Great Online Bible Research Website

I was just looking for a few Bible verses to share with a friend, and I came across this great website,  Bible Hub. Often when I'm looking for a Bible verse, I'll know the basic message of the verse, but I won't know the address, so I won't be able to read the actual verse itself. This website has all sorts of neat things, with lots of different translations, commentaries, the actual Greek, photos of locations mentioned in the Bible,  etc.
 I hope y'all find it helpful also...
~Kelsey Morgan

Current Favorite Color

 

I really love bright colors, especially warm toned ones. Although  I really love yellow, coral is my current favorite.

The color coral can be a pinkish orange, orangey hot pink, or lighter orange pink. I especially love the brighter orange version. The other day a bought a new summer cardiagan, and decided to take a picture of all the coral/orange clothes I have, only after I took the picture did I realize I actually had more clothing in that color than I thought. :)

Since coral is a popular color this year, it's really easy to find in clothing stores, and thankfully, it's also one of the colors I'm supposed to wear to complement my warm skin tone.

 

 

 

 

Y'all enjoy the weekend!

~Kelsey Morgan

 

 

Sometime between the 30th of March, and the 1st of April, my little baby sister  went to live in heaven forever. Although the baby was a few weeks from being able to determine the gender, we belive she was a little girl.
My parents had bought a baby doppler machine, so up untill the time she passed away,  Mom listened to her heartbeat everyday, and the rest of our family often joined in. It was such a neat experience to be able to hear it, especially since we did not have the machine with the other babies that were miscarried.
We were all very shocked to lose her at fourteen weeks, and disapointed that we had waited untill twelve weeks to tell people, since then we were not able to share the happiness for very long.
It just makes you wonder why God would allow us to have that hope, and make our plans and dreams, only to have them torn away three and a half months later.
 Following God's will for your life and walking in obedience to His Word does not ensure earthy happiness at all, but it does reap rewards in heaven. I know that this little baby is just one more precious life that will forever be able to worship God, along with the other four other babies, because of my parents' willingness to let God choose the size of our family.

Jerimiah 29:11
For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.

Romans 8:28 
And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

Blessings,
             Kelsey

Exciting New Blog Update

 

 

 

Operation Easter Dress pt. 3 (final!)

Well, I have good news, and I have bad news...

The good news is that the dress is finished, it looks very nearly perfect, and fits wonderfully! (Plus, it's completion only required 2 trips to the fabric store- definitely a record. :) )

The bad news is that I'm a rather impatient seamstress, and couldn't bring myself to stop at a few points to photograph my progress. It probably would have been boring anyway. I spent a lot of extra time making sure it would hold up through the washing machine- the entire dress is lined and serged, and the top is actually double lined, so that nothing can come unraveled and you can't see any seam allowances through the chiffon. I'm not going to post a picture of the finished dress before Sunday, though, since that kind of defeats the purpose of waiting to wear it, but I'll post pictures asap afterwards!

Hope everyone enjoys the rest of the week!

Operation Easter Dress pt. 2 (by Kendal)

To celebrate gaining three semesters of college credits (I passed my last CLEP for that semester last night!) I decided not to even think about clep tests today, and do "just exactly what I like, the whole day long" (Roman Holiday).  :) I spent most of my free time this morning recoloring my hair, which turned out nicely, and after lunch I decided to finally start on my dress for Easter Sunday. I really hadn't done anything with it besides think about how to put it together, but today I started the actual measuring and calculating. This is a pic of the paper I was writing everything on, it's just sideways.:)

 

After getting some basic calculations for different pieces of the dress down, I decided to cut out the skirt portion of the dress, since that will take up the most fabric. I'll then be able to see exactly what I have to work with for the top. After a lot of measuring, math, cutting, trimming, more measuring, and more trimming (chiffon is SO hard to work with) I finally finished cutting out the chiffon for the skirt. It's a half circle, and should be just above ankle length when it's hemmed. The lining for the skirt portion was easier to do- it's an A-line, and is mid-calf length. When everything was cut and trimmed, I ironed everything, sewed the two lining pieces together, and basted the lining to the chiffon at the waist. It looks promising! I'm just holding it on in these pictures- the side seam won't be sewn together until it's attached to the top and I put the side zipper in.

Side view:

 

Front view:

 

It flows so nicely. :) I can't wait to start on the top and attach the two!

 

-Kendal

A Quote I Came Across While Studying (by Kendal)

"Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty." -Edgar Degas

An Example of What Can Happen at The Chicken

While studying at Chick-fil-A the other day before work, I came across the following bit of nonsense in my Humanities CLEP exam book:

"how i became charming, likeable and delightful
by tristan tzara
19th december 1920

I sleep very late. I commit suicide at 65%. My life is very cheap, it's only 30% of life for me. My life has 30% of life. It lacks arms, strings and a few buttons. 5% is devoted to a state of semi-lucid stupor accompanied by anaemic crackling. This 5% is called DADA. So life is cheap. Death is a bit more expensive. But life is charming and death is equally charming. "

Crazy, right? I still can't believe that was actually in a textbook! I turns out that it is a result of the "dada" art movement- who knew? I just had to share it with someone, and I knew Rees and Dave- two guys I work with- would appreciate the craziness. After we all read it a few times, we were inspired to write our own nonsensical paragraphs...

Disclaimer: Rees, Dave, and I do not necessarily agree with anything we wrote- the following paragraphs were written merely for laughs- do not attempt to follow any advice that we may or may not have implied we were giving. :)

My version:
A Matter of Opinion

I know 9/10ths earthly. That which is not earthly fails to exist as it ceases to be unknown. No knowledge pertains to what is known, but half of my knowledge is known. Thoughts are attainable and lucid as an ellipse. Thoughtless knowledge is known 11%, but primarily 95% of knowledge is factually abstract. Life is the majority of knowledge, because when knowledge fully repents of earthly properties, to know is to live.

Rees's version:
I Do Not Exist

What is purpose? Does it mean anything at all? Or maybe it is meaning to mean it is meaning itself? Who knows? Who's to know? What's to know? Nobody's to know, or maybe anybody will ever know it at all! Maybe so? Maybe no. Maybe ever. Maybe superficially. But to know is to mean, and to mean is to purpose, and these are the same. Are you following me? Possibly not, so I will continue. To know anything I say is to imply I make any sense, and if I do make sense then I have purpose. But have we decided what purpose is at all? No? Then no it is! And if we have not decided what purpose is then I make no sense, and if I make no sense then how are you to know I even exist, for even if I say I exist but make no sense, who's to know I make no sense? Who's to even care? Nobody I guess. So I've concluded: this is better than coffee.

Dave's version:
Die

If you feel me, then you know me. For feeling is more than a mere sense-based superstition based on the illusions of ever growing wonder. To be sure of nothing is to be sure of what you understand. But don't base understanding upon what you feel. Feeling withers the flower and takes cheap tricks from a deceitful magician. So grow weary only when necessary. Necessity know no feeling. Death is absence of life, but death brings life. So die.


We actually each had a message we were sort of trying to communicate- mine is about how we can really never know how much we know, or if what we think we know is true; Rees's was questioning the meaning of purpose and meaning, and Dave claimed that his is about love. :)

Are you inspired to write your own?

-Kendal

Operation Easter Dress- Year 4 (pt.1) (by Kendal)

Every year I design and make a dress for Easter Sunday- this will be the fourth year in a row, assuming it works out again. When Kelsey and I were little, Mom made us Easter dresses (not every year, but often enough that it was a tradition of sorts). So when I could sew clothing well on my own, I decided to make a dress for Easter Sunday. I was 16 that year, and had already been experimenting somewhat successfully with clothing design, so I decided to design the dress myself. It worked, and I've done it every year since. Now that it's a tradition, there are a few guidelines that I follow regarding my "Easter Dress":

1: It has to be the first Spring dress I make that year
2: It is the first Spring outfit that I wear to church that year (supposedly there's a fashion rule that says that you shouldn't wear spring clothes/shoes until Easter Sunday anyway)
3: I've made the dress white on alternating years- why break the tradition now?
4: It has to be a design that goes outside my current comfort zone

I'm willing to break any of these if necessary, but I've stuck to them so far. :)

Here are the designs from previous years:

The first dress was white eyelet- the style was probably a bit young for a 16 year old, but it was pretty, and I enjoyed making and wearing it. Here is a drawing from my design folder- I no longer have the actual dress:

I made the next dress out of Swiss dot, and was a little more daring with the design. It was a combination of two patterns- one I had designed and one I bought- plus a tie in the front similar to one I had seen on a friend's dress. (Beware to my friends- I may copy elements of your clothing!) Here is the dress and the drawing:

Sorry about the quality of these pics- I didn't feel like dragging out the camera, so I used my webcam.

 

I really took on a challenge with the next dress. It was definitely the most difficult thing I have ever designed- it took weeks just to make the pattern. I had seen a similar dress at Khols for $150, but I wasn't willing to spend that much on a somewhat casual dress, so I made my own version. I had no idea what a challenge it would be to make a lined dress solely out of vertical panels, but it was worth it! The design:

Kelsey and I did a photo shoot with the dress in Floyd:

This year I knew I would make the dress in a color other than white, but I didn't have any strong inspiration. I wanted to use chiffon (which I have avoided for years, but used successfully in a semi-formal dress I designed last fall), so I sketched something out that I thought would be workable with that fabric. (For those of you who don't sew, chiffon is almost always an absolute nightmare to work with, but it hangs and flows SO nicely)

After I showed my original drawing to Mom, I had to adjust the drawing a little (modesty factor vs. artistic design- you know how it goes) and this is what I came up with:

It's pretty, and doable, but I still wasn't feeling inspired, so I did a Google search for chiffon dresses hoping to get some ideas. I found a dress I liked, and made some adjustments, and this was the result:

(you can click on the picture to see the back- it is pretty much the same as the front, though)

It will be slightly simpler (less time consuming!) than the previous idea would be, which is great since I'm trying to complete a good bit of CLEP testing right now, and don't really have a ton of time for sewing. :) I think it's somehow more artistic as well... I don't know exactly why...

I'll probably still make the other dress, or some version of it, later this year, but I'm definitely sticking with the second idea for the annual Easter Dress.

 

I went ahead and bought fabric this afternoon, here is a picture:

 

The color isn't quite accurate- it's a bright, somewhat greenish, robin's egg blue. Kelsey wouldn't let me get the periwinkle color. :) I'm sure I'll like this color best anyway...

 

Since I've never done posts on my design process, I think I'll at least attempt to post at different points while I'm making this dress. (I probably won't start working on it for a couple of weeks, though.) Unfortunately, this means y'all will know if the project is a total flop, but I suppose that's  ok. :)

 

Well, I hope all of you are having a great week so far! -Kendal

Worn by Tenth Avenue North (by Kendal)

 

Kelsey and I made this video today of me singing Tenth Avenue North's song "Worn". We decided to play around with "mixing", and added audio of me playing the guitar afterwards. Kelsey patiently filmed it for me. The quality of our camera microphone was an irritation- it makes the audio harsh and wobbly (on all but the softest notes it sounds sharp, and like I'm singing from my head)  but we enjoyed playing around with Windows Movie Maker. We think it might help to tape part of a cotton ball over the microphone... maybe we'll try it sometime. (Kelsey is reminding me that she is getting a nice camera with video soon, so we won't have to deal with that in the future) My singing is definitely not the greatest anyway- I was trying really hard not to mess up on the piano, as all I had to work from was the chords, so we just filmed it and hoped for the best. :) Let us know what you think (even if you hate it. :) )!

 

can you raed tihs?

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlya s tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it.
Very interesting, isn't it? -Kendal

Small blog updates

I finally decided to change my "profile" picture and "my brothers and sisters" picture, and I'm thinking about getting a new background.
My profile picture was three years old, and since then I've been through a few different changes, so I thought a new picture would be nice. Some of them were, getting  contacts nearly two years ago, got braces, got them off last year (yay) , and went through a variety of hair cuts and styles.
The brothers and sisters picture was old enough that I was regularly correcting the ages, so I put up one we took just a few weeks ago. It's kinda neat I have enough siblings to wear a whole package of socks at once! :) (If you're confused at that statement, just scroll down and look at the picture)
Sometime soon I'll post some pictures that we took for our Christmas card, they're really cute. We took them at Nagshead in October, while we were there with our Granddad.
I'm going to get to the second part of my post soon, which will include pictures from that vacation.
I saw a neat hairstyle on   Rachel Heffington's blog the otherday, so I tried it out. It was very easy to do. Here is the video tutorial. I try to not use curling irons, since they're so bad on your hair, so I put my hair up in pin curls, and it turned out well.

I hope everyone was able to get out and enjoy the beautiful weather today!
Have a blessed week,
Kelsey

 

Is Time Travel Possible? by Kendal

I like to pretend to be a genius and contemplate travel through and outside of the fourth dimension, so I thought this article was pretty awesome. I googled "is it possible to build a time machine" and this came up- it's super interesting, and explained in very simple terms. It's a long article, but if this kind of thing interests you, you won't be able to stop reading. :) If you do read it, please share your opinion!

Here are a few questions that came to mind when I was reading it:  Do you think it's possible to travel to the future, but not the past? If you haven't heard of the grandfather paradox, look it up and tell me what you think in light of that. And do you think you would see a younger version of yourself if you traveled to the past, or would the present you be the only you? Would you be your current age, or would you suddenly be your younger age, in which case you would not have traveled at all- you would merely live again. Is that impossible, and in itself prevents travel to the past? Or does that actually mean that remembering the past is the same thing as traveling back in time...and is that connected to deja vu somehow? Now you probably think that I'm really weird, but I just find it all so interesting!

"Hello. My name is Stephen Hawking. Physicist, cosmologist and something of a dreamer. Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free. Free to explore the universe and ask the big questions, such as: is time travel possible? Can we open a portal to the past or find a shortcut to the future? Can we ultimately use the laws of nature to become masters of time itself?
Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank. But these days I'm not so cautious. In fact, I'm more like the people who built Stonehenge. I'm obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I'd visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens. Perhaps I'd even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.
To see how this might be possible, we need to look at time as physicists do - at the fourth dimension. It's not as hard as it sounds. Every attentive schoolchild knows that all physical objects, even me in my chair, exist in three dimensions. Everything has a width and a height and a length.
But there is another kind of length, a length in time. While a human may survive for 80 years, the stones at Stonehenge, for instance, have stood around for thousands of years. And the solar system will last for billions of years. Everything has a length in time as well as space. Travelling in time means travelling through this fourth dimension.
To see what that means, let's imagine we're doing a bit of normal, everyday car travel. Drive in a straight line and you're travelling in one dimension. Turn right or left and you add the second dimension. Drive up or down a twisty mountain road and that adds height, so that's travelling in all three dimensions. But how on Earth do we travel in time? How do we find a path through the fourth dimension?
Let's indulge in a little science fiction for a moment. Time travel movies often feature a vast, energy-hungry machine. The machine creates a path through the fourth dimension, a tunnel through time. A time traveller, a brave, perhaps foolhardy individual, prepared for who knows what, steps into the time tunnel and emerges who knows when. The concept may be far-fetched, and the reality may be very different from this, but the idea itself is not so crazy.
Physicists have been thinking about tunnels in time too, but we come at it from a different angle. We wonder if portals to the past or the future could ever be possible within the laws of nature. As it turns out, we think they are. What's more, we've even given them a name: wormholes. The truth is that wormholes are all around us, only they're too small to see. Wormholes are very tiny. They occur in nooks and crannies in space and time. You might find it a tough concept, but stay with me.

Enlarge  

A wormhole is a theoretical 'tunnel' or shortcut, predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity, that links two places in space-time - visualised above as the contours of a 3-D map, where negative energy pulls space and time into the mouth of a tunnel, emerging in another universe. They remain only hypothetical, as obviously nobody has ever seen one, but have been used in films as conduits for time travel - in Stargate (1994), for example, involving gated tunnels between universes, and in Time Bandits (1981), where their locations are shown on a celestial map

Nothing is flat or solid. If you look closely enough at anything you'll find holes and wrinkles in it. It's a basic physical principle, and it even applies to time. Even something as smooth as a pool ball has tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids. Now it's easy to show that this is true in the first three dimensions. But trust me, it's also true of the fourth dimension. There are tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids in time. Down at the smallest of scales, smaller even than molecules, smaller than atoms, we get to a place called the quantum foam. This is where wormholes exist. Tiny tunnels or shortcuts through space and time constantly form, disappear, and reform within this quantum world. And they actually link two separate places and two different times.
Unfortunately, these real-life time tunnels are just a billion-trillion-trillionths of a centimetre across. Way too small for a human to pass through - but here's where the notion of wormhole time machines is leading. Some scientists think it may be possible to capture a wormhole and enlarge it many trillions of times to make it big enough for a human or even a spaceship to enter.
Given enough power and advanced technology, perhaps a giant wormhole could even be constructed in space. I'm not saying it can be done, but if it could be, it would be a truly remarkable device. One end could be here near Earth, and the other far, far away, near some distant planet.

Theoretically, a time tunnel or wormhole could do even more than take us to other planets. If both ends were in the same place, and separated by time instead of distance, a ship could fly in and come out still near Earth, but in the distant past. Maybe dinosaurs would witness the ship coming in for a landing.
 Now, I realise that thinking in four dimensions is not easy, and that wormholes are a tricky concept to wrap your head around, but hang in there. I've thought up a simple experiment that could reveal if human time travel through a wormhole is possible now, or even in the future. I like simple experiments, and champagne.

So I've combined two of my favourite things to see if time travel from the future to the past is possible.
Let's imagine I'm throwing a party, a welcome reception for future time travellers. But there's a twist. I'm not letting anyone know about it until after the party has happened. I've drawn up an invitation giving the exact coordinates in time and space. I am hoping copies of it, in one form or another, will be around for many thousands of years. Maybe one day someone living in the future will find the information on the invitation and use a wormhole time machine to come back to my party, proving that time travel will, one day, be possible.
In the meantime, my time traveller guests should be arriving any moment now. Five, four, three, two, one. But as I say this, no one has arrived. What a shame. I was hoping at least a future Miss Universe was going to step through the door. So why didn't the experiment work? One of the reasons might be because of a well-known problem with time travel to the past, the problem of what we call paradoxes.
Paradoxes are fun to think about. The most famous one is usually called the Grandfather paradox. I have a new, simpler version I call the Mad Scientist paradox.
I don't like the way scientists in movies are often described as mad, but in this case, it's true. This chap is determined to create a paradox, even if it costs him his life. Imagine, somehow, he's built a wormhole, a time tunnel that stretches just one minute into the past.

 

Through the wormhole, the scientist can see himself as he was one minute ago. But what if our scientist uses the wormhole to shoot his earlier self? He's now dead. So who fired the shot? It's a paradox. It just doesn't make sense. It's the sort of situation that gives cosmologists nightmares.
This kind of time machine would violate a fundamental rule that governs the entire universe - that causes happen before effects, and never the other way around. I believe things can't make themselves impossible. If they could then there'd be nothing to stop the whole universe from descending into chaos. So I think something will always happen that prevents the paradox. Somehow there must be a reason why our scientist will never find himself in a situation where he could shoot himself. And in this case, I'm sorry to say, the wormhole itself is the problem.
In the end, I think a wormhole like this one can't exist. And the reason for that is feedback. If you've ever been to a rock gig, you'll probably recognise this screeching noise. It's feedback. What causes it is simple. Sound enters the microphone. It's transmitted along the wires, made louder by the amplifier, and comes out at the speakers. But if too much of the sound from the speakers goes back into the mic it goes around and around in a loop getting louder each time. If no one stops it, feedback can destroy the sound system.
The same thing will happen with a wormhole, only with radiation instead of sound. As soon as the wormhole expands, natural radiation will enter it, and end up in a loop. The feedback will become so strong it destroys the wormhole. So although tiny wormholes do exist, and it may be possible to inflate one some day, it won't last long enough to be of use as a time machine. That's the real reason no one could come back in time to my party.
Any kind of time travel to the past through wormholes or any other method is probably impossible, otherwise paradoxes would occur. So sadly, it looks like time travel to the past is never going to happen. A disappointment for dinosaur hunters and a relief for historians.
But the story's not over yet. This doesn't make all time travel impossible. I do believe in time travel. Time travel to the future. Time flows like a river and it seems as if each of us is carried relentlessly along by time's current. But time is like a river in another way. It flows at diff erent speeds in diff erent places and that is the key to travelling into the future. This idea was first proposed by Albert Einstein over 100 years ago. He realised that there should be places where time slows down, and others where time speeds up. He was absolutely right. And the proof is right above our heads. Up in space.
This is the Global Positioning System, or GPS. A network of satellites is in orbit around Earth. The satellites make satellite navigation possible. But they also reveal that time runs faster in space than it does down on Earth. Inside each spacecraft is a very precise clock. But despite being so accurate, they all gain around a third of a billionth of a second every day. The system has to correct for the drift, otherwise that tiny di fference would upset the whole system, causing every GPS device on Earth to go out by about six miles a day. You can just imagine the mayhem that that would cause.
The problem doesn't lie with the clocks. They run fast because time itself runs faster in space than it does down below. And the reason for this extraordinary e ffect is the mass of the Earth. Einstein realised that matter drags on time and slows it down like the slow part of a river. The heavier the object, the more it drags on time. And this startling reality is what opens the door to the possibility of time travel to the future.
Right in the centre of the Milky Way, 26,000 light years from us, lies the heaviest object in the galaxy. It is a supermassive black hole containing the mass of four million suns crushed down into a single point by its own gravity. The closer you get to the black hole, the stronger the gravity. Get really close and not even light can escape. A black hole like this one has a dramatic e ffect on time, slowing it down far more than anything else in the galaxy. That makes it a natural time machine.
I like to imagine how a spaceship might be able to take advantage of this phenomenon, by orbiting it. If a space agency were controlling the mission from Earth they'd observe that each full orbit took 16 minutes. But for the brave people on board, close to this massive object, time would be slowed down. And here the e ffect would be far more extreme than the gravitational pull of Earth. The crew's time would be slowed down by half. For every 16-minute orbit, they'd only experience eight minutes of time.

Inside the Large Hadron Collider

Around and around they'd go, experiencing just half the time of everyone far away from the black hole. The ship and its crew would be travelling through time. Imagine they circled the black hole for five of their years. Ten years would pass elsewhere. When they got home, everyone on Earth would have aged five years more than they had.
So a supermassive black hole is a time machine. But of course, it's not exactly practical. It has advantages over wormholes in that it doesn't provoke paradoxes. Plus it won't destroy itself in a flash of feedback. But it's pretty dangerous. It's a long way away and it doesn't even take us very far into the future. Fortunately there is another way to travel in time. And this represents our last and best hope of building a real time machine.
You just have to travel very, very fast. Much faster even than the speed required to avoid being sucked into a black hole. This is due to another strange fact about the universe. There's a cosmic speed limit, 186,000 miles per second, also known as the speed of light. Nothing can exceed that speed. It's one of the best established principles in science. Believe it or not, travelling at near the speed of light transports you to the future.
To explain why, let's dream up a science-fiction transportation system. Imagine a track that goes right around Earth, a track for a superfast train. We're going to use this imaginary train to get as close as possible to the speed of light and see how it becomes a time machine. On board are passengers with a one-way ticket to the future. The train begins to accelerate, faster and faster. Soon it's circling the Earth over and over again.
To approach the speed of light means circling the Earth pretty fast. Seven times a second. But no matter how much power the train has, it can never quite reach the speed of light, since the laws of physics forbid it. Instead, let's say it gets close, just shy of that ultimate speed. Now something extraordinary happens. Time starts flowing slowly on board relative to the rest of the world, just like near the black hole, only more so. Everything on the train is in slow motion.
This happens to protect the speed limit, and it's not hard to see why. Imagine a child running forwards up the train. Her forward speed is added to the speed of the train, so couldn't she break the speed limit simply by accident? The answer is no. The laws of nature prevent the possibility by slowing down time onboard.
Now she can't run fast enough to break the limit. Time will always slow down just enough to protect the speed limit. And from that fact comes the possibility of travelling many years into the future.
Imagine that the train left the station on January 1, 2050. It circles Earth over and over again for 100 years before finally coming to a halt on New Year's Day, 2150. The passengers will have only lived one week because time is slowed down that much inside the train. When they got out they'd find a very diff erent world from the one they'd left. In one week they'd have travelled 100 years into the future. Of course, building a train that could reach such a speed is quite impossible. But we have built something very like the train at the world's largest particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
Deep underground, in a circular tunnel 16 miles long, is a stream of trillions of tiny particles. When the power is turned on they accelerate from zero to 60,000mph in a fraction of a second. Increase the power and the particles go faster and faster, until they're whizzing around the tunnel 11,000 times a second, which is almost the speed of light. But just like the train, they never quite reach that ultimate speed. They can only get to 99.99 per cent of the limit. When that happens, they too start to travel in time. We know this because of some extremely short-lived particles, called pi-mesons. Ordinarily, they disintegrate after just 25 billionths of a second. But when they are accelerated to near-light speed they last 30 times longer.
It really is that simple. If we want to travel into the future, we just need to go fast. Really fast. And I think the only way we're ever likely to do that is by going into space. The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000mph. But to travel in time we'll have to go more than 2,000 times faster. And to do that we'd need a much bigger ship, a truly enormous machine. The ship would have to be big enough to carry a huge amount of fuel, enough to accelerate it to nearly the speed of light. Getting to just beneath the cosmic speed limit would require six whole years at full power.
The initial acceleration would be gentle because the ship would be so big and heavy. But gradually it would pick up speed and soon would be covering massive distances. In one week it would have reached the outer planets. After two years it would reach half-light speed and be far outside our solar system. Two years later it would be travelling at 90 per cent of the speed of light. Around 30 trillion miles away from Earth, and four years after launch, the ship would begin to travel in time. For every hour of time on the ship, two would pass on Earth. A similar situation to the spaceship that orbited the massive black hole.
After another two years of full thrust the ship would reach its top speed, 99 per cent of the speed of light. At this speed, a single day on board is a whole year of Earth time. Our ship would be truly flying into the future.
The slowing of time has another benefit. It means we could, in theory, travel extraordinary distances within one lifetime. A trip to the edge of the galaxy would take just 80 years. But the real wonder of our journey is that it reveals just how strange the universe is. It's a universe where time runs at different rates in different places. Where tiny wormholes exist all around us. And where, ultimately, we might use our understanding of physics to become true voyagers through the fourth dimension." 
 

Year in Review 2012 part 1

Hello, everyone!

I hope you all had a blessed Thanksgiving and Christmas with your families this year. I know I did! (I'll get to that later, probably in part 2)

 Thank you to Kendal who has kept up with my blog in my negligence. I have been reading all of y'all's posts, but haven't gotten around to posting any myself, as you have seen.

 I've been fairly busy with my junior year of high school, which I'm enjoying.  I'm excited about two new jobs that I'll be starting in early 2013. I'm still playing around with photography, and I'm looking forward to buying a SLR camera of some sort soon. The camera that I have been using is almost useless now, and I decided to save my money, and buy the best camera I could as a replacement, instead of buying one in between. I've been enjoying practicing taking photos of people, instead of only animals and up close flowers, though I enjoy both. Taking pictures of people definitely requires much more patience though! :)

I have numerous pictures I wish to share, so I'm going to organize them into categories.

My Photography

 (note, some of these were taken in 2011, but never shared, or just favorites)

                                   I got the idea for this cool photo from Matthew Walker, he had taken a picture in a similar way and shared it on his blog, so I had to try it out!

 I love cooking, and photography, and the two go together well, don't you think? I've actually entertained the idea of being a food stylist. By the way, this desert I made was FABULOUS!

 I thought this picture was so funny! The female kept stretching up to grab a sunflower seed.

 I had the picture below printed and framed and it's on my dresser.

 This summer I set up a hummingbird feeder, and these beautiful bees were the first to find it. Eventually hummingbirds did come, and I enjoyed many hours watching them. I even got a video of a female hummingbird cleaning her feathers way up in our tree!

 This is Jimmy, the bird we nursed for a week until he died. You can find the whole story on this blog.

Friends

These pictures were at one of my friend's surprise room makeover party, in February

 Needless to say, she was VERY surprised! :) 

 We shared a few trips to Busch Gardens with the Larums this year, and had a blast!

 We also discovered we are the perfect size for making pyramids, almost pain-free. As you can see in this photo, we were a little worried about Katie. :)

 We had a fun time at the Pollards house one summer evening. ( I stepped out in the rain to watch the boys try to catch a chicken, and got soaked. I had read that a chicken could be hypnotized by laying it on it's side, and drawing a line with your finger from it's beak about a foot long repeatedly, and wanted to try it out. Unfortunately, the boys couldn't even get to the chickens because of all the water, but we had fun anyway)

 This was my friend Cailin's first ever roller-coaster ride, and she loved it!

 The Larums came over one afternoon sometime around the Fourth of July I believe.

 OK, let me just say I wasn't even sure if I should post these pictures. But I had great fun and you can go ahead and have a good laugh. :) This was mine and Cailin's surprise '50's themed 17th birthday party. I've wanted to have a '50's party for a while now, so I was thrilled!

We had hamburgers and coke in glass bottles ( I saved mine, and it's on my dresser) painted our nails (red was a favorite) watched "I Love Lucy" did each other's hair, and attempted to do '50's makeup. (I think we got the red lipstick down) I did Cailin (the girl in the middle) and Rachel's hair. (the girl in the turquoise shirt)

 My friend Olivia made two of these delicious cakes. Isn't it cute?

 This is before the activities began, and our somewhat scary transformation! ;)

Thanks to Olivia, who was the main planner of this event, Mom, Kendal,  and Morgan for also doing much of the planning, and the Mitchell family for offering your home and everything else you did behind the scenes. Love you girls, you're the best!

Things with Family

This was at a Romney rally, which was a neat experience. Dad was able to take off work to come last minute, and got to talk to Governor Romney and shake his hand. Although I was greatly disappointed in the outcome of the election, the future of our country is in Gods hands, not whoever gets elected.

 This year our family was greatly blessed by the arrival of a precious little cousin, Matilda Evelyn, born in early October. As we only have one other cousin whom we rarely see, we are super excited about little Matilda. (she is my mom's sister's baby, and named after her two great- grandmothers)

 This is the day of the barn dance at the Alexanders, and the first time we met Matilda.

 

I have many pictures of Joshua asleep in funny places around the house. This was  after a day swimming at the YMCA.

This is Kendal in the "uniform" she made for Chick-fil-A cow appreciation day.

These are the shoes the little girl is wearing in the photograph. They are around 100 years old! (I love stuff like this)

Old food processor:

 

New food processor: thanks you, Dad!

 

Chris Tomlin at Glory in the Gardens. This was a truly amazing experience. It was something like I imagine heaven will be like, only in heaven we will be able to see the One we are worshiping.  

 

I hope everyone has a blessed New Year!
I'll have the second part posted soon!
~Kelsey