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ZTF J1406+1222 is a trinary star system consisting of a "black widow" binary and a third far-flung star that orbits the other two every 10,000 years. The very academic term "black widow" refers to one of the two stars, which is a neutron star (or a "pulsar"), that orbits another smaller star and slowly "feeds" from it, sustaining itself. Because neutron stars are violently and rapidly spewing out neutrons, they usually die out pretty quickly (in stellar terms). This one will be longer lived,…

Our class teacher in 9th grade, let's call him Mr Huber, was not a pervert like our biology teacher. I really need to get this straight: He liked double entendres, Freudian slips and the like, but these were there for his entertainment, and ours. I never thought Mr Huber meant his little wisecracks and remarks as anything other than a bit of fun - it was part of his creating a fun learning environment. The jokes could become kind of dirty, but they mostly seemed innocent to me early on.

W…

Poodle Springs, or more accurately, The Poodle Springs Story, is Raymond Chandler's last, unfinished book about private detective Philip Marlowe — abandoned per force majeure when Chandler died. Subsequently the incomplete story was finished and published under the shorter title by the famed wine critic Robert Parker, wait, no, I mean by some schmuck crime hack named Robert B. Parker. It's possible that the wine guy would have done a better job. At least he and Chandler have the…

In random thoughts style:

It started with a headline for a news magazine editorial stating that, in the author's opinion, 2023 would come to be known as the year of AI. Rather than read the accompanying article, I ran a google search for the topic, sorted by date, to see what was up. In the search results were a large number of references to something called ChatGPT. Curious, I read a bit farther and found that it was an app…