Damn, I really wish I had mod points now. The first time I saw that beat poem, I was hooked. A very funny and smart skeptic. For those interested, you can listen to him in youtube, spotify, etc., since he has recorded some musical works (he's a very competent pianist and musician also).

You mean, he's a continuing source of inspiration, Jimmy?

My mistake. As always, I didn't RTFA before posting. Now I realize that they're talking about the molecuar orbitals (who would've guessed!) and not the picture taken by IBM before. It's actually pretty nice. Again, apologies.

I remember having seen this very same picture a year ago or so posted here... It's still in my pictures folder because it really impressed me that time. Guess it shows that chemistry isn't alchemy after all. Link to the original article

It's so common to find him in patent-related articles that I'm starting to miss him... What's happened to you, /., a sudden change of mind?

My worries are that moving the asteroid could somehow disrupt the balance of the solar system and have gravitational repercussions with other objects, kind of a butterfly effect... Yes, it's small, but if it disbalances the orbit of another object, and those do the same thing to others... the millon-years-old balance that we have in the solar system could be wrecked. Just a very wild thought. Any astrophysicist that could help me with this? Is it really possible, or is the lack of coffee messing with my mind?

But he'll come back, as usual

I'd think that the market itself its it's own Hawking Radiation, and there's no limit to the mass a financial system can have for it to spontaneously evaporate... I think we may be on to something here

Don't worry! Once they pass the modified Chandrasekhar limit for critical financial mass (hasn't been properly calculated for monetary matter), they're pretty much in the realm of Relativistic Accounting, for which no solution exists.

I'm beginning to suspect this guy (For a Free Internet) is a machine... have you seen his previous posts? Either he is one, or he hasn't passed the "toring" test himself.

ftfy

But the presence of a constant magnetic field would spawn eddy currents on the rotating part of the heat sink and the fluid itself, leading to heat losses and magnetic resistance created by the eddy currents themselves. Obviously, this isn't set in stone (I can't remember the details), but I remember having to solve a rather complex exercise very similar to this in my Electromagnetic Fields course (I'm an EE). It sure would be interesting, though, to know if this effects could be rendered negligible by using some other materials.

Beware! On behalf of everyone I know, I say: Yeah, right.... There's nothing to see here, move along

I took a course in my university that was called "Introduction to music", which was pretty good. One day, our teacher showed us a BBC documentary that was narrated by George Martin. Sadly, I haven't been able to find it. It was a very interesting show, because he talked exactly about this subject. He analyzed some popular songs and related them to the way he thought music producing is, and shared some interesting ideas. For instance, he said that popular songs tend to be in the 120 bpm range because our hearts beat approximately at that frequcency, and we find it more pleasurable to walk at that particular speed. To illustrate that idea, he took a Bee Gees song and tore it apart (Stayin' Alive, IIRC), and said that we like to walk and sing-along with tunes that have some correlation with our heartbeats. On a personal note, I find that most songs in the popular repertoire have the same verse-chorus structure because, in some ways, it's easier for a writer to compose a song in that way instead of having to ellaborate in different key circles for each part that share a common idea. Think of Coldplay's "42" or Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" (Doug Adams should be proud!). Those two songs don't have a normal verse-chorus structure and are somewhat difficult to follow because of it. For a pop singer it's easier to write a catchy song if it has a very singable chorus to which people can sing-along. Sir George Martin really made me think about popular music, being an amateur musician myself.