Maverick Wild Card!

Who knew that John McCain watched It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia? I think we at Bostodelphia can be confident behind a guy who's adopted Charlie Day's "Abort and freak out!" Wild Card philosophy as the cornerstone of his maverick policy.

Maybe if the guy knew how to check his e-mail he'd be able to keep up to speed on the economic crisis without going to D.C. to weigh in with his professed lack of expertise on our "fundamentally sound" economy.

Seriously, how can you back a guy who apparently needs to be remedially schooled on everything except how to militarily target other countries with Beach Boys' lyrics?

(I'm Thinkin' 'Bout Nailin') Sarah Palin

What's an election without catchy satirical songs?

Physicists' Online Typography Changes Fundmental Laws of Nature

Taken from a boston.com article related to the new supercollider:

Protons are actually pretty complicated objects, made of little bits and pieces, and in a collision of two protons it can happen that two of the little pieces find themselves very close together. Those pieces carry a lot of energy, and due to Einstein's E=mc{+2} one might imagine that a lot of mass in a little space could lead to a black hole. (bold emphasis Bostodelphia's)

Perhaps a copy editor will fix the universe for us, until then any speculations or calculations on just how radically the world apparently changed this morning?

Update: the article in question actually ran back in April, looks like we've been living in an altered plane of reality for some time now....

Update II: With the loss of energy in fusion reactions by a factor of 30,000,000, it appears that the sun has snuffed out. Damn you, Swain and Reucroft!

Boston vs. Philadelphia 2008 Round 10: Our Mayors Kick Sarah Palin's Ass

Sarah Palin's put in 20 months as governor of Alaska. What's that worth? There are 670,000 residents of our nation's largest state. How does that stack up with Our Fair Cities?

Let's compare the executive efforts of Mayors Menino and Nutter. Boston has 590,000 residents, with a hair under 6 million in the metro region. Philadelphia has 1.4 million with a metro population the same size as Boston. That's right: being a mayor here on the east coast is a bigger job than being governor of the whole state of Alaska. Menino and Nutter deal with a wider range of demographics, ethnicities, institutions, crime, education, infrastructure, and government issues before their second cups of coffee each morning than Gov Palin handles in a month.

As far as the city of Wasilla, pop ~5469, well, 'round these parts that would be referred to as a 'small town' and no one would mistake running such a place with running a real city.

Score for this round: Boston tag teaming with Phillie 1, Alaska 0.

Bonus round: Menino and Nutter have never suggested that their states ought to secede from the Union. Make that 2 points for B & P.

Jake Von Slatt on Wired Science

Go check it out, JvS made it onto Wired Science with a well-done video interview!

Link

Gaaaah! Get it out of my head!

A Ride on the Bedford Narrow Gauge Rail Trail

Here's a pair of pics from the Bedford-to-Billerica rail trail that's built on the right-of-way for an old narrow gauge line. To my knowledge this is the only narrow-gauge rail trail in the country, please correct me if I'm wrong.

At the start of the trail in Bedford there's a preserved bit of track:
Here's a shot of what much of the trail looks like. It's got a stone-dust bed that's pretty easy to ride on. The 28mm-wide slicks I use were the narrowest I'd want to use here due to the sandy patches.
The trail is 3 miles long. On the way to the end I took it easy with a 10 mph pace. On the way back I picked up the pace to 16 mph. Any faster than that and the handling on the somewhat loose surface got a little squirrelly - a consequence of the tire width.