The Bookwyrm

I had a story idea and asked people to make characters for it.

But I had the idea to turn it into an RP.

This is an interest gauge. If I made an RP out of the idea presented in my previous SU, would you join? Would it go well?

Who wants to help me come up with a character?

I've created a Sci-Fi universe detailing humanity as an interstellar species reliant on a strange ability held by a small part of the population known as Starshaping, which facilitates futuristic technology and FTL travel. It's inspired in part by Orson Scott Card's "Enderverse", in that certain worlds or sectors were colonized specifically by single cultures. So I have some planets that are basically uniformly one culture from old Earth, some that hold cultures that evolved over the centuries (this is about 700 years in the future (and I might need to adjust that number)), and some that are "melting pots" of various cultures, creating unique ways of life that are more in line with what you'd expect from a space opera.

I am having a tiny bit of trouble getting started with the story that I want to tell in this universe, but some inspiration from elsewhere prompted me to start another story in the same universe, but far earlier.

I want to tell a story about the colonization efforts to an ocean world called Namaka in the year 2276, as a way to flesh out the world and how it was in the earlier years.

But I need a character. Or a group of characters. A whole bunch of characters, actually.

So, does anyone want to make me a character I can write about for a little sci-fi story? Someone who's moving on, braving the frontier of space for a new home on a new planet? Right now in my head I have the planet Namaka being colonized mostly by native Pacific Islanders, but the character doesn't have to be of that ethnicity.

Just a fun little thing that would help me and be fun for the rest of you. I'm also not good at characters. But some of you are. So suggestions are helpful. And so are the characters you make.

Happy birthday!

Turns out you can make a pretty good bow out of PVC pipe and some paracord.

Courtesy of my Young Men's leaders, who actually know what they're doing.

Happy birthday!

So.

Today is my Shardiversary.

It has been one year since, after quite a while lurking, I decided to join this community. Little did I know that the choice would mark a turning point in my life.

As I slowly got involved in the activities on the Shard, I made friends. Connections. One of the first friends I made was The Wandering Wizard, who, though I didn't realize it at the time, lived in the same city as me. After some social deduction (and some off handed mentions of penguin...excrement...) I realized where he lived, and managed to meet up with him.

A month or two later I met Cellist and Ranryu, and we got them to join too. During this era a bunch of other Sharders, many that I knew in real life and even more that I didn't, joined, and I somehow became popular.

I fit in this community now. I have a place. I have friends that I can confide in, friends that know how to help me when I need help. Joining this site has given me friendships in real life and made them stronger, but it's also let me connect with so many amazing people, people who think like me, people who I'd been looking for for a long time.

My time here has helped me realize who I am, I think. I've been able to greater understand my interests and goals and values in the last year, and while there were a great number of factors in that, this site, and the people here, have been a huge part in it.

I'm glad all of you became Sanderfans and decided to come here at one point or another. Because you being here has been a huge blessing in my life.

Thank you all, and here's to many more years!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

...You might get some more hymn medley requests for your birthday present...

Happy birthday! Thanks for making witty comments on Shardcast and keeping all of us weirdos here in line!

So.

Yesterday was the State competition for the science fair run by the local Junior Academy of Sciences. Same thing as the Regional Competition, which I think I talked about. I had my poster and presented my research to a bunch of judges. The first few were really tough, they asked me hard questions. One listened politely, said I had good research, then questioned the validity and importance of the topic itself. The later judges were better.

From my school were five people at state; four seniors and me, a junior.

The awards ceremony took forever, but they had a bunch of cash prizes and scholarships from a bunch of sponsors, and I got a 250$ thingy from some organization that I know nothing about.

Then they announced the overall winners for State, the people who would go to Nationals.

And I was somehow one of them. Apparently my project impressed the judges enough for me to present my research in Denver, Colorado. There aren't any awards at Nationals; it's basically just a conference where science nerds get together and present their science. Which sounds fun. It's in February.

I am proud of this. I seem to be good at science. Which is nice, because I want to go into science as a career.

Also my ACT scores came back.

IT CAME!!!

IT'S SO BEAUTIFUL!!!

Happy Birthday!

Guys, I need books to read. I'm specifically looking for hard sci-fi space opera type stuff. 

But I'll take anything. Just put the sci-fi stuff at the top.

I just realized the address I had in Backerkit was wrong.

I should have realized this much sooner.

I sent in a help ticket. Hopefully them wizards at Dragonsteel can fix my silly problem.

And then, just maybe, I'll get my copy of Tress...

Happy Birthday!

You're the best Nameless we have here!

I just took the ACT. 

I think I did good.

BUT THAT'S IRRELEVANT!

I'm going to do a Fadran style post and rant about Hawking Radiation!

You may have heard of Hawking Radiation before. It's a theory devised by Stephen Hawking that illustrates how black holes could slowly evaporate over time. This is interesting because it means that instead of black holes eternally trapping everything they have inside their event horizons, they will slowly fade away, letting everything inside them escape.

But how does it work, you ask?

It has to do with quantum mechanics.

Before you groan and run away, I promise that I'll do my best to explain this simple. It's still really wacky. So maybe you'll still groan and run away. Ah well.

Let's talk about the Uncertainty Principle.

The Uncertainty Principle is the basis of all quantum mechanics. Everything else in quantum physics is essentially derived from this principle. You may have heard that in quantum physics, simply observing a particle causes it to do weird things. This is true, but not because of any weird interactions of your sentient consciousness with the mechanics of the universe (unfortunately). Let me ask you this: how do you see things?

Answer: Light.

In order to observe something, that something first has to interact with light. When we're on large scales, this is pretty simple; light bounces off the thing and into your eyes. But when we get down to really small particles, the rules change a little.

Let's say you have a particle travelling through space. It has both a position and a speed. Lets now say that you want to know how it's position. In order to do this, we need to take a unit of light - or a "quantum" of light - and bounce it off of the particle. The problem is, light comes in wavelengths. And, light can only interact with things that are larger than it's wavelengths. For example, Microwaves are quite literally too big to fit through the little mesh in the window of your microwave oven. But light at visible wavelengths is small enough to fit through. That's why you can watch your food cook without melting your face off.

So, in order for our light to interact with our particle so we can measure it's position, it needs to have a pretty small wavelength. And, the more precisely we want to measure the position, the smaller wavelength it needs to have.

And here's the problem.

Smaller wavelengths mean higher frequencies, and higher frequencies mean more energy. Quanta of light that have a high enough wavelength to interact with the particle are also going to have high amounts of energy. This means that when the light bounces off the particle so we can observe its position, it changes the momentum of the particle by simple energy transfer. The more precise you want the position measurement, the higher wavelength you need, and thus, the less precise the particle's momentum.

This is the uncertainty principle.

It also works vice versa - the more precise the measurement of momentum, the less precise the position becomes. This creates the reality that we can never truly know where a particle is and how fast it's going. There's a limit to how precisely you can know the properties of a particle. This means that, functionally, particles act more like ambiguous smears of probability than precise points. This allows them to behave as waves, and creates the strange nature of particles that forms the basis of quantum physics.

But wait! I hear your eager minds cry out. What does this have to do with black holes evaporating?

To which I say: Patience. I'm getting there.

The weird thing about the uncertainty principle is what happens when you apply it to empty space. According to certain understandings of quantum mechanics, namely the particle/wave duality, things that normally seem to be waves in our lives (light, electricity, even gravity) have hypothetical "virtual" particles that can be associated with them. Essentially "quanta" of any given force. This means that you could consider any wave of any medium to be made of quanta of the force that that wave is made of. 

Empty space is a field in which these waves can travel, but when there are no waves in it, the measure of the wave in that empty location should be zero. Here's the problem: zero is a precise number. And according to the uncertainty principle, you can't have a precise measurement of a particle, virtual or otherwise. In order to satisfy the uncertainty principle, you have to assume that there are constant tiny little fluctuations in the quantum state of empty space. It's not empty at all; it's constantly buzzing with a faint hum of activity. Like a pool of water that seems motionless until you peer very very very closely to see the tiny rippling of waves.

These tiny waves manifest as particles - oftentimes virtual - appearing two at a time in opposite pairs, traveling apart briefly, then coming back together and annihilating one another. Before you protest that this defies the whole "no creation of matter/energy" thing in thermodynamics, I'll illustrate that one of the particles is positive in mass and energy, while the other is negative in mass and energy at the same value. So the total number of mass/energy in the universe stays the same even before the particles annihilate one another.

But wait! I hear your eager minds cry out, yet again. What does this have to do with black holes evaporating?

To which I say: ...I'm seriously right about to answer that. Just KEEP READING.

Black holes are weird. They do weird things all the time anyway. But when you add the quantum fluctuations of empty space due to the uncertainty principle to a black hole, really weird things start happening.

Let's say that in the space right near a black hole's event horizon, two of these particles come into existence. One of them keeps travelling through the space outside of the event horizon, while the other ends up falling through the event horizon. This causes weird things to happen that I don't understand. Somehow, the gravity of the black hole changes a property of the infalling particle that makes both it and it's counterpart real particles instead of virtual ones. (I don't know how this works. I tried to read wikipedia articles about it and was very confused.) This changing of properties also makes it so that the particles are no longer obligated to annihilate one another, allowing them to travel along different paths. One falls into the black hole. The other continues out into space.

But wait! I hear you say in concern. Wouldn't the infalling particles make the black hole BIGGER? Why does it evaporate?

The answer comes in the weird changing of properties; the infalling particle becomes negative in mass as it falls inwards. If you take a very big number and add a very small negative number, the big number becomes a little smaller. Thus, the tiny negative particle actually shrinks the total mass of the black hole by a little bit. The positive particle continues into the universe, appearing as if it was emitted from the black hole, rather than from the space right above it.

Over trillions and trillions of years, this effect would slowly erode the black hole away, shrinking its mass particle by particle until the amount of mass is no longer large enough to justify a point of infinite density. The event horizon would vanish, and all the remaining mass in the singularity would explode forth in an intense flash of light rivaling the supernovas of the age of stars. The light would wash across the universe, briefly illuminating the black void that had once been filled with stars before they all died out eons ago.

So yeah.

That's Hawking Radiation.

So, I, um, may have spent the entire day reading all of Secret Project 2 between General Conference sessions while simultaneously neglecting a chemistry test review and a US history essay and ACT prep.

It was a good book, though.

I think Thaidakar mentioned it in an SU, but I want to draw everyone's attention to this article:

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a43438119/brandon-sanderson-profile/

It's interesting that this appeared so soon after the Wired article. It portrays Brandon Sanderson in a far more fair light, highlighting his strengths and the reason he's so popular. It was very refreshing after the whole Wired thing, and I suspect it might exist because of the Wired article, as a sort of fair response to even the playing field and help people realize there's more than one side to it all.

I'd say it's worth a read.

I've always loved stories where there's some conflict among gods. Great forces that create and destroy worlds. But, because of the laws and rules that govern them, they find themselves limited to act in meaningful capacities in certain crucial times. This is when they start almost a game of pawns, but also far more than that. Mortal beings without the full view of the scope of the conflict are guided along frustrating and seemingly impossible paths to grow and learn and achieve what a higher force predestined them to. We watch plans unfold from the eyes of the pieces, real humans with emotion and desires, but willing to set those aside - or perhaps embrace them? - in order to carry out something for the greater good. These omnipotent beings lay plans upon plans in conflicts that span eternities, but in the end it all comes down to people not that much different than us wielding the power to shape reality in order to win a conflict for good. Eternal conflicts hinging on actions that happen in the relative blink of an eye.

This is the basis for some of my favorite stories; the Cosmere, for instance, especially the original Mistborn trilogy and Stormlight. Some of my favorite video games also utilize this concept, such as The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and the first Xenoblade Chronicles. (Though in XC1 things go slightly differently than what I've summarized above...)

If I write a story ever, I'd like it to be along these lines. I already have a rough outline for a connected universe - my own Cosmere, if you will - that has a few elements of this plotline, but is also lacking in others. Namely, gods that would operate in these parameters, and laws that govern those gods that would require them to use mortals in order for their plans to work.

...I'm not sure why I typed all of this. I like ranting. And I suppose I want to start a discussion that may give me book ideas.

But yeah. Stories like this are cool.

Happy Birthday!

Today I presented my research project that I've been working on since September at a regional science fair.

They had us set up our posters, two to a table, in a sort of gymnasium or conference or something room in a building at the big college in my city. 

I had been kind of nervous, but not that nervous. I was fairly confident in my presentation, though I'd never actually written it down.

The first judges came for the first round, and my confidence waned just slightly as I presented. My presentation itself felt solid, and I felt I was able to answer their questions well. The first judge complimented my poster, saying it stood out and looked good. But both the first and second ones pointed out a lot of ways I could have improved the research, or at least continued it. They grilled me a little bit, which resulted in the minor confidence loss.

We had a small break, then onto round two. At this point I should mention that all of the students in the high school division (probably about 30-40 of them) were all juniors and seniors from my science focus program that I attend except for two of them. So I was around a bunch of fellow juniors, and in spaces where judges weren't around we discussed and tried to figure out who the judges were visiting the most. I had three more judges come listen to me present for a total of five. They each had good things to say, and only one of them asked as many questions as the first two had.

Afterwards they gave us lunch and some tours of the college campus. Then results.

They gave six awards in the high school division, though in no particular order. And I was one of them! It seemed as though I had impressed the judges. Five of the six winners were from my school (which makes sense), and I was the only junior amongst those five. The rest were seniors.

As we were cleaning up, one of the judges that had interviewed me came to congratulate me afterwards. She got a little quiet and said to me that some of the other judges had said things about my project along the lines of: "If I had been told this was a college sophomore or junior undergrad project at a conference, I would have believed it."

So yeah. I can apparently do science.

Hey guys!

I'm back!

I was in Houston, Texas for a week over spring break and was not faithful to my postings on the Shard. Hopefully I'll be more active now.

Let's see...you probably want an update...

Monday was driving. For 15 hours. In a van with five younger siblings. It was surprisingly tolerable.

Tuesday, we visited a local state park that had alligators. It was interesting to see them in the wild. There were also cool trees with hanging moss that made the place look like something out of a fantasy novel.

Wednesday, we went to the ocean. I've only been to the ocean...what, four times in my life now? It was neat. We saw some Portuguese Man-o-wars (Men-o-war?) washed up on the beach. The Gulf of Mexico is cold this time of year. It's salty. And isn't it nice that we live on a planet with water?

Thursday we went to a nearby island called Galveston island. There was a bunch of cool stuff there. We temporarily rented a sort of tandem-bike-car-thing that we all pedalled around together for about an hour. We visited some neat shops. And we rode a ferry, which was fun, and saw some dolphins.

Friday was my favorite, because we went to the Johnson Space Center there at Houston. I like space, and so I enjoyed this. We did a bunch of stuff, including visit the astronaut training facility there, see a Saturn V rocket laid out on it's side (never figured out whether that was a replica or not), looked at a Space Shuttle that never flew but was still built as if it could have, listened to an astronaut talk about being an astronaut (he'd visited the Mir space station, so that was interesting), saw some other historic things, touched a moon rock, and spent a lot of money. I have a NASA shirt now. It's a problem that I didn't have one until now.

Also on Friday we ate at a Korean barbecue restaurant, which was interesting because they would bring you the meats you ordered raw, and you got to cook them yourself on a grill that was in the middle of your table. It was very tasty.

Saturday was basically the same as Monday.

I also procrastinated a research paper the entire time. Luckily that's basically all done now, I just have to tweak a few things. I'm presenting my research at a science fair on Wednesday, so I hope that goes well.

And that's about it.

So yeah!

Okay, I thought we were done with the PFP madness, but now everyone switching to a cat.

Go to Wikipedia.

Click "Random Article."

Find the first little blue link in the article.

Click it.

Continue doing that for each new article.

Almost all of the time, you will end up on the article "Science."

Or perhaps the eternal loop between "Existence" and "Entity."

Guys...

There are planets out there. Like, a lot of them. Like, so many that our mind cannot begin to understand how many there are.

You could walk on them. Some have water. Some have air. You could feel their grass and soil beneath your feet and smell the scents of their flowers and feel their breezes on your face and feel and see the light of their suns raining down on you. You could feel the water that flows on their surface cool your hands and run down your face as it falls from the sky. You could marvel at the life that they harbor, so familiar and yet so alien and yet beautiful in a way you never knew was possible. You could look up at night and see the light that they catch from unimaginably distant stars and see the reflected light of their suns in the details of their moons. You could find the distant speck of space where the world you came from lived and marvel on how vast and how wonderful and how beautiful the universe is and how precious the worlds that dot it are.

They exist.

We can't reach them right now. Perhaps we never will.

But they exist.