Below are the most recent 2 friends' journal entries.

Thursday, December 10th, 2009
sciences [ akktri ]	4:03a	Question about quasars Okay. I have a theory about quasars, and I want you to provide some evidence that explains why I am wrong. I don't know much about science, so that's why I'm asking. On television, a quasar is depicted as a sort of spinning flashlight, and that's what they say causes the flickering. However, my theory is that there is some kind of cloud between a star and our instrumentation, and that the cloud's movement causes the variations in light intensity and creates the illusion of movement, and the star might not be spinning like that at all. One counter argument I heard was that the cloud would have to be the size of a universe or something. However, I theorize that it only has to be big enough to block our sensors. Kind of like how you can block out the sun and make it appear to flicker by putting a fan in your window. The fan is obviously not big as the sun, but it subjectively seems to make the sun flicker. But I don't know that much about quasars. What information do I need to be aware of? Why am I wrong? Can you direct me to some relevant websites? I tried Wikipedia, but that just confuses me. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, December 7th, 2009
lj_maintenance [ mhwest ]	1:15p	Notification System **FINAL EDIT Thu Dec 10 02:15:47 UTC 2009** So there is the final update... Over the past day we have processed around 11 million jobs out of the 12 million that were in queue at that time. Please bear in mind that over this past day, more jobs for notifications are also created. So while the queue has been dropping, we are still not fully caught up at this point, due to backlog and new jobs. We have roughly 3 million jobs still pending that involve the notification system in some manner. We had hoped we could have fully cleared the queue in a day, but unfortunately we can't clear it too quickly, since we need the rest of the site to operate normally. From our current perspective on the amount of jobs that are left in queue, and how many it has processed thus far, we believe it will take around another 8 - 12 hours to process everything. And finally some answers to some questions: ( Read More and Get Some Answers... ) Current Mood: grumpy (607 Comments |Comment on this)