Blinks & Pics

Guess who has a new blog? Welcome, Tara! Thanks to Lori for spending a bit of her free time helping Tara set it up.

"I pity the fool." Here's a great Mr. T story that happened this past year. Hilariously cool.

I've heard about doctors implanting computer chips into the skulls of paralyzed people as a means of signalling actions with their brains. This article talks about how they're taking that technology to a whole new level now. After the chip and wires are hooked up, the diagnostic system just takes a few minutes to figure out the person's thought processes. The person just has to imagine themselves doing something like opening their e-mail or moving a prosthetic hand and the linked computer can translate those repetitive neural pulses into action. Quite interesting, and who wouldn't want to be a cyborg?

There was an article last year describing how astronomers had found some massive black holes at the edge of visible space. Due to the expansion of the universe and the placement of these black holes, they must have been created around the time the universe was created - and yet, they couldn't have been created then because black holes take such a long time to develop. They were both too young and too old to exist. This article has a new theory that explains that these young black holes could have bent the laws of physics by swallowing their own radiation before the radiation could escape, creating an internal loop that quelled the required explosions of matter and allowed for continued growth. I love this kind of stuff, despite the fact that these kinds of astronomical studies tend to contradict themselves fairly often.

I'm off on another camping trip later this afternoon with the young adults from Open Door. This one will be much easier for me since I'm only driving and I don't have to organize it all like last weekend. Plus, we get to do some tubing down the river. I've done some white water rafting before and that kind of thing is always a great experience. I've been looking forward to this camping trip since Joel Terry told me that he went to it last summer. His high recommendations were the direct reason that I started going to Young Adults every Friday night there.

Finally, I'll post a few more pictures from my camping trip this past weekend, just because I can.

Celia & Candace:

Happy Birthday, Grace!

Abe's Grill:

Anyone from Wawa remember this shirt?