You shall now receive a glimpse into my psyche. If you’re not prepared, you should flee now. Go look at LOLcats or something.

Everyone else braced? Okay, good.

I Google weird stuff. I really do. During the course of a work day, you wouldn’t believe the kinds of questions I type into search bar. But for your edification, I’m going to share with you the answers to the last 5 questions I asked the internet. The fun part? You get to guess the questions. The first person to get all of them right wins a prize.

Answer 1: “The total amount of radiation coming from your body is determined very simply from the surface temperature of your body and the surface area by the Stefan-Boltzman Law, which says that total energy radiated by a blackbody per unit area per unit time is sigma*T^4, where sigma is the
Stefan-Boltzman constant, 5.67E-8 J K^-4 m^-2 s^-1, and T is the temperature in Kelvin. So if you have a surface area of 1 m^2 and a surface temperature of 310 K, you radiate at a rate of a little over
500 Watts. If you were thrown naked into a freezer with a temperature close to absolute zero, you really would radiate at a net rate of about 500 Watts (for a short time). But usually, things around you are warmer than that, and so they radiate too, and you absorb some of that radiation. Also, your effective surface temperature is the temperature of your clothes, which is less than your skin temperature. 50 to 100 W is probably not a bad guess.”

Answer 2:
“A picture of a ladybug.”

Answer 3:
“Towards the end of a star’s life, the temperature near the core rises and this causes the size of the star to expand. Such an expanded star is called a red giant. This is the fate of the Sun in about 5 billion years. Stars convert hydrogen to helium to produce light (and other radiation). As time progresses, the heavier helium sinks to the center of the star, with a shell of hydrogen around this helium center core. The hydrogen is depleted so it no longer generates enough energy and pressure to support the outer layers of the star. As the star collapses, the pressure and temperature rise until it is high enough for helium to fuse into carbon, i.e. helium burning begins. To radiate the energy produced by the helium burning, the star expands into a Red Giant.

A star that has exhausted most or all of its nuclear fuel and has collapsed to a very small size. Typically, a white dwarf has a radius equal to about 0.01 times that of the Sun, but it has a mass roughly equal to the Sun’s. This gives a white dwarf a density about 1 million times that of water! It can also be defined as a type of star that is abnormally faint for its white-hot temperature (see mass-luminosity relation). Typically, a white dwarf star has the mass of the sun and the radius of the earth but does not emit enough light or other radiation to be easily detected. The existence of white dwarfs is intimately connected with stellar evolution. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon and is coated by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases. The physical conditions inside the star are quite unusual; the central density is about 1 million times that of water.”

Answer 4:
“Different barks express different emotions, including loneliness, fear, distress, stress and pleasure, as well as a need for care among puppies and serve to alert other dogs, people or animals to changing external circumstances.

Barking also helps keep a comfortable social distance among canids. In addition to snarling, growling, [and] hissing, barking tends to be a call of warning in all three species (the mother wolf may have a distinct ‘warning bark’ with which she warns pups away from danger) … Calls used to decrease social distance, such as whining, mewling or whimpering, are generally related to calls used by infants to elicit parental care and usually express submission during courtship, greeting, or aggressive encounters.”

Answer 5:
“A light-year or light year (symbol: ly) is a unit of length, equal to just under ten trillion kilometres. As defined by the International Astronomical Union (which is the body which has the jurisdictional authority to promulgate the definition), a light-year is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one Julian year.

The light-year is often used to measure distances to stars. In astronomy, the preferred unit of measurement for such distances is the parsec, which is defined as the distance at which an object will appear to move one arcsecond of parallax when the observer moves one astronomical unit perpendicular to the line of sight to the observer. This is equal to approximately 3.26 light-years. The parsec is preferred because it can be more easily derived from, and compared with, observational data. However, outside scientific circles, the term light-year is more widely used.”

Whew, so you’ve survived a glimpse at what I do to write these books. Take a wild guess at the questions. You might win something!