Scientists: More Methane in Uranus Than Originally Thought
(tee hee)
Can I tell you a secret? In the few weeks since I began hanging here not one pre-planned piece of content has survived to publication. I’d start something a day or two early, poke it a few times with an editorial toe, and then abandon it to write something new that day. If you are reading this (or listening to the voiceover), welcome to a Steve Substack first!
I wrote this yesterday.
It's one of those headline-writes-the-piece articles (and I don’t even know if that’s a thing, but it is to me). I’ll see a story or hear something, and it pops into my head. Everything that follows rises up from there. It is very backward and not typical of most of my work (and that headline doesn’t always survive the birth of its baby), but here we are. This one might. Let’s see how it goes.
Getting There from Here
I consume a fair amount of internet content each day, and while most of that tends toward the increasingly unavoidable clash of politics and culture, diversions (digital day trips if you like) make it easier to crawl back to the politics (say, like Andy Dufresne’s escape from Shawshank Prison).
It’s not that bad. I rather enjoy the political stuff (it’s a strictly physical relationship), and I’m not married to it, so this is not cheating.
My wandering away from the well-worn track of political blogging begins with slumming onto the Edge browser (which I would otherwise never use) and then the MSN.com home page (which I would otherwise never visit). As it opens, I am bombarded with so-called celebrity influencers who died suddenly, actual celebrities who have died (suddenly), and news about the latest Royal Family rumor (it’s usually about those Windsors).
There are stories about bad Botox (in at least nine states) as if Botulinum toxin isn’t bad out of the box; there’s always something about Trump (not here for that), and depending on what I’ve said out loud near any smartphone - ads for cars (I’m not even looking), sleep (which after 60 years I’m still not very good at), or recipes on how to prepare [randomly insert the name of some meat] in a slow cooker.
There’s no privacy, and there never was.
Fifteen years ago, I was quite adamant that there could be no such thing as online privacy, but we still pretend. I turned Alexa off (she came with my Fire TV Cube) because she’s nosier than Mrs. Kravitz, but everything’s connected these days. No matter what I do, Facebook, Pinterest, Amazon, Google, MSN, the NSA, and the FBI all think they know me when it’s actually just something off-topic for Substack that I need. They know me the way scientists thought they knew what Uranus was made of.
Or is it ‘scientists who thought they knew of what Uranus was made’ (for the folks who can’t tolerate a preposition at the end of any sentence)?
Scientists know a little about Uranus. It is an average distance of 1.8 billion miles from Earth and is about 19 astronomical units away from the Sun.” Math can tell us where it is at any moment in time, but other than the Voyager 2 pass by they have little close-contact data (look, rings!), and the rest is guesswork and lucky for us. Uranus is big, cold, tilts 97.77 degrees, and guess what else?
What’s In Uranus?
As an aside, if you are one of those folks who pronounce it Yerrahhness, then the anus jokes might be lost on you, or perhaps you are too adult to say it the other way because pah - foolishness.
Well, Uranus fooled them. “Scientists Thought They Knew What Uranus and Neptune Were Made Of. They Were Fooled.” That’s the headline. And here’s the best part. There’s a lot more methane than originally imagined.
How is that not at least middle-school-level amusing? Scientists agree there’s a lot more methane in Uranus.
(rimshot!).
I can hear Mark, Chris, and Pete tittering behind their hands even now (we didn’t have any Parkers, Duttons, Caspers, or Liams)—we had Steves, Donalds, Erics, and Davids. Fear not. Baby naming seems to be coming back around to Elijah, Noah, James, and Lucas. It’s okay. They think they are naming their kids after modern famous people (who happen to have old Biblical names). They don’t really know, like the scientists who don’t know what constitutes either Neptune or … Uranus.
But Wait, There’s more!
Uranus, the planet, is (of course) named after the Greek god of creation, which means you could say to the person across from you—with a straight face (go ahead and try it)—that according to Greek Mythology, everything in existence originated from Uranus.
(Tee hee)
And look at that—my first “written-early” Substack post. You might be wondering what I’d have come up with if I’d bailed on this (like all the others) and produced something else on Wednesday. Would it be better? Could it not be better?
I’m wondering, too.
We’ll all have to wait for Friday to find out. Until then, giggle, titter, and laugh a bit. Life is hard enough.