I personally prefer the theme called Tree because it changes with the weather. All you have to do is type in your city when you select the theme and it takes care of the rest. It’s awesome, and also very accurate. No joke – one time I was checking my email and saw that it was snowing on the screen behind my emails and then I turned my head and looked out the window and sure enough it was snowing. Had it not been for my Gmail theme I might have never known! Based on this principal I have thought of a really fun challenge that you can do. It’s pretty hard because I haven’t even been able to complete it yet. So it’s hard and it’s fun. At least it’s fun, though.

I have been using the Tree theme for about 4 months and up to this point I have only noticed about 4 different weather possibilities. That is until today, when my Gmail suddenly showed a dark and ominous sky that I had never seen before – even during rain. It scared me. It really really scared me. No it didn’t, but anyway I wanted to find out just how many different types of weather my theme was capable of showing me. It turns out there are a total of 12 possible variations of the Tree theme!

Here’s what I usually see:

And here’s what punched me in the face and gave me a dose of reality today:

So dark, I know! Really really scary. Not really, but you can imagine my shock nonetheless. Ever think you’re about to take a big swig of coke and it turns out to be ice tea? You have to be careful in this life. On with the challenge.

So the first ever (and probably last) TGM reader challenge is: can you find all 12? Here’s how to play:

1. Change your Gmail theme to “Tree”:
   • In Gmail, click Settings (top right)
   • Click the Themes tab
   • Click “Tree” (about halfway down the list)
   • Make sure your location is correct (below the list of themes)
2. Note your current weather and then have a look at all 12 possible weather conditions so you’ll know what yours is called (sunny? hazy? cloudy?)
3. Now here’s the hard part: change your city until you find all 12 conditions

So far I have been able to find 6 of the 12. The way I did it was to look at current weather maps and then change my city in Gmail to where it looks like that weather is. For instance, I saw a bunch of rain over Kentucky this morning, so I changed my city to Lexington in Gmail and just like that it was rainy and all my emails were wet (literally – this theme is sweet!)

Tip: each time you change your city, make sure you refresh your browser to see your new weather.

The 12 possibilities are:

1. sunny
2. hazy
3. windy
4. foggy
5. mostly cloudy
6. cloudy
7. rainy
8. stormy
9. thunderstorm
10. icy
11. flurries
12. snowy

Here are the ones I’ve found so far:

Sunny In El Paso

Mostly Cloudy In Cleveland

Cloudy In Alexandria (Louisiana)

Rainy In Lexington

And finally, I’ll help you out with a gem I was able to find today:

Hazy In Los Angeles

So, it’s up to you to find the 6 remaining weather conditions: windy, foggy, icy, thunderstorm, flurries, and snowy. Take a screenshot and post it in the comments (do my comments accept screenshots?) or at least the city, weather condition, and time. I bet thunderstorm is the rarest, and fog is probably hard to snag too. I wish they would add the following conditions: sleet, hail, tornado, hurricane, humid (90%+) and sweltering (100°+).

Good luck and enjoy the weather!

Pay close attention to the super-slow speed footage at 3:11. Where does the car go? I don’t know the answer to that. How do explosions happen? Where do things go? Who decides which pieces are left, how big they are, and where they land?

1. “Your life saddens me.”
2. “That’s impossible. Your life saddens me.”

It only follows that this video intrigued me. It’s another video about the relative size of things, specifically using the power of 10 scale. If you liked my previous posts regarding this sort of thing (Big Ol’ Numbers and Our Sun Is Tiny) then you will undoubtedly enjoy this video. If not, here is the web page you should be reading instead.

BONUS VIDEOS!

Here’s my way of saying thanks to you for somehow having enough of an attention span to still be reading this scatter-brained blog. I like to sprinkle a little miscellany everywhere I can, especially if it’s gimcrack miscellany. If you read Digg everyday you’ve already seen these. Sorry.

Lightning strike right on the beach! (Audio is NSFW)

Chuck Norris in training! BOOM HEADSHOT

Backdrafts were featured in the film by the same name. We all know what a backdraft is by now. All the oxygen is consumed and there are no longer flames but everything is still so hot that any new oxygen introduced to the fire will rapidly expand and splode real big. Lets turn to the video evidence.

I thought that was pretty cool. But then I learned of flashovers, which are indeed cooler – or hotter, depending on your preferred level of literalness. What happens is, in an enclosed room (similar conditions to a backdraft) a fire gives off hot smoke which radiates heat onto all the surfaces in the room. Once all of these surfaces get to around 1000 degrees, they expel flammable gases which ignite, along with every surface in the room. All at the same time. That’s tight.

Read more about flashovers and then feast on these yummy youtubez.

The flashover in this one happens at 1:15:

This one happens right away and the rest of the video is garbage:

But wait, let’s take it one step further. What happens when a flashover occurs OUTDOORS? An eff’n firestorm. That’s right. A storm made out of: fire. Is fire even a thing to be made out of? I’m starting to get confused and overwhelmed and scared.

Firestorms are rare as a dang two-headed kid. They happen usually in nature during wildfires. But we have managed to set buildings and stuff on fire in the past that are capable of producing them too. I want you to visit teh wicky on firestorms and think about them for a minute. Here is the first sentence: “A firestorm is a conflagration which attains such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system.”

!!!!!!!!11!!1!1one

Here are some firestorms that resulted from fires us humans made: The Great London Fire (1666), The Great Chicago Fire (1871), The Oakland Firestorm (1991), and the one created by the atomic bomb in Heroshima.

So we have this comparison: backdrafts < flashovers < firestorms < fire whirls -WAIT wha??? Fire whirls?!?

Yes, fire whirls. They exist. And they are coming to get you. According to Wikipedia, a fire whirl is a phenomenon in which a fire acquires a vertical vorticity and forms a whirl, or a tornado-like effect of a vertically oriented rotating column of air. You may wonder how this happens. Me too, but I figured it out on my own: Lucifer.

Just listen to the following sentence and then I’m done with my tirade on fire whirls:

“An extreme example is the 1923 Great Kant? earthquake in Japan which ignited a large city-sized firestorm and produced a gigantic fire whirl that killed 38,000 in fifteen minutes in the Hifukusho-Ato region of Tokyo.”

When you go to bed tonight I want you to think of “a gigantic fire whirl that killed 38,000 in 15 minutes” and I guarantee you will have dreams about fire, featuring scenes with Kurt Russell and Donald Sutherland.

I believe that was recorded in Mordor.

Wow, that looked really windy. And fiery angered evil.

So our final tally is backdrafts < flashovers < firestorms < fire whirls < flame hurricanes – WAIT, wha?!?

I know they exist. I have seen them with my mind.

First, glance over the post about why i’m scared of cephalopods which was posted exactly 5 days ago. Then note the following sequence of various references since then, which combined are a classic example of Reference Burst Theory™.

1. My wife sent me this link she found on Yahoo news (she had not read my blog post at that time): http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080429/ap_on_sc/new_zealand_colossal_squid.

2. I was browsing Digg.com and saw this article on the front page: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/04/30/colossal.squid/index.html

Here’s where it gets crazy.

3. I was on The Sixty One listening to some of my old favorites and noticed one of the songs had just changed its avatar to this:

4. Finally, I proceeded to go to the New section of The Sixty One and was shocked to see the following:

That’s right, two songs right next to each other, the first with an octopus as an avatar and the second mentioning tentacles (not to mention the guy in the picture sort of resembles an octopus).

I fully expect a giant squid to be sitting in my favorite chair when I get home.

*****EDIT*****

Another article on Digg’s front page today: 8 Supersize Sea Monsters. Here’s an image from the article:

I have a fear of voids, so that’s all I wanna know.

• 1. Voids
• 2. Cephalopods

While you’re glaring at me for using a big word that I obviously found on Wikipedia, let me touch on #1.

Voids frighten me. Remember ‘The Nothing’ from The Neverending Story? That was my first encounter with this fear. The best way I can describe it is a large, empty, dark space. The best example of a void is a cave entrance, specifically a Blue Hole:

A Blue Hole is a huge sink hole that got submerged and filled with water when the Ice Age ended. The one in these pictures is over 300 feet wide and 400 feet deep. There’s one in The Bahama’s that goes down 663 feet. That scares me.

But what genuinely frightens me more than anything else is a large cephalopod – specifically an octopus or a giant squid. I can deal with my fear of voids. I can go inside a cave as long as it has previously been explored and I’m with at least 2 other people with 2 other flashlights. But you’ll never catch me anywhere near a giant squid – alive or dead. Especially in a void.

Perhaps these pictures will say a thousand words:

That last one might not be an actual photo per se, but I bet that really happened. A lot of people are scared of spiders. A lot of other people are scared of the deep ocean. Well guess what? Squid are basically huge spiders that live in the deep ocean. And they can kill sharks. Gah!

If you’re not convinced, listen to these frightening facts about squid and octopuses:

• Squid can get up to 66 feet long
• Squid have the largest eyes of any living creature – over 1 foot in diameter
• Octopuses have three hearts
• Octopuses and squid are highly intelligent
• Octopuses can detach their own limbs which will crawl around and distract a predator

I can barely even write about this. Octopuses and squid are invertebrate, which means they can flatten their bodies and fit through small spaces. Apparently you can’t really have them as pets because with the combination of their intelligence and ability to fit through small gaps they usually end up breaking out of aquariums. Just look at this octopus escaping an aquarium through a thin crack:

And then watch this video of an octopus escaping a glass cage through a 1 inch hole:

I don’t know what it is, but I am petrified of giant squid. The following image is the most frightening image I have ever laid eyes upon. Just drink it in and tell me it doesn’t freak you out:

Look at the eyes! LOOK AT THEM! What IS that? Now imagine coming face to face with that monster in a Blue Hole.

One more thing I came across that is going on my list is Abyssal Gigantism. It’s the tendency for deep-sea dwelling animals to display a larger size than their shallow-water counterparts. Look at this little gem:

*shutter*

Previously, I thought the differences between the sizes of the stars was like the differences between the sizes of the planets in our solar system. This video really puts my wrongness in perspective.

I’m a total sucker for illustrating a point with really good quality computer animation. That’s why I love shows like Build it Bigger and Mega Movers. Don’t worry, I’ll do a LOLhead post soon.

In this case, a bird fights a deer. And by “fights” I mean “captures in its talons”. The deer never had a chance. Watch right at the end when the eagle is sitting on the deer’s captured body and looking around. It’s like he’s saying “bring on teh liuns and elifints you n00b.”

Catching A Deer With A Bird – Watch more free videos

Moral of the story: get a golden eagle instead of a guard dog.

The edge of the universe is 50 billion trillion miles away. While Googling this number to see what it’s technically referred to, and how many light years it equivocates, I stumbled upon the largest diamond in the world galaxy.

Space is so cool. I guess a diamond isn’t really “space”. I don’t know what to call that of which I speak. The universe is so cool? All is so cool? Yeah, that’s it. All is so cool.

Oh right the number. Let’s see, 50 billion is 50,000,000,000. A trillion is 1,000,000,000,000. I guess we have to multiply those two numbers by appending zeros. Just to be sure, my cute little Windows calculator says it’s 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Now let’s Google that. Alright, it’s 50 sextillion.

Now how many light years is that? There are 5,878,499,812,499 miles in a light year. I knew that off the top of my head. So divide 50 sextillion by about 5 trillion. That’s 8,505,571,420, which is about 8 and a half billion. I knew that too. So it would take us 8.5 billion years to get to the edge of all things known if we were traveling the speed of light. I knew that as well. THANKS TO THIS SWEET VIDEO. Just wait till you get to the part where it shows outside our galaxy and you start zooming away from the Local Group. Wait, how do they know it looks like that?

I love how they couldn’t figure out how to portray the edge of the universe so they just put a blurry whitish distortion on the image.

Speaking of large numbers, there are more possible chess games than atoms in the observable universe. One quattuordecillion more to be exact. Just in case you think a quattuordecillion is a souped-up Audi, it’s one trillion trillion trillion billion.

One more time for geek’s sake: there are a trillion trillion trillion billion more possible chess games than atoms in the observable universe.

That’s also the number of how much I hate Bill Belichick.