xenexian

Yes, I would. When you. have the time. It sounds fascinating and possibly practical.

I wish I had seen this thread earlier. The true definition of sound, as we know it, is minute fluctuations of air pressure producing what is called "Compression" and "Rarefaction". An object, voice, or instrument causes changes in air pressure that ours ears pick up and transmutes or changes into electrical pulses to the brain via the ear drum and inner ear. Sound travels by compressing the air molecules and then releases them when the energy of the sound wave passes. Think of a slinky stretched out horizontally. If you take one end and give it a push, you'll see that little wave travel down the length of the slinky. The coils compress as the energy travels down the length and then returns to it's original position once the wave has passed. Sound in air or water works this way. In space, there is really no medium for sound to travel through, there is not enough dense material for the waves to travel through. Air has mass and therefore can transmit energy. Space just doesn't have enough mass to be able to transmit a sound wave that our ears can hear. Plus we can only hear sounds that fall into the rage of 20Hz on the low end and 20,000 Hz on the high end. Our sensitivity though falls primarily between 400 Hz and 7,500 Hz. A very narrow range. Everything else above or below these numbers our ears pick up as harmonics of those frequencies. We sense them more than really hear them. SPL or sound pressure level, determines how loud we perceive that sound to be. Expose yourself to enough high SPL's and your hearing will begin to diminish. Now in space, there are energy waves that are way above our level of hearing and most likely produce frequencies that we just can't pick up and depending on what sort of energy wave it is, might or might not produce a sound if it meets a barrier such as the side of a space capsule or such. As far as we know, gamma, x-rays and such produce no discernible sound that we can detect but it just may be that we haven't yet developed the instruments sensitive enough to actually measure and transmute those energy waves into something our brains can understand. It would fall into the realm of psycho-acoustics or how our brains interpret sound. To understand psycho-acoustics more, here's a fun experiment I used to give my students when I was teaching. Stand in front of a normal set of stereo speakers set at a minimum of 6 feet apart, enough to produce a proper stereo image. Stand in a position that places you at equal distance between the speakers. Now blindfold yourself and have someone either play a piece of music or better yet a sine wave or steady tone out of just one speaker. Without moving your head, keeping it facing forward to the speakers, point to where the sound is coming from as you hear it. Now have that person slowly pan that sound towards the other speaker all the while continuing to point to where you believe the sound is coming from. If you set this up correctly, your finger should follow the sound from one speaker to the other. That left and right spectrum is produced by the changes in SPL between the two speakers and if you send equal levels to both speakers, your finger should be pointing to a space directly between the two speakers where there is no sound source. This is where your brain is telling you where the sound is coming from but there is nothing there. I got a little off track here but it helps to understand the rudiments of how sound actually works.

I believe carbon dating only works to a certain point, something like 6,000 years.

 

Why would carbon dating work to only 6000 years? Personally, there are more things in heaven and earth that we have no clue about. If there is any destiny for humankind, IMO, it's that we need to try and know everything there is to know.

I've watched every episode so far and the only complaint I've got, is that these guys don't spend enough time in any location to get a true reading on the phenomenon. Why do they think that ghosts, or spirits if you prefer, will just do something on cue simply because they are there? In my own studioes of paranormal phenomenon, there is no set time or trigger that will make events happen. Sometime you need to spend a week or more at a location to get a real feel for what is happening. Their equipment is top notch but I'm a little lost as to what is they're trying to prove or uncover. There seems to be an underlying reason for what they are doing but have been very reluctant to reveal what that is.

I've seen this topic come up before and I tried to find a post I had written some time ago concerning this but it seems to have been lost. I don't think Trelane was a Q at all. It seemed to me he was more Organian. Remember them? They're the ones that stopped the Klingons and Starfleet from going to war over their home planet and forced both sides to accept a peace treaty heretofore known as the Organian Peace Treaty. If you remember at the end of the episode, the Organians revealed themselves to be beings of pure energy and thought and were bright blobs of light, like Trelane's parents. I bring this up because even though he had powers that were very Q like, he was also very limited in his ability to use them, although being able to move and keep an entire planet in front of a starship doesn't seem very limited. The only views and knowledge he had of Earth was through some sort of telescope that saw the earth as it was some 900 years earlier due to the speed of light. A young Q, as we've seen on Voyager, has powers and abilities way beyond what Trelane could accomplish. Again this seems more in the lines of the Organians or even possibly the aliens from Charlie X. There were numerous beings that had some Q like powers but not all of them are Q. I believe that Trelane was an adolescent Organian instead. Even Trelane's parents displayed more manners and courtesy than a Q always seemed to display. Honestly, would a Q apologize for what one of their kind may have done? I don't think so. Organians, on the other hand, were far more polite and only seemed to want to be left alone for the most part. It all just doesn't add up to Trelane being a Q.

Okay, this is kind of fun. My ship would be named the "Free Bee", and it would have bumblebee stripes on the secondary hull.

thank you, Xenexian. and FOr the record, I have taken it as my personal mission to convert as many Bears fans to Packerdom as possible. and I have succedded a couple times, too.

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How did you do that? I have never met a Bears fan that didn't despise the Packers. Did you get them drunk and have them sign an affidavit?

The original idea of daylight savings time comes from when we were all more agricultural oriented. The idea was to give farmers that extra hour of daylight to continue working in the fields longer and produce more. An idea that is now now pretty outmoded but now so ingrained in the U.S. that trying to do away with it would meet with extreme resistance. Alot of people like the idea of the sun still being up or even fairly bright at 9:00 pm. My problem with it is that somehow the starting and end times of DST used to be the last weekend in April and the first weekend in October. I somehow missed the memo that changed the weekends. I even remember back in 1974 when Congress authorized DST to begin in March of that year because of the oil shortage and embargoes. Going to school when the sun still wasn't going to rise for another two hours really bother me and alot of parents complained and protested because elementary school kids had to stand and wait for their bus in complete darkness. Congress rescinded that idea before the summer was out because of the complaints. I personally like it but it really wouldn't bother me if it was eventually abolished. I would prefer though, to return to the original start and end weekends. Right now, the last weekend in October is just too late. I hate getting up in the dark. I've always believed that mankind was not meant to rise before the sun.

. In adults it has a higher fatality rate than children. One of the reasons I'm concerned about such an occurence is the fact that I have never had chicken pox. I'm 23, and if I was to contract it now, it would probably kill me.

I've been there. When I was growing up I had every childhood sickness that you could get with the exception of chicken pox. It just didn't sweep my neighborhood. In 1992, my then 5 year old daughter brought it home from daycare and it never occurred to me that I was suseptible. Ten days later the pox broke out. On my 35th birthday, I was rushed to by ambulance and admitted to the hospital and immediately put into intensive care and was completely isolated from everyone else in the wing because the chicken pox was still contagious. The pox almost killed me. The weekend before being admitted, I had a temperature well over 105 degrees and was completely incoherent about my surroundings or what was happening to me. The pox opened me up for a staph infection due to the weeping of the pox and attacked my saliva glands in my neck and face. I looked like someone took a football, cut it down the middle lengthwise and plastered it to my face. I had a traceotomy (?) tray next to my bed because the doctors were fearful that the swelling would close off my windpipe and I would suffocate to death. For five days, I'm told, I was fed the strongest anti-biotic available at the time, directly into my veins. The doctors I had, had never seen anything like me at all and I've no doubt that I may be written up in a medical journal somewhere. After a whole week of being fed nothing but the strongest drugs they could give me without killing me, the disease was finally beaten and I was allowed to finally go home but it still took another six months before I was declared cured. It was the scariest moment of my entire life. I still don't have a clear recollection of those two weeks, it was almost dreamlike in a sense. Because of this, I'm all for the developement of a chicken pox vacine. The scariest part of this for anyone is the fact that if you get infected, the disease has an incubation period of about a week to ten days so if you get exposed and you've never had it, you don't know you're going to get sick until it breaks and by then, you could already be doomed. To anyone who never caught the disease, that thought alone should cause you to shake in your boots.

Sorry Ktrek, but the statistics don't really show the whole story. The Packers were winning championships long before the Cowboys even existed and some of the division championships that you listed from the thirties were actually league championships. The champions were determined by the overall season record and football playoffs really didn't even begin until the late thirties, I believe. You also seemed to have neglected the fact that the Pack also went to SB 32 where, unfortunately, they were beaten by the Broncos. Your list of Championships from the 60's also seems to neglect the 1965 season when the Packers beat the Browns to win it all. That was the first of three in a row, 1965, 66, and 67, the Packers are the only team to ever have accomplished this twice. No other team even comes close. Super bowls didn't even exist until that first year of the agreement to merge the AFL and NFL. Too many fans think that football started in January of 67, the year of SB I. By that time the Pack had already won 8 championships. Division championships are great today because they determine the seeding for the playoffs but we all know it's the overall winner that really matters. With all of that taken into consideration, the Packers are still the best with 12 championships compared to the Cowboys five. And if you look at how many time the Pack actually played for the championship, they have on record only two losses in the big game in their entire history. That record would be 12 wins and only two losses. The Cowboys have lost the big one almost as many times as they've won it and the Packers were responsible for two of them. Now if you're talking about overall wins and losses, you might have something there but did you really count all the Pack's games going back to 1920? The Packers were winning back then as well and you have to take that into account as much as baseball fans count the Yankee's championships from the first 50 years of the 20th century. Just because we have no recollection of those times doesn't mean they didn't count. No, for overall NFL championships and the title of the NFL's greatest team, there's only one and that's the Green Bay Packers.

Way to go, Krissy. Farve is still the most dangerous quarteback in the league. My team is also the World Famous Green Bay Packers. You're just not born in Wisconsin without bleeding green and gold. Watch out Eagles, sunday could very well be payback time. The Pack is the hottest team in the league right now and they don't fear cold weather and there's alot of motivation there. Packer fans are everywhere.

I grew up in Wisconsin and the man's philosophy and teachings are almost required reading there. His teams were the epitomie of sacrifice and team play. Had it not been for the Detroit Lions in 1962, the Packers would have been the first team to go an entire season undefeated and win the championship and not Miami. And yes VBG, the Eagles did give him his only post season loss but it just made him more determined to never lose again. Hence the five championships in seven years and three in a row, a streak that no team today can touch. And it could have been even more had the playoff system that we have today existed back then. The Packers and tv grew up at the same time and football has never been the same. Even today when pro football coaches are mentioned, the name Lombardi always comes up first. I was lucky enough to have been a child during his tenure and watched the games with my father. He admired Vince so much it just about broke his heart when he passed away in 1970. I was 13 then and I remember my entire school practically shutting down when the news came. He really is a saint in Green Bay and the entire state and no other teams even comes remotely close when it comes to fan support. The fact that there is no one owner has alot to do with that.

I'm actually both. An artist and a writer. I don't use paints for the pictures I create but use sound instead. My pallette is my mixing board and audio computer. My colors are voices, sound effects, and music tracks. My brushes are my mics and speakers. Using all of these I can create soundscapes and pictures that video and the camera could never touch. I'm also a writer. I write scripts and commercial spots and love to write radio drama when I have the chance. I also write the occassional technical piece for other audio engineers. Like an artist that uses canvas and paints, my sound pictures are limited only by my imaginataion and what I can make you think you're hearing. With a picture or video, your input in limited by what the creator of the picture wants you to see. But with sound the hum of a refridgerator becomes the hum of starship engines. The shaking of a piece of cloth becomes the flapping of wings. The sound of rain falling could also be the sound of bacon frying. I can make you see things in your minds eye that can be the stuff of dreams using nothing but the sounds of household appliances. So I consider myself an artist that dabbles in writing as well.

Unfortunately, I happen to live in the same city where PETA has it's headquarters and have even worked on a few audio projects for them. They are actually very nice people, quite commited to their cause but horribly misguided. This is something they always do when their PR section notices that they haven't been in the news lately. Do they honestly believe that they are going to change the habits of customs of different cultures that depend on the sea for their liveihood and life? No, and they know this. This is just another attempt at getting people to be more aware of their cause and hoping that out of maybe 100 people, they can change the eating habits of maybe 1 or 2. This is considered a great victory for them. Remember, these are the poeple that also wanted everyone to stop going to Mcdonalds by handing out faux happy meals that had pictures of a blood covered Ronald McDonald holding a butchers knife to children. Or how about the time they campaigned college campuses and high schools to stop serving and drinking milk and switch to beer instead. (No Joke.) Or my personal favorite, petitioning my Green Bay Packers to change their name to the Pickers or six packers because they thought the name Packers was too reminescient of the meat packing industry and therefore promoted suffering and death. Granted the name Packers was given because the first team sponsor was the Indian Meat Packing company, but the name Packers was chosen because the company paid for the first uniforms. I've seen worse names on the backs of little league uniforms. If these people had been around at the dawn of civilization, we'd all still be living in caves, if we haven't frozen to death because how warm can leaves keep you, and eating nothing but bushes. You'll see this type of stuff everytime they haven't made the headlines for a couple of months. Let them spout and then go order a burger or bucket of chicken.

If there is any one area that as a species we are most vulnerable, it's biological. It's already been said that if there is any one thing that can threaten the continued dominance of humankind on this planet, it is the virus or any biological agent, that we have no natural defense for. If a virus mutates or is caused to mutate by artificial means, i.e. biological warfare agents, it could cause the human race to fall. It doesn't even have to affect humans. A biological agent could be introduced to the food chain, beginning a cascade failure of every living thing on the planet. As the lower stratas of the chain begin to crumble and break apart, those higher up on the chain will fall as easily as a building that loses it's foundational support. As humans, we are actually living on the knife's edge when it comes to attacking and rejecting any foreign element introduced into our immune system. All it takes is one microscopic bug that our bodys are totally unfamiliar with to begin the downfall of mankind. And it's not the first time we have faced this. History has already shown that the first colonists brought the smallpox bacteria to this continent which wiped out numerous tribes who had no defense against this new disease. The flu pandemic of 1918, which swept the world, accounted for over 11 million deaths. With our packed population centers of today, any new disease introduced would be deadly and quick and most likely, unstoppable. The stuff of science fiction movies such as "28 Days Later", or "12 monkeys", or even that classic "Andromeda Strain", could be much closer to reality than we all care to think. This nightmare could become reality in a split second.

There was a bit more to it than that. The Bartender character, I can't remember his name at the moment but I remember he also played D-Day in "Animal House", Bruce something, knew who Sam was and where he was from. It was never implied that he was God but it sure seemed odd that he knew just about everything Sam had gone through, and this was almost forty years before he made his first leap. Not bad for a 1950's bartender. There was definetely some devine intervention going on. Sam leaps into the coal mining town bar with all his personal possessions from the future such as a hologram drivers license and a wallet with velcro. Objects that he had not taken with him when he did his first leap. Sam saves Al marraige, as VGB stated above but never returns back to his time. Where he went was never revealed but a sabatical in mentioned in the episode, so the viewer is left to make his own conclusions. I still havae the last two episodes on tape that I recorded the night they aired and they are still prize possessions of mine in my sci-fi collection. The only fear I have is who is producing the movie and where will it pick up. If the last attempts at taking a TV show and making a movie version is any indication of the direction for Quantum Leap, We'll all be very dissapoionted. We'll see what developes as the premiere date moves closer but at this point I'm not holding my breath.

This area is used as a pawn when it comes to teams moving. They use us to get better deals in other cities.

I agree with you. But I would have to admit that this area, Hampton Roads, is just not major league material for any sport. There are too many fiefdoms to contend with and the media does one of the poorest jobs I've ever seen when it comes to sports reporting here, to make this attractive to any team. Hampton roads, in spite of being the largest metropolitan area in Virginia, will always be minor league when it comes to sports.

Very interesting. I finally had the time to click the above link and check out the article. Now being a Sherlockian, I did have to read it with a bit of tongue in cheek but it was no worse that some of the latter pastiches of Holmes that have been written in the past 25 years, such a Holmes vs Dracula, or Holmes and Freud and Holmes actually being Jack the Ripper. Each has their points that make it very plausible, just as the above link will take you to a very good argument for Holmes being a Vulcan. But after reading the article and also realizing that Nicholas Meyer was the director and also a Sherlockian in his own right, if any inference is to be made from Spock's quote, I would have to say that somewhere in his lineage, such that it is, Doyle was a distant relative of Spock, and Meyer just wanted to use the laws of deductive reasoning in explaining how Spock could have surmised that a cloaked ship fired the shot. What better way to explain the situation then to bring the master of deductive reasoning into the picture. Meyer certainly knew the quote and inserted it into the dialogue and used the phrase, "ancestor", to explain how Spock could know about the phrase. In doing so, he also opened a can a worms by making the connection between the two characters. This will never be resolved, of course, but it is certainly fun to think about.

I think Janeway took the attitude of protective mother when it came to Seven. Yeah, she may have been somewhat hypocritical but the position she took was the same as a mother with a child, which in retrospec, Seven was when it came to dealing with the fact she was a human. Seven didn't really know what being a human all entails. How many of us have screamed at our own parents for not letting us do what we though we wanted to do, like jumping off a bridge because all our friends were doing it? There were just some decisions that Janeway made with Seven because Seven just didn't really know any better yet. Janeway was going to protect Seven from herself if she had to, just like a mother, and wasn't going to let her go off and rejoin the collective just because she wanted to. Janeway was determined to keep her as a human and all of Seven's wailing wasn't going to change that. Really, don't you think that you saw a bit of your own mother in Janeway in how she treated Seven?

I know what you're going through. Losing any team to another market hurts no matter if you follow the team or not. I had the unfortunate experience of watching the Braves leave Milwaukee and there are still some people there who won't ever forgive Bill Bartholomay for lying to the people of Milwaukee about how the Braves weren't going to leave after his group bought them. Now Milwaukee's second team is in the process of finalizing their sale to new group and rest assured, and this is just my opinion, but I think in about six to seven years, the Brewers will be leaving as well. When that happens, Milwaukee will never, ever get another baseball team. When that happens, listen for the wailing. As in all cases like this the cliche' is very true. You just never know what you have until it's gone. Support your team, even if they're bad, and maybe they won't go away. In Montreal, I'm sure if more fans had showed up, there might never had been a discussion of leaving. Fans need to take some of the blame, after all it is a business. And even though the product on the field may not be the best, if fans ignore it or protest their disgust of having a lousy team by not showing up, when you wake up some morning and find that the team is no longer there, you have to look in the mirror and ask, would more support have made a difference. And I do agree, if the strike of 94 had never happened and the Expos had gone on to win the series, a very real possibility, this whole circumstance probably would never have happened. You have my sympathy.

I was there for the start of it all, like Klingonmike. Nine years old in 1966. I was hooked as soon as the first scene of transporting to the planet was shown. What a great Idea, I thought at the time, why land the ship when you could transport yourself molecularly down. I never stopped watching since.

Well, congratualtions, I suppose. But to be honest, didn't England exist before the Normans?

 

I probably should have been more clear. Yes, England did exist before the Norman conquests, as pointed out in a subsequent post. The 1066 date, the Norman invasion, is pretty much the accepted date of the beginnings of the rise of English supremacy and the beginnings of the unification of England itself. Although history has shown that to be a centuries long process. The anniversary is much along the same lines as Americans accepting the date of July 4th as the beginnings of the United States even though we all know that America existed long before that date and the beginnings of the American system of self governance was established back as far as the late 17th century when colonies, such as Virginia, established the House of Burgesses as one of the first forms of a democratic congress. In any case, the Norman invasion of 1066 is pretty much the accepted date of the beginnings of England rise to becoming a world power.

Absolutely love the Avengers. Back in the late sixties, it was run on ABC on monday nights at 10:00 eastern. I lived in the central time zone growing up so I was able to watch it then. This was all pre-monday night football. I had, and in some ways still do, a crush on Diana Rigg back then. One of the most beautiful women on tv at the time. Now, it's friday nights on BBC America. Yeah, baby. And then The Prisoner. It doesn't get any better.

I would have posted this yesterday, since that was the actual anniversary, but I was a little too busy. 938 years ago yesterday, England became Norman. The Norman Invasion of 1066, which was won, by the way, because of a small innovation in the way calvery men rode horses. The invention of the stirrup. This is not to say that the invasion would have failed without it but it was a huge step forward in warfare technology at the time and gave the Norman horsemen a distinct advantage over their opponents. Up until that time, men rode horses without any leg support. To anyone who does ride horses, I'm sure you can see the advantage of having stirrups when riding to not having them. Balance is decidedly enhanced which is extremely usefull when swinging a sword. So Happy Birthday England. This was the day you became the country we all know today.

I am so surprised that no one has commented on this yet. I practically grew up on this guy's films. I loved being scared as a kid, I mean being drawn to the types of movies and books that would send a shiver down your spine. I think I"ve seen just about every Vincent Price movie that he put out and it was during the sixties in my hometown, that the locally owned movie theaters would run kids matinees on the weekend when they would run his movies. "House on Haunted Hill", really spooked me as a kid, especially when that skeleton emerged from the vat of acid in the basement. I think he was really a more successful, Ed Wood twin than a low budget Hitchcock. I don't believe Castle ever really believed that he could compete against the big studios of his time and had to really rely on sensationalism and showmanship for his movies to make money. Although he did help Vincent Price prolong his career and make him an icon of things scary and dark. He created a sort of following of devoted fans who really just wanted to be entertained without alot of bluster or, like me, wanted to be scared enough to have to sleep with the lights on and the closet door closed for a few days. My computer isn't allowing me to see the other examples that you have here but I seem to remember such films as, "The Tingler", "The Raven", the original "13 Ghosts" and all the Edgar Allen Poe adaptions as having his hand in producing or directing, although I could be wrong about the Poe movies. For me, he has given me some great memories of my pre-teen years with my neighborhood friends of going to the movies so we could be scared. He has his place but never really playing in the big leagues of movie making. But I'm sure he still laughed all the way to the bank.