The Wonderful World of Reals... with Tax!

Interesting new Xbox Live ad. Quite un-Microsoft like I think. But it's good.



And for some bummer news, Congress is starting to talk about taxing online sales. Again. I hope it doesn't come to fruition although with Chicago having the highest sales tax in the USA (11.25%!!!), uniformity of sales tax might actually mean that I need to pay less... Then again, I'd rather not pay it at all.

A true Hand of God

Taken from NASA's X-ray Observatory, this is actually the death of a star. The blue rays are X-rays emitted as a star loses energy and collapses onto itself. It takes 150 years to traverse from the base of the palm to the tip of the longest finger. And it happened 17,000 years ago. That's the awesome thing about astronomy, it's a study of stars and our past. Due to the limit of the speed of light, it's the one form time travel that is possible - we see what happened hundreds and thousands of years ago as it reaches us from light years away. Amazing.

Here's to hoping that in the next decade, we see a "finger of God".