Oh, bane of my existance.
My computer broke last year, and began making funny clicky noises at me whenever I tried to turn it on. Apparently that was the hard drive. My laptop has the summation of everything I've ever done from about 2004 until the time it broke last year, and I'd sort of like that back. We brought it to BestBuy's Geek Squad to try and retrieve things from it yesterday, and they said it'd cost about $160, so we bought an external hard drive and forked over the money.
Got a call a little while ago - the clicky noises were the hard drive, and that means that they can't do it there. They've got to send it out, and maybe the 'big' Geek Squad people can get it. The big guys have a 95% success rate, and it'd be just my luck for me to be in that 5%. Also, it's going to cost more than $160; it could cost anywhere between $250 and $1600. Holy shit, that's more than a new computer. All this for a few days of music, a whole mess of files, and my otherwise irritrievable collection of pictures from Israel and beyond. Dammit.
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Friday, November 9, 2007
Tractus
I love astronomy.
It's just so amazing, looking at the stars and realizing that they're not just friendly little points of light that seem to be just out of reach. They're really countless lightyears away. Most of them burn brighter, bigger, and hotter than our own sun, which seems so powerful and huge.
Most people don't really realize that light has to travel to get from place to place, same as the rest of us. Of course, the reason why we don't think about it is because light that we produce or see on our planet has to travel so little that it seems instantaneous to us. The sun rises eight minutes before we see it. That, though, is not a particularly long amount of time, considering how fast light travels (299,792,458 meters per second, in case you were wondering). What's really fascinating is that because some galaxies are so far away from our own, we're actually seeing into the past.
Woah. Hold on. What? Let me repeat this for emphasis, because it's really too cool to say just once.
We're seeing into the past.
Some galaxies are so far away that it takes light billions of years to travel to our corneas. We can see almost to when we think the formation of the universe happened.
Makes you question how hard-and-fast all those science 'laws' you were taught are, huh?
It's just so amazing, looking at the stars and realizing that they're not just friendly little points of light that seem to be just out of reach. They're really countless lightyears away. Most of them burn brighter, bigger, and hotter than our own sun, which seems so powerful and huge.
Most people don't really realize that light has to travel to get from place to place, same as the rest of us. Of course, the reason why we don't think about it is because light that we produce or see on our planet has to travel so little that it seems instantaneous to us. The sun rises eight minutes before we see it. That, though, is not a particularly long amount of time, considering how fast light travels (299,792,458 meters per second, in case you were wondering). What's really fascinating is that because some galaxies are so far away from our own, we're actually seeing into the past.
Woah. Hold on. What? Let me repeat this for emphasis, because it's really too cool to say just once.
We're seeing into the past.
Some galaxies are so far away that it takes light billions of years to travel to our corneas. We can see almost to when we think the formation of the universe happened.
Makes you question how hard-and-fast all those science 'laws' you were taught are, huh?
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