Funny Quotes

1."Bart, with $10,000, we'd be millionaires! We could buy all kinds of useful things like...love!"
Short and funny quote by, Homer J Simpson.


2."When I die, I want to go peacefully like my Grandfather did, in his sleep -- not screaming, like the passengers in his car"
Short funny quotes, Unknown.


3."I'm an excellent housekeeper. Every time I get a divorce, I keep the house."
Short funny quotes by, Zsa Zsa Gabor


4."I remmember the time I was kidnapped and they sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof."
Short and funny quotes, Rodney Dangerfield


5."People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world," Calvin.


6."Isn't your pants' zipper supposed to be in the front?" Hobbes.
Short and funny quotes, Calvin and Hobbes.


7."Cheese… milk's leap toward immortality."
Short and funny quote by, Clifton Fadiman.


8."Never stand between a dog and the hydrant."
Short Funny Quote by, John Peers.


9."You have a cough? Go home tonight, eat a whole box of Ex-Lax, tomorrow you'll be afraid to cough."
- Short and funny quote by, Pearl Williams.


10."Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant?? I'm halfway through my fish burger and I realize, Oh man....I could be eating a slow learner."
Short and funny quote by, Lyndon B. Johnson.


11."He's so optimistic he'd buy a burial suit with two pairs of pants."
Short and funny quote by, Chuck Tanner.

Fart To The Beat

You are on the bus when you suddenly realize … you need to fart. The music is really loud, so you time your farts with the beat. After a couple of songs, you start to feel better as you approach your stop.

As you are leaving the bus, people are really staring you down… and that’s when you realize… you have been listening to your ipod.

What'd You Think?

Tales from the looney bin

Dr. Smith recently got his doctorate in psychology and his first assignment was to visit the community loony bin retirement home for the patient’s monthly mental examination.

He sees his first patient and asks him, “Ralph, how much is six times six?” Ralph responds “74.” He asks the next resident, “Tim, how much is six times six?” Tom responds, “Thursday.” Expecting more of the same, he approaches Randy and asks him, “Randy, how much is six times?” “THIRTY-SIX” replies Randy. “That’s right Randy, well done! Now tell me how did you know that answer?” “Oh it was easy… I just subtracted 74 from Thursday!”

What'd You Think?

HOW TO TICK PEOPLE OFF

1.Leave the copy machine set to reduce 200%, extra dark, 17 inch paper, 99 copies.

2.In the memo field of all your checks, write “for sexual favors.”

3.Specify that your drive-through order is “TO-GO.”

4.If you have a glass eye, tap on it occasionally with your pen while talking to others.

5.Stomp on little plastic ketchup packets.

6.Insist on keeping your car windshield wipers running in all weather conditions “to keep them tuned up.”

7.Reply to everything someone says with “that’s what you think.”

8.Practice making fax and modem noises.

9.Highlight irrelevant information in scientific papers and “cc” them to your boss.

10.Make beeping noises when a large person backs up.

11.Finish all your sentences with the words “in accordance with prophesy.”

12.Signal that a conversation is over by clamping your hands over your ears and grimacing.

13.Disassemble your pen and “accidentally” flip the ink cartridge across the room.

14.Holler random numbers while someone is counting.

15.Adjust the tint on your TV so that all the people are green, and insist to others that you “like it that way.”

16.Staple pages in the middle of the page.

Foster unveils Western Europe's tallest towers

Foster + Partners has unveiled plans for the tallest mixed-used towers in Western Europe at the MIPIM property fair.

Designs for the Hermitage Plaza include two 323m-tall buildings in the La Défense area of Paris, on the left bank of the River Seine. One will house a luxury hotel and spa plus flats and the other offices and serviced apartments.

Speaking to Building after revealing his designs on Wednesday, Lord Foster said that the project would transform the area of the city “in every way”.

He said: “Most towers are predominately one-use. [But here] in a small cluster of towers you are able to get hotels, apartments, shops, offices and culture. It is a true mix.

“It will be a place in its own right, very much part of the area of La Défense and in the bigger picture Paris itself.”

Construction of the 91- and 93-storey structures is expected to start in 2010 and complete by 2014. The developer is the Hermitage Group.

wonderful building

The Tate is great
3 April 2009

Herzog & de Meuron’s extension to the Tate Modern has been given the green light by Southwark council



School games
3 April 2009

An education campus planned for the 2012 Olympic village has been given the go-ahead



New lease of Liffey
3 April 2009

These are the latest designs for the proposed North Quay Tower development in Dublin by Zaha Hadid Architects for Treasury Holdings

Finding Twin Earths Is Harder Than Thought

ScienceDaily (Mar. 21, 2009) — Does a twin Earth exist somewhere in our galaxy? Astronomers are getting closer and closer to finding an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit. NASA's Kepler spacecraft just launched to find such worlds. Once the search succeeds, the next questions driving research will be: Is that planet habitable? Does it have an Earth-like atmosphere? Answering those questions will not be easy.


Due to its large mirror and location in outer space, the James Webb Space Telescope (scheduled for launch in 2013) will offer astronomers the first real possibility of finding those answers. In a new study, Lisa Kaltenegger (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and Wesley Traub (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) examined the ability of JWST to characterize the atmospheres of hypothetical Earth-like planets during a transit, when part of the light of the star gets filtered through the planet's atmosphere. They found that JWST would be able to detect certain gases called biomarkers, such as ozone and methane, only for the closest Earth-size worlds.

"We'll have to be really lucky to decipher an Earth-like planet's atmosphere during a transit event so that we can tell it is Earth-like," said Kaltenegger. "We will need to add up many transits to do so - hundreds of them, even for stars as close as 20 light-years away."

"Even though it's hard, it will be an incredibly exciting endeavor to characterize a distant planet's atmosphere," she added.

In a transit event, a distant, extrasolar planet crosses in front of its star as seen from Earth. As the planet transits, gases in its atmosphere absorb a tiny fraction of the star's light, leaving fingerprints specific to each gas. By splitting the star's light into a rainbow of colors or spectrum, astronomers can look for those fingerprints. Kaltenegger and Traub studied whether those fingerprints would be detectable by JWST.

Their study has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

The transit technique is very challenging. If Earth were the size of a basketball, the atmosphere would be as thin as a sheet of paper, so the resulting signal is incredibly tiny. Moreover, this method only works when the planet is in front of its star, and each transit lasts for a few hours at most.

Kaltenegger and Traub first considered an Earth-like world orbiting a Sun-like star. To get a detectable signal from a single transit, the star and planet would have to be extremely close to Earth. The only Sun-like star close enough is Alpha Centauri A. No such world has been found yet, but technology is only now becoming capable of detecting Earth-sized worlds.

The study also considered planets orbiting red dwarf stars. Such stars, called type M, are the most abundant in the Milky Way - far more common than yellow, type G stars like the Sun. They are also cooler and dimmer than the Sun, as well as smaller, which makes finding an Earth-like planet transiting an M star easier.

An Earth-like world would have to orbit close to a red dwarf to be warm enough for liquid water. As a result, the planet would orbit more quickly and each transit would last a couple of hours to mere minutes. But it would undergo more transits in a given amount of time. Astronomers could improve their chances of detecting the atmosphere by adding the signal from several transits, making red dwarf stars appealing targets because of their more frequent transits.

An Earth-like world orbiting a star like the Sun would undergo a 10-hour transit once every year. Accumulating 100 hours of transit observations would take 10 years. In contrast, an Earth orbiting a mid-sized red dwarf star would undergo a one-hour transit once every 10 days. Accumulating 100 hours of transit observations would take less than three years.

"Nearby red dwarf stars offer the best possibility of detecting biomarkers in a transiting Earth's atmosphere," said Kaltenegger.

"Ultimately, direct imaging - studying photons of light from the planet itself - may prove a more powerful method of characterizing the atmosphere of Earth-like worlds than the transit technique," said Traub.

Both NASA's Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes have studied the atmospheric compositions of extremely hot, gas-giant extrasolar planets. The characterization of a "pale blue dot" is the next step from there, whether by adding up hundreds of transits of one planet or by blocking out the starlight and analyzing the planet's light directly.

In a best-case scenario, Alpha Centauri A may turn out to have a transiting Earth-like planet that no one has spotted yet. Then, astronomers would need only a handful of transits to decipher that planet's atmosphere and possibly confirm the existence of the first twin Earth.