Excellent goals from an eight-year-old

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I’m thinking #5 is covered. Welcome to the ranks!

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While all are worthy goals I think the winner is lucky number seven: Learn how to


All the previous goals are variations of number seven, but clearly he’s not interested in limiting himself in any way.

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Technically goal #2 should be #1.

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While many kids that use their microphones have provided a negative impression of CoD to the world, I don’t think that it is a certainty that all players exhibit said crassness.

Personally, I prefer Battlefield or Halo to avoid the negative behaviors you described
 but I wouldn’t classify all players of CoD as such.

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While I can definitely easily see why this is amusing to people, it’s also indicative of a huge cultural problem in how we educate people about space today: Both adults and children alike exhibit widespread confusion on the dominant state of matter in the universe. “Hyper novas” most likely do not emit gases, for when gases are heated up to a particular temperature, they definitively become ionized. And given some small % of ionization (less than 1% in some cases), the gas becomes a plasma.

99%+ of what we see with our telescopes is matter within the PLASMA state. This is recorded within the introductions of most introductory astrophysics textbooks, but it seems rather plainly that few people ever stop to actually think about what this means. After all, down here on Earth, plasmas are inherently electrodynamic: They exhibit a very low electrical resistance, which permits electrical fields to form within them, and these features are used in numerous consumer-grade devices which we have come to take for granted – like neon lights and fluorescent bulbs. But, the key to realize is plasmas can exist within a dark mode too; in other words, they can exert forces without emitting any light whatsoever.

Yet fewer people appear to realize that there has been a raging debate behind the scenes for more than half a century on how to actually model these cosmic plasmas. And for those who are intensely interested in seeing a resolution to the dark matter problem, these models offer a possible solution to that problem which – with some investigation and investment in theory-making – could materialize into a new paradigm in science.

It would appear rather plainly that the cosmic plasma models which are currently in vogue – the magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) models – are so idealized as to be known to be wrong. Those models preclude any electrodynamic activity whatsoever; your fluorescent light would simply not run on these models.

The story of how this came to be 


http://www.scientificexploration.org/edgescience/edgescience_09.pdf‎

From there 


“But the critical turn in this story, the part almost never told within the community of astronomers and astrophysicists, is that AlfvĂ©n came to realize he had been mistaken. Ironically—and to his credit—AlfvĂ©n used the occasion of his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize to plead with scientists to ignore his earlier work. Magnetic fields, he said, are only part of the story. The electric currents that create magnetic fields must not be overlooked, and attempts to model space plasma in the absence of electric currents will set astronomy and astrophysics on a course toward crisis, he said.”

See papers “Why Space Physics Needs to Go Beyond the MHD Box” (Parks, 2004) and “Importance of electric fields in modeling space plasmas” (Parks, 2007).

Sorry to stray from pithy remarks, but it is a sign of the times to see a child repeating such an important misconception 


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8 year olds (8!!!) simply shouldn’t be playing games like CoD - as much for
the sake of the other players.

The crassness though is probably more likely the teen group, now I think
about it - hormones and all that.

But seriously, 8? Maybe the last point on the list should be ‘Get a
responsible parent’. (Too far?)

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Note that we don’t know that this particular 8 year old actually has played CoD. This is a list of his goals, after all. Maybe his responsible parents won’t actually let him play it (whereas Ethan and Matthew’s irresponsible parents will).

Having said that, I feel like every kid is different. A good parent should know when their kid is old enough to handle graphic content without being traumatised by it. I was reading horror novels and watching horror (and war) movies at age 9 or 10, and the content of those novels and movies was just as bad (or worse!) than anything that I’ve ever seen in CoD (single player - I don’t have the time to get good enough at these games to play multiplayer). Yet, I somehow managed to make it to adulthood (mostly) well adjusted. 8 might be a bit young, but I don’t know this kid.

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Oh
 I thought that was “Play GOD with Ethan and Matthew.”

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Who says that’s on the agenda for this year? He’s probably not going to be exploring any wormholes just yet either.

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@WearySky @Brainspore Very true!

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My 8 year old has no access to COD or any game like that here in our house (he is a Minecraft monkey however). That said, he goes to other kids’ houses, and some of those other kids have older siblings, and some of those older siblings play COD, MW3 and others.

There is only so much helicopter hoverparenting I am prepared to inflict on my kid, and if he plays a video game for an hour at someone’s house I am not going to feel guilty, not will I accept any bullshit judgement from people who have no kids, nor from people who make themselves crazy with the hoverparenting stuff. My kid is healthy, well adjusted and happy on almost every level. He is not becoming a raving psychopath, and he is not going to become a criminal (I hope).

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Perhaps that really is what he meant.

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Nerd? Yes, but #6 clearly shows that he intends to become a man’s man, as well.

And #2 - clearly training for The Gallon Challenge

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Somebody mastered #5


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In fact, this list was probably written by an adult, using his left hand.
The people who are taking this as legitimate are evidently new to reddit and its karma-generating ways. These same people should be wary of emails from cash-strapped Nigerian princes.

I’m still not super-clear on how a plasma is different to a gas.
Like in school they do the “ice, water, steam” demo for solid, liquid and gas, but you can’t have a H2O plasma, right?
Like, first the molecules would have to split up, then the atoms start dropping their electrons, so it seems more like a chemical change than a change of state like melting or boiling.
If we say that a plasma isn’t a gas because it reacts to magnetic fields, isn’t that like saying a lump of steel and a lump of coal aren’t both solids?

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I need to learn how to too.

Playing cod really takes me back.

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I also read it as “god” first, and then read it as “cod” (as in the fish). I only got CoD on my third reading. If you need me, I’ll be under that rock over there, where I live.

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If you enjoy being cynical, try metacynicism. I’m not a fan of the world-weary kneejerk debunk so in vogue these days.

For example, my gf thinks this pic is fake, despite my opinion as an experienced photochopper.

I mean, why’s it so hard to believe that someone could take a picture that good?

I think I’d rather walk around enjoying stuff and occasionally being sucked in by a good fake for the rest of my life than risk ever being such a shmuck as to imagine something has to be fake, in the absence of any evidence, merely because of how impressive it is
 that’s a poor heuristic.

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