Bought House and Home in Santa Clara, CA

Alice and I bought a new home and moved to Santa Clara, CA.  (Original post/backup link)

Tap the Top of a Soda can

I used to be one of those people that laughed at people who tapped the top of a recently jostled soda can in order to prevent it from fizzing wildly when opening it (as opposed to just letting it take the time to settle down on its own)

We've all dropped our soda can or been the victim of someone shaking it before giving it to us or something similar. The desire is to not let that slow us down from enjoying the tasty beverage contained within the soda can.

So, I one time, I saw someone tapping the top of his soda can after dropping it, and I was like, "What are you doing?" I mean, how does that have anything to do with the released carbon dioxide from creating pressure in the can, right?

Everything "official" I've found on the topic also says that it doesn't work. This person or that person supposedly did this or that test which never shows any difference between tapped and nontapped shook soda cans. But that doesn't change the fact that it does work. Remember, I used to laugh at people who did this. With basic cola like Pepsi and Coke, I've never had overflowing fizz blow out of the can if I tapped it. Since I started using this technique myself, I have amazed others with full on demonstrations.

Of course, there are others who are proponents (backup link) of this technique.

So basically, I've had nothing but success using this method on regular colas. (I've seen results with A&W Root Beer, and me own experience says that no trick works with it cuz it is designed to foam and foam it does!)

Urbandictionary.com

In case you've not heard of it, there's a great place to find out the meaning of the newest words or phrases being used, called Urban Dictionary. Fellow users frequently update the Urban Dictionary with new words and definitions, including yours truly. So far, I have added 6 words that have been accepted, 5 of which have been met with significant thumbs up peer approval.
I'm also a frequent user of Dictionary.com too, which has recently improved its site content.
Oh, and also, on many online searches I do nowadays, I follow up the search text with "wiki" to make sure wikipedia entries show up, as these are often more concise and useful than traditional news or database sources.

Google

Google or Yahoo? Well, I use both, but mostly Yahoo for immediately available content. There, there's also Clusty that organizes my search results. That's all.

Unusual attention on an old post

Sometime last year, I posted a light-hearted commentary on the idea of viewing human history in human-centric terms titled Something about Evolution Just Occured to Me. What's odd is that this posting has just recently provoked a healthy array of comment responses.

Al-Qaida must be scratching their heads

Recently Al-Qaida leadership has offered a hand out to Americans to join the Muslim faith. Then days later, they go about making more threats against us. I say it now, truly, if every American was a Muslim, Al-Qaida would still be a terrorist organization fighting against us. They are so hypocritical, that it is just ludicrous. One has to wonder why they haven't figured out why 1.2 million Muslims within the U.S. haven't stooped to join their cause. America isn't a place that people live so much as it is an idea we hold valuable. Freedom isn't a sin. It is God's gift to those who are willing to give trust to a system that at least tries to treat everyone with equality, even if we do fall short of that goal in reality. What does Al-Qaida offer? Freedom from freedom? Laughable. America isn't a superpower because strove to be. We did not seek this out. It was thrust upon us. And, history will show, we have acted most responsibility amongst any other nation that has held this position in any time in history. Al-Qaida is nothing more than a power lusting organization that is covering over their sins under the banner of jihad. Watching them work is like watching a mediocre online RTS game play out. It's as though they got their world strategy by playing Command and Conquer. Seriously, if you've play any of those games, you can see the pattern. There will always be a yin and a yang, with two opposing sides. But Al-Qaida has done nothing except make the U.S. more powerful and drove us to become an even greater superpower. ::sigh:: I've never seen the U.S. be able to wield so much force with so little effort. We are waging two wars at the same time on a peacetime economy! Imagine what would happen should America convert our economy over to wartime again (as we did in WWII). This is not the direction we should be taking the world in. Yet, it is Al-Qaida which is driving the America to become such a force. As much as the Japanese underestimated America in the 40's, Al-Qaida is underestimating us much much worse now. The Japanese awoke a sleeping dragon. Al-Qaida has sharpen that same dragon's claws and given it steroids.

Buzy buzy week.

nuf' said.

So, a bit more on Pluto's demotion

It is appropriate that their are already scientists that are rebuffing the recent supposed demotion of Pluto as a planet. I mentioned there would be embarrassment on this decision within 20 years. Well, one week is certainly within 20 years. lol

Reuters reports:

"The IAU can say the sky is green all day long and that doesn't make it so," said Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "The IAU created a definition which is technically flawed, linguistically flawed and scientifically embarrassing," Stern said in a phone interview.

This is pretty funny and pretty much matches the point I made previously. These people don't own our solar system and they don't own the English language.

Fact of the matter is, the new definitions of "planet" actually are poorly worded to specifically exclude both Ceres and Pluto as planets.

A "planet" [1] is a celestial body that: (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.

Furthermore, these rules fail to recognize the differences between the accepted planets. Gas Giants like Jupiter or Saturn have very little in common with Terrestrials like Earth or Venus. Instead of playing political games with how words are used, these scientist should be working to create meaningful classifications of planets that describe their general make-up and origins.

Once we start exploring other solar systems, I think we will find the familiar order of our own solar system is quite rare, and that our current understanding of what a planet is not resemble its future definition. There will be planets that share orbits in one fashion or another. There will be protoplanets larger than Earth, but residing within an Asteroid field. There will be double planets that are similar in size and that orbit either other. There will smashed planets, rogue planets, comet tail planets, double Gas Giants, heavy element planets, obround planets the size of Mars, empty planets, planets that look like the Virgin Mary or Abraham Lincoln, hard surface planets bigger than Neptune, and planets where it really is easy being green. All of this makes the current politically motivated discussion, of what deserves to be called a planet, all very silly.