Admiral Regulus

I'm pretty sure if I suddenly stopped having a penis I would be immensely disappointed in life. I generally think of sex as being a good thing, so anything that takes that away is not something I'd like. But if I was born that way, grew up that way, and never knew what sex was because there was no such thing, then perhaps it wouldn't be so bad.

I'm tired. I'm so tired. And it's cold. Brrrrrrrr!

Looking at things from a worldly perspective, I'd say I'm pretty set in the middle, possibly leaning slightly liberal. But in terms of American politics, this puts me far, far left of both the Republican and Democrat parties. Basically, even the Democrats--the less conservative party of the two--are too conservative for my tastes.

Pretty much somewhere in the middle ground. Not bad but not great either.

Bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored. Not that bored, but still bored bored bored bored bored bored.

A member of this forum once said... So, you know what? Challenge accepted. Let's start with the basics. We know that the speed of light, denoted c, is always constant. Whether you're walking at 5 mph, riding in a plane at 500 mph, or on a rocket going 5,000 mph, you're always going to see light travel at the same speed. Why is this? Let's take a closer look. Speed is defined by a distance covered over time. In the case of the speed of light, it's a distance of 299,792,458 meters covered over a time of one second. If this is always going to be constant, then either the distance has to change, or the time has to change. You guessed it, it's the time that changes. But let's look at this more analytically. Let's suppose the we're going to shoot a radio transmission to astronauts on the moon, and instantaneously, as soon as they get it, they'll send the signal back to us. Let's also say that the distance to the moon is exactly a distance of d in km. Since we know how fast the signal goes, c, we can expect the transmission to hit the moon at a time tone-way = d / c. Then, we can expect the time to get our signal back to be tround-trip = 2d / c, since it has to make a return trip, too. To make things simpler, let's just call tround-trip to be t0. But what if another group of astronauts are on a shuttle going some speed v? Let's look at that. In this case, the people on the shuttle are going to cover a distance a = dt * v, where dt is the time that passes for them. We also know that the distance the light travels is going to be distance b + distance c, which, is going to be 2 * sqrt(d2 + (a/2)2). Using what we know for a, this becomes 2 * sqrt(d2 + (dt * v / 2)2). Since the speed of light is always going to be a constant c, this ultimately means that the light takes dt = 2 * sqrt(d2 + (dt * v / 2)2) / c seconds to reach the shuttle again. But for stationary observers, we can simply say that d = c * t0 / 2 as previously mentioned. Combining the two equations gives: dt = 2 * sqrt((c * t0 / 2)2 + (dt * v / 2)2) / c. This is a complex equation to solve, so I hope you remember your algebra. With a little bit of jiggery pokery we can move the terms around to find out what dt is. First, square both sides: dt2 = 4 * ((c * t0 / 2)2 + (dt * v / 2)2) / c2 Then expand a little: dt2 = 4 * (c2 * t02 / 4 + dt2 * v2 / 4) / c2 Then expand a little more to kill off some unnecessary terms: dt2 = t02 + dt2 * v2 / c2 Then move both dt terms to the same side: dt2 v2 * c-2 * dt2 = t02 Now, we can factor out dt: dt2 (1 - v2 * c-2) = t02 From here, solving should be pretty easy. Let's just skip to the answer, which is: dt = (t02 * (1 - v2 * c-2)-1)1/2 Or, alternatively: dt = t0 * (1 - v2 * c-2)-1/2 So yes. That's the way this works. There, you have a mathematical expression for the way time changes relative to a difference in velocity between observers. We can plug in some numbers here and get a general idea of how this equation behaves. Going back to our example with things on the moon, a radio transmission from Earth to Moon takes 1.2822 seconds for observers on either body. But for observers moving on a rocket going 5,000 m/s, it's still 1.2822 seconds, because 5,000 m/s is such an insignificant speed. But what if the speed of the shuttle is 90% of the speed of light? In that case, it's 2.9416 seconds that pass on the moon, for those 1.2822 seconds on the shuttle. Another way to analyze this is to observe what happens at the extremes. If v is infinite, then dt becomes 0. If v is 0, then dt becomes t0. Larger v means a larger difference in time perception from stationary and non-stationary reference frames. This will be important later. What's interesting, is that just as time is not constant, neither is mass. A similar equation times an object's rest mass, m0, is the mass of an object traveling at that speed. So, in essence, we have: (1 - v2 * c-2)-1/2 * m0 = M Where M is the mass accounting for relativistic effects at high speeds. Now, let's look at what exactly energy is. Kinetic energy, at least, is defined by the integral of a force multiplied by a distance. Because of newton's laws, this force is d(M*v)/dt. So, the integral looks something like: d(M*v)/dt * ds, where the ds is the distance that the equation is being integrated over. Now, since ds/dt is just simply v, this means the form can be reduced to v * d(M*v). We know what M is based on the prior equation, and this becomes v * d((1 - v2 * c-2)-1/2 * m0*v). This is not an easy integral to evaluate, but it can be evaluated using integration by parts. The solution becomes: KE = M * c2 - m0 * c2 Where KE is the kinetic energy. Rearranging this, we can write: KE + m0 * c2 = M * c2 Or, in terms of energies: KE + E0 = E Here, we're basically saying the E0 term is the energy in which the reference frame is stationary, and E is the relative energy. Now, assume the mass is stationary in a certain frame, such that kinetic energy is zero. We still have that the energy is E0, and we know that E0is m0 * c2. So, in essence, this really just comes down to E = m * c2, which is the nice, cute and simple formula that everypony and their grandmother remembers. So, the answer is yes. I do believe the idiot that was Einstein. I believe this is completely true, and I do attempt to understand the mathematics behind it to the best of my abilities. My understanding leads me to believe that this is entirely correct.

I have 12 gigabytes of DDR3. As a less-important note, my memory is pretty terrible. I think of my brain as something like an iceberg in the antarctic, and on this iceberg there are penguins. Each penguin contains a memory. Sometimes, the penguins jump off into the water and get eaten by sharks. Sometimes, they jump off into the water, and show up some weeks later. Sometimes they just swim away and never come back. Sometimes they get cold and die. Who knows. The point is, sometimes they're just gone, and that's how I forget things. Every so often there is a mass migration of new penguins onto the iceberg, and they beat up the established penguins and take over, thus replacing old memories with new information. Occasionally, the adult penguins mate, and raise their young until they die off. In those cases, the offspring penguin is some other memory that is related to two previous ones, but never actually existed before. That's how memories can get distorted over time--they get mixed in with other memories, and the details get diluted.

I think the best age of gaming is somewhere between the two, during the early and mid 2000's. So, I'm basically referring to the time games were on Windows XP, PS2, and the original Xbox as the golden age of gaming. After that, starting with the PS3 and Xbox 360, I think developers started to rely too much on online patches, DLC, and multiplayer to unsuccessfully fix what was lacking in the game itself. Really old games, like those that would be considered "classic" today, have a tendency to bore me. I grew up on the original Playstation Console, but I've had no desire to play any of those games again whatsoever.

Yes. But can I take off the helmet first?

I feel... a bit drained and melancholic.

I didn't have strict parents, but they were very overprotective.

I'd kill them as quickly and painlessly as I could. And then I'd go hide and do nothing but cry endlessly for the next week or so.

If I were in your position, your avatar's expression would fit my reaction perfectly.

I was younger than 10, I think. I may have been exactly 10. My parents called me to their room one day and told me. I wasn't particularly devastated with the news. I think my reaction was something like "I didn't think it was possible for deer to fly and a man to crawl through the chimney we don't have anyway." I had been suspecting that Santa wasn't exactly what everyone said he was, so it wasn't so much of a surprise to me. I didn't so much believe he wasn't real, because I saw pictures of him and his reindeer in books, and I knew that he always delivered presents to me. So, to me, it was more of a matter of figuring out how it was real. I never understood how he visited so many houses (and at one point, I tried to guesstimate and calculate how quick he needed to be at each one). I never understood how one bag could hold so many things. I never understood how he could get in the house. I knew magic wasn't real, so I never understood how the reindeer could fly. When my parents told me, everything made sense.

Pretty okay, but I'm not looking forward to feeling crappy again in a few days. It's only a matter of time before I start feeling lonely again.

This. Exactly this.