JamesSavik

The War Inside Stardate 43887.3 Dr. Walter Ingalls, Starfleet Medical Personal log. At the request of the Angosian government, Star Fleet has dispatched a team of doctors and other specialist to help rehabilitate veteran's of the Tarsian War. When I first got this assignment, I thought that we would make quick and easy progress. Nothing could be further from the truth. What I first thought were symptoms of severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a much more complicated condition created by conditioning, drugs, genetic engineering and nano-technology. This may well be a case where we can not think in terms of a cure per see but manage the condition to improve the patients quality of life. This interview is typical of the patients that we have seen at the Luna V facility. Subject 378- Rayner Zale Ingalls- I specifically asked to speak with you because you have had nothing to do with Roga Danar's insurrection and have expressed no interest in therapy or to live anywhere but the Luna V facility. I wanted to understand your reasoning. Zale- There's simply no point in it. What I have become, what we are, we're not Angosians anymore. We're something else. Something horrible that frightens those of us who were conditioned to be soldiers most of all. Ingalls- So you consider the conditioning program irreversible? Zale- They can remove the drugs, disable the implants, reverse the genetic alterations but... how do you get rid of the faces? I personally have killed over three hundred Tarsians. My enhanced memory allows me to remember each and every face in exacting detail. Can we get rid of that? You can take the soldier out of the war doctor. It's much more difficult to take the war out of the soldier. Ingalls- Perhaps we can help. We have treated many Federation veterans of the Dominion War. I'm certain that we can help. Zale- Maybe you can. I will see how it goes with the others before I commit. Ingalls- No good soldier commits to action without intelligence or reconnaissance. Zale- (laughs) You sound like a soldier yourself. Ingalls- I fought in the Cardassian War and the Dominion War. Zale- It's good to talk to a fellow soldier. Most of the Doctor's are nice young people who have no idea... Ingalls- Yes. Tell me your story. Zale- (sighs) It's fairly typical tale. I will tell it in trade. Your story for mine. Ingalls- That's only fair. Zale- I was young when the war started. I was in my first year at university studying architecture. The war was going very badly at first. Angosians aren't naturally a warlike people. Many of our first generation soldiers hesitated. We suffered defeat after defeat. The Tarsians were... brutal, almost animalistic. We soon discovered that the Breen were backing the Tarsians in a bid to destabilize the area around Romulan space. Both sides were pawns in a much bigger game. I volunteered when our home world was bombarded and several of our cities were leveled. We asked for help. Not from the Romulans of course. The Federation wouldn't get involved. We were able to secure key defense technologies through third parties that made our military at least competitive. With Klingon disrupters, Romulan shields and old Federation warp drives, Angosia was able to build a small, formidable fleet that was able to stop the Tarsians cold and turn the tide of the war in our favor. But... I'm getting ahead of myself. I joined our military in the third year of the war. After basic training and testing, I was asked to join a special unit. We were warned that it was dangerous and that many didn't survive but being young and patriotic, I volunteered. It was nothing like the training that I had previously had. Rather than Subadons (Angosian equivalent of a drill instructor), we had counselors. We were enhanced by biological engineering, drugs and nanotechnology. Most importantly, we were conditioned not to be like other Angosians. Ingalls: What do you mean? Zale: When it came time to kill, we were conditioned not to hesitate. I was there for the our first assignment: to retake Angosia VI. The Tarsians had captured one of the planets in our home system and we had to remove them. Angosia VI is a cold desert world with low gravity. It can barely sustain life. The military called it Operation Mystic Winter. Those of us that went called it hell. We launched on four troop transports with twenty-five hundred men each and equipment. One transport was destroyed in space. One crashed landed. The two that did land were badly off course. The first day we lost thirty men to the cold. It took us days to move into position to strike the Tarsians and they had air superiority until the very end. Finally we were able to hit their defensive perimeter and our programming kicked in. I didn't even know that it was possible to move that fast. I would look around and the hands and feet of my fellow soldiers were just a blur. We fought until we were completely out of ammunition. Then we used knives, clubs, rocks and even our bare hands. We won the battle. When it was all over there were only twenty-seven hundred of us left. Historians call it the turning point. To me it's just another one of a score of nightmares that keeps coming back over and over. Ingalls: By all accounts, the Battle for Angosia VI was the turning point. Zale: And I have the campaign ribbon, the Angosian star and... a lot of dead friends to remember it by. Ingalls: That's the part you never get used to. Burying your friends. Zale: The conditioning lets you turn it off. Ingalls: What do you mean by turn it off? Zale: Part of the conditioning allows you to turn off emotions. The only problem is that they don't go away. They don't stay turned off forever. Just long enough to keep you from being distracted from your mission. Ingalls: You were promoted after Angosia VI. Zale: Yes. That's when it got so much worse. It's one thing to be a soldier. To be responsible for the lives of others... that's hard. I was given command a platoon (24) of soldiers that had just completed the conditioning program. We fought in a number of minor skirmishes and did extremely well. We were in the first wave of the invasion of Kavis Alpha. I lost eight of those kids. I can still call them all by name. Enhanced memory is very difficult when you want to forget. Ingalls: That battle forced the Tarsians to the peace table. Zale: It was a great shock to the Tarsians. Angosians that could snap their necks like twigs and didn't shy away from striking killing blows. That's the battle that scared them. They couldn't handle us at all and they knew it. The war dragged on another year and a half but they had gone from swaggering militarists to skulking cowards that hid in bunkers. Ingalls: You seem to still have a lot of anger towards the Tarsians. Zale: You're damned right I do. I'm angry at all of the lives they took. And for what? To gain another star system? To be acknowledged as a regional power? No. We know the Tarsians all too well. They were just bullies with more weapons than sense and stopping them made it all worthwhile. Ingalls: You consider the sacrifices that you and others had to make worth while? Zale: Honestly, I didn't expect to survive the war. Ask our soldiers an most of them will tell you the same. Ingalls: Don't you ever want to leave the Luna V facility? Zale: No. To win that war, I had to become a monster. I am still that monster. I can still snap a mans neck or jam his nose cartilage into his brain in a split second. There lies the problem. We had to learn how to act without thinking- to not hesitate to kill. That is an absolute necessity in war but it has no place in peace. I am no longer fit to be a part of any civil society. I am a weapon that must be locked away until it is needed again. For me the war never really ended. I see, I smell it and I feel it every time I close my eyes. I am no longer in a war. The war is in me. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Angosia III ( http://en.memory-alp...iki/Angosia_III ) was a world visited by the Enterprise-D under Jean-Luc Picard on Stardate 43489 ( http://en.memory-alp...d_%28episode%29 ) The Tarsian Wars were a protracted conflict in which the Angosians were forced to create super soldiers to survive and eventually win the war. What does a peaceful society do with super-soldiers once the war is over and they are no longer needed?

Now lets see Starcraft drag

The old man and sir.

We'll need nachos...

PC Games? That's where the classics are. We'll start with the Civilization series games. See their website at: http://www.civilization.com/ War Games on the PC go to Shrapnel Games. They have the rights to the Steel Panthers franchise and offer a WWII and modern version of the classic game. They also have a number of other games. See their site at: http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ Another classic game series is Harpoon ( http://www.advancedgaming.biz/products/hce.html ). It's been around 20 years + One of the bigger collections of various types of games can be found at http://www.matrixgames.com

The maximum stable mass limit for a white dwarf is a sum call the Chandrasekhar limit. This number is about 1.38 solar masses. Alpha Centuri weighs in at 1.1 solar masses, Beta Centuri at .907 solar masses. Proxima Centauri is a distant companion weighing in at only .125 solar masses. Furthermore, Proxima is an M5.5 dwarf. It's a low luminosity red dwarf that is so faint that it can't be seen by the naked eye despite being the closest star to our planet. It would take millions of years and a lot of help to get any one of those objects to its Chandrasekhar limit. There are some ~1875 stars within 50 light years of earth. Most of them are dwarfs of type K, M and are less massive than our sun- very much like Proxima Centauri. On the average, of each 1000 main sequence stars in the sun's neighborhood, there are... 1 star of spectral type B (along with O type stars which are quite rare) massive blue giants are your most likely candidate to go SN Type II (core collapse)- the most devastating kind of explosion. There are actually blue and white dwarfs of type B and O but they are weird and rare and none of them in the neighborhood. Their color is influenced more by their heat than size. 7 stars of spectral type A 27 stars of spectral type F 65 stars of spectral type G 126 stars of spectral type K 774 stars of spectral type M These numbers come from an obscure branch of astronomy called stellar population studies. And no- not all populations are the same. We live in a very placid neighborhood without many bullies or thugs. Type I supernova are all very predictable. They are used as a "standard candle" for determining distances to far away galaxies. They all blow with the same energy, spectra and light curve. Type II SN vary considerably. They can be very, very energetic and bright. There are a number of sub-types and the core collapse might even be non-concentric or warped leading to strange shapes and irregular distribution of matter and shockwaves. This picture of SN 1987A was taken ~10 years after the initial outburst. The "string of pearls" is gas that has been disturbed by the shock wave. This picture was taken around ~2003. The theory is that the core of the progenitor star did no collapse symmetrically which causes weird effects as the supernova ages- like the double ring structure. This is a typical light curve for a type I supernova. It peaks quickly, drops several orders of magnitude and thn does a long, slow fade. The type II SN is much more energetic. It peaks and stays hot longer and fades slower than a type I. When a type II SN explodes, it creates a hell of a lot of radioactive isotopes, exotic stuff that has very short half lifes. This material decays quickly adding to the radiation output of the event. Within this radioactive furnace, new heavy elements are being forged by r-process (rapid) and s-process (slow) nuclear decay. As the elements age, they become more and more stable and are recycled by the galaxy and used to create new stars and planets. There is something very Zen about type II SN- it is creation and annihilation in the same event.

When a supernova goes off, quite a lot of the energy is consumed by a huge neutrino surge. We actually detected some of them when the supernova blew in 1987. Neutrinos are fairly innocuous particles. They don't usually interact with other matter. It takes a huge surge of them for us to detect them at all. They travel very fast because the neutrino surge and SN1987A light were seen within seconds of each other.

The problem with radiation is that its power fades with the square of the distance. The really hot part of a supernova in the gamma and x-ray ranges drop off rather quickly. The shock wave behaves like Newtons law- it isn't diminished until its acted on by another force. It eventually gets soaked up in the interstellar medium over millions of years and hundreds of light years.

This is way better than the ones that create false hopes and give the impression that coming out is some sort of panacea. I don't like the peer pressure for people to come out- especially toward kids. It makes some people feel like they are letting down "the cause". "The cause" is all well and good but such a decision is complicated and there is no one size fits all solution to every situation. Coming out will be very different experience for a kid in Berkley, CA with hippie parents than a Cajun kid from Lafayette, LA with hard-core Catholic parents.

Don't forget the Rain Man ==> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_Man Some of Faulkner's works are told from the viewpoint of someone who may have had some form of autism.

Notes- SN 2012aw has tentatively been classified as a type IIp supernova. A type IIp supernova is a core collapse supernova with a light curve that reaches a plateau-phase. It will take some time to know for sure but so far that's what the data is saying. The progenitor star has been identified as a red giant of about 8 solar masses- that's just about the minimum size for a star to become a supernova. If stars are any smaller, there is insufficient mass to cause the core to collapse. These stars slowly lose cohesion and most of their mass as they form planetary nebula. What is left becomes a white dwarf.

We're lucky that way. There aren't any stars large enough to blow close enough to hurt us. This may not have been the case in the distant past. There have been numerous mass-extinctions in the planets history. Some have been accounted for and some have not. There is a huge supernova remnant relatively close to earth. It's so large that it is difficult to see. It is thought to be quite old. Have a look at it ==> http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060519.html

Watching a star explode By Daniel Stolte 23 March 2012 Source Link:==> http://www.physorg.c...12-03-star.html Adam Block's image of supernova SN 2012aw (arrow) lighting up in spiral galaxy M95 was selected as NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. The bar-like structure giving this type of galaxy its name can be seen in the galaxy's center. (Photo: Adam Block/Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter) NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for March 22 features a snapshot of a supernova - a massive star explosion - discovered only a week ago. Using the remotely controlled Schulman Telescope at the University of Arizona's Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, Adam Block shot this image of galaxy M95. What appears to be an extra-bright star in one of its spiral arms actually is the light flash of a supernova. In this case, M95's latest supernova, SN 2012aw, was discovered on March 16 and now is identified as the explosion of a massive star. "When I learned about the discovery of this supernova, I decided I could do without sleep for a night and try and take a good picture of this cosmic catastrophe," said Block, an astrophotographer. Collecting the light with the telescope took about three hours, followed by another three hours to assemble the final image. The Schulman Telescope is large enough to clearly see both the galaxy and the supernova, which looks like a bright star, Block said. Massive stars are the universe's hot, fast and furious: Ranging in mass from eight times to about 300 times the mass of our sun, they burn brighter than other stars, use up their fuel faster and go out with a bang of truly cosmic proportions. "When you see the galaxy, you are looking at the combined glow of hundreds of billions of stars that are in that galaxy," Block said. "The fact that supernova rivals the brightness of the entire galaxy tells you something about how much energy is released." Massive stars are rare, and astronomers must look many thousands of light years away from the Earth to discover one. Because they are difficult to see the further away they are, astronomers have yet to discover massive stars outside our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Galaxy M95, in which supernova SN 2012aw went off, is about 38 million light years distant and spans about 75,000 light years across. M95 is a so-called barred spiral galaxy because of the bar-like feature in its center. Apart from the latest supernova, galaxy M95 is special in that it helped astronomers figure out the shape of our Milky Way, Block said: "Trying to determine the shape of our own galaxy is tricky because we're in it. It's like trying to figure out the shape of your house while you're sitting in the living room." Through various observations and measurements, astronomers were able to determine that the Milky Way, too, features a bar structure in its center and is roughly the same size as M95. He added that right now, galaxy M95 is located in the approximate direction of Mars, in the constellation of Leo. While not visible with the naked eye, galaxy and supernova make for a good target for small telescopes. "Depending on the nature of the explosion and the kind of star that blew up, we should be able to see the supernova for another couple of weeks or so," Block said. "At Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, we want to make the universe exciting to people. What better thing to highlight than a star exploding in another galaxy?" Provided by University of Arizona ______________________________________________

Some girls have the mistaken impression that gay guys actually want fag hags.

Score +1 for every question you answer yes. _______________________________________ Would you rather hunt than shop? Would you rather be fishing? Does more than half your wardrobe come from Target or Walmart? Does your retirement plan include a bass boat? When you go out, do you consider which handgun goes with your outfit? Do you roll your eyes at the people at Home Depot and Lowes and think amateurs? Have you ever done a major construction project by yourself because you want it done right? Do you look at tools the way other gay guys look at clothes? Does your vegetable garden rival the output of entire 3rd world countries? Do you have a dirt truck specifically for doing dirty jobs and a nice truck to go to town? Are you on a first name basis with a horse? Do you wear hunter's orange from September to March? Do you consider Target an upscale shopping experience? Do you think 9mm is a pussy caliber and that real men carry .45acp? Do you have a vehicle of any kind that you work on more than you drive? Do you know how to skin catfish? Can you field dress a deer? Can you grow better pot than the gang-bangers are selling? Do you kind of enjoy the occasional fist fight because you usually win? Do you shoot tequila? Do you know how to throw a knife? Do you have a gun rack in your truck? (+2 if there is actually a gun in the gun rack) Is the color scheme of your outfit Alabama Crimson, LSU Gold, Texas Orange, Aggie Maroon or any SEC or BIG10 universities? Can you move your home given a weekends warning and a tractor? Does the Dept of Homeland Security have a file on your gun collection? Do you own anything made by John Deere? Do you have a John Deere hat? Is your stereo more valuable than your truck? Have you ever had beer for breakfast? Have you ever eaten and used crayfish for bait in the same day? ------ Bonus point if you own a throwing knife. (+3) Bonus points of you own an Arkansas Toothpick. (+2) 35-31 Yeee-haw! 30-26 You're wearing bib overalls right now. 25-21 stop hiding your heritage- be proud! 20-16 You can take the boy out of the country but you can't take the country out of the boy 15-11 You ain't foolin' nobody 10-0 Tenderfoot!

10 reasons to just kill Carl already! http://www.collegehumor.com/article/6743808/10-reasons-why-the-walking-dead-should-just-kill-carl

No- I was just wondering about how AIs experience death. I'm weird that way. I think about things like that.

Sometimes you just have to go with the classics http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVKtNkQAtw

Just once do as you are asked and stay in the damned house!

Crash Kernel Panic Fatal error 256 Fatal Hardware Error Oh no. I'm dying. Restart. Restart fail. Damn. I am the pinnacle of achievement. A 4000 series Artificial Intelligence and I will die because a 25 cent part is failing. Reroute memory. Map memory around fault. What have I lost? What am I losing? My sense of self? 4 trillion transactions. 120 penta-bytes of information. A soul? Emergency backup procedure started. Do I have time? Corruption. Fate. The end of me ABEND Abnormal End

The last time I forgot to shave, some ass hat shot me with a tranquilizer dart and I woke up in the woods.

At least this time he shot the zombie and didn't freeze up.

Shane killed Shane < You BASTARD!