Outside It Was: Fill & Download for Free

Repeat after me: There is no void the Universe is expanding into.I’m guessing that at some point in your past, you saw a physics teacher or some TV professor explain the Big Bang and the expansion of the Universe. He (or she) probably used a balloon prop with a bunch of dots on it, which was blown up with air and expanded. The teacher then pointed out how all the dots are separating from one another. The teacher should have also pointed out that if you pick out any one dot (we’ll call that “Earth”), then the distances to the dots closest to it are growing slowly, while the distances to farther dots grow faster. This phenomenon is called Hubble's law.The expanding balloon is a good and useful analogy, however like all analogies, at some point it breaks. One of the many ways that this analogy is not true, is in the fact that the balloon needs to be in a pre-existing space (sometimes called an “embedded space”). As far as we know, there is no “embedded space” around our Universe. Having unseen “stuff” in a higher dimension is simply not necessary, and just makes the theory messy (see the principle of Occam's razor).Mathematicians do this all the time when they discuss manifolds. Such objects are fully described using a set of equations, and imagining them floating in some larger space is nothing more than a crutch for your imagination.As always, the XKCD comic has something to say about this too.[math]\ [/math]EDIT:In his comment, Eric Widdison pointed out this very cool minutephysics video that does a great job intuitively explaining the expansion of the Universe. Without needing any embedded space.

This morning I saw a bird lying on its back when I looked out of my windowAt first I thought it was dead, but then I noticed it was opening and closing its beak, so I immediately grabbed some water and went outside.It was not strong enough to fight me so I was able to easily grab it and helped it drink some water. I was hoping it’d get strong enough to fly away, but it couldn’t, so I grabbed a diaper box and put it inside with some water and crackers(I had no idea what kind of bird it was, or if it ate crackers) and left it on its own hoping it’d get better.After an hour I went outside to check on it and it started to hit the box, trying to threaten potential dangers I guess, which scared me because I’m not used to handling birds and I did not want to get bitten, but once it saw it was me, it calmed down and let me grab it so it can drink some more water, it was not trying to bite me or anything.I ended up taking it to wild bird care center and they told me it had a concussion, but it looked overall OK, so I’m hoping it will get better soon.Edit: Called the wild bird care center and they told me he was able to fly away yesterday. The center was only 20 minutes from my house, so hopefully he was able to find its mate (I’ve been reading about Belted Kingfishers and learned that they are monogamous per mating season).

It appears that the head of the Kentucky “Three percenters” showed up near the end of the protest with the effigy and hung it. I haven’t seen any evidence that the rest of the group knew it was going to happen, and at least some reports that they cut it down. Stopping the jerk from hanging it would have been better, but at least they didn’t leave it.This should be another warning that these right-wing militias have no respect for the actual Constitution (though they claim otherwise, but their actions betray them) nor the rule of law and are potentially dangerous threats to American society.