Weekly Meanderings, 25 January 2014

Last updated on: January 25, 2014 at 12:11 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 25 January 2014 2014-01-23T13:37:46-06:00 Scot McKnight

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To my knowledge, a student has never Rickroll’d me in a paper or essay, but this physics student pulled it off.

A high school student managed to “rickroll” his physics teacher, cleverly inserting the lyrics of Rick Astley’s ’80s hit “Never Gonna Give You Up” and lining the words up perfectly.

Even more impressive, the essay on scientist Niels Bohr actually makes perfect sense. It’s hard enough to write a physics essay, but we don’t even want to think about how much time it took student Sairam Gudiseva to “rickroll” his teacher.

Hopefully he got an A for creativity.

How much do authors make? As it turns out, most make very little.

Immediately after the Big Bang, inflation!

At first, there was nothing — complete and utter emptiness. Zero energy and zero matter.

And then, out of this nothingness,the universe was born. Tiny, but extremely dense and packed with energy. And then, within a miniscule fraction of a second, it rapidly grew in size — inflated — by at least a factor of 10raised to the 25th power.

This theory, known as inflation, is currently the dominant explanation for what happened after the Big Bang and for how the universe came to be the way it is today. But although many scientists now believe that inflation did indeed take place, they still don’t know how or why it started, or how it stopped. And so far, there hasn’t been any solid experimental evidence for this accelerated expansion. [8 Baffling Astronomy Mysteries]

Priests, abuse, numbers.

And the big ol’ turtle shall lie down and bask in the sun with the young gator.

Amazon gets ahead of itself:

Online retail giant Amazon says it knows its customers so well it can start shipping even before orders are placed.

The Seattle-based company, which late last year said it wants to use drones to speed package delivery, gained a patent last month for what it calls “anticipatory shipping,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Amazon, the Journal reported, says it may box and ship products that it expects customers in a specific area will want, based on previous orders and other factors it gleans from its customers’ shopping patterns, even before they place an online order.

Among those other factors: previous orders, product searches, wish lists, shopping cart contents, returns and other online shopping practices.

Identity theft and your income tax refund check.

The hazards of too much sitting.

Springfield Mass, car thieves foiled … how?

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (AP) – A trio of would-be Massachusetts car thieves had to hit the brakes on their plan because none of them knew how to drive a stick.

Police in Springfield say the men pulled a knife on a food delivery driver Tuesday night and demanded the grub and his keys. But then they noticed the car had a manual transmission.

Sgt. John Delaney tells The Republican newspaper (http://bit.ly/1mahyod) the thieves argued among themselves then ran down the street with their ill-gotten dinner.

Do you read Dickens? Here’s a good collection for a life in photos.

Nothing serious, other than ghastly images and screams:

DUNMORE, Pa. (AP) – Between the mysteriously banging doors, the odd noises coming from the basement, and the persistent feeling that someone is standing behind them, homeowners Gregory and Sandi Leeson are thoroughly creeped out by their 113-year-old Victorian.

So when they put the house in northeastern Pennsylvania up for sale last month, they advertised it as “slightly haunted.”

Then things got REALLY weird.

There were calls from ghost hunters. An open house attracted lots of curiosity seekers, but no legitimate buyers. And a former resident came out of the woodwork to tell the couple that when he was a kid, he found a human skull in the basement – the same basement whose door Sandi Leeson once barricaded because she swore she could hear the clicking of a cigarette lighter emanating from the subterranean depths.

It’s enough to make her husband wonder whether he did the right thing when he playfully wrote about the home’s spooky charms:

“Slightly haunted. Nothing serious, though,” says the listing on Zillow’s real-estate site. It goes on to describe 3:13 a.m. screams and “the occasional ghastly visage” in the bathroom mirror.

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