Happy New Year wubbers. Everyone back to normal life?

@Green What'd you get?

@James More/less.

How's it going?

@Hosch250 Trying to remember what the hell I was doing before vacation...its not going great.

LOL.

Anyone get cool loot for christmas?

I deliberately didn't start anything for a couple days before my vacation to avoid that.

No, I didn't, but that's not my fault. I don't know my parents' relatives well, so just got some generic foodstuffs.

And, I'm sorry to say I didn't get them anything in return :(

@Hosch250 Smart.

@Hosch250 This is at least 50% your fault.

(Fixing it for next year--trying to think of something really good. Maybe Secret Hitler?)

@James Yes it is.

And 50% my parents' fault.

@Hosch250 lol

I don't know their number or anything, and I'm not the type to just walk over and knock on their door.

I could ask my mom for their number, I guess.

@Hosch250 I don't personally do the facebook thing anymore but that could be a start if you are on it anyway.

@James No, I don't do any social media socially.

Twitter and LinkedIn professionally, and a Pinterest that hasn't been active for probably 3-4 years.

See, I'm the guy who, if I make it to a party at all, it's by dint of knowing one person vaguely, and they felt sorry for me.

@Hosch250 Yeah, I mainly do nerd stuff and politics on the twitter and then I have a FB account that hasn't seen an update in...5+ years probably.

I don't do politics on Twitter, since I have less than mainstream views.

I don't need that kind of attention.

Happy New Year, my fellow Worldbuilders

It wouldn't do anything except maybe screw me in the workplace.

@Ghanima Happy new year!

@Ghanima Hola :)

@Hosch250 Self awareness is a good thing.

@James Agreed. I'm pretty self-aware.

It gets me in trouble all the time :P

@Hosch250 I find it gets me out of trouble but... Clearly, I'm not you ;)

Or keeps me out of trouble.

LOL. It makes me more blunt about what I think.

Mostly, I keep my mouth shut, but when I do say something...

For people with thick skins, that's a far more tractable approach to take.

Well, when working with them.

Unfortunately, my family is amazingly thin-skinned.

And some of them tend to be a bit of a control freak.

Which I don't play along with anymore.

It's been good lately, though.

@Hosch250 Hooray!

In better news, my sister got married.

In worse news, my family got sick at the wedding, and I expect to go down any day (or, really, hour).

Y'all doing OK in that department still?

Seems like everyone around here (Twin Cities) has been sick lately.

@Hosch250 my wife caught a chest cold that made her sound double her age with a life of chainsmoking unfiltered cigarettes. I'm fine though.

@Green Sounds horrid :( Good luck!

She's a lot better now. A week ago though....

@Green I had that crap it lasted 2 weeks. Suuuuuck.

@Hosch250 I went to college up there.

UMN Twin Cities?

I went to UMN Crookston online campus.

@Hosch250 St Thomas. It was not worth the cost in retrospect.

Oh.

Nice place though.

Some of my brother's acquaintances are going there.

He coaches the local baseball team (even though he's the same age as the kids).

And agreed. My schooling wasn't worth the price either.

Didn't hardly learn anything.

The only reason I am not still in crazy debt 14 years later is because the Air Force paid for most of it.

What did you do in the AF?

Logistics Officer.

Transportation, Supply, Plans, Fuels, and whatever else they needed people to do.

(I paid for half my college with grade-based grants, and my parents did the other half--they told me up front either they paid or I didn't go, since they wouldn't co-sign a loan. Ended up being like 2500/semester that they paid.)

Interesting.

Your parents are weird.

(Though I feel that statement could be applied equally to basically everyone)

They saved money that way, if I failed to pay the loan.

Fair enough.

Because if I took a loan, I would've gone on-campus for engineering.

And that would've at least doubled my costs, and I would've gone to an out-of-state school (in ND) where the reciprocity agreement for resident rates hadn't been renewed.

So, yeah, it worked out OK.

If I ever join the military, I'd try to be an AF or Navy pilot.

what's this reciprocity agreement for resident rates

@Ghanima In the US, there are two rates for college--state resident rates and out-of-state rates.

if I may ask

The resident rates are a lot lower, since the colleges get funding from state taxes.

I see

thanks

So they reduce the rates for residents since they are already paying some.

In some states, college is free for residents.

I think California is one.

I know Alaska is one--they pay for it with the profits from the oil (the state own the oil fields in Alaska, and rents them out to oil companies).

Kind of like how Wyoming is mostly govt land too, but they rent it to farmers.

IIRC, residents don't have to pay taxes in Alaska either, and get a refund, since the state makes so much from renting the oil fields.

And even then, they are severely limiting what can be taken out.

My dad says it's mostly so we are guaranteed to be the last country without oil, so our military stays functional longest.

He's not in the know, but he was in the military and worked in the oil industry, so....

@Hosch250 I take it Alaska tries quite hard to lure residents over there

@Ghanima TBH, I don't know.

It's one of my top places to visit, and maybe live.

Along with the Dakotas and Montana and Utah and Wyoming.

I hate cities. Give me a small town where I know most everyone and a lot of wide open space.

I may be initiating the process to move to SD in a few days/months.

@Hosch250 Rapid City?

No, I don't remember the name. Frankfort City, or something.

It's a small town with 500 people (per 2010 census).

No gas station or grocery store or anything. Those are in the larger city 13 mi away.

Well damn.

Got to prep for a meeting, but tell you more later.

Have fun

OK, I have a couple minutes.

The larger city is just 3k people, and the house looks awesome.

Wood floors, wood paneled walls and ceiling.

Stone counter tops.

Round peaks at the corners, like a temple or castle or something.

And only $70k.

I don't know if it's because it's in the boonies, or if it's because something's wrong, but I suspect the first.

It looks like it was someone's country home (built in 1904), and later they sold the land around it.

I could put 50% down and pay it off within a year, if I can negotiate working remote.

Anyway, time to go.

@Hosch250 well, TBH (again), all I know about Alaska is from the Simpsons moving picture ;)

I know that the North Slope is really, really cold

Yeah, but the southern parts of Alaska are surprisingly temperate from the ocean.

In MN, though, you have to be suicidal to walk 2 blocks to get lunch.

And then they only give you 1 bagel instead of 2. Screw it, I'm not going back :(

I'll live.

Didn't notice the mistake until too late.

@Hosch250 Yeah I remember winters where I'd wake up, look outside and say, "yeah, not going to class today...sweatpants and video games it is."

LOL.

(I was not a great student)

I was homeschooled. Didn't have that choice.

Not the crazy wacky kind of home schooling.

My mom actually made sure I did my work and graded it until I was in HS--then I was told to grade it myself and I'd better not cheat.

Ended up getting straight A's in college, except for one A-, since the teacher would test us a random number of modules ahead of where we were.

@NexTerren Pretty close.

But then, considering what I've seen of other schools, I can't say homeschoolers are any worse.

Or, for that matter, any different.

No idea.

I did Algebra in late middle school.

Or was it mid-middle school? TBH, I don't even know when the cut is.

I did 2 algebras, geometry, pre-calc, and calc in HS. And for sciences, I did General, Physical (basic physics), Biology, Chemisty, Physics, Advanced Chem, and Advanced Phys.

Generally high school is the last 4 years, middle school is the two years before high school.

My Biology and Physics (non-advanced) covered the same material as my college courses.

@NexTerren OK, I think I did algebra in late middle school then.

Each book was 30 lessons, so that was 30 weeks.

And I did extra lessons on some weeks.

And then, we did school the year round to keep us busy (I mentioned my mom had a ton of kids, right?).

So, it wasn't like we were crammed, then had all summer off. It was more steady, and we usually had time to play outside each day.

Or do other non-school activities.

When next someone arrives here, I've a qustion to posit: I read the following at Wikipedia, " The measurable inertia and gravitational attraction of a body in a given frame of reference is determined by its relativistic mass, not merely its rest mass." Does that mean if I accelearte a planet toward the speed of light, it could become a black hole? I.E., a mini-black-hole (planet-sized) would be found roving the universe at nearly the speed of light?

@JBH I found this. physics.stackexchange.com/questions/189015/…

@James In an amusing coincident, my dad got my mom See's chocolates, I got my parents See's chocolates, and my girlfriend got me See's chocolates. Basically, everyone gave everyone the same thing.

. . . So now my house is full of chocolate.

There are worse things a house could be filled with.

Chlorine trifluoride, say.

@Shalvenay Hey. How's your rocketry going?

@HDE226868 did a bit more looking at it -- basically, that giant delta-V number turns out to be a total impulse, if you will...and under my constant mass assumption -- rocket formulas of course won't work, the better analogy is a solar sail XD

Oh, interesting. I wouldn't have thought of that.

I'll have to take a closer look at solar sail maths at relativistic speeds though