The Internet was made for good conversation. I find that Reddit sometimes hits that mark on the less-read items. Take, for instance, the topic of beans in chili. I love the opinions and the discussion. I also love explaining that what the Yankees call chili is really just spicy spaghetti.

Meat. Chilies. Heat. Food.

Everything else is a dish with a chili (con carne) base. That said, I like a bowl of beans with a chili base and I fully support the love of said dish. Just call it what it is: chili with beans.

Hubble’s operators created a picture (started in late 2003 and finished in early 2004) by repeatedly exposing a seemingly-black point in space about the side of a grain of sand. They took 800 exposures over the course of 400 orbits from September ’03 to January ’04. The resulting image is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

A funny thing happened with this photo: there was something there. In that speck of blackness, that speck of nothing in the expanse of space that envelops us, Hubble took a picture of something when given enough time to do it. It turns out that there are galaxies in that void. In fact, in that tiny speck of space, Hubble found ten thousand galaxies.

Having just come back from Indiana Jones 4, I have but one thing to say:

Mr. Lucas:

Please get out of the business before you ruin another childhood memory. It’s obvious now that it’s a compulsion that you can’t quit as long as you’re involved with movies, so please just go away now. You’ve lost the touch. We’re done with you. Shoo.

Thanks in advance.

-The World

Russell T Davies is to step down as executive producer of Doctor Who, the BBC has announced.

Oh say it ain’t so…

At least the replacement is the guy that wrote the Blink episode (the weeping trans-dimentional angel statues) and The Girl in the Fireplace. I’ll trust him to do it justice.

There’s some good stories over at 365 Tomorrows. It’s one-a-day and they have a full-text RSS feed. Great stuff.

The ship’s computer revived me from stasis. It took hours for my body to fully awaken, and for my muscles to respond to my wishes. But what could you expect from a woman that was 345 years old? We had volunteered for this one-way ambassador mission in the year 2136, shortly after the space probe Tycho Brahe passed through the Alpha Centauri system. The probe had sent back images of an Earth-size planet orbiting in ‘The Goldilocks Zone,’ approximately 1.1 AU from Alpha Centauri A. But the most amazing images came from the planet’s night side. It was lit up like a Christmas tree.”

I have no idea why, but last night God drained his pool on us. For four to six hours we had nothing but wet coming down on us.

Normally, I like a good storm, but the first wave from that storm included what the National Weather Service called “quarter-inch hail” that, by the time it got to us, was golf-ball-sized hail. Of course, I only realized this when I saw it on the ground … and heard it hitting the house and car.

Oh, did I mention the garage was full because we have things we have no place for just yet? So the two of us hit the garage and pushed it all towards the back and made room for the car. We got it mostly in and away from the storm (save a few inches that were protected by the roof and such) only to look at the hood and realize we were a little late. Three dents.

Of course, that’s for the whole car, so it’s not so bad. I managed to get some photos and video of the fun, though.