The Y2K+10 Holiday Card [Y2k10]

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Have a Merry Xmas and a Happy Next Decade! Much love, The Last Decade.

Anna Jane Grossman will be with us for the next few weeks, documenting life in the early aughts, and how it differs from today. The author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of ObsoleteTheBook.com, she has also written for dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post, as well as Gizmodo. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.



Young Girls: Do Not Give Up Your Sexting Virginity to Half the High School Like This [Sexting]

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Look, teenage girls of America: You have got to save your sexting virginity until you meet someone really special. Not some random "male acquaintance." Because that's when the police get involved.

A sexting case in Plainfield, Illinois (a lesser-known site of the sexual revolution) has "exploded into the largest sexting case Plainfield police have ever encountered." A 16-year-old girl sent out less savory pics of herself to "a male acquaintance" (?), and being presumably a 16-year-old guy, the shots didn't stay secret for long. Apparently over half the student body has seen them, parents, police, PTA members and probably President Obama are all freaking the fuck out, and really, this could be the end of the noble American experiment. Note: The source has several hundred photo galleries linked underneath the story. Do not be fooled, none of them contain nudie pics of 16-year-old girls. [WBBM]



Slo Mo Duck’s Corkscrew Penis Showcases the Majesty of Nature [Science]

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Here is a slow-mo video of a scientist making a duck have sex with corkscrew-shaped beakers. It is one of the craziest things I've ever seen. Merry Christmas!

You're going to want to check out Carl Zimmer's full article about what exactly is going on here. Essentially, evolution has caused duck penises and duck vaginas to adapt into pretty wild and complex contraptions, with the penises unfurling into clockwise corkscrew shapes while the vaginas have evolved into counter-clockwise passageways with multiple pockets. And you thought your vagina was impressive!

Seriously, go check out the article to give this video some context. If nothing else, it'll provide you with a deeply inappropriate anecdote to tell your extended family over dinner tonight. [Discover Magazine]



Time and Relative Dimensions in Cookies | Bad Astronomy

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One of the reasons I love this time of year is that Mrs. BA is a fantastic cook and baker. She was making cutout cookies the the day, and asked if I wanted anything special.

Well, duh.

tardis_cookie

Who wouldn’t want a cookie that’s bigger on the inside than the outside?

And of course, more apropos of the season:

fsmcookie

MMMmmmmmm. Sacrilicious.


Office Depot’s Laptop Glue Fix Fails in Predictably Epic Fashion [Repair]

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What's the best way to fix a broken-off power port on an Acer Extensa? If you said "glue the sucker back in there," you might just work in Office Depot's repair department. You're also, in that so-painfully-obvious-it-hurts-my-face way, real wrong.

When Consumerist reader Scott sent his under-warranty laptop into Office Depot for a repair, he noticed that they'd used glue to fix his power port problem. Okay, that's bad enough, since the glue melted to the power port and caused a serious burn hazard. But when Scott sent his Acer back in for round two, well:

"I detailed the issue to the Office Depot Warranty operator, and he
specifically wrote "Problem: AC port loose. glue melted from last fix.
AC adapter gets extremely hot" on the work order. I again sent the
laptop off hoping the problem would be fixed. My hopes were too high.
Turns out, glue the power port so it is usable is a masterful fix when
compared to the attached photo. As you can see... again the service
people glued the power port back into "place." Though this time it is
glued in off center, and can not be plugged in. Obviously whoever
office depot sends their laptops off to for service does not even
check to see if their "fixes" are functional. An added bonus is that
my expansion slot cover is now missing. So not only do I receive a
broken laptop, it also has a part stolen."

So, in brief: don't try to fix your laptop with glue, definitely don't try to fix it with glue twice, and definitely definitely don't trust Office Depot with your valuables. [Consumerist]



Sun and Moon and Tremors on Earth

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The San Andreas. Credit: Reuters

Reuters has a very interesting story saying tidal forces parallel to a segment of the San Andreas Fault could be causing non-volcanic tremors, and a study published in Nature Magazine say the tidal forces are the tug of the sun and moon. These tremors could possibly used to predict earthquakes.

From Reuters:

Low-level tremors have long been associated with volcanoes, because they often warn of impending eruptions.

A study published in the journal Nature says these tremors beneath the San Andreas Fault could provide similar clues about earthquakes.

The researchers say the faint tug of the sun and the moon on the fault causes tremors well below the level where earthquakes occur.

The finding suggests that rock far underground is lubricated with pressurized water, allowing the rock to slip easily and weakening the fault.

“If you could go down there and push the rock with your hand you would cause a tremor,” said researcher Amanda Thomas of the University of California, Berkeley.

Thomas and colleagues analyzed nearly 2,000 tremors detected over eight years in the Parkfield segment of the San Andreas Fault. They also looked at micro-earthquakes in the same area and calculated the stresses produced by the Earth and ocean tides.

The study says they found a strong correlation between non-volcanic tremor activity and extremely small, tidal stresses parallel to the San Andreas Fault.

Thomas says studying tremors could help seismologists better understand and, perhaps, predict earthquake activity.

“They’re looking at tremor as kind of an indicator of large earthquakes as tremors signal the buildup of strain below the fault zone,” Thomas said. “So we might be able to use tremor to tell us something about when the next large earthquake will happen.”

Reuters editing by Maggie Fox and Sandra Maler.

How To: Build Your Own Full-Scale Eiffel Tower [Architecture]

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So you've got your 7,000 metric tons of puddling iron, your unruly 19th-century French construction crew, your Michelin starred chef and a Rosetta Stone French DVD. Today, finally, you have the final piece: Blueprints!

They're less precise than the perfectly-modeled CAD renderings people rely on now, but equally, they're more beautiful; and perhaps not coincidentally, so are the results. So get to it, fauxrchitectes. [Kottke]



Underground Five-Star Hotel Fit For a Mole King [Architecture]

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This proposed subterranean London hotel is going to put all 200 guest rooms beneath the surface of a former golf course. Sorry, CHUDs: it's time to gentrify the soil.

The hotel, designed by ReardonSmith Architects, aims to preserve the verdant appeal of its Green Belt location while at the same time offering a full range of luxury spa, hotel, and golf accommodations. If they're able to blend it into the scenery as seamlessly as the spec art indicates, it's going to be a beautifully unobtrusive bit of five-star property. [Inhabitat via io9]



PIPE CHUCKS

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Is there anything out there I could use to grip a round tube and mechanically rotate it with high torque.

I install screwpiles using a torque motor which attaches to the end of the pile with a collar and pin system. This method nessitates the pile to be in short pieces (ie. around 2mtrs long).

Holiday Schedule

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Marc's note: NASA Watch will be updating only on a limited basis until next Monday at which time we will resume our normal schedule until New Year's Eve.

From New Year's Eve until Monday, January 5th we will once again only be publishing on a limited basis.

We wish everyone the best during this holiday season and please do be careful during your travels!

Happy Holiday's