Stranger than Fiction

Note: It seems appropriate that this item somehow did not post at the designated time on March 31 as scheduled. The re-post has it showing up at the time I had originally selected, but not appearing until almost a day later. Go fig.

If you think your life is like a Twilight Zone episode -- and I wonder how long it will be before no one understands that reference -- allow this website to help you create one of your own.

Sorry, though. "In one of the more important elections in a while, both major parties nominated people so awful that whoever won, the rest of us lost" is not a Twilight Zone episode, but instead the real world we live in.

Quiet, Please

Mental Floss shares this map of the noisiest areas of the country. Excessive noise can cause serious health issues. Of course, that doesn't take into account the content of the noise, which means that some noisy areas (Washington, D.C., cough, cough) are more unhealthy than others. Just saying.

Unbelievable Precision

I'm not buying this Los Angeles Times article about how many jobs in the United States are at "high risk" of automation in the next 15 years or so.

It's not because I think it's some kind of "liberal media" cliché that's trying to talk about bleak economic news in order to get people thinking negatively about the current president. It's not because I think that jobs won't get phased out by innovation and advances in automation. It's not because I think that the story ran because the figures were less for Europe and all newspaper reporters have a goal of making America look bad. That's ridiculous.

No, I'm not buying it because the analysis firm that conducted the research and survey came up with a figure of 38 percent. Not a rounding number like 35 or 40. Nope. A precise oddball figure of 38. Which is also ridiculous. There's no way anyone could come up with that kind of number, whether the time frame is the next week or the next decade. If the analysts had said "a third," or "around a quarter" or even "more than two-fifths" that would sound like a reasonable guess or even aa reasonable result for speculative analysis.

But 38? Nah. Go back to the drawing board and come up with a vaguer answer. It's easy. Just look at the way politicians talk about budgets: The closer they get to exact dollar amounts the more nervous they are. Only when the talk turns to values like "several billion" or "almost a trillion" do they seem relaxed.

Knock, Knock. Who's There? Meaninglessness...

Over on Existential Comics, Jean-Paul Sartre and Søren Kierkegaard show up at your door in order to prove that there are worse things than door-to-door salespeople or folks who want to inform you about their particular understanding of deity.

At least when those people leave, either unaided or with the assistance of a properly-placed shoe, you feel better about things.

Christmas in March!

Physics World has premiered a series of free e-books that cover different topics of interest related to the discipline. They're called Physics World Discovery and so far there are five of them, on topics ranging from dark matter to the use of physics in modern financial market strategy to cancer research.

Did I mention they're free? They march alongside a handful of other series on some scientific topics that range from layperson-friendly to pretty technical.

And did I mention they're free? I'll be busy over here for awhile.

Live From New York! It's Saturday Evening!

NBC has decided that the last four episodes of this season's Saturday Night Live will air live in the country's western time zones that had been showing it on tape delay. The entire continental United States will thus see the show at the same time, even though it will technically be "earlier" on the West Coast.

SNL usually starts at 11:30 in its native Eastern Time zone and 10:30 in your humble correspondent's locale. It will still do that, but the four-episode experiment will have it start at 9:30 in Mountain Time and 8:30 Pacific Time. Hawaii and Alaska will still be scared to check Twitter feeds, as they will stay on tape delay. Otherwise the show would be on at 5:30 PM in Honolulu.

When asked if any other changes were planned, show officials said, "Absolutely not. We will continue to honor Will Ferrell's legacy by remaining unfunny no matter what time zone you're watching from."

The Apocalyptic Pitch

I've used some What If? questions before as subjects to natter about, but I had never gone all the way back to the first edition of the page in 2012. It seems relevant as we approach the beginning of baseball season.

A questioner wonders what would happen if you tried to hit a baseball thrown at 90% of the speed of light. The short answer is that you wouldn't -- if the ball could somehow be accelerated to that speed within an atmosphere its collision with the atoms of air in front of it would create a massive release of energy that would be the next best thing to an atom bomb going off.

And if it happened in Yankee Stadium during a Yankees-Dodgers series, well, it might just turn into the best thing period.