I don't know why we spend so much time traveling around the sun; you can just stay in the same place and see the whole thing - it rotates every month or so on its own! But regardless, I've spent the last 29 years going around and around the sun.

Of course... if we weren't flying around the sun at thirty kilometers per second (relative to the center of the sun), we would just fall in. It would only take the Earth about a month to reach the sun falling straight towards it... so we would have just enough time to see the whole thing revolve once. (If you want to know, yes I simulated this problem, and it is something akin to 2,732,076 seconds before the Earth reaches the surface of the Sun.)

So yeah, I'm at work on my birthday and clearly distracted by whimsical apocalypse simulations. I opened all my gifts as they arrived, so the only thing I've actually received today was a bag of cookies from Coker. They're yummy.

But I'd like to thank my parents for the binoculars, lens, book, and shirt; my sister for the cookbook and sauce; Nina's parents for the books, DVD, and rocket kit, and Mikki for the sushi. Oh and Barb for actually doing the cooking of the cookies that Rob gave me.

My birthday, as usual, is a pretty lackluster affair. Time to get back to work.

UPDATE: It has come to my attention that my simulation was flawed (used a constant-acceleration equation at one point). Due to the massively increasing acceleration, the actual time would be in the realm of 4306 seconds, or slightly over an hour. But of course the simulation also gives an impact velocity of faster than the speed of light. So basically what we've shown here is that I should be fired; I don't know what I'm doing. And whatever it is, it isn't what I should be doing.