Crush: Tanith Belbin

Oh, yes. I have long crushed on Tanith Belbin. Seeing her back in the Vancouver Olympics brought it all back. What a pity she's a Cancer!

I don't know how well she'll do this go'round, but what a nice thing to see her out on the ice yet again.

Yes.

Kefir

Yesterday, "Exene" was gulping down Kefir, and I shuddered at the sight of it. She managed to talk B1 into having some, and, despite initial resistance, it turned out he liked it. When he asked me why I didn't like it, I said "I'm not a fan of yogurt." and he said "But have you ever TRIED it, Daddy?" and I admitted I hadn't, but said that yogurt gave me the willies. It was cute to see him challenging me on that.

On the way home from work, on the bus, I saw a trio of people surfing at the lakeshore, which was very wavy, naturally. They were in wetsuits. You have to be crazy to surf Lake Michigan in February. The water has to be so cold!

Dark Star

I find it fascinating that the idea of a black hole was first theorized during the Enlightenment, before vanishing from scientific thought for a century...

The idea of a body so massive that even light could not escape was put forward by geologist John Michell in a letter written to Henry Cavendish in 1783 to the Royal Society:

If the semi-diameter of a sphere of the same density as the Sun were to exceed that of the Sun in the proportion of 500 to 1, a body falling from an infinite height towards it would have acquired at its surface greater velocity than that of light, and consequently supposing light to be attracted by the same force in proportion to its vis inertiae, with other bodies, all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it by its own proper gravity.

—John Michell^[2]

In 1796, mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace promoted the same idea in the first and second editions of his book Exposition du système du Monde (it was removed from later editions).^[3][4] Such "dark stars" were largely ignored in the nineteenth century, since light was then thought to be a massless wave and therefore not influenced by gravity. Unlike the modern black hole concept, the object behind the horizon of a dark star is assumed to be stable against collapse.