True. I switched around a bit but ended up with a political science major with a pre-med concentration. So obviously I moved to LA to act and write. 

Really miss Boston, although if I never saw Warren Towers again, it would be too soon. If you’re there, have a dunkaccino for me.

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The Internet is Awesome

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sciencesoup:

What’s up with all those giant volcanoes on Mars?

Mount Everest is an enormous and awe-inspiring sight, towering 9 kilometres above the Earth’s surface. But if you were to stick it on Mars right next to Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system, it would look foolishly small—Olympus Mons triples the height of Everest and spans the state of Arizona.

Mars is sprinkled with huge volcanoes, hundreds of kilometres in diameter and dozens of kilometres tall. The largest volcano on Earth, on the other hand, is Mauna Loa in Hawaii, which rises only 4 km above sea level.

So why is Mars blessed with these monsters of the solar system? Why doesn’t Earth have any massive lava-spewing structures?

Geology, my friends.

Earth’s crust is split up into plates that move and collide. Usually, volcanoes are formed at the boundaries where two plates meet, and one subducts below the other and melts in the heat below the surface. This melt rises as magma and causes volcanism.

But in some places on Earth, there are “hot spots” in the middle of plates, where magma rises up from the core-mantle mantle in plumes. When this magma is spewed up onto the surface, it cools and solidifies into rock, and over the years, the rock builds up and up. When plumes open out in the middle of the ocean, the magma builds islands.

Plumes are fixed, always pushing magma up to one spot, but the Earth’s plates don’t stop for anything. While the magma rises, the plates move over the hotspot—at a rate of only a few centimetres a year, but still, they move and take the newly-made volcanoes with them. So, gradually, the plates and volcanoes move on, while the plume remains in the same spot, building a whole new volcano on the next bit of the plate. As the plate moves on and on, the plume builds up a whole chain of islands, called island arcs. This is how the Hawaiian Islands were formed.

The island-volcanoes never get too big, because the plates keep moving onwards. On Mars, however, the volcanoes are enormous because the magma appears to keep rising, cooling and solidifying in the same place, taking its sweet time to build up colossal mounds of volcanic rock kilometres high.

So far, we’ve seen no volcanic arcs like we do on Earth, and this is generally taken as evidence that Mars has no tectonic plates.

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fuck yeah pomplamoose.

that is all.

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clearlylit:

Amory Ross by Jeff Ayliffe http://ift.tt/1u2QfCT

Cool interview with Alvimedica’s OBR Amory Ross, including a brief discussion of his having done the race last time around on Puma.

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As of noon today UTC (October 28), the teams are gradually sailing into the lighter winds on the northern edge of the high. Brunel is nominally in the lead per the tracker, but that’s because they’re closer to Cape Town. In terms of who’s closer to the good wind I think it’s a tossup between them and ADOR, 60 miles west-southwest of them.

Then there’s a gap of about 70 miles to Alvimedica (who’ve done a great job moving up from the back of the fleet in the last few days), Dongfeng, and Vestas (well to the west). And then a gap of 150 miles to Mapfre.

And poor SCA. They had a terrible time since midnight. When I saw how much distance they’d lost I wondered if they’d had some kind of mechanical failure. But no, checking the tracker it shows that they just sailed into a hole.

At midnight UTC their nearest competitor, Mapfre, was 23.5 miles south of them. But then their windspeed and boatspeed fell to under 10 knots and stayed there for hours while Mapfre kept going. By 1000 UTC Mapfre was 77.1 miles south of them.

SCA is moving again now. But that 0715 sched must have been awful. It’s one thing to struggle in light winds all night when you hope the other boats around you are experiencing the same or worse. But to learn that no, it was just you, is discouraging.

The silver lining about their being so far behind is that they have a chance to see which of the leaders do best crossing the high and use that to their advantage. But it’s small consolation.

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sylvia-morris:

Under the Influence of Vilis Ozols – Sylvia Morris

In response to Art Assignment 11 by Peggy Nolan.

Click here for the final piece.

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mostlythemarsh:

Autumn Panorama

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blueringumbreon:

This is annoying. Lately I’ve been getting sponsored posts with these startling animated GIFs advertising horror movies. Horror movies don’t really bother me that much in themselves, but I don’t care for them, and I definitely don’t like scrolling through my dashboard looking for cute posts about Pokémon and getting startled by an auto playing GIF of a crazed sweaty guy shaking his head back and forth and screaming! Good thing GIFs can’t play sound at least. Really, a still image would work just fine for the advertisement of your gory Halloween flick. You don’t have to give people Heart Attacks!

Is there any way to disable these kind of things?

If you are browsing on a computer (as opposed to a tablet or phone) you can look into installing Tumblr Savior or XKit with the Blacklist plugin.

But yeah. It’s awful. It’s awful because in this respect the business decisions made by staff (and I assume in particular by david) really, really suck.

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Rumble Fish, 1983.

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Aboard Camper in the Roaring Forties, 2011-2012 Volvo Ocean Race, Leg 1, Day 18. Source.

In 1488, when Bartolomeu Dias became the first European to reach the southern tip of Africa, he named its prominent headland the Cape of Storms (though it was subsequently renamed the Cape of Good Hope in a public relations ploy).

During the era when commercial sailing ships routinely circled the world by dipping below 40° south latitude and riding the westerlies, they named the region the Roaring Forties for the sound the wind made in the rigging.

So far this year’s VOR has been relatively mild. Except for the first night after exiting Gibralter, when the teams beat their way into a weather system with winds of 30-35 knots, the strongest winds they’ve encountered have been trade winds in the mid-20s.

That’s about to change. Once they get south of the Saint Helena High, they’re going to be heading into conditions like the images above.

Three of the VOR 70s used in the last race failed to complete Leg 1. Stormy weather on the first day, while still inside the Mediterranean, dismasted that race’s ADOR entry (skippered by the same Ian Walker leading ADOR this time) and forced Chinese entry Sanya to retire with hull damage. Later, Puma was dismasted as they were leading the fleet into the strong south Atlantic westerlies.

The VOR 70s were not true one designs. They were custom-built by each team and optimized for performance. With the benefit of hindsight, they weren’t built strong enough to handle the extreme conditions of Legs 1 and 5.

This year’s VOR 65s were intended to address that shortcoming. By building them as true one-designs, costs for for the teams’ sponsors were reduced, while safety margins could be maintained without worrying about the effect of a few extra pounds on performance. As a nice bonus, the closely matched boats have made for great racing.

The new boats are about to get a real test, as are their crews. Especially for the relatively inexperienced teams, the next week promises to be an initiation that makes the equator-crossing ceremony look like a holiday by comparison.

Here’s hoping all the teams reach Cape Town safely.

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Whoa. ADOR (until recently in the lead; now it’s hard to say) and Vestas (in third) have spent the last several hours literally sailing away from Cape Town. Which would make no sense just looking at the tracker. You have to look at the wind.

They appear to be going for that patch of 20+ knot wind southwest of them. By the next three-hourly update they should be in it. And beyond that, they may be setting themselves up to take a relatively western route across that blue, windless ridge of the Saint Helena high. Brunel, by staying to the east, may be indicating that they’re going to try to cut the corner, crossing the high somewhere east of their current position.

This leg could very well be decided over the next 24 hours. Everything is coming down to how the sailors choose to cross the high. There’s no obvious best path; everyone is going to have to pick a spot and go for it. The fleet will certainly compress as the back-enders keep sailing with the old wind; then they, too, will hit the dead zone and stop.

But there’s dead and then there’s dead. Some routes might slow the boats to a half a knot or less. Others might let them keep sailing at 1 to 2 knots. And whichever boat emerges first is going to catch an express train for Cape Town.

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dannysguitarchannel:

“Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who’s connected with it, the studio’s gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that’s left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.” – Tom Waits

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Costum Porn from Season 4

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Fellowship of the Ring

I remember the day this came out. It was the first time anyone had seen actual footage. The extended sequence in Moria wouldn’t be screened at Cannes for a while still.

This was the point when FoTR was the most perfect it would ever be. It was like the first ultrasound, or the imagined but as-yet-unwritten novel. There were no flaws, no disappointments. It was all potential. It was as good an adaptation as I was capable of imagining it to be.

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Rumble Fish, 1983.

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There were some interesting maneuvers at the front of the VOR fleet this morning. After running the tracker back and forth and thinking about it a bit, here’s my current best guess about what happened:

0715 – The regular every-six-hours “sched” comes in. Everyone knows where everyone is.

0845 – Brunel, in second place, gybes to starboard to take them farther west. My guess is that this gybe was about setting them up to sail in the stronger winds of the small low-pressure region to the south of them that I was speculating about last night.

0855 – ADOR, in first place, gybes to starboard as well. I assume this is about heading for that same patch of higher wind. Also, I suspect they may have been able to see Brunel gybe behind them, and wanted to cover. The boats were separated by about 14 nautical miles, close enough for them to see Brunel’s gybe, assuming visibility was good. So ADOR may have been trying to stay between Brunel and the better wind.

0945 – Vestas gybes to starboard. They may have seen the approaching Brunel, and wanted to preserve their westward position.

1020 – A series of weird flips in boat orientation are visible starting now in the tracker for ADOR and Brunel. No idea what that is. Both boats had wind. My guess is that it’s a tracker anomaly, maybe related to that lat/lng bug I previously talked about.

1106 – Vestas gybes to port, resuming their mostly southward heading. Maybe they decided they were as far west as they wanted to be?

1130 – Vestas gybes back to starboard. I guess they weren’t quite as far west as they wanted. More or less simultaneously, ADOR gybes back to port.

1200 – Vestas gybes back to port.

1205 – Brunel gybes back to port.

As I’ve reconstructed things, these maneuvers were partly about strategy (positioning to get into the best part of the upcoming low-pressure system) but mostly about tactics (jockeying with the nearby boats to defend or attack). Another factor might have been wind shifts; the boats may have been gybing to stay on the headed (favored) gybe as they tacked downwind.

I’m looking forward to watching today’s batch of videos (none of which I’ve seen yet) to see if they shed more light on this.

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“

Does it make you happy? Does it fill a place in your heart and soul that you felt needed filling? Does it make you want to dance, or sing, or cry, or sleep, or sigh, or love, or feel?

Yes?

Then forget about other people and love what you love.

”

– flutish

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