Ravioli vs. Spaceship

What follows has been floating around the internet for years (oldest reference I found to it is from 1998).  Someone just sent it to me (thanks, Chats) and I thought it would be entertaining for our readers.  Not being a physicist, I can't speak to the accuracy of the science.  However, there's nothing here that seems flatly wrong to me.
And yes, this is geeky as hell. - AB

"There was still one aspect of the whole concept of a ravioli-loaded
railgun type weapon which we, lolling about late on a weeknight, with
only a few neurons randomly firing, could not resolve. Would a chunk
of metal (can of ravioli) impacting another, larger, rest mass
structure (star destroyer) produce an "explosion" effect, or simply
punch an appropriately shaped hole as it passed through? Bill?"

What am I, the neighborhood blast physicist??? Well, maybe... :-)

It all depends on speed of impact versus the speed of sound in the target (what is called the Mach number, where Mach 1 means the speed of sound, Mach 2 is twice the speed of sound, etc), and the speed of the ravioli versus the speed of light in the target (which I'll call the Cerenkov number, where Cerenkov 1 is the speed of light in anything; Cerenkov 1.3 is the speed of high-energy protons in a water-cooled reactor (that's why you get that nifty blue glow), and you can get up to Cerenkov 2.4 using diamonds and nuclear accelerators. In the late 40's people used to talk about Cerenkov numbers, but they don't anymore. Pity.). Lastly, there's the ravioli velocity expressed as a fraction of the speed of light in a vacuum (that is, as a fraction of "c"). "C" velocities are always between 0 and 1.

At low speeds (REAL low) the ravioli will simply flow over the surface, yielding a space-cruiser with a distinctly Italian paint job.

Faster (still well below speed-of-sound in the target) the metal of the space-cruiser's skin will distort downward, making what we Boston drivers call a "small dent".

Not Even a Little Bit Cute

by Jude Feldman

I'm a news junkie.  And when the news gets to be too much (as it can when you're contemplating the possible imminent fall of the Euro,) I frequently turn to cute pictures of cats to make things temporarily better. (Cute cat pictures being one of the two major things for which the Internet was invented.)

However, in one of my recent searches for cute cat videos, I came across a video of a Not Even a Little Bit Cute Super-Creepy Deep Sea Creature that had been caught on film by a remotely operated video camera.  Do keep watching, as the critter leaves the camera's field of view for a while, but then comes back with a vengeance:  http://www.wimp.com/creaturecaught/

Steven Haddock PhD., a research scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium who specializes in bioluminescence and zooplankton, claims this thing is a Deepstaria enigmatica as explained here.

But those of us at Borderlands know the truth -- that this is actually one of the Old Ones --  and are brushing up on our pronunciation of "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn".  Sweet dreams to all of you!