Mat Twassel: Blog

I've added another definition of a second as proposed by Wheel721. Illustrations.

I posted a little piece this morning illustrating some new definitions of the second. (See my previous Blog entry for some details.)

Also because swimsuit season is all but upon us (I hope), I've posted a couple of tiny swimsuit stories. I wonder if Sports Illustrated still comes out with a Swimsuit Issue. Back in my early teens I had three magazine subscriptions: Boys Life, Mad, and Sports Illustrated. Nowadays I have two magazine subscriptions: Science News and Wired. I have to admit, I rarely even open either of them. Back in the day, I read every word of Boys Life, Mad, and Sports Illustrated. Yes, those were the good old days.

We've all heard of a New York minute, but what about a Mars second?

I ask because at Desdmona's FishTank someone mentioned the recent landing of a spaceship on Mars, and someone else remarked:

And now NASA has flown its helicopter - "a Wright Brothers moment" on another planet. NASA's flight lasted 39.1 seconds - as long as the Wright Brother's first three flights combined.

So I asked if a Mars second was the same as an earth second.

I got this reply:

No. It was 1/86400 of the solar day, but apparently that kept changing, so the powers that be adopted the following:

The second is defined as being equal to the time duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the fundamental unperturbed ground-state of the caesium-133 atom.

I suppose that's clear enough. But is there casesium on Mars. And if not, does time stand still there?

In any event, I think we could use a more practical definition of a second. For instance: the time it takes Winnie, down at Red's, to deflect a conventioneer's straying hand from her scantily clad ass.

Can we have some other definitions?

Cover versus Embedded

In preparing a story for adding to the posting queue, I found myself with a minor dilemma. The story (called Plain and Solid) is about six pages long. It's about a pair of college roommates, one of them, Steffi, student teaching at her old high school, and the teacher she's working under is her old high school math teacher, and back then she had a huge crush on him, but he paid her no attention. The roommate, Gena, unbeknownst to the student teacher Steffi, has a huge crush on Steffi. That might be something of a dilemma for Gena, but it's not the dilemma I'm faced with. I have one illustration for this story. It shows Steffi, the student teacher, in the classroom pressed against her old teacher. This action is described in the story much nearer the end than the beginning. Okay, I do not plan on doing any more illustrations. But where do I put this one? At its place within the story? Or at the beginning as cover art? I am leaning toward putting it at the start, as cover art. I think it acts nicely as a teaser. But does it give too much away? Okay, it may be that this action never actually occurs. It may be that it's only what Steffi desires. Or not. If the picture occurs late in the story, and it's the only picture, is it too late? While it's a nice picture, it doesn't really add anything significant to the story. Embedded, is it extraneous?

If you have any thoughts about this, or about cover art versus embedded art in general, please let me know.

Two insect stories today.

"Bees" is of historical interest to me since it was my first "official" flash fiction. Celeste, the preeminent sex story critique of the newsgroup alt.sex.stories (circa 2000) hosted a flash fiction contest-500 words and no more-and of the hundred or so entries, mine came in first.

In looking over my ladybug story, I thought I'd check out Shaker furniture. For whatever reason Yahoo was my computer's default search engine. And for whatever reason it's somewhat slow to get results in image search. I switched to Google. The results were quick but annoying: the first five pages were all ads. Maybe there's a way to turn off Google ads in search results, but I suspect not.