Below are the 3 most recent journal entries recorded in bkerr_89's LiveJournal:

Saturday, January 7th, 2006
10:59 pm	Mammoth Mountain You can do so much and have so much fun when low friction coefficients are involved. My asianness factor is rising. Somehow, i have begun exclaiming "aii" instead of things like "shoot" and such when i'm surprised. Go figure. And i swear 95% of the poeple there were white. The remainder were asian. Ryan and I were the only happas within a 20 mile radius. While on the ski lifts we saw that someone lost (and let's pretend "their" is a singular pronoun. I like it for its gender ambiguity.)... 1) a map of the slopes 2) a glove 3) a pole 4) a gatorade bottle (but i doubt it was an accident 5) a cell phone 6) their lunch 7) some blood I saw some actor when in the shopping village dealy. I don't know his name, but he has straggly dark hair, has been in a couple movies, and can't act very well. However, his acting ability must be pretty good because the dog he was walking with had a gold collar (or at least Ryan said. While i was ponderously recognizing him from a movie in which he made out with Dean Cain for like five minutes, Ryan was looking at the dog. For this, Ryan loses gay points). If only i had kicked him as i kicked Drake Bell at the Rufus Wainwright / Ben Folds concert. Or at least "slipped" on the ice "accidentally" and ...attached myself to him to support or something. Then I could actually say something. But whatever. A couple things occurred on the trip that seemed very appropriate for my family members' personalities. In the ride up, i told a really bad pun (forgot what it was). My dad did the "ba dum ," Ryan hit me, and I hit my knee. Also, when we were playing Taboo, Ryan and I made nerdy references, my mom used Japanese words, and my dad used Jeff Foxworthy references. Taboo clue of the year: word - hickey Ryan: "when you're snogging and you move don to the vertebral column" My parents were a bit perplexed at his use of "snog." I figured i had to have something nerdy in here to testify to the fact that Joel still needs to do some more converting and i'm not stopping witht hat awful pun. While in a ski lift with Ryan, I was pondering a more three-dimensional equivalent of skiing where you don't just go down a slope and such. The only thing i could come up with was skydiving with skis or whatever and that didn't appeal. I then realized that, if I were to instruct someone in how to ski while considering the third dimension that isn't often used (i'm assuming the ski slope is a plane, more or less), i would end up saying something like "and if you have your skis perpendicular to the ski slope using any definition of 'perpendicular,' then you'll end up slowing to a stop or eating it." Also, Ryan and I determined that, as a general rule, the IQ of a person on the slopes is inversely proportional to the absolute value of the slope of the run they are on. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 27th, 2005
9:38 pm	the wonders of INSTINCT Have you ever wondered why you tend to look up when you think? For that, we must thank instinct. When you look up, something changes about your optic nerve (it becomes relaxed i suppose) and it (for some reason) gives you greater access into your visual memory. If anyone can tell me specifically what happens and why, I'll be slightly happy and even more amazed because I couldn't find anything online. When you look down to think, it's just so that you move your field of view away from things that might distract your thought process. Perhaps it has the same function but to a lesser extent. For some reason, we look up when we close our eyes, also. This might have something to do with dreaming, but i'm not sure why we would have developed the instinct to dream more efficiently. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 10th, 2005
6:00 am	Purpose: To convince people that I was right and O'Neill was wrong on 12/9/05 She claimed that the sole reason why ionization energy (the energy required to remove an electron from an atom) increases after removing electrons is because... 1) for example in Li (3 p+ and 3 e-), there is a "balance" of e- to p+, therefore, the "tug of war" between the charges is balanced. +++ vs. - - - 2) Once you remove an electron, there are 3 p+ and 2 e-. Because of that, the "tug of war" is thrown off, and p+ exert more force (or rather charge?) on the e-. +++ vs. - - Ms. O'Neill claimed that this is why the ionization energy increases once you remove electrons. I told her that i intuitively have a problem with that. With my understnading... 1) The electrons will, individually, always be attracted with a constant attraction to the protons. The electron removed does not effect the charge of the other electrons in the atom. 2) The only effect of removing that electron is that the atom, as a whole, has a net positive charge afterward, and, therefore, will attrace foreign electrons. However, within that atom, the protons do not exert any greater or lesser attraction on the electrons. 3) An example of this is - if i loaded a giant cannon with Justin Cruel, packed in enough gunpowder to help him achieve escape velocity, then shot him off the planet, ther would be less mass on the planet for gravity to attract, but it wouldn't realize that and suddenly attract the remaining matter more. 4) A better example I just though of is that, if you remove Pluto from orbit around the Sun, even though it is, as electrons are around the nucleus of an atom, in "balance" with the Sun's gravitational attraction by centrifugal force, the other planets will not be attracted any more by the Sun. This is why I think that there must be some other force (like the shielding effect or valence shell stability) that factors into this situation that makes it so that, as electrons are removed, the ionization energy increases. (4 Comments |Comment on this)