I Went To College In Another State From Where I Grew Up. I’d Been With My Girlfriend For Three Years

First, a bit of background - I have lived with a girl for 4 years after putting an ad out online. She pays her bills and is never there at the weekends, while I’m rarely there during the week. However - she is unbelievably lazy, selfish and messy (imagine those shock images of student houses and you’re not far off).

I’ve spent 4 years getting petty revenge on my flat mate in the most passive aggressive ways possible. My objective is for her to never realise I’m responsible. Here is story number 1:

The Offence: Christmas 2014. I have bought 6 bottles of wine for my Nan at a cost of around £30/bottle. Before I can gift them, I return home one night to find she and her boyfriend have helped themselves to one of the bottles…

HER: “Oh I had one of your bottles of wine. I hope you don’t mind. I’ll replace it.

ME: "Errr… Ok. Right.”

Bottle is replaced with Sainsbury’s Basics Red Table Wine at approximately £3 in value. Was given the replacement the night before I was due to travel to my Nan’s leaving me with half a present and a disappointed grandmother.

Petty Revenge: For over 2 years now, I have been sealing all of her bottles and jars with gorilla glue before she opens them for the first time. Tomato ketchup? Gorilla glue. Laundry detergent? Gorilla glue. All those bottles of nail polish just left lying around on the hallway floor? Gorilla glue. I’m a regular maestro when it comes to gorilla gluing things without leaving any evidence.

I gorilla glued her light bulb in to its socket so when it blew, she needed to replace the whole lamp. I gorilla glued the windscreen washer fluid cap on to her car. I gorilla glued the caps on to all the pens she bought when she got in to that adult colouring-in phase.

So far she’s invested in 3 automatic jar openers to no avail and thrown away dozens of items. It’s never been mentioned to me and I assume she thinks she’s just weak and this is normal.

Lowell Observatory astronomer Phil Massey and his graduate student research assistant Kathryn Neugent recently captured this spectacular image of a beautiful spiral galaxy known as M108 using the Discovery Channel Telescope. This image has not been photoshopped in any way; all that has been done is balancing the three colors to provide a close match to what would be seen by eye.

The dark splotches visible in the galaxy are regions of gas and dust silhouetted by the light of stars that lie behind them. Future generations of stars will be born from this material.

Because M108 is 50 million light years away it’s impossible to see individual stars in this galaxy, we see only their collective glow. The stars you see sprinkled across the image are actually in our own Milky Way galaxy. Like raindrops on a windowpane, these stars get in the way when we look out at more distant objects.

#lowellobservatory #lowell #observatory #flagstaffaz #flagstaff #arizona #dct #discoverychanneltelescope #galaxy #astrophotography #science #space #astronomy

VLT Snaps An Exotic Exoplanet “First”

Astronomers hunt for planets orbiting other stars (exoplanets) using a variety of methods. One successful method is direct imaging; this is particularly effective for planets on wide orbits around young stars, because the light from the planet is not overwhelmed by light from the host star and is thus easier to spot. This image demonstrates this technique. It shows a T-Tauri star named CVSO 30, located approximately 1200 light-years away from Earth in the 25 Orionis group (slightly northwest of Orion’s famous Belt). In 2012, astronomers found that CVSO 30 hosted one exoplanet (CVSO 30b) using a detection method known as transit photometry, where the light from a star observably dips as a planet travels in front of it. Using the data astronomers have imaged what is likely to be a second planet! To produce the image, astronomers exploited the astrometry provided by VLT’s NACO and SINFONI instruments. This new exoplanet, named CVSO 30c, is the small dot to the upper left of the frame (the large blob is the star itself). While the previously-detected planet, CVSO 30b, orbits very close to the star, whirling around CVSO 30 in just under 11 hours at an orbital distance of 0.008 astronomical units, CVSO 30c orbits significantly further out, at a distance of 660 au, taking a staggering 27 000 years to complete a single orbit. (For reference, the planet Mercury orbits the Sun at an average distance of 0.39 au, while Neptune sits at just over 30 au.) If it is confirmed that CVSO 30c orbits CVSO 30, this would be the first star system to host both a close-in exoplanet detected by the transit method and a far-out exoplanet detected by direct imaging. Astronomers are still exploring how such an exotic system came to form in such a short timeframe, as the star is only 2.5 million years old; it is possible that the two planets interacted at some point in the past, scattering off one another and settling in their current extreme orbits.

Credit: ESO/Schmidt et al.

Just so you know, you can always watch the Earth live from the ISS. Its really relaxing to me (the music they play is soothing too)

Afternoon Thunderstorms roll across the prairie. 

Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park, FL

Here’s one I haven’t seen before. Perseid meteors viewed from above, from the International Space Station, 2 in about 2 seconds from the high resolution downlooking camera.

Years ago, I worked at a large chain grocery store in the Southeast US, you can probably guess which one. I had a manager that just did not like me. For example my car broke down on my way to work on my birthday, and when I finally made it there she chewed me out in front of the store for coworkers and customers alike to spectate. 

She often pushed me to quit school and work full time because she was so certain I would fail, and she needed the shifts covered. Well Saturday before Easter(a busy day for them) I was back in my old city, now gainfully employed and quite happy. I stopped in that store to pick up a few things. It was so busy that she was relegated to bagging groceries. Perfect. I made my way to her line with a huge grin on my face. She recognized me. Perfect.

This particular chain makes baggers ask guests if they would like help taking their groceries to the car. She must have forgotten, so I specifically asked her for help. She would have been reprimanded for refusing, and thus obliged. She’s an old woman, the uniforms are conservative, the parking lot is huge, we are in South Florida and the employees can’t accept tips. I relished in walking her to my new car, a car that would have been far out of my reach on a grocery clerk’s salary. As she finished loading my groceries, she said “Come back and see us again!” and I said “Yeah, I guess you’ll still be here.”

Left a smile on my face for the rest of the day.

What is so special about Saturn’s moon Titan?

Titan is Saturn’s largest moon and the only natural satellite in our solar system known to have a dense atmosphere. But there is something much more amazing about the Saturnian orbiter.

Titan has a vast system of oceans, lakes, and huge mountain ranges. How, though, could a body whose average temperature is -290°F (-179°C) contain liquid water on its surface? It doesn’t.

The oceans and lakes on Titan are made of liquid methane (CH₄) and ethane (C₂H₆). The mountains are made of water ice. That’s right. The “waters” of titan are made of not water, but hydrocarbons, and its mountain ranges are made of not minerals like calcium, iron, and cobalt, but ice.

Could, then, there be not water-based, but hydrocarbon-based life on Titan? Astrobiologists (scientists who study possible extraterrestrial life forms) are hoping to send rovers there one day to sample the oceans and answer that question.

If it turned out that there is life somewhere else in the solar system, it would be so much more than just a cool scientific discovery. For two hundred thousand years, we humans have thought that we were alone in the universe. We thought that only our blue and green home harbored life. If life turned up elsewhere, we would know that we were wrong all along.

(pictured: Titan; source: NASA, Cassini spacecraft, 2006)

Blood Red Suwannee River.

The water is stained by decaying vegetation (similar to how tea is made), giving it this amazing blood red color (photo not edited) that looks like its out of a horror movie.

Upper Suwannee River, FL

You aren't getting away Scott free after pissing on my car

This story takes place at 1am today.

I’d just gotten home from working my 5th 12 hour work day and started to unwind with a bottle of wine and a show (the Eric Andre show) in the living room with my girlfriend. (I should note the door to the patio is about 10 feet directly in front of the sofa. And I live on the 4th floor in an apartment building.)

I begin to hear loud voices but it’s 1am on a Saturday night on a busy street, not out of place. However I decided to go on to the porch to people watch. I see five drunk 16/17 year old kids getting out of a truck parked directly in front of my car. There appears to be maybe 4-5 inches of space between my car and theirs.

Everyone seems to crowd around my front bumper laughing and are staring at my car, at first I thought they’d hit it, but then I notice the driver of the truck is pissing on my car. I hear him say to his friends “sucks for whoever owns this car” and pisses on the handle. So I shout back “that’d be me” they didnt look my way so I assumed they didn’t hear me. Then he quickly finishes and they start running toward the lobby so I yell “cheers mate” and he yells back a “cheers bud.”

I decided I needed to have revenge. So I grabbed a condom and filled it with conditioner. I then wrote a note that said “piss on my car? Enjoy my cum :)”

I delicately placed the note under their blade and took the condom and threw it full force at the windshield causing a glorious splatter. I then moved my car underground to make sure they couldn’t retaliate.

I woke up bright and early this morning and drank tea on my porch for an hour and a half just to be there to witness them see my work. The driver audibly yelled “what the fuck” and looked up to my porch. I raised my mug and yelled back a “cheers bud”. And then returned inside to watch The Eric Andre Show (the show is fucking awesome)