Slashdot Mirror

Have fun with this story, https://darwinawards.com/darwi.... Amps kill more than volts and alternating current is far worse than direct current, just ask a certain elephant, well, you can't because, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., just proves you can't believe anything were money is involved.

What Tesla should have done, was do a deal with nearby residents, to put in a solar powered charging grid adjacent to those charging stations, well, at least a few stations of them for marketing purposes. How many residents would depend upon location and sun exposure and not too hot or not too cold, as that would consume a lot of energy. Create a competing grid for marketing purpose and possibly considerably more.

Turn in your nerd card, and stop posting.

No matter how determined, flat earth adherents are a nerd's natural enemy. And, honestly, it's all the worse if they're determined to prove themselves correct.

Maybe they are after an Darwin Award and in addition prove evolution. :-)

And further to this point: http://www.darwinawards.com/da...

> Is there a strain of the flu going around that reduces emotional maturity to that of an 8-year-old?

Perhaps you thought blind faith in science wouldn't lead to something like this?

Better than blind faith in blind faith to cure/prevent the flu, as recommended by Evangelical Trump adviser tells people to skip flu shots in favor of prayer:

A Texas evangelist preacher and member of Donald Trump’s faith advisory council told parishioners to skip the flu shot in favor of prayer, inviting scorn from concerned medical professionals and epidemiologists.

“Jesus himself gave us the flu shot,” Gloria Copeland said in a video posted last Wednesday that has slowly begun to go viral, no pun intended, after some observers highlighted Copeland’s ties to Trump.

“Just keep saying that ‘I’ll never have the flu. I’ll never have the flu,’” she continued. “Inoculate yourself with the word of God. Flu, I bind you off the people in the name of Jesus. Jesus himself gave us the flu shot. He redeemed us from the curse of flu.”

On the other hand, perhaps they'll all be Darwin Award winners.

Here's a new year's resolution for you: Strap yourself to a rocket and launch it to demonstrate that the Earth is flat.

Not really since "flat earthers" would not believe no matter what they were shown. However, it would be an excellent example of how the so-called "flat earther" could win a coveted Darwin Award .

one of which was actually caused by an idiot pouring a plutonium solution down the drain

Idiot is too kind. The guy won himself an instant Darwin award despite surviving for over a month after his stupidity:
http://darwinawards.com/darwin...

> It's too quiet. How can pedestrians keep being absorbed in their smartphones if you can't hear traffic anymore over the music you're playing on your headphones?

What do you mean "how can"? The quietness of these sleek trucks does not inhibit pedestrians from being absorbed in their smartphones. (Not necessarily absorbed listening to music.)

As for listening to music with headphones and being unable to hear traffic. Either turn down, or turn off the music, or become a nominee for the prestigious and coveted Darwin Award.

We should be celebrating the death of the low-I.Q. members of our societies, not protect them!

Read the rules: http://darwinawards.com/rules/...

"The existence of offspring, though potentially deleterious to the gene pool, does not disqualify a nominee."

Nominees significantly improve the gene pool by eliminating themselves from the human race in an obviously stupid way.

They are self-selected examples of the dangers inherent in a lack of common sense, and all human races, cultures, and socioeconomic groups are eligible to compete. Actual winners must meet the following criteria:

Reproduction Out of the gene pool: dead or sterile.

Excellence Astounding misapplication of judgment.

Self-Selection Cause one's own demise.

Maturity Capable of sound judgment.

Veracity The event must be true.

They are dead, obvious lack of judgment, did it to themselves, and the event is true. The only question mark is maturity. But the same can be said for most members of Congress and the Senate.

The March for Science seems focused on earth's bleak environmental future. Fortunately, science has some sure fire answers:

1. Nuclear energy

2. Geo-engineering

3. Carbon dioxide extraction

4. Albedo modification

5. Solar radiation management

You get the idea.

However, you probably won't hear much during the March about the world's population as the root cause of climate change. Nobody wants to face the obvious fact that we are having too many babies. If you suggest that population growth is the fundamental problem behind climate change, the science loving marchers will reply with their timeless response.

Despite a flood of scientific data illustrating human overpopulation, people refuse to accept it. Where is the March for Birth Control? Boys and girls, if you want to stop climate change, get your tubes clipped/tied.

So, can a March for Science change anything? Oh sure! Because it is backed by the democratic process, and Americans can always send a message at the ballot box. (ROTFL)

Politics is a pay-to-play game, and Citizens United has etched that rule in granite around the Capital Rotunda. Which means the environmental crisis will not be addressed until Big Money finds it more profitable than the status quo.

In the meantime, there is really nothing to worry about. Even the long term crisis caused by population growth will soon be a thing of the past.

Science teaches us that if we don't solve our problems, mother nature will
do it for us.

Darwin's take on this...

http://www.darwinawards.com/st...

The guy is a mechanical engineer. What sort of "open source projects" do you want him to participate in?

An open source design for a household cleaning robot would be cool. An open source sexbot would also be nice. The real killer app would be to combine them both into one device.

Already been done. Just look for stories about guys damaging their penises in vacuum cleaners, like this Darwin Awards story about the guy who permanently chopped off part of his penis that way, which has this note added:

Johannes Schya says such events are common in Germany. A graduate dissertation at the University of Munich details this strange kind of injury, and includes case studies and interviews with the involuntary volunteers. The dissertation was made public by members of the "Chaos Computer Club" of Hamburg, and has been referenced in Der Spiegel, Nr 5 1986. Those interested can read "Penisverletzung bei Masturbation mit Staubsaugern" Theimuras, Michael Alschibajy Von der Universitt Mnchen.

Ecclesiastes: There is nothing new under the sun.

are people dropping dead

Yes they are.

This kind of person.

The Darwin Awards are going to need more funding...
http://www.darwinawards.com/

... Pedestrians walking around staring at their smartphones, wearing headphones and/or otherwise not paying attention to their surroundings will be required to emit a "beep, beep, beep" sound to warn other pedestrians and near-by vehicles. Fair is fair people - pay attention or get a Darwin Award -- I'm also talking to you, guy I saw riding a bicycle no-hands while browsing your phone, wearing headphones and smoking a cigarette. (true story)

What part of the term "splitting hairs" do you not understand?
Christ, AC's, 2.5 seconds 0-60 in a street-legal sedan that seats five is fuck fucking fast. That's an acceleration of 24 mph per second or 1.09g's.
At a fraction of the cost of a Bugatti Veyron. Probably less for insurance, too. So what if some hand-made toy for sons of oil barons squeaks 0.1 second more? You have better odds of strapping a solid-rocket to your Chevy than driving, much less obtaining, one of these so-called supercars that look so pretty in the magazines.
So, give it up, a little. The Tesla, at least, is on the horizon of obtainable, if you sell your house, raid the retirement and the kid's college fund, or wholesale a couple of keys of... no, scratch that last one.

(really, I have a lot of sympathy for stupid people)

I would, except for the tremendous network effects that happen when there are so many of them. It's far too burdensome to ignore.

So, I'm in favor of leaving them to their own devices instead of constantly protecting them from themselves (or otherwise making stupidity less painful and risky).

Read this -

http://www.darwinawards.com/da...

Hope you don't end up becoming the next Darwinian champion

But there is

http://www.darwinawards.com/

Well, that doesn't seem to be completely true

1999 Darwin Awards - Resistance is Futile

and that was only a 9v battery.

Actually, you can kill yourself with a single 9 V battery -- or the 12 V battery of your car. One man did:

http://darwinawards.com/darwin...

The computation goes as follows. The issue, as several people have pointed out, is that it is current across the heart that causes defibrillation (basically interrupting the heart's natural rhythm so that it pulses chaotically), not a matter of cooking the person (which will also work, BTW, but isn't the most common cause of electrical shock deaths). It isn't even the case that more current is always worse -- there appears to be a range of currents that are more toxic than others. A brief explanation of this is here:

https://www.physics.ohio-state...

The maximally toxic range of currents across the thorax is empirically 0.1 to 0.2 amps. Below that it isn't enough to defibrillate, above that the heart muscle clamps all the way which means that when the current is removed it is actually more likely that it can with help or will on its own restore a normal rhythm.

The internal resistance of the human body once you introduce probes through the comparatively insulating skin is around 100 ohms. A 9V battery across ~100 ohms makes a thoracic current of roughly 0.1 amp, right at the start of the maximally fatal range. The Darwin above was given because an idiot didn't believe this and stuck probes through his skin to "prove" that it wasn't so.

Personally I've experienced shocks from 12 V car batteries when screwing around with them on rainy nights with salt water on my hands. That's another good way of reducing skin resistance. I didn't take the hit across the torso, but it was every bit as painful as a 110V shock through dry skin -- more so, actually -- and caused my muscles to contract like lightning.

None of this is actually news -- it has been known as long as there has been electricity, because people have been killing themselves accidentally with electricity just that long. My scout leader 50 years ago worked for GE (as an inventor, actually -- one of the people who invented the photodiode controlled light). He taught me that long ago to ground one finger and then brush another finger of the same hand against any possible hot wire so that you find out with a jolt across your hand, not through your torso. Hand to foot, hand to hand, not so good. People used to kill themselves all the time touching hot electrical switches while standing in wet feet on bathroom floors before ground fault circuits were invented and mandated by code.

None of which has much to do with TFA, but it is good to know if you work at all with electricity. Physicists need to know it just to be able to teach it to their students so THEY don't kill themselves accidentally one day. It isn't the voltage that kills you, it's the current, and it doesn't take much current to do the job (or much voltage to create a fatal current).

Anybody can die. The trick is to die in an interesting way. Maybe your purpose in life it to serve as a warning to others.

Have you read the Darwin awards? They seem to be a flimsy excuse to laugh at other people's tragedies, with a little bit of superiority thrown in for good measure. There's quite a bit of questionable entries in there. For example.... And that's even if you accept the idea that only people who are stupid because of heritable characteristics ever do dangerous, dumb things. Plus you kind of have to ignore a bunch of more recent evolutionary theory which suggests that individuals within a species dying or living comes down more to chance and doesn't really drive evolution gradually.

Does that stick interfere much with sitting? Seriously.

The entire basis of humour is misfortune, either through the actions of others, the environment, or self-inflicted. Try to think of a joke (other than puns, which IMHO don't count) that doesn't involve something bad / embarrassing happening to someone. They are out there, I am sure, but they aren't the ones people typically remember...or elicit more than a brief chuckle. The Darwin Awards are simply a tongue-in-cheek collection of stories regarding one subset of (admittedly darkly) comedic circumstances. We laugh, because otherwise we'd spend all our time crying.

Have you read the Darwin awards? They seem to be a flimsy excuse to laugh at other people's tragedies, with a little bit of superiority thrown in for good measure. There's quite a bit of questionable entries in there. For example.... And that's even if you accept the idea that only people who are stupid because of heritable characteristics ever do dangerous, dumb things. Plus you kind of have to ignore a bunch of more recent evolutionary theory which suggests that individuals within a species dying or living comes down more to chance and doesn't really drive evolution gradually.

Wearing stuffs like this that distract the wearers from the reality around them is dangerous.

Not only they could walk into walls, they also could be distracted enough (like this Epson thingy which actually plays movie) to walk into the middle of a very busy thoroughfare !

As if we haven't had enough of drivers distracted by their phones, now we are equipping the pedestrians with glasses which actually blind them from what is going on around them.

Well, evolutionarily speaking we have kind of been coasting for awhile now... we are getting bigger and dumber (it would seem) so a thinning of the herd may be useful. Think of it as adding chlorine and a filter to the gene pool... give people the option to massively screw up and maybe win a Darwin Award.

The problem is that such people generally don't suffer from their own mistakes; if they screw up while operating a half ton killing machine, it's not usually them that get the daisies. So what we're really saying is that people who live in areas where this kind of device is acceptable in public need to get culled.

Wearing stuffs like this that distract the wearers from the reality around them is dangerous.

Not only they could walk into walls, they also could be distracted enough (like this Epson thingy which actually plays movie) to walk into the middle of a very busy thoroughfare !

As if we haven't had enough of drivers distracted by their phones, now we are equipping the pedestrians with glasses which actually blind them from what is going on around them.

Well, evolutionarily speaking we have kind of been coasting for awhile now... we are getting bigger and dumber (it would seem) so a thinning of the herd may be useful. Think of it as adding chlorine and a filter to the gene pool... give people the option to massively screw up and maybe win a Darwin Award.

You would have even more chance than with a soda vending machine to earn a Darwin Award:

http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin2001-25.html

I hope he does better than this guy.

For sure, this kid is a candidate for a Darwin Award. See: http://www.darwinawards.com/

Clearly, you're trolling because no one can realistically be as unbelievably stupid as you portray. But, I live in a tourist town and routinely see bicyclists riding against traffic, so uneducated people like you (pretend to be) are out there, so I'll bite one last time:

so i am not allowed to question stupid rules?

Sure, but this rule isn't actually stupid - fact..

a car coming at you at a very high rate of speed compounded with your speed in the opposite direction is a low possibility of survival

Very true, so don't ride against traffic.

as opposed to a zero chance of survival from the idiot swiping you from behind because you cannot SEE him at all, and have NO chance of evasive maneuvers

I was swiped by a car I did not see and lived, so this argument is invalid.

and so i will continue to prefer a low chance of survival over a zero chance of survival, and continue to ride against traffic, and continue to advise others to do the same, and support that the laws will change to recognize this common sense

You're obviously statistically challenged, and your "zero chance of survival" scenario is invalid, but please continue in your endeavor to be a Darwin Award winner as you have no common sense...

Again, please don't breed - ever. Cheers.

As a non-native and never-living-in-Ohio person, I too applaud speeding there.

That reminds me of this episode of king of the hill where he said that the US government was putting too much pressure on the Russians because they didn't realize that the Russians were incompetent. I happened to read shortly afterwards about this:

http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1994-25.html

Nobody heard about it til way later.

If she left a loaded gun where a three year old could pick it up, and died as a result, then she should have been nominated for a Darwin Award.

The fact that she was shot by her child removes her from Darwin Award eligibility.

I remember this old story on the news that a 3 year old picked up a gun, not knowing what it was, and shot his(?) mother when she tried to take it back.

If she left a loaded gun where a three year old could pick it up, and died as a result, then she should have been nominated for a Darwin Award.

This would prevent stories like that.

Why would we want to prevent the removal of fatally stupid people from the human gene pool? Too bad she had already procreated at least once.

As a pedestrian, I think it's fair to trade off a few more rear-end collisions for better pedestrian safety.

Or smarter/more aware pedestrians. Seriously, while it's a given that motorists have a responsibility to be mindful of pedestrians, if you're not *also* being pro-active as a pedestrian, watching the traffic to ensure that you're not going to get run over, then you're even more irresponsible and probably a future Darwin Award winner. Just sayin' ...

I say this as a bicyclist who was once, many years ago, hit by a car at an intersection, even though I had the right-of-way. I had even looked directly at the driver as I approached and he looked at me, then he pulled out anyway. I ended up on the hood of his car glaring at him with my best "WTF" look and he looked *really* surprised - like I came out of nowhere. Luckily, I wasn't hurt, got off his car and he drove off. I'm a better, more alert, bicyclist - and pedestrian - because of this and hope he's a better driver.

If you think that's bad, did you hear about the guy who injected cocaine into his urethra? It had the intended effect initially, but it ended with him losing both his legs, nearly all his fingers, and his member falling off!

http://www.darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1993-04.html

http://www.cocaine.org/health/dangers.html

They aren't missing anything. They've just taken into account the roughly 50% chance that any offspring will have the retarded gene.

What's more: http://www.darwinawards.com/rules/rules1.html

"Removing ones genes from the pool clearly has less merit if the genes have already been passed on to several offspring, unless you can rely on the offspring to also find creative ways of eliminating their genes before they reproduce. Thus, a weighting factor should be applied to the criteria, giving maximum benefit to a victim who has never procreated, decreasing as the number of offspring increases."

In short, don't believe everything your pastor tells you, fatty.

just let Darwin do his work!

I think a touch sensitive screen could be sinful Will you need to repent, do penance and pray for forgiveness after use? Can you use it to get to http://www.darwinawards.com/?

Darwin awards aren't given to people whose exposure to danger is consciously undertaken, and most certainly not those for whom the risk was for the betterment of society- for instance, coal mine workers, soldiers, infectious agent researchers, and of course, scientists.

http://www.darwinawards.com/rules/rules2.html

Anyway, I do find myself hoping that Alan Turing's death was accidental instead of deliberate.

Indeed, he'd give awards.

Of course we are!

I spent a while searching for a copy of the Yahoo! article and came up with nothing. I did find this story from a local news outlet that probably says about the same as the Yahoo! article did. I also wasn't able to find more than search engine hints of a followup article saying that the guy was released from the hospital. He missed out on a Darwin award, at least. I imagine he recovered mostly or completely.

First of all, mod+1 for the reference to the minimum amount of heat -- I knew that such a limit existed but it was good to see the estimate and have links to the formal argument and beyond. Second, while we may or may not be able to reduce the heat released from the bits themselves as they change state, room temperature superconductors will still make two very significant improvements in processor design. First, reducing the resistance of everything BUT the bits will reduce the heat released by a chip by a nontrivial amount, rather a nontrivial fraction -- presuming that one can lay down the superconductor in VLSI circuits and mass produce them, as opposed to build them a molecule at a time. Second, electrical superconductors are usually thermal superconductors as well.

It is this latter property that is probably by far the most important. Note e.g. this article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/11/031112072719.htm -- if one were able to make the base of a chip out of a superconductor in good thermal contact with the actual semiconductor matrix a thin film on top of it, and couple that base directly to a superconducting heat sink, one could e.g. produce 10x to 50x the heat in the actual CPU and still remove it fast enough to keep the chip itself sufficiently cool. If the traces within the chip itself were superconducting, if clever use of superconducting material let one reduce the heat associated with switching closer to the limit, so much the better. Ultimately, it would probably mean that one could run chips at higher voltage and higher clock to produce faster reliable switching and still deal with the heat.

I don't have time to do a formal estimate of the speedup possible, but I'm guestimating that a real thermal superconductor -- one with "zero" resistance to the flow of heat -- suitable for use as the base material for a chip would permit a very rapid scale-up of chip speed by up to an order of magnitude in clock or effective clock. It also might make it possible to build a three dimensional CPU -- one reason chips are 2D is so that one can get the heat out; if one had a thermal/electrical superconductor one could in principle stack up layers and scale performance by one or more orders of magnitude, at first multiple cores on steroids but all at much higher clocks, later true 3d design and layout.

In any event, the impact would very probably be profound, at least if the hypothetical RTS was cheap and suitable for nanoscale integration as a substrate and/or trace material (and functioned as a thermal superconductor as well as noted).

Still, I think that simply eliminating resistivity in power transmission would have the greatest societal impact. PV solar power, for example, "instantly" becomes feasible because one can generate in the Mojave and use the electricity in Maine without transmission loss. That isn't huge, that is game-changing enormous. The Sahara become the electrical source for Europe and Africa, India for Asia, etc. Depending on the hypothetical materials magnetic properties (big if, actually!) it may well revolutionize electrical motor design, maglev trains and roadways, and more, but just letting us move power for free to where we use it makes Edison have the last laugh over Tesla -- human civilization can convert to low voltage DC electrical service. A civilization run on 5 VDC would make electrocution a historical oddity from pre-RTS times -- one can manage to kill yourself with as little as 9 volts (see my favorite Darwin Award, "Resistance is Futile" -- http://www.darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html) but 50 mA should be below the fatal threshold even for somebody that tries very hard.

rgb

Nothing?

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/20/local/me-dna20
http://www.darwinawards.com/science/forensic_analysis.html
that didn't take me long to find.

And the most damning, from a university:

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/labs/gel/forensics/

Is DNA evidence alone enough to acquit or convict?

It is easier to exclude a suspect than to convict someone based on a DNA match. The FBI estimates that one-third of initial rape suspects are excluded because DNA samples failed to match.

Forensic DNA is just one of many types of evidence. It is important to examine other clues such as motive, weapon, or additional evidence linking a suspect to the crime scene. The more evidence collected, the less likely it is that samples from a particular suspect were planted, either on purpose or by accident, at the crime scene.

So assuming that taking someone's DNA is going to match later? And not acknowledging that people could be mis-identified?

Either everyone on the planet is in your "DNA bank" or it's simply not going to be accurate. Guess how realistic that is?
"look a DNA match! this guy's guilty, let's go arrest him" (because he's the only person in the database). You know that will happen.

B) No one is happy about it.

Oh yes some people are happy. Google for cleaning the gene pool. See also: http://www.darwinawards.com/ .

In what way does that magically gift the driver the ability to see through a car?

PLEASE LEARN TO READ.

Did you read the part about rear sensors? e.g. "The rear reversing sensors that come standard on many cars seem pretty good at detecting stuff. So why cameras for all cars? How many more would these cameras save compared to those sensors?"

As for your insults I can think and understand far better than you can read.

Your education system failed you or you failed it. Not going to bother trying to teach you anything since you're rude.

Have a nice day.

Still seems that they're frequently evaluated in the original order listed though.

And provides material for The Darwin Awards. :-)

The http://www.darwinawards.com/ pokes fun at deceased idiots on a daily basis. In fact, "dead funny" is the merit for the award. Hopefully they are not located in UK, because judging by the turn of events they all earned capital punishment by now.

P.S.: I do not support the unfortunate troll, but a slap on the wrist would be more than enough in this case.