Glad you got the book, Kat!

More fun than PuppyCam? PlinthCam art project in Trafalgar Square! For the next 99 days, they're filming someone on top of the plinth in front of the British museum for an hour at a time.

[link]

I hate laundry. I want a laundry elf.

I love laundry. There's maybe 15 minutes of actual work for me per load. I can slounge on the couch, reading fic and listening to the washing machine do its thing, and feel like I'm accomplishing something. Unlike, say, vacuuming or dusting, where I have to actually be doing something throughout the entire process.

My laptop, it is alive! ALIVE!!!

Yay! Good luck with the data recovery.

Why am I just as gronky now as I was Monday morning? It's not fair.

Pro'lly my subconscious going, "The three-day weekend is over! And I've got a five-day week to get through! Waahh!"

Maybe coffee will make my subconscious whine less....

I think the current guy on the Plinth is eating his lunch.

It is clean-up day in my office. So far I'm going through computer files which were "organized" by someone who apparently had no idea what any of them were...

Flags of Forgotten Countries

In recent years, we have seen a number of countries disappear, along with their flags. The Soviet Union came to an end, to be replaced by a multitude of new or revived republics, all with their own flags. Czechoslovakia split into its two component parts, while Yugoslavia splintered, as the individual nationalities all asserted their independence. All this happened very recently, but many states have vanished from the map before over the centuries. Here’s a look at some flags of those long gone - and in many cases forgotten - kingdoms and countries.

I am so sore this morning. We did full contact sparing last night - two on one. The one was supposed to use fancy footwork to keep out of the middle and only spar one opponent at a time. Exhausting.

The Soviet Union came to an end, to be replaced by a multitude of new or revived republics, all with their own flags.

Watching Chess a couple of weeks ago, I found myself actually shivering a little when I saw the hammer and sickle flag.

Just recently, a man-made object became the coldest object in space. Coldest Known Object in Space Is Very Unnatural

The coldest known object out in space has now been announced by scientists. It's not a frozen comet or even some distant, chilly gas cloud. Rather, it's a spacecraft.

On July 3, the European Space Agency's Planck spacecraft reached this frigid extreme as part of a key step in the satellite's mission to observe the remnant radiation of the Big Bang.

Since its launch on May 14 (accompanied by its sibling spacecraft Herschel), Planck has been traveling to its final orbit at the second Lagrange point of the sun-Earth system, L2, and cooling its instruments down to their operational temperature of minus 459.49 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 273.05 Celsius). This temperature is just 0.1 Celsius above absolute zero, the coldest temperature theoretically possible in our universe.

"It is indeed both the coldest spot in any spacecraft that we know about, and also the coldest known object in space, including dust, gas etc.," Planck project scientist Jan Tauber wrote in an email. "Of course in a laboratory on Earth, colder spots can be made."

Such low temperatures are necessary for Planck's detectors to study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) — the first light released by the universe, only 380,000 years after the Big Bang — by measuring its temperature across the sky.

I have Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation - in my pants!