I need to take a day or two off from the site, as I’m feeling rather burnt out with all this big news that’s been breaking. It’s been a headlong rush into awesome, but it has left me feeling a bit worn down. Regular posting will likely resume on Monday, at which point I will attempt to cut down to size the backlog of links and articles I have been accumulating.

In the meantime, here’s a couple items of interest to stimulate off-topic discussion.

The water-fountain star.

Astronomers have found a star — relatively closeby, too, at a distance of only 750 light years — that shoots geysers of water from its poles, ejecting 100,000,000 times the volume of the Amazon River every second at a velocity of 120,000 MPH.

The stream of gasses is about 180,000 degrees Fahrenheit, so the water is not liquid, but rather atoms of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, the building block of water. When it gets into space and the molecules interact with the dust surrounding the star, however, and the atoms probably combine to form water ice.

[Lars E. Kristensen, a postdoctoral student at the Leiden University in the Netherlands, an author of the paper] and the European astronomers described the jets of being made up of “bullets” of water but that is a bit misleading. The water actually pulses, like a fire hose with an unsteady water supply.

Kristensen says the pulses fly out at 50 kilometers a second, or about 120,000 mph. As a pulse starts to slow, it is rammed from behind by pulses moving faster behind it, producing something like a bow shock wave. Those collisions are what the telescope sees and what he described as bullets.

Okay, so the star doesn’t quite literally shoot water out of its poles. And the ejecta has a temperature in the area of 180,000 Farenheit, so it’s not like it would be liquid water even if it did. Still…very cool.

The Lytro camera.

It’s a bit hard to describe exactly what this “light field camera” does, but basically it captures as much of the inbound light from a scene as it possibly can, from all points in the scene, and leaves aside things like focus and exposure until post-processing.

In other words, you just shoot pictures with the camera…and then worry later — when you’re editing the recorded images on your home computer — about where in the image you want to focus, or what point(s) in the image you want to use to determine exposure.

The possibilities are endless.

Being raised in a city…puts you at greater risk of mental disorder.

Stress, apparently, is again the ultimate culprit here. Not that any of you should be surprised.

Chinese warships playing chicken with Japanese territory.

It’s probably nothing.

Saab is out of money.

As in: they lack even the necessary cash to pay their employees.

What’s Swedish for “boned”?

Tonight’s post brought to you by engineering:

Been there!