Barren Realms MUD

Why does hair turn gray when we get older?
Why do we say PIN number? PIN stands for Personal Identification Number. So if we say PIN number, then we are really saying Personal Identification Number number.
Why is the sky blue?
Why do we label only some people as "native americans". I have met many people whose ancestors were european, asian or african, but they were born in america. Thus, they are native citizens of america. Why do people look at me strange when I suggest that they are native americans?
If my father is Menominee and my mother's parents were from Germany, then what race am I supposed to be?
Why are owls supposed to be wise when all they do is ask the same question over and over again?
Why haven't we seen signs of other life in the universe yet? Seriously, it's a big place out there. Surely there has been enough time for one or more civilizations to develop space travel. How long does it take evolution to reach perfection anyway?
When someone holds a gun and says not to move or they'll shoot, don't they realize that the Earth is hurdling through space at tremendous speeds, and everyone with it. It is beyond our power to stop moving. I guess the person has no choice but to shoot.
Why do we call them blackboards, when they are almost always green?
Why do we say the sun is rising when it isn't really doing anything but sitting in space? We are the ones moving around it. (Yes, of course the sun is moving through our galaxy, and thus doing more than just sitting still. But if our sun is moving in a direction that appears to be "rising" from one perspective, then it must surely be falling from another perspective.)
Why do my socks only smell some of the time?

Thank goodness for the "Ask Kiri" forum! Where else would I go with these important questions?

1. "Grey Hair is a symptom of improper protein synthesis. Hair grows white when the colour pigment (melanin) ceases to be produced in the hair follicle and small air spaces take its place. Pigment cells located at the base of each hair follicle produce the natural dominant colour of our youth. However, as a person grows older and reaches middle age, more and more of these pigment cells die and colour is lost from individual hairs. The result is that a person's hair gradually begins to show more and more grey. Individual hairs each have an outer layer (the cuticle) of overlapping flat cells, underneath, which is the thick cortex, which consists of horn-like keratin. The inside of the hair is made of softer, rectangular cells. Hair colour is determined by the concentration and depth of melanin pigment in the cortex - this produces the whole spectrum of hair colour from blond to black, with very fair people having almost no melanin. When these melanocytes die, then the hair turns grey. Melanocytes produce the pigment melanin and they are the cells responsible for much of the coloring of the human body, including the hair. With age the melanocytes lose their ability to make pigment, so color is absent from new hair."

-- http://www.seasonsindia.com/beauty/greyhair_sea.htm

2. PIN Number is people being stupid, a la ATM Machine.

3. "Blue sky: short explanation
Blue light gets scattered (spread) around much more than all the other colors from the sun, causing the sky to appear blue."

-- http://www.why-is-the-sky-blue.org/why- ... -blue.html

4. Native Americans is defined as: "A member of any of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. The ancestors of the Native Americans are generally considered by scientists to have entered the Americas from Asia by way of the Bering Strait sometime during the late glacial epoch. Many Americans have come to prefer Native American over Indian both as a term of respect and as a corrective to the famous misnomer bestowed on the peoples of the Americas by a geographically befuddled Columbus. "

So there you go.

--http://www.bartleby.com/61/87/N0028700.html

5. Half Native American and Half Germanic, I would suppose.

6. "The legends about owls are very different. Swan Lake makes the owl the enemy, while Greece makes the owl a symbol of wisdom.

The idea "wise old owl" probably came from the way they look and ancient history.

Owls have large, flat faces and slow movements of the head, all of which are just adaptations of nocturnal hunting, but which seem to make owls seem vaguely human.

The Greeks, who worship Athena, the goddess of wisdom, chose the owl to represent her.

Supposedly it was the owl who gave Athena the wisdom for which she is known and fameous for. "

--http://estabrook.ci.lexington.ma.us/Owl ... lotte.html

7. Probably because it's really, really big. And whose to say they haven't yet?

8. How long does it take evolution to reach perfection? I don't think anything ever reaches perfection.

9. No, they don't realize that.

10. Traditionally they were black slate.

11.Because it looks like it's rising.

12. Because you aren't sniffing them the rest of the time.

Or, because your feet don't sweat as much some days.

Or, because you washed them.

13. Nowhere nearly as cool.

HA!! SO THERE!!!

rofl!
You're the greatest, Kiri.

Btw, Green "black boards" are actually caleld Greenboards. It's just another case of people not really knowing what they're talking about.

ROFL, the fact that she went out and got all the answers is the greatest.

hey kiri, i have a why question too. why are my nipples a different color from the rest of my body? thanks!

In response to 7. (Why haven't we found other people in space, yet?) there's actually a famous paradox stated by Enrico Fermi (a theoretical astrologer or physicist, I believe) regarding that. It reads: "If they existed, they would be here." (The paradox obviously being that if they don't exist, why do we?)
Just adding my two cents.

xorex wrote:hey kiri, i have a why question too. why are my nipples a different color from the rest of my body? thanks!

The best explanation for this I can find on the web suggests that your skin cells are different on your nipples then on other parts of your body. It also suggests that melanonin (your skin pigment) settles unevenly there.

There are also reports of nipples darkening due to pregnancy. Something you're not telling us, Xorex?

kiri wrote:2. PIN Number is people being stupid, a la ATM Machine.

This is a popular joke, one in which I have myself indulged from time to time, but I'm not convinced it's really true. I haven't been able to find anything on the web to support my theory, but I have come to believe that these redundancies and others like them are not so pointless as they seem, especially in spoken English.

Many networking and storage protocols used in computing include something called a CRC, or cyclic redundancy check, which helps the receiving computer interpret a set of information correctly even in the presence of line noise. It is a redundant value attached to a set of data that is useful only for determining the validity of that data as received. It seems to me that spoken abbreviations are most commonly first interpreted by listeners as a sort of line noise, because unlike full words the letters have no meaning in themselves until the last one is spoken. The listener then has to arrange the letters and fill in the meaning. I think the extra word is much like a CRC for the abbreviation, especially early on when the abbreviation is new and unfamiliar jargon to most people.

Of course, that could be just another crackpot theory of mine.

Everybody wrote:a theoretical astrologer

This made me laugh so hard I had to leave my office.

I didn't notice that right away. ROFL laughing!

One more question for you, Kiri...
What is a theoretical astrologer?

I must credit Scavenger for this:

"A practiving one is one that actually observes what happens and bases their findings on observations. A theoretical one uses the laws of physics and nature to predict what is supposed to happen based on the theories and laws of science."

See http://www.explorit.org/stumper/stumper_31.html for more.

For clarification, I'm pretty sure I meant astronomer instead of astrologer. Of course, it could've easily been one of those Freudian slip things.

I have seen a couple places where the words "theoretical" and "astrologer" have been linked together. I ran a search on it and found a couple things. Man, these star-gazer types sure take themselves seriously.

Here's a cute quote.

"...the one thing that everyone expects from an astrologer is information that can be put put to use. Advice which has as its main ingredient practicality and certainty is preferable to theoretical fantasy and polite niceties." -Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi, Vedic Astrologer

Kiri, why do people look for answers in rocks floating around a star and formations of big balls of burning gas that only look the way they do from here?

Maybe the magnetic pull of some of the planets might have some tiny affect on us that I am unaware of, but can they or the stars predict that I will start a new carreer and get married tomorrow?

I mean no offense to anyone who believes in astrology.

People look for answers in everything - that's why there's mythology, tea-leaf reading, numerology, and yes, even religion.

It's a source of comfort to think there's method to life's madness.