Akano

It's Tekulo's birthday! I made him a thing. Go wish him well over there, if you like. *poke* *prod*

Or Nigel, or Santa Jumpy, or whatever you're called nowadays. Please join me in wishing my little bro a happy 23rd, everyone!

Those are my favorite kinds of faces.

Nope – guess again! 8D Picard's are fine. Kirk's. Are. ...belowaverage!

Who is this "Tekulo" of whom you speak, Mr. Thornberry?

Ohs nos! 8D They aren't oaks, so they're cool.

Maple, pine, elm, and birch are totally cool, but no oak logs, please.

I do understand the woes of the color purple, especially in BIONICLE and LEGO sets. And while, yes, it isn't over half, it is still the most represented. Also, there is a scientific reason for wanting electricity to be purple. (perhaps I'll do an Equation of the Day on that...) Green has its fair share of representation, so no. This is a fairly good point. I do find yellow and cyan/blue to be a cool color combo and would like to see it done more often. (Though, maybe I'm the minority on this opinion, but I don't really like any of the Mixels...) I should do an Equation of the Day on this... I mean, yeah.

If you're talking about the friends that I think you are, then yes, I can corroborate this statement. *noms chip*

With the rebirth of BIONICLE, a great debate has arisen, and I am now able to put all of our qualms to rest. In my recent entry about making mountains into molehills, the comments brought up a serious issue: the color of the element of electricity. Specifically, I am a proponent of its color being yellow because I don't buy into the popularity of the color blue, and that Pokémon represents the element with the color yellow. I had many (read: a couple) people disagree with me on that sentiment, so I decided to use my math and science skills to better humanity to prove my point. I used the resource known as Bulbapedia to acquire the complete list of electric type Pokémon (pure and dual-type) and entered in their official Pokédex color. Using the advanced mathematical concept of "counting" to total up how many electric types are of each color, I obtained the following results: Yellow: 18 Blue: 8 White: 4 Black: 3 Gray: 3 Red: 3 Brown: 1 Pink: 1 Ergo, my scientific findings have brought me to the conclusion that electricity is yellow by a landslide. Have a good day, everyone.

I like the black and white version in your avatar. The contrast of the shading comes out really nicely there that isn't quite the same as the green-on-tan here. I especially like its eye, personally.

Who replaced Santa Junpei with Nigel Thornberry?! M. Night Shyamalan, I'm looking at you...

I'm Akano, and I would make an "I approve of this entry" joke.

Hello, BZPeople! I just wanted to drop in and let you know that I'm quite alive and well and have had a wonderful holiday season. I thought I'd give you all a quick rundown of my last month or so after I vanished without a trace. Went home and celebrated Christmas with my folks. Got AN AWESOME INSECT COLLECTION from Tekulo; a custom lightsaber, a LEGO coffee mug, and a Knights minifigure set from KK; a portable charger thing from my mom; an Elvis mug/cocoa mix from my aunt; and a gift box from my dad which had a Bazinga shirt and socks, TARDIS/Dalek ice tray (!!), and other miscellaneous nerdy things. Spent New Year's with some friends from college, one of whom is having a baby in the extremely near future. (I will soon be an uncle, which is kind of awesome.) Went to Walt Disney World for a week with my mom and Tekulo. Magic Kingdom is still my favorite park, Haunted Mansion is still my favorite ride, Space Mountain is still my favorite thrill ride, and Tower of Terror is still awesome. I didn't really enjoy Epcot all that much (though I had fun riding Spaceship Earth after virtually zero wait), and Universal Studios was fine except for the head-jostling the Rockin' Roller Coaster gave me. (I remember it being much more avoidable as a kid...) Now I'm back at school doing research. Also, thanks to all who supported Tekulo in his recent blog entry where he came out. It makes me very happy to see that here. Keep being awesome.

If you're past the event horizon of a black hole, information cannot escape, since light cannot escape. This is because, in some sense, time and space swap roles past the event horizon. Outside the event horizon, moving forward in time is inevitable. Inside the event horizon, moving toward the singularity is inevitable. So now the question is, what do you mean when you say "teleport?" Are we somehow transferring the information of your body's makeup? Because that will never escape the black hole. Are we accessing an extra dimension to move over a large amount of space by taking a shortcut, like a wormhole?. If so, can such a thing exist within the event horizon of a black hole and help you survive? I don't know. Suffice it to say, with our current knowledge of black holes, we can't get information about them within their event horizons. If we ever did figure that out, it would be groundbreaking.

I just finished my General Relativity final on Thursday. Best of luck on your final; collapse those wavefunctions!

Looks like Electromagnetism, yes? The first time I did E&M, it was not very intuitive and challenging to grasp (though I had already taken quantum mechanics, which helped with the math a bit).

The comics I was thinking of were Pak Man's (of Psycho Dogs and Carbonated Beverages), featuring Weku, but yes, you had 10?s (blue Miru-wearing Matoran?), right?

ALL OF MY WILDEST DREAMS ARE COMING TRUE…I THINK!! Crackles! Fixed now. Like Manectric and Minun? =P Or Pachirisu? =P or Zekrom... Lanturn.... Luxray... Eelektross... Thundurus... =P Also, what Xaeraz said. All of which – except Zekrom and Thundurus – have yellow as part of their color scheme in some way. I'm sticking to my guns on this one! Okay, if your type is fluid, I don't think it counts.

It's really amusing to me that everyone is freaking out about this canonization stuff, mainly because this is what happened to me several years ago. As someone who ended up disagreeing with new canon information during BIONICLE's initial tenure, let me assure you: the new canon is meaningless. Even if Greg Farshtey says that Toa can transform into gigantic dinosaurs and feast on souls, it would mean absolute bupkis. Why? Because the fun of BIONICLE isn't what's officially created, but what we, the fans, create. I have seen beautiful creations on this site in the forms of MOCs, comics, general artwork, movies, stories, and music posted on this site for the past 11 years, and it is far more impressive than just about anything that has come out of the official storyline (although, Time Trap is the best thing Greg ever contributed to the actual canon, and there's no way I can knock it). You want a story where Vo-Matoran, -Toa, and -Turaga are male? Or have no set gender? Go for it. There's a headcanon floating around about a transgender Tamaru, there were comics featuring the only male Ga-Matoran, and there were epics that featured Toa, Matoran, and Turaga of Muffins. Do you think Muffins would ever be canonized as a for reals element? Who cares?! It made for far more interesting plots and ideas than a Toa of the Green who has only ever been hinted at and never seen in action! Part of the fun of writing my epics – How I Became Me and The Inventor of Metru Nui (which I hope to work on again at some point, I swears!) – was twisting one part of the canon while leaving the rest be. Trying to get my OC to fit into the BIONICLE universe was fun, and when it was announced that Vo-Matoran are female (and blue, what's with that? If you've played Pokémon, you know that electricity is yellow bar a few minor deviations ), I didn't budge because I didn't have to. So have fun making mountains out of molehills, BZbloggers. I'm going to sit over here, lean back, and enjoy my bowl of popcorn whilst I watch the fireworks. Because I'm just that nice a guy. 8D

The room you are currently sitting in is probably around 20°C, or 68°F (within reasonable error, since different people like their rooms warmer or colder or have no control over the temperature of the room they're reading this entry in). But what does it mean to be at a certain temperature? Well, we often define temperature as an average of the movement of an ensemble of constituent particles – usually atoms or molecules. For instance, the temperature of a gas in a room is given as a relation to the gas' rms molecular speed: Where T is the absolute temperature (e.g. Kelvin scale), m is the mass of the particles making up the gas, and k is Boltzmann's constant. But this is a specific case. In general, we need a more encompassing definition. In thermodynamics, there is a quantity known as entropy, which basically quantifies the disorder of a system. It is related to the number of ways to arrange the elements of a system without changing the energy. For instance, there are a lot of ways of having a messy room. You can have clothes on the floor, you can track mud into it, you can leave dishes and food everywhere. But there are very few ways to have an immaculately clean room, where everything is tidy and put in its proper place. Thus, the messy room has a larger entropy, while the clean room has very low entropy. It is this quantity that helps to define temperature generally. Denoting entropy as S, we have that Or, in words, temperature is defined as the change in energy divided by the change in entropy of something when its volume remains fixed, which is equivalent to the change in enthalpy (heat) divided by the change in entropy at constant pressure. Thus, if you increase the energy of an object and find that it becomes more disordered, the temperature is positive. This is what we are used to. When you heat up air, it becomes more disorderly because the particles making it up are moving faster and more randomly, so it makes sense that the temperature must be positive. If you cool air, the particles making it up slow down and it tends to become more orderly, so the temperature is still positive, but decreasing. What happens when you can't pull any more energy out of the air? Well, that means that the temperature has gone to zero, and movement has stopped. Since the movement has stopped, the gas must be in a very ordered state, and the entropy isn't changing. When the speed of the gas particles is zero, we call its temperature absolute zero, when all motion has stopped. It is impossible to reach absolute zero temperature, but it isn't intuitive as to why at first. The main reason is due to quantum mechanics. If all atomic motion of an object stopped, its momentum would be known exactly, and this violates the Uncertainty Principle. But there is also another reason. In thermodynamics, there is a quantity related to temperature that is defined as Since k is just a constant, β can be thought of as inverse temperature. This sends absolute zero to β being infinity! Now, this makes much more sense as to why achieving absolute zero is impossible – it means we have to make a quantity go to infinity! It turns out that β is the more fundamental quantity to deal with in thermodynamics because of this role (and others). Now, you're probably thinking, "Akano, that's all well and good, but, are you saying that this means that you can get to infinite temperature?" In actuality, you can, but you need a special system to be able to do it. To get temperature to infinity, you need β to go to zero. How do we do that? Well, once you cross zero, you end up with a negative quantity, so if we could somehow get a negative temperature, then we would have to cross β equals zero. But how do we get a negative temperature, and what would that be like? Well, we would need entropy to decrease when energy is added to our system. It turns out that an ensemble of magnets in an external magnetic field would do the trick. See, when a compass is placed in a magnetic field, it wants to align with the field (call that direction north). But if I put some energy into the system (i.e. I push the needle), I can get the needle of the compass to point in the opposite direction (south). When less than half of the compasses are pointing opposite the external field, each time I flip a compass needle I'm increasing entropy (since the perfect order of all the compasses pointing north has been tampered with). But once more than half of those compasses are pointing south, I am decreasing the disorder of the system when I flip another magnet south! This means that the temperature must be negative! In practice, the compasses are actually molecules with an electric dipole moment or electrons with a certain spin (which act like magnets), but the same principles apply. So, β equals zero is when exactly half of the compasses are pointing north and the other half are pointing south, and β equals zero is when T is infinite, and it is at this infinity that the sign on T swaps. It's interesting to note that negative temperatures are actually hotter than any positive temperature, since you have to add energy to get to negative temperature. One could define a quantity as –β, so that plotting it on a line would be a more intuitive way to see that the smaller the quantity, the colder the object is, while preserving the infinities of absolute zero and "absolute hot."

+10 internets to you, sir.

This evening, KK and I will embark on an epic quest to return home via Greyhound bus. Neither of us has ever partaken in such an adventure, so it will probably be full of intrigue, drool, and snorts due to the fact that we leave after midnight. 'Twill be interesting indeed. In other news, scattering theory is still something that eludes me. This is funny, because one of my research projects sort of uses scattering theory as an approximation technique. I get it there, but not when it comes to General Relativity. Also, dat Detective's Office set. 8L

This is now my new favorite reaction clip.