Kent Couch and his amazing flying machine

Admit it. You’ve thought about doing the exact same thing. Maybe you’re at a backyard barbeque. Some festive occasion, complete with cases and cases of chilled, refreshing and possibly alcoholic beverages, plus the obligatory ‘festive’ balloons the missus (or whoever your party-planning co-conspirator is) made you spend all afternoon inflating with that dang-blasted rental helium tank. Or, who can say? Maybe there’s just you, a backyard and the aforementioned case of refreshing alcoholic beverages. Either way, you spy a lawnchair that you reckon couldn’t possibly weigh more than a couple of pounds. And the dang-blasted helium tank. And the wheels get turning…

(This and more pictures available from CNN.)

Sure, it’s a fantasy so played out they’ve even made movies about it. I don’t imagine that makes the trip any less exhiliarating. Mr. Couch, this nicely chilled beverage is for you. I hope Idaho was all you hoped it might be.

Breaking news on the Bigfoot front

As seen on Fox News, 7/01/08:

What’s truly shocking about this is that Fox — the network responsible for full hour explorations of how the moon landing may have been faked, among other hot button pop-sci topics — is the voice of reason in this report.

Out of all the bears that everybody hears about, talks about and they see on vacation, how come nobody’s ever found a skeleton of a bear?”

So says subject matter expert Tom Biscardi in this report. Hey, Tom? Just in case you Google yourself and come across my blog:

(Image appropriated from www.jamd.com sans permission)

This and approximate 200,000 other images resulted from an image search for bear skeleton. If that’s not good enough, I have no doubt Troy Hurtubise can turn one up for you in a jiffy.

In all fairness, I appreciate how being grilled by Ken and Barbie might lead to words coming out of your mouth in an order other that you intended. Feel encouraged to set the record straight here.

Birds turn table on cat

Chupacabra sightings

Coming across this two-year-old news story on what may have been a sighting of the elusive desanguinator of goats, el chupacabra, I set to looking for a followup story:

Sadly, all I was able to find was that, though posted in March 2006, that newscast was in fact from August 2005; the fact that the initial report took that long to work its way onto YouTube was not a good indication that I’d find an update of the situation. Though Google turns up plenty of mentions of the report by Ms. Rivas on Channel 9 News (2,320 or so) and the hairless dog/rat/kangaroo farmer Reggie Lagow captured and handed over to authorities at Texas Parks & Wildlife, a search for chupacabra coleman TX yielded a suspiciously low 0 search results. In their defense, I suppose, one could argue that Texas is, after all, the size of a planet, and look how long it’s taking those NASA guys to search Mars.

There was, however, an incident in the Dominican Republic in March of this year leading to the demse of this creature, which blogger Faustino Perez suspects may be a chupacabra:

If, like me, your Spanish isn’t so hot, you can read a translation of Perez’s post in the first comment down this page, but the short version is that folks in the DR don’t take kindly to unusual looking beasties drinking out of their toilets.

Truth to tell, I’m skeptical on both of these accounts. Having been in the company of goats on a couple of occasions, I can promise you neither the dog-kangaroo nor the albino rat-otter would stand a chance of draining a goat of it’s blood. Unless, of course, they had some sort of hypno ray…

Reptiles run amok

After complacently playing second fiddle to mammals for 65 million years, give or take, recent news seems to indicate that class Reptitia is in the midst of a play to reestablish their position of dominance. The last week has seen a barrage of reptile-related news that can only be seen as a deliberate, malicious and cold-bloodedly coordinated attack. A stealthy python attack in Australia. Attempts by both alligators and crocodiles to sneak into our cities, thankfully intercepted by the vigilant forces of justice. This story, perhaps run before the reporter was able to get all the facts, shows evidence the reptiles have already begun indoctrinating our youth, brainwashing humans into doing their dirty work for them. Then, just because no story is complete without a cool audio/visual segment, there’s this video of a snake eating a hippopotamus:

I hope it goes without saying that this assault must be stopped. And it’s going to take all of us: me, you, our cats, dogs, horses and hippos. Unless we want to go back to living in caves, fighting dinosaurs and sleestaks with pointy sticks, we have to act fast. Contact your local government and/or gun-toting militia and let them know you’re ready to do what’s neccessary to keep us safe.

How I’ve gone 5 months without a bigfoot post is a mystery in its own right

Thankfully, members of the International Brotherhood of Persistent Bigfoot Pursuers popped up on the BBC today:

Okay, I jest. The actual story and accompanying video are here on BBC News, whose videos can’t be embedded in WordPress, and whose artwork looks like it belongs hung on the refrigerator.

My favorite aspect of this report is its inclusion of a handy primer on how to address Bigfoot around the world:
 

In the US it’s known as bigfoot, in Canada as sasquatch, in Brazil as mapinguary, in Australia as a yowie, in Indonesia as sajarang gigi and, most famously of all, in Nepal as a yeti.

The little known Indian version of this legendary ape-like creature is called mande barung - or forest man - and is reputed to live in the remote West Garo hills of the north-eastern state of Meghalaya.

 My second favorite is this quote by the man in the second video down the page, I believe identified as Nelbison Sangma, in response to the reporter’s speculation that these Bigfoot sightings are “a wheeze(?) to attract tourists to Meghalaya”:

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Which I totally plan to add to my own library of snappy responses. Even though it’s pretty clear that what Mr. Sangma means is “Yes.”

Lightning-struck Michiganer wins lottery

This story on MSNBC blipped my weirdness radar from three sites away: a 16-year-old girl was struck by lightning, survived, and then won the lottery the next day. I mean, wow. What are the odds? I don’t know about lightning, but I did do a little legwork tracking down the odds of being hit by a meteor not terribly long ago, and figure meteor, lighting, what’s the diff?

And then… what gives? Twenty dollars? Twenty? I mean, I’m glad yound Miss Helsel is okay and all, but, come on. Extrapolating from these statistics I found on Them Internets (i.e., inarguable facts) some two thousand people are struck by lightning every year. Which isn’t a lot, given the current world population approaching 6 billion, but still too many for a list a recent lightning victims to be much of a draw in USA Today. And the number of people that win twenty-dollar bills every day? That’s another of those numbers I can’t really hold in my head. in Must’ve been a slow news day at MSNBC.

Yep. I can relate.

South Korea legitimized by crop circle

After what I imagine was a bid process not unlike the one cities endure in hopes of hosting the Olympics, South Korea has at long last been legitimized as a member of International Brotherhood of Nations Plagued by Unusual Occurances (hereafter, IBNPUO) by the visitation of a crop circle upon a field of grain of (thus far) unverified yield, as discovered on June 3:

 
(photo swindled from blogger 98papa, albeit by way of this German site that didn’t pixelate the model’s face. You can see the full formation on either of the sites linked to; I chose this one based on its exhibiting a) a crop circle and b) a South Korean.)

My more-or-less sincere congratualtions to the nation and citizens of South Korea — way to go, guys! For the record, I saw The Host way before it was cool, and find South Korean director Chan-wook Park’s segment of Three… Extremes far and away the most disturbing of the three.

Unicorn sighting: Rome

While I’d ordinary leave unicorn sightings to the Harry Potter contingent (no offense to you, Harry Potter contingent), something about the idea of an Italian deer unicorn provides all sorts of extra opportunities for snarkiness:


(photo appropriated sans permission from newsvine.com.)

Sadly, unlike another recently discovered abnormality, this mono-antlered Roe Deer cleverly named “Unicorn” (hey, maybe it’s clever before being translated from Italian to English) has been determined to be not a manifestation of divine providence, but a garden variety genetic flaw/birth defect. So, rather than a magical improvement on the quality of healthcare worldwide, speculators anticipate Uni’s legacy primarily being remembered by the Italian-crafted shoe buyers of the world.

Whoa, look out for that gravity storm

Yes, yes, I know it might seem lazy to post a video linked to in the ‘Related Videos’ column from a previous post (the one directly below this one, even), but you’ve got to admit it’s kinda cool. This is a 36-minute time lapse of an atmospheric event I had previously only heard referenced by Jimmy Buffett: a gravity storm. Or, either since it’s not actually storming per se or because the person that posted the video says so, a gravity wave:

I consulted the wiki elves to help patch this hole in my understanding of how the world works:

In fluid dynamics, gravity waves are waves generated in a fluid medium or at the interface between two mediums (e.g. the atmosphere or ocean) which has the restoring force of gravity or buoyancy.

Which totally cleared it up for me.

Errr, ummm, wait. Maybe I didn’t catch that on the first pass.

Since the fluid is a continuous medium, a traveling disturbance will result. In the earth’s atmosphere, gravity waves are important for transferring momentum from the troposphere to the mesosphere. Gravity waves are generated in the troposphere by frontal systems or by airflow over mountains. At first waves propagate through the atmosphere without affecting its mean velocity. But as the waves reach more rarefied air at higher altitudes, their amplitude increases, and nonlinear effects cause the waves to break, transferring their momentum to the mean flow.

So, what they’re saying is that, with the right gravitivity and/or polaritude, these waveforms cause an inverse yet reciporocal… okay, sorry. Lost it again.

The phase speed c of a linear gravity wave with wavenumber k is given by the formula

c = √ g/k,

where g is the acceleration due to gravity. Since c = ω / k is the phase speed in terms of the frequency ω and the wavenumber, the gravity wave frequency can be expressed as

w=√gk.

The group velocity of a wave (that is, the speed at which a wave packet travels) is given by

c_g = dw/dk,
and thus for a gravity wave,

c_g = ½ √g/k = ½c.

The group velocity is one half the phase velocity. A wave in which the group and phase velocities differ is called dispersive.

 

blink, blink.

Okay, then. Honestly, though, none of this helps make that Buffett song make any more sense.