Scientists discover beer in space!

7/14/2006 12:54 PM EDT

At that time I asked if anyone else had any such laws, and several folks responded. For example, I was pointed to a page on Murphy's laws, which is to be found on the site of the New York software engineering firm End of the World Production, LLC – an interesting group of folks who even provide us with a PGP public encryption key on their "Contact Us" page so that the more paranoid amongst us can send them an email saying "Hi There" without fear that any unauthorized person can see it.

We're all familiar with Murphy's basic law, which can be summarized as: "If anything can go wrong, it will." This law is then developed along the lines of: "If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the first one to go wrong," and "If anything just cannot go wrong, it will anyway!". And so forth. There's also O'toole's commentary on Murphy's laws, which is: "Murphy was an optimist!" plus a bunch of other items.

But we digress... While wandering around this site, I meandered into a whole slew of interesting stuff, such as an article entitled Scientists Discover Beer in Space!. Well, who could resist a lead like that? (Obviously not you, because you are reading this blog.)

Apparently, three British scientists have discovered an interstellar gas cloud containing enough alcohol to make 400 trillion trillion pints of beer (that's real English beer – you can pretty much double this quantity if you're thinking about making its weaker American counterpart). Interestingly enough, this gas cloud is floating around in the constellation of Aquila, which is the sign of the Eagle, which – in turn – is the mascot of Anheuser-Busch. (Coincidence? I think not!)

There's a whole lot more to this story, and a whole bunch of other interesting articles on this site. I'm about to bounce back over to see what other gems are to be found. Hold my calls, I may be gone some time

Questions? Comments? Feel free to email me – Clive "Max" Maxfield – at max@techbites.com). And, of course, if you haven't already done so, don't forget to Sign Up for our weekly Programmable Logic DesignLine Newsletter.