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Unlike the folks in Indiana, who dabble in all manner of regulatory digressions:

Wow. Did you even read the article you linked? "...it's ... a danger to vulnerable folk such as asthmatics, children, and the elderly." "I agree ETS is harmful, broadly speaking..." Cecil hardly said second hand smoke isn't harmful. Indeed, he specifically said that the science suggests real risks. However, for the specific risk of second hand smoke, Cecil says there is disagreement and it's not clear.

If I recall corectly, the Pentateuch was writen by Moses as dictated to him by God. This includes Genesis.

That depends on who you ask. Researchers believe the pentateuch was more likely written by at least 4 scholars/rabbis during the exile in Babylon.
See:
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mbible1.html
or this book.

This is just an FYI for a link to more info about Deuterium toxicity:

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mheavywater.ht ml

I would have thought that Deuterium would have been just fine, but I can understand perhaps that large quantities of Deuterium can indeed slow down some metabolic processes enough to cause some problems. I was thinking more along the lines of Tritium toxicity, but being radioactive that should make a little more sense. Deuterium is atomically stable but unusual because it is consumed quickly in stars to become other atomic products (the source of most deuterium found in nature). It is much harder to combine two simple hydrogen atoms to become Deuterium through fusion.

Yeah, the Hydrino would likely behave quite a bit different from normal hydrogen, but in this case it is more like an even lower quantum state than typical quantum state for hydrogen. I don't know where the "inventor" of this idea comes up with yet another elemental name for this quantum state, however. A photon hitting the electron is going to push the electron back into a more "typical" quantum state anyway, at least with current theory.

I have seen muon catalyzed fusion taking place using a theory similar to this one where the muon takes the place of the electron to form an exotic atom. The problem with muons, however, is that they have a relatively short half-life and are therefore not useful for large scale fusion production.

Smoking does not gain you anything, there are much more efficient ways you could ingest nicotine

i smoke, but i don't smoke tobacco. the drug in my smokable plant of choice can also be delivered in other forms, but i can tell you that the other forms don't matter -- i smoke it because i enjoy the smoking. i can tell you aren't a smoker because you don't seem to be familiar with the enjoyment of the act of smoking, you seem to assume that people smoke only to deliver the target drug into the body. that is not so: smoking itself is enjoyable.

furthermore, second hand smoke doesn't cause real harm, it is merely bothersome. "bother" may still be above your threshold for a ban, but "bother" isn't so strong a reason as "harm".

finally it's disingenuous to say that humans don't have the "right" to spoil the air that others might breathe. if you insist on continuing that claim, please apply the argument to all the other, far more significant, forms of air pollution first.

now you have been informed, so you may revise your argument.

PS shit, you know, i just read the last paragraph of your post and realize you were trolling! ha! that's awesome, you totally had me going. nice of you to throw in the nazi thing at the end, so we all know you were intentionally trying to be an idiot asshole.

it's fine to believe that second hand smoke causes (real, actual, not imagined or pretend or alleged) harm, but i don't want anyone to think that there is any actual science to support that claim.

link

so if you base your beliefs on science, rethink your assumption that secondhand smoke is actually harmful, instead of just bothersome (which might still warrant a ban, but then again maybe not). and you can rethink the assumption once again if real evidence of harm is found.

are you saying you advocate physical violence against a person who is merely passively bothering you, not harming you?

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mcredit.html

Thanks for playing. You lose.

How long will the power last when the zombies arrive? As usual, Straight Dope has an answer!

Second, of course there's no end to pi. I was referring to this attempt at passing a law.

However, the human body was designed to operate at 98.6 degrees.

Really? So those people not at exactly 98.6 have malfunctioning bodies?

Do shifts in temperature or cold temperatures cause colds? Your hypothesis about temperature changes doesn't really explain for example marathon runners or clubbers on E who raise their body temperature without catching a cold. Also, isn't the whole point of a fever to make the body better at fighting infection? It just so happens that the body is overreactive to raising the body's temperature.

If anything overheating the body is much worse for you then cooling the body. But you get sick from rain and cold weather? Here's a quick sanity check on which temperature change is more dangerous...How much does your temperature have to raise before killing you? How low does it have to drop to kill you?

Or check out straightdope like someone else posted.

Also known as cold stress (3rd and 2nd paragraphs from the bottom).

New York State wildlife expert Richard Thomas found that a woodchuck could chuck around 35 cubic feet of dirt in the course of digging a burrow. Thomas reasoned that if a woodchuck could chuck wood, he would chuck an amount equal to 700 pounds. Such sayeth Cecil. http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_083a.html

"They call him Maurice, because he speaks of the pompitous of love"

Oh no my dear boy, it's much worse.

. There are two kinds of sweetbreads: stomach sweetbreads (also known as heart or belly sweetbreads), which are an animal's pancreas, and neck (AKA throat or gullet) sweetbreads, an animal's thymus gland. (The animal in question can be a hog or calf or just about any other large mammal, I gather.) They're called sweetbreads for the obvious reason that if you called them thymus glands or whatever you couldn't give the damn things away. The art of euphemism goes back a long way.

Isn't that the same "prototype" that has been offered for sale for the past 15-odd years?

Funny how it never makes it into "production"... Oh well, for only $25k, you can get on the list to receive a newsletter about how you're going to get one Real Soon Now, except you don't get the newsletter.

Hey, I hear you can get some green powder that changes Water into GASOLINE, for only $0.08US/gallon!!! The investment price is good: only $1,000US!

Hurry!

How did the moon=green cheese myth start?

"The moon is made of a greene cheese," greene meaning new, unaged.

I thought the same and was going to comment, but then I made sure I could find a reference.

Unfortunately, Mr. Adams of Straight Dope disagrees as to the origin, so i'm more inclined to believe him than you or my own misguided musings.

At the time General Motors was buying up all the streetcar lines. Streetcars were replaced with busses because General Motors only made busses.

This is not true, according to the Straight Dope. Streetcars went bye-bye because busses looked better.

Yet another irritating site where random words in an article link to irrelevant ads and Web sites.

It sounds like you're in serious need of some anti-static dryer sheets. If you're still in a college environment, these things also have another great use. Toss wrinkled clothes into the dryer with an anti-static sheet and a damp paper towel. In about 5 minutes, the clothes will be wrinkle-free, as if you'd ironed them.

Well, except for the fact that nuclear testing killed John Wayne, Susan Hayward and Agnes Moorehead, along with many others. It's pretty amazing that so few people are aware of this.

That said, I'm still in favor of nuclear power. But don't kid yourself that we knew what we were doing in the 50s. We did a lot of insane things.

Regardless of what they might spew in DARE classes...

http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_writings4. shtml
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_229.html
http://www.levity.com/aciddreams/samples/chromosom e.html
http://www.serendipity.li/dmt/chromosomes.htm

Info about freemasons: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_138.html

I don't understand this post. Are you saying the Mexicans are stealing our movies?

Our dollar loses more value every day as the Fed inflates our currency. That is a fact.

Um. The Fed doesn't inflate our currency. Banks inflate the currency. Here, read this.

So here's my question, are there Firefly fans out there who didn't watch Buffy or Angel, etc.? Because I really really didn't like those shows and if such an intersection of Buffy non-fans and Firefly fans exists, I'd like to hear from their opinions on Firefly.

Your post is pretty misleading

Part of that is probably the roots of America's predominant religion - US Christianity stems from Puritan and other sects where being poor wasn't a sin but sloth was - hard work was a virtue

Most religions share the common belief that sloth is a sin. Canada was also founded by missionaries from Christian sects. Why does Canda have a social network?

As a side note - America's disdain for socialism is rooted in the innate distrust of government and a belief in the "American Dream." American's don't like taxes (ask the English about that)so establishing a broad social net funded by high tax rates is very unlikely.

We paid much lower taxes under the British crown. The real issue was with the lack of representation.

The Shuttle has exactly the same level of reliability and safety as the Russian system

The Russians have lost two crews. One cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, died when Soyuz 1 re-entered Earth's atmosphere out of control and crashed just three months after the Apollo 1 launch pad fire. Then, in June 1971, three cosmonauts died when the Soyuz 11 capsule decompressed during descent.

Try reading this writeup: http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/memc2.html

Don't bandy words with me, you slime. Despite what many of the Teeming Millions apparently believe, E=mc^2 applies to all reactions, not just nuclear ones. Permit me to quote from Space and Time in Special Relativity by N. David Mermin, a book I read myself to sleep with every night: "A loss of mass occurs whenever internal energy (nuclear, electrical, chemical, etc.) is converted into energy of motion. Only in the nuclear case is the amount of energy so large that [it results] in an observable change in mass, but in principle E=mc^2 is as descriptive of a chemical explosive, a gasoline engine, or a flying bird [or, I might add, a flying human] as it is of a nuclear explosion." Case closed.

Straight Dope

Britain and Australia top U.S. in violent crime (the U.S. wasn't even in the top 10!)

Crime is higher in the UK in every major category except rape and murder, which are declining in the U.S. and have for the past decade

Official crime rate facts

No matter how much some need to believe it, the U.S. is not some downtrodden, crime-ridden hellhole. Europeans and other foreigners need to stop watching Law & Order to get their idea of what the U.S. is like.

I see where creationists have a hard time understanding scientists debating about evolution. Creationists assume that the bible is the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth.

Scientists don't. Why? The bible is claimed to be the word of god because those that wrote/edited/translated it say they were "divinely inspired." If the person who did the work didn't say why they did it, it's assumed that they were "divinely inspired" or even taking dictation from god.

Your "eye witness account" is the bible. That's not scientific, that's wrapping Christianity with a science wrapper. Your "scientists" site scripture to prove their point. The arguements presented against evolution are laughable and don't give any actual evidence to falsify evolution or give a theory for creationism.

In other words, the only evidence the web site actually has against evolution is that "the bible says." Scientists don't take the bible as fact because they know much of it's history and someone claiming divine inspriation isn't enough to prove it's 100% Truth.

You are obviously correct. And after checking up on this on the straight dope, I think I may use the more formal...

hear, all ye good people, hear what this brilliant and eloquent speaker has to say!

I think that'll go over real well around here.

Remember when someone thought it'd be a good idea to change Pi to equal exactly 3? http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_341.html

Are you kidding? Start minting mills!

*yes, I know that thing about PI was a hoax

not entirely

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_341.html

It happened in Indiana. Although the attempt to legislate pi was ultimately unsuccessful, it did come pretty close. In 1897 Representative T.I. Record of Posen county introduced House Bill #246 in the Indiana House of Representatives. The bill, based on the work of a physician and amateur mathematician named Edward J. Goodwin (Edwin in some accounts), suggests not one but three numbers for pi, among them 3.2, as we shall see. The punishment for unbelievers I have not been able to learn, but I place no credence in the rumor that you had to spend the rest of your natural life in Indiana.

Just as people today have a hard time accepting the idea that the speed of light is the speed limit of the universe, Goodwin and Record apparently couldn't handle the fact that pi was not a rational number. "Since the rule in present use [presumably pi equals 3.14159...] fails to work ..., it should be discarded as wholly wanting and misleading in the practical applications," the bill declared. Instead, mathematically inclined Hoosiers could take their pick among the following formulae:

(1) The ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference is 5/4 to 4. In other words, pi equals 16/5 or 3.2

(2) The area of a circle equals the area of a square whose side is 1/4 the circumference of the circle. Working this out algebraically, we see that pi must be equal to 4.

(3) The ratio of the length of a 90 degree arc to the length of a segment connecting the arc's two endpoints is 8 to 7. This gives us pi equal to the square root of 2 x 16/7, or about 3.23.

The Straight Dope on pig orgasms.

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_220.html

Keep washing those hands, kids!

Whatever chemical differences there may be between fructose and glucose, the difference between HFCS and traditional sugar is slight. Both sweeteners contain both compounds, and in roughly similar amounts--table sugar is 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose, whereas the most common form of HFCS is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose.

If all Chinese jumped at once, would cataclysm result?

Dear Cecil:

I hope that you can answer a question that has plagued me since childhood. If every man, woman, and child in China each stood on a chair, and everyone jumped off their chair at exactly the same time, would the earth be thrown off its axis? Also, if prior to jumping, they all yelled at the top of their lungs, would we hear it here in the United States, and how much of a time delay would there be? --Robert P., Los Angeles

Dear Robert:

Amazing as it may seem, I am actually going to answer this incredibly retarded question. But first Uncle Cecil wishes to have a word with his devoted readers.

As you can imagine, I possess phenomenal scholarly resources. I have converted the spare bedroom in my house into a research library containing 16 million volumes, which are dusted twice a day by a team of robed acolytes holding candles. I have instant access via my Apple 380S GT to all the world's data banks. Why, right here on my writing table next to the box of spare quills I have a dog-eared copy of 16,000 Unbelievably Complicated Physics Experiments for the Home and Garden, With Answers, which has helped me out of many a jam.

But despite this wealth of scientific knowledge, the Teeming Millions routinely write in with questions that not one sane person has ever asked in 6,000 years of recorded history. As a result, my usual sources of information are useless.

Nonetheless, I try. I have been in repeated contact with the Beijing government all week in an effort to persuade them to get all 1,027,000,000 Chinese (1980 estimate) to jump off chairs. I have pleaded with them that will signficantly advance the cause of science. However, they have not been cooperative.

They point out the China is a poor country, and lacks a sufficient quantity of chairs. Moreover, many of the chairs that are available are of nonuniform height, meaning that even if all the Chinese jumped off at the same time, they would hit the ground at different times, thus throwing off the results of the experiment.

Finally, they point out that discipline among the Chinese people has become notoriously lax since the Cultural Revolution, and many of the participants in the project could be expected to be fooling around when they were supposed to be jumping. The Chinese government suggests that instead of having the entire nation jump off chairs, I should get one representative citizen to jump and multiply the results by 1,027,000,000. I have, needless to say, rejected this solution as grossly inadequate.

The possibility of an actual test thus being remote, I have been forced to rely on my considerable powers of inductive logic, to wit: given the principle that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, when the Chinese get up on their chairs, they would essentially be pushing the earth down in the process of elevating themselves. Then, when they jumped off, the earth would simultaneously spring back, attracted by the gravitational mass of one billion airborne Chinese persons, with the result that the Chinese and the earth would meet somewhere in the middle, if you follow me. The upshot of this is that action and reaction would cancel each other out and the earth would remain securely in orbit.

Just for fun, however--after you've been doing this job for a while you get a pretty bizarre notion of what constitutes a good time--suppose 1,000,000,000 Chinese, give or take 27,000,000, were somehow to materialize atop chairs without their having to elevate themselves thereto. And suppose they jumped off.

Having performed astonishing feats of mathematical acrobatics (requiring the entire afternoon, I might note--sometimes I can't believe the crap I spend my time on), I calculate that the resultant thud in aggregate would be the equivalent of 500 tons of TNT. Not bad, but nowhere near enough to dislocate the earth, which weighs 6 sextillion, 588 quintillion short tons. I refuse to even discuss what would happen if all the Chinese yelled at the top of their lungs.

--CECIL ADAMS

Exactly. Most of the "benefits" of the DSK (Dvorak) keyboard are pure hype. Read and learn. You should be concerned with the design of the keyboard as a whole, rather than the order of the keys.

Your observation that my ears and system aren't good enough is also true.

And I think it was my parent's parent who made the claim that it's "recorded in the exact quality as you hear it", not me. ( With me, very few things are exact. )

My less-than-perfect fascimile is good enough for me. And I don't feel too bad because as I noted, even the big guys do it, and their own Lawyers and the Courts said it was OK.

Just don't make an EXACT copy. (IANAL).

Dear Cecil:

I have a friend who insists that filling an ice cube tray with warm water will cause the cubes to form more quickly than they would if you started with cold water. He said it had something to do with the air circulation around the trays being affected by the temperature.

Not knowing much about frigidity myself, but being contrary, not to mention skeptical, by nature, I expressed doubt. Cecil, was I right, or is there indeed some basis in fact for this foolishness? --Mary M.Q.C., Santa Barbarba, California

Cecil replies:

You were smart to let me handle this, Mary. God knows what would happen if you tried to experiment with ice cubes on your own.

Needless to say, I conducted my research in the calm and systematic manner that has long been the trademark of Straight Dope Labs. First, I finished off a half a pint of Haagen-Dazs I found in the fridge, in order to keep my brain supplied with vital nutrients.

Then I carefully measured a whole passel of water into the Straight Dope tea kettle and boiled it for about five minutes. This was so I could compare the freezing rate of boiled H20 with that of regular hot water from the tap. (Somehow I had the idea that water that had been boiled would freeze faster.)

Finally I put equal quantities of each type into trays in the freezer, checked the temp (125 degrees Fahrenheit all around), and sat back to wait, timing the process with my brand new Swatch watch, whose precision and smart styling have made it the number one choice of scientists the world over.

I subsequently did the same with two trays of cold water, which had been chilled down to a starting temperature of 38 degrees.

The results? The cold water froze about 10 or 15 minutes faster than the hot water, and there was no detectable difference between the boiled water and the other kind. Another old wives' tale thus emphatically bites the dust. Science marches on.

AN ANOMALOUS SITUATION ARISES

Dear Cecil:

Just a few days after I read your column on whether hot water freezes faster than cold water (you said it didn't), I happened to come across an article in Scientific American entitled "Hot Water Freezes Faster Than Cold Water. Why Does It Do So?" What gives? I hope we will see another column soon resolving the issue. --Ellen C., Chicago

Dear Ellen:

I know it must unnerve you to find that a supposedly infallible source of wisdom can make mistakes, so let me hasten to reassure you: Scientific American did not screw up. My results and theirs (specifically, those of Jearl Walker, author of SA's "Amateur Scientist" column) are consistent--we were just working in different temperature ranges.

I found that cold water (38 degrees Fahrenheit) froze faster than hot water out of the tap (125 degrees F). I chose these two temperatures because (1) they were pretty much what the average amateur ice-cube maker would have readily available and (2) I couldn't find a mercury thermometer that went higher than 125 degrees.

Jearl, who is not afflicted with penny-pinching editors like some of the rest of us, was able to get his mitts on a thermocouple that could measure as high as the boiling point, 212 degrees F. He found that water heated to, say, 195 degrees would freeze three to ten minutes faster than water at 140-175 degrees. (There were differences depending on how much water was used, where the thermocouple was placed, and so on.)

Jearl suggested that the most likely explanation for this was evaporation: when water cools down from near boiling to the freezing point, as much as 16 percent evaporates away, compared to 7 percent for water at 160 degrees. The smaller the amount of water, of course, the faster it freezes.

In addition, the water vapor carries away a certain amount of heat. To test this theory

..you can blame all those simpering faggots who voted for Tony Blair

Why do you Yanks keep using meatballs (or do you mean kindling?) as an insult? Never understood that one!

Not sure if you are serious or not but, here we go...

Currently, the most commonly used deffinition of "faggot" is a derogatory term for a gay man. Here's a link on its origin.

Read a complete, accurate, and very well researched article on such hemp theories: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_131.html

During prohibition people were allowed to make "near beer". That is beer with less than 0.5 percent alcohol. The recipe for it gave explicit instructions on what not to do because if you did you would be making something illegal.

Like prohibition this ruling will be just as effective. Oh, well. America already has two million people in jail. Why not throw a few million more behind bars? We aren't the worst, but it's nothing to be proud of.

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mstarwar.html

Here it is, straight from Lucas' first Hollywood boss and fellow USC graduate, Francis Ford Coppola: "George wanted to do Flash Gordon ... he met with the people who owned it, and they didn't take him at all seriously. So he took the Flash Gordon trailers -- the diagonal titles that talk about the universe at that point [he means the opening story synopsis that seems to recede from the viewer as it scrolls up] -- and sort of combined it with a Stanley Kubrick '2001' world and created his own 'Flash Gordon.' " Lucas says the characters of "Star Wars" are not originals but "tributes."

The Straight Dope answered this one 10 years ago: Why does the moon appear bigger near the horizon?

Regarding braille on ATM's.
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_010.html