Moving time!

Okay, the three of you who read this blog! We have decided to switch blogging services from Blogger, the large corporate publishing tool, to Metajournal, an highly-featured blogging community. You should update all links and bookmarks to this blog.

There are a few things that you should know about our new blog: it supports searching, our names have been replaced with aliases (I, Seth, am momerath, Adam is sanguinemonkey, and Felix is flixthecat85), you will need to sign up for an account (you only need give your username and password) in order to comment with a name (though you can still comment anonymously), and you can message us once you have an account.

Thank you all for your patience, and thank you for reading Black Smokers!

More NUEN 101 stupidity

There was a homework question that said something like "What is the average power for a house? 10kW, 40kW, 100 kW" (except it was worded better). The same blonde ninny I was talking about on my previous post complained that it wasn't a good question because it was over an indefinite time, so you couldn't find the answer. She managed to get about half the class saying, "Yeah, she's right! What time period?" Before me, my friend, and the teacher explained to her the concept of "power" as being a function of time.

If it were up to me, she and the others asking that question would have been kicked out of that class to go into something less challenging, like business.

I shudder to think of them working in a reactor: "You said to set the power to 900 megawatts; is that 900 MW a day, or what? I need a time period to work with that."

Diversity bake sale

The A&M young conservatives held one yesterday, hooray. My favorate quote from the Batallion (which is highly liberally biased normally) - "I'm offended by the way [the Young Conservatives] approached the situation. They could have been more politically correct."

Because being politically correct is what matters.

The move was to protest the new "Vice President of Diversity," yech.

edit: the pricing scheme was : Asian, $1; white, $.75; Hispanic, $.25; African American, $.10

This looks like something Michael would post

Wow

Boy, I am glad that this is not Mrs. Jones or Mrs. Walker or Doc Smith.

A modest proposal

I'm thinking that we move new posts and stuff to Patrick's new, happy MetaJournal. It has some pretty nifty features (including some pretty nice search ability, integrated commenting, private posts, and relations) that might make it worth switching to. Also, Patrick wants more bloggers and visitors, so this seems like a good way. Patrick has a real commitment to improving the thing (he works on it a lot and takes new feature requests), so I think it's worth a shot. The slight downsides are: the page isn't quite as customizable (I have to format the entries with CSS instead of HTML or whatever), you need to sign up for a new account (a quick an easy process), and we would have to bother the people with links to our blog to move them to the new site (even though I could put an obvious message saying it in the html template).

Anyway, Felix and I think it's a pretty good idea, but we're not the only ones who use this blog. I think. In the meantime, anyone who wants a funky new blog (certainly better than Xanga, LiveJournal, and whatever others) should sign up.

My next car

Forget buying an SUV. I'm going to get me one of these puppies:


I thought about getting the NASA shuttle crawler, but it's pretty slow (like 5 mph). Maybe, though. Also, that radioactive waste-moving truck we saw at SRS might be kinda cool, if not for the "radiation" value.

Just for fun

Just for fun, I sent a "wish request" to the Blogger peoples.

As you are undoubtedly aware, TrackBack (http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/) is a system allowing blogs to reference each other (more specifically, entries from different blogs can reference each other) as a form of advanced commenting.

Implementing this system in Blogger would be a revolution in interconnectivity. Any Blogger blogger could easily comment on any other blog with the added advantage of not having the comment hidden behind a small, Javascript-generated link. Also, since few blogs provide the trackback service for free, it would encourage more people to sign up for a Blogger blog if only to comment on the blogs of other people. This would additionally remove the need to have a dedicated Blogger-hosted commenting system.

I realize that due to the static nature of Blogger pages, this might not be possible. If it were though, it might very well influence more bloggers to use Blogger as their blog of choice.

Sincerely,
Seth Johnson

Silly question

I am going over the powerpoints from my ENGR 111 class because we have a test today. One day we learned "engineering ethics." One "moral issue" is the following: "Should drivers be allowed to speed?" My answer was, "If they were allowed to, it wouldn't be speeding, now would it?"

Jet lag

Did you ever think that so-called "jet lag" was because of time dilation from traveling at high velocities? That would pretty cool, although it would take a relativistic penguin or a well-equipped hobo in a relativistic boxcar.

Euphemisms?

Am I the only one who finds ironic that the so-called "reproductive rights" are specifically about not reproducing?

Okay...

Because other people aren't posting, and because I kinda want to post my own stuff (yet I don't want to turn a group blog into "my blog"), I made my own blog now.

I figure people don't come to this blog to read about me, so, whatever. I will continue to post anything that the general populace might find interesting (or anything related to science bowl).

People need to post, or else I will be the only person on this blog, which would be totally uncool and unwanted.

Update on my life

I finished my research paper, which is not good at all, but it doesn't matter due to the extremely high grade in that class (I think it is impossible for me not to get an A). I spent an hour helping a friend with his chem lab (crystal violet, remember?), and now I have quantum physics to catch up on for a test tomorrow. :(

On my research paper

I think my tiredness is affecting my writing. Proof:

The government has shown its ability to have a safe method of disposing of radioactive waste. Why is some of it not being disposed of? Why do some people still make a big deal about it? The second question is easy, even though there is no source or documentation for it. Some people fear what they do not understand, and some people’s purpose in life is to bother people, prevent good things from happening, and generally cause trouble for no reason.

Inexplicable behavior

For some extremely strange reason, I have been spontaneously been giving myself a physical thumbs-up for a day now (i.e. if I think, "okay!" or "all right!" my left hand will give me the thumbs-up sign). Maybe it's just because I really need sleep.

Just a thought

If any of you black smokers have any documents (research papers, essays, whatever) it might be cool to put them up in the docs section of this site (where the Rules of 80.doc currently is all alone) for the good of mankind (or blog-perusing-kind).

A few things going on this weekend

(Not like any of you care)

• I slept in until 3 PM on Saturday (yay for wasting the whole day)
• There was a big thunderstorm here last night and there were some very close lightning strikes. The thunder sounded like a big electrical discharge on a much larger scale (i.e. like a big discharge on a Van de Graff generator instead of the rumble rumble of distant thunder). The sky was lit up green by some of the strikes. It was neat (and scary).
• I stayed up until 5 in the morning (doing some calculus, listening to the thunder, and playing games).
• I have a 5-page research paper to do today on radioactive waste disposal that has been assigned for a month.
• I have a test in NUEN 201 that I REALLY need to do well on.

Junior Science Bowl

My brother is in the junior science bowl (at one of the 6th grade college station schools), and he says that they practice by raising their hands instead of slapping or buzzing.

We should tell his coach of that kid at our regional bowl who raised his hand instead of buzzing and lost the question because of it. (I think it was B or C team playing last year.)