In your FACE, turdknockers! YEAH.

Back in 2003, the ESA (European Space Agency - NASA's younger, dumber brother) gave the UKSA's (United Kingdom Space Agency - ESA's younger, dumberer step brother) Beagle 2 Mars lander a piggyback ride to Mars aboard the Mars Express mission.

Remember? Anybody else remember what happened to that mechanical clamburger looking thing, the Beagle 2 lander? And how it was supposed to pop open, like a... a waffle iron, and then flop out those two space waffles on each side, like a couple of space flavored Pop-Tarts? Remember how you don't remember it doing any of those things?

Yeah, it was a flop. Just the awfullest, colossalest, floppiest, sloppiest 40 million mile high dive belly flop onto another planet, EVER.

Y'all remember that now?

Well, that ESA kid on the other side of the lake just up and got too big for his britches in 2016, and decided to send it's very own 30 trazillion euro paperweight to Mars... and they named it the ExoMars mission.

Come on. I thought Europe was supposed to be trendy and ahead of the curve. Naming everything that's supposed to be awesome after the letter X didn't make the Mars Express any more X-Treme than it already wasn't, and that was at the tail end of the whole EXTREEEM!!! fad.

So why are you still doing it sixteen years later, ESA? Huh? Are you trying to bring back the old black? Trying to be retro for the hipsters, or whatever those things are called over there? Is that it? Are you trying to appeal to a worthless demographic? Why would you do that? Is your, uh, board of ministers or whatever run by stuffy old farts who still think the mimeograph machine is mind blowing technology? Huh? What?

You don't have to answer any of those, because here's the answer.

NOPE.

Sorry boutcher hipster-fueled next generation Waffleman with X-Treme autoskip protection and the latest European army man parachutes that went SPLAT all over Mars yesterday, like a Mongoloid hijacked the short bus and sent it careening toward Mars, hell bent for space waffles.

Come on, Europe. How hard is it to put an armless, legless robot with a walkie talkie on Mars, for Pete's sake? Your older, smarter brother has had like, seven of those things up there for the past 40 years, now. Four of them are cars by the way, and two of those cars are still driving around. One of them for thirteen years, and still going.

BAM! In your face, Europe! And Russia, and China too, as a matter of fact!

In your FACE, turdknockers of the world!

JPL RULES!

Over now.

Tonight, I went out in search of the storm, I guess, because that's all I had. Never mind... it's true.

Well, I sure as hell found it. Boy, did I ever get pounded. I got tangled up in a barbed wire fence trying to make it into the sparse shelter of a loose copse of trees, just as all hell was breaking loose.

I finally got all huddled down with my umbrella, down in there amongst the wet things and the fertile things and the rich things. How I huddled, for about 30 minutes. It was almost like being indoors, under those trees. But man, wasn't it hell raging outside.

Finally it started to let up, and I crept out from my enclosure, into an adjacent field. It was like a meadow in moonlight, except it was cloudlight. You know. Lowlight. Lowglow. Light bouncing around from cloud to ground and back up and down again.

It lit up everything. I could see the trees, right over there, where I'd been crouching. And I could see lightning flashing beyond the trees, through and behind them, with the intricate limbs and leaves of the copse outlined as black shapes in silver-blue fire, for an instant. That sight alone made getting drenched totally worth it, ten times over.

But now. I can't help but wonder... who all, if anyone, has ever seen a grassy field come back to life after a violent storm? I never have, or had, until tonight. What I'm talking about is the slow but increasing movement of a few bugs. One or two.  Then shake it up a little. Just shake it up, until it gets back to normal. The storm is over.

It was one of the most amazing things I've ever stopped purposefully to witness the happening of.

Me, at first, and then nature.

So. This is what my life looks like.

Firstly, I feel rotten for feeling rotten. I wanna just get that out of the way right quick, because it's like the bad taste of a shitty malt liquor. There's no buzz without the crappy taste, just like there's no self indulgent whining without the self loathing. We square? Coo.

What happened was, I got excited and jumped the gun just then and spoiled the Big Reveal about feeling rotten. And also - because I'm passing by the place and thinking of it right now, and so it has to be said - I totally, completely resent you, whoever you are, and what you did, by installing 24 hour lights in my underground secret stairway, where I read 'On The Beach' and bawled my stupid head off four years ago. Thanks for the dark stairway to begin with, I guess... but 'THANKS' (wink wink, nudge nudge) for ensuring that I'll never, ever be able to seek solace there, inside of the intolerable small hours, ever EVER again. EVER. So...

THANKS FOR THAT.

Ok, enough about them, and back to me. Me me me, and my one point perspective. That's a joke. It's ironic, because one point perspective is a description of a static picture. You learn that in drawing 101. But, consciousness isn't static, so it's actually a perspective consisting of infinite points, receding outward in all directions... but the joke is the comparison of a physical perspective to a mental one.

Whatev. It ain't funny anymore because I've over explained it. You shouldn't have to explain a joke... I mean, I shouldn't have to explain a joke. You know what I mean. Hell, it wasn't funny anyway, so it must not have even been a joke to begin with.

So... what was believed to be a joke wasn't a joke, and... thusly, it becomes a joke on the joker! Isn't that funny?

Anyway. I almost cured my bad mood with that anti-anti-joke. I almost don't feel like bitching and moaning anymore. Plus, there's the ever-encroaching lightning on the horizon, and that's giving me a buzz.

No, it's not the alcohol, or the nicotine, or the Substance D...

Nature gives me a buzz. Pissed off nature, just woke up with a hangover nature, nature in a murderous rage, nature on its wedding day, so beautiful that it hurts my eyes to look at it, nature that forces the incomprehensible math of Itself into my tiny awareness, so that I become a flubbering imbecile, drooling and pointing at the Hyper-Calculus of it, and muttering, 'so pretty, so pretty...'

Where was I? For a minute there, I lost myself.

2(10^11) galaxies.

How many galaxies are in the universe?

There are about 2*10^11 galaxies in the universe, as the smart apples like to say.

That is, a 2 followed by eleven zeros, or 200 followed by 9 zeros, which is another way of putting it.

Or you could just write it out as 200,000,000,000, which is tedious, but probably a more familiar way of expressing it.

If you wanted to forego a strictly numeric expression, you could describe the number of galaxies in the universe as two hundred thousand million... but the simplest, most familiar way would be to just say or write two hundred billion. Two hundred billion galaxies. That's how many galaxies there are floating around out there in space.

Two hundred billion galaxies, yup. That's how many galaxies...
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NOT!
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Throw all of that crap right out the window, because that's what we used to think. Because NOW we've discovered,  very recently, like in the last couple of days, that there are many many many MANY more galaxies bouncing around out there than we ever, ever, ever EVER would have imagined... as in, somewhere around 2*10^12 galaxies, as the smart apples like to put it, hanging out in all of the vasty deeps.

2*10^12 galaxies. That is, a 2 followed by12 zeros. 2,000,000,000,000. You know. Two thousand billion, or two trillion.

We live in a universe which contains TWO TRILLION galaxies.
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NOW!
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Your average galaxy contains about two hundred billion, or two hundred thousand million, or 200,000,000,000, or 2*10^11 stars.

Oh... and I just realized that I probably should've explained wallago about how scientific notation works and how to read it. It's about powers of ten, you know? Remember that from junior high?

Just in case you don't, it's like this:

10 to the first power is written 10^1
The ^ symbol signifies 1 as an exponent.
10 to the first power is 10^1
10 to the first power equals 10
10^1 = 10

10^2 is 10 to the second power
10^2 is the same as 10 squared.
10^2 means10 multiplied by 10
10*10 = 100
10^2 =100

10^3 is 10 to the third power
10^3 is 10 cubed
10^3 = 10*10*10
10*10 = 100
100*10 = 1000
10^3 = 1000

And so on. Get it? So in order to write numbers in scientific notation that aren't limited to the strict powers of ten, you just multiply the power of ten by another number. So, if you wanted to write, say... 4000 in scientific notation, you'd write it like this:

4*10^3

In other words, the exponent of the power of ten is the number of zeros following the first integer.

Otay?

Our own galaxy, The Milky Way, is a fairly average sized, barred spiral galaxy which contains around 200 billion stars. Since the Milky Way is pretty run-of-the-mill as far as galaxies go, then we can safely assume that the average galaxy in the universe probably contains about two hundred billion stars, more or less.

Now, multiply 2*10^11, or 200 billion, by 2*10^12, or 2 trillion. To do that, you just multiply the integers and add the exponents.

2(10^11) * 2(10^12)
equals
4*10^23
or
4 with 23 zeros
or
400000000000000000000000
which is

400 sextillion.

So, just FYI. There are approximately two trillion galaxies in the universe, and four hundred sextillion stars. Approximately.

Galaxies = 2,000,000,000,000
Stars = 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Just sayin'.

Duh Lekshun

There's this thing that I've noticed a lot more of lately, because of duh lekshun for the new Principal of America... about how people who spend a lot of time farting around on Facebook tend to react when experiencing a head-on collision with such instigationalizing items as news, information, observations, opinions, inane drivel, incessant ramblings, cat memes, caca, poo poo, bullshit, and the antics of the apparatchik chicks... who, admittedly, are just super cute and impossible to look away from. GO APPARATCHIK CHICKS! YOU GUYS RULE!

Anyway, back to the thing that I've noticed a lot more of lately. Para ejemplo (just a couple):

1. Mainly, it's all of this crap about the upcoming showdown for the new Principal of America that's got everybody's panties in a wad, and it's just unfathomable to me. I mean...

Ok. I think I can safely presume that just about everybody has had his or her panties in a wad before, for one reason or another. I know I have, and I can say with utmost vehemence that having my panties in a wad pretty much sucks thoroughly, and sideways. Having to dig in there and rescue my underwear from the cracks of doom is NOT an experience that I've found particularly palatable, and I feel as though I'm speaking for pretty much everyone here. Right? Am I right?

Ok. Now that we've established the unpleasantness of having to rescue your underwear from the Challenger Deeps, it becomes necessary to examine the reason why your underwear ever needed any rescuing to begin with. Why? Why would anyone knowingly ever put their underwear in such peril?

I'll tell you why. It's because politics makes you stupid and oblivious and causes your butt cheeks to clinch up incessantly, creating the perfect underwear trap. There. I feel that I've just spelt it out clearly enough so that any moron can understand. I mean, they teach this to us in kindergarten. Even the tardlies who take the short bus to school know better than to get their panties in a wad about... about... POLITICS!

IT'S ALL JUST A WIDELY BROADCASTED PSYCHOTIC JOKE, ALL OF IT! HOW CAN ANYBODY TAKE ONE LOOK AT IT AND THEN DECIDE, WITH AN UNPSYCHOTIC MIND, TO ACTUALLY INVEST ENOUGH CARE IN IT TO ACTUALLY PARTICIPATE, AS IF IT WAS SOMETHING THAT WASN'T JUST THE BIGGEST UPCHUCKED HAIRBALL OF LIES THAT'S EVER BEEN SERIOUSLY PASSED OFF AS A THING THAT ISN'T A BIG, FAT, HAIRY, STINKY, HILARIOUS JOKE, ESPECIALLY SINCE YOU'RE THE PUNCHLINE FOR BELIEVING ANY OF IT?

And then there's -

2. - the real badassery that gets circulated on social media now and then, but that nobody gives a flying horses patoot about. Stuff like, how the universe has a hundred times more galaxies than anybody ever thought it had, before... two trillion galaxies, that is! Preposterously awesome.

And other cool shit, like that star that keeps getting dimmer and dimmer with no plausible explanation for it, except that maybe there's a Dyson sphere under construction there? And that's what's blocking the light? An alien megastructure, in other words?

Or how about the Juno probe which just arrived at Jupiter?

Or the six inch wide, single celled amoebas at the bottom of the Mariana Trench?

Or the two supermassive black holes that collided and shook the universe so hard that reality crumpled and exploded like a rebounding trampoline for just a split second, and during that split second, every single cell in your body accelerated to Warp Factor 1? No shit?

Huh? What about all of that amazing stuff? What about all of that? Why do people instead love jacking their brains to a cartoon race to the top of a gold plated garbage heap? Why why why?

Why? Am I the mutant?

I just flat out do not get it.

ATALL.

Oh. And here's the REAL butt clincher...
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Naw, just kidding about the butt clincher. I'm done.