Dark energy is real!

And it’s speeding up the expansion of spacetime.

Speaking of space…let’s talk about orphan planets!

Japanese and Kiwi astronomers have discovered the first orphan planets in the Milky Way, and apparently they’re massive (as in: Jupiter-sized).

And numerous, too:

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, explains David Bennett, a NASA-funded co-author of the study. “Our survey is like a population census,” he said. “We sampled a portion of the galaxy and, based on [this] data, can estimate overall numbers in the galaxy.” Bennett and his colleagues believe there may be twice as many lonely planets as stars, adding up to hundreds of billions of lone planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone. Aww.

Hey, what’s that “aww” for? Maybe the planets like being out on their own, roaming the stars with no clingy stars dragging them back into orbit all the time.

Help my friend Ian raise funds for MS research!

My friend Ian Crowe rides in the RONA MS Bike Tour every year to help raise funds “for all the people with multiple sclerosis who need help financially to get through life and to help increase funding for research so that one day they will find a cure.”

MMO games and their avatars.

Photographer Robbie Cooper lines up real-life photos of MMO gamers with screenshots of their virtual selves.

Cuter in real life.

Actually, it’s an interesting list — some of the comparisons are touching, others cringe-inducing, and others stereotypical — and I’m sure there’s the potential for a psychology paper examining the implications of how people see and present themselves in the virtual world.

Not that I intend to embark on such an analysis.

Verifying passwords by how you type ’em.

It makes sense, actually. Most of us, when we sit down at our usual computer and log in to our usual services, type our passwords almost by rote; “muscle memory” does more of the work than actual memory, and we “recall” the password less by consciously calling it to mind and more by simply executing a series of hand movements that ensure the appropriate keys get pressed in the right sequence.

And usually, things like the time it takes to enter the password, the force applied to each key, and the minute delays between each key-press remain relatively constant.

Whereas someone else typing in our password would type it with a very different timing.

For once, I agree with the cops.

Okay, they actually removed this lady from the Amtrak train she was on because of disorderly conduct. But there’s a bit more to the story:

For sixteen solid hours after she boarded an Amtrak train in Oakland, KATU.com reports, she yapped loudly into her goddamned phone. SIXTEEN HOURS. And she was sitting in a designated “quiet car.”

After several passengers asked her, pleaded with her — begged her just out a sense of basic human decency — to stop yelling at the top of her lungs into the greasy little piece of plastic wedged inside her clammy paw, she completely ignored them. Then, a passenger who had reached the breaking point finally mustered the courage to stand up to her. So Beard “got aggressive.”

But wait! There’s a happy ending! These things never have happy endings, but this one does! Conductors stopped the train in Oregon, where hero members of the Salem Police Department were waiting to escort Beard off the train.

Just hazarding a guess here, but based on the image of the woman that accompanies the article, I’m thinking that the excruciatingly long/loud converstaion was probably also fairly banal and overly personal in nature. The sort that isn’t just annoying, but also very awkward to have to overhear.

Sometimes, I’m glad that airplanes (unlike trains) don’t get cell reception.

Tonight’s post brought to you by Jimi:

Trippy!

Bonus Jimi:

Trippier.