Hmmm? The top ten space pictures of 2011 is it? The author states that, being taken on the 4th of January, Thierry Legault's eclipse photograph only just made the cut. So what about anything taken after the 6th of December?
Actually I suspect the list was compiled more than a week before it was published, for one simple reason. Rolf Olsen's staggering photograph of the circumstellar disc around Beta Pictoris was published on the 30th of November. And that is certainly among the best astrophotographs of 2011. I would add that it is possibly the cleverest especially given the equipment used to create it.
So how do you vacuum seal ziplok bags? Completely evacuating all the air would be difficult, but even then it is unlikely the seal could be totally maintained in the water. Then there's the issue of the temperature. No matter how well the cooler is sealed the temperature will drop significantly because the food will take heat from the water. You would either need a very large cooler or a very small appetite (small portions) for the ratio of the mass of water to the mass of food to make the drop in termperature to be significant.
Oh and @dlauthor cooking steak is the most basic cooking task I can imagine. It certainly wouldn't be possible to achieve the Maillard reaction when cooking sous vide.
I did. Maybe you are bright enough to guess what it is?
Got it yet?
It's astronomy.
However, what I don't get is why I get grief when Samuel is the one that thinks it's "awesome" (does he even know what the word means?) that they called Pluto a planet.
@Jim you're damned right it can hurt. It might come of the ground as snow, but packed hard it's ice and it will hurt like hell if you get one in the face.
Snow fights round here are, as I said, competitive and the competition is usually about gaining ground. If you can drive your opposition past a given line you've won. So you make damned sure your snowballs are going to hurt. If they don't hurt the enemy will not retreat.
@houndogg "everybody see just how dumb and entitled wydra's commet looks? staying out of the way of cars and people leads to bad behaviors?!?!"
No I don't see that. If you have rights you should excercise them. And as for cycling like a coward, yes it does lead to bad behavior. Nervous cyclists who give way all the time lead car drivers to expect cyclists to give way all the time.
I like the French example. You know the maritime law where powered vessels must give way to sail? So if a powered vessel colides with a sailing vessel then it is up to the skipper of the powered vessel to prove the skipper of the sailing vessel was in the wrong. And it's pretty unlikely that he will manage that. Well in France if a car collides with a cyclist (or indeed motorcyclist) then the assumption is that the car driver was in the wrong. The onus is on the car driver to prove that the rider was at fault. This makes car drivers pay a whole lot more attention to two wheeled road users.
@houndogg I don't know about where you live, but where I live the law is pretty clear on the point. Cyclists not only have as much right to use the road as anybody else, they even have as much right to adopt primary position. Not only that, but cyclists are banned from the "sidewalk" expect where specifically permitted - so cyclists are required to use the road.
@Frau so the cyclists "refuse" to pull over do they? Sorry but cyclists have as much right to the road as anybody else. I don't know about where you live, but in my neck of the woods there is no minimum speed limit.
Only the other day I was stuck behind a horse trailer on a twisty moorland road for miles. It didn't pull over to let me past, but that's just fine because I realised that the driver was probably going as fast as was possible and safe. Why should I expect somebody else to pull over to make my journey quicker and in doing so make their journey take longer?
So much of the resentment and bad driving I encounter in road users is down to selfishness and self importance. It's all about people imagining that their journey and the time it takes is more important than anybody else's journey. Dangerous overtaking, running red lights, cutting people up, speeding, etc. nearly all of it is because people are impatient and selfish.
Traffic is about every road user, not just you and not just one type of road user.
On saturday I heard a friend complaining that he had been late because he had allowed and hour for the journey and due to traffic on the motorway he had been half an hour late. In his mind the problem was entirely down to the traffic preventing him from driving the whole journey at the 80mph he had planned, even though that would be illegal, not that he had not allowed enough time for his journey. And this is the attitude of most drivers these days - they treat the posted limit as a minimum cruising speed not an absolute maximum to be attained when the wind is fair.
The problem with cyclist's image, at least here in the UK, is that there are is a small minority of pretentious, arrogant dickheads, but people tend to perceive all cyclists as being like this group. The media aren't helping of course, it seems that all branches of the mainstream media are anti-cyclist. I even saw a hatchet peice on the BBC news last year.
Most urban cyclists just want to get to work and obey the law as much as any car driver (ie about 90% of the time) but car drivers and pedestrians have two perception problems; firstly that they only notice the cyclists who are breaking the law; and secondly that they don't even understand the law. And example of the latter is that they don't realise that it isn't illegal for a cyclist to filter to the front of the queue at a junction, just so long as the cyclist does not obstruct anybody in doing so. Most car drivers not only seem to think this is illegal, but resent the fact that cyclists can do this while they are stuck in a queue.
The arrogant dickheads with their stupid clothing and often equally ridiculous bikes have created an image problem for the ordinary cycle commuter.
However what amuses me is that cyclists tend to hold the same resentment for motorcylcists as do car drivers for cyclists. As a cyclist, car driver, motorcyclist and (obviously) a pedestrian I hear all sides of the argument. Cyclists tend to whinge about the fact that motorcyclists can do most of the things they can as cyclists, but also have the speed advantage of cars and can accelerate faster than anything else on the road.
IOW it all comes down to resentment. Car drivers resent cyclists because they can get through urban traffic more quickly. Cyclists resent motorcyclists for the same reasons. My view is that all modes of transport have their advantages and disadvantages and if everybody stopped being such a bunch selfish cocks we would all get along on the roads just fine.
Hey look! Something steampunk that could actually be steam powered. Yes I know it's not, but it looks like it could be and that's the point of steampunk.
@Pile of Pooh. Cut across the fold? No he didn't. When he cut it there was no fold. And not only do the cuts not cross the fold, but the fold doesn't cross the cuts. So clearly you are not a math professor. Indeed, like Pooh, you would seem to have very little brain.
Actually I suspect the list was compiled more than a week before it was published, for one simple reason. Rolf Olsen's staggering photograph of the circumstellar disc around Beta Pictoris was published on the 30th of November. And that is certainly among the best astrophotographs of 2011. I would add that it is possibly the cleverest especially given the equipment used to create it.
http://www.pbase.com/rolfolsen/beta_pictoris
Oh and @dlauthor cooking steak is the most basic cooking task I can imagine. It certainly wouldn't be possible to achieve the Maillard reaction when cooking sous vide.
Got it yet?
It's astronomy.
However, what I don't get is why I get grief when Samuel is the one that thinks it's "awesome" (does he even know what the word means?) that they called Pluto a planet.
Snow fights round here are, as I said, competitive and the competition is usually about gaining ground. If you can drive your opposition past a given line you've won. So you make damned sure your snowballs are going to hurt. If they don't hurt the enemy will not retreat.
No I don't see that. If you have rights you should excercise them. And as for cycling like a coward, yes it does lead to bad behavior. Nervous cyclists who give way all the time lead car drivers to expect cyclists to give way all the time.
I like the French example. You know the maritime law where powered vessels must give way to sail? So if a powered vessel colides with a sailing vessel then it is up to the skipper of the powered vessel to prove the skipper of the sailing vessel was in the wrong. And it's pretty unlikely that he will manage that. Well in France if a car collides with a cyclist (or indeed motorcyclist) then the assumption is that the car driver was in the wrong. The onus is on the car driver to prove that the rider was at fault. This makes car drivers pay a whole lot more attention to two wheeled road users.
Only the other day I was stuck behind a horse trailer on a twisty moorland road for miles. It didn't pull over to let me past, but that's just fine because I realised that the driver was probably going as fast as was possible and safe. Why should I expect somebody else to pull over to make my journey quicker and in doing so make their journey take longer?
So much of the resentment and bad driving I encounter in road users is down to selfishness and self importance. It's all about people imagining that their journey and the time it takes is more important than anybody else's journey. Dangerous overtaking, running red lights, cutting people up, speeding, etc. nearly all of it is because people are impatient and selfish.
Traffic is about every road user, not just you and not just one type of road user.
On saturday I heard a friend complaining that he had been late because he had allowed and hour for the journey and due to traffic on the motorway he had been half an hour late. In his mind the problem was entirely down to the traffic preventing him from driving the whole journey at the 80mph he had planned, even though that would be illegal, not that he had not allowed enough time for his journey. And this is the attitude of most drivers these days - they treat the posted limit as a minimum cruising speed not an absolute maximum to be attained when the wind is fair.
Most urban cyclists just want to get to work and obey the law as much as any car driver (ie about 90% of the time) but car drivers and pedestrians have two perception problems; firstly that they only notice the cyclists who are breaking the law; and secondly that they don't even understand the law. And example of the latter is that they don't realise that it isn't illegal for a cyclist to filter to the front of the queue at a junction, just so long as the cyclist does not obstruct anybody in doing so. Most car drivers not only seem to think this is illegal, but resent the fact that cyclists can do this while they are stuck in a queue.
The arrogant dickheads with their stupid clothing and often equally ridiculous bikes have created an image problem for the ordinary cycle commuter.
However what amuses me is that cyclists tend to hold the same resentment for motorcylcists as do car drivers for cyclists. As a cyclist, car driver, motorcyclist and (obviously) a pedestrian I hear all sides of the argument. Cyclists tend to whinge about the fact that motorcyclists can do most of the things they can as cyclists, but also have the speed advantage of cars and can accelerate faster than anything else on the road.
IOW it all comes down to resentment. Car drivers resent cyclists because they can get through urban traffic more quickly. Cyclists resent motorcyclists for the same reasons. My view is that all modes of transport have their advantages and disadvantages and if everybody stopped being such a bunch selfish cocks we would all get along on the roads just fine.
Put simply why can't Hollywood have the occasional original idea?