Dantius

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Edited by Dintiradan (Today at 12:10 AM) Edit Reason: I'm totally going to call participants in this campaign Creepers from now on. Hissssss...

Originally Posted By: Master1 Just a note about entropy in passwords. Length is better than random characters when computers are doing the hacking. Yeah, a password like mmmmmmmmmmkmmmmmmmmmm6 (10m k 10 m 6) is for all intents impossible to brute-force and it reay quite easy to memorize. No, that's not my SW password, and my password isn't even of that form, so you can stop trying before you even start.

I leave the thread alone for ten hours, and this is what happens? Jesus.

Originally Posted By: Sylae you have an engineering degree and we get that as an annotated screenshot. It's pretty difficult to hand-letter things in Paint, and I'm hardly going to print something out, letter it, scan it, and then upload it when I can just use a computer program to do it. I'll have you know I at least made a token effort to color the vector, so there!

I don't recall there being more than like thirty or so guests being here at once a year ago. Is this another sign of how Avadon is boosting Jeff's popularity?

Right now I'm reading Éminence by Jean-Vincent Blanchard. It's a history/biography of Cardinal Richelieu and the rise of France as a nation state (at least that's what it says on the cover). I haven't gotten very far in, but it's quite well-done so far, and the subject matter is fascinating.

Originally Posted By: Necris Omega Originally Posted By: Harehunter Quote: No Marx -> no Internet -> no time-travel -> Marx's parents never met -> no Marx. x Marx the spot. On your Marx, get set, go? I'm giving you failing Marx for those puns.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S I didn't end up using it, though; I decided to write about Arcadia instead, because oscillating time-shifting seemed like a good example of something. Damn, I never had to work with differential equations modelling simple harmonic motions in my English lit exams. Maybe I would have done better in your class...

The book that fits your criteria to a T is Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, parts I and II. It's got several things going for it- it's short, I finished my copy on a two-hour plane ride, it's held in high regard in the English canon, usually placed on the rung just below Shakespeare, it has an ambiguous enough theme that- so long as the words "Renaissance humanism" appear somewhere in your essay- you can get away with arguing it means just about anything, and above all else it's entertaining. The last point can't really be overstated, the book is just flat-out awesome. At it's heart it's the tale of a dude conquering, raping, and pillaging the hell out of Asia because he has nothing better to do and the stars said he could get away with it, and it never strays unbearably far from that. Furthermore, it's pretty clear that the audience is supposed to (and does!) get a visceral pleasure out of watching him lock the Sultan of Turkey in a cage and only take him out to use as his footstool because he can. In terms of absolute quality, it's inferior to Doctor Faustus, but that play is longer, less engaging, and has a more clear-cut message, which makes it harder to argue it any way you please like you can with Tamburlaine.

Originally Posted By: Master1 I doubt my high school has non-denatured ethanol. On a semi-related note, I've actually seen ethanol-based rubbing alcohol. I was surprised by this, and I wonder if anyone else has seen it and if it's common. I was under the impression that rubbing alcohol was by definition isopropyl alcohol.

I don't get it. We're on a series of tubes, not a big truck.

Originally Posted By: Excalibur That's the problem: crap vodka gives me a headache regardless of how much sugar is in it. Vodka has to be of Smirnoff quality or higher for me to drink it. You can tell I'm kind of picky. Personally, it says more about your taste that you think Smirnoff is high-quality vodka than that you refuse to drink vodka below a certain quality level.

Originally Posted By: Goldenking Originally Posted By: Lt. Sullust While we're at it, maybe change the edited tag as well. That doesn't seem like it needs multiple lines. You can always take the option to not display that you edited your post, and encourage others to do the same. I just presumed that the "Don't say my post was edited" option was for minor cosmetic changes like spelling and word order, and that you'd only make it as edited if you did something like EDIT: adding a major thought or revising large parts of your post.

Originally Posted By: Tyranicus Originally Posted By: Harehunter MAC OS Sorry, but this is a big pet peeve of mine. Mac= An abbreviated form of Macintosh, a computer made by Apple. It is not an acronym, therefore only the first letter is capitalized. MAC= Media Access Control, an identification system for network interfaces. If it's an abbreviation, shouldn't it be Mac. OS? That looks even worse than MAC OS.

Originally Posted By: Flame Fiend I still don't get how the tower just stood there for a good hour after the initial hit, then suddenly fell in about 30 seconds. If the core or whatever was melting, then shouldn't the floors that took the actual hit collapse first? And it kinda looked like it started falling from the bottom. Okay. I'm presuming that you're familiar with the concept of stress and strain and deformation and the modulus of elasticity, because obviously you'd have taken the time to research into such an incredibly complex and deep field before making broad claims about what the fact that the towers didn't fall for an hour or so means. ... Haha, who am I kidding. The MoE, or elastic modulus, is a measurement of how far a beam or component can deform without being permanently altered on a molecular scale. As a demonstration, find one of those cheap clear frosted plastic BIC pens (these are the best for engineering demonstrations) and bend it a little. See how it returns to its regular shape after you do so with no visible indication that you bent it? That's because it deformed elastically, which as you can guess means it goes right back to its original shape and can do so as many times as you like. Now bend it as far as it can go and let go, and it won't return to its original shape and a sort of milky white band appears where you bent it? That's because you've bent it past the modulus of elasticity and there was a change in the structure of the material and it has began to deform in a plastic manner (this is just a term, it doesn't refer to plastics specifically, metals do this too) instead of elastically, so not only will it never ever return to its original shape, but it's also much easier to bend from then on- you'll not that you can now twist and bend the pen with a fraction of the effort you needed before. What essentially happened to cause the failure was that the jet fuel and the friction and the heat didn't melt the beams, per se, but rather that they heated the beams and columns supporting the building to the point where the metal began to soften. If you've ever seen a blacksmith at work, or even just watched it, you'd know that there's no "melting point" at which the metal goes from "ROCK HARD" to "LIQUID" in a flash, but rather gradually softens to the point where it is malleable with common tools- and a standard wood-fueled fire is more than enough to get it there. Anyways, this increase in temperature leads to a decrease in said modulus, and eventually things reach the point where the load that they would normally be able to support at room temperature would deform them in their heated, weakened state and the beams would begin to enter plastic rather than elastic deformation, and eventually experience catastrophic failure. Of course, moving into thermochemistry for a bit to talk about heat transfer, objects don't immediately take on whatever the surrounding temperature of the environment is, and for certain metals with low thermal conductivity, it takes a while to heat up. So while the jet fuel was burning, the beams were heating up, and the beams would have to heat up for a while in order for the modulus to decrease to the point of collapse, which would account for the time difference between impact and collapse. Savvy?

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S You would put down the Emperor Qin. That's an awfully rosy picture of his works. Most of those people weren't particularly nice guys. I could have put down Newton instead, and then none of them would be nice guys. That still doesn't stop them being the most influential historical figures of all time, it just stops them being the nicest historical figures of all time. Fredrick Douglas and Mother Teresa and Rousseau and MLK or whoever might have been nice people with progressive ideals, but they didn't really have that much effect on the broad sweep of history like some of the not-so-nice people did.

Originally Posted By: Necris Omega Maybe a more international bent would help. Top 5 Historical Figures? That's easy. 1. Napoleon Bonaparte, created the European political map as it still largely stands today, and also the tensions that resulted in wars up to and even including WWII. 2. Muhammad, created Islam as a political and religious force that remains unchanged in core principles, unlike Christianity, which has been all over the place since its inception. 3. Qin Shi Huangdi, created China as it existed for thousands of years, finished the foundation of the longest-lasting and most advanced pre-Enlightenment civilization ever (yes even better than the Romans). 4. Robespierre, inventor of the modern revolution. Everyone from Lenin to Mao to Ataturk followed in his footsteps at some point in their career. 5. Sir Francis Bacon, main inventor of the Scientific Method. 'Nuff said.

Originally Posted By: Excalibur Ewww Jell-O shots...nothing like swallowing a burning gelatinous substance. It's a good way of adding sugar to crap vodka to make it palatable if you lack access to a charcoal filter. Did it in college all the time.

Originally Posted By: Earth Empires Originally Posted By: Slouching Towards Blosk —Alorael, who was terribly disappointed to discover that writing posts by editing in one letter at a time wouldn't send his post count skyrocketing. LMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Not that it isn't skyrocketing already. It's pretty difficult for something to skyrocket when it's already in low-earth orbit, EE.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity I would also go with the first version. I'd bet few professors actually read scientific papers while drunk or tired, if for no other reason than that being drunk or tired normally lowers your motivation to read scientific papers. There's nothing I love more than downing a dozen Jell-O shots and reading through dense research papers on arcane subdiciplines of biophysics. It's fun for the whole family!

Originally Posted By: Annhog It means you can use it to bomb different continents, I think. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible ICBM != IBM C We can still dream, though.

Originally Posted By: Flame Fiend But what about the no window thing? Those are shots of the bottom of the plane. I highly doubt cargo bays have many windows in any sort of plane, commercial airliner or secret military jet.

Originally Posted By: Lt. Sullust I suspect if this were ratings for the Doctor, you'd have gotten more responses. the dude in the dalek wheelchair was my favorite doctor.

Originally Posted By: Flame Fiend But what about the fact that it's gray, has no windows, and that the initial impact occurred before the actual plane hit? Two reasons: 1. Of course it's gray. Not only are commercial airlines largely steel grey when viewed from the bottom, that's a black and white photo, so of course it's going to be grey. 2. I rewatched the video, and a frame-by-frame look shows pretty clearly that the tower is impacted at the same time the nose of the plane would reach it. , it's fairly obvious that any misconception of the explosion occurring before the impact is just a result of the poor video. And as a final thought, why would aforementioned evil shadow government even bother to use a military plane and load it with a missile, which is obviously incredibly suspicious and incriminating, when a regular passenger plane would be just as effective?