Slashdot Mirror

It's pretty funny how many uninformed people like to spout off on this site. I see several people telling me how my source is wrong. I thought that perhaps it is and did a quick Google check. According to Wikipedia, you get 1mg of absorbed nicotine from smoking a cigarette. Well, we aren't talking about smoking them, so you are wrong on that fact. This site talks about extracting the nicotine for use in e-cigarettes. Starting with 4g of tobacco they get 15ml of liquid at a concentration of 2.5mg/ml. That is 37.5mg of nicotine. This site has a couple of guys that used 40g of tobacco to roll 51 cigarettes. So that's 0.79g/cig. Ten cigarettes would be 7.9g of tobacco which would yield almost 75mg of nicotine. That is at the high end of the range for toxic levels of nicotine for mammals on the Wikipedia link above (30-60mg).

Thanks for getting me inspired to do a little research on these numbers, it was a good exercise. And all you dumb asses that think you know better -- Suck It!!!

It was a joke off the fact that inkjet toner is one of the most expensive liquids in the world:

http://www.cockeyed.com/science/gallon/liquid.html

Wow, that beats everything on this list, except for scorpion venom ($38,858,507.46/gal.).

Mirrors, like compact discs, reflect from the back side, so while the thickness of the glass might cause some refraction, the reflection is still happening close enough to the dish to far outperform foil.

The light sharpener is the much more serious version done on an old school 12 foot satellite dish that is actually closer to deserving mention on slashdot. The article is annoyingly laid out over more than 20 pages, but it is kind of cool what he was able to do with that much concentrated solar power. He also didn't try any better methods of depositing a mirror on the dish. He did small tests with tinfoil and they showed the tinfoil was clearly less reflective than the mirror. Of course the problem with the huge old school dish is that it's a mesh, not a smooth parabola, so any silvering or foil deposition really would have required placing and polishing a smooth parabolic surface for maximum efficiency.

This kid's implementation is cute.. but, come on now.. THIS is a proper version built years back:
http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish01.shtml

The larger tiles do make for a less-focused spot, but the much, much larger area makes up for that and then some.

Check out this guys "Light Sharpener" project...

http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish23.shtml

Like this has never been done before

Or, if you're serious, you could try one of these.

Is there data you can share that supports this statement?

I wish I had anything concrete. While they claim they've stopped a lot, there's never any name attached, only vague statements. I wager the TSA is chomping at the bit for their first real capture so they can display them on the news and go, "SEE!? We ARE being productive!!"

But instead there's simply crates and crates of confiscated scissors... ( http://www.cockeyed.com/photos/airport/airport.html )

http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish01.shtml

you mean like this?

http://cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish01.shtml (sfw)

Attaching aluminum foil was no problem. I bought four rolls of extra wide foil, which was light enough for a child to carry. We stuck it down with spray adhesive. http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish07.shtml

Check out http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish01.shtml.
Rob Cockerham's been there, done that (although with small mirrors rather than Mylar on a 12-foot diameter dish). He also has a number of videos on YouTube showing various items subjected to his "light sharpener."

http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish01.shtml

Make it shiny and you've got one hell of an energy collector.
  Solar Cooker
  Solar Furnace
  Solar Destruction

If you're actually interested in building something like this, check out http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish01.shtml which documents the process he went through to build the "light sharpener." For spoilers of it setting things on fire skip to the last page.

Check out http://cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish01.shtml

That's a 12 foot dish covered with mirrors. It gets HOT

Make a huge solar concentrator / death ray with it

As seen here: http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish01.shtml

http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/gas_zero/gas_zero.php

I dunno, I'd be fine with one million. Keep it in a secure location (you can afford a nice fireproof safe with that much) and just use it to augment your current lifestyle. Don't make outlandish purchases. One million in hundreds isn't that large either: http://www.cockeyed.com/inside/million/million.html

That's the rub though: being careful with it. You can't blow it on Rodeo Drive day one. Limit yourself to a grand a month and spread it around. Can probably deposit some in your normal account occassionally. Explaining 1M at once? Problem. Explaining 1M over 20, 30 years? Much easier.

And you can only get 146 greyscale pictures out of a single cartridge!

Light sharpener . . . http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish21.shtml

I'm more concerned about the "send us your old and worn out gold jewelry ads".

Rob Cockerham recently tested out their scam by sending them a bunch of junk spray-painted gold. They sent him back a check! It was only $1 or so, I guess it's a consolation prize they send to anyone who bothers to mail in an envelope.

Someone else tried it with actual gold and found that the prices they're willing to quote you (at least initially) are way below the true value, but if you complain about their offer, they'll make a reasonable one.

I'm more concerned about the "send us your old and worn out gold jewelry ads".

Rob Cockerham recently tested out their scam by sending them a bunch of junk spray-painted gold. They sent him back a check! It was only $1 or so, I guess it's a consolation prize they send to anyone who bothers to mail in an envelope.

Someone else tried it with actual gold and found that the prices they're willing to quote you (at least initially) are way below the true value, but if you complain about their offer, they'll make a reasonable one.

Oh... I didn't realize there was an answer already. Serves me right to ask without googling.

http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/nouveauriche/nouveau_riche_toc.shtml

AKA, use it as a light sharpener:

http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish01.shtml

Turn it up-side-down and use it fror a roof over a porch swing
http://www.mountlehmanllamas.com/feeder-sat-dish.html

Cover it with aluminum foil and make a solar cooker
http://www.backyardnature.net/j/solardsh.htm

Cover it in mirrors and melt/combust an amazing verity of things
http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish23.shtml

Giant Snow sled
Big Flower planter
Garage Sale Sign
Fish Pond

Rob from Cockeyed.com made his own Archimedes Death Ray and it worked:
http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish01.shtml

Also, you can refill your soda fountain for pennies on the gallon."

This list includes the price ($8.20/gallon) of Coca-Cola syrup. Since soda fountains mix at about a 5:1 ratio, fountain soda costs about $1.64/gallon. Of course, that's not including carbonation, but I have no idea how much that would cost.

A better list (old, thouigh, and no graph)

http://www.cockeyed.com/science/gallon/liquid.html

Lists black ink as $2,701.52 per gallon, compared to human blood ($1,514.79/Gallon) and insulin ($9,411.76/Gallon).
=Smidge=

5'7" @165 lbs results in a BMI of 25.8, which, under WHO guidelines, is marginally overweight. All of the figures I gave were marginal...

5'2 @165 lbs yields a BMI of 30.2-- marginally obese.

BMI really has little to do with physical attractiveness, the 5'2 @165 has her mass arranged attractively

You're insane.

5'2" @ 165-185 pounds is my ideal mate. Admittedly, I like my women soft, but still. You need to take a look at the weight chart available at http://www.cockeyed.com/photos/bodies/heightweight.shtml

They can probably save 37cents per applicant by shipping it off to some cheap off-shore country.

I agree with you. They should be held 100% responsible for their negligence, just like the rest of us.

Probably. The alcohol goes away very quickly. Residue on the hands should evaporate, and it goes from the mouth quicker than you might think, about 5 minutes. http://www.cockeyed.com/science/breathalyzer/breat halyser03.shtml

The BMI also becomes very unreasonable for anyone who is short or tall. I'm 6'3", 215lbs. According to the BMI, I'm overweight. Check out this pictoral representation of people who are different heights & weights.

http://www.cockeyed.com/photos/bodies/heightweight .shtml

Look at the dude who is 6'3", 210lbs. Does he look overweight? Hell, check out the guy that's 6'3", 250lbs. He's officially obese!

He took a pre-approved credit card application from the mail, tore it to shreds and taped it back together. He filled it out with an address other than his (parents), and used his cell phone as promary number. He recieved the credit card from his father when it arrived.

On another story he did he documented signing for credit card purchases with stuff like "Not Authorized" and the like, and rarley was he declined. He had picturs to document the entire story.

http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/creditcard/applica tion.shtml

Velcroman98

Or we could all download from the same account, like these guys. (Now if there was a possible way to do that with iTunes...

Yeah.

Cockeyed.com's Rob Cockerham has also done it.

- RG>

> I bet that crazy fool brought down the median lifespan.

I saw a show on these guys going to the Nobel ceremony. They're actually very funny.

Here's the whacky guy:
http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/marshall/intro.sht ml

And his research partner. His partner is smarter because (1) he let Barry be the guinea pig, and (2) he hates people who star in informercials.
http://www.vianet.net.au/~jrwarren/

Here's a good piece about their research and the scientific community's sledging:

http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-11/bacteria.html

I'm not sure if the GP was kidding or not, but this has really happened before. A guy named Rob tried it, got the credit card, and wrote about the experiment on his website.

A year ago (November 2005) there was a flurry of military silly string articles (LifeHacker, Schneier, others) all leading back to a cockeyed.com article, which quoted a soldier saying they used it for locating tripwires. The site didn't leave the content up for long, but it's preserved at the Internet Archive.

You have to love email forwards disguised as news articles.

This has been floating around for years -- I first saw it as a piece promoting British Special Forces ingenuity. Our very own Bruce Schneier mentioned it (and the suppressed Cockeyed piece) around this time last year.

If we don't feed the timothy, it will go away. Please don't encourage this crap.

Or if you must use this space to talk about something, I propose giving links to the kind of stuff that used to make old-school Slashdot cool (at least I think it used to be cool. I have vague, fuzzy memories of being entertained at one point). So in that spirit, for those that haven't seen it:

How much is inside?

Jokes aside, cost might be an issue. Scorpion venom is the most expensive liquid in the world by volume.

The amount of gold we're talking about probably isn't any more than what's in a bottle of Goldschlager

driving a shiny car makes you a better person than him. Go you.

Hah! I'm a better person than either of you! Go me!

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driving a shiny car makes you a better person than him. Go you.

Hah! I'm a better person than either of you! Go me!

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