We received an email here in our sekrit underground bunker from a concerned reader.  Someone out there in the wild internets had mentioned pepper-infused Vodka, and perfidy.  Now, it may seem obvious that these things go together like two things that go really well together.  And you’d be right in thinking that.  But our concerned reader was unable to find the actual posts.

Given my staggeringly efficient search skills, locating the posts in question was in no way a problem.  In fact, if you’re interested in putting spicy and boozy in the same place, just look here:

Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow may be tax time or something. And that would suck, you know?

and

Question and answer time with Drunkle John

But what was really horrifying was that this website has not mentioned Vodka – not even once, glancingly – since four years ago yesterday.

Well, VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA!

There.  That’s better.

Things haven’t been the same since Minister Johno stopped posting.

The Instapundit linked to the top five worst hyperinflations of all time.  The worst was in Hungary in 1946:

Highest monthly inflation: 13,600,000,000,000,000%
Prices doubled every: 15.6 hours

The worst case of hyperinflation ever recorded occurred in Hungary in the first half of 1946. By the midpoint of the year, Hungary’s highest denomination bill was the 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 (One Hundred Quintillion) pengo, compared to 1944s highest denomination, 1,000 pengo. At the height of Hungary’s inflation, the CATO study estimates that the daily inflation rate stood at 195 percent, with prices doubling approximately every 15.6 hours, coming out to a monthly inflation rate of 13.6 quadrillion percent.

The situation was so dire that the government adopted a special currency that was created explicitly for tax and postal payments and was adjusted each day via radio. The pengo was eventually replaced later that year in a currency revaluation, but it is estimated that when the currency was replaced in August 1946, the total of all Hungarian banknotes in circulation equaled the value of one one-thousandth of a US Dollar.

Holy devaluations, Batman!  An entire currency worth a tenth of a cent.  That just blows my mind.  That and having a radio adjusted currency.  Strangely, it sounds sort of science fictiony.  Like, if you didn’t know how fucked up it is, it would sound cool.

At 2:07 this morning, #3 daughter came into the world, delivered by me.  Granted my wife did most of the work, but I didn’t drop the baby, so we’ll call that a win.

The midwife arrived about a half hour after the baby, and pronounced everything good.  Funny, through the years I’ve had a fair bit of emergency training, but baby delivery was really the last thing I expected to have to deal with.

What if the Singularity already happened?

Damn, you stop paying attention for one second.  One second.

Well, this is fascinating. It appears that solar flares have an effect on radioactive decay rates here on Earth:

On Dec 13, 2006, a solar flare sent a stream of particles and radiation toward Earth. Purdue nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins, while measuring the decay rate of manganese-54, a short-lived isotope used in medical diagnostics, noticed that the rate dropped slightly during the flare, a decrease that started about a day and a half before the flare.

Long-term observation of the decay rate of silicon-32 and radium-226 seemed to show a small seasonal variation. The decay rate was ever so slightly faster in winter than in summer.

If this apparent relationship between flares and decay rates proves true, it could lead to a method of predicting solar flares prior to their occurrence, which could help prevent damage to satellites and electric grids, as well as save the lives of astronauts in space.

All well and good – flare warnings would be of great benefit. But it seems to me that the article is missing something very important: if radioactive decay rates here on Earth are subject to variation based on electromagnetic activity from the Sun, what does that mean for all our radiometric dating techniques? The Carrington Event back in 1859 was orders of magnitude more powerful than the flare in ’06. The Sun was quiescent for centuries in the Little Ice Age. What other changes in our electromagnetic environment have occurred in the past 50000 years? If they were strong enough, they could have a significant effect on the calculated age of archaeological finds.

Also, I remember being taught that radioactive decay was a constant.  Why was I lied to?  Or is this really that ground shaking a discovery?

In other Sun news,

• Solar cycles have been detected in another star. They’re much shorter than ours, though, less than a year. Interesting.
• Shocking news:  “Large changes in the sun’s energy output may drive unexpectedly dramatic fluctuations in Earth’s outer atmosphere.“  You think?  Why would that be unexpected?  Or is it unexpected like each month’s unemployment numbers?
• And, bonus vaguely sun-related link: Bull-killer, Sun Lord, about Mithraism in the Early Roman Empire.  I think my neighbor is a Mithraist.  He was in the army, and he doesn’t like the Chicago Bulls.

Wired reports that InterOrbital is offering personal satellite kits for the low, low price of $8000.

“$8,000? That’s just the price of a cool midlife crisis,” says Alex “Sandy” Antunes, who bought one of the kits for a project that will launch on one of earliest flights. “You could buy a motorcycle or you could launch a satellite. What would you rather do?”

The hexadecagon-shaped personal satellite, called TubeSat, weighs about 1.65 pounds and is a little larger than a rectangular Kleenex box. TubeSats will be placed in self-decaying orbits 192 miles above the earth’s surface. Once deployed, they can put out enough power to be picked up on the ground by a hand-held amateur radio receiver. After operating for a few months, TubeSat will re-enter the atmosphere and burn up.

“It is a pico satellite that can be a very low-cost space-based platform for experimentation or equipment testing,” says Randa Milliron, CEO and founder of Interorbital Systems.

That is pretty damn cool.

Just think what this will mean in the future, though.  If, ten years from now, you could launch a 10kg satellite for $2000 – think what kind of gear (made possible by another decade of the remorseless of Moore’s Law) you could cram into a 22 pound satellite.  Christ, you could probably make a plausible hunter-killer sat that small.  Gun, targeting system, station-keeping; swarms, networking…

I am giddy with the thought of it.

From the Oatmeal, source of all kinds of awesome. Like, Seven Reasons to Keep Your Tyrannosaur off Crack Cocaine. And How Long Could You Survive Chained to a Bunk Bed with a Velociraptor? Or after Kicking a Bear in the Balls? And then there is the mighty, Motherfucking Pterodactyl.

The wife showed me this the other day.

Classic.  Full story here.

I was looking at the old Suck website yesterday, and even though it’s been most of decade since it has been updated, it still looks cool.  How many sites can claim that?

I just got the second highest score, ever, in the world, on the iPhone game Drop7.

602,174 points, bitches. If you have the game you can see it in all it’s glory, reveling under the name, “bob” on the global score board.

Also, I got a job. ¹