In 2007, the Galaxy Zooites — 100,000 housewives, high school students, helicopter pilots, physicians, school teachers, truck drivers, secretaries, and a mobile home park manager from all over the world – got together on the internet under the guidance of some astronomers and classified galaxies. Galaxies tend to be either spirals or ellipticals, computers are […]
I’ve never understood how we go about ascribing character traits to animals. Every cat I’ve known fits Abstruse Goose’s checklist, but aren’t we both just making stuff up? No dog I ever had could remotely be described as “faithful” or “devoted;” they’re in it for the free lunch, period.
Heat rises, cold falls, and like a pan of soup on a hot stove, the earth boils, exceedingly slowly. The boiling is called convection: columns of heat rise from the earth’s hot core, move up through the viscous solidity of the mantle, cool at the crust, roll over and fall back down. The crust that […]
Even though Heather is Canadian, Josie and I have prevailed and Last Word on Nothing is having a holiday today, the American Labor Day during which labor is celebrated but nobody works. We’ll be back on Tuesday and we hope that before then you won’t have gotten discouraged and quit. Please, come back. Actually Labor […]
Sublime: you don’t hear it much except as an adjective meaning really, really good, used the way “divine” or “glorious” “wonderful” are used, just another adjective, nothing to do with divinity or glory or wonder. But really, sublime describes something that takes you beyond the ordinary — Glenn Gould plays Bach sublimely — something […]
I’m not exactly sure what this is a picture of — I’ve seen it somewhere, maybe a graphic picture of noise? some computer thing? — but given his title, Abstruse Goose clearly means us to think of it as stars. #1. It looks real. #2. Abstruse Goose, if you’re out there, can you tell us […]
This is how astronomers think giant galaxies form super-massive black holes (the adjectives are the astronomers’). Way back at the beginning, maybe a billion years after the birth of a 14 billion year old universe, enormous galaxies a hundred times bigger than the Milky Way were born, pulling themselves together out of clouds of stars […]
I’ve often had the same thought myself. You have too, haven’t you. http://abstrusegoose.com/208
