7 posts tagged “qotd”

What small act of kindness have you done in the last thirty days? 
Submitted by One Kind Act.  

Helped a girl carry her bike up the three flights of stairs at Berkeley BART. It was a heavy fucking bike (40lbs plus? It was filled with lead I guess), and she was struggling really really hard. She would take one step, pause, catch her breath, then take another. It felt nice to help her out :)

What time is your alarm clock set for?  Do you use the snooze button?

7:35am and very rarely.

Today, however, I used the snooze button not once but twice. That's right. I said it.

What kind of camera(s) do you own?

I have four cameras, five if you include the one on my cell phone.

My first camera that I purchased was the Nikon N80 which got me started in photography. Once the dSLRs became more affordable I had my sights set on that and eventually bought the Nikon D50 which was my kick start into digital photography.

On an impulse one weekend I picked up two old twin lens reflex cameras whose names and models escape me. I wanted to grab some medium format camera to play around with but haven't really used them nearly as much as I planned on.

What's some good advice you've given to a friend, but not followed yourself? 
Submitted by robbbiedobbbie.

"Get some sleep"

What does it mean to live well? 
Submitted by Dean.

Alright I can't resist this one.

I define 'living' as: Roof overhead, job, reliable transportation, and gym membership.

This is about 'living well', though. That's different. I am a total gadget nut, and I think living well is having a well rounded and balanced collection of up to date well maintained toys. I'm serious, don't laugh.

For example, an ideal-perfect-world gadget collection would have the following:

- Media center / music/vid files low-power box, a gaming / productivity box, and a laptop
- DJ Gear
- Photo equipment
- Projector (Mitsubishi HD100u, maybe?) + HT system + Gaming consoles
- Fancy portable gadgets (iPod, Phone, etc)

A geek that has the above is living well, by my book. I have a ways to go before I meet my own definition of living well, though. The day I complete that gadget collection will be a grand day indeed.

So there's my definition of living well.

Do you have a sixth sense?  How do you experience it?

I think the idea of telepathy or some 'traditional' sixth sense is possible.. but it would seem to require an extreme sensitivity to magnetic fields (to the point where being around anything electronic would probably be.. painful?). Even then, being sensitive enough to magnetic fields where you could distinguish various stages of brain activity from a distance would require a huge amount of 'processing' and seems difficult to imagine. I guess I have a huge skepticism for that kind of stuff.

I'd say the (my) sixth sense is the sense of balance. No way to live without it, and it's transparent to us until it goes out of whack.

Do you believe there is intelligent life on other planets?

Statistically it would seem extremely improbable that we're the only planet. Considering all things, a result of one just seems... highly unlikely. The Drake equation was thought up by brighter minds and can state this better than I ever could:

[revision 1.1] Nick clarified that my post in it's current form is a bit misleading regarding my belief of communicating life forms, so I've modified the equation to do what I desire.

[ Originally, Quoted from Wikipedia: Drake Equation, modified for my purposes ]

The Drake equation [v2] states that:

where:

N is the number of [planets] in our galaxy with which we might expect to be able to [have developed intelligent life]

R* is the rate of star formation in our galaxy

f_p is the fraction of those stars that have planets

n_e is average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets

f_l is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life

f_i is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life

[Set these to 1 to negate for our purposes:]

f_c is the fraction of the above that are willing and able to communicate

L is the expected lifetime of such a civilization for the period that it can communicate across interstellar space.

Granted this isn't some hard fast equation that solves the problem completely, but it's a great starting point. I like to think of it like this:

Assume we're the only intelligent race in our galaxy of 200 billion stars. We know of (literally) billions of galaxies. So even if we said that one in every 200 billion stars will yield one planet with life, we have billions of planets with life. If you want to say one in a million of those planets have intelligent life, we'd still have many planets with intelligent life.

The idea that we'd ever come in contact with these species is another question entirely. I, personally, feel it's a technological impossibility in our stage of development.