Slashdot Mirror

I'm certainly no taxonomist, but when I took a course in zoology, the preferred name was Felis sylvestris catus. Of course, even then, some people used sylvestris and others used silvestris essentially interchangeably.

The Straight Dope suggests that this derives from the wild-type progenitor, Felis sylvestris lybica. Honestly, you could probably get away with any of them but the second.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/041001.html

According to the International Centre for Prison Studies at King's College London, the U.S. currently has the largest documented prison population in the world, both in absolute and proportional terms. We've got roughly 2.03 million people behind bars, or 701 per 100,000 population. China has the second-largest number of prisoners (1.51 million, for a rate of 117 per 100,000), and Russia has the second-highest rate (606 per 100,000, for a total of 865,000). Russia had the highest rate for years, but has released hundreds of thousands of prisoners since 1998; meanwhile the U.S. prison population has grown by even more. Rounding out the top ten, with rates from 554 to 437, are Belarus, Bermuda (UK), Kazakhstan, the Virgin Islands (U.S.), the Cayman Islands (UK), Turkmenistan, Belize, and Suriname, which you'll have to agree puts America in interesting company. South Africa, a longtime star performer on the list, has dropped to 15th place (402) since the dismantling of apartheid. ... Another nation suspected to have a lot of prisoners is North Korea. The country isn't listed in ICPS statistics, but a recent NBC News investigation put the number of political prisoners alone at 200,000, or more than 900 per 100,000. ... Great, you're thinking. The only countries that might put away more of their own people than we do are both notorious authoritarian states. No question: considering we're supposed to be the land of the free, we've got a huge number of folks locked up. Most countries, including almost all our industrialized peers, have imprisonment rates under 200. India, hardly an orderly utopia, has a rate of just 29.

Well along with abortion and incarceration the US will not have to worry about the poor revolting anytime soon. Approximately 40 million people do not exist today due to abortion that would of mostly been at or below the poverty line ( children of students, urban minorities, and the like) and approaching 800 per 100,000 in prison helps keep the country from attempting to overthrow the government as well. IF they could make soldiers die in the same amounts as vietnam we would have a massive boost in the economy.

As usual, Unca Cecil knows

Well, Bush has a MBA, Vs Kerry's Bachelors in law, Bush is also in the "88th percentile on the verbal and 86th in math" by today's standards (based on his SAT scores).

Not that a MBA means anything, Kerry could've dabbled in rocket scientist in his 27 years as a politician. We all know he loves to hang around NASA.

Yeah. Let's see who benefits from trade barriers. Do consumers benefit ? No, they have to pay higher prices. Do in-country business owners benefit ? Yes, their competition was just hamstringed. Wow. You got it exactly backwards.

What good to a country it is when consumers send money out of a given country? Look at the US trade deficit.

Look at how Spain became economically backeards after it stole all the south-american gold. The same thing will happen to the US...

All economics is based on human nature because the actions of humans combine to make the economy. If you don't understand basic human nature, you can't understand basic economics.

Here are the basic principles of human nature you miss :

• insulate people from the effects of their inefficiency and THEY WILL NEVER LEARN TO BE MORE EFFICIENT.

One man's inefficiency is another man's way of life. US capitalists fail to see this by tying to shove down their culture down the throat of the rest of the planet through free-trade agreements.

• • more money BEFORE good results NEVER LEADS TO BETTER RESULTS LATER, in salaries or government programs.

If the good results brought more money, I'd agree with you, alas it is not the case. The standard of life has been dwindling for the middle class of all the countries involved.

If you were able to race against a bunch of people who had to wear lead shoes (analogous to tarriffs) when you didn't, would you try as hard to compete ? Salaries are nice, but when I get the salary someone who outdid me should have gotten, that doesn't lead me to conclude I should try harder. It leads me to conclude that the politicians are useful idiots I need to cultivate.

And what is the point of competing more? Make more widgets? What if no one can buy the widgets because they've become nouveaux pauvres thanks to the new improved (for whom?) economy????

Assuming that government throwing money at the problem of competitiveness will help is absurd. Look at the effectiveness of nearly any government program. Why do public schools turn out morons when trillions of dollars have been spent on education ? Because more and more money is shovelled at it when it fails in order to "help it out" instead of waiting to shovel more money after it produces good results.

Public schools turn-out morons because the bourgeois have no use for an educated population. A moronic population will dutifully do what it's told without question, and buy whatever shit the bourgeois throws at them so they can be cool.

It's no surprise that the bourgeois send their offspring to private schools, because there, they can have better edcation that tells them how to become leaders and screw the population for their own benefit!

Let's look at the logic of Ford in your example: give money, get it back, lose a car. Net loss: one car, net gain: absolutely nothing. Ford succeeded by becoming so EFFICIENT it could offer LOW-PRICED cars and the masses (that didn't work for him) could buy lots of them.

Nevertheless, FORD doubled or tripled their worker's salaries SO THEY COULD BUY THE WIDGETS. Nowadays, the companies are cutting salaries and benefit that the workers cannot afford the widgets anymore. It's getting to the point that there will be no middle-class left to buy the goddammed widgets, leaving the bourgois up the creek!

You deride people who disagree as myopic. Let me spell it out for you :

• You aren't insulated -> you have to actually outdo your competitors -> you get more efficient to do this -> yo

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_334.html

Some linguists don't believe that was originally the case. I only have a Straight Dope cite handy, but "pig" and "pork" supposedly meant the same thing in the middle ages. Pig was of Anglo-Saxon decent, and pork was French. During one of France's political occupations of the British Isles, the native Anglo-Saxon language was percieved by French noblility as "crude" while French was considered proper fit speech. This lead to the introduction of connotations between the two word types; it was only in recent times that connotation became denotation, futher cementing Westerners' cognitive dissonance between food and its sources.

Diamond prices are total b.s., diamond is not a commodity, here is "the straight dope" on this for example.

OPEC is another example. People want a lot of oil, most of it is in the hands of a small number of producers, therefore an oligopoly develops.

There are a lot of other different sources of enegery, if oil wasn't so subsidized (by the government) and hence cheap, you would be using something else.

A pretty good writeup of the "Ohio wasn't a state, therefore the President wasn't a valid President, therefore income tax isn't legal" baloney is here. Summary: those people are screwballs.

as you can see from my sig, i am not a lawyer, but i did once read this article on straight dope regarding personhood for corporations- for what its worth...

Everyone on here seems to be thinking inside the box. Let's leap outside, and see what we can do. Bluetooth headsets for audio are available now (monaural, at least). I wear glasses anyway, so I'd like a Bluetooth video monitor with eye tracking. With fast eye tracking, a small monitor resolution can provide a large visual space.

Then, add a Bluetooth inertial sensor on a finger or several to replace keyboard and mouse, especially if the sensor system provides tactile feedback.

Now the processing system can remain "comfortably" and safely in a pocket, bag, or briefcase, or even strapped on the arm like the "Predator". Shape and other parameters can be freed from the handheld form factor constraints. (It might even include a flexible heatpipe to an external radiator, for hi-pro versions, though that does seem excessive for most users.)

Gratuitous geekjokes:
"Is that a banana in your pocket, or are you just surfing Slashdot?"
"Geeks are like bikers - they both have hot metal between their legs."

[Old SF story, from the 40's or 50's concerned how the very first portable wire-recorder, called Poo-Bah (Gilbert and Sullivan) start out as the first audio note-taker and gradually expanded in capability and power, providing expert advice and eventually getting wired right into the user's brain - and then, via radio links, sharing data and becoming the "Evil Computer Network That Takes Over The World - BWAHAHAHAHA!!" Interesting, this story included all the major concepts of modern mobile tech, some 50 years ago - before magnetic tape. Talk about prior art!!]

The processor and other components could even scream bloody murder if anything is separated too far from its partner components. The screamer's a good idea, which I should patent - every bluetooth component should include the ability to complain audibly, e.g. a piezoelectric tweeter, to help prevent misplacement or theft. Of course headwear will also have to not be too loud when it's attached to the head... This could also be triggered by a bluetooth signal, so when you do misplace it, you can have it squeal [and/or light up, why not?] so you can find it. If someone else patents this, consider this as prior art. Actual implementation, via vibrator, piezo transducer, trad. speaker, etc. is straightforward. Does Bluetooth include a standard command for this, like "alarm" or "findme"?

Actually, shells have been used in place of toilet paper.

I'm with you on the (lack of) effect religion has. Tsarism, overtly christian, was despotic & cruel. But the secular communisim that followed was inifinitely worse. Today we have a despotic secular regime in China, and despotic religious regimes in the middle east. We see peaceful religious communites in the US and peaceful secular civilization in Japan. We don't see masses fleeing oppression in more-christian southern Europe to more-secular northern Europe, nor the reverse.

I see no pattern; the religious or secular nature of a society seems to have no effect on its respect for freedom & human dignity. (Take that, Ayn Rand!)

And the really sad thing is that every minute you waste on Slashdot is actually worth 7 minutes of your life!

(More or less...)

Indian Health Service routinely sterilized women as late as 1970.

This still goes on today! Medi-Cal, California's public health service, routinely sterilizes the poor.

Perhaps you meant IHS forcibly sterilized Native American women? Bullshit.

Very funny, but untrue, and Bush's stupidity is a common myth supported by his occasional inability to be coherent.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/010622.html

Summary: Bush scored a 1206 on his SAT, which scores to a modern era equivalent of 1280, which puts him in the 88 percentile, or about 10 times as smart as the average Slashdot smartass.

Actually,
nobody did.

Serious linguists find the question "are there more linguistic units that mean 'snow'" more useful and meaningful. However, this approach also has some difficulty because the boundary between things that are "snow" and thing that are not-"snow" is a somewhat soft one in language, e.g. is "sleet" a wet type of "snow" or not?

Despite these issues, people are still interested in "the answer" and experts commonly come up with counts of about 1 or 2 dozen, which is not particularly remarkable in comparison to english.Here's a brief article synopsizing all that a little more clearly.

Well, having just read the Cecil Adams treatise on the subject, I have to admit: we're both wrong.

The Inuit have many words for snow slash ice, but they're not really that different from our terms for different properties of snow ( drifting snow, packing snow, sleet, slush, etc ). The inuit language is polysynthetic, meaning you make up your own words from particles of meaning as you go along. Therefore, they have as many words for anything as they have time to speak them. Add the particle for snow to the particle for bureau, and voila! Snowbureau.

In many ways, this is not that different from English speaking idiots who think they can invent plurals however they like (statii, virii, emails, boxen and the like) or sound impressive by putting ir- onto the front of a word starting with r (irrespective, irregardless, irridiculous, etc).

The principles of rotary motion were known throughout both the "Old" and "New" worlds, but the development and use of the wheel was a technological outgrowth of the domestication of large herbivores such as kine, horses, water buffalo, etc.

The "New World" didn't have any large domesticable animals except for the llama which lives in regions too mountainous for wheeled vehicles.

Jared Diamond is a recent popularizer of this observation but he wasn't the only to make it. It's not that early Americans didn't "think" of the wheel: it's just that in the absence of large draft animals, they couldn't figure out how to use it in any practical way.

There are three primary additive colors and three primary subtractive colors. Cecil explains it rather well.

tf

For those who, like me, were mildly confused by this showing up, it seems it's an old typesetting exercise. Google the first few words and you'll find plenty of information on it.

Not true. I believe it was Robert Alton Harris, who got the death penalty in California, raped an inmate at the Sacramento jail. Harris held a trial in jail, convicted the other jailbird of being a sissy for only having forged checks, and punished him.

I didn't say it wasn't possible, just that it wasn't likely. However, it sounds like what Harris did was while he was in prison, not jail. ("jailbird" is a misnomer)

I say if you're in jail, you've lost your rights and should be on camera.

Please keep in mind the difference between jail ("A place for the confinement of persons in lawful detention, especially persons awaiting trial under local jurisdiction") and prison ("A place for the confinement of persons in lawful detention, especially persons convicted of crimes"). If you're in jail, you've not been convicted of anything yet, and thus you have not lost any rights, nor should you. You're being held, but you've not been tried or convicted of anything yet (that's not to say that you're innocent, or that you didn't do it, but as other posters have pointed out we do have the concept of "Innocent until proven guilty"). As such, you'll typically only run into drunks, vagrants, prostitutes, and other less violent criminals (or suspects). If you're being held on some more heinous charge, you're not going to be put into the communal holding cells (commonly referred to as "the drunk tank"), but you're also not likely to be congregating with other folks in jail. Once you've been tried, convicted, and sentenced to a term of confinement, you'll be put into prison. That's when you lose some (not all!) rights and are at serious risk of ass-raping and other unsavory acts (the fact that a short prison sentence can become a death sentence due to the rampancy of AIDS in federal prisons is sad, but I'm not addressing that -- do you really deserve to die if your crime was "minor" like fraud or larceny? Do you not deserve a chance to be rehabilitated?).

So, if you're in "jail", you're still innocent but suspected. If you're in prison, you've been found guilty. There's a world of difference, and saying that anyone who is ever in jail (not prison) should lose their rights is stupid and insane.

We've got several halves of the story.

*Yes, QWERTY spreads the letters out.
*No, it wasn't because the close letters jammed. It was because _any_ letters typed quickly enough caused a jam.
*Yes, in the end it sped people up because of fewer malfunctions, but the goal was to be easy on the machine.

Sorry for the nitpicking, but I just wanted to get it straight (thanks to Cecil Adams' Straight Dope http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_248.html -- good bit on Dvorak, too)

Yeah, what morons. Imagine if TV shows and movies used real phone numbers (instead of the agreed 555 prefix). Interestingly, the UK also has reserved numbers for dramatic purposes, but they're not quite so obviously fake. See here for details.

Apparently, 555 phone numbers in the U.S. redirect you to directory assistance.

no one's going to go to "katie.com"

And yet there's a reason why every phone number in the movies has to be prefixed with 555.

Or they could assume that the associated website would contain more information about the book, author, etc.

The Swiss are the "Helvetians", so Switzerland would be the "Conferederation of Helvetians" or CH.


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

one problem with the original article remains to be fixed: Atmospheric scattering tends to make light from the Sun, moon etc. red not blue, if due to macroscopic particles, or just to wash out the sky color if due to water vapor, etc.

I'm not sure which article you're accusing of being wrong, but atmospheric scatering _can_ cause the moon to appear blue, it just depends on the size of the particles doing the scattering.

The first appearance of "blue moon" is in a work entitled Rede Me and Be Not Wroth (1528): "Yf they say the mone is blewe/We must believe that it is true." According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "if the moon is blue" is equivalent to saying "if the moon were made of green cheese." In other words, it's meant to indicate a patent absurdity.

Tapping on the lid doesn't even do anything for normal cans. Wait, yes it does. Hold on, no it doesn't. Shit, I don't even know.

You're using a strange definition of "trivial", one which omits the significant details of how to get truck-sized quantities of explosives into such a small plane, how to rig them for effective detonation, how to get nerve agent and fly it into restricted airspace, and how to hit anything other than the ground with coins from "a few thousand feet up", much less kill people. I'd be more cautious about accusing others of "poor logic".

As usual, The Straight Dope has an exhaustive entry on the issue:

The one inescapable fact is that in classical Latin, there was no plural of the word. In English, the only correct plural is viruses.

Sonny Bono was also the congressman from Scientology. A number of works of Elron Hubbard were due to escape their control without the new law. (Joining some already gone because of messed up registrations.) It was rumoured that Sonny was also leaving them before he died.

That's because the moon landing hoax theory has about as much support as the flat earth theory nowadays. Telescopes can see the landing site, for example. See Unca Cecil's column and this site for more. And of course Buzz has the best nutcase response.

I'm saddened that I found solace in alcohol, which does the trick a hell of a lot better than Tylenol PM. I drink at least a six-pack of beer a night, just to get my mind relaxed enough so that I can pass out.

You may already know this; and you don't explicitly say that you're using both alcohol and Tylenol simultaneously. But just in case you don't know this, and in case someone else here doesn't and is contemplating going this route: don't mix alcohol and Tylenol (acetaminophen). Surprisingly small quantites can cause significant liver damage; if you have a history of alcoholism, comparatively small amounts of acetaminophen can kill you. Acetaminophen toxicity is the main issue; the alcohol simply enhances it. As a good article on this subject from Cecil Adams points out:

The real problem with drugs like Tylenol is that the difference between a therapeutic (that is, medically effective) dose and a toxic one is surprisingly small. In adults the maximum safe dosage is four grams (eight 500-milligram tablets) over a 24-hour period. The toxic dose is a mere seven grams taken all at once.

Sorta. He had the chance to serve and passed it up.

Sorry for the "revisionist history" lesson, it had to be said.

(If you don't believe in the propaganda Hollywood churns out today, why should you believe anything from its past?)

Of the 220 people who worked on location, 91 contracted cancer by the early 1980s and 46 died of it -- including Wayne, co-stars Susan Hayward and Agnes Moorehead, and director Dick Powell. Statistically, only 30 people out of a group that size should have gotten cancer in their lifetimes.

Source: Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope.

But then, if one includes native americans, total comes to something closer to 20,000,000

Sort of, if you count the effects of European diseases. Check out here

Usually I check Snopes and the Straight Dope archives. Last I checked, that snopes page wasn't there. (That "last updated November 2000" bit at the bottom is a pipe dream.)

Anyhow, nice catch and thanks for the pointer. Boy, my junior-high teacher is gonna be pissed when she finds out. :-)

read, weep.

View the full scoop here.

(quoting part:)
Here's what happened. Santa Clara County in California was trying to levy a property tax against the Southern Pacific Railroad. The railroad gave numerous reasons why it shouldn't have to pay, one of which rested on the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause: the railroad was being held to a different standard than human taxpayers.

When the case reached the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Morrison Waite supposedly prefaced the proceedings by saying, "The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does." In its published opinion, however, the court ducked the personhood issue, deciding the case on other grounds.

Then the court reporter, J.C. Bancroft Davis, stepped in. Although the title makes him sound like a mere clerk, the court reporter is an important official who digests dense rulings and summarizes key findings in published "headnotes." (Davis had already had a long career in public service, and at one point was president of the board of directors for the Newburgh & New York Railroad Company.) In a letter, Davis asked Waite whether he could include the latter's courtroom comment--which would ordinarily never see print--in the headnotes. Waite gave an ambivalent response that Davis took as a yes. Eureka, instant landmark ruling.

For what it's worth, this is exactly the kind of case that could get back to the S.C. to force this issue, as one could also argue 'Fine, you have free speech rights but this is trespassing and you should be jailed'. I wouldn't have much hope with a consumer-favorable result with the current administration though.

Our power grid is more vulnerable than you realize...

Then there is world war deux, remember back to the afternoon of June 22, 1940. That whole armistice treaty you signed with germany to protect your collective french butts? Yeah, thanks for standing strong with us there.

Um, what the hell are you talking about?

First off, France had been invaded, its supposedly foolproof Maginot Line had been completely circumvented, and the population was fleeing before the German advance. Sure, they should have planned better, but at that point, what else was there to do? The later collaborationist actions of the Vichy government were dispicable, but to go on actively fighting would have been bloody ridiculous.

And 'standing strong with us'? You admit with the reference to the Revolutionary War that you're an American. So how hard were the Americans fighting against the Germans in 1940?

Oh, right. They weren't in until Pearl Harbor, a year and a half later. (In fact, Prescott Bush, whose last name you may find familiar, had his assets seized after the Americans entered the war because comparies in which he had an interest had funded Nazi Germany.)

In this MP3 clip on flash photography's effect on art, CBC Radio's Quirks & Quarks interviews Dr. Tito Scaiano, professor of chemistry at the University of Ottawa.

Artefacts absorb light, and thus molecules. The molecules convert the energy to heat, but sometimes a molecule changes chemical structure, resulting in a visible change. When a photo is absorbed, it pushes the molecule to a higher energy state that breaks the bond. In other cases, it promotes oxidization. Organic pigments are more sensitive than inorganic pigments (which are already fairly oxidized). In other words, flash photography can lead to deterioration of an artefact, not to mention changes to the pigment.

Although aircraft may not be as sensitive as the Mona Lisa, it's still possible that flash photography could damage the artefact. An art student told me that his professor confided that one flash was equivalent to three days of natural light. I don't know if that's entirely true, but I've heard the warning repeated.

Although some people might not use flashes, even a small percentage of wrong-doers could eventually ruin an artefact. For example, when I saw the Mona Lisa, about 30% of the crowd was taking flash photos. The Mona Lisa is behind 3 inches of plexiglass, but the flashes do take their toll.

The Straight Dope also answers a question about flash photography's damage to art.

-God doesn't play dice with the universe, putz.

If I rememeber correctly, the only animal capable of speaking back as some Gorilla that could speak back with sign language.