Slashdot Mirror

They are materials science problems.
Newtonian physics does the job of predicting what will happen extraordinarily well and quite frankly you could do the experiment on earth, with a centrifuge apparatus and learn more, and cost less. Something like this https://www.roadsideamerica.co... if you want to test your cable climber but you don't even need that.

Flat earthers are a different breed altogether. With your typical conspiracy (9-11 inside job, fake the moon landing, vaccines cause autism, etc.), all it takes is a combination of a good story, not understood or misunderstood science, and a belief that you know something special that most people don't. It also becomes more popular as time gets further and further away from the initial event. But a key element is the inability for everyone or the average person to recreate the original variables surrounding the conspiracy. (We cannot recreate 9-11, we cannot recreate a moon landing limiting our technology and knowledge to what we had in 1968, etc.

But with flat earthers? There are literally hundreds of ways today the average human can observe that the Earth is round. There's no depth of science to it. One can ask themselves the question, "Why can't I see the Rocky Mountains from my house?" Or, one can go find a straight road (perhaps on the salt flats or on ND Hwy 46), get a pair of binoculars or a good telescoping lens on a tripod, watch a car drive by, and watch it disappear over the horizon, then ask the question, "Would the car disappear if the Earth was flat?" Or just go onto YouTube and watch all the videos made floating weather balloons up to the stratosphere, where the camera can capture the curvature of the Earth. Or talk to an airplane pilot. Or control tower personnel whose equations they use to calculate distances, vectors, and flight plans would fail miserably if they were to use Euclidian Geometry instead of Spherical Geometry. Or duplicate Eratosthenes' experiment. (Yes, that one's far more complicated than watching video's on YouTube, but if it worked for some dead white Greek dude over two thousand years ago, who didn't have the internet or Google, then it can work for anyone today as well.)

Most conspiracy theories choose to ignore expert opinions because they're incapable of understanding the science themselves. Flat-earthers are fully capable of understanding the science; they just refuse to understand.

https://www.roadsideamerica.co... We had one of these a couple of decades ago. I believe somebody tried to make a night deposit and it was closed shortly thereafter.

Bitch-ass brother added me to his linked-in profile, next thing you know, the FBI takes my cabin and gives it to the f'in "Newseum" .

p.s. -- I warned you.
04475-046
Florence, CO

Idaho is the home of nuclear energy in the US. What better place to put the "clean, safe and too cheap to meter" waste materials than the location of the first nuclear energy plant? They still celebrate "Atomic Days" every July 17 in Arco, Idaho. And, I believe Idaho still has more nuclear power plants per capita than any state in the US.

http://www.roadsideamerica.com...

http://www.boiseweekly.com/boi...

So the question is not "why would the Department of Energy" want to store nuclear wastes in Idaho, it's really, "Why would the Department of Energy want to store nuclear waste anywhere else?"

Reminds me of the day that a giant statue of Jesus was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. And of course, the religious nutjobs immediately started raising money to rebuild it.

What I should have done, but didn't, was figure out the frequency of the wireless mike the preacher almost certainly uses during his services, then secretly broadcast this message right after the pitch to donate to the replacement statue "DID YOU NOT GET THE MESSAGE THE FIRST TIME? I THOUGHT I WAS PRETTY CLEAR ABOUT IT!". The reaction of the congregation would probably have been priceless.

Ooh, which reminds me.

The House of Mystery, Hungry Horse, Montana.

(and other mystery spots)

Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin still holds the world's largest refractor in a beautiful 19th century building. The Astronomer royale of Scotland once called it, "The Taj Mahal of astronomy" and perfectly fits the stereotype of what an observatory should look like. Their visiting hours are meager and much of the lovely grounds was turned into a housing development during the property bubble, but it's well worth a visit.

Venture further north to the Wisconsin Dells, a down-to-earth tourist trap where you'll find water parks, Indian trading posts and.... the Mir space station? Yep. One Mir copy fell out of orbit, the other is somewhere in Russia and this one is in Wisconsin.

The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry isn't my favorite science museum, but it is big and was recently updated.

The university of Chicago's old Stagg Field was demolished (happily, via non-nuclear means) but you can visit a sculpture at the site of the world's first man-made atomic pile.

So it went through Switzerland, France, and Belgium?

Still not that impressive; I'm working on a boomerang capable of traveling across four US states, which I plan to test in New Mexico.

Make sure you pick your test site wisely or failure may result.

Regarding your .sig: is that old, I thought Apple was on the outs these days?

Good point, but sign language would be unambiguous as we'd see letters, words, meaning, etc. What we have here is highly ambiguous. Its a hand in a certain position. Occam's razor suggests this is just a person holding a showl funny.

If this video showed a keypad, dialing, etc then it would be comparable to your example, but it doesn't. Its just an artifact that looks kinda sorta like something we use nowadays the same way Christians find Jesus images on potato chips or how a water stain on a bridge near my home is considered a miracle. Its just meaningless simulacrum.

Foamhenge is a styrofoam Stonehenge that's been mentioned in some of the articles about this bureaucratic nonsense.

frozen bags of astronaut urine...

Hehe, looks as if astronauts aren't any better than truck drivers...?

It's kind of like the allegations of voter fraud when someone distributed leaflets in Cleavland Ohio claiming that democrats should vote on some day 2 days late for the election.

Anyone intelligent enough that should have a legitimate interest will not fall for the tricks. Some people will and it gives more idiots a chance to complain. Of course there is always the Streisand effect and the possibility that the changes were made just to create or manufacture a controversy and promote then event. Chances are, it was some kid somewhere playing games and not even realizing how it would be taken in this context.

Now, if someone was really attempting to confuse people, they wouldn't have moved the location to the same general area where mistakes will only cause delays. Instead, they would have changed the Lincoln memorial location to the Lincoln monument location where a mistake would cost the entire event.

it may never burn out, like this fire that has been burning for 35+ years: The Door to Hell

We also have the Centralia mine fire, going since 1961 in Pennsylvania, US (39 years.)

With the possibility of more of this stuff happening (see the Guatemalan sinkholes trying to swallow buildings into huge underground caverns), I'm beginning to see a problem. If something happens in your town but I can't leave relocate for financial reasons, like the bad economy plaging us and how hard it is to find cheap housing or sell/buy another house, there could be a "calculated risk but I must live here anyway" trend as our environment breaks down all around.

You have also a burning coal mine in the US that has forced at least one town, Centralia, PA to be more or less abandoned.

You mean a BOL - Big Old Lemon.

Got that for you right here.

(This thing is only two blocks away from where I live, BTW)

Once GPS came in, suddenly they are being expected to make 11 stops (because the gps showed they were sitting around for 20 minutes) and work 100% while on. But the pay is still 8x dollars.

What that leads to is drivers that can't afford to stop to take a piss. So what do they do? Piss in a plastic jug and throw it out the window. There's more to life than money.

Community opposition and zoning requirements are often major stumbling blocks to building more cell sites.

Actually, the BIGGEST problem is getting the backbone to the tower. You have some opposition to towers, yes, but you can build whatever you like? If you can't run a pipe to it, all you've got is a ugly looking tree and nothing else.

That's the problem the telcos are running into right now? They're all trying to cut back on wireline services and boost their carrier network, but all of them run into a brick wall at the CO and remote terminals. You can only squeeze in so many DS3s before you have no choice but to upgrade the whole shootin match from the ground up, simply because the copper can't give anymore.

Being from Buffalo I was curious that I'd never heard of that - turns out it's actually in Syracuse, which is two cities east of Buffalo (Rochester in between) and about a two and a half hour drive :)

Here's some info,

And here's a photo.

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/set/lightbulbs.html

That would be great if all I needed was a 4 watt bulb and I never turned it off.

(BTW not "Edison's original Light bulb")

next best thing?
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/

And there's also this light bulb that has burned for over a century: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/set/lightbulbs.html

Great idea, or they could just move "South of the Border" http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2211 a little bit north
It's a pretty lude little stop between NC and SC.

I grew up in SC and all i have to say is thats why i fucking left!!!

Auto junkyard.

The Black Hole if you're close enough.

Most any plant has a pile of junk. Many gizmos in there.

At a rest stop in ohio, I noticed a sign about the crash of the shenandoah, an earlier version of these. Still, high time they came back. Skyhook is a brilliant name for it.
They should give Randall Munroe a free ride.
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/10432

America had four zeppelins of its own in the 1920s and 1930s. One -- the Los Angeles -- was built by the Germans, flew successfully for a decade, and retired with dignity. The other three -- the Shenandoah, Akron, and Macon -- were built by Americans, and each crashed less than two years after its first flight.

The first, and the only one to crash on land (and thus be suitable as a tourist attraction) was the Shenandoah. In September 1925 it was ordered to conduct an ill-advised publicity tour of midwestern state fairs. Less than 24 hours into its flight "the strongest airship in the world" was caught in a thunderstorm, torn to pieces, and scattered across the rolling hills of Noble County in southeastern Ohio. Amazingly, 29 of its crew of 43 survived.

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/

qz

They haven't solved the integer problem yet, but if you need to store strings you should take a look at the latest data center they are "rolling out."

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/set/lightbulbs.html

Let's see another light bulb burn 100yrs...

For those who have never been in Portland, Oregon, we should explain that people are a little different here.

Question: Why do hippies move to Portland? Answer: Because there are no jobs.

The world's smallest park is here, and the world's largest bookstore.

The spirit of Douglas Adams lives on in the body of Linus Torvalds, who lives in Portland, creating artistic chaos for commercial operating systems. Douglas Adams loved technical gizmos. "Douglas was a keen technologist, writing about such inventions as e-mail and Usenet before they became widely popular, or even widely known." Linus Torvalds makes technical gizmos happen.

For something similar, try the House on the Rock outside of Madison, WI. Very interesting and odd place all around. There are several music rooms with set-ups of chamber orchestras, quartets, and band ensembles all done with automated machines. From what I saw there, the machines are very hard to keep in tune, which gives something like the second video. However, there were a few rooms which sounded quite neat, especially given that it was all automated.

Links:
http://www.thehouseontherock.com/HOTR_AttractionMain.htm http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/WISPRhouse.html

for those who don't get it http://www.roadsideamerica.com/pet/topsy.html

They would store it in the middle (instead of on the edges, where it could fall off), somewhere like Lebanon, Kansas, equally convenient to both coasts.

Before we start adding some piddling monuments like Mt. Rushmore, I think we need to consider some more of our overlooked wonders:

world's largest ball of string:
    http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/MNDARtwine. html

world's largest pecan:
    http://www.worldslargestthings.com/missouri/pecan. htm

world's largest buffalo:
    http://www.wlra.us/wl/wlbuffalo.htm

world's largest pineapple:
    http://www.wlra.us/wl/wlpineapple.htm

world's largest muskie:
    http://www.wlra.us/wl/wlmuskie.htm

world's largest catsup bottle:
    http://www.catsupbottle.com/

Too bad she wasn't a guy. Any trucker could tell you about the great time saver known as the empty jug.

There is one view that Andy Warhol's nihilistic pop consumerism was the crowning cultural response to America's culture-as-such in recent decades. But them's city folks with book learning talking.

A serious proposition -- Don't think of the U.S. as a First World Nation. Just get that idea out of your mind. To expand upon one of our radio commentators the other day: we export raw materials, we import manufactured goods, we have a crushing national debt that does nothing for the people, we have extraordinary class division in income and we may or may not have had a government for the last six years that was actually elected by the people. Our literacy ranks us in the 50s, as, according to Reporters Without Borders, does our freedom of the press. We don't have national health care and our infant mortality and lifespan are worse than much of western Europe. You see? Just don't think of us as a first world nation.

Now, what does that open up? Why is third world tourism popular? Obviously, the natural attractions and curious ways of indigenous populations. There you go! See Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, raft the Colorado, take a multi-day steamboat cruise down the Mississippi. Rent a car and drive out of the cities like Jean Baudrillard and you'll find places weirder than you imagined. Rub shoulders with the natives at something like the WeFest country music bonanza. What could be more ethnically colorful than Polka Worship service at the 7th annual Fort Ransom Norski Days? And a little tip -- when the population is so thin that small towns are 20 miles apart, few of those towns support fast food restaurants and you can still meet locals at family-owned diners. Check out roadsideamerica.com for the bizarre things little towns erect in the hope of making a name for themselves.

It's simple. Get a map of the U.S. Pick a state in the middle nobody ever talks about. Go to their state tourism web site to find some bizarre festival and make a commitment to be there. Entirely different experience than visiting the top ten big cities.

According to the theory there should've been countless unfit creatures that would've become extinct -- so how come no one's been able to find any of these fossils?

In a small religious town called St. Benedict, OR, the monks have a really neat museum with many unfit creatures that went extinct, not just fossilized, but actual taxidermy.

Hey look what's for sale!

big light bulb...
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/sights/sightstory.p hp?tip_AttrId=%3D11143

Hmmm, roadside cows huh, you mean like these?? http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/NDSALcow.ht ml http://www.roadsideamerica.com/set/titans.html He isn't kidding about mosquitoes either, well, at least in the eastern part of the state. They share Minnesota's mosquitos, affectionately known as the state bird. On the upside they aren't the right kind to be carrying malaria. So by jungle comparisons, the mosquitoes aren't bad at all. Compared to other "temperate" climates though, they are quite bad I guess.

Hmmm, roadside cows huh, you mean like these?? http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/NDSALcow.ht ml http://www.roadsideamerica.com/set/titans.html He isn't kidding about mosquitoes either, well, at least in the eastern part of the state. They share Minnesota's mosquitos, affectionately known as the state bird. On the upside they aren't the right kind to be carrying malaria. So by jungle comparisons, the mosquitoes aren't bad at all. Compared to other "temperate" climates though, they are quite bad I guess.

He actually roasted an elephant to show how dangerous his competitor's AC current really was.

I found a ISO link to download it.
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/KSCAWtwine. html

I don't see a torrent anywhere.

Any "balanced" exhibit would come down firmly on the side of Darwin to the total exclusion of the others. Both ID and Young Earth creationism are so full of crap that there's no way to present them accurately and scientifically without alienating the creationist (including ID) crowd. Asking for a "balanced" Darwin exhibit that gives fair play to creationism is like asking for a "balanced" Hubble exhibit that gives fair play to astrology.

You just gave good proof why the Coppe/Coyne ID needs to be presented; you're stupid enough to believe that it's creationism. It is possible to present their views "accurately" without being "scientific"- http://www.roadsideamerica.com/ has quite a list of museums that do exactly that without presenting evolution. And unlike you, I don't have a problem with pictures from the Hubble Telescope being presented right beside an exhibit that gives fair play to the math used in astrology, because I'm not a bigot.

The craters pictured (Google Maps link is http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=37.108040,-116.0454 94&spn=0.146118,0.240704&t=k&hl=en ) are NOT in Area 51. It's the Nevada Test Site, where we did aboveground and underground nuclear testing for decades. There is a museum for the site in Las Vegas, where I live. It's website is here: http://www.ntshf.org/ .

By the way, the large crater at the north end of the site is from the biggest underground test ever done by the US, code-named Sedan.

Also, if you want to see an atomic cannon (only fired once, at the Nevada Site), there's one outside Junction City, Kansas. The Google Maps URL is http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Junction+City,+Kansa s&ll=39.037964,-96.763169&spn=0.004566,0.007522&t= k&hl=en . It's the small black blot in the center of the image. More on it can be found at Roadside America: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/KSJUNatomic .html .

Power from Spinach

You have Got To Be Kidding Me

I want to see. . . a national map of the worst, funniest tourist traps across the U.S.

This will satisfy all your "worst, funniest tourist trap" needs.

That'll go down nicely with my chips

...but in Houston, you can cover your house with disposed aluminum beer cans and it's considered outsider art. Sacramento may be flat and have hot weather like we do, but at least we celebrate our eccentrics.

I've been there many times, including on the property when we went by while a tour was happening. It's quite a sight to behold, and beautiful in its own right.

You could spend some time looking for these.

CRT's are surely as healthy as radon.

For more info on Radon Health Mines... and this is NOT an April Fools... visit here: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/MTBASradon. html

Some of my inlaws are freaky-nutty suckers and go in for this crap.