Thought provoking (IMO)

[url]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOfjkl-3SNE&feature=channel_page[/url]

Diehard Christians will not appreciate the sense of humor.

From [url]http://www.rr.com/news/topic/article/rr/8459870/9134912/Pack_of_raccoons_mauls_74-year-old_Florida_woman[/url]

[code]
Animal control officers hope to trap a pack of raccoons that mauled a
74-year-old Florida woman who tried to chase them from her yard.

The sheriff in Polk County, east of Tampa, says Gretchen Whitted fell
when five raccoons surrounded and attacked her Sunday. She was
taken to a hospital with extensive cuts from her neck to her legs.

"We're not talking about a lot of little bites here," Sheriff Grady Judd
said. "She was filleted."

A neighbor called for help after hearing the woman's cries and seeing
her covered in blood.

Whitted was treated for rabies, though officials doubt the animals
were infected.

Fire crews flooded nearby drains to drive the animals out, but none
appeared. Animal control officers hope to catch them using cat food
and sardines as bait.
[/code]

When will these reporters ever learn that the correct term for a group of raccoons is a "gaze"?

No wonder I can't hear myself think:

[QUOTE=Flatlander;192015]No wonder I can't hear myself think:[/QUOTE]Ermm, I think that means you have a [b]really[/b] quiet upstream link. The background noise is, umm, not a lot. 24dB - 2147483647dB = really really really quiet? :ermm:

[url=http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2009/09/27/conputer-meltdown-115875-21703149/]Just asking for trouble![/url]

For astronomy buffs, from [URL="http://www.rr.com/news/topic/article/rr/8459870/9149573/NASA_telescope_discovers_giant_ring_around_Saturn"]New Giant Ring around Saturn[/URL]

[code]
PASADENA, Calif. — The Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered
the biggest but never-before-seen ring around the planet Saturn,
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced late Tuesday.

The thin array of ice and dust particles lies at the far reaches of
the Saturnian system and its orbit is tilted 27 degrees from the
planet's main ring plane, the laboratory said.

JPL spokeswoman Whitney Clavin said the ring is very diffuse and
doesn't reflect much visible light but the infrared Spitzer telescope
was able to detect it.

Although the ring dust is very cold _ minus 316 degrees Fahrenheit _
it shines with thermal radiation.

No one had looked at its location with an infrared instrument until
now, Clavin said.

The bulk of the ring material starts about 3.7 million miles from the
planet and extends outward about another 7.4 million miles.

The newly found ring is so huge it would take 1 billion Earths to fill
it, JPL said.

Before the discovery Saturn was known to have seven main rings
named A through E and several faint unnamed rings.

A paper on the discovery was to be published online Wednesday by
the journal Nature.

"This is one supersized ring," said one of the authors, Anne Verbiscer,
an astronomer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Her
co-authors are Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland, College
Park, and Michael Skrutskie, also of the University of Virginia.
[/code]

[url]http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/9/38904-the-status-of-the-p-versus-np-problem/fulltext[/url]

I was driving home yesterday with the kids and we were making up tongue twisters. I could think of a few well known ones for some letters, but was curious to see what exists for all letters. Here is what I found:

[url]http://www.jokesnjokes.net/funny.jokes.amusing.humor.laughs/General/tongue.twisters.001.htm[/url]

Note that I consider some of these to be a stretch. I'm certain that a number of Mensa members on this board will find a few of these interesting.

[QUOTE=rogue;192117]
[code]
Before the discovery Saturn was known to have seven main rings
named A through E ...[/code][/QUOTE]

Seven rings
A through E

Apparently when my teachers taught me the alphabet in school they missed a couple letters between A and E.

[quote=petrw1;194248]Seven rings
A through E

Apparently when my teachers taught me the alphabet in school they missed a couple letters between A and E.[/quote]The rings' letter designations have been given in chronological order of their discoveries, not their spatial order. ([URL]http://pds-rings.seti.org/saturn/[/URL]) The innermost known ring is D, not A. The outermost ring known, until just recently, was E. Rings F and G are at intermediate positions.

So, there [I]are[/I] seven officially-named rings, ranging (as should have been written in the article rogue quotes) from either D through E or from A through G, depending on ones choice of ordering principle.

As explained in the Wikipedia article [URL]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Saturn[/URL], the most recently announced (see rogue's post above), and now outermost-known (farther out than the E ring), is unofficially the "Phoebe ring".

A cautionary tale:
[url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8332689.stm[/url]