[Baelin] Scrapbook

[Baelin Holt]

Here's an article! I'm biased because I love baseball, but still. A false story gained momentum. The author discusses both the how and what he believes to be the why. Here's a quote from the article that I feel sums up his point pretty succinctly:

A story about something so serious, with such an obvious lack of evidence, doesn’t spread as far and as quickly as this one did unless people want to believe it.

It helps to be familiar with baseball to read this, but if you're not it's still a pretty good read. How a Few Cubs Fans Trolled the National Media Into Covering the Bogus Heyward Story written by Chase Woodruff on Double-Birds.com. Keep in mind that Double-Birds is a site for Cardinals fans. The story is definitely biased, especially considering where it was written and who its audience was. But its fact checking was fairly solid and the points it raised were reasonable.

I'm always open to hearing other people's thoughts. Do you disagree with him?

[Baelin Holt]

I got a good one today! Felt particularly stupid, considering I've been doing this process for years now. I use oxygen plasma in a vacuum chamber, and I always check the color of the chamber. If things are good, then the chamber's this weird yellow-green color. One of the guys I work with calls it "swampy green." (I looked for a picture to show you guys, but couldn't find one. All the pictures I found have prettier colors from using different conditions. Here's an example of it looking pink-purple.) Anywho, I was watching the chamber the other day and realized for the first time that it looked an awful lot like what pictures of the aurora borealis looks like. It literally never occurred to me that the aurora was oxygen plasma. I go to look it up and sure enough, the green and yellow seen in the aurora are often from excited oxygen (Space article).

Since I don't have any pictures of the "swampy green" chamber, here's a picture of the aurora! Note how there's lots more colors than just yellow and green, since the atmosphere is much more than just oxygen!

[Baelin Holt]

I don't care how. I don't care why. I'm somehow going to get this KO in a thread:



Just...insane!