Brewster Rockit by Tim Rickard for February 28, 2010

For a HOT time, 1-888-VENUS11

Good one, Marg.

‘Morning, ejcapulet! I liked the sound of the breakfast that you said that you make the other day.

Smokin’…

Since 1959 I’ve been learning things from comics, and today is no exception. Just like algebra, I’m sure to use this new knowledge any day now!

The only reason I’m not dialing 1 888 VENUS11 right now is I have dial up & one phone line. Of course, that is the precise reason I would call….

More fun facts:

Venus is so bright, you can see it in a clear, blue, daylight sky as a pale, white dot

It is the object most frequently reported as a flying saucer.

@Jukeofurl – dialup?! Reminds me of the old days on the CompuServe COMICS forum!

@ARF2 – yeah, not too many celestial bodies with a negative brightness magnitude. Hmm – just thinking about yesterday’s earthquake – what would a negative magnitude be for an earthquake?

Venus is just like Earth, minus all the good stuff.

wdave, since the Richter scale is logarithmic, a negative magnitude would have meaning. Counting various correction factors, an 8 on the Richter scale would mean something like 300 feet displacement down where the quake was actually happening (I could be off here…it’s messy because of correction factors). If that is so, then a magnitude of -1 would mean one billionth of that displacement. So maybe if a fly landed on your patio, you’d feel a -1 tremor. Aren’t you glad you asked? ;-)

http://www.seismo.unr.edu/ftp/pub/louie/class/100/magnitude.html

Tim - Frankie Avalon called. He said you ruined it for him.

Another interesting fact about Venus is that it is viewed in phases from Earth just like the Moon. Galileo first observed this in his telescope, and this was the first observational proof that Ptolemy’s universe was incorrect, and that Copernicus had a more correct model. It doesn’t seem much by today’s standards, but at the time, it changed the way educated people thought about the entire Universe.

“There once was a woman from Venus, Whose body was shaped like a –” (Data, just before being interrupted by Picard, in the ST:TNG episode “The Naked Now.”)

As they say in Phoenix, “but it’s a dry heat!”

I loooooooooove Rockit Science!!!! :D

Why hasn’t Ursula been showing up?

@Ray C – thanks for that info, plus the additional info in the link! –WDave

Terraforming would be very challenging. Changing angular momentum on a planetary scale is hard.