#6 ::: Renatus
Here's a fact sheet on military recruiting, from Quaker House. Key point: recruiters lie.
#18 Marilee:
Short version: publishers should stop paying advances and publish only books from celebrity authors.
This bozo has no idea how the book business works, and probably hasn't read a non-celebrity non-bestseller since college, if then.
I think that photographing and identifying the disruptors is the only thing that will really work. If you try to remove the disruptors, they can get even more disruptive. Taser somebody and the meeting's effectively over. (OTOH, if they get arrested, they'll have to provide ID ....)
I'd suggest having a big muscular guy with an obvious camera and several stagehands with small, unobtrusive cameras. I expect attempts to intimidate photographers. You also want multiple angles.
YouTube videos sound like a great idea to me.
#41 --
No, cats can just manipulate gravity somehow.
For details, see Robin Wood's "Theory of Cat Gravity". Amazon has a couple of sample pages, and Larry Smith usually has copies at cons.
Warning -- industrial- grade cuteness.
Yup, Alton Brown. The first time I tried this recipe was the first time I got a steak to come out a perfect medium-rare.
Addenda:
* Let the steak rest for a few minutes before serving. Otherwise, all the juices will run out when you cut into it. You can use the time for doing things with pan drippings.
* Before doing this or any other high- temperature recipe, make sure your range has a real exhaust fan. Far too many electric ranges just take the air over the stove and blow it out the top and into the smoke detector.
* When Jim says cast iron, he means *cast iron*. Accept no substitutes; nothing else can take the heat.
* Do not attempt to replace the time in the oven with time in the microwave.
A couple of tweets short of a blog.
A couple of Cheetos short of a position paper.
A few betas short of a release.
As trustworthy as spam.
As reliable as Version 1.0.
As subtle as the Klingon ambassador.
As subtle as a Limbaugh routine.
As subtle as a slasher flick.
As honest as a mortgage broker.
As honest as an Iranian election.
Makes as much sense as a Palin speech.
So, any guesses as to what the plot is?
[hat type=tinfoil]
Evangelicals (the "Republican base") love a reformed sinner more than anything else. Live a good life, stay out of trouble, raise decent kids, and nobody cares. The more gruesome a "reform" story you can tell, the better.
To be a Reformed Sinner, you first have to be a sinner. And if you talk about sex, people will listen. Closely. And if you're going to commit a sin, might as well pick a fun one.
Sanford can now go on the Reformed Sinner circuit and get a free pass for all the nasty stuff he's done up to now.
As to leaving the state with nobody in charge; well, Government doesn't do anything anyway. Who cares?
[/hat]
The "watch list" is purely political. If there were a real "watch list", the law enforcement types would be very careful to make sure that the people on it never realize they're being watched. Watch where they go, who they meet, what they buy, etc, etc.
For this to work, law enforcement has to be all over the watchee like cat hair on a sweater. It's *very* labor intensive; you don't do it unless you're really sure you have a Bad Guy.
#58 ::: Terry Karney --
95% of the time, my Sprint cellphone is one of those delightful pieces of technology that just sits there, does its job, and doesn't get in the way.
Perhaps the "Check your messages *now* nonsense is a "feature" of my phone. I don't pretend to have all its little "features" sorted out. The "check messages" nonsense comes up occasionally when I open the phone to do something else, like make a call. It opens into a memu that I've never seen anywhere else, with a summary of all pending messsages. Only way out is to hit the "end" button until the menus go away.
#18 ::: Fragano Ledgister: Which company is your mobile service provider?
Sprint. I once spent the better part of a job interview grousing about Sprint with the recruiter. You can imagine what that kind of delay does for somebody whose livelihood depends on prompt communication.
The other nasty little habit that Sprint has is to suddenly decide that I have to check all my messages (text, voice, video) *right now*, and won't let me do what I picked up the phone to do in the first place.
From what I've heard, all the cellphone companies have their little "quirks". You get your choice of annoyances.
I rather like voice mail, when it works. Unfortunately, it usually doesn't. Problems:
Mumblers, like your callers. Learn to speak clearly, even if only for voicemail. Pause between words.
Assumers. "Hi. Give me a call; it's important". I don't recognize your voice. (Nothing personal; I don't recognize *anybody's* phone voice) And don't assume I have your phone number handy; I probably don't.
The Tech. My home answering machines work just fine. The voicemail on my cellphone will be delayed by up to several *days*.
#164 ::: Terry Karney --
It was more than one. Point I'm getting at is that a hydrogen filled airship isn't going to go all Hindenburg without a great deal of help.
#145 ::: Terry Karney --
Fascinating! Thanks! Seems that it took a lot of tracers to bring down a Zeppelin.
Of course, engineer a hydrogen- filled airship that's immune to tracer bullets and somebody'd find another way to start a fire. In a war zone, an airship is just a big, fat, slow, juicy target.
Nobody sell SPADs to Al Qaeda, OK?
#142 ::: Terry Karney --
The WWI observation balloons were, near as I can tell, simple cloth bags filled with hydrogen. I'd imagine that it should be fairly straightforward* to engineer a structure that wouldn't go up in a fireball from a tracer bullet.
Did anybody ever shoot tracer bullets at a Zeppelin? They were used as bombers, after all.
* Not that I expect anybody to try. The picture at the start of this post is all any politician will ever be interested in seeing.
#131 ::: Terry Karney --
Actually, I'd think an airship would be pretty much immune to conventional terrorist attacks.
Explosives? You'd just rupture a gas cell or two, and the whole thing would settle to the ground. Structural elements? Ditto.
Bullets? Calculate how long it would take a significant amount of gas to leak through a little round hole. Remember, the gas pressure is only a tiny bit above atmospheric. Bullet holes would probably only get noticed at a regular examination.
Using hydrogen as a lifting gas complicates things. While hydrogen burns like crazy, IIRC the hydrogen/oxygen mixture to get an explosion is pretty critical -- not the sort of thing you'd get with a terrorist device. Still, if a hydrogen gas cell ruptured and the hydrogen caught fire, you'd want to be far, far away. Fortunately, the traditional weapon for doing this (a biplane firing tracer bullets) is not a big favorite of terrorists. (It also violates the "far, far away" restriction.)
Overall, I'd say that an airship (even one using hydrogen as a lifting gas) would be more resistant to terrorist attack than a conventional aircraft. (Against *military* attack, as opposed to terrorist attack, they're both toast.)
The biggest defense against terrorism, of course, is the "sexiness factor". Bringing down a passenger airship in a huge ball of fire would be a major terrorist coup; bringing down an industrial heavy- lift airship (the main application I've seen described), much less so.
#53 ::: OtterB
Not stupid at all. Elementary, yes. Stupid, no.
The mass of a given volume of gas depends on its molecular mass. At one atmosphere and zero degrees C, 22.4 liters of hydrogen (molecular mass 2) has a mass of 2 grams. The same volume of helium (molecular mass 4) has a mass of 4 grams. Air has an average molecular mass of about 29. So in air, a balloon with 22.4 liters of hydrogen has a "mass" of -27 grams and would balance a mass of 27 grams. The same balloon filled with helium would balance 25 grams.
The best you could get would be a "molecular mass" of zero (for example, a vacuum), which would have a "mass" of -29 -- not much better than hydrogen or helium.
The only gas that would be lighter than hydrogen would be monatomic hydrogen (hydrogen with one atom per molecule instead of the normal two). This is, BTW, the "single-H" that Heinlein used for rocket fuel in "The Rolling Stones". Problem is that it is wildly unstable -- if you were to use it for rocket fuel, the nuclear reactor Heinlein used to heat it up would be superfluous -- it has enough energy on its own. Not the sort of thing you'd want filling your airship.
Problem with rigid airships is rigid + big + wind shear = oops. The Zeppelin Company had the engineering figured out; seems nobody else did. Non- Zeppelin airships tended to break.
I saw some cable show about the Hindenburg (not Mythbusters*) where they claimed to have an actual piece of the skin of the Hindenburg. They lit it off with a spark (like you'd get with static electricity) and it went up like a flare. Iron oxide + powdered aluminum = thermite. Not what you'd want on your airship skin.
The whole helium** fetish is odd. Why not use hydrogen for things like weather and atmospheric balloons where you don't have to worry about tracer bullets?***
* Mythbusters is a lot of fun, but I don't trust their results one little bit. They're mindbogglingly sloppy and don't seem to be able to do the simplest engineering calculations.
** "helium" (lower case) is the element. "Helium"(cap) is the city on Barsoom.
*** Not that I'm complaining. I own a part interest in a couple of helium wells.
#70 ::: kid bitzer -- so i agree that the underlying political philosophy behind my little story is not one that i think the nation should adopt.
That "magic" is really hard work and talent? That there are no magical shortcuts? That "magical" solutions that really work translate as "get off your butt and get to work"? What's wrong with that?
I thought the inspiration was pretty obviously "The Devil and Daniel Webster". Or maybe "Kung Fu Panda".
#38 ::: Paula Lieberman:
What, there wasn't any Bigfoot was here! graffitum?!
Bigfoot is, as near as we can tell, illeterate. As Tom Lehrer put it, "We'll have to make do with more primitive visual aids, as they say in the Ed Biz."
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 29 |
| 2008 | 30 |
| 2007 | 10 |
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