Was it in Natter where we talked about writing one's landlord to ask for cheaper rent? Here's an example of such a letter: Reduce Your Rent with This Simple Letter

Timelies all!

Happy Birthday Kristin and Maria!

Heading to Boston tomorrow for Boskone, which means I need to pack tonight.

Uh oh.

[link]

Huge layoffs today at lots of law firms across the country.

The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds is an experiment in scale: By condensing 4.6 billion years of history into a minute, the video is a self-contained timepiece. Like a specialized clock, it gives one a sense of perspective. Everything — from the formation of the Earth, to the Cambrian Explosion, to the evolution of mice and squirrels — is proportionate to everything else, displaying humankind as a blip, almost indiscernible in the layered course of history.

In his Cosmos tv series, back in the Pleistocene, Sagan made the point that if you look at the history of the earth--not the universe, not the solar system, just the earth itself--as a year, one-tenth of the last second of the last minute before midnight would represent all of human history. That's always given me some perspective.

Happy Birthday, PixKristin and Mfnlaw!

Huge layoffs today at lots of law firms across the country.

Ouch. That will impact my company (law firms' libraries are big clients of ours).

Yikes! [link]

At what point will an orbital garbage collector be necessary/cost effective?

Shouldn't there be an air traffic control-equivalent for satellites?

Shouldn't there be an air traffic control-equivalent for satellites?

There sorta' is. At least the US Air Force has an excellent system for tracking all satellites and all orbital debris above a certain size. Occasionally the Space Shuttle or the ISS has to adjust its orbit due to warnings they receive.

Happy birthdays, Kristin and Maria and Darwin!

And I'm all sad at having missed a Nilly sighting.

I don't look at any video-type objects at work, but The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds definitely sounds bookmark-worthy.

Just got back from an office Valentine's party, which was generally fun but had some odd moments. The very first topic of conversation was the Vatican's recent thumbs-up to evolution, to which one person responded thus:

But how would that even work if you're religious, trying to believe in evolution? The Bible says that Jesus came two thousand years ago and that God and Jesus are the same person, or the Trinity, or whatever, so if you tried to count the timeline through evolution wouldn't you be, like, thousands of years off?

Everyone in the room, religious and non-, attempted valiantly to parse out what on earth she might have meant, and our conclusion was, I do not think those words mean what you think they mean. Any of them.

Also, because it's so awful it deserves its own non-snarky post, I don't even think I can read that article about the PA judges without getting teary with rage. But, in short, what Strega and Teppy said.