Harry Potter Walks Fast Without His Broom

I love to run, and speed walk if I’m indoors. I was in the skyway today and went past a guy who said “Harry Potter walks faaaasst without his broom.”

I looked around and saw no other suitable canadites, so I assume he was talking about me. Afterall, it’s not the first time I’ve been called Harry Potter. But I thnk he meant it as an insult.

I mean, I’m not a big fan of his stories, but I wouldent mind being Harry Potter. Then I could throw people across rooms with spells and conjure light when it’s dark. Plus, I would have a flying broom. I don’t think I’d mind it one bit. Besides, darn muggle, you’re eating chips while walking slow.

I’ll take Harry Potter anyday.

Taking stuff for granted

I’ve been miserable and sick these past handful of days. At first it was just an ordinary sinus infection, now my gums hurt so badly that eating has become hard. I’ve always claimed to be someone who doesn’t take anything for granted. I never considered that eating (as in, not having food to eat, but being capable of the very process of placing food in my mouth, chewing, and swallowing) was something I could lose.

In a week (hopefully) when I can eat again without pain, I’m going to have to remember to not take it for granted.

Mars

For years and years, the concept of life on other planets was ridiculous to the mainstream scientific community. Now examining a crater on Mars may help to change that. Evidence of not only water, but the conditions for life underground were discovered. This is huge. In the past handful of years we have found that the Solar System is a wet place. Water can be found on several moons and planets. It’s on Mercury, the closest planet to the sun even! So now we are learning about potential conditions for life right over on Mars. Finding anything, either conclusive proof of past life on Mars or finding single cell organisms would be, in my opinion, the single greatest discovery in the history of the human race. I just hope I live to see that day. And I hope I don’t have to re-write any of my sci-fi novels.

Fortune Cookies

Today I had crummy Chinese food court fare again (one of my favorites). When I grabbed my fortune cookie, it was connected to a second so I pulled not one but two onto my tray. I shrugged and figure machines make mistakes too and took the two cookies. I didn’t think anything of it and would not have, had the cookies said something different. When I opened the first, I realized I had opened them out of order. The first I opened said “Ignore previous cookie”. Given I had taken two connected cookies, clearly I just mixed up my order. Here are the two of them together.

Cookie

What does it mean?

The cookie is never wrong. Now I just need to figure out what ignoring this one means.

It’s the end of the world as we know it

Posting this here from my article. I set a post to be made at 11:12 AM GTM tomorrow if the world is still here. I hope we make it! This article was included in an award-winning issue of my college paper.

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Starting this New Year, perhaps the last thing we want to think about is that this is our final year to live. At risk of bringing a sad mood to this paper, the following must be included.

Dec. 21nd, 2012 is to be the last day for Earth. It has been a good run; in the last fraction of the planet’s history, the human race had made quite a few amazing accomplishments. We have harnessed electricity and we can communicate with each other from anywhere on the globe. Travel that once would have been impossible now takes a few hours by plane or by rail. It is as if we have managed to all come together under one flag, that of Earth, just in time for it to be destroyed.

Yet, this cannot last, for during human kind’s history, a group known as the Mayans accomplished something of their own: they learned that the Earth would end on December 21nd, 2012.

Now, let us not forget the other grand achievements of the Mayan people. They played amazing sacrificial ball games, where either the winning or losing participants died, and it may have been an honor. Today, tourists still flock to the outstandingly detailed pyramids and ziggurats that they constructed. They had substantial knowledge of the cosmos, and integrated that knowledge into works including their pyramids and, more notably, their calendars. Continue reading

Water on Mercury

Apparently there’s water ice on mercury. Like a lot. Like somewhere between 100 billion and 1 trillion metric tons (isn’t it funny how large the margin of error for space can be?)

And organics. So we have tons and tons of water, and organic compounds. This is how life on our planet worked. Water+organics.

No life discovered (yet) but this is a great new discovery! It has to be out there…
CBS has a good article
And NASA’s
I really hope we find life out there. With how much organic compounds and water (or evidence of it) we have been finding lately it seems like it’s only a matter of time. No one is saying there’s a strong chance there is life on Mercury, but at the very least we could perhaps learn more about life on Earth by observing the organic compounds and water there.