A most peculiar program description popped up on the TV last night. You’d get rapped on the knuckles if you submitted this in elementary school:

When Dinosaurs Ruled
Rumors of the existence of an ancient, gold-rich South American empire destroyed by a 250-million-year-old predator that decimated South America following the worst natural disaster ever suffered by mankind persist.

Sifting it out results in “Rumors persist” — the nose and tail of this brachiosaurus-like sentence.

Today is the birthday of Douglas Adams, who had this to say in Last Chance to See:

I’ve heard an idea proposed, I’ve no idea how seriously, to account for the sensation of vertigo. It’s an idea that I instinctively like and it goes like this. The dizzy sensation we experience when standing in high places is not simply a fear of falling. It’s often the case that the only thing likely to make us fall is the actual dizziness itself, so it is, at best, an extremely irrational, even self-fulfilling fear. However, in the distant past of our evolutionary journey toward our current state, we lived in trees. We leapt from tree to tree. There are even those who speculate that we may have something birdlike in our ancestral line. In which case, there may be some part of our mind that, when confronted with a void, expects to be able to leap out into it and even urges us to do so. So what you end up with is a conflict between a primitive, atavistic part of your mind which is saying “Jump!” and the more modern, rational part of your mind which is saying, “For Christ’s sake, don’t!” In fact, vertigo is explained by some not as the fear of falling, but as the temptation to jump!

Did you know there’s a California Nebula? I found out myself today thanks to the ever-awesome Astronomy Picture of the Day and its March 7th entry, “Comet over California” showing Comet Holmes gracing the edge of the image:

Today’s entry linked back to a March 2005 APoD entry: “NGC 1499: California Nebula” which shows it off to better effect:

More info on NGC 1499 is available at the Atlas of the Universe and also at SEDS. Wikipedia’s page on the nebula says:

It is almost 2.5° long on the sky and, because of its very low surface brightness, it is extremely difficult to observe visually. It can be observed with a H-Beta filter (isolates the H-Beta line at 486 nm) in a rich-field telescope under dark skies. It lies at a distance of about 1,000 light years from Earth.*

* Other sources place it at about 1,500 light years.

Ahem:

A hearty Whoo-hoo! thanks to the 10.5.2 update.

Bonus and completely unrelated trivia for the day:

Both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on this date in 1809, the former in Hardin County, Kentucky, and the latter in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. Happy birthday Abe and Chuck! Not too shabby of a duo!

I would feel obligated to link to these sites even if the names weren’t too perfect not to — the photographs are very cool, and both sites have a natural history bent to them.

First is Fahrenheit minus 459, “Absolute Zero where all motions stopped - Freeze frame - images through my looking glass.”

And then the companion site, Celsius -273, “A sequel to Fahrenheit -459. Both are references to the same temperature point - ABSOLUTE ZERO.”

So, quite a bit colder than Celsius1414, but worth a look nonetheless.