zero to sixty and old skool science

I just got super busy out of nowhere. After not having much of anything to do for the past few months, I'm now staring down the barrel of 3 simultaneous projects. And after not writing a note of music in a year and eight months, I now have to fire up Logic and start cranking on some new material.

When it rains it pours, I s'pose. Or like the North East just learned, when it snows, it fuckin' dumps it.

This weekend, Amanda and I inherited from her mom a wonderful old book called the New Century Book of Facts. This particular edition was published in 1943 and is a really interesting snapshot into the science, history, and politics of the time. Along with entries which outline the mysterious and "unknown country" of the human spleen, creepy mentions of Eugenics that show a total lack of understanding of how at that very time Eugenics were destroying Europe's Jewish population, and descriptions of how to send a still image via radio waves, there were also mentions of a planetoid called Eros.

Now, this was weird to me because I didn't have any idea what it was talking about when it said there is a large planetoid parked between Earth and Mars named Eros. I thought "well .. wait... how come I've never heard of this thing before?" Well, it turns out that I have and just didn't recognize it when described as a planetoid. Eros is 433 Eros, the asteroid that just recently had some crap of NASA's parked on it. So, today's Science Lesson of the Day is: When you time travel back to 1943, the word for asteroid is "planetoid."

Also interesting to note was that they thought Pluto was larger than Earth, Venus, Mars, and Mercury and that the idea of plate tectonics was just about as fringe a notion as earthquakes being caused "by the Moon's tides effecting the mostly liquid core of the Earth."

That's the funny thing about a book called the New Century Book of Facts. You'd better really know they're facts or else some dork will poke fun at you and your crazy out-dated ideas 80 67 years into the future.

And that's a fact.

UPDATE: In order to comply with my citations from the Math and Blog Police, I've replaced the number 80 as it was originally in my blog. I then proceeded to strike it out and replace it with a fancy 67 (which is large Times Roman fonted and set to the color 3366ff). I then went ahead and added a block of update text at the end describing all of the dumbass changes I've had to make.