If you’re feeling depressed, unloved, alone, then the best time to defrost your freezer is on the Saturday night before Christmas. If you weren’t feeling seasonally super-shitty before, suddenly realizing that you’re spending the Saturday night before Christmas at home defrosting your freezer will send you over the festive edge. There is only one way to counter-act this neo-Dickensian scenario, and that is to live-blog it.

Like a drunk at a barbecue – we are not special, and we are not alone. Ponder that sentence for an hour or so, then continue reading here. NASA’s Stardust Spacecraft  (named by the same lyricists behind “Hair”) has discovered “glycine”, a fundamental building block of life and a good word to pull out the back of your mind when playing Scrabble. I keep thinking that this should be the lead story everywhere, but somehow it isn’t.

Do you dream of electric sheep? Then maybe you’re an android and you don’t pee. Well – when you’re not smashing Harrison Ford’s face off some rain-soaked tiles while a big fan cast shadows, you damn replicant – you should know that real humans pee in the shower and those who say they don’t are liars. You see – like mocking a sea-lion, peeing in the shower is an entirely natural thing to do – and it’s finally got the golden seal of approval from St. Louis University. Read on, McDrip;

Pi, as everyone but samuraipandapoetry will recall, is the ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter.  If the diameter of a circle is 1, than its circumference is π.  Its value is traditionally represented as 3.14159…  Some people celebrate the 22^nd of July for its approximation of π (22/7).  Others celebrate March 14 (3.14), although the deluded followers of the March date refer to it simply as Pi Day.  But all values for π are approximations, because π is irrational.  The ancients did not know this - and it wasn’t finally proven until the 18th century - but π cannot be expressed as any exact fraction. (This despite the Indiana House of Representatives passing a law stating that π = 3.2.) Pi extends forever and ever, and where π goes, its devotees follow.

In physics, π appears in the cosmological constant, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and Einstein’s field equation for general relativity.  Pi comes at us in unexpected ways, too, often having nothing to do with circles.  It arises in the distribution of prime numbers, and in the probability that a pin dropped on a set of parallel lines will intersect one of them.  The ratio of the actual length of a river and its “as the crow flies” length is, on average, π.

Having been a dork for this stuff as a kid, I’m amazed to have only just learned that when Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, Carl Sagan and Michael Ford were drunk and stoned, laughing their asses off that Voyager 1 was going a couple months after Voyager 2. Something about orbits and whatnot was why, but so fucking what?

This was passing for drunken druggie humor with these kinds of guys in those days. Hardy har har! Yuk it up, Einsteins!

And, now, see, these are the probes that are carrying not only incredibly important scientific instruments, but also those recordings and symbolic messages from Earth, just in case intelligent life elsewhere comes across them somewhere out there.

And, so:  Sagan and Ford are all wasted, and the night before Voyager 1 goes up, they finagle their way to the launch bay and put a bunch of pornographic

Greetings, toilet-goers of America! Did you know you’re killing THE FUCKING PLANET by WIPING with the WRONG SORT OF PAPER? Yes. You are, you naughty-botty!

I’ve done research and learned that we all shit on the planet. Literally. Well, unless you were part of the Apollo program, or are currently on the International Space Station staring at a Windows blue screen of death on an IBM Thinkpad while drinking your own filtered pee (yes I am a NASA geek). But NASA or DARPA or OPRAH won’t save you now.

Because TOILET PAPER FAIL to America, people. FAIL. TOILET PAPER. TOILET. AMERICA. PAPER!

It’s been dubbed “The Eye Of God” and it’s 700-odd light-years away in the constellation of Aquarius.

America’s official groundhog, Punxustawney Phil, has been predicting the coming of Spring since 1887.

Imagine you make cars in America right now.

I'm in there somewhere.

Not really much of a news item, but I just wanted to apologize for the lack of Monday Morning Maya and any other unnecessary things you might be missing. I’m not sure what’s making me so lethargic, but I think it might be the horrifically bad polution that has gripped Salt Lake City for the past week or so.

A real and relatively amazing change in US policy was signalled today as President-Walking-Erect Barack Obama appointed one of the world’s leading global warming experts to his team as Chief Scientist. John Holdren, an actual Havard physicist (and not some dude who gave Bush cash/votes/a ride in his big vroomy bible-car) will take over from the incumbent wing-nut not a moment too soon.

Like all good Americans I do my part by trying to watch as much TV as I can. Part of the fun is to then complain about it with your friends, except those (invariably Canadian) ones that love to tell you that they don’t own a TV and instead only listen to NPR. Today’s subject is the FOX drama House, which tends to be tremendously entertaining as long as you can get past Hugh Laurie’s American accent and you ignore the so-called character development.