Thought or Rant of the day!!!

[raspberrytea]

Drunk in the gutter?

Ironically, I'm pretty sure getting a degree in game design/art or something would be more useful to me.

[Henkie]

Well, it can only be late.. Never too late

[Andu]

I don't think I've become more productive since I started using less time on cantr...

[Cheshierekat]

So I won't be on as much for awhile. Husband's complaining about the amount of time I play and didn't understand it was just because of a very intense time in game that I was playing more. As I type this I'm actually sneaking it on my phone...ugh

[Snickie]

It kind of annoys me that there are now so many gluten-free products and whatnot, and people freak out if there is even a chance of cross-contamination.
I mean, nobody had even heard of gluten until suddenly everybody became allergic to it.


Also:
What the #@$%, Windows?! You just installed pointless updates FOUR DAYS AGO, and now you're making me do another force restart? NOT COOL!

[SekoETC]

My internet connection has been broken since Friday. I had to go over to my parents for the weekend and now I'm there again. I learned today that the outage is caused by some smart person installing the wrong kind of amplifier (what ever that is) and as a result, cable tv and cable internet is out in the whole building.

[Aurora]

I'm seriously thinking about breaking up with my boyfriend. I know he loves me, but I'm just too stressed over work that I don't enjoy the time I spend with him as I used to enjoy it, and he's getting so clingy and anxious that I don't know what to do; it's like having a small child as a boyfriend (which is almost my case, he's 4 years younger than me). I literally rather tell him I feel tired and go home and play Cantr until midnight. It's killing me, because I love him and I know he loves me too, but.. I think I need to do some serious checking priorities in my life. *rant over*

[SekoETC]

Internet connection finally fixed.

[gejyspa]

Just a random musing over the dichotomy between the needs of the rich cantr cities, which have everything (although possibly locked away), and therefore lead to boredom, and the poor places which are struggling not to die/hold on to their scissors and bicycles, and how the game admins can balance both. Okay, so let's say it turns out that all the metal on cantr is actually radioactive. Gather too much manufactured goods together in one room, and Critical Mass! Town blows up, taking everyone and everything with it!

Well, okay, it was just a thought...

[curious]

People who put dirty dishes in the dishwasher, just after it has been run..!

[masterekat]

I love it, gejyspa!

Rant of the day: Ok, when it's January and still in the 60s, people should NOT be complaining about how cold it is outside.

[Henkie]

Last year around this time, it was snowing and about -20 celsius in the morning (the chill, not the real temperature, that was like -11 or -12). Right now it is (only) -3 in the morning!! I'd still like the comfy 22 degrees summer back though

[Cheshierekat]

I sprained my thumb (don't ask) and my normally fast typing skills have been reduced to hunt and peck style typing. I have homework this week, as well as a lot of work at work that involves typing. UGH. (end rant...)

[RedQueen.exe]

New role at work that's going to have a lot more visibility. Should be great for my career, but I'm a little nervous.

[gejyspa]

Those talks about temperature reminded me of this rant of mine from Monday to my family:
I heard a very cool science story on the radio on the drive in to work about the new Webb space telescope, but the intro made me go gkk! gkk! gkkk! {sound of strangled scream}. It started like this (copied and pasted from their transcript):

"Think about the last time you were cold. As in, teeth-chattering, goosebump-raising, shivering-in-your-boots cold. You were probably outside, and the temperature very well could have been below zero. Washington, D.C.'s lowest recorded temperature is 15 degrees below zero. And in a slightly colder place - such as Alaska -- it's more like 80 below.
But if you take that last number - 80 degrees below zero - and multiply it by five, you'll get an idea of just how cold the James Webb Space Telescope will be after it's launched a million miles from Earth, in the year 2018"

No! No! No! You can't take a temperature number based on a completely arbitrary scale with an arbitrary zero point, and multiply it and have that make any kind of meaning! If you wanted to say, "Now go down another 320 degrees," then yes, that's fine., since everyone has a feel for how much one degree of Fahrenheit feels like (more or less). But multiplication??? Ridiculous. OF course, if you said "The lowest temperature recorded in DC was 444 Kelvin, and in Alaska, it's more like 379 Kelvin, now divide it by 10, and you'll get an idea...." that would be fine also, because here we are measuring an actual scale with some meaning.

On the cool side, the Webb telescope, according to one of the team working on it, can detect "the heat given off by a bumblebee at the distance of the moon". That's pretty darn cool (in more ways than one). Now, working that out, (making the completely absurd assumption that heat radiation from a bumblebee in terms of body mass can be scaled up linearly and applicable to other creatures (absurd, because of completely different chemical processes, and because surface area varies as a square of the cube root of mass, and that probably has more to do with it), and that the detectability of the heat source follows an inverse square law (probably true)) that means that Hank [our 165-lb dog --g] should be observable at the distance of a far asteroid, and a blue whale outside the heliopause. (warning -- false precision ahead) Now, when we get to the first star (Proxima Centauri), we need about 9.4 billion human beings to be seen (i.e about a third more than exist on Earth). And if we take the entire biomass of the planet Earth, that should be detectable at about a distance of 231 light years, about the distance of Alpha Cassiopeiae. Of course, anything that sensitive is perforce swamped by any heat source anywhere near there target, so unless there's an absolutely cold planet out there with no star to orbit about, I don't think we will be able to detect life directly by its heat....,