NO CAPES!

ita, I so hear you on project drama and frustration. Ugh. My boss likes me and knows the project is awful, but it's really not a great way to start a new company and showcase my talent or promote-ability.

Happy Birthday, Sox!

Happy Day after, Sarameg!

I am utterly astonished at how much detail my manager and boss expect me to be able to pull out of my ass given how little technical knowledge they have. Like, they don't understand stuff to the level I currently know it, but they also don't seem to appreciate that I'm not actually ever expected to do these tasks, so the detailed knowledge--not mine. It's in the hands of the technical experts. Which is why I depend on them to supply it, and to verify it's correct.

They're in this weird place of asking me to know more than the developer, and I don't see how that's vaguely feasible.

Doesn't matter--I made it into work, lasted about an hour, and said fuck it and came home. I'm about to disconnect all the phones and go to bed because this hurts too fucking much. The ER visit this weekend...better than nothing, without actually being good.

The xkcd guy is branching out:

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?

The ideas of aerodynamics don’t apply here. Normally, air would flow around anything moving through it. But the air molecules in front of this ball don’t have time to be jostled out of the way. The ball smacks into them hard that the atoms in the air molecules actually fuse with the atoms in the ball’s surface. Each collision releases a burst of gamma rays and scattered particles.

These gamma rays and debris expand outward in a bubble centered on the pitcher’s mound. They start to tear apart the molecules in the air, ripping the electrons from the nuclei and turning the air in the stadium into an expanding bubble of incandescent plasma. The wall of this bubble approaches the batter at about the speed of light—only slightly ahead of the ball itself.

The constant fusion at the front of the ball pushes back on it, slowing it down, as if the ball were a rocket flying tail-first while firing its engines. Unfortunately, the ball is going so fast that even the tremendous force from this ongoing thermonuclear explosion barely slows it down at all. It does, however, start to eat away at the surface, blasting tiny particulate fragments of the ball in all directions. These fragments are going so fast that when they hit air molecules, they trigger two or three more rounds of fusion.

After about 70 nanoseconds the ball arrives at home plate. The batter hasn't even seen the pitcher let go of the ball, since the light carrying that information arrives at about the same time the ball does. Collisions with the air have eaten the ball away almost completely, and it is now a bullet-shaped cloud of expanding plasma (mainly carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen) ramming into the air and triggering more fusion as it goes. The shell of x-rays hits the batter first, and a handful of nanoseconds later the debris cloud hits.

When it reaches the batter, the center of the cloud is still moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. It hits the bat first, but then the batter, plate, and catcher are all scooped up and carried backward through the backstop as they disintegrate. The shell of x-rays and superheated plasma expands outward and upward, swallowing the backstop, both teams, the stands, and the surrounding neighborhood—all in the first microsecond.

Heh.

So, you guys, Batman's cape? Doesn't actually work.

Maybe if he switched to a shorter, more fashion forward cape.

Is this sweetly tearjerking story good for Good Things?

Just looking at the headline and not watching the video, it looks a little too sad?

Slang term I learned today:

“clopping” is Brony slang for masturbation.

OMG, after not knowing it before yesterday, and performing it tomorrow, I'm pretty sure I'll never get Copland's Ching-A-Ring Chaw out of my head ever again. Yikes.

tommyrot, the best part is the footnote:

A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered "hit by pitch", and would be eligible to advance to first base.