Hey, is there any news on the specific time of our trip to Savannah River? It looks like my student confefrence might conflict with it as well... :-(

I suppose on further thought that Laurel's happiness is due to the fact that the school year is over. If so, BOO ON YOU! I still have another 19 days 18 hours 41 minutes and 40 seconds until I officially am completely graduated. (I keep a countdown clock on my palm.) Make that 19 days 18 hours 42 minutes and 35 seconds...

Meredith, don't worry about it. It's not that important, and maybe it's just working without our knowing it.

Laurel, what the heck? Is it about the monkeys?

Okay, enough with some cheapie bravenet discussion board. Now you can comment directly on the web site, thanks to enetation.co.uk. Try it out if you're not an official blog member.

Ha ha ha! Wow, this is the absolutely funniest news article I have ever seen: Typing Monkeys Don't Write Shakespeare.

Here are a few of the best excerpts if you don't want to see the whole thing:

Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.

Give six monkeys one computer for a month, and they will make a mess.

Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word.

"They pressed a lot of S's," researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. "Obviously, English isn't their first language."

In a project intended more as performance art than scientific experiment, faculty and students in the university's media program left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to six Sulawesi crested macaques.

Then, they waited.

At first, said Phillips, "the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.

"Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard," added Phillips, who runs the university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies.

Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S. Later, the letters A, J, L and M crept in.

Ooh, the new posted by color is much easier on the eyes. Glad I changed it.

Hey, thanks to Laurel's link on her web site (I put a link to hers on the left), we've had some interesting visitors, some of which are from Duke, UT, and other places. I suspect that some of these were former students...

Yay for delaying the paper! Because of you, I just wasted the evening doing nothing whatsoever. So now I have to do my English thesis this weekend. :-)

By the by, Meredith and Laurel, you should click that link under the counter (make sure cookies are enabled) in order to keep from artificially inflating the counter count.

Seth

Laurel: knock, and the door shall be opened unto you. Just post the address of your link, and I'll put it up for you. Also, I was the one who said your status as "God" is a problem. Remember, I can kick you off...

Wow, I was looking for the zinc experiment, and I happened upon an, um, rather interesting web site. Its title is

CENSORED DUE TO CONCERNS ABOUT NATIONAL SECURITY

and, believe it or not, it has the instrutions to making trinitrotoluene (aka 2,4,6-trinitromethylbenzene). I will never, ever do anything like this. And I hope I'm not violating any laws by linking to it.

[censored July 27, 2003 10:35 PM]

Oh, by the way, Laurel, your definition needs to be a bit more specific. Black smokers spew metal sulfides which precipitate out when they come into contact with the colder ocean water. The hydrothermal vents that are a little bit cooler are white smokers, which spew metal sulfates. Those are white. Speaking of chemistry, I am keeping the stuff organized. Today (under the supervision of Mrs. Jones, of course) we did an awesome reaction that Mrs. Jones pointed out to me. It's called "zinc pyrotechnics" and it's really cool. Mix 8g very fine zinc dust, 8g ammonium nitrate, 1g ammonium chloride, and crush them up together. Put them in a 50 mL beaker inside a fume hood with no other flammable substances. Add two drops of water and close the fume hood front. Watch the sparks fly and the flame foom! Use only under adult supervision.

Laurel, the problem is that you must have entered your user name as "God" whenever you signed up. You should probably change it. God is not happy with you. :-)

Okay, I fixed some stuff minor problems with the html code. You can now look at old posts under "archive" in the left bar. Also, you can see the current poll results just to see how cool our blog is. Also, I invited Laurel since she is such a loyal visitor and she is a former lab aide (which is at least as cool as being in Science Bowl). :-)

Hey! We got third place! That means we get to get a trip to Georgia for 8 days at the end of June. Awesome! We had a great time, even though we probably could have done better the last round and gotten second place. Ah well. Third is still pretty awesome. Well, I still have physics up the falafel yet to do, and I have to take the English Lang AP test tomorrow morning. Ultra-yuck. :-( I miss vacation.

The next round starts in less than 10 minutes, so I'll make this brief. We lost a round last night (after winning one in the winner's bracket), so now we're in the "sudden death" bracket. We're going to play a team that's supposedly not too hard. Depending on how we do, we might be playing until whenever. Wish us luck!

Yo! We won every match in our round robin competition, so we get to advance to the double elimination rounds! Our match with North Hollywood was scarily close (though we still won by a nice margin). One team forfeited by not showing up at all. It was sad. We heard they didn't show up for a couple of other matches. Well, we still have to play 3 rounds tonight. I'll check in later, probly. Keep on stopping by!

Hey, we're about to take team pictures. We just woke up 15 minutes ago, so we got a lot of sleep. The batteries on my camera ran out, and the gift shop here charges $2.50 for a cheap-looking 2-pack. My camera needs 4 batteries. Yuck. Anyways, the matches start at 12:00. So long, everyone!