The Troll Dens

Existance explained in 105 pages - for reals

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Chenault) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:20:00 +0000

This was gathered form Paleoblog.

The basic idea of Dr. Andrulis’ framework is that all physical reality can be modeled by a single geometric entity with life-like characteristics: the gyre. The so-called “gyromodel” depicts objects—particles, atoms, chemicals, molecules, and cells—as quantized packets of energy and matter that cycle between excited and ground states around a singularity, the gyromodel’s center. A singularity is itself modeled as a gyre, wholly compatible with the thermodynamic and fractal nature of life.

You can download the paper here.

Abstract: Life is an inordinately complex unsolved puzzle. Despite significant theoretical
progress, experimental anomalies, paradoxes, and enigmas have revealed paradigmatic
limitations. Thus, the advancement of scientific understanding requires new models that
resolve fundamental problems. Here, I present a theoretical framework that economically
fits evidence accumulated from examinations of life. This theory is based upon a
straightforward and non-mathematical core model and proposes unique yet empirically
consistent explanations for major phenomena including, but not limited to, quantum
gravity, phase transitions of water, why living systems are predominantly CHNOPS
(carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur), homochirality of sugars and
amino acids, homeoviscous adaptation, triplet code, and DNA mutations. The theoretical
framework unifies the macrocosmic and microcosmic realms, validates predicted laws of
nature, and solves the puzzle of the origin and evolution of cellular life in the universe.

I have not read it but keep thinking its April 1st today.

Medieval Castle in the Ozarks

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Chenault) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:33:00 +0000

For reasl. This project is awesome as all get out and trumps anything else being built today. If you have any interest in castles or castle construction, peruse this site! They are building a castle in the ozarks.

I wish we could have troll con near there.

link

Supernova detection is a go

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Chenault) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 22:08:00 +0000

Uh yeah, read this article, got a bit of it, and come away with the possibility we could detect a supernova in out galaxy shortly before it happens.

It will look like this

or maybe this

before this

I think

Dinosaurs in 3d for the iPad

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Chenault) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:34:00 +0000

A new app for the iPad allows you to explore the world of the Dinosaurs in 3d.

A fully-interactive digital dinosaur encyclopedia, Inside the World of Dinosaurs leverages all the multimedia capabilities of the iPad to engage everyone from paleontologists, to school students, and even fans of 'Jurassic Park' or BBC's 'Walking with Dinosaurs'.

It features all the discovered species from A to Z - from Archeopteryx to Zuniceratops - and a library of 60 fully animated and interactive dinosaurs. You can touch 3D images of the beasts to look at details that pique your interest.

For example, you can analyze skin texture and color by spinning the dinosaur around and zooming in on some areas.

More here.

The app is somewhere in the education section

Music afternoon

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Chenault) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:39:00 +0000

Well, its Friday and I needed some pik-me-up music to energize my weary mind.

Wake UP

They have discovered Ngorondoro The Goblin Cave

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Chenault) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:29:00 +0000

Apparently it lies in Vietnam and is large enough to put a 747 into with plenty of space to book. Filled with scores of caves and crawls this mammoth complex is not yet wholly explored.

Nation Geographic does it again!

Photo property of Nation Geographic, taken by Carsten Peter who has some astoundingly beautiful pictures on his site! This is where the characters go!

Wallee

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Chenault) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:41:00 +0000

This guy keeps on working. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. No breaks. Work Work Work. He's old school. Its the Wallee of the real world. The Mars Rover, Opportunity by name, begins its ninth year of exploration on Mars. Of course we should note that those are nine Earth years and 5 Martian years as the Red Planet moves at a slightly more majestic rate through the cosmos than the Lady Gaea.

Now if he could only find a Thark!

Its not often a movie . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Chenault) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:51:00 +0000

. . . . grabs my attention, as Hollywood has decided to leave the realm of heroic adventure and enter the worlds of pseudo-intellectual clap trap, but watching the trailer for The Grey made the hair on my neck stand up. Man against nature, the most powerful of all struggles, as it embodies the primordial! On the surface that movie seems to capture all those long buried fears about the wild that we have buried but can never escape for at our heart it is what we are!

And I have to say, Liam Neeson, is doing a kickass job at the box office!

World's oldest dino nest discovered

noreply@blogger.com (Davis Chenault) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:05:00 +0000

This may be old news to those of you who follow such things, but the oldest known dinosaur nesting site has been discovered in South Africa.

“This amazing series of 190 million year old nests gives us the first detailed look at dinosaur reproduction early in their evolutionary history, and documents the antiquity of nesting strategies that are only known much later in the dinosaur record,” he added.

What in the world is that

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Chenault) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:37:00 +0000

The ki-lin or chinese unicorn. Sorta freakish looking.

Imagine this for REALS

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Chenault) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:35:00 +0000

Random internet wanderings found this site, Way Past Normal, with this juicy tidbit in it. Adventure fodder.

Icelandic children lived in fear of being eaten by bloodthirsty ogres living in the mountains. The most ferocious of these was Mother Grýla, who wandered through the village at Christmastime with her evil cat.

Fun site.

Unholy Savings

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Chenault) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:21:00 +0000

As we wind things down at the old store and prepare the new one for launch. I thought I would throw up one last sale through that portal. For a limited time only you can get the Castles and Crusades Players Handbook and Monsters & Treasure bundled at 30% OFF!

Pick em up, with other items HERE!

Cover piece by Jason Walton!

Dog bites Archaeologist

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Chenault) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:26:00 +0000

Not really. A while ago I posted an article about the dog being from somewhere in china (the mother of all domesticated dogs so to speak). Maybe there was some shark jumping going on.

A domesticate dog skull was found in Siberia dn its 33,000 years old.

That's older than me! But just by a hair.

The dog and its skull

Troll Con planning

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Chenault) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:24:00 +0000

So we have a convention here in Little Rock every year. Or about every year anyway. We just had our first preliminary pre-meeting get together, idea generator, thought provoking moment. It looks like the end of September or early October are looking like the dates.

Yee Haw

Rethinking some adventure material

noreply@blogger.com (Davis Chenault) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:07:00 +0000

So, an idea occurred to while pondering the hero. If the 'hero' in an rpg is basically the adventurer, at least initially, then mayhap the manner and mode of adventure design needs changing.

A long time ago I came up with this idea called Adventure World. Adventure World was basically a setting bereft of theme and what I would refer to as deep content. It was essentially a world whose coherence was based upon satisfying the entertainment needs of the players and not that of a story. Coherence was not much of a concern, rather, like a series of unrelated though highly entertaining action movies, the motion and action were the guiding theme and the story element. It did not make sense in the manner that LotR makes sense, but more in manner that World of Warcraft does not make sense. (A note here. I do realize there are story elements to WoW but the story elements followed the game element, not vice versa.)

So, there was Adventure World. I can't remember what I actually named the place, but it had a name. In any respect, I was thinking of revisiting the concept and starting a city adventure. A 'Thieves World' type setting but with dungeons, dragons and other such craziness.

Anyway, just rethinking some adventure paradigms.

Davis

Track from the movie Beowulf! GO SEE/RENT/BUY IT. It is AWESOME!

Solar Storm Coming Take Cover Now

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Chenault) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:37:00 +0000

I have to say this type of article drives me insane: "The sun is bombarding Earth with radiation from the biggest solar storm in more than six years with more to come from the fast-moving eruption." SIX YEARS??? Madness! The gulf of time in inconceivable! That must make this solar storm almost...almost...average!

At any rate,the sun is acting up again.

Image from sciencedaily.com

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/24/2605032/strongest-solar-storm-since-2005.html#storylink=cpy

The Classic Hero, an RPG missing link?

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Chenault) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 03:26:00 +0000

So, the recent news of 5e's release has generated much discussion across the boards and blogs in the rpg world. A good sized portion of the discussions and ruminations concern the nature of The Game. What I find interesting are the descriptions of people's games and preferences in play and style. This has always fascinated me. Why do we play rpgs?

A long time ago I put pen to paper and started to generate some ideas about collective story telling, modern myth making and the roll rpgs play in filling an 'empty mythic shoe box.' My contention was that we played rpgs to 'be' heroes. By that, I do not mean we experience being a hero vicariously, rather, that we tell the story of a hero to fill in the gaps of a mythic landscape bereft of heroes - at least in part.

I am thinking maybe I am wrong. We play rpgs for something entirely different and the 'mythic shoe box' may, by accident find some articles floating in it, but by no means is filling it the primary reason we play.

Think of the character you played or types of characters you enjoy playing. Think of the types of adventures you like to undertake. Do your characters fall into any of the classic hero molds? Are there actions and adventures those of a hero?

Classic Heroes

star Wars the "director's cut" released again

noreply@blogger.com (Davis Chenault) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:07:00 +0000

important again important news for all of you fans of the Star Wars franchise. Star Wars Is being released again. For Free on the interwebs.

Look and see

cool Sci Fi Posters

noreply@blogger.com (Davis Chenault) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:19:00 +0000

over IGN There is an article on the 20best Sci Fi posters E V A R. I've seen all the movies except for Another Earth. The movies may have been good but the posters, after looking at them, make me go, HUH? I'm not a big poster art guy.

But I do have my favorites!

Philosophy is dead, dead, dead

noreply@blogger.com (Davis Chenault) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:51:00 +0000

So said Stephen Hawking. Uh... what? It irked me then and does so now. Luckily Stephen has been wrong about big things in the past and is not a little off base on this one as well. There is a write-up in the Atlantic

offering a rebuttal.

Here is the best part (from my perspective),

Newton would call what he was doing natural philosophy, that's actually the name of his book: "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy." Philosophy, traditionally, is what everybody thought they were doing. It's what Aristotle thought he was doing when he wrote his book called Physics. So it's not as if there's this big gap between physical inquiry and philosophical inquiry. They're both interested in the world on a very general scale, and people who work in the foundations of physics, that is, the group that works on the foundations of physics, is about equally divided between people who live in philosophy departments, people who live in physics departments, and people who live in mathematics departments.

Hawking is a philosopher. He just killed himself.

Walk the Line ... to Stonehenge

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Chenault) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:14:00 +0000

It would seem that people have been walking for a long time, and over long distances. They have discovered through studying isotopes in various bones at Stonehenge (or in common parlance, that big thing with all the blocks) that some of the people buried there came from the Mediterranean area, in 1500 BC and maybe before. That means they either walked on their own volition or were carted there via the slave trade. But the article poses the idea that Stonehenge attracted people from many diverse regions.

Very interesting article over at Adventures in Archeology.

Of course its always a little arrogant for us to assume, because the distances are daunting to us, that early bronze age cultures found such distances daunting. They may have taken a summer jaunt up to visit their aunt's inlaws. Who can say where the bronze age is concerned.

Man eating Tulips found in Burgess Shale

noreply@blogger.com (Davis Chenault) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 15:46:00 +0000

This massive tulip shaped creature roamed the world gorging itself on man and beast in a ravenous rampage.

Roar.

Ok, that's my fanciful take. Its not quite massive, being the size of a dinner knife, it couldn't have roamed much being anchored to the ocean floor, and likely could not have eaten much but plankton and such and even lived long before man graced the world with his presence. It did look like a tulip.

Termite Awesauce

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Chenault) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:17:00 +0000

Termites are just cool...well unless they are eating your house...unless you have a house of stone, but even then you probably have a house of stone with wood frame. But as you may or may not know termite mounds are air conditioned and have been for thousands of years. Well seems to be that in Zimbabwe they are building a building modeled on the termite mound.

I stole this post from Tim Burns!

If a castle can be sold, then the Acroplis can be rented

noreply@blogger.com (Davis Chenault) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:23:00 +0000

So says the Greek Culture Ministry.

So save up a little money and rent the Acroplis for a night. Invite your friends and have a ball. Maybe there can be reenactments of those Dyonesian celebrations and all as well. A bachanalea so to speak. Or even an rpg convention.

TROLL CON 2012!!!!!!!!!!

Popcorn is 6000 years old today

noreply@blogger.com (Davis Chenault) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:11:00 +0000

Well maybe.

A new study suggests that people living along the coast of Peru snacked on popcorn 1,000 years earlier than previously believed, based on corncobs recently found at an ancient site.

It appears as though opcorn could be 6000 years old or even older. So, this leaves me wondering, is gaming 6000 years old or older?