Here Are Some Words and Graphs Open Thread

Only one in ten of the uninsured who qualify for Obamacare have bothered to sign up for it. Seems like a pretty good reason to take away everyone else's insurance.

Obama, for his part, thinks Obamacare is working exactly the way it should.

Completely unrelated I'm sure, but Bobby Jindal thinks it's time to revisit our assumption that Barack Obama is a smart man.

At Sarah Hoyt's place, a guest post about the science-fiction community's descent into busybodying, witch-hunting intolerance.

From @rdbrewer4 in the sidebar, @charlescwcooke notes the downside -- for Democrats -- of a filibuster-free world. They had to kill the nomination of that Adegbile character themselves. There was no Republican filibuster which would allow them to hide.

From @tsrblke, Volokh considers one of the dumber posts ever appearing at Salon, and when I say it's one of the dumber posts ever appearing at Salon, I really mean only that it's a post appearing at Salon. When you're drowning in a sea of stupid, you really can't parse out the relative heights of stupid-waves.

Also from @rdbrewer4, scientific proof that nothing's funny if you analyze it to death.

One of the coolest things of the day comes from @comradearthur, who links this tour of the solar system, which is -- for once -- in proper scale.

Your usual depiction of the solar system cannot display distances to scale because the distances between planets are so enormously huge the planets would be smaller than a single pixel and hence invisible.

Well, this link aims to show you what Douglas Adams meant when he had the Hitchhiker's Guide define space's size in this way:

“Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space. "

And it defines infinity thus:

Infinte: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real "wow, that's big," time. Infinity is just so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here.

It's a neat link. I'd like to tell you the first billion kilometers are the hardest, but in fact the solar system is relatively action-packed with planets in the first billion kilometers. It's the last four and a half billion kilometers where you start to get a sense of what "empty space" really means.

Empty... space.

So that's why they call it that.

Thanks for help on the Hitchhiker's Guide quotes to Mike in the Hinterlands.

posted by Ace at 07:12 PM

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