Wishfire

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Posts posted by Wishfire

  3. Posted

    With 600 years of sailing experience, the Chinese had already developed many tools useful to sailing over great distances - like magnetized compasses and watertight bulkhead compartments of a kind the West would have to wait hundreds of years for. Importantly, Zheng He's ships, known as junks, included on-board vegetable patches, growing soybeans in tubes all year to provide protein and vitamin C, guarding sailors against scurvy.

     

    Now that is definitely impressive. I give the ancient Chinese mariners a lot of credit for that.

     

    But I still think the Vikings were in the New World beofre anyone else. Except of course for Native Americans. I mean, wasn't Leif Erikson supposed to have been here back in the 11th century? And that occurence is entirely plausible even without long over-sea journeys since he was supposed to have gone by Iceland, Greenland, and Nova Scotia.

  6. Posted

    OMG me and my friends saw the exact same thing, at first i thought it was a helicopter, then a plane, but as it got closer it becae obvious it wasn't. This was at about 1 this morning..

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    Really? I saw it earlier than that. It was between 10 and 10:30 pm.

  7. Posted

    too bad you didn't have  video camera handy - we might have seen you on the news.

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    I do wish I had a video camera. Definitely. But I wouldn't want to be on the news. I'd probably be attributed to being one of those nut-jobs who always yell about how they were abducted during Nam and got probed be George Bush Jr and John Kerry wearing bikinis made of tofu...

     

    Ew, that's a disturbing image...

  8. Posted

    So I watched it for a moment, then called my girl outside to look at it.

     

    Sounds like that scene in the new War of the Worlds. :)

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    Don't say that! My life has reminding me of a lot of pop culture lately. The other day I get home from work, and just as I get onto the little walk up to the front door, my girl and our son come out the door. Reminded me of a 50's sitcom. At least it was a briefcase in my hand, but an old beat-up Korean War-era medics bad with the names of several dozen punk bands written on it. :)

  10. Posted

    I stepped outside to have a cigarette and, as I usually do I looked up into the sky. Toward the horizon I saw what I at first thought of as the running lights of an airplane. Except they were red. So I watched it for a moment, then called my girl outside to look at it. It wasn't going spectacularly fast, and it was going basically the same direction the whole time, basically from the north-east going toward the south-west, but it did swerve side to side now and then. Once it had passed overhead, it slowed to the point that it didn't seem to move very much. All of a sudden, three smaller red lights moved quickly away from it, each smaller light going in a different direction. After that, the large red light flickered and vanished.

     

    I can't think of anything else it could be. At first I thought maybe some sort of military exercise, but that doesn't explain why the large light would flicker and vanish.

     

    Hmm...

  13. Posted

    He he, I haven't seen this thread in a long time. :hug:

     

    So, about planet Miri... was there ever any good explanation (canon or non-canon) as to how a planet that was completely identical to Earth (except that it's natives basically eradicated themselves in the mid 20th century) exists somewhere else?

  15. Posted

    Hmm... I'll go with the one-per-band as well...

     

    In no particular order...

     

    Ring of Fire - Johnny Cash

    Return (Coming Home) - the Crüxshadows

    Mine Eyes - Switchblade Symphony

    One - Metallica

    Rebels of the Sacred Heart - Flogging Molly

    We Only Come Out at Night - Smashing Pumpkins

    Losing My Religion - R.E.M.

    Cemetary Gates - Pantera

    Army of Me - Björk

    Don't Fear the Reaper - Blue Öyster Cult

  16. Posted

    I'm almost done with Stone of Tears. Only 8 books in the series after that. :lol:

     

    Then I'm going to read the Jason Bourne trilogy (The Bourne Identity, The Bourn Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum). Then I'm going to read through Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles (and I'll have to throw in New Tales of the Vampire). And maybe after that I'll go through Tom Clancy's mainstream novels (The Hunt for Red October, The Sum of All Fears, etc... none of the series) again.

  21. Posted

    It seems to me that someone travelling back in time could not alter the past because the past would already contain the person travelling back in time and doing whatever he does. So basically, even if he's about to go back in time, history has already recorded that he's done whatever he will do once he goes back in time. I know, that sounds kinda like a paradox itself, but it really isn't.

     

    The only way a paradox could happen is if (for instance) I went back in time and murdered my mother, preventing my own birth. Which would mean that I would never be born, therefore I'd never go back in time to prevent my birth, which would result in my birth still occuring. But if the theory if seperate time-lines is true, then that would mean that, rather than a paradox, there would be a resulting two time-lines, one in which my future self exists in order to prevent my younger self from being born (therefore the original me never existing), and a time-line in which the original me exists, grows, and develops, and then disappears from that time-line when I went back (and hence entered the other time-line).

     

    Kinda weird, no?

  24. Posted

    I don't usually eat out, I'd rather cook something good at home. If I eat out, it's usually fast food, and in that case I eat at Jack in the Box. There's only one restaurant that I'd really like to go to again, it's called Tweet Balzano's (or "Tweet's" for short). It's an Italian/seafood restaurant in Bristol, Rhode Island. Problem is, I live in southern California. :lol: I used to eat ther all the time when I was a kid, my grandparent took me there a lot. I miss that place.