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PaperBoy

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  1. PaperBoy
    The Sun provides us with a lot of things, most significantly life. However, without one of the special properties of our planet, it would quickly destroy us. This is because the Sun emits “solar wind.” Of course, there’s no atmosphere in space, rather, this term defines charged particles moving at supersonic speeds out of the Sun towards Earth. So, how does Earth protect us from this onslaught?
     
    Well, it actually has a dipole magnetic field surrounding it. This means it acts like a double sided magnet with a North and South pole. This field only provides 25-65 uT, but because most solar wind is comprised of beta or alpha particles and neutrons, it’s more than enough to keep us safe. How is it made? Well, the most common theory is the Dynamo Theory. This belief states that celestial bodies emit magnetic fields due to convection currents in the core of the object, spinning electrically conductive fluids in the mantle for long periods of time. Scientists have even linked plate tectonic movements to the reversing of Earth’s magnetic field, which happens every several 100,000 years or so. These poles similarly account for the usability of compasses.
     
    The magnetosphere - where the field does its work - exists for several kilometers outside the atmosphere, and protects it as well from harmful particles. Thank God too! Our ozone can’t take much more!
  2. PaperBoy

    Something Different

    By PaperBoy,

    Once somebody asked me what I felt was more important: art or science. At the time I instinctively replied science, but upon further inspection I think that might have been a bias.
    I know a lot of people who don't want anything to do with science, and would much rather spend time expressing themselves in new and interesting ways. There's nothing wrong with either I suppose, but now that I'm getting older it might be good that I make a judgement call.
    I certainly still believe in stimulating progress as much as possible. But then again, who's to say that art isn't progress. Maybe it's a progress of the mind, the practice of developing new ideas and the cultivation of outside the box thinking. I think we can all agree, no matter who you are, that you need to be inventive to create progress. Isn't that the whole point?
    So then which is more important, cultural or mathematical progress? If you had to choose to keep one and destroy the other, which would you pick?
    I think that for me, the answer is still science. Of course we need free thinkers and inventors in order to really get anywhere in science, but if we focus on free thinking without getting results then what's the point? I don't think moral growth or maturity really mean much if you're not going anywhere anyway. I mean, what's the point of pondering what it means to be human if we'll never go out into the universe and find something that challenges that belief? Maybe I'm still locked into my logical thinking pattern, but I feel like there's a pretty good argument for seeking results over better ways to get results. Then again that goes against all the Disney movies I watched as a kid...
    Tell me what you think if you care, I'd love to get another perspective on why either art or science is necessary to human development.
  3. PaperBoy
    Lots of people have heard of the word "supernova." It's gained a lot of popularity because of its incredible power. It's not surprising, after all, supernovae are the most powerful event in existence believe it or not. They're incredibly rare as well, only three have been observed in the Milky Way in the past thousand years, and that's a lot of space to blow up in.
    You probably already know that a supernova is the death of a star. However, there are two ways this happens. In a binary star system, if a white dwarf begins to suck matter from its neighbor, then it will eventually gain too much mass to contain itself with gravity and will explode. The more commonly known tactic is when a massive star begins to run out of fuel for fusion. Its mass begins to fall into its core, which then collapses in upon itself and explodes. During these eruptions, supernovae can appear anywhere from a dim light in the sky, to a supposedly new star, to a bright light that outshines its entire galaxy to us.
    Supernovae are incredibly important to the formation of the universe as well. All elements heavier than iron had to have been created in a supernova. Not only that, if you believe in the Big Band Theory, that itself was simply a massive supernova, if you'll pardon the repetition. They play a key role in sending various elements across the universe for solar system creation. Supernovae are even part of the reason we know the universe is expanding, and constantly provide evidence with which to study the Big Bang Theory.
    I myself think supernovae are one of the coolest events in the known universe. My dream is to someday meet one, inevitably incinerating in the following explosion.
  4. PaperBoy

    Out with the Old

    By PaperBoy,

    Recently I was playing video games with my brothers and their friends when they decided to move the party to another house. We were all set to go when suddenly someone mentioned the TV involved. This was soon drawn out into a long conversation about why old video games don't work well with new TV's, but work perfectly fine with old ones. Why is that?
    Well, the problem I am mentioning is called input lag, which is the loose definition for any large difference in time between the input to a hardware device and its associated output. For example: hitting a button on a game controller and waiting a second before the TV displays the action. Many of my brothers' friends noted that this input lag was almost never seen with old cathode ray tube TV's, while it can be often seen with liquid crystal display or plasma.
    The reason this occurs is because of the difference between the analog signals of old video game consoles, and the digital signals of new TV's. When an old video game controller is pressed, the controller takes information and packages it in an analog signal to be sent to the TV. The TV then accepts this signal for display. Old TV's used analog display, so they could simply unpack and use the information. However, new TV's use digital systems, and must first demodulate the data (which includes changing the carrier wave) to be unpacked. They also nowadays store video information, which previous TV's did not.
    As a result, your original smash bros. game may not perform as well as you'd like unless you fish something archaic out of a trash heap. Good luck with that buddy.
  5. PaperBoy

    Winter Wonderland

    By PaperBoy,

    Rochester winters are famous for their snow, and the next one isn’t far off. The more the merrier I say, except when it's that really dense, slushy snow that clogs up your driveway. Unless of course, you're using it to peg some random stranger with. But what if it breaks up like mine always do? Will it still hit the mark?
     
    Let's say we have a nice big snowball, separated into three chunks. The dense center has a mass of .02 kg. The next, slightly less dense section has .01 kg, and the outer ring is fluffy snow with .005 kg, for a total of .035 kg. It's thrown from a teenage boy's arm height - let's say 1.2 m - at a small child's head - about .5 m high. The child is 6 m away. The snowball is thrown at exactly 15.88 m/s horizontally so that it may hit the target perfectly. But, after 2 m, .005 kg breaks off, and after another 2m, .01 kg breaks off too. Using conservation of momentum, knowing each piece breaks off at the current speed of the snowball, we find the speed in the x-plane to be 15.88 m/s again! Repeating the same procedure for the next 2 m, we again find that the speed of the snowball hasn’t changed. Thus, the snowball hits its target perfectly, and the scientists involved get a stern talking to from an angry mother. Complete success!

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