File cabinet furniture: [link]

Don't all high school health classes teach you that excessive bleeding from a limb must be stopped with a tourniquet?

Actually my recent first aid course for Little League discouraged using a tourniquet because (a) it causes a lot of damage; (b) you really should only use if if you have to lose the limb to save the life. Direct pressure is better.

Direct pressure and elevation.

Oh yeah - I remember hearing that. Is that direct pressure on the wound? or on the artery above it?

Anyway, a general rule of thumb that everyone should know is, "If you bleed too much you will die."

An alternative to Buffista Island could be a Buffista Planet: [link]

For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for "life in the universe."

Maria, I've seen some antique filing-ish cabinets recently, but I don't recall the pricing. Probably in an antique store in Ellicott City. There's one place with that writing desk that is still taunting me. Except the front is too...baroque. Chunky curved front detailing, where I prefer something simpler and more delicate. I can't spend $350 on something that I'm gonna think "I hate those legs" every time I see it. But the functional design is exactly what I've been looking for. Ahrg.

I wish I could convince mom's friend to part with her writing desk. It's tall and spindly, with an brown black finish that's crackled on the unused surfaces. It came from her husband's great-grandfather, who was a ship's captain so I'm pretty certain it's gonna stay in the family and I'm SOL. When I housesat for her, I wrote longhand letters at it, just because. It was that kind of desk.

An alternative to Buffista Island could be a Buffista Planet:

I was gonna post that. In fact, I was gonna suggest it be Buffista planet. But I didn't. So... um, what's my point?

It's only 20.5 light years away. Who's working on the FTL drive?

Awesome quantum weirdness!

A false vacuum is a metastable sector of a quantum field theory which appears to be a perturbative vacuum but is unstable to instanton effects which tunnel to a lower energy state. This tunneling can be caused by quantum fluctuations or the creation of high energy particles. Simply put, the false vacuum is a state of a physical theory which is not the lowest energy state, but is nonetheless stable for some time. This is analogous to metastability for first order phase transitions.

Why is this cool? Because! It's a new way for the universe to end!

The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.

eta:

The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has been considered. If a bubble of lower energy vacuum were nucleated, it would approach at nearly the speed of light and destroy the Earth instantaneously, without any forewarning. Thus, this vacuum metastability event is a theoretical doomsday event. This was used in a science-fiction story by Geoffrey A. Landis in 1988

[link]

Timelies all!

Congrats megan!

Congrats hec!

Something even more scary than false vacuum:

"My job is a job to make decisions. I'm a decision—if the job description were, what do you do—it's decision maker."—George Bush, Tipp City, Ohio, April 19, 2007