How old are you?

[ky]

Give me a proof !! :lol:

Heres proof: http://www.orbiter-forum.com/member.php?u=6001

 

[indonesianorbinaut]

Heres proof: http://www.orbiter-forum.com/member.php?u=6001

it's kevin580 :lol:

 

[insanity]

26 years old, which I guess is right because sometimes I feel 13 and sometimes I feel 52. I've worked in politics all of my life, hopefully on a trajectory to become the President while also getting the flight training to fly my own 747 around.

I have my own place, but I spend most of my time at my girlfriend's. She's a few blocks from the office which makes my life loads easier.

 

[Codz]

I've worked in politics all of my life, hopefully on a trajectory to become the President while also getting the flight training to fly my own 747 around.

Hey, maybe one day orbinauts around the world will be able to say that they frequented the forum that the US President used in his younger days.:lol:

 

[Yoda]

Christ, looks like I'm the old fart on this forum :facepalm:

 

[Mojave]

Thus the name, eh Yoda? :lol:

Let's see. I'm 15 going on 16 next month. Going into 11th grade next year and I plan on going into electrical engineering in college. Been orbiting since I was 12.

 

[mojoey]

I'm 14 and 2/3. Started the whole flight sim thing in fifth grade, and started orbiter when I was 13. No combat experience outside of school fights :shifty:

 

[TMac3000]

So for now, I'm unofficialy 14 (my birthdate is July 1st). I am never married, you should know why
So, I'm the youngest orbinaut of this forum.

Actually, I believe sorpendarin has you beat at the age of 9

---------- Post added at 09:16 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:14 AM ----------

I can guarentee not.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Attached: The wonderful girl mentioned in my last post.

Not bad, Nick!

 

[PhantomCruiser]

Christ, looks like I'm the old fart on this forum :facepalm:

Nah, I'm right there with you... There are a few older than us, but I think we are the oldest "regulars" at age 44.

 

[TMac3000]

Christ, looks like I'm the old fart on this forum :facepalm:

When 900 years old you reach, old fart you can claim to be

 

[mojoey]

Nah, I'm right there with you... There are a few older than us, but I think we are the oldest "regulars" at age 44.

You are old!

How was it to ride a dinosaur to school every day?

 

[Ripley]

I am 16...I have my first girl friend...and i hope/ plan on being with her for the rest of my life...

That was sweet! Talk about the power of love!


Me, I am soon 49...

 

[Scattykat]

74.62 Venusian years going on 34.06 ...
Office Administrator / Freelance Graphic Designer.
I did work in the Merchant Navy many years ago and that was fun! Setting sail in Orbiter space has rekindled my enthusiasm for navigation

 

[Ghostrider]

Me? Uhm. Seventeen.

... A while.

 

[Notebook]

You are old!

How was it to ride a dinosaur to school every day?

I'm 60 next week, when I was a lad you could only dream about riding a dinosaur to school...

N.

 

[Screamer7]

Hmmmm, I feel a bit embarrassed now.
47 years old and still kicking.
I orbit around with Orbiter since 2004.

 

[Stevodoran]

15, going on 16. Just finished my oh so important junior cert. They said it was going to be hard but it was the easiest so far. And im one of the only few Irish Orbinauts that are still around.

 

[mojoey]

15, going on 16. Just finished my oh so important junior cert. They said it was going to be hard but it was the easiest so far. And im one of the only few Irish Orbinauts that are still around.

You may live in Ireland, but you're not the only one that has blood in their alcohol stream

 

[Napalm42]

To kinda go Artlav's route with this, I'm currently 18, so I had to hand my butt over to the US government in case they need me, but can now go on various other websites of questionable origin.:shifty:

Most of the time I feel 35, sometimes I feel 60, and other times I feel 8. I found Orbiter a year ago and was promptly infatuated to the point where I stayed up extremely late practicing orbital maneuvers. Still live with the folks, they'll never let me leave until I'm married (my dad has said so many, many times.) Haven't had relations with the fairer sex lasting more than 2-3 months, but have hope for the future, and look forward to studying computer engineering in the upcoming months at the University of Miami.

 

[Eccentrus]

Why just tell the age? It's like judging a book by it's thickness.
Look away from the screen, and look at the people and objects around you at this time. Get a good feel for the moment's scenery and melody.
That's where your story is at now.

What is it like?
How did you get there, to this moment in life, and how do you feel about it?
Where do you think your life is going? What new things are getting in, what old stuff is getting out?

Well by this call then let myself make an addendum to my post

of all the objects surrounding me these are what I consider the most important

My private library which contains about 75% of what I have, people will usually ask you about what is the your most precious possession, and if I have to answer that question, the answer will be this picture.

On the currently reading section (a.k.a my bed)

Just to clarify this is my room, as I mentioned before I live away from my parents, about 163 km away to be exact (that's what the car distance counter says anyway), so how did I came here? Perhaps the question particle how should be changed into a what here.

What am I doing here? As many of you have known, and many of you who were in the IRC a couple years ago would've heard my rant about this. I'm here in the pursuit of a medical degree, which ironically, not the first thing that I would say as my dream. Before that I was doing Astronomy, which I love, but loathed by my whole family, I couldn't stand the pressure, I gave in and moved, they gave me the options of going into any kind of engineering, or economics. Unfortunately, my school was the best there is for engineering within 1000 km or so, and because of the tight competition to enrol there, they didn't allow changing faculties, and even within the same faculty you have to have a psychologist's letter to approve your moving majors. Economics has never been my stuff, I hadn't ever approved of the so called "Social Sciences" as a part of the whole community of Science at all, and I didn't want to study what I couldn't believe in, so that puts it out of the equation. Due to these constraints, and allured by the prestige brought by being a doctor, I enrolled into a Med School instead. Of course over the passing years, my loathing of the Social Sciences went by and I am now interested in History and Anthropology as well.

Now about the how. The question "How did you get here" is never easy to answer, there's so many factors as to why a person can end up in the place he is. In Medicine there's this stuff called History Taking, which purpose is to know of how and why a disease can cause the signs and symptoms a patient presents with, which will lead to the ultimate answer, the diagnosis. I will treat this question in a similar manner, in short, the answer to the question itself is my history.

I am getting into 22, as my earlier post has told you. I was first interested in Science, or into anything at all when I was 6. Children are always interested in pictures, in drawings that depicts something, in colours. And it was no coincidence that I was like that as well. The catch is what I did pick up at a bookstore when I was 6. Just like every young child, I was first mesmerized by this book because of its colour, and yet, unlike any other colourful books, this one tells a very different story, because it's about the five senses, and the drawings are not in cartoon, but rather much more similar to what we have in Anatomy Atlases. My mom was of course against buying a kind of books that has the label "for 12 years and older" for a 6-year old. But I was crying and valiantly begged my mom for that book, good thing I was too young to know shame, because of course she already did, which prompted her to buy it just to shut me up (yes I come from a pretty-well off family which can serve my book-hunger, almost literally at first, only to come metaphorically much later). I loved the drawings in the book, because for the first time in my life I know how many parts of my body truly look like, beneath the skin, the eyes was drawn with the muscles, there was a rudimentary explanation on how we can see, feel, touch, hear, and smell, which of course I didn't fully understand at the time. It was two years later when I was finally able enough to read and understand what the book says. At the same time, my much older cousins graduated from school and go to college in the States. Their parents decided to clean up the house and found their old encyclopaedia, which came from the 80s, please be reminded that it was already 1998 at the time, so they decided that rather than letting those books go rot they gave it to my family, I think it was directed more to my older brother whose age was much more appropriate to read the encyclopaedias. But he wasn't interested so I had those books all for my own, and my favourite from all those encyclopaedias? The ones titled "The Universe" and "The Solar System", these two encyclopaedias are the trigger in what would be my life-long romantic affair with Physics and Astronomy.

It was at this time as well that my grades started to fail, I was making many more Cs than Bs or As. But my older brother, who was leaning tad bit to the left in the Bell's Curve, also experienced this at roughly the same age, so my parents thought that, "Well two average people got married and have children, those children are ought to be average as well." Completely oblivious of my precocity which is masked (I read tonnes of books for my age with average grade, I was more interested in those books than the class, so it really wasn't my fault), and absolutely ignoring the fact that the aforementioned cousins went to Purdue and Cornell (not that they knew of the quality of the universities my cousins went to, my parents were just, wow your cousins are studying in the States).

Skipping on to 2004, because nothing much really happened inbetween, except that I watch Discovery channel almost 7 hours a day, without subtitle (hence my good English in spite of being educated in a system which English subject is a total wreck). But at that year, aside of falling in love, and having my first acne, I found a life-changing book, the title? "The Theory of Everything", authored by this one Stephen William Hawking. This is the start of my many ventures into the non-fiction section of the libraries and bookstores. Speaking of non-fiction, perhaps it is time that I show you the detail on the non-fiction rack in my bookshelves.

It is said that you can't judge a book by its cover, but I believe you can read a person from the titles of the books he has read. Over the 8 years since then, I have read a lot of books, ranging from Physics, to Philosophy, to Ideology, and to History. the time between I was 14 until I was 18 was a time of inflation of knowledge. I was more of a superstitious person back in the days, just like a normal Indonesian, telling you the story of my life between those ages will be awfully boring, because I would just tell you about the books I was reading back then. Except for a change, I finally recognized my precocity, and the valley dividing me and my peers grew deeper at the time.

It was a hard time at first. Understanding the philosophical consequences of the elementary physics is not easy. It's never easy for anyone, let alone for a 14 year old teenager raging in hormones. And yet I did understand that book, only about 300 pages being reread for about two months, and still, I understood it, a thing that my fellows who are actually studying physics in uni can have a difficulty to understand, and I did it at 14, and I didn't know that 14 year olds are not supposed to understand singularity, event horizon, and the concept of information at 14, I just went up and tried to talk about it to my friends, who at the time was of course much more interested in Yu Gi Oh or Pokemon trading cards rather than the secrets of the universe. And this created the awkwardness and the outcasting that will last for years. There was this one time, when I tried to discuss black hole with my friend who came back from Ukraine, after getting gold medal in International Astronomy Olympiad (for junior HS, mind you), and he didn't understand what I was talking about, and that was the moment that I started to understand, that I wasn't reading anything that other people can easily accept.

I then take a hiatus from Physics, reading Genome by Matt Ridley, which was an absolute thrill. But by the time I'm 15 I had these two Physics tutors who came from my first University, They noticed my interest when one of them asked in my class, "How do you think the Earth will end?" and I answered it in the classic textbook description of the shift into red giant and then to the nova and stuff. Their strategy of teaching was one of the best that could have happened to me, they used real life objects as examples, bringing the real world, the factual world, into what used to be a subject that we only has to pass, the first time in my life that I realize the School is full of subjects that actually describe the real world, but my School was a Calvinist institution, most of my teachers don't believe in half of what they teach, of course it would come across wrong, and at that time I started to oppose their method of teaching. After that realization, I finally can apply my understanding of the philosophies that Hawking introduced me to, I used the concepts while solving the equations and my grades soared through the ceilings. My Physics tutor sometimes give us an extra question in the exams, which is taken from his old exams in University, something that HS student would find hard to solve, because it was only taught implicitly, rather than explicitly. It was a test of philosophy, of the understanding of the concepts of Physics rather than the ability to compute, unlike the other questions mandated by our dysfunctional National Department of Education. The reason I ace these tests is these extra questions, which only 1 or 2 students in each classroom can get right (mind you this is essay, so no luck involved). This convinced me that I should get Physics or Astronomy in university, which became my life-long dream.

So let's skip it to age 18, I graduated with more or less average score according to my school (excellent according to the national average) with that in hand, I did the admission exam for the Institute of Technology of Bandung, a place notorious because of the 1:70 admission rate. And that place was like a dream, for the 3 most important subjects (Calculus, Physics, and Chemistry) are all done by professors, and I was privileged to be taught by two of the youngest professors at the time, I gained a 75% score almost effortlessly (GPA was 3,03/4 at the time, I was average in Calculus and only excelled at the others, and unfortunately calculus has the highest credits of them all). As a bonus, many of the students there are freethinkers, some who have read what I had read, it was the first time in my life that I can conduct a meaningful discussion at all. It was a time when my mind was lift off of its former constraint, no more fear of being labelled an outcast, because I'm talking about the school subjects after all, no more bashing by the religious nut-jobs of my HS (not that they don't exist in my university, but they are only 40% of the students over there), it was the first time in my life that people don't say "It's a sin to believe in evolution" when I talk about it. But of course my parents and family are all becoming more and more concerned about my future at this time. Astronomy doesn't really has a job-opening aside from being a teacher in Astronomy here (ignoring the fact that almost half of the graduates there eventually went to Europe, not that they will be noticeable, only 20 graduates from Astronomy each year). The Second semester there I was put under considerable pressure from my parents and family, to reconsider my options, they told me to move major, which is actually in another faculty (like hell that will be allowed). So then, like in the first part of my story I moved out, I ended up in a place that is actually harder to enrol (Med School compared to Astro dept there), and much more rural.

And I thence spent the last 3 years here, trying to extort from the prestige of being in a Med School (you know to get a girlfriend et al) to no avail, and of course, my grades took an impact from the stress. I managed to go on from the first year almost smoothly, the only catch of which is almost all my grades are C, and I failed the second year, and made an awesome comeback. Most of the first two years in Med is just filled with bouts of depression, I read less books than I had the previous years, I don't study, I reluctantly come to the lectures, and with all the loads of the materials, perhaps the only thing that saved me is my ability to read anything only once to understand it. Med School isn't really hard like what people imagine, there's no calculus, no singularity, no hocus-pocus with logics like you do with quantum theory, everything is straight-forward Newtonian, with almost no surprise at all, pretty boring if I must say. With all that said though, I failed my second year and had to repeat it, and in my comeback, I just use about 2 weeks every three months reading all the books that is related to the subject at the time, and gained considerable improvements compared to my first attempt on those subjects, I might even ace Immunology and Haematology now, the subjects that failed me last year. And no, still no girlfriend, the girls here are almost all overtly religious, with having a future handling dying people and whatnot, I think that it is for their own good, but certainly not mine.

So there, that's how I made it here, in the middle of nowhere studying in one of the best Med School in the country, even though I'm more interested in Physics and Astronomy rather than Meds. People sometimes say that I might end up like House, being miserable as a doctor. Good enough for me if I have his skills and knowledge. I think I would want to be a Radiologist, but Internal Medicine also sounds very interesting. Well, there's still 3 more years to think about that. Any other else has been said in my former post, so yeah, waiting to be a 30 year old before making any money here, just hope that the probe will keep me sane for all that time.

and I think it's time to share the heavy list of my Medical Textbooks

you will notice here that there're non-medical textbooks there, a reminder of who I really am, and a book that don't fit into the upper rack, literally, by literally, I mean physically impossible to fit into the upper rack (pun intended)

And of course, for those who are interested, the Fiction and Biographies Rack

And of course, after reading my story, aside of the books, what else do keep me sane doing all this, crazy studying stuff? I would say, calligraphy and tea. I'm hoping that I'll become a polyglot by the time my study ends, because I'm somewhat already a polymath

Well that's all from me folks, I shall not bore you with more story of my life, and don't blame me, blame Artlav :rofl:.