In the spirit of 1776: Washington
stamps@12: Interesting, I'd never run across that interpretation of upside-down stamps before. The only other association I have with intentionally upside-down stamps is as a form of protest when mailing your tax returns. (I think the reasoning there is that stamps often have flags on them, flying a flag upside-down is a standard distress signal, and flying the US flag upside-down has come to symbolize opposition to the Feds in semi-wingnut circles.)
Re DHS stupidity: this Schneier post makes me weep for, well, everything, especially the "unexplainable news" paragraph. On the upside, though, I guess I know how to recruit a mule next time I'm running contraband through the San Diego airport. And, to their credit, the fact that they're reporting lots of failures of the inspection process means that they actually are testing the inspection process, which is a good thing.
Fun bacterial factoids: AIUI, bacteriophages are one of the routes of horizontal gene transfer among bacteria, and are postulated to be one of the ways that an innocuous or beneficial strain of Staph aureus can turn into a pathogenic strain.
Also: Bacterial cells outnumber human cells in your body by about ten to one. (They don't outmass you, though, since the bacteria are individually smaller.)
Ayse@171: No, and I'm sure that if someone had said, "And the triclosan protects me from the flu!" they would have been quickly corrected. But that misconception is painfully persistent among, e.g., my coworkers, who worry about catching colds and flus and buy triclosan-containing soap to protect themselves. So when I read a long discussion, apparently motivated by the approach of flu season, on the benefits of handwashing, with a side discussion on the benefits or hazards of antibacterial soaps, with no acknowledgement that the one thing has little bearing on the other, well ... it just makes me itchy, is all. It reminds me uncomfortably of the way that some politicians will frequently mention 9/11 and then immediately mention the Iraq war, implying, but carefully never stating, a connection between the two. No one here is intending to mislead, but the persistent association can still reinforce a misconception, even if that's not what's meant. I think it's better to be clear in matters of health.
(And while we're commending noen for being, er, man enough (as it were) to apologize, I think Diatryma's calm and reasoned responses also deserve a lot of credit for turning what could easily have become an escalating flamefest into an actual discussion. Thank you, Diatryma; I don't come here to read flamefests.)
I'm depressed that in a discussion of flu and antibacterial soap it took until comment 132 for someone to acknowledge that flu is not a bacterial disease.
meg@159: A wizard's staph has a grape on the end?
rob@64: An anecdote: Somewhere I read of someone who rigged a germicidal UV lamp inside their bread-box, with a switch so that it would only be on when the box was closed. This made their bread last a lot longer. It would eventually dry out, of course, and apparently mold would eventually find its way to grow inside the bread, but the light prevented all surface mold.
greg@95: And I'm pretty sure that bacteria and viruses can't evolve to be resistant to ultraviolet.
They could possibly evolve an ultraviolet-blocking pigment (e.g., melanin).
Come to think of it, I did build a device with blinky LEDs and loose wires in sixth grade, and someone did tell me they thought it looked like a bomb. (It was actually an "electronic thumb" prop for a book report I did on The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.)
The most compelling UFO I've seen turned out to be a flock of birds (geese or ducks, probably). It was dark and they were lit from below, and while the flock was moving more or less in formation my brain *insisted* that I was seeing a single large rigid object, with irregularities that caught the light, and a strange shimmer at the frequency of wingbeats. It was only when a few birds split off and flew in another direction that the illusion dissipated.
@53 and @68, re the Fermi paradox: it really is a puzzle; most reasonable assumptions about the nature of the universe lead to the conclusion that we ought to have alien visitors. But not aliens who pop down to probe us and then disappear: logcally, we would expect to be in the middle of a galaxy-spanning alien civilization. There'd be an office park and a WalMart on Venus, a strip-mining operation dismantling Jupiter, and a mini-storage facility where the asteroid belt used to be. A lot of SF novels are basically explorations of random ideas about why this appears not to be the case.
Ha. In my job I've repeatedly discovered that "stupid stuff everybody knows" is often "stupid stuff someone else knows" and after exhaustive interrogation I discover that nobody knows it, and possibly nobody has ever known it. (For example, incomprehensible requirements sometimes show up in project plans, and after hours of meetings discussing what item 23(a) might actually entail in terms of time and effort and implementation expense, I go off to seek clarification from whoever put it there. Everybody tells me they didn't originate the requirement and don't really know what it means, it just got included from some other source. Eventually I run out of sources...)
Bob W. @ 85:
The impurity energy band, by the way, is associated with anomalies in the theoretically uniform electric field of the crystal. These are caused not only by [...] but also by structural irregularities, places in the crystal where the spacing between atoms deviates from the regular distances found in a theoretical perfect crystal.
You mean, places in the crystal with unnatural, eldritch spacings and irrational angles, beyond the theories of science?!?
"Even as I write this, Lockton, who had thought himself finally safe in a crystal defect, is decaying from his metastable state, while emitting a photon of about 580 nm..."
Or perhaps it's a stone with a lot of zinc sulfide particles. I like Kip W's experiment proposed in #19.
Maybe the gravestone was cast with fiber optics and it's transmitting light from the network of caverns below (caverns being invariably home to luminescent fungi, as we know from D&D).
#4: I hope so too, but it's clear that it won't just happen. Considering how friendly the post-2006 Congress has still been to this kind of thing.
So what can we do, now, to make such a change more likely in 2008?
@124: I'd expect a healthy bibliography to look more like a Poisson distribution or the like (after all, you can't cite works from the future).
#20 et seq.: What's interesting about that lettter is that the Big Divisive Issue of the last election (gay marriage) is nowhere to be found. Does this mean it's being intentionally deëmphasized for the next round, or are they just focusing on issues that people tend to care about even without coaching?
#60: That reminds me of an old joke among programmers. It's been observed that any nontrivial program can be written more compactly, shortening it at least by one instruction. And it's well-known that any nontrivial program has at least one undiscovered bug in it. Applying induction, we can see that any program can, with enough effort, be optimized down to a single instruction ... which will be incorrect.
Teresa, you describe the letter as a blackmail request, but I think it's pretty clearly extortion, not blackmail. </pedantry>
(Kneejerk pedantry: it's "sound bite", not "sound byte". Thank you.)
Jules @ 11: I don't think it would be so bad, if that's how the company presented itself to the writers as well. It's a bad sign when a company that acts as an intermediary has to describe itself differently to its two sets of customers.
j h woodyatt @ 12: Actually it's still finite. Imagine I offer you a magic device that spits out $1 every day (and this is somehow legal). How much should you rationally be willing to pay for this device, which will give you an infinite amount of money (if you wait long enough)? Turns out the answer is surprisingly small, in the neighborhood of $6000. That's how much you would need to put into a good investment to be able to withdraw $1 daily without using up the principal. If I asked $12k for the magic device, you'd be better off turning me down and investing the money elsewhere.
People make this calculation all the time, substituting "stock in a company" for "magic money-producing device", and the number is the (stock)-price-to-(yearly)-earnings ratio.
Of course, as with a company, you don't really know how much money those electronic rights will be producing in some future year, which means you can't reliably figure their present value...
Xopher @271: Momentum is force times time (or mass times speed). Energy is force times distance (which works out to be proportional to mass times the square of speed). They're *both* conserved; it takes more work to apply a given force to a moving object than to a stationary/slow-moving object.
If you're pushing a big slow object around with muscle power, the immediate limiting factor is probably "how hard can I push this?", that is, how strong you are, how much force you can apply. I'm guessing that energy corresponds more to endurance than strength. But if you've only got two seconds before the cargo crate crushes you against the bulkhead, that's a test of strength, not endurance.
Joshua Keroes, @287: The number I've heard is 30 MPH, for a sudden body-into-a-wall stop (no crumple zones, etc.). Perhaps the professionals can supply the real number.
DDB @57: Have you ever moved a boat around in dock? It's a pretty similar situation, I expect, to moving a massive object around in zero-g (except with one fewer dimension). The Heinlein quote rings very true. Our usual intuition is that an object's momentum is related to how hard you push it. But in the absence of friction, the momentum is force times time, even if the force is small. You can give the thing a moderate push over a five-second interval, walk to the other side, and using your friction-trained intuition, try stopping it when it's one second's travel from crushing you --- you'll get crushed. The basic safety rule is to never, never put any part of yourself between the boat and the wharf. (That's what fenders are for, and the nice crushable wooden wharf. Not your nice crushable legs.) Heinlein having been in the Navy, I wouldn't be surprised if he had had some of the same safety rules drilled into him.
On SUVs: They make me uneasy too, in a very monkey-brain way. I'm high up, on a wobbly, uncertain platform, in an eggshell-thin metal and glass balloon. I'd much rather be low to the ground, maneuverable, and in what feels like a much sturdier passenger compartment. (Even in a normal-height car, I can see several cars ahead in traffic.) Driving a truck is a little less uneasy-making: I'm still too exposed and can't dodge, but at least I'm inside a heavy object.
And on being "thrown clear": my mother is yet another of those people who'd be dead if she had been wearing a seatbelt. Instead of being impaled, she ended up in a snow bank, relatively unharmed. Regardless, she was insistent that I wear a seatbelt; I've never really considered not doing so, even when I was young and foolish in other ways. I suspect that as a nurse she, too, had a visceral understanding of the odds and the risks. (If your parents work ER or are EMTs, you get dinnertime stories of the people who were in accidents that day. I got dinnertime stories of people who were in accidents ten or twenty years ago and still couldn't feed themselves or recognize their family. If they were lucky enough to have family who still visited them.)
On the other hand, I suppose if I were forced to drive an old, no-safety-features car through a slalom course of fluffy pillows and balloons, I just might take the nonexistent seatbelt off. I'd wear a helmet though...
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2007 | 23 |
| 2006 | 15 |
| 2005 | 5 |
| 2004 | 1 |
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