Rogue Galaxy

Rogue Galaxy is a RPG that released in North America in 2007 for the PS2. I've heard nothing but good things about it (basically summed up as "that game is awesome!" but I've never had the money to buy it since all my funds are going into the new 360 and PS3 games (and Wii if you really want to include that in there). I found out it's basically about a guy named Jaster Rogue that dreams about becoming a space pirate then one day a beast appears and attacks his town. Jaster chases the beast and get's ambushed by smaller beasts, then gets saved by a man known as the Desert Claw. After that the Desert Claw gives Jaster his sword and some pirates mistake Jaster for the Desert Claw. Those pirates help Jaster defeat the beast and their captain asks Jaster to join their crew. That's all I read into the story because I didn't want to read any spoilers, but it sounds a bit like Disney's Treasure Planet to me.

The game was developed by Level-5, which are the creators of Dark Cloud 1 and 2 (which I loved) and it also uses the cel-shaded style graphics. The battle system works pretty much like Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII's did where enemies appear and there's no transition between exploring and battle. Game sites rated it in the 8-9 out of 10 range, so I'm guessing that since game sites and user reviews are both high, the chances of me liking this game are pretty good. I hope that soon I'll have the money and the time to get this game and explore space as Jaster Rogue.

Black Holes

Black holes are pretty much a mystery to everyone. Since we've never been out in space, we've never actually been able to study them close up. However, based on observations, some theories have been produced to try to explain them. The most accepted one is that black holes have gravity wells so deep that time is stopped near them. This makes an event horizon that things can go in, but nothing comes out. Once something (such as light) is past the event horizon, it can't get back out. It's also been shown that black holes have a temperature and give off Hawking radiation. This means that a black hole actually can evaporate if it's small enough if it's giving off more radiation than taking in mass. The study of things like this could make space exploration safer when we get more technologically advanced and are able to go that far into space. I wish that in my lifetime I would get to see humankind adventure that far space into space to see what a black hole actually does, but I know that it will most likely not happen for many, many years.

The Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator in France. I've heard somewhere that it could create a black hole (or at least the media claims it can). I found out that it was made to discover the higgs boson which is the only standard model missing in particle physics. Basically, if we find the higgs boson, it would help explain the origin of mass in the universe. What the Large Hadron Collider does is sends protons at each other near the speed of light, and when they hit they are supposed to recreate the big bang and let us observe particle that were in the big bang that we've never seen before. Along with that came the theory that it has a slight chance to create a black hole. Even if this smallest of chances comes true and a black hole is created, it would be so tiny that it would evaporate because it's not close enough to anything to suck it in so there's no way for it to grow.

Opera

This post is not about the musical opera, but the web browser named Opera. My friend was complaining about me only having Internet Explorer on my laptop one day so I just told him to download whatever web browser he wanted, so he downloaded Opera. Having known nothing about this browser, I decided to look up information on it. I found on wikipedia it supposedly the fastest browser out there and was designed for people with motor impairments. It uses mouse shortcuts such as holding the right button and clicking the left button to go back or holding the right mouse button and dragging the mouse left to go back. So far I've been using this instead of Internet Explorer and haven't had any problems with it, so it seems to me that it's a good web browser.

Sinks with handles

This is any old bathroom sink. You turn the handle, water comes out for you to wash your hands, then you turn it back, dirtying your hands right after washing them. They've made motion-sensor sinks to combat the dirty handles, but usually those are really annoying to get working and then when you finally get water out of them, they shut off right away. After talking with my friend about this, we wondered why they don't just make foot pedal sinks to replace the handles. After looking around, I found that there are actually quite a few sinks that have foot pedals instead, although they appear to be a bit more expensive. The lowest priced handled sink I found was priced at $80, and the cheapest foot pedal one came in at $410. This is a matter of are these sinks so expensive because they cost that much to make? Or is it simply because they have no real competition in the foot pedaled market? I think that if a few public places start to use foot-powered sinks, they could start a new trend that will give people less annoying and cleaner sinks.

Charr

The Charr are an enemy race in Guild Wars that invades Ascalon at the beginning of the first game. I find them to be an interesting enemy because their design is unique (even though based on cats) and they're ways are savage, but as you go through the games you start to understand them better and some people even start to like them (like me). I never knew much about the history of the Charr, but I found out in older times they had a somewhat hierarchical way of living. After a period of them fighting anything that threatened them (sometimes even each other) all the warbands united for the good of the race under a single leader called the Khan-Ur. Sometime after that the human race were made by gods that the Charr didn't recognize, and the humans started to threaten the Charr's dominance over the land. After the Charr got pushed back, the Khan-Ur was assassinated, separating the Charr and giving time for the human to build defenses around their newly seized lands. For over a thousand years no Khan-Ur was made, and what finally made the Charr unite was new "gods" that were the titans. With the power of the titans, the Charr attacked the humans in what is known as the Searing, and that is where the first game starts off. With this newfound history, I like the charr even more because technically, they're just taking back the land the gods took away from them via human force.

Knuckles the Echidna

After posting about Sonic, I started thinking about his friend and rival, Knuckles. I also realized that knuckles was an echidna, and I had no idea what an echidna was. When I looked them up, I kind of thought they looked like a mixture of a hedgehog and an anteater. That makes a somewhat good choice for Sonic's rival since it's not just another hedgehog, but a different, similar looking species. They didn't really make the nose look like an anteater nose, but I can understand why. Having a rival with a long nose, but everything else similar to Sonic facing him would just look silly. They did a great job with the concept of Knuckles since Sonic focuses on speed and Knuckles on strength, Sonic is blue, Knuckles is red, and while Sonic can run so fast he runs up walls, Knuckles can use the spikes on his fists to climb walls. They are opposites in many ways which makes them great rivals, yet they're still friends. Normally I would think they shouldn't be friends, but since they were brought together by a common enemy (Dr. Robotnik), it makes sense to me that they become friend's after his defeat.