Solar System - Sun

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Things you don't know about the Solar System

I've always found space fascinating, and among my first books was a book about astronomy. It was just a small, general guide that had a number of interesting facts about the solar system and the stars and galaxies. This was 1980 or before, and we've made a LOT of discoveries since then, and I've kept up on it, partly thanks to Ars Technica, the Science Channel, and NASA.

I'm going to present a few curious things to you about what surrounds you that I'll bet you don't know. Let's start with the giver of all known life: the Sun.


The Sun is a great big ball of hot gas that sits at the center of our solar system. All the planets orbit around it. In fact, we call it Sol, and that's where the name Solar system comes from, but it's a term that, at least in science fiction circles, is used to describe any star and its orbiting companions.

The next thing you don't know about the Sun is that there is an area outside the Sun that is much much hotter than the surface. The surface is in the range of 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but the corona, which surrounds the Sun, is a couple MILLION degrees! How can this be? So far, no one knows.

The last new thing I'm going to tell you about the Sun (for now) is that, for a long time, there have been some missing neutrinos. A neutrino is a tiny particle that can pass through practically any amount of matter without noticing it - a wall of lead several LIGHT-YEARS thick, would be needed to ensure all neutrinos were blocked - and so they are a good indicator of what's going on inside the Sun. It takes a photon - a particle of light - millions of years to reach the Sun's surface, but neutrinos pass through without delay.

For a long time, scientists' theories on how the Sun worked required that it produce a certain number of neutrinos per hour, but they were only able to detect about 1/3 as many as they predicted they would. Just recently, they came upon the solution: there are three different KINDS of neutrinos, and we could only detect one of those three. But now that we can detect the other two, we've found that the Sun is producing as many neutrinos as were predicted.

Oh, okay, one more thing to add. I recently saw a movie with a really stupid plot - or rather, a plot with no basis whatsoever in science. It seems an alien robotic race built a huge weapon on Earth that was capable of destroying the Sun. Yeah. Um, hey, Michael Bay, do you have any concept what would be required for the Sun to even notice us? Let's see some numbers:

The Sun weighs a third of a MILLION times the Earth. That's not 10 times, not 100 times, not 1000 times, that's about 333,000 times! If we gathered together every single nuclear weapon ever built, that would be a force of about 10,000 megatons of TNT. The "Dinosaur Killer" asteroid was 10,000 times as much as that, or about 100 million megatons. In a single second, the Sun produces another 1500 times as much energy, or about 150 billion megatons. Every single second! I don't care what you say, your Sun-destroyer is a pop-gun, and just using it would have to blow up the planet. Dude, stars eat planets without noticing. You're not going to blow one up with a big gun. God, man, think for a change!

And before you can say "antimatter", to produce that kind of energy is equivalent to denotating 4 million tons of antimatter per second. The only way you're going to create that kind of energy is with another star. Everything else literally pales in comparison.

Ok, that's all for the Sun and my rant about junk-science. Now let's move onward and outward, to Mercury!

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Further reading to whet your appetite for knowledge:
Solar System - Mercury
Space Links
To Your Health - Part 1

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Stony King - 2009

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Many famous and interesting people have had brushes with me that served to skyrocket their careers to new heights. If they hadn't met me, chances are you never would've heard of them. Sure, many of them were famous before they met me, but that's just how awesome I am: I can improve your career before you've even met me!


I've known Stony King all my life: literally. That’s my cousin, and we consider each other brothers. Stony has only recently started his singing career, and that's why I say I've met him in 2009, but he’s always had the fire in him as a great singer.

For those of you who don’t know who Stony King is, or why you should all idolize him, take a look at this video of one of his performances. He's sent me a few recordings of his songs, and I may get a chance to post them some day, but right now I'm having a hard time even figuring out how to post my pictures!

Stony King on YouTube

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You Might not Know how to Drive

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Things you Might not Know

In my travels about the Earth, I have uncovered various truths. It seems there are a lot of people out there who aren’t aware that they don’t know how to drive, or that they don’t know the value of a dollar, or various other Earth-shattering problems. To help regular folks find out if they know this or not, I created some questionnaires so my friends and fans could find out if they are afflicted with these dangerous or inconvenient problems. We’re all often blind to our own problems, right? So take these tests to find out yours.

You Might not Know how to Drive

In my life, I’ve seen some crazy stuff. Most of it, I’ve seen as a truck driver. Most of these, I’ve witnessed myself, but a couple I’ve had told to me by reliable sources. Considering how dangerous it can be to mishandle an automobile weighing in at 1 to 2 tons, this is a very serious affair, and if you don’t know how to drive, it’s important that you find out right away! If you have any reason to believe that you don’t know how to drive, please take this test and keep track of the YES answers. Scores will be tabulated at the end.

1. Have you fallen asleep at the wheel more than once?

2. Do people frequently have to pass you on the right?

3. Do you frequently pass people on the right?

4. Are people constantly flashing their high-beams at you because you don’t know how to turn yours off?

5. Do you regularly drive with your headlights off during poor visibility conditions, thinking you can see just fine, never realizing that other people might not be able to see you?

6. Do you regularly have your blinker on for more than a few seconds when you're not trying to turn or change lanes?

7. Do you often make turns in front of people without bothering to signal?

8. Do you enjoy cutting off other people?

9. Have you ever passed someone, and then slowed down in front of them, just because your exit was coming up?

10. Do you have an aversion to driving at the proper highway speed until someone tries to pass you, and then you get an aversion to being passed and then you either speed up or you block the travel lanes? (Double points for this question.)

11. Do you spontaneously move over to the left lane even when there's no one around you?

12. Has it ever taken more than 20 seconds to pass someone?

13. Do you often sit next to trucks while driving at highway speeds, hoping one of his tires will explode and destroy your car? Or was it just that you wanted to hang out in his blind spot and see if he’d really run you over?

14. Have you ever thought you could go through a red light just because the four people in front of you just did it?

15. Do you often switch back and forth between lanes for no apparent reason?

16. Have you ever tried to avoid a traffic jam by jumping on the shoulder?

17. Has someone THEN cut you off, and then you yelled at them for it?

18. Have you ever switched lanes on the highway and someone has to run off the road to avoid hitting you or you hitting them?

19. Do you drive on the shoulder in the wrong direction?

20. Do you stop on highway entrance ramps when there is no stop sign? (Pennsylvania and New Jersey residents excluded.)

21. Have you ever driven 30 on the interstate because you had car trouble, and then bypassed an exit?

22. Did this exit you bypassed go to a frontage road that would have been a LOT LESS DANGEROUS to the other people on the highway if you had driven on it instead?

23. Have you ever been going 70 down a hill, then slammed your brakes in front of two large, 40-ton semi-trucks, just so you could make an illegal U-turn, and narrowly avoided getting killed only because those drivers right behind you had really good brakes? (Double points for this question.)

24. Do you make left turns from the right turn lane, or right turns from the left turn lane?

25. Do you think it’s acceptable to drive up an entrance ramp just because you missed your exit?

26. Even if you drove up it in reverse?

27. Do you usually drive 55 in a 75 zone, or 75 in a 55 zone?

28. Do you apply makeup or read the newspaper while driving, especially through dense Chicago traffic?

Scoring

0             Excellent! You probably know how to drive.

1-2         Please ask the next policeman you see to take your driver’s license away from you, and not to give it back to you until you perform a driving test with an authorized testing agent.

3+          You are a dangerous hazard to other drivers. Please get off the road before you kill someone!