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It's been awhile, so let's do some updating. Give me a Personal Text, Custom Title, and some delightful nonsense for my signature. If you please, of course.

Day 1 Part 1:
Prepare Log Phase Bacteria

Ingredients:
20 microliters of Brain Heart Infusion broth
1 milliliter of stationary phase Enterococcus faecalis in Brain Heart Infusion broth

In a 2 mL tube, combine the BHI broth and the bacteria culture.
Shake the tube on a vortexer
Bake for 2 hours at 37°C

Do the dishes. There's always dishes to be done
Do your homework. There's always homework to be done.

#gapingasshole2016.

Not my idea, just ran with it. Tracy O'Phyte. Tracheophyte. Vascular plants.

I've mostly been hanging out in Atheists vs Christians and to a lesser extent Atheists vs Theists Death Battle, and recently playfully describing myself as a Gozer worshipper (though it is generally known by people who have known me there for a while that I am a Discordian). Death Battle had a thread over the weekend urging people to do a rap battle sort of thing, so I came up with these two, which I am now saving here for posterity and for your enjoyment and critique.

Some of you may have confessions of faith
Or put stake in thinking it's a waste to worship a wraith
Some of you might be concerned about karma
Or fulfilling your dharma
Chanting hare Krishna or following Siddhartha
some of you might get a boost
out of Zarathustra
But if so we're not used to
hearing from you sir
Maybe it's true
That you are the few
That will make it through
A one forty four thousand JW
Maybe you and your bros and
Your sisters are chosen
The children of Goshen
And your last name is Rosen
Maybe it is fairly likely
You follow the JC
Catholic, orthodox, or heresy
Spending your Sunday hearing homilies
Or maybe the word to mom
Happens to be Islam
Getting your God on
Reading the Qur'an
maybe your gods are several
Maybe your boy's the devil
Maybe your gods are nil
Maybe none fits the bill
I don't care about all of your teachers
Because none of your preachers
Foresaw the main feature
Total destruction of all the sub-creatures
When Zuul and Vinz Clortho join as one
Your civilization is done
Gozer make you go numb
Volguus Zildrohar, the Traveler has come


Hail Eris, All hail Discord
Ia can see the fnords if you get on board
the law of Eristic escalation Is just what the Doktor disordered
The more that the forces of order insist
The forces of disorder equally resist
Fighting the curse of Greyface
Through humor's embrace just have a taste
Of a hot dog, hold the bun
On a Friday night it's Erisian kinda fun
Who's your favorite Nephew if not me
Representing the Black Iron Prison contingency
When you're leaving your rants word salad ain't valid
It ain't deep, son, don't make no ballad
Your idea of order ain't no perception
Your idea of disorder misconception
Your view of chaos through the lens of self deception
Your reality grid is messing up the reception
Trying to cut the signal through the noise
Salvation through absurd, and playful skeptical joy
Hail Eris, All hail Discord
Ia can the see the fnords if you get on board

...but in different universes, and the only constant is that Paris just ignored Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera and gave the Golden Apple back to you.

What do you do next? You tricky prank was just ruined, but it also just made your day.

... and aside from the fact that she and I are still friends and the ambiguity of my invite (matter of number and invites, plus groom's comfort)....

She asked me for input on the musical selection. I made some facetious as well as some serious input, but at the end of the day, I realized that a lot of the music I listen to, is, well, ambiguously appropriate at best.

This left me with the odd realization, "what the hell are we going to listen to at my own wedding, when it eventually happens?"

Irish music is like country music in this regard. Starts off good but, goddamn.

Heavy metal?

lol, you gotta work with Motorhead at best.

I guess this is coming up because all of the hurdles that were in place between Villager and I getting married are now gone, excepting me finishing college, since I'll probably propose to her not long after I get my bachelor's. We've even figured out the where to live. Massachusetts, just not Boston.

Has there ever been a moment in your life where music no longer mattered?

I kinda noticed it in the past couple of weeks. It was in Villager's car. Here's the thing, I'm a metalhead (with untapped flexibility because what you listen to inherently sucks) in his borderline mid-30s. Villager was born in 1984, so she is 30. Her next best friend who isn't me is in her mid twenties. She also, on an objective level, has poor taste in music. I say this as a musician, rather than an old dude. Her secret boyfriend seems to agree. Of course he would, he listens to, as she would put it, "angry white boy music" never mind that she listens to valium dosed white girl music. What does any of that mean? I don't care about the folk, I've played it for money and loved it. I don't care about the color of the skin of the musician, if you guitar, you guitar. I don't care if he or she is angry. If it's targeted to boys, I'm honestly not interested. There's a very good reason that I grew up in the 1990s and want to beat the whiny shit out of Jonathan Davis. He sucks. His band sucks. I didn't know at first, but I still figured it out before the year 2000.

I guess this is a defense of the get off my lawn, but a strange twist on it. You're welcome on my lawn, but stop pretending that your grass is greener Your music sucks as much as the music from my era that I now recognize as sucky.

The difference is, I'm willing to give your music a shake. A fair shake.

I'm just not going to give it a free pass. I may be older. But I'm going to put myself in that position of listening to it as a 13 year old and then fast forward myself 20 years.

There's a reason why a Twid likes a bit of Nirvana. It's not because Kurt was good. It's also not because Kurt was shitty (he had some chops, if you listen to Bleach). It's because Kurt happened to be at the right place at the right time. And I'm a better musician than him, so fuck his ashes. So I like crap music from the 90s. That's a challenge. I'll listen to it one way or the other. Most of it is going to suck, much like most of what I liked back in the day also sucked. What's going to stay though? What are you listening to that you'll still be listening to in 2030? Because that's the kinda shit that you're listening to now that I want to hear.

Part of what I do at work is to see if our respondents have died or not. So I read my share of obituaries in a day (and try to figure out if it's the same person at all). It's occasionally morbid and bummer work (The worst I saw was yesterday: "[redacted]: [DOB]-[DOD] [redacted] was a resident of [redacted]. She was DOD minus DOB years old." That's it.) but it's also an occasionally, unintentionally, funny genre of writing. Volunteer, and I will ham up your life (and death) to celebrate your existence and its abrupt, and possibly, unseemly, end.

I've got a bit of an idea that I want to work with. The genre is pop music, so, the main thing I'm asking is how best to go about doing synth. I have a shitty Yamaha keyboard, but I want to figure out how to make a convincing pop music sound on the cheap. What sort of equipment and/or software should I be working with?

After a series of somewhat difficult conversations with Villager, who is adamant about leaving Boston, and quite likely, New England, we're eventually going to have to figure out where to go. Time frame is basically after getting my BS. Grad school will be elsewhere. Ireland and the United Kingdom are on the table, but it should be noted that those are options because if I'm going to be far from one side of the family, I want to be close to the other. I would prefer to stay west of the Atlantic, east of the Mississippi, and north of the Mason-Dixon. Areas outside of that are negotiable, except for California, and most likely the southwest in general. Place needs biology career opportunities, obviously, but large cities discouraged. And no, I don't want to leave Boston, and never have. So, help me figure out where I would be willing to go.

So, I have this friend, who's recently come back into our lives, and he's a hardcore Star Wars fan, which is fine, but he thinks that he is somehow betraying George Lucas if he even entertains the idea of liking Trek.

I have no idea why. I like both. I like Trek more, but I like both.

So I want to troll the shit out of him and bonus points if I turn him into a Trekkie.

Help a nephew out.

So, before we do the lab we have to do a lab skills test prior to. I don't want the answers, I just want to know how to set shit up, because, I'm really not getting it. I've got half the answers and have no idea if I'm correct, so if you can tell me if I am and if I went about it the right way, then bully. It's all molarity shit, so I imagine it's pretty basic for someone who has taken chem, but I have not taken chem.

1. Calculate the amount of Tris [Tris(Hydroxomethyl) Aminomethane] needed to make 500 ml of a 1 M stock solution. MW=121.14.
Answer I got: 60.57 grams. Formula: MW*mol*volume

2. Calculate the amount of EDTA (ethylenediamine tetraacetic acid, disodium salt) needed to make 500 ml of a 0.5 M stock solution. FW=372.2
Answer I got: 93.05 grams. Same formula as above.

3. Calculate the total volume of  solution needed to get an 80% solution from 100 ml of 95% ETOH (Ethanol). [Note: Use absolute (100%) ethanol, but be aware that shortly after the bottle is opened, absolute ethanol becomes 95%. If a bottle has been opened, calculate the total volume of solution needed to get an 80% solution from 100 ml of a 95% solution.]
118.75 ml (I'm thinking this is wrong, whereas I'm pretty sure about the above two). Formula: Concentration of stock agent/final concentration needed=Final volume needed/volume of stock reagent. Which is a formula given in the lab manual.

4. You have 300 ul [sic. I'm assuming microliters] of DNA solution in TE buffer. You wish to add salt to precipitate your DNA. You have a 3M NaOAc  solution. You wish to bring your DNA solution to 0.3M NaOAc.
No clue.

5. How much solute is required to make 300 ml of 0.8 M CaCl₂?
I imagine I use a variant of the formula in 1 and 2.

6. How would you prepare 500% (w/v) solution of NaCl?

I want to make a picture.

Problem is I don't know what to draw. Give me something to draw, and I will draw it, and put it in this thread.

Also a convenient place for me to drop stuff specifically relating to genetics rather than biology as a whole, since I'm taking genetics in two weeks.

So, just as a quick run-down of how DNA and RNA work together before getting deep into the protein bits:

-DNA and RNA are strands of genetic instruction, the main difference between them being that the sugar molecules in their bases differ by one oxygen atom.
-Both use 4 nucleotides (bases), Adenine, Cytosine, and Guanine for both (differing only in that one oxygen atom, natch) and DNA uses Thymine where RNA uses Uracil. Cytosine always pairs with Guanine. Adenine always pairs with Thymine or Uracil. This is basically due to whether or not they can form 2 or 3 hydrogen bonds on the center of the double helix.
-Nucleotides are made up of a phosphate group, a sugar (ribose/deoxyribose/other- more on that in a bit), and a nitrogenous base. The phosphate group of one forms a phosphodiester bond with the sugar of the one next to it, this creates the strand, and nitrogenous bases, which determine what nucleotide it is, forms weaker (and therefore, easy to unzip) hydrogen bonds with the nitrogenous base of its counterpart.
-There are more than one kind of nucleotide, and more than one kind of nucleic acid. ATP, for example, which is the fuel our cellular processes, is basically a modified adenine molecule with three phosphate groups. Further, there are nucleotides that form XNA- nucleic acids that for some reason or another, life on Earth decided not to bother incorporating, but can be used it the fields of synthetic biology and biotechnology (creating exotic nucleic acids that won't interact with ours if it got loose, or even in capping off replication early in biotech). XNA sounds intriguing to me and I think I'll read about it more in my own time as well.
-DNA is an instruction manual, genes are particular tasks in the instruction manual, RNA is the instruction being read outloud, and proteins are the end result of the instructions.
-Triplet sequences of nucleotides code for one of twenty amino acids, or tell you to stop coding. There are 64 possible combinations for codons. Only one sequence codes for "Start" and "Methionine." SIX code for Leucine, and three code for "stop". I'm not exactly sure how these redundancies work, or why Methionine gets no redundancy. Most get 2 or 3. The redundancies help mitigate the chance of damaging mutation. If a syllable can be coded for in a couple of different ways, spelling errors don't have to be that nonsensical.
-DNA unzips, messenger RNA gets grafted on to the exposed nitrogenous bases, and makes a mirror copy. Since most DNA doesn't actually code for anything, the mRNA needs to get edited. The edited mRNA then gets paired with transfer RNA. tRNA is what ends up going on to synthesizing amino acid sequences, which then fold around and create 3 dimensional proteins.

I'll address some of your questions in the next post.

So, when the bedbugs reemerged (they seem to have been deemerged again) I of course, avoided going over to Villager's place for 3 weeks. During that time she bought me a webcam and had it shipped to my house. I finally installed everything and got it to work (and have yet to find a proper angle for it where I can look sort of at it without being a disembodied head due to black tee shirt and dark background). Problem is with the software is that I can only record for 99 seconds at a time unless I go through youtube, which presumably gives me no editing capabilities. So, what I'm asking is what can I do for the balance of recording for 100 seconds+ for minimal editing? Especially because I might like to record songs here and there (different can of worms, audio-wise. Will cross that bridge when I get there)

My webcam is a Logitech QuickCam IM run on Vista.

Dear Uncle Roger,

     I've been debating theists and atheists alike on Yahoo News. The annoying part is that I'm starting to sound like an atheist. Now, I know that I'm going through my own spiritual doubts, but they only apply to me, my immortal soul and the grace of God. But dear God, man. How is it that our fellow theists have totally missed out on the idea that our holy mission, aside to fuck with everyone, is to actually figure this shit out? What happened to the likes of Newton, who, while dead wrong on matters of chemistry, was dead right on physics because he wanted to know what God was up to? When did we become dumb, and when did the infidels steal our academic thunder? It's offensive unto our LORD(or LADY) that a bunch of smarmy asshats would take up our sacred cause.

     I may be a humble Nephew, but I am also a Doktor, and this heresy on both sides makes my firebrand itch. You are a Holy Man, and I a mere monk. How can we make this itchy brand a beacon for all to see? How can we bring the Shut The Fuck Up to the masses? How can we bring the flag burning hippies, and the gun toting preppers, to the same BBQ? What must we sacrifice, by fire, unto our LORD (or LADY)?

    Genuinely curious, because it is grilling season now, even here in New England.

Your favorite Nephew,
Twid

I know we all have to sell out from time to time, but really?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ygkwDX3p40

So-

Warning I'm a bit wired because I drank a bunch of coffee to get my biology report done and it's almost 2 am, but this has to do with the Big Bang and the asymmetry of matter and antimatter. The question of what happens before it is irrelevant because there's no before but could it work out that the other side of the Big Bang is the antimatter Big Bang, doing the same thing that our universe is but, from our perspective, backwards in time and never the twain shall meet? Here's a stupid graphic I'm about to make to illustrate my point:



Such that, it's not a Big Crunch on the other side, it just happens to be a roughly identical universe expanding in the other direction through time from our perspective. It's still not really before because the Big Bang is more of a pinching off point. Chegolas' thread and tiredness got me thinking about it. I don't know, I feel like I can't quite get the idea out correctly. It's probably wrong anyway.

Got a new phone. Text me your name if you have my number or PM me if you want me to have your number.

So, one of my cousins just posted this one on her facebook. I'm not sure what to make of it. Some of the phrasing in the article is setting off my "suspect content" radar. Paging Faust and Cain because I'm not sure how trustworthy the Irish Examiner is. My news consumption when I am over there is limited to RTE and occasional trips to the Internet cafe. I am also immediately suspect of a news piece in Irish media about a vaccine to guard against a sexually transmitted virus. I've not heard about this otherwise.

http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/health/cancer-vaccine-warning-129227.html

Put Death Metal here.

Keep On Rotting In The Free World by Carcass:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R_RavpIGxo

For example:

I think it gets harder each time if you don't experiment. Um, for us, we've always tried to be innovators, we've always tried to do something different from the last record, and that's what keeps it fun for us.

I think [Barack Obama is] an Illuminati puppet. It just doesn't make sense, the whole thing. The guy comes from out of nowhere, he gets made president, all this stuff starts happening. I don't know... It just didn't make sense to me.

http://www.metalsucks.net/2014/02/19/korns-jonathan-davis-joins-dave-mustaineted-nugent-conservative-nutcase-alliance/

I'm temporarily converting to Norse Paganism, because my religion du jour never gives me Armageddon when I'm it. Besides, as far as the End of the World goes, I'd be a poor metalhead to not celebrate it.

http://www.npr.org/2014/02/16/277941699/vikings-of-the-world-unite-in-battle-the-apocalypse-is-upon-us

Feel free to add your own. Here's two that have happened on Monday, and tonight:



This one was left on the toilet by the landlady. It confused me greatly until I talked to one of the roommates. Apparently someone has been tying their shoes on the toilet, and the landlady meant on rather than in (English is her fourth language). Why she put feet in quotation marks and underlined it is anyone's guess.



I'm pretty sure I know which roommate wrote the note, and I suspect I know who left the egg carton with a dozen eggshells in the fridge. Whether this is the same person as toiletshoes is also anyone's guess.

Villager and I got invited to a wedding at the end of July in Chicago. We're probably going to go on a Thursday and come back on that Sunday (the wedding is on a Saturday). So, that gives us the Friday to look around Chicago. Any of you spags know some weird/cool shit to look at, great places to eat, what kind of local beer to try?

https://twitter.com/ChemFreeBear

I forget which one of you provided the link, only that you were both involved in the conversation, but one of you had a link that showed that the US could produce 4 times its power consumption with off shore wind turbines. Do either of you still have that link?

http://conferencecall.biz/

 

http://www.aux.tv/2014/01/infamous-grindcore-loving-goat-died/

If you were to play an Irish music set in 2 months, or were forced to listen to one, would you prefer vocals/guitar/fiddle, vocals/guitar/accordion, or vocals/guitar/fiddle/accordion?

I ask because I've basically been booked for $150 the week before St. Patrick's, and need to figure out what would sound the best, and since fiddle and accordion fit the best, and Villager lives with a violinist and I live with an accordion player who's otherwise looking for a gig as a bassist.

I'm reading this new book, courtesy of my keyboardist/vocalist, called , "This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science Of A Human Obsession" by Daniel T. Levitin. It was a Christmas gift, but I just finished the chapter where it describes that how we recognize an instrument as its specific sound, timbre, in English language musician jargon, is due to overtones. It made me think of your stuff because it's very synthesized and how it's amazing that the only difference between how a human brain recognizes the difference between, say, a synth and an electric guitar is really nothing more than a matter of how loud the various frequencies in the overtones are.

I'm trying to wrap my head around it, the idea that the sound of one thing or another playing the same note will sound like the same note but the only difference in our perception is just a matter of loudness in overtones.

Actually, Nigel might fin the book interesting as fuck too, so I'll put her in parentheses in the subject.

So I have a sort of dilemma.

I mean, not REALLY, but let's just pretend that somehow I have some kind of say in the matter.

There's my accountant. In Baltimore. Who I have been kind of in love with for like 20 years. I would like him to move back to Portland, no idea if that's going to actually ever happen. Pipe dreams and wishful thinking, right?

And then there's this artist who I have had kind of a minor recurring crush on for the last 5-ish years. Who owns a home in St. Johns and is really into dogs and gardening, and who gave me a fantastically panty-moistening hug last night. With his absurd, perfect body OMG how does he even do that.

I think artist guy likes me and he is single again, having finally broken up with his last lady who was basically superhumanly awesome and totally intimidating. But he's also suuuper monogamous and if I go there, that's IT. Any extracurricular interests go into shutdown, goodbye accountant.

Actually this is not even really a dilemma because I'm too chickenshit to do anything about it. Like if I was a player I would be all "hey artist, know how you wanted to come to the coast but there's no more room at the house? Well you can share my bed" but I'm not actually ever going to say that.

Well, could you see yourself spending the rest of your life with him and enjoying it? If so, take the chance. If not, then don't. The extracurricular is a draw, but if the intramural outweighs it, intramural.

To put it into my experience, Villager chased after me for a couple of years, and I resisted it because I wanted to not be tied down. Now I can't imagine life without her. And thing was, I could, when she was chasing me, see myself marrying her, and I think that's why I was so resistant. If that makes sense.

...a petition worth signing:

https://www.change.org/petitions/the-national-football-league-allow-gwar-to-perform-the-2015-super-bowl-halftime-show

Suggest.

Well, two I suspect.

Have you ever had Magellan gin, and what would be a good bitter flavor to mix with gin?

Apparently very, if the mounds of butthurt in the comments are any indicator.

http://modernwomandigest.com/goth-club-30-sign-loser/

Whats going on in thailand and if the democrats arent looking for elections then what would this peoples council that suthep wants entail?

So, I read this one thing tonight, since I was going and getting lost in links as sometimes happen, and it was about movies that you thought were awesome when you saw them but on further reflection were shitty.

A recurring theme in it was White Man saves the day. Well, all of the lead actors are white so that makes a little bit of sense, and we all feel a bit guilty about all the horrible things that white people did throughout history (which ignores the larger problem that humans do shitty things throughout history).

I guess one of the things that stuck out in my mind was criticism of Avatar, and White Man saves the day. Again.

But it goes a little beyond that. What you see now is White Man saves the day after a process of cultural appropriation and leading the natives into glorious battle against the bad white people. Also, after White Man saved the day, he was stuck as a blue cat thing because his White Man body died, and you know, maybe this is some sort of deep metaphor about how he could never go back to White Man culture after seeing what he saw.

So, let's go over this again. White Man walks around a planet inhabited by Blue Cats, and has to put on Blue Face to understand the Blue Cats and then because he's a White Man Blue Cat leads the Blue Cats to a victory that they never could have achieved on their own.

Well, that's a little fucked up isn't it? What about that Tom Cruise samurai flick? Those samurai didn't stand a chance without a Scientologist leading them. But it's ok, because he became one of them. He had his Japanese card along with his deep understanding of Bushido.

I mean, I get it, it's supposed to portray other cultures as equally valuable. But the thing is, it has the dual hidden meaning that those cultures are still seen as inferior, because White Man still needs to save the day, but because there is no White Man without The Man, White Man has to bring his Big White Brains to the other side and become that other side as a means of redeeming himself. You know, instead of actually fixing the problem.

Ok, great. White Man put on Blue Face and saved all of the otherwise helpless and naive noble savages.

But when was the last time the culture that created White Man ever stopped? I suppose if one White Man only lead the Iroquois Confederacy to victory, that Europeans would have called it a day and stayed in Europe.

Seems to me that it would have been better if White Man didn't pretend to be Blue Cat and started being a loud about what he saw was being done wrong by his own people.

What the movie doesn't show you is the headlines. "Human With PTSD Backs the Wrong People, Starts Insurgent Group"

Wherein we discuss whatever Nigel and I happen to be learning at the moment in order to get a better grasp on it than anyone else in our respective classes. Come one come all, and feel free to tangent into other sciences as long as they relate to the bio du jour. My exam on Monday covers chapters 7, 8, 9, and 10.

Anyway, Nigel and I have the same textbook, excepting that mine is a Bunker Hill specific edition, so the chapters and pacing should be relatively the same.

I also have finals in about 3 weeks.

Chapter 7: Membrane Structure and Funtion
Chapter 8: An Introduction to Metabolism\
Chapter 9: Cellular Respiration and Fermentation
Chapter 10: Photosynthesis

I've got nothing at this specific moment to discuss, since I'm Fridaying, but wanted to get the thread going. Expect more of these, as a kind of informal study-group, even if you don't happen to be studying it formally type thing.

I pledge allegiance to The Flag^TM of The United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, [passage in dispute between atheists and theists], indivisible, with Liberty^TM and Justice^TM for All^some

Now of course, the goddamned passage in dispute is "Under God" because, you know, all of the Founders and Framers agreed on this one specific God and all that shit and decided that it totally wasn't a generic deistic metaphor best left alone and ignored.

Most certainly, we are all Americans, theist and atheist alike, so this passage, well, maybe we can come to some common ground with this at some point when it is politically expedient for the extremists on both sides who clearly have no sense of poetry. (History is on the side of the atheists here, I will note.)

No, no no, we must come to some common ground on this whole "God" issue in the Pledge of Allegiance. Clearly "God" is the most significant part of this utterance that we do, with hand over heart looking reverently at the Stars and Stripes.

I gotta say. Even though it is totally in retrospect, one of the most eye opening things about the Pledge was when I was in Ireland.

Yeah, I talk about my Irish heritage and my dual citizenship a lot. Thing is, I don't actually talk much about where it matters. I'm an American who has a clear and well anchored outside perspective on America. That's where it becomes important.

I used to be a very patriotic American, when I was a child. It's easy. I live in the best country in the world, right? Otherwise, why would we not pledge allegiance to a piece of cloth? That cloth must somehow be important. I once even told my Grandfather that America was a free country and Ireland was not, even though I am named after someone who precipitated massive popular support for revolution in Ireland.

Stupid kids right?

Well where does that leave me? Who should I pledge my allegiance to, if I have two options?

One of my cousins in Ireland mocked me once, by saying "I pledge allegiance to the flag, Michael Jackson is a fag" (it was the mid 80s, mind you, when homophobia was the norm)

Homophobia aside, the man had a point. What do I pledge my allegiance to? "USA! USA! USA!!!!"? Ireland?

I pledge allegiance to the human race, and the common siblinghood of all its degenerate members, and to the fractured planet on which they stand, one quagmire, under the Sun, totally divisible, with ideals and hope for all.

We know but two things about hirley- he writes real funny with some recent noticeably standard posts here and there which is terrifying enough in its strangeness
And
Hes a perpetual college student.
So what the hell do his classnotes and papers look like?
Ive recieved a vision of a portland full of adjunct professors driven mad by impossible geometries misaligned stars and unspeakable ancient horrors merely glimpsed.

It's facebook, so obviously people are missing the goddamn point.

https://www.facebook.com/kevin.mulkerrins/posts/10151990983092069?comment_id=30650891&offset=0&total_comments=53&notif_t=share_comment

I say by accident. I'm not sure if it's a New England thing or just me or what, but whenever someone says on accident like CPD did in Open Bar a few minutes ago it becomes immediately noticeable to me.

Hey Europe, thanks for the memories. Totally funny.

Love,
some American asshole on FB who never fought in the military at all, let alone bombed Europeans. Or backpacked in Europe for that matter.

[DRUGS.]

DRUGS.

So, I'm going to put random ideas that I have in this thread for further consideration. Please weigh in as you see fit.

So the first idea I had was a version of a space elevator. As I understand it, having the counterweight would make the elevator incredibly long. But what if we had a stationary atmospheric surface platform instead? The space elevator in this case wouldn't have a counterweight in the traditional sense but rather a sort of truck stop consisting of a really large blimp that goes to the edge of appreciable atmosphere. From there a shuttle of some sort or another would use standard rocket technology to go the rest of the way. This would have the benefit of cutting down on the fuel requirements to escape Earth, and reduce any impact that rocket fuel exhaust would have on the atmosphere itself.  Or perhaps we could go even further and have stations further up in Low Earth Orbit reaching down to the atmospheric platform to function as a different elevator? Ultimately the idea here is to reduce the energy cost of leaving Earth. Obviously leaving the Moon would be much easier, and maybe the Moon at that point could function as another stopping off point or even a shipyard.

 

http://drunkdialcongress.org/

Democrat congressman puts IRS official on trial for witchcraft in Congress.



http://news.yahoo.com/irs-official-says-she-never-consorted-devil-154304313--politics.html

Congratulations!

You have it all figured out. Everyone is fucking retarded but you. They can't help it. They're Sheeple^TM. They clearly can't match your intellectual capacity or have anything in common with you. More than that, they are less than human. They're not people, they're Sheeple^TM! That smart ass from Harvard who can't change his tire? Fucking retard. Person who doesn't understand how the Constitution^TM works? Retard. I understand the Constitution^TM more than anyone else. Hell, I am all of the Framers rolled into one goddamn package deal. Wake up Sheeple^TM!

Actually learning shit has no comparison to fumbling about, scratching my head and after a lot of wasted time, finally getting it in a very inefficient way. That's the American^TM way. Fuck Google. I don't need Anybody^TM telling me how it's fucking done. I got this. Hands. On. Experience.

Oh, you can do something I can't? You have a degree in it? I can do something that you can't. I'm clearly smarter than you, even if you've actually never had to do it before. Now I have to help you out. You have a PhD and I graduated from high school, and I helped you out on this one minor thing. I rule and you suck. My underpaid lack of ambition and lack of specialization and education trump your life, which you clearly have failed at due to this one thing.

Wake up, Sheeple^TM! Can't you see I'm sleep walking here?
Wake up, Sheeple^TM! Can't you see I'm busy baaaaaaing at the shepherd what he's doing incorrectly?

Fucking stupid shepherd, thinks he knows what he's doing. Damn sheep, doing what he wants them to.

So, it's been said that if you can't explain something to a layman, you don't actually understand it. This is obviously true, but sometimes this must be done through example or analogy. Since I'm now starting on my way to science, and I'm actually getting it, I will attempt to write essays about some of the topics from other perspectives in order to explain them.

The first one I will do (which will follow in the next post) is explaining evolution through the lens of music. It's restating an idea in another specialty, but it's a language I'm familiar with (and I will try and put the musical perspective in layman's terms, or define in layman's terms for clarity), and therefore a step towards putting it into plain music.

I think this an important exercise because I've always believed in evolution, but evolution isn't an article of belief. Science deals with evidence, not faith. I no longer believe in evolution, I accept it as an accurate explanation of the diversity and unity of life, based on well attested evidence.

If considered sufficiently sound, I'll post these elsewhere.