Not a Journal

I never know how I feel about posting these types of blogs. It's the equivalent of someone posting anything on facebook and me completely ignoring it because who still posts things on facebook? Oh, the irony... This will be a "let's catch up with Jay" post as I usually do when a big change is coming. So if you care as little as you should, I won't be offended if you don't stick around to read. So I'm down to my last week in Thunder Bay (I hope) and wow, what a ...lack of a feeling I have about it. I'm kidding, I actually liked this place, more than I thought I would. It's been a crazy ride. I can't even remember much of the summer I spent here back in 2015, or much of the first year now that I think about it. It seems like so long ago, but two years went by quite quickly. I made some great friends and hopefully some good contacts for the future over the last two years. I wish I got to explore the city a bit more, but like a friend said rece...

So as you may know,  my last post  was a social experiment proposal. I can't even believe all the success and feedback this post had. Thank you all. ... I'm obviously kidding because not one comment was made about it. Ready for the catch? And I'm not making this up as I type because I want to make myself look good.... not that at all... I promise.... The post was not meant to be an experiment for you to carry out. It was meant to test you! That's right friends and audience, it was a test. You all failed, miserably. Kind of like I did on every thermodynamics test I took (that's a joke, I nailed that class... 64%). I learned a valuable lesson about this blog. Regardless of how many views I get per post, and regardless of all the pennies I make on ad revenue (seriously, like 2 cents so far), it really doesn't matter. I don't write this blog for views, or earning money. I'm not that great a writer. I write it so maybe that one person who reads it will...

I'd like to propose an experiment. As a member of society, I have an obligation to have at least a basic understanding of what is going on in the world right now. And even if I don't, I try to use common sense to be skeptical. But does everyone? Now I know in today's society, you can't just go walk up to a stranger and ask them a question because well, people suck nowadays, but maybe you can get to some people you know. And trust me, I realize the irony of asking the 10 people who read this thing to go out and do a social experiment, but I'm going to ask you anyway. So, what's the best way to achieve results? First of all, what's the experiment? I propose you tell someone a fictional news story, mentioning you "saw it on the news". I know, fake news and all. However, the catch is you tell them a recent, true news story first. I also realize this involves actually talking to another human being, in person...yuck... But I want to know how...

This was originally going to be solely a discussion on time travel. However, discussing the timeline is a rather good starting point before or while discussing time travel. I've always wanted to write about my thoughts on time and time travel. It is one of those obscure enough topics where anyone can theorize about the generalities of it. But are those theories based in any realm of realism? There are well-respected theorists like Stephen Hawking who have gone into great detail regarding time travel. There are a ton of TV shows and movies which go to great lengths to be as accurate as possible. In our current understanding of physics, time travel is mathematically allowed. But the reality is that we just don't know, yet. Perhaps there is another law of physics we have yet to discover which proves time travel is fundamentally not possible. But it's fun to think about regardless. Let's start simple. If I were to build a time machine right now, would I be able to use i...

So if you understood my lackluster title, this post is about stars. What are they? Where do the come from? How big are they? .... I was asking you... you.. you don't know? Well, I have bad news for you........... GOTYA! Why else do you come to this corner of the observable web? That joke probably went right over your head because it was completely unrelated to anything I may or may not mention later in this post which of course you haven't read yet. Okay, that's enough of that intro... Stars are, well, pretty simple actually. If you look at a periodic table, you know the one that's kind of a weird shape and has a bunch of letters and numbers on it and you probably have no idea what they are? Yeah, that table. Well, we're in luck. We really only need to look at the first two elements on it. Hydrogen and Helium. Now a star usually contains other stuff too, but for simplicity, we'll stick with the basics. Hydrogen is the 1st element on the periodic ...

Ladies and gentlemen! We are in a state of emergency. Okay, I'm overreacting. But still, I feel it is my duty to make this blog, even though it will likely never reach the people who this post is targeted to. Nonetheless, hopefully it's a little interesting for the regular readers, all 6 of you and the accompanying 40 bots and web crawlers I assume my audience includes. So I was made aware that it might not be common knowledge, or it is and this person just missed the 80 science classes I'm sure this was discussed in over the last 10 years of their education, that our solar system is NOT THE ONLY SOLAR SYSTEM OUT THERE. I CAN'T BELIEVE I HAD TO WRITE THAT. I ALSO FORGOT TO TAKE CAPS LOCK OFF and didn't want to retype any of that. Now I'm not trying to make fun of anyone, but let's go back to square one here. Next time you're outside at night, not you fake audience, just the real people, look up! Those twinkling white dots, those are stars! On a...

I wrote my highest viewed post a year ago.  Here it is if you missed it.  Look how helpful I am! That post was a discussion of the potential of solar power. We've made significant strides since then. Solar is now the fastest growing renewable energy production method in the world. Ignoring President Trump's public statements, solar has generated over 50,000 jobs in the US, Elon Musk - founder & CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, is investing a ton in solar with his Solar Roof initiative and PowerWall tech, and China is increasing their solar energy generation capacity by a great deal and abandoning coal (*cough* take notes, USA *cough*). That's pretty exciting if you ask me. In the post on solar from last year, I mentioned only one type of solar tech - where the solar panel acts as a concentrator of light to generate steam. Due to improvements in material science and electronics, there is another type of solar technology which is driving this upbringing of large-scale solar a...