Starship Asterisk*

Beyond wrote:I couldn't see a Pelican anywhere. Not even in the zooming link. I think it went fishing.

APOD Robot wrote:
<<Stars are also forming within the dark shapes. In fact, twin jets emerging from the tip of the long, dark tendril below center are the telltale signs of an embedded protostar cataloged as Herbig-Haro 555.>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_timer_IC wrote:

<<The 555 timer IC is an integrated circuit (chip) used in a variety of timer, pulse generation and oscillator applications. The part is still in widespread use, thanks to its ease of use, low price and good stability. As of 2003, it was estimated that 1 billion units are manufactured every year. The IC design was proposed in 1970 by Hans R. Camenzind and Jim Ball. After prototyping, the design was ported to the Monochip analogue array, incorporating detailed design by Wayne Foletta and others from Qualidyne Semiconductors. Signetics (later acquired by Philips) took over the design and production,
and released the first 555s in 1971.>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_%28telephone_number%29 wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF]World's tallest obelisk, standing 555 feet 5[size=85]1⁄8[/size] inches.[/color][/b]

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<<Telephone numbers with the prefix 555 are widely used for fictitious telephone numbers in North American television shows, films, computer games, and other media. Not all numbers that begin with 555 are fictional—for example, 555-1212 is one of the standard numbers for directory assistance throughout the United States and Canada. In fact, only 555-0100 through 555-0199 are now specifically reserved for fictional use - except for the 800 area code where only 800-555-0199 is reserved - and the other numbers have been released for actual assignment.

The phone companies began encouraging the producers of television shows and movies to use the 555 prefix for fictional telephone numbers, roughly during the 1960s. One of the earliest uses of a 555 number can be seen in Panic in Year Zero! (1962), with 555-2106. In older television shows from the 1950s or 1960s, "KLondike 5" or "KLamath 5" was used, as at the time the telephone exchanges used letters and numbers in phone numbers. More recent works set in this period typically use this convention as well. For example, in Back to the Future Dr. Emmett Brown's 1955 phone number is "KLondike 5-4385" while the 1985 Jennifer Parker character writes the number 555-4823 on the clock tower flier telling Marty to call her at her grandmother's. In 2011, the fictional Netflix Relief Fund satirized the company's price increase of that year and used the fictional number 1-555-368-7147.

Before "555" or "KLondike-5" gained broad usage, and before touchtone phones became standard, scriptwriters would sometimes invent fake exchanges starting with words like "QUincy" or "ZEbra". The letters "Q" and "Z" were not used on the old dial phones.

In the Seinfeld episode The Pool Guy, Kramer gets a new phone number which is 555-FILK, which he keeps getting wrong numbers from with 555-FILM (movie phone). Many times in Rugrats, the number 555-5555 is used. It's used for many businesses and places in the show.

In addition, 555 use is only restricted in North America. Neglecting this fact resulted in a lawsuit in the late 1980s: in his daily The Far Side panel, cartoonist Gary Larson included a graffiti of a 555 number by which prank calls could be made to Satan. When the panel was printed in Australia (where 555 was at the time a standard exchange), the owner of the 555 number became the subject of much harassment, and sued Larson and his syndicate for defamation. The suit was unsuccessful.

555 numbers are mentioned in the 1993 action film The Last Action Hero, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The character of Danny Madigan (played by Austin O'Brien) tries to convince Schwarzenegger's character that he is inside a movie by pointing out that 555 numbers give at most 9,999 possible telephone numbers(although there are technically 10,000 possible phone numbers: 0000-9999), clearly not enough for all phone users in Los Angeles. Schwarzenegger's character replies that area codes would solve that problem and O'Brien's character drops the subject.>>

JuanAustin wrote:Have dark absorption clouds ever been considered as making up a significant amount of the so-called missing mass of the universe? They seem to be so impossibly difficult to detect against the back of empty space when it could be filled with it!