Seeing as tomorrow is a Therapy Tuesday and we all know what kind of entry I will write after that, I figured that today, I had better cough up something more like content and less like the deep psychological sputum of the soul.

First up : oh crap, the Sun is gonna blow chunks!

Scientists in solar observatories all over the world today witnessed the telltale ultraviolet burst that heralds a coronal mass ejection, meaning that a huge mass of slower than light solar particles are heading our way.

Because the ultraviolet light reaches us at light speed, whereas the solar mass travels at a comparatively pokey 1,400 miles per second, we get some warning before it’s going to happen.

Still, the idea that the sun basically just hurled and the results are coming at us at something like five billion miles an hour, is an awesome prospect indeed.

Luckily, we little monkeys living on planet Earth will be fine. For one thing, these sorts of things are not all that rare. And for another, this one in particular is going to just graze us, and thus we will be spared the full brunt of its fury.

So there might be a few glitches here and there, but we don’t have to worry that all our electronics will fry and we will be cast into a Thundarr the Barbarian future.

Like your new spouse? She's the one on the right.

Still, a massive solar storm would be a great time for any latent mutant superpowers I might happen to possess to activate.

I’m just sayin’.

Another bit of science awesomeness : people at MIT have come up with an even faster Fourier transform.

And I am terribly excited about it despite only just barely understanding what it’s all about.

All you (or I, thank gosh) need to know about the Fast Fourier Transform is that it’s an Al Gore Rhythm, er, algorithm for taking the input from something that creates an irregular, noisy signal and turns it into a clean, pure signal with very little loss of information.

In that capacity, the Fast Fourier Transform is built into tons of different electronic devices, from massive radar arrays to your trusty little mp3 player.

Well, now it’s gotten even faster. Those meganerds of superpower at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with an even faster version of it, and this could have long-range implications for the speeds of nearly everything electronic.

Not only that, the Fast Fourier Transform is at the heart of all file compression. With a brand new shiny Even Faster Fourier Transform to play with, we might see forms of file compression that make the current standards seem like something from the era of punch cards.

At least, I think so. Like I said, I am barely keeping up here.

Still, this seems like quite the development. It seems, in fact, like one of those little-heralded innovations that ends up changing everything in the long time, like something out of an episode of Connections with James Burke.

So as you can see, without the invention of rubber nipples, we would never have gotten SPAM.

In other good news, Washtington State seems poised to legalize gay marriage.

Way to go, Washington! As the dominoes fall and society in the gay marriage states continues to completely shatter into a million pieces due to this vicious attack on the traditional marriage, as the streets quite insensitively refuse to run red with the blood of the innocent (stupid Anti-Christian streets!), the case against gay marriage being legal is shown for the pathetic social conservative spook show it has always been.

There is something downright pathological about how easily social conservatives accept enormous amounts of completely baseless information that happens to accord with the ridiculously childlike fears that seem to dominate their tortured and woebegone psyches.

The very idea that society will tumble if gay people are allowed to get married is laughable on the face of it, and yet millions all over the world believe it because they just naturally assume that their fears are justified. That things are always as bad as they are scary, and therefore if something scares them as much as gay marriage does, gay marriage must be bad enough to ruin civilization.

Otherwise, they would have to admit to themselves that they can be incredibly frightened of something which actually won’t affect much at all, and they would have to face what tiny minded children they are.

That’s not gonna happen.

This was inevitable as soon as men stopped wearing spats!

Finally for today, we have this well polished little gem of reductionist office comedy :

I like that they set up that our lame presenter earned all the bad things that happen to him because he decided to pick on That Guy.

Now, never having worked in an office (or really, much of anywhere) I can only assume that those observations about what presentations are like ring true. They seem true to me, or at least, to my understanding of human behaviour.

Honestly, I think our presenter got off lucky. If I had been That Guy, I would not have just made bored noises. I would have asked a lot of innocuous seeming questions that totally threw the presenter off his game and made him look like a complete idiot who had no idea what he was talking about and who was just wasted everybody’s time by being up there.

Next time, don’t pick on people. Some of us people fight back, and fight back hard.

Some of us, in fact, save it all for defense.

Well, I guess that’s it for this vaguely content-oriented entry. Tune in tomorrow, when I will no doubt revert to long form navel gazing and primitive divination via the examination of my entrails after my trip to the therapist tomorrow morning.

Maybe I should be blogging more publicly.