Per Ardua Ad Astra

Honestly, I need to redirect my attention back to my work. I have a serious problem with Attention Deficit Syndrome.

Anyways, Concerned at hlcomic.com has ended its run. Goodbye Gordon Frohman, you won’t be missed (but your stupidity will be). Like the rest of Concerned fans, we’ll be praying for a comic strip on Half-Life 2: Episode 1. I’m going to miss strips like this.

A typical case of maximum points for creativity, but zero score for logic in solving a physics problem. Therein lies the problem. The personification for the ‘He Knows No Fear, He Knows No Danger, He Knows Nothing’ tagline from Johnny English.

Of course, I did not forget the One Free Man, the Opener of the Way, MIT physicist Dr. Gordon Freeman who ‘cameoed’ in some strips.

If you don’t get it, you never played Half-Life 2. Simple as that.

Not to worry, there’s pbfcomics.com to come to the rescue of the comic deprived. Not that it’s such a bad thing you know (you’ll love the schadenfreude element in the comics!).

Also, thanks to Facebook I found xkcd.com. It’s hard to understand sometimes (it’s populated with scientific in-house jokes after all), but when you do, laughter is guaranteed. The author was, after all a roboticist at NASA. Ain’t that surprising.

Yes, the author has this thing with dinosaurs. Tip: To properly understand the joke, read the search terms in sequence from top to bottom.

Now this is really sad. He needs a life, like many of us here in NUS.

Comic strips courtesy of their respective sites.

A YouTube video answering the common question "What happens if the Sun suddenly ceases to exist?" An excellent visualisation for those stumped for a better explanation of the general relativity problem.

The video looks correct except for one thing: If gravitational influence acts at the speed of light, then wouldn’t it take 8 minutes before the Earth departs from its orbit into a tangential trajectory (like sparks flying from a steel cutter) after the Sun disappears? Maybe I need an update since my source is almost as old as I am (great, I sound so old!). Or maybe the timescale is compressed so the 8 minutes is practically instantaneous. I think the latter is more likely since everything has a speed limit at c.

Oh, and to make things clearer read this description from the YouTube video:

The traditional interpretation of general relativity says that can’t happen because, at worst, the Sun turns to energy, but energy continues to gravitate. But the new physical interpretation of general relativity has no need to dodge the question.

That explains why I encounter two schools of thought whenever the subject was broached. For the traditional interpretation I always thought that the energy would eventually spread out and the gravity acting on the Earth would slowly weaken. Of course, that scenario deals with matter conversion into energy (like matter-antimatter annihilation) which isn’t exactly what the question wanted. Maybe it takes a newer interpretation to take the Sun out of the picture literally, hence the newer model.

What a lucky day to have an impulse to change my XP skin. All right, I’m the next to be suckered into giving my XP a new look.

Introducing the Royale Noir skin.

Image courtesy of flexbeta.net

Wonderful isn’t it? Dark dark blue, the way I like it most! How long did I take to re-skin my desktop? Less than 30s.

You see, the skin was developed by Microsoft as part of their Royale skin for their Windows Media Center Edition. As it was never perfected Microsoft never made a public release of the skin till recently (about 3 days ago judging from the posts on the Internet). So all I have to do is download the skin, unzip into the proper folder and then initialise it. Piece of cake. Best of all, no significant performance degradation!

Want to know more? Go here.