Leave of Absence – Diablo III

I want to apologize if my article from last night seemed rushed.  I had a lot more ideas in mind when I started the article, but when I remembered about the midnight release of Diablo III, I rushed to publish the darn thing.  I knew that if I didn’t publish it last night, I wouldn’t bother looking at it again for at least two weeks.  Unfortunately, the Diablo III servers are still offline due to emergency maintenance.  So, I have some time to finish up my thoughts.

My post was NOT intended to silence atheists.  It’s important to stand up when any type of theism tries to legislate their morality on others.  I was strictly talking about a non-faith-based community of individuals who come together to help each other in their day to day lives.  It doesn’t seem like that kind of thing exists right now for atheists.

As for Diablo III, the servers were suppose to go online at 3am EDT. Unfortunately, virtually everyone was told that the servers were busy and to try again later.  I was already asleep, but that’s what I’ve been hearing all day.  I don’t know if the problems ever got better, because at 8:30am EDT, Blizzard took down the servers for “Emergency Maintenance”.  They were suppose to be back online by 4:30pm EDT, but now we are being told 6:30pm.  Who knows?!

Either way, we are setup and ready to go for when the servers come online.  My girlfriend is going to join us, which may just be the coolest thing in the entire world.  I even had an extra, unopened Logitech G500 mouse laying around for her to use. =)

Messy, but functional. (Sorry about crappy picture quality.)

My Christian Childhood

I had an awesome childhood; I was definitely spoiled compared to most other kids.  Not in the sense that I was given whatever I wanted, because that certainly wasn’t the case.  Everyone called my father frugal, but that’s just a nice way of saying he was cheap.  I was spoiled because I was lucky enough to be born into a loving, stable family.  My parents didn’t drink or do drugs.  I wasn’t ever abused emotionally or physically.  They spent time with me every single day and gave me all the attention in the world.  In addition to having an easy home life, I had two wonderful sets of grandparents.  Everywhere I went, people loved me and spent time with me.  I was living in a bubble.

My father was an Electronic Engineer who designed circuit boards for a living.  I’m not going to publish his actual salary, but I netted more income at the age of 24 than the highest paid year of his career.  Somehow, he still managed to send my sister and me to a Christian, private school.  I was genuinely happy, which shows that love and compassion go a lot further than money.

We were members of First Baptist Church of New Kensington while it was under the leadership of Pastor Clunas.  Unlike other atheists, I didn’t have a bad experience with my fellow Christians. Quite the opposite, actually.  I would never take back the time I spent in the church.  I remember having great fellowship with everyone and took a lot from the sermons.

It wasn’t until 7th grade that the bubble started to pop.  The people in our class started to act differently and I found myself able to fit in less and less.  I don’t hold this against Christianity, the actions and behavior of Christians during their adolescent years doesn’t represent the religion as a whole.  Besides, I was just as immature and annoying as any of my peers.

However, there was an adult who left a lasting, negative impression of Christianity on me. Mrs. Nadeau, an older woman who had started that year as an English teacher.  She was also wife to one of the school’s pastors.  She loved to tell us how important her role in society was because of her husband.  During one of her many self-absorbed stories, she told us about how pastors and their families go to a special, privileged place in heaven.  That kind of nonsense isn’t even in the Bible.  Fortunately, there’s a special place reserved for people like her here on Earth: the loony bin, the cook fringe, or whatever you want to call delusional people who refuse to accept reality.

[Read more...]

Blog Changes and Traffic Milestone

First, the good news: I just hit 20,000 hits on my blog. All of that traffic has been within the last 10 weeks, we didn’t go online until the very end of February. My goal is to hit 1,000,000 by the end of the year.

There’s been a drastic overhaul of the blog categories tonight. I write about so many things that there was soon going to be hundreds of categories. Some small adjustments may still be needed in the future.

I also have decided to split up the Self.post category. Previously, I was using it to post news related to my blog and also free writing. From now on, self.post articles will be specifically about the blog itself.

I renamed New York City – Day 1 to First Day in New York City. This is because I didn’t get time to update the blog each night, so there won’t be a Day 2, Day 3, etc. I plan on writing separate articles about 1). the astronomy convention, 2). things I did in NY, and 3). the journey back home.

I’m considering adding guest bloggers to write articles here. If you have similar interests and would like to write something published here, please leave a message in the comments below or shoot me an email. (My email is my first name @gtwy.net.)

First Day in New York City

Well, I’m in New York. I could be out having fun in town right now, but I decided to return to the hotel and write an article for fear of falling asleep on the MTA. Besides, I’ll have plenty of time after the Northeast Astronomy Forum tomorrow to explore the city.

I left the Greater Pittsburgh Area around 1pm this afternoon. My route took me north on PA-28 to Interstate 80. 28 is a four lane express way until you get to Kittanning. After that,  it’s a windy cow path country road. But I did get to make a stop at my favorite Sheetz, located at the I-80 junction in Bridgeville.

I jumped on I-80 East and drove for what felt like forever. There are way too many rest stops on that damn road. I consumed no less than six bottles of water on the drive, but I didn’t need to stop more than twice to use the facilities. Along certain parts of I-80, there’s a state funded rest stop every twenty minutes. If you need to pee every twenty minutes, you shouldn’t bother leaving your house without wearing depends.

As you can imagine, I was making great time. But right around 5pm, my trip came to a complete halt. Twenty-five miles of backed up traffic at a dead stop! It was right before you enter the Delaware Water Gap. I pulled out my smart phone and kept refreshing Google Maps until a traffic bulletin was posted. “Overturned tractor trailer between Exit 2 and Worthington State Park. Eastbound closed until further notice.”

Dammit! I had never been on this stretch of highway before and wasn’t sure if I should risk a detour. On one hand, I could get around the closure and get back onto I-80.  On the other, I could get lost and waste more time than if I just waited the closure out.  I started looking around Google Maps and found a state route that seemed to parallel I-80 named PA-611. I maneuvered my way off the highway and took my chances on 611. The first two on ramps to get back onto I-80 were still full of stopped traffic, so I continued on PA-611. When I got to the third on ramp, I-80 was empty. Finally! I was past the road block. By the time I got back onto I-80, it was nearly 6:30pm.

Shortly after, I reached I-287, which I followed until I got to my hotel. I didn’t start using GPS navigation until this point. Surprisingly, my GPS said I would arrive at my hotel by 7:30, which means I was 30 minutes ahead of schedule. I have no idea how I could have possibly been that far ahead of schedule after getting stuck in traffic for so long. I stopped at a Shell station across from the hotel and filled up my tank before checking in. Another surprise, I made it the entire way on a single tank of gas. My “miles till empty” screen still had 10 miles on it when I pulled in to the gas station.

There was a really strange and yet awesome car at the gas station. I took a picture of it. Then I realized that I was freezing! I was wearing flip flops, jeans and a t-shirt. When I left Pittsburgh, it was about 50 degrees and sunny, too warm to even wear a hoodie. When I got out of the car in New York, it was in the lower 40s and windy. I actually was shivering while I pumped my gas.

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Ramblings of an Almost Internet-Famous Guy

This is only my second Self.post, which are meta-posts about my own social media, blog, or even myself without intending to make a point or even much sense. I tend to write these when I have the urge to write, but nothing terribly interesting to write about. That last statement wasn’t entirely true, I have a folder stacked to the brim with wonderful blog ideas that I simply don’t feel like researching at the moment. Regardless of how personal or casual an article may appear, there’s a lot of research that goes into each of these suckers.

I put my life out there by way of social media because I love connecting with so many people. My perspectives and views have been broadened by countless conversations and debates with people from around the world. I met my girlfriend through social media, she is a real-life friend of one of my real-life friends. She was severely sunburned at a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game. I commented on her post about the burn, instructing her to immediately start taking aspirin as it helps prevent (or lessen) the symptoms of sunburn. I’ve been using this trick to avoid sunburn for years. I can’t explain to you why this works (but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.) When I followed up with her in a couple days, she was feeling much better and I asked her if she wanted to get coffee.

Instead of coffee, Jessica and I went to Nakama for sushi. I never cared much for sushi, but I had only tried it twice prior to our date. That night, I fell in love with two things: my girlfriend and sushi, but mostly sushi (just kidding!) She also taught me how to use chopsticks, something that I didn’t think I would ever be able to do. In hindsight, my inability to learn chopsticks was mostly laziness. I was trying to impress her and I forced myself to work through that laziness. Now, I can pretty much eat anything with chopsticks.

I don’t ever think I’ll have the following of someone like Philip Defranco, but I certainly wouldn’t complain if I did. I’ve had my fifteen minutes a couple times over, but I always seem to lose momentum before I can turn it into anything. The first time this happened was during the Half Life 2 source code leak. I started a submission-driven, detective style blog to help apprehend the hacker responsible for leaking the source code. Why? Because immediately after the leak, Valve had the community convinced that Half Life 2 would never ship. Teenagers everywhere were furious! Just imagine the reaction at a geriatric center if you suddenly announced that Wheel of Fortune was cancelled. Someone was going to pay!

Half Life 2 Source Code Resource Page [Read more...]

Astrophotography

I haven’t had a chance to write anything over the last few weeks because I’ve been sucked into yet another obsession: astrophotography. To those who are unfamiliar, this type of photography involves capturing images of celestial objects. Until a couple months ago, I didn’t even realize this hobby existed. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always appreciated images of other planets, the Milky Way, and distant galaxies, but I never gave much thought about who was taking the pictures. I guess I just assumed that they were all provided by various government space programs around the world.

On February 24, the crescent moon, Venus and Jupiter aligned in the night sky in the shape of a triangle. I found out about it through the emails that I get from SpaceWeather.com. I’m normally someone who unsubscribes from everything, but I highly recommend their free email subscription: emails are only once or twice per month, text is short and to the point, and I’ve never received spam. I went outside and peered at this beautiful display in the sky, but didn’t think anymore about it.

A couple days later, I started seeing lots of amateur photographs of the celestial triangle appearing on the internet. I was really impressed with some of them and at that moment, I “discovered” that anyone can take pictures of the sky! I know how absolutely silly this probably sounds; why didn’t I realize this before?

I have always had an interest in photography. My very first gallery is actually still online, hosted at DeviantArt. I haven’t used that site in years, so please accept my apologies for the crude language of my angsty teenage/young-adult self. I never owned expensive cameras or lenses. I never took any formal classes. It was just something I did because it was enjoyable. I have fallen away from it in the last couple years because life got crazy, but I spent those years enjoying the work and art of many others. Below are my four favorite shots from my old gallery.

[Read more...]

More Logic, Less Emotion

On Wednesday, I posted an article that clearly disproved the hoax about the Mayan calendar. I showed my evidence using basic multiplication and addition. Unlike some of my controversial articles about religion, I assumed this post would be a slam dunk. Among my friends and regular readers, it was.

The general public had other ideas about my post. Most people seemed to think that basic math is an opinion. Others just thought that the real explanation wasn’t as interesting as the lie. What I’ve been slowly learning is that people tend to hold onto some of the most irrational views.

As a social experiment, I searched for people who were spreading the rumor on Twitter and sent them my article along with the message, “saw your tweet about the Mayans, thought you’d find this to be interesting.” Here are just a few of the negative replies I received.

[Read more...]

Mayan Calendar and the Gregorian Leap Year

There has been a bogus forward circulating Facebook and Twitter about the Mayan Calendar. It claims that the Mayans were unaware of our Leap Year system, therefore the world should have already ended. The forward going around reads:

There have been about 514 Leap Years since Caesar created it in 45BC. Without the extra day every 4 years, today would be July 28, 2013.

Also, the Mayan calendar did not account for leap year…. so technically the world should have ended 7 months ago.

While I appreciate the ultimate goal of this forward, whoever wrote it is very misinformed. The current era (known to the Mayans as a baktun) does end on December 21, 2012. However, the world will not end; the calendar simply rolls over to the next baktun. It’s very similar to the Gregorian date of January 1, 2000.

And just like we celebrated the beginning of the new millennium, the Mayans would have celebrated the beginning of a new baktun. This was not something to fear.

Julius Caesar did modify the Roman calendar in 45BCE to include Leap Years. This new calendar was called the Julian calendar. As of the time of posting, today’s date on the Julian calendar is only February 23, 2012. This is because the Julian calendar adds a leap year every four years, meaning that each year is 365.25 days long.

In reality, one solar year is ~365.24219878 days. In order to correct Caesar’s mistake, it was changed in 1582 to a calendar year equal to 365.2425 days. This was done by skipping leap years that were divisible by 100 unless they are also divisible by 400. For instance, the following years would have been leap years under the Julian calendar, but are now skipped: 1500, 1700, 1800, 1900. Likewise, the following leap years were not skipped because they were also divisible by 400: 1600, 2000. This system, known as the Gregorian calendar, is what we use today.

The Mayan calendar is very inaccurate when calculating years. Not only did they not account for leap years, they were completely wrong about how many days were in a year. The Mayan “tun” is 360 days long, equivalent of 0.986 years.

However, the date of December 21, 2012, is not based on Mayan tuns. It is based on the total accumulation of days since the beginning of the Mayan calendar. It is commonly accepted that the first date on the Mayan calendar is August 11, 3113 BCE on the Gregorian calendar. Therefore, we must start on that date and count forward in time.

The Mayan baktun is the equivalent of 400 Mayan tuns (years). But remember, their years are only 360 days long. 400 x 360 = 144,000. Therefore, each Mayan baktun is a total of 144,000 days long.

As of the time of posting, the Mayan date is 12.19.19.3.11. The first number represents the baktun, the second number katuns (20 Mayan years), the third number is tuns (Mayan years), the fourth is uinals (20 day “weeks”), and the final number is the day. I know that I’m making some history nut cringe at my over simplification of the Mayan calendar; I’m using “years” and “weeks” to make things easy to understand.

On December 21, 2012, the first number in the Mayan calendar will change from 12 to 13, making it 13.0.0.0.0. The last time this happened was on September 18, 1618, when the current baktun started. As you have already imagined, the Mayan date on that day was 12.0.0.0.0. Obviously, the world didn’t end.

But how do we know that 13.0.0.0.0 will happen on December 21, 2012? First, we need to calculate the total amount of days required to reach the 13th baktun: 144,000 x 13 = 1,872,000 days.

If we start counting from August 11, 3113 BCE, we probably won’t get very far. I don’t know about you, but counting to almost 2 million isn’t something that I have time to do. Instead, use any date calculator to do the math. Sure enough, you’ll always arrive at the same date: December 21, 2012.

Update 4/26/2012: I would like to clarify a misconception about when the Mayan calendar began. Some date calculators convert everything before Oct 15, 1582 to the Julian calendar. This is because dates recorded in history during that time were recorded on the Julian system. I didn’t see any reason to convert it twice so I used August 11, 3113 BCE on the Gregorian calendar and counted forward. However, the Mayan calendar began September 6, 3114 BCE on the Julian calendar. If your calculator is using the Julian calendar for older dates, please keep this in mind. For more information, please read the original message that prompted this.

The Mayan Calendar

The Mayan Calendar The Aztec Sun Stone. Commonly, but incorrectly, shown to represent the Mayan calendar

Testimony of My Father

Five years ago this morning, my father committed suicide. My father, who was separated from my mother, was living at my grandparents’ house with my sister. Like this year, it was a Monday. With my grandparents out of town and my sister at school, my dad went into the garage and shot himself. I was downtown at a hearing for a traffic ticket. I actually have pictures from that day, I’m in a suit smiling and laughing about my court victory. It was the last time I’ll ever experience the childhood bliss of ignorance and happiness.

This picture was taken at 12:04PM, possibly the exact moment that my father pulled the trigger. These pictures have haunted my photo gallery for 5 years; I don’t know if I should feel guilty about them or hold onto these very last moments of childhood bliss. They always say that when things like this happen, you know. A sixth sense comes over us and we can feel it. I did not feel any sixth sense, my soul was not tugging on my heart, I was absolutely ignorant to the fact that five blocks away, my father had just taken his own life.

It wasn’t until Saturday, March 10, that my world shattered. My sister, for reasons I will not speculate, waited until Saturday to alert the family that dad was missing. I’ve never asked, but I can’t imagine what she went through over those 5 days or how she felt after learning he was in the garage. I was at Chili’s with my girlfriend of the time, when my mother called me in tears, asking me if I had seen or heard from dad.

I paid our tab and went to meet with the family at my grandparents’ house. It was just after lunch when most of the family arrived. My mother and sister were there. My aunt and her wife showed up shortly after. My uncle, a cop, was working a detail and asked us to keep him posted. We started off by calling all of the police departments, jails, and hospitals in Western Pennsylvania.

After getting nowhere, everyone started to get upset and restless. My aunt and I stopped at a couple local bars to ask about my dad, but nobody had any information. When we arrived back, the others had started cleaning up my grandparents’ house. Maybe it was out of anxiety, but we all helped, hoping that my dad would show up.

His white truck was still in the driveway. His wallet, cellphone and an empty pack of cigarettes lay on an end table in the family room. The signs were there, but none of us wanted to accept it. The police finally showed to take a missing person’s report. For whatever reason, the cop needed to walk around the property checking every room and closet before filing the report. Like all of us, he didn’t enter the garage and therefor never found my father.

I went to take the garbage out through the garage, but it was packed tight with two vehicles, an Astro Van and a 91 Lincoln Towncar. There was a strong smell, which my mind assumed was just garbage that had been sitting out all winter while my grandparents were away. My aunt, who was near the door way, must have realized what it was. She said something along the lines of, “Do you smell that?”

We circled around the house and opened the garage from the outside. My aunt opened the door to the van. I was directly behind her and immediately went into shock when I saw my dad. He had lain plastic down in the back of the van before doing it. He knew that my sister would never look there and saved her from having to find him. I ran inside as fast as I could and pushed my sister and girlfriend back inside of the house. I kept repeating some sentence that everything was going to be okay, but not to go outside. I was out of my mind.

I cannot clearly or accurately recall the details that followed these events for the next six months, let alone the rest of the night. I know that I called my uncle and told him what happened. He showed up about the same time that the local police and fire department showed up. They found a 9mm handgun under my dad. My grandparents on my mother’s side came to pick up my sister, my girlfriend and me because none of us were in any position to drive. In my emotional state, I lashed out at my grandfather and told them to let me walk the rest of the way home.

This single moment in time has forever changed my perspective on life. I don’t believe my dad wanted to put any of us through it. To really understand the situation, we have to go back… [Read more...]

U.S. Foreign Policy in Iran and the Middle East

It’s no secret that the U.S. has been pressuring the global community to increase sanctions on Iran. Sanctions are often precursor to war. We did it to Japan during World War II and they bombed Perl Harbor. You cannot put sanctions on a nation like Iran and expect them to just roll over.

For more than 60 years, we have meddled in the business of the middle-east for the sole purpose of guaranteeing a strong and cheap oil supply. Oil is the blood of free-market capitalism. Without oil, our entire way of life stops. But instead of spending that time building more refineries, opening oil reserves and inventing alternative energies, we’ve been setting up dictatorships and regimes in the middle-east.

[Read more...]

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