Vagueness and the Aftermath - A sporadic diary

[hector62]

It's nice to be thought of as " youth" but not sure that 48 years old is in that category. Just had a deprived childhood. I am still mentally scarred that i never had a "chopper" bike!

[Karabiner]

Speaking of bouncing balls reminds me of the time that Anna Kournikova was playing at Wimbledon a few years ago and at that time she was promoting a new sports bra. which had the advertising slogan "Only The Balls Bounce".

She was playing a match on an outside court and a male streaker emerged from the crowd and ran towards Anna.

He was totally starkers and had "OnlyThe Balls Bounce" written in big letters across his chest.

Just thought I'd share that with you.

[RED-DOG]

I am still mentally scarred that i never had a "chopper" bike!

Oh I sooo wanted the chopper bike that I saw in the bike shop window in Clay Cross, and the hand tooled Mexican saddle that I saw in the tack shop at Bawtry.

Total cost for both, £85.00  (It might as well have been £1000.000)

[RED-DOG]

Speaking of bouncing balls reminds me of the time that Anna Kournikova was playing at Wimbledon a few years ago and at that time she was promoting a new sports bra. which had the advertising slogan "Only The Balls Bounce".

She was playing a match on an outside court and a male streaker emerged from the crowd and ran towards Anna.

He was totally starkers and had "OnlyThe Balls Bounce" written in big letters across his chest.

Just thought I'd share that with you.

How could any self-respecting streaker resist?

[thetank]

There are self respecting streakers?

[tikay]

Never heard of the Buckyball ?? I despair of youth today, I really do. Besides, that was yesterday.

Today's version is bouncing balls, and nobody seems to know why. And you can only see it on certain browsers. Some people reckon its there for Google to show you if your browser is out of date.

They have an "Ask tikay" section on the Saturday night Show, where anyone can throw a random geeky question at me, (non-poker, obv), & I got thrown this one on Saturday, & I was able to insta-reply "Buckminsterfullerene". Sadly, there was a supplementary, too, "& what does it mean?", which buggered me completely. I said something like "it's a carbon molecule, & is found in soot I think". Epic failage.

My eyes water when I see these sort of things on Rex's linked Wiki page about "Bouncy"....

Part of a series of articles on


Nanomaterials

 
Fullerenes
Carbon nanotubes
Buckminsterfullerene
Fullerene chemistry
Applications
In popular culture
Timeline
Carbon allotropes
 
Nanoparticles
Quantum dots
Nanostructures
Colloidal gold
Silver nanoparticles
Iron nanoparticles
Platinum nanoparticles
 
See also
Nanotechnology
 
Jeez! Quantam dots ftw, I say.

Now I'll waste the whole of this evening trying to get even a basic grasp of all that.
 

[tikay]

I could never understand a word of this if I re-read it 1,000 times, but just reading it fills me with awe for those who write about, & understand, these things. It's as awesomely illegible as the Stats they endlessly batter you with when you watch televised Baseball (The Ball Game"), & to me, it's half the fascination, "wtf does all that MEAN?".

Other buckyballs
Another fairly common buckminsterfullerene is C70,[22] but fullerenes with 72, 76, 84 and even up to 100 carbon atoms are commonly obtained.

In mathematical terms, the structure of a fullerene is a trivalent convex polyhedron with pentagonal and hexagonal faces. In graph theory, the term fullerene refers to any 3-regular, planar graph with all faces of size 5 or 6 (including the external face). It follows from Euler's polyhedron formula, V − E + F = 2, (where V, E, F are the numbers of vertices, edges, and faces), that there are exactly 12 pentagons in a fullerene and V/2 − 10 hexagons.

   
20-fullerene
(dodecahedral graph) 26-fullerene graph 60-fullerene
(truncated icosahedral graph) 70-fullerene graph

The smallest fullerene is the dodecahedral C20. There are no fullerenes with 22 vertices.[23] The number of fullerenes C2n grows with increasing n = 12, 13, 14, ..., roughly in proportion to n9 (sequence A007894 in OEIS). For instance, there are 1812 non-isomorphic fullerenes C60. Note that only one form of C60, the buckminsterfullerene alias truncated icosahedron, has no pair of adjacent pentagons (the smallest such fullerene). To further illustrate the growth, there are 214,127,713 non-isomorphic fullerenes C200, 15,655,672 of which have no adjacent pentagons.

[rex008]

Never heard of the Buckyball ?? I despair of youth today, I really do. Besides, that was yesterday.

Today's version is bouncing balls, and nobody seems to know why. And you can only see it on certain browsers. Some people reckon its there for Google to show you if your browser is out of date.

They have an "Ask tikay" section on the Saturday night Show, where anyone can throw a random geeky question at me, (non-poker, obv), & I got thrown this one on Saturday, & I was able to insta-reply "Buckminsterfullerene". Sadly, there was a supplementary, too, "& what does it mean?", which buggered me completely. I said something like "it's a carbon molecule, & is found in soot I think". Epic failage.

That's a pretty good start; wouldn't call that failage at all. although "and it's shaped like a football, but not the ridiculous World Cup thing" would have finished that précis off a treat.

You'd probably be much more interested in the life of Richard Buckminster Fuller. Sounds like an interesting character. Expelled from Harvard twice, but then decided he wanted to make a difference in the world, and then basically became a practical environmentalist, before anyone knew what one was.

[Karabiner]

There are self respecting streakers?

I think that this  is as close as we get to having a "whoooosh" smiley.

[Claw75]

There are self respecting streakers?

I think that this  is as close as we get to having a "whoooosh" smiley.

or we can pinch one like this:



Is it really such an oxymoron though?

[RED-DOG]

Is this a wind up or what?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11223473

[boldie]

Is this a wind up or what?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11223473

Well, at least they're not wasting their time trying to find a cure for some disease...that's just be a waste of time and money.

[RED-DOG]

Cost of haircut at regular barber = £8.50.

Cost of haircut at new "Discount" barber = £5.50

Ability to play role of John Mills character Michael in re-make of Ryan's Daughter = Priceless.

[RED-DOG]

This is how I feel today. (In fact, this is how i feel most days)

[tikay]

This is how I feel today. (In fact, this is how i feel most days)

Very nice, Tom.

After we spoke today, I entered "obdurate" into an online thesaurus.

It came up with....

adamant, bullhead, callous, cold fish, dogged, firm, fixed, hanging tough, hard, hard-boiled, hard-hearted, hard-nosed, harsh, immovable, implacable, indurate, inexorable, inflexible, iron, mean, mulish, obstinate, perverse, pig-headed, relentless, rigid, set in stone, stiff-necked, stubborn, thick-skinned, tough, tough nut to crack, unbending, uncompromising, uncooperative, unimpressible, unrelenting, unshakable, unyielding.

Just saying, that's all.