fastortoise

-Programming is proving to be very difficult, but I'll keep at it -I'm not going to try and learn a new language, I'd need a teacher for that -Chess is great, but it's only fun when playing with friends and family, and they get bored easily -Restoring a car is a dream of mine, but I don't have the funds nor the space. However, I am doing some landscaping around the house with my dad which will also provide that deep satisfaction of a job well done -Memorizing number sequences is useless and not productive -Playing an instrument/recording music would be nice, but I only have talent for playing the xylophone... my musical talent peaked at the age of 8 -Writing is a great idea, I took your idea and starting drawing/explaining some of my invention ideas I've been having recently which gave me a lot of motivation for learning new things -xkcd forums are PERFECT, just what I was looking for. Thank you so much I am now doing some research on recombinant DNA technology for environmental cleanup, after wondering if a factory of GM bacteria could potentially convert all the free inorganic carbon (CO2) in the atmosphere into organic carbon. If I keep up at this pace, I will have accomplished a lot in one month. However, I still need more ideas!!

My thoughts exactly. If I have a fantasy for making love to an elderly woman in a pool of green Jello and there happened to be a comic story about it, i'd obviously purchase it. Does that mean I would jump into a pool of Jello with someone? No. There's a difference between fantasy and reality, I suppose the authority didn't have the brain capacity to understand the difference.

I just pop out some of "my" moves that everybody loves & grind or slow dance for the rest of the night, even though I feel grinding in clubs is a waste of time (some of my friends go on for hours.. I don't see the point). My moves consist of various stolen dances (I hope you didn't expect I'd come up with my own, lame ones), such as the string dance. Everyone thinks I invented it, when I really just stole it from Conan. I also do the running-on-spot, moonwalk (circular moonwalk, too), that crazy Australian shuffle & the knee-to-face jerk. They're crowd pleasers.

Hahaha, I tried that last summer. I found this great free site that had thousands of tutorials for learning Spanish. I learned the basics but I can't advance anymore since nobody I know speaks fluent Spanish. Programming is a GREAT idea. I already know XHTML/CSS and some basic PHP, I have the offline server thingy to test out PHP scripts too, I just totally forgot about it. I will leave out Python/C++ since I don't see myself ever needing to use it. Wikipedia is also rewarding, I prefer reading long first-source research papers though. :thumbup: As for forums, yes I know google can bring up instant hits, I was just wondering if there are any Tip.Iters who are already established in one and can guarantee a nice stay. I will try Dawkin's forum, but even though I personally do not think he's too extreme, he sure does attract extremists. Thanks a lot everybody for your input, I'll be surveying this thread all day. Even when it dies, I have it bookmarked so your ideas won't be lost.

Well folks, I quit my job at Subway and my next employer only needs me in July, so I have a month vacation (wrote my last final last Thursday) with limited cash funds. Needless to say, I'm extremely bored. I started going to the gym with my friends (influenced by many weightlifting topics here), but that only kills around 10 hours a week. My goal for this month (and the rest of the summer) is to expand my mind as much as possible. Reading is the obvious best method for training my brain, and I've been reading some books recommended in the reading thread. I've also started studying first source research papers (found with Google Scholar) which I find very enlightening and second source papers (such as articles in the New York Times), primarily related to Biology/evolutionary developmental biology. Reading really helps because it not only works out my brain, I also gain a lot of knowledge. The huge downside is, I get very sleepy when reading and I'm physically limited to reading for only maybe 4-5 hours a day. I've also tried my hand at logic problems found on the Internet (e.g. 2 jugs problem), but most of them only require 1-2 minutes of out-of-the-box thinking before finding an answer. These don't have the satisfaction of figuring out a complicated math theorem which is what I was looking for. So, another logical choice for expanding my mind would be to do some math (no harder than Calculus2 or linear algebra). Even though I dislike the science, I am forcing myself to do some math exercises but I confess I will probably drop them soon. Other logic games like the ones found on Nintendo DS also bore me, since like many of you I am an above-average gamer and I beat the game in an hour. Captivating conversations are also stimulating, but I don't have any nerdy friends. I barely stay in touch with students from my old Bio classes, which was a mistake retrospectively. Sometimes my dad (a Biology professor at a University near my house) invites his colleagues over, but they refrain from Bio talk and instead talk about soccer or beer/wine. My only outlet to interesting conversations and debates is here, which is very limited. If anybody knows of any smart and active academic or scientific forums, please PM me since advertising links aren't allowed on this thread. This is where my ideas for stimulating my mind end. Hopefully you guys can help me out by suggesting other methods of stimulation, or you could discuss the effectiveness of some of my methods. Trolls always welcome. [hide=Concerning Drugs 18/21+]I drink a strong black coffee each morning because it gives me an extra 4 hours awake time and gives a swift wake-up kick to my brain, but it is addictive so I wouldn't suggest anybody to start drinking coffee until they are atleast over 20.[/hide]

Plagiarism deserves 0% and an "X" on some sort of permanent academic-record. Only real dirt bags would plagiarize, so I think giving them a nice 0 is fitting. As for late submissions.. why don't teachers just take off 5% each school day it's handed in late? It's what I've seen done all my life and it works.

Speaking of crowbars, I just replaced my bedside baseball-bat with a burly crowbar. My dad bought a new one (I don't understand why, crowbars last forever) so I took his old one, and now I feel much more at ease bashing in robbers' heads. The sharp end is completely dulled so it loses the bash&cut combo, but I'm confident it's bashing capabilities surpass my needs. I also own a digital camera that has some PG-13 pictures on it, the only reason why they're still on there is exactly the same reason you're thinking of. They're pictures from a night with friends a couple of weeks ago that I didn't even take (I only noticed them last week), but I've lost contact with the girls in them. I'd ask my friends for their names then facebook them, but I feel like a jerk for not getting in touch with them within a month after the party. Great pics though :thumbsup:

Most lagers are 5% and under, would you call them girls drinks? Unfortunately it was all the bar had, but you could compare it to 12-13 ( i think) vodka shots. Apples and oranges. Shots are supposed to be high percentage because they're specifically for getting hammered as quickly as possibly. Corky's and Sourz and the like are for people who want to order a shot just so they can do a shot. The only real barrier to putting away any significant amount of this stuff is the sweet sickly taste. Exactly. Those things are too sugar-y than alcohol-y, making it a "girly" drink. I also don't feel like comparing how much more I can drink than you or your friend, because it's extremely dangerous and unhealthy and I don't want to encourage other posters. All I will say is 12-13 vodka shots is quite a lot for a social drinker, but it's definitely not the limit/half the limit of what some people I know can do. More than half the time alcohol poisoning ensues though, so again I wouldn't advise anybody to do this unless it's a REALLY wild party :

We sorta live in between the US and other scary-communist countries like Russia and NK. I wouldn't be surprised if a rogue missile dropped from the sky and exploded an entire Canadian town :thumbdown: :| You're kidding... right? Kidding about how Russia and NK are/were communist countries, that they were scary, that nukes can fall from the sky or that Canada is positioned between the US and those countries? Because I was kidding about them being scary.. I can punch nukes back to their country with my first so I don't see any threat here.

"Sorry for the inconvenience"

We sorta live in between the US and other scary-communist countries like Russia and NK. I wouldn't be surprised if a rogue missile dropped from the sky and exploded an entire Canadian town :thumbdown:

Just don't let him come to your house anymore (he seems to be inviting himself a lot... I hate people who do that) but stay polite with him when you guys chill together someplace else. Tell him your parents are sick of him if you don't feel like calling him a moocher again.

o.m.g. same here. It's strange though, because it is such an odd thing to ask people to stop rubbing their fingernails on paper that I refrain from asking and I weep inside. Once my mom was correcting her students' exams and just kept rubbing her fingernails on the paper as I was making a snack... I completely tripped bawls and begged her to stop. It's even worse when they make a fist with their fingernails on the paper and then spread them apart slowly imitating an explosion or something. Arrrrgh I can't stop thinking about it now :cry: :x

Sure I've heard of an arm before :lol: But seriously, even though it's a pretty accurate way for detecting common ancestry, the pentadactyl limb only applies to tetrapods. I'm talking about a universal tree for ALL species, and since the only thing that unifies all living organisms is DNA, I want to see a DNA-tree.

I used to love making garlic bread, but broiling it in the oven took a long time (for it to pre-heat) It's just bread, butter and garlic powder/salt. I discovered that if you butter the bread and tap the garlic into the butter, none of it will fall off if you stick it in a toaster. Toasters make it worthwhile :D

I'm just sad they didn't get any DNA from it. I never liked how taxonomists classed species based on their anatomy, I prefer when people make the links based on DNA. I'm still waiting on an evo-devo scientist to start compiling a new life tree based solely on DNA-relatedness.. I got the idea during a genetics exam, wrote a paragraph on the last page and my teacher loved the idea. The only setback, however, is that a project at such a large scale would require thousands of scientists and super-computers. Linking species through DNA-relatedness would finally put an end to all the bickering between Biologists that never leads anywhere, and could help scientists have a more concrete evidence for their research.

Since my voting system was invented by some crazy canadians, my vote doesn't count. However, that's only because I vote for the Green party, essentially killing my vote at the municipal level and doesn't go on to anything higher.

It's because the stimuli of a doorbell ringing usually indicates a stranger is going to walk into their domain. Animals are pretty smart when it comes to that. There was a science experiment where they rung a bell before every time they fed the dog, and eventually the dog picked up on it and would get excited just from the sound of the bell - it knew it would be fed. That doesn't explain why my dog stares outside for hours then starts barking at nothing for no reason. It scares the jeepers out of me and annoys me to no tomorrow.

Interesting how the people who think evolution is a load of bologna do not even understand the basic principles of it. So far only Adrenal comes close to the correct evolutionary theory, the sheer ignorance in this thread makes me weep. I know others in this forum (mainly warrior & bauke) can understand and appreciate this discovery, but refrain posting because of the headaches from the 'uneducated'. If you think it's annoying when people try explaining proper evolution to you, believe me when I say reading posts like the majority in this thread doubly annoying.

People don't smoke because smoking looks cool. People smoke because cool people smoke.

I wore one as a skateboarder, fell on my arm once & broke it. I figure if my arm is going to continue taking the impact, I won't need my helmet anymore. So, no more helmets for me... unless i'm playing contact ice hockey with my extreme friends, I also wear a cup at those times.

I remember reading a book about this in high school... The Wave by Todd Strasser. It's short & teaches you a lesson, without using complicated literary techniques and devices.

Apparently eating pizza on the public pools roof is illegal. I'm sure it was that delivery guy who called the cops on us, maybe because we made him climb up the food to us : But the second I saw a cop car, I jumped down the back of the building and bolted across the park. I was waiting on the other side of a fence when one of my friends joined me like 5 minutes later... geez cops are slow. Only 3 out of around 10 of my friends actually got tickets :lol: I had so many other run-ins with the cops, but it was all after I broke the law (not during) so they couldn't really do anything.

For the first time in 4 months, I was able to relax on my sofa with my dog and chill all day.

^ can't take the root of a negative number because there is no number which, multiplied by itself, gives a negative.