At last, a decent explanation of the "leap second" phenomenon onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com At last, a decent explanation of the "leap second" phenomenon

Leap day comes around every four years (give or take a few), but just what is a leap second and why does it happen? This video explains the science behind our lost time.

In this clip, Chief Scientist for Time Services (and cool title-holder) Demetrios Matsakis of the U.S. Naval Observatory, poses an interesting problem: The Earth's rotation is infinitesimally slowing at a rate far too small for us to notice, but not for our increasingly precise clocks. "What do you do," he asks, "if the Earth slows down and you have so many seconds in a day, your clocks are giving you the right answer and the Earth is telling you the wrong answer?" The answer, as explained in the video, is the leap second

The clip is from The Atlantic Tech, and is part of a larger video piece from The Atlantic on where time comes from, which features a whole bunch of cool atomic clocks, and which you can watch here.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com At last, a decent explanation of the "leap second" phenomenon

At last, The Originals adds real emotion to its random plot twists onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com At last, The Originals adds real emotion to its random plot twists

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Since The Originals started airing, it's never been dull — the Vampire Diaries spinoff has followed in the footsteps of its parent show, throwing in plot twist after plot twist and betrayal on top of betrayal. But last night's episode was the first time any of it felt emotionally powerful.

Spoilers ahead...

This show seems to be finding its groove, slowly but surely, and since it's a pretty big hit by CW standards, it has time to figure out what it wants to be about. Certain characters are starting to feel more fleshed out and real, most notably the ones who didn't come over from TVD originally.

The plot of last night's "Apres Moi, Le Deluge" was pretty simple — everybody finds out Sophie dug up Elijah's ex-girlfriend Celeste. And thenit turns out that if the witches' "Harvest" ritual isn't completed, there will be a series of natural disasters that make Katrina look like a minor breeze. Everybody (except Marcel) gets behind the idea of sacrificing Davina to complete the ritual, on the theory that Davina will be resurrected along with the other sacrifices. But in the end, the ritual doesn't work, although the city is saved. And it turns out that one of the witches is secretly Celeste, back from the dead.

(Oh, and there's a lot of stuff about burying the Originals' mother, to help complete the ritual, which will probably be important down the road but isn't particularly here. And Rebekah continues to dabble in trying to scheme, which is sort of adorable.)

It was an exciting enough episode, purely as another helping of plot sauce. But for the first time, some of the characters felt emotionally alive, and I started to buy into some of these relationships. Notably:

Marcel and Davina. Marcel doesn't seem to have anything to gain from kidnapping Davina from Klaus' compound and preventing her being sacrificed. He seems to care about her for real, and the bit where he apologizes for using her as a weapon against the other witches feels genuine and stark — and his attempts to comfort her as she dreams of the normal life she can't have are kind of lovely. Given that the episode starts with her throwing him against a wall over and over, the reaffirmation of their bond and family status is unexpected, but all the better for that. And then she dies, and he blames Klaus.

And actually, the scene between Klaus and Marcel is the first time Klaus has been interesting in a while, as he talks about how grief-stricken he was 200 years ago when he thought Marcel was dead. Klaus is always best when he wears his heart on his sleeve (and worst when he's just ranting aimlessly.)

Also, the Elijah-Haley relationship, which this show has been trying to push for a while now, suddenly feels a bit more grounded. Both the fact that Haley betrays Elijah and then has to deal with his reaction, and the way that Elijah is portrayed as someone who feels things very deeply and holds on to a few relationships — even with people who've been dead for 250 years. This show has often shorthanded Elijah as "the honorable one," which isn't a terribly interesting way to go, but this glimpse of his slow broken heart is way better.

And Haley's speech to Elijah, in which she points out that he made his promise 200 years ago and "I live in the present," was a really neat moment. "I won't choose the dead over the living, so why are you?" All of a sudden, the Haley-Elijah romance has a bit of a spark.

Oh, and I'm curious to see what it means that Sabine is the super-powerful Celeste — especially since I saw mentioned on another site that Sabine was the one who warned Haley's baby would destroy all witches. Interesting to see where that love triangle is heading.

All in all, a major step forward for The Originals, towards being not just entertaining, but actually affecting.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com At last, The Originals adds real emotion to its random plot twists

At Last, Some Down-and-Dirty Badassery from Castiel, on Supernatural onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com At Last, Some Down-and-Dirty Badassery from Castiel, on Supernatural

When Castiel finally stops moping and feeling guilty for everything, he gets back to being the ass-kicker we know and love. Last night's scene of Castiel kicking ass was the highlight of the Supernatural midseason finale. The whole episode was highly entertaining, but also felt very much like a re-run.

Spoilers ahead...

In a nutshell, last night's midseason finale was all angels, all the time. The angels who fell to Earth are having a civil war, with a more corporate faction led by Bartholomew and a faction led by the "street tough" angel Malachi. (Confusingly, the "street tough" angel has a prissy women's choir on his side, and the more corporate faction includes a lot of bikers.) We see lots of entertainingly violent angel hits and counter-hits, and we get the sense that the angels are just going to wipe each other out, and maybe the planet along with them.

Castiel gets pulled into this plot, first when he's investigating along with Sam and Dean, and later when he meets a nice unaligned fae angel, who gets captured and killed by Malachi. Malachi's guys are going to torture Castiel for info on Metatron, the recording angel who expelled all the other angels from Heaven — but then it turns out Malachi's right-hand torturer just wants to jump ship and join Metatron's crew. Which leads to Castiel's awesome scene of raw cunning and murder, culminating in Castiel stealing the angel's grace with a single gulp.

Also love Castiel confessing that he's become a "barbarian" and descended to the same level as the other warring angels. Nice stuff.

Meanwhile, after vague hints all midseason that the angel inhabiting Sam isn't what he seems, we find out he's not Ezekiel — he's Gadriel, the angel who was locked up for letting the serpent into the Garden of Eden. And Gadriel gets what that other angel wanted — he's recruited by Metatron, who's randomly back on Earth because he got bored alone in Heaven. Metatron has some supremely creepy, funny scenes where he talks about creating a new Heaven, without all those functionary angels, or any of the silly angels. And he basically wants to rule the new Heaven, but he won't be called God — instead, you call him X. (Huh?)

I feel like the episode is groping for some cosmological satire here:

The episode culminates in Dean realizing, too late, that Gadriel is not to be trusted, and that it may be too late to get him out of Sam's body, where he's been for the past nine episodes. Dean tries to set a trap for Gadriel, but it backfires, and we discover that Gadriel has a mission from Metatron: kill Kevin the prophet, the one person who could threaten Metatron's plans by deciphering some brand new unreadable text on the Angel Tablet.

The takeaway of the episode is that Dean has screwed everything up, yet again — he's lost Sam, who apparently is just Gadriel's vessel now. And right after Dean assured Kevin that trusting Dean won't get Kevin "screwed" this time, Kevin is royally and permanently screwed. Dean has gone from being the show's heroic mouthpiece for never giving up and hanging on to free will, to being the guy who makes terrible choice after terrible choice, because he can't let his brother go.

In any case, this was a superfun episode, that nevertheless felt a bit warmed-over. The angel civil war felt very much like the last angel civil war. And the Earthbound angels aren't, at this point, feeling that much different than the Leviathans a couple years ago. Sam is possessed yet again — this is the third or fourth time that Sam hasn't been Sam. Castiel is once again getting his hands dirty to try and clean up a mess he helped create.

There's nothing wrong with the tune, or how it's being played — it's just that the show has played this tune better in the past.

Also, I'm not sure what the angels represent any more. They used to have a legitimate point of view, believing that they were fulfilling God's plan in God's absence. Now they just seem like another set of supernatural mooks who look human most of the time — slightly harder to kill than demons but not that much harder. We haven't seen enough of Bartholomew for him to feel like a meaningful character, and Malachi is new as of this episode. It's also kind of random that the brothers have Crowley in their dungeon but we haven't even seen him in a few weeks, and the Abaddon plotline is apparently on hold.

All in all, Supernatural is still a fun show, but it's like when your favorite band from 10 years ago comes to town and plays all their greatest hits from 10 years ago. You still get out the lighter and all, but it's not like it'll be as good as when they were touring on that stuff right after it first came out.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com At Last, Some Down-and-Dirty Badassery from Castiel, on Supernatural