Jim and Jim

The identical twins separated at birth that met each other after 40 years and discovered they had been living identical lives

The stories of identical twins’ nearly identical lives are often astonishing, but perhaps none more so than those of these identical twins born in Ohio. Jim Lewis and Jim Springer first met February 9, 1979 after 39 years of being separated. They had grown to adulthood completely unaware of each other’s existence. When Jim Lewis finally found his twin brother, Jim Springer, after years of searching through court records, he knew their unwed mother had put them up for adoption shortly after giving birth. When the two first met, Lewis described it as “like looking into a mirror.” For starters, both had the same first name. They were physically identical. But when they got talking, the similarities were astounding. Both had childhood dogs named Toy. Both had been nail biters and fretful sleepers. Both had migraines. Both had married first wives names Linda, second wives named Betty. Lewis named his first son James Allen, Springer named his James Alan. For years, they both had taken holidays on the same Florida beach. They both drank Miller Lite, smoked Salem cigarettes, loved stock car racing, disliked baseball, left regular love notes to their wives, made doll furniture in their basements, and had added circular white benches around the trees in their backyards. Their IQs, habits, facial expressions, brain waves, heartbeats, and handwriting were nearly identical. The Jim twins lived apart but died on the same day, from the same illness

The wrong physics in Transformers

More than meets the eye…

The Transformers movie series deals with very large robots from space. It sounds ridiculous when you say it like that, but it was actually a fun movie. That’s not to say that it was error-free. Most of the obvious mistakes in the movie come from a lack of attention to the effects of the large mass of the robot entities.

The first problem to deal with is the immense mass of a Transformer robot. When you scale things up and make them larger, their volume increases according to the cube of their size. For example. If you make something 10x larger, then its length is 10x greater, its width is 10x greater, and its height is 10x greater. That means that its volume has been increased by a factor of 1000 times!

Lets compare a Transformer to a car, since obviously they share a lot of components. A typical car weights somewhere in the area of 2000 pounds. When standing up, Optumus Prime looks to be at least 3-4 times larger than a typical car. If he is 3x larger than a car, then his volume will be 3x3x3 = 27 times more than a typical car. Optmus Prime would weigh around 54,000 pounds!

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a robot weighing 54,000 pounds. That of itself does not defy any physics. In fact, a Boeing 747 is quite a bit larger than that. The problem is they way the Transformers jump around. Every time they land on the ground they would exert immense forces. Roads would be destroyed just from the robots walking around. A robot leaping in the air must push off of the ground with enough force to cause significant acceleration. Even though the robots in the movie do cause a fair amount of destruction where they fight, its far, far less than what it should be. They should cause damage just from walking.

there is an absolute rule that must still apply, and that is Conservation of Mass. No matter what shape the robots change into, they do not gain or lose matter. They still must have the same amount of mass as they had before. So, when Frenzy changed into a cell phone, and Sam picked it up, Sam should have noticed that his cell phone was really heavy.

When Bumblebee changes into a Camaro, that Camaro would weigh what Bumblebee weighed in full robot form. That weight would put be very hard to accelerate. Every time Bumblebee tried to accelerate, his wheels would spin as they tried to gain traction and push that immense mass forward. There is no way he could maneuver as nimbly as he does in Camaro form, because his sharp turns would cause him to slide off the road due to his large inertia.

I think the thing that bothered me most when viewing the movie was toward the end. Sam refuses to give the All-Spark to Megatron, and he gets knocked off the top of a building. He falls pretty far. Heroically, Optimus Prime reaches out and catches him.

It looks good in the film. In reality, though, Sam’s toast.

The principle at work here is impulse. Impulse is the change in an object’s momentum. In Sam’s case, he has a fair amount of momentum when he reaches Prime’s hand, and then he is stopped so he winds up with no momentum.

If you find impulse, and divide it by the duration of the impact, then you get force. Thus, a sudden change in momentum requires a large force, while a more gradual change in momentum requires less force (that’s just Newton’s 2^nd Law restated). This is the reason that cars have airbags. In an accident, your momentum will suddenly decrease upon impact. If that change in momentum is caused by your body hitting the steering wheel, then it is very sudden because the steering wheel has no give to it. That small impact time causes a large (and likely fatal) force. If there is an airbag deployed, then it slows you down more gradually. A larger impact time translates to a smaller (and safer) force.

When Sam reaches Prime’s hand, he’s falling at a pretty good rate. He hits Prime’s solid metal hand. There is no airbag, of course, and the metal has no give to it. Sam will be brought to a very sudden halt. The small duration of the impact will cause a large amount of force on Sam’s body. Not only will Sam’s bones be shattered, but his internal organs will be pulverized by the sudden deceleration.  Barring some sort of magical or supernatural intervention, it’s not survivable. Poor Sam.

Physics-talk aside, just look at it! Sam falls and lands on a metal surface! Would you want to fall that far and land on a metal surface? It doesn’t matter that it’s a hand catching him, it’s a metal hand!

Heyyy.. permit

So, recently, I spent 11 hours taking my permit test. Well… one of those hours was wasted by my technologically unskilled mind to register,  four of those hours were spent on the drug and alcohol course, five more hours were spent cramming the florida driver’s handbook into my brain, and the last hour was spent taking my legit permit test. Of course, I passed, and therefore, I was not among the thousands that fail that thing. (19/20 on road signs, 17/20 on road rules woooo!)

So, it gets me to thinking, what exactly is the price of happiness? would you spend money on an utter piece of shit just to make someone happy? Personally, I would, but would you?

Me, Renamed

If I could choose any other name for myself, what would it be

where the streets have no name

Hmm… I would keep my own, because it's part of my identity and who I am, and that's never gonna change, no matter how much i want it to.

DEEP BLUE SEA

So, last night, I watched Deep Blue Sea.. or at least the last half of the movie.

So, basically, in top-secret island facility called Aquatica, a team of scientists are searching for a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. One of them, Dr. Susan McAlester , violates the ethics code, and genetically spikes up three Mako sharks, intending to increase their brain capacity so that they can harvest the tissue as a cure. Unfortunately, the increased brain capacity also makes the sharks smarter, faster, and more dangerous.

In order to prove that the research is worth it, the team manage to remove brain tissue from the largest shark the adult female. (I started watching at this point. you should have seen this, they had this big claw thing that made holes in the shark’s flesh and then the lady just stuck this huge stick into its brain… and I’m like… even if I was put under, I would so be feeling that.) However, an accident (the shark wakes up and eats a guy’s arm of) sets off a chain of events that allows the sharks to engineer an escape, and flood the internal structure, allowing them entry to target the humans within it. (while trying to save the arm less guy, the shark takes it and like flings him into the screen) The team of scientists have to escape the sinking research centre and avoid being killed, without allowing the sharks to reach open water.  One by one the team is killed off by the sharks (one falls int a pool, and then the old one, like an idiot is standing around on the edge where aa shark can just reach up and eat up and it does) until only the cook, McAlester, and Carter Blake are left alive. They make the startling discovery that the sharks have not just been trying to kill them, but were actually leading them to flooding the facility so they could escape into the open sea to breed. McAlester, in a sacrificial effort to distract the last of the three sharks, allows it to kill her while Preacher and Blake blow the shark out of the water, and await rescue as boats containing other researchers come toward the facility. At the end the cook is like “are you sure there are only three of those things?” which kinda makes you think there are more.

In the film’s original cut, McAlester lived, but test audiences made it clear how much they disliked the character (going so far as to shout “Die, bitch!” at the screen) as her actions had caused all that had gone wrong. Thus, the decision was made to re-shoot the ending so that her character died. Conversely, Sherman ‘Preacher’ Dudley, played by LL Cool J, was to die but test audiences loved the character so much that filmmakers re-shot the ending and had him live.

Overall, it wasn’t bad… okay, it gave me night mares… its not a film for the faint of heart. Like… legit, I was being eaten by sharks all night. So yeah, a pretty basic thriller on an overused idea… but still scary.

what do people do with VODKA at a LIBRARY?

so, I’m at the library and a man in a delivery truck is wheeling in a huge case labled “Vodka” wtf?

New rule: You pay me money when you breath

The rules I would make on my day to rule:

You pay me money when you breath
Hey, its my world.. I need to be rich… **** straight I’m gonna charge you for air.

Free Education and Health Care for all
Since you are paying me for your air, the least I can do is offer you the two most important things that most people should have aside from the basic necessities.

Presents for all the Kids at the holidays
provided that there is money left over (cause all the kids need something)

Hey, I don’t care
you know, you can do what you want.Just know, whatever you do, I will do back. You kill someone, I will order you killed. You steal a pony from house A, well whoever lives in House A can steal one thing from your house. Deal with it, An eye for an eye.

Every day, I ….

my three things I do everyday

Hate myself
because I can never improve otherwise

Learn one thing
so I can know about the world around me

Take a Bath
because its soothing (and you stay clean by doing that)

I Wish I Could Ask This Person for Advice

what famous person would I ask for advise?

Amanda Bach : Fashion model icon : sexy

any famous really skinny model… to I could figure out how they stay skinny… yeah, my priorities are messed up, i know.

So… updates on my life

Friday: I went to kanes and mobbed the place for my free mp3 player. Sure enough, they gave me a number (62) and then I went around and found members of my family so I could use their driver’s license for the number (I dont have one of my own) So, I get it (and everyone else wants to use it despite the fact that it is MINE,  and I was the one that found the commercial that told me I could get a free mp3 player) and it holds like 160 songs and it isnt bad. it doesnt shuffle, you cant pick what you want to listen to, and the sound sucks… but for a free thing, it was well worth the effort I had to go through to get it. (also, kanes has lovely furniture… horribly expensive,  but pretty)

Saturday: I’m pretty sure I sulked all day long.

Sunday: hmmmm… i think that was another sulking day.

Monday: So… I  go to the mall to see if there are any sales, I buy bedsheets (I think I mentioned this before), my family and I blow like $10 trying to fish an i- touch out of a vending machine — or a claw machine, what ever you call it. that thing with the stuffed animals except this one had an i-touch, a mall giftcard, and a gold watch (BTW… if any of you reading this has like… random music playing technology lying around that you’re just dying to give to me, you can be assured that I will love it and care for it and hoard it…  just throwing that out there… if you wanna send me free technology). Every store has this  “Shoplifters Will Be Persecuted”  sign. (yeah, I copied and pasted it. On my mac, that’s apple + C… on this shitty windows its ctrl + c… I have to reach my pinkie a lot further away on this windows comp. Very uncomfy for my hand…. windows should change that, switch around the ALT and the CTRL). And I’m like.. of course you will be, is there really a store in which you can just go in and steal stuff and nobody calls the police? If there is, someone needs to send me the name of that store.  And lastly, my computer was hogged for like… seven hours while people tried to unite MSN and Y!Messenger and GT and AIM and all that onto one super mega chat thing-y. Why? It’s beyond me, I liked it fine before… but whatever. (And if you buy a used computer… i guess you should get rid of all the old info on it)