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Black Hole Birth Detected this Morning
An anonymous reader writes "SPACE.com is reporting on the first optical afterglow ever detected from a short-duration (milliseconds) Gamma-Ray Burst. The GRB signals the birth of a black hole resulting from a merger between two neutron stars. Theory had predicted the whole thing, which was all spotted this morning by NASA's Swift satellite and ground-based observatories, thanks to an automated email system that notifies astronomers worldwide."
"Mr. Scott I need your warp 8 speed now"...."Captain I'm giving you all that I can muster"
If you didn't catch last night's Simpson's, you really should. Homer gets caught up in the "Left Below" craze. Pretty sharp satire.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Yah know - religious zealots know not to take everything in the bible as 100% literal - parables and whatnot...
You would think that maybe, just maybe, they'd realize that maybe God's creation 'week' wasn't a week with days as we know them - 1 day could equate to thousands of years...
Or maybe you'd realize that Genesis is no more accurate than the Hindu or Shinto or Greek or Babylonian creation myths.
This kind of "well, if you squint your eyes, it looks partly accurate" is the most pathetic type of grade-school apologetics. The language is pretty damn clear, and it meant "day" not "uh, could be a day, could be billions of years, but whichever it is, this story is still 100% completely accurate, so believe it."
Anyhow, with that absolutely incisive analysis "day == thousands of years" are we all supposed to slap our foreheads, and say, "Oh, my. Now I understand that Genesis IS 100% true, I just need the right decoder ring. I'll stop looking through my telescope now, because it is all right there in the Good Book. Thanks, caino59, you've made my life better."
Next, I'll suppose you'll tell us about the angels guarding the entrance to the Garden of Eden, so that none of us wander back there.
The only thing more annoying is those people who will talk about the "talents" in Matt. 25:14-30 as a metaphor for our abilities, even after admitting that talent is just a unit of weight.
No cause then the RIAA would have you in jail for having anything to do with it!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer