HUMOR - Happy birthday, December babies!

HUMOR - Family Knows Better Than To Fall For Mom’s Little Bullshit Speech About No Presents This Year

RICHMOND, VA—Saying that several of them had learned the hard way, members of the Gordon family confirmed to reporters Friday that they knew damn well not to believe Mom’s little bullshit speech about not giving gifts this Christmas. “She doesn’t mean a goddamn word of it,” said Alex Gordon, 32, one of Ellen Gordon’s three adult children, all of whom agreed that you’d have to be pretty fucking thick if you didn’t see right through her little song and dance about just enjoying each other’s company without the expense and obligation of giving presents. “She says this every year, but forget that—of course she wants to do gifts. Can you imagine the look on her face if there actually wasn’t anything under the tree and we just sat around empty-handed like a bunch of assholes? No way is that happening.” Gordon added that he and his siblings were taking their mom’s suggestion that they could leave on Christmas Day if the ticket was cheaper for the utter horseshit that it is.

Original site - http://www.theonion.com/articles/family-knows-better-than-to-fall-for-moms-little-b,37673/

MY LIFE - A hectic morning...

HUMOR - If it had been three wise women...

HUMOR - Merry Christmases!

ENTERTAINMENT - Have a very Trek Christmas!

MY LIFE - When my daughter's misspelling of "OMG" autocorrected as "Ming"!

MY LIFE - My boss thinks I'm ugly!

SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY - What would it look like from Earth if the moonwere a giant disco ball?

By Robbie Gonzalez (http://rtgonzalez.kinja.com/)

So, technically, this is what it would look like if the Moon were a disco ball AND orbited Earth at the same distance as the International Space Station, i.e. roughly 420 kilometers (260 miles) above the surface of the Earth. But that doesn't make it any less incredible looking.

This fantastic animation is by Nick of Yeti Dynamics (the same guy behind this simulation of a normal, non-disco-ball moon at a distance of 420km) and comes by way of Michael Stevens of Vsauce. Some good stuff in here from Stevens about Roche limits (if the moon were ever suddenly teleported to so close a distance, it would promptly disintegrate... worth it?) and earthshine – although it's worth the watch for Nick's simulations alone. The one that envisions a giant, single-plane mirror orbiting Earth is especially awe-inspiring.

From Vsauce

DISCO BALL MOON INFORMATION: 
The large mirror-tiles are 150km squared, and the small ones are 100km squared. 
They are all 10 km thick with glass (with an IOR of 1.56) 
There are 3012 mirrored tiles 

When as near as the ISS, the Earth surface to disco-ball-moon surface distance is 420 km or so The orbital period in relation to the earth is realistic, about a 2.1 hour period. 

When the disco moon is in low orbit, each reflection of the sun as a caustic is effectively a tiny sun, although you can never reflect enough light to get above the temperature of the surface of the sun (about 6000 degrees). 

Since the sunlight is going through glass first, glass will in general filter out a lot of the UV, so your caustics shouldn't reflect too much UV. The projection of a mirror-tile is larger than the projection of the sun when seen from low altitude. . 

when seen from far away the tile is smaller than the sun, and hence the caustic isn't as bright . Basically the disco tiles are glass with a silvered backing. Some of the light will not penetrate the glass, and will be simply reflected off the first surface of the glass, This reflection strength increases as the angle of incidence approaches 90, generally referred to as a Fresnel reflection.. or rather the strength follows that equation. This reflected light will generally be full spectrum 

The center of the giant flat mirror is orbiting at a distance of 2157.4 Km above the Surface of the earth, It's diameter is 3474.8 km (same as the moon), It's orbital period would be longer than the disco moon simply because it has less mass. But in this video it has the same orbital period as in the moon.

The actual mass of the giant mirror is absurd.. it's way over-engineered.. if a real one were to be built it wouldn't have huge thick rims, it would more likely resemble a girder work, with Mylar films. Not huge death star like mirror with towers, and strobe lights (and a strange lack of solar panels) 

Follow me on twitter! https://twitter.com/tweetsauce or instagram: http://instagram.com/electricpants and subscribe to Vsauce for more: http://www.youtube.com/user/vsauce?su...visuals by YETI DYNAMICS: https://www.youtube.com/yetidynamics music by JAKE CHUDNOW: http://www.youtube.com/JakeChudnow

MY LIFE - Watching Christmas specials with my daughter...

SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY - The origin and history of the Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm-Flailing Tubeman!

99 Percent Invisible - 

Episode 143: Inflatable Men

By ROMAN on December 2, 2014

You see them on street corners, at gas stations, at shopping malls. You see them at blowout sales and grand openings of all kinds. Their wacky faces hover over us, and then fall down to meet us, and then rise up again. Their bodies flop. They flail.

They are men. Men made of tubes. Tubes full of air.

[An “AirDancer” from LookOurWay. Credit: Sam Greenspan]

Depending upon your tastes, they are either full of ridiculous joyful exuberance, or the tackiest thing in the world.

A number of cities across the US have actually banned the use of tube guys. An ordinance in Houston enacted in 2008 proclaims that dancing a tube guy “contributes to urban visual clutter and blight and adversely affects the aesthetic environment.”

Some may seem them as visual clutter now, but they have ancestry in stunning works of Caribbean art.

The tube guy origin story begins with celebrated artist and “mas man” Peter Minshall. He made a name for himself in Trinidad & Tobago (and beyond) for his Carnival bands, featuring larger than life puppets which dance through the street to the beat of Calypso music.

In the early 1990s, Peter Minshall had gained fans among members of the planning committee for the Olympics and in 1995, he found himself in a stadium in Los Angeles working with a bunch of different artists, trying out different ideas for the opening ceremonies for the Atlanta Games the following year.

As Minshall tells it, he was was trying to do something using inflatable tubes, but it wasn’t working. And then Minshall realized that if they were made to look like people, they would dance just like people did back home in Trinidad & Tobago—limpid, loose, and gracefully...

After the Olympics, Doron Gazit applied for a patent for “apparatus and method for providing inflated undulating figures,” in 2001. He then began licensing its use through his company, Air Dimensional Designs.

This became a point of tension between Gazit and Minshall; Minshall had been unaware of Gazit’s intention to patent and monetize the inflatable figure. Gazit, for his part, says that he applied for a patent because he put a lot of research and development into making the “flyguys” (as Gazit calls them), and he was already starting to see other people people rip off his efforts...

However, Gazit’s company, Air Dimensional Designs, does continue to license its patent to various companies that manufacture and sell vertical inflatables. One such company is LookOurWay, which in addition to making “AirDancers,” also sells “Air Rangers.”

Turns out that vertical inflatables also make for good scarecrows. Farmer Gary Long, who helped develop the Air Rangers, says that bird damage in his orchard of honeycrisp apples went from 20,000 pounds a year—to zero...

To read the full piece or listen to the podcast - http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/inflatable-men/

HUMOR - Ralphie "just" had a fight...

CULTURE/SOCIETY - Christmas before Thanksgiving!