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Black holes are completely invisible themselves, as any light that passes the event horizon is completely consumed. That said, in reality, black holes are usually blazing with light, because as matter falls towards a black hole, it is accelerated and compressed by gravitic forces. As that matter heats up it begins to release light as energy, eventually running through the visible spectrum, and then on up into x-rays.

So the accretion disk around a black hole is ridiculously bright.

Now, if the black hole really was out in space with no matter falling in, it would still be really bright because of the material it ate before. Imagine a photon with just enough energy to stay above the event horizon. It slowly, slowly circles outward until it reaches a point where it can move away from the black hole, giving the hole a slow, rosy glow for millions of years after the last matter fell in.

Finally, if it ran out of that glow, it would still be visible by the massive distortions it causes in light, bending and lensing the light from behind it, and even the light coming from the viewer could be wrapped around the event horizon, coming back to create a sort of mirror image sphere shape, with distorted lens-like properties around it.

There’s a few pictures and more information here: http://www.universetoday.com/74462/what-does-a-black-hole-look-like/

How can anyone, ever, consider the creator of Microsoft Bob (look it up) and Clippy the “Assistant”, be considered wise?

Question: What’s with the “goodfella” on the left hand side there?

Question: What’s with the “goodfella” on the left hand side there?

Caesar is feeling generous today — he may live.

There may be some teachers who work 6 hour days, 9 months a year, but the good ones don’t. My wife does 12-16 hour days, every week day and usually 6-8 hours each day on the weekend. During “breaks” she spends hours grading assignments and writing report cards.

Her summer “break” starts about a week after the kids get out, after she’s spent hours cleaning her room, because the janitorial staff won’t. Then she spends weeks of the summer going to re-certification and training sessions. When that’s over, she gets to spend at least 2-3 days a week working with her “team teachers” to develop the curriculum for the next year. Then, for her, school starts 2-3 weeks before the kids come back, with training sessions on all the new laws and requirements — and all the whims of the merry-go-round administrators to learn about.

And that doesn’t begin to include the parents who believe their little Johnny could never do anything wrong, and he deserves straight “A” grades, even though he hasn’t turned in an assignment all quarter. Did I mention irate parents calling my unlisted home phone number at 2AM to scream obscenities at my wife?

And after 15 years as a teacher, she earns less than I did two years out of college as a computer programmer.

Oh, and did I mention she’s required, by law, to take 3 or more credits of continuing education at a college *EVERY YEAR*. And every three or four years, she has to go pay $500 and take two days of tests to keep her license. And, if she’s ever, ever let go from a job (even for a personality conflict or just because some administrator doesn’t like her shoe color) she can never get a job as a teacher again.

So, before you start throwing that crap out, ask yourself if you’d be willing to put up with 180 kids, for what works out to about $4 an hour with the time my wife puts in.

So, do I think that every teacher deserves $$$$? No, just the ones who work their ass off and get results like my wife does. For 10 straight years, her classes have shown the biggest improvement in math scores in the state of Colorado. Yet she gets the exact same salary schedule as the teacher who’s on his fifth sexual harassment investigation, and grades his students papers by giving them full points if they turned it in.

Him you can say that crap to. Not my wife.

Of course, the greatest movie priest ever must be...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbqv3MwwVd8

Hasselblad camera, Kodak film.

To be fair, it’s deep-fried, batter-coated, bubble-gum *flavored* marshmallows. It’s not actually deep-fried bubble gum.

Those screens aren’t really made to be user serviceable, and anything you do to get it open and try and clean the outside will likely make it worse. On the plus side, a 20” monitor is round about $100 on most on-line stores (TigerDirect, NewEgg, etc) these days, so you might want to just avoid the 60’s replay and grab a new one.

A gamma ray is just a very high energy form of electromagnetic ray, or what’s more commonly known as “light.” At the low end are things like radio waves, then infra-red, visible light, ultra violet, microwaves, x-rays, and finally gamma rays. The higher the energy, the more penetrating it is, and more damage it does to things like living cells.

Gamma rays can literally tear apart the long-chain chemicals in your body, like DNA, proteins, and enzymes. X-Rays can too, with a much lower chance, and that’s why we’ve found that exposure can cause cancer. The DNA is damaged, and a cancerous cell results.

If we got hit by a nearby, powerful, gamma ray burst, like a supernova or a black hole/star absorption, it could literally sterilize the entire earth in fractions of a second.

As for a “stream of neutrons”, there really isn’t such a thing, since single neutrons decay into a proton and electron (i.e. Hydrogen) with a half-life of 14 hours. Even if the nearest star to Earth (after the sun for nitpickers) Proxima Centauri, lobbed a wedge of neutrons at us at half the speed of light, by the time it reached us here (3.8 years away and after a time-dilated 3 odd years) the amount of neutrons would be nearly immeasurably low, and the protons/electrons would impact on the top of the atmosphere as either ionized particles (auroras channeled to the poles by the magnetic fields of Earth) or “cosmic rays” that would smash into other particles high in the atmosphere resulting in a slight increase in the constant rain of background particles/radiation we get every day.

It doesn’t appear in the H-Alpha or Infra-red sky surveys, or in the astro-photo data either. Given the fact that it’s a pure blue color, I would actually say it’s a speck of dust that got caught on a filter or the lens during the sky survey.

Having worked with “commercial fireworks” — I got to help on a professional shoot once — I know this wasn’t a “commercial firework.” Those have cheap paper labels on a cardboard/brown paper shell. If it said “return to government” then that was an artillery shell or a mortar round that he was setting off.

Much like the various idiots playing with landmines and grenades, this was *not* caused by commercial fireworks, but by someone using a device meant to kill people...

...successfully.

As the husband of a Teacher, I have to agree. She’s been threatened with lawsuits for patting a kid on the shoulder for a good job. I can’t imagine how fast she’d get sued for “assaulting our perfect Angel, Johnny” for breaking up a fight.

Until we get the ambulance chasers under control in this country, we are going to have to accept the damage they do to every other area in society.

Sadly it would appear likely that all 50 are (or soon will be) way over exposed before ever being allowed to leave?

I would not be surprised if most of these brave 50 are dead within weeks.

Enough! These brave men are in far more danger from the explosions and fires then from radiation. So far the highest level of radiation exposure has been 1.015mSv. Now, very few people understand the meaning of a millisievert, so let's put it into a term you can understand.

That's about 30 BED.

What's a BED? That the "Banana Equivalent Dose" or the amount of radiation you'd get from eating a banana, as they concentrate Potassium, including the radioactive Potassium-40 isotope.

So, so far the worst dose has been the same as eating 30 bananas. The current "highly elevated" readings at the plant are 2 BED. That's right, the same as eating 2 bananas.

Lifetime (actually 5 year) allowance for a nuclear plant worker is about 15,000 BED.

No one at the plant is going to die from radiation, unless something else goes horribly wrong at this point. Even the fire in the holding pool only released about a 27 BED dose. Even then, TEPCO is rotating workers in and out of the area on 4-6 hour shifts to reduce even the low exposure time. Although it's just as likely to be to reduce the likelihood of stress exhaustion.

Please - please - please - stop the hysteria!

Just when I was wondering what to have for lunch...

State regulators ignored complaints about him and failed to visit or inspect his clinic since 1993, but no charges were warranted against them, District Attorney Seth Williams said.

Uh, how about conspiracy to commit murder? How about negligent homicide? How about Accessory After the Fact? At the very least, can we agree the entire government department that gets complaints about *MURDER* and takes no action needs to be shut down and all the so-called "public servants" in it get fired with no pension?

If a private company ignored complaints about an employee or contractor they are responsible for, and that ignorance led to the murder of eight people, there wouldn't be a lawyer in the country that wasn't lining up to prosecute them both criminally and civilly.

Why not build a molten salt reactor, in which case the name of this waste becomes, “fuel”? The byproducts of a molten salt reactor are safe after only 300 years, a far more manageable timescale.

Please note that it's not the first time it collapsed, It's collapsed four times before under heavy snow.

It's an air-supported structure, so as soon as the first tears occurred, the air-pressure that holds up the roof escapes, and the roof sags. As it sags, instead of being an arch distributing the weight, it becomes a bowl, concentrating the weight, and the roof material tears dumping the snow. They'll probably have to drain the rest of the snow/meltwater out of the dome before they can even begin to work on fixing it.

Though please be nice to the people who encounter who are leaving CA, they want to be like you, that’s why they’re leaving...

No! This is just what we thought in Colorado, "Oh, the people leaving California and coming here are the ones who want to be like us." It's taken six years to go from blue to barely purple. The pain has been incredible. Don't let these people in.