Cool. The guy I put you in contact with actually spends his summers working with middle school kids on creating and performing their own scripts.

The Universe Could Tear Itself Apart Sooner Than Anyone Believed

Blame dark energy.

It's worth noting that, given this timescale, and assuming that the big rip will hold as theory, the Universe will never go through the much-considered heat death phase, which was scheduled to start 10100 years from now. And what's particularly disturbing about all of this is, stars and planets will very much be still in existence at the time of the big rip. It's going to be a universe-wide catastrophe, that words cannot even begin to describe.

...

And the picture they paint is very strange indeed. The cosmologists suggest that dark energy's gravitational repulsion will continually increase until it overcomes all forces holding objects together, causing every structure in the Universe to be torn apart. Nothing will be immune to this cataclysmic event — including those atomic-scale objects that are more tightly bound (they'll be the last to go).

Now, it's very unlikely that our solar system will exist in its current form at that time, but it's worth considering what would happen if it did.

Zhang and Li write that the the Milky Way will be torn apart 32.9 million years before the big rip. The Earth will be ripped away from the Sun two months before the end, and we'll lose our moon with five days left. The Sun itself will be destroyed 28 minutes before the end of time, and the Earth will explode a mere 12 minutes later.

Fun times.

Only 16.7 billion years to go....

Cripes. I did not seriously just offer to foster another dog. I have no time for this! I have no room for this!

But she needs out of the shelter, bad. [link]

Aw, pupper!

So much of the Penn State community's economy is dependent on football, I suppose the NCAA is really trying to walk the fine line so they don't overmuch punish the truly innocent.

Yeah. On football weekends, I think it's something like 10,000 people come into town, and the town has a usual population of about 45,000. And a lot of those people stay at hotels, go to restaurants and bars, buy stuff at stores, and so on. Canceling games would mean pretty much every local business would take an enormous hit. I've seen listings on craigslist of people renting out their apartments for football weekends for $1000 per weekend, so I imagine the hotels must be charging a ton of money those weekends.

The guy I put you in contact with actually spends his summers working with middle school kids on creating and performing their own scripts.

Oh, man! We definitely want to email him!

I'm trying to listen to a Nerdist podcast, but John Barrowman is just so extraordinarily filthy that I had to pause it because it became impossible to smother my laughter.

Aw, brenda. That face!

Well fuck. My awesome boss at my new job is leaving the company. For completely understandable, family-based reasons, but I'm still not thrilled.

I don't know who the guy on the Jamaican $100 is. I feel like a crap citizen for that.

Jilli--that bites. I hope it has minimal effect on you professionally, even if you miss him.