Yackity-Yack

[ChainsawDooM]

As you can see, the gravity field is pretty much the same as a star of a comparable mass at the same distance, until you start getting near where the surface of a star that size would be... so, You really have to get close to feel the great pull of a black hole. Since the strength of the gravitational field approaches infinity the closer you get to the event horizon, it'd be impossible to draw a graph that ever ended...  

[ChainsawDooM]

A lot of this stuff I knew from a very young age, because I was a total space buff... the book just helps me explain it quickly in writing.

I will admit I didn't know the stuff about a black hole's gravity well, but I already knew about the 3 possible types of universes since I was like... 6 or 7. Amazing what you can learn from reading every scrap of paper or book you come across. I think that stuff was from some kind of promotion through the mail for some kind of science journal... little preview things. I kept them... probably still have them in a box somewhere... I should probably throw them away. I can still remember a lot of the pictures, too. I studied the little things a lot, since they were the most accurate space things I had... memorized all sorts of stuff about pulsars, neutron stars, nebulae, dwarf stars, black holes, wormholes, time travel theories... heh... I was exposed to Einstein's theory of relativity when I was 7... those were nice little papers...

I wonder what career I should try to go into. I have so many knacks for so many different things... Sometimes I wish my skill sets weren't so damned general. I know so much crap about everything but so little about each thing specifically... it really kind of blows...  

[Gweener]

That's really something.
Thanks for the graphic. It does literally help me see what you're saying.
You know, it'd be a shame not to share all that knowledge, at least for a while, perhaps... maybe you'd enjoy being a teacher, or more specifically with you level, a professor. At least to give yourself some time to dabble in different fields that interest you until you narrow down something specific that you enjoy and can make a living doing. Plus, all you need is a degree in anything to become a teacher. Your enthusiasm would be like magic in a classroom! And you know there's a need for good teachers. Anyway, you know more than what would be considered common knowledge, in my opinion, for whatever it's worth.

That's cool that you had access and interest in all that information, especially at such a young age. Hmm... I recently had a subscription to Astrology magazine. The pictures were amazing, but alot of what they discussed was stuff I knew almost nothing about. I mean, I'm not totally clueless when it comes to our solar system. I found it interesting about the inner planets being terrestrial and the outer ones are gas; I love the elliptical orbits, solar winds, and the gravitational pulls. Did you hear about the study done that accurately could predict earth quakes by noticing weak areas in the crust that were closest to the moon when the moon's at its closest to the Earth. I thought that was pretty cool. But I can see that I only know a fraction of what there is to learn about, at least today's theories, like you said.  

[Gweener]

Ok, so let's make it official...
we are planning to meet via IM
for a Watumelon Meeting
in the near future.
Now to narrow down a date!
Remember, this is a meeting for everyone.
Ideas of how to clean up the guild and ways to increase activity are welcomed and encouraged!

Seriously, I don't care how out there an ideas may be, just throw it out there! Some great solutions can come out of a group brainstorm! And if nothing else, we should have fun chatting or joking with each other all together!

I'm going to check out how our madlib recipe is coming along, now! I don't think I've ever eaten or drank something fluorescent. Does that make it radioactive?  

[ChainsawDooM]

... Not if it's fluorescent, no. If it's fluorescent, it just scatters certain wavelengths of light, specifically high blue, purple, and low ultraviolet light, making it looks like it's glowing. It's just... a modifier to the color to call it fluorescent... It just means that it's going to be really, really f***ing pink.

Remember, highlighters are fluorescent, and we all know they aren't radioactive. Just because something can glow doesn't make it radioactive. In fact... it usually isn't... that's just one of those movie myth things. Yes, you can make some stuff glow because it's radioactive... but that's kinda hard, and there are a lot of chemical reactions you can use instead that are so much easier, and safer.

If you really care, you could double check me in wikipedia, but I don't think I'm too far off.

Remember, Fluorescent means it kinda glows when exposed to certain light. Luminescent means it glows by itself, even in zero light.  

[Gweener]

Ok. I was remembering a professor talk about some old glassware that was radioactive, and also that the cement cinder blocks that the walls walls were made of were also slightly radio active.

Here's an article that mentions the glass:
http://www.hps.org/documents/consumerproducts.pdf

And here's one about why radioactive things (glass & water) might seem to glow: http://education.jlab.org/qa/radglow_02.html  

[Gweener]

Referring back to the booming population, this article reports "significant increases in teen birth rates," and even mentions "groups that traditionally have higher birth rates."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090107/ap_on_he_me/med_teen_births;_ylt=AnaAdEyWown1hY6gahnutQoazJV4  

[Hazumu-san]

I read an article on Space.com a few weeks ago. It was talking about an odd gravity anomaly. A group of galaxy clusters are moving in a direction that they shouldn't. here is a summary.

NASA astrophysicists have discovered what they claim is something outside the observable universe exerting an effect on the observable. The material is pulling clusters of galaxies towards a region of space known not to contain sufficient matter to create the effect. They can only speculate on what the material is and how space might differ there: 'In these regions, space-time might be very different, and likely doesn't contain stars and galaxies (which only formed because of the particular density pattern of mass in our bubble). It could include giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe. These structures are what researchers suspect are tugging on the galaxy clusters, causing the dark flow.'"

Super weird!  

[ChainsawDooM]

I just figured out that my new laptop has voice recognition software in it. It's pretty cool... only problem is that, right now, it's still pretty retarded. I write phenomenally fast as long as it doesn't screw something up, because then I have to go back and correct it in a way so that it knows it screwed up and it'll try not to do it again.

So! What I've decided to do is... well... every day, I'm going to read to my computer. That's what I've decided. I'm sure that sounds pretty weird. Hell... it even sounds weird to me... but I want my computer to be the voice recognition equivalent to... I don't know... at least me when it comes to vocabulary. I've decided to start it off kind of small... maybe 15 pages of Chuck Norris facts a day, or 15 pages of zombie haikus. Then I'll work up to... well... the only middle type stuff I have is me and my sister's old collection of Animorphs books. Those should work pretty well. I'm hoping to read to my computer at least an hour a day, preferably before I go to bed.

... I'm sharing this to ask if I seem as crazy right now to you guys as I sound to myself...  

[Gweener]

That is so interesting, Hazu! There's a sense of curiosity that should encourage exploration and future discoveries! There's so much out there! What's strange is how right here on our vary planet there are areas unexplored, such as the oceans. I saw something about a whole different ecosystem that didn't depend on oxygen.

Chainsaw, that is funny. It's like it's your baby and your having to teach it. The only thing I use with voice recognition is my cell phone, and it works surprisingly well. It's great for hands free driving. The only thing that aggravates me it when the phone is in my purse and a button gets pushed that starts the voice menu, and there's no command to exit!  

[Gweener]

That show about the predictions concerning 2012 is on the History channel tonight.  

[ChainsawDooM]

Hey, if you do end up watching it, would you mind telling me about it? I'm probably not gonna be able to see it... But I really wanna know how feasible it sounds. Usually these end of the world ideas are a load of bull. I'm pretty sure they tried to do one of those Nostradamus things back in 1984. Oh yeah, that turned out to be right. neutral  

[ChainsawDooM]

My computer is starting to learn how to understand me pretty well. This post and the last one were both using speech recognition.

You know, in some ways it's kinda fun tryin' to teach this thing how to talk. At least it seems a lot less annoying than it did yesterday. It was really bad yesterday. I'm sure I'm gonna have a helluva lot of trouble getting it to get the different forms of their there and they're right.

Holy crap, it typed all the different forms of there without me having to try and correct it... So I guess it's smarter than I thought it was.

It's probably going to take me awhile to get all of its kinks worked out, but when I do, man is it going to be awesome.  

[ChainsawDooM]

... I've always wanted a robo-baby...
...
Not really, but a robot of my very own that I could teach to be smart would be pretty awesome. Too bad I'm not so much teaching my computer as I am getting it to recognize certain sound waves...

... Some day, soon, I suppose.

Hey, at least when that day comes, I'll have had practice.  

[Gweener]

Well, I kinda watched that show, but I was distracted most of the time. But what I kept hearing repeated was that Dec 21st, 2012, from our perspective, our sun will be lined up with the center of our galaxy, and that the most advanced cultures such as the Mayans and Egyptians and people such as Nostradamus had all this mapped out, like the end of a cycle of destruction. But it sounded like a bunch of speculating and pointing our similar predictions, SO they don't know anything.

*insert*
This is the description of the show:
"There are prophecies and oracles from around the world that all seem to point to December 21, 2012 as doomsday. The ancient Mayan Calendar, the medieval predictions of Merlin, the Book of Revelation and the Chinese oracle of the I Ching all point to this specific date as the end of civilization. A new technology called "The Web-Bot Project" makes massive scans of the internet as a means of forecasting the future... and has turned up the same dreaded date: 2012. Skeptics point to a long history of "Failed Doomsdays", but many oracles of doom throughout history have a disturbingly accurate track record. As the year 2012 ticks ever closer we'll speculate if there are any reasons to believe these doomsayers."
It comes on again this Sunday.
Here's a clip:
http://www.history.com/video.do?name=armageddon&bcpid=3887230001&bclid=5983807001&bctid=6085856001
Plus there's plenty more:
http://www.history.com/content/armageddon/

That's pretty d@mn impressive that your computer recognized the difference between the "there's!" How'd it do that!? Do you pronounce them slightly different? That's crazy!
That reminds me, did you see the fembot?
http://www.gaiaonline.com/guilds/viewtopic.php?t=14276883
Lots of positive possibilities for that one! I hope he gets funded. It would be interesting to see all the different types of specialized robots programmers could think of to create. I guess that would leave open some undesirable ideas, too, but it would be a step towards that picture that we have of the future.