, I can not, for the life of me figure out why Foreigner's "Double Vision" made good hockey music.


If it was played right after a really hard check, I would make a case that it's hockey music, though in pretty bad form.


It was a pretty physical game, but those weren't the circumstances. It was a normal play stoppage, and the crowd seemed to be singing along or getting otherwise involved in the playing of the song.


Maybe something was playing on the Jumbotron while this was happening.


It's about the only logical explanation I can think of. Can somebody who was at the game last night fill me in? I'm confused, and that's no way to be on a Friday. I'll be Nerd Sniped all weekend.

SCIENCE!

"Why do all my attempts at science end with me being punched by Batman?" – xkcd


I saw that comic last week. It was great.


So every once in a while, there's a quote from one of the whimsical webcomics I read on occasion that cracks me the heck up. This time, it came in the form of the mouseover text from Last Week's xkcd. It almost makes me wish Batman would come out and punch me whenever I try science. It would be worth it!

"That's where I'm a viking!"

I either need to start remembering my dreams, or start waking up thinking that they wouldn’t make great screenplays


Chasing your dream of being a sitcom writer again, are you?


I don't think so. I'm pretty sure last night's was a drama. There was a plane crash involved, and a colorful pigeon owned by my sister, but much beyond that, I don't remember. All I do know is that it would have made for an awesome movie, and somebody totally needs to write it.


Get cracking, then.


Sadly, I can not. I think this edition of the whimsical webcomic xkcd puts it best:

I'm not sure what he was getting at

It's a good thing I don’t like olives. Because if I did, I'd eat them a lot...and I don't like them.


Congratulations. That makes no sense.


That's okay. It's part of a lecture once given by my old history teacher. Maybe it's part of why to this day, I know nothing about history. Lines like this that make no sense at all and send my mind into a swirling miasma trying to figure out what it's supposed to mean instead of listening to the rest of the lecture.


You could just take it for what it's worth, let it pass, and move on with life...and the lecture...


It's akin to Nerd Sniping, made popular by the whimsical webcomic xkcd. Here's the comic for your Friday:

...and then you get hit by a Blue Shell...

It's called a road, it's called The Rainbow Road. It is a road that you go.


Uhm...right. What?


I'm not entirely sure why this exists, but it does. So the best I can do for you today is point you to the source and have you all draw your own conclusions.


Alright then, what's the source?


First, some background info. Anyone who's spent a significant amount of time (Greater than 3 hours) playing Mario Kart on any one of a number of Nintendo Platforms has exhausted their knowledge of profanity while playing a course called "Rainbow Road." It's the Mario Kart equivalent of the "Boss" at the end of a video game that's ridiculously hard to beat, and right about the fifth time one of the turbo boosts launches you right over the side of the course, to fall helplessly into the night sky, your friends and family start to wonder why all of your creativity went into finding all of these new combinations of curses instead of curing cancer.

Well, some guy took The Jimmy Buffett Approach, and wrote a song about it instead. It's not all that hard, considering Nintendo already did half the chore and provided the music right along with the game, so all you need is lyrics, video editing software, and some reasonable singing skill.


Well, two out of three ain't bad...if you give him the benefit of the doubt and call those lyrics. Yikes...


So there you have it. I'm not clear, exactly, on what "it" is, but...yeah. To make up for it, here's a related comic from Randall Munroe's whimsical webcomic xkcd.

Why isn't it working?!

The AccuTemp Digital Control senses the current temperature and responds by cycling off and on. Like any other fan, this model will not change the temperature of the airflow.


Is this a Blag, or an instruction manual?


In some ways it's life. I like to think of my Blag as sort of an instruction manual for life. A while ago, we had "Don't Be That Guy" Week, and occasionally we'll watch people doing stupid things, or read some stupid quotes. Today's takes a little extra work, but the payoff is terrific.


So where did this come from?


I bought a fan.


Well you certainly have no fans of your Blag, you HAD to get one somehow.


More specifically, I bought a window fan. It has a temperature sensor to decide how to control the temperature. It's a cute little feature, and makes things a bit more environmentally conscious. It also opens the door to a darker side of life: The people who think that a fan is a substitute for an air conditioner.

Today's Sametime Status comes from a sticker on the fan itself. I removed the sticker because I am not a moron. I have to think of just how that sticker came to be, and why it is now placed on every fan the company makes. Obviously, they got phone calls. They got letters and some returns and possibly an angry email from dissatisfied customers who thought, for some unknown reason, that the fan they just purchased was actually an air conditioner, and would provide cold air rather than circulation.


That's probably what happened.


Exactly. It's a pretty sad state of affairs, but it's a part of life. So I propose a homework assignment for his weekend to The Most Intelligent Readership In The World: Call up the manufacturer of whatever fan you have in your home. Ask them why it doesn't change the temperature of the air, and see what kind of response you get. We can join the whimsical webcomic xkcd in making the world a weirder place:

I actually don't want instant death

Stupid Bumper Sticker of the Day: "I Brake for Trains"


Stupid? That seems like pretty sound judgement.


Of course it's sound judgement! It's common freakin' sense to stop for a train. What do you think you're going to accomplish by not stopping for a train?


Getting to your destination quicker?


No. If you don't stop when a train is moving in front of you, you will stop by way of the train. In a collision between your car (and I don't really care what kind of car you drive) and a train, the train will win. Guaranteed!


Okay but maybe...


NO! Never nuts around with trains! They're big and will mess you up! The average freight train weighs 6000 tons. Trains in some parts of the world can approach 200 miles per hour. Put those two numbers together, and you have an incredible amount of force.


Freight trains don't travel 200 miles per hour.


That is so not the point! Did you know that more people died in train accidents last year than bowling accidents, Blogging Accidents, and Bird Flu COMBINED!


Where did you get this information?


I made it up to sound scary.


That's what I thought. Ever consider that Bumper Sticker Boy meant he just likes model trains?


Well...no. But if the one message he wants to send to the world is that he has a thing for toy trains, he's got a whole new set of issues.

I still don't know how it knocked me off the bridge

I'm pretty sure I cursed at Mario Kart more in one hour last night than any other video game in history combined.


A little road rage perhaps?


Maybe just a little, but I assure you, I'm NOT ALONE.

So in the middle difficulty level of the new Mario Kart Wii, which I have obviously yet to master, you get to ride on motorcycles instead of karts. This serves no useful purpose I'm aware of other than to make it more difficult to keep yourself on the road. Also, the time gap between first and seventh place is at most a second and a half. What this means, ultimately, is that you can be leading an entire race, and on the second half of the final lap, you get nailed by a blue shell, then when you land back on the ground one of the other bikes speeds past you, knocking you right back off the bike and off onto the side of the road. Getting back on the road is now slow because the bikes don't travel well off-road, and by the time you're fully up and racing again, you've been relegated to 8th place with no chance of catching anyone before the end of the race.


And how many consecutive times did this happen to you?


I'm not at liberty to say.

Jeremy Is In The Office

I'd like to welcome all of you to Jeremy's Sametime Status.

First of all, yes, this is a direct ripoff of Jeremy's Status Message , but I'm okay with that. He explained to me that he gets money from his banner ads, and that was the most convincing arguement I heard to creating a blag.

First, some ground rules:

• The Status Message changes daily, but this blag will update when I darn well choose
• No, I'm not misspelling Blag
• All Sametime Statuses arecreated exclusively by me, unless otherwise notes. You are free to reprint them, as long as you add a dash, and the name of this blag. Example: "'If your fan is fast enough, whatever hits it will be evenly distributed.' - Jeremy's Sametime Status"
• Be on the lookout for "Theme Weeks"
• I may give prizes on occasion.

That's all for now. The rest, we'll figure out as we go along. Happy reading!

-Jeremy!