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Well, it's a well documented phenomenon in birds and aquatic mammals. They're actually able to let half their brain sleep at a time, while the other half remains alert to look for predators and handle other important functions.

Happened once, a long time ago.

Reasonably subtle, but I reckon the language gives it away. Got a good run though.

Lots of people literally believe it. About 44 to 47 percent of Americans agree with the statement that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." Source: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2680/nearly-half-the-u-s-population-believes-the-earth-is-less-than-10-000-years-old.

And, there's good reason to suppose the Genesis story was meant to be read literally. For example, if you look in the New Testament, you'll find a list of Jesus' ancestry leading back to Adam. This leads to a tension in Christianity between people who know science well enough to know that it isn't true (and suggest that it should be read metaphorically, despite the evidence in the Bible that it's supposed to be read literally) and the people who either don't know the scientific evidence or use dubious explanations to explain-away the gap between science and a literal Genesis.

In the real world, dumbasses who think Pi=3 (or 3.2) get elected to their state legislatures...

This idea has been tried several times and it always ends the same way (with fail). Think about it, if it were really that easy to declare your own country with its own laws, every asshole with a sea-worthy boat would be proclaiming his own little kingdom. Idiots who believe you can do this are the same morons who think that you can murder someone in international waters and not face prosecution or that you can get out of paying taxes by sending a letter to the IRS stating that you refuse to recognize their authority (ask Wesley Snipes if that shit works).

The only real way to establish your own country is to get the people of an existing country to elect you dictator or to stage a coup overthrowing the existing leader (or at least seize a portion of their existing territory). And even then, your rule is only as stable as your ability to defend it (from both internal and external threats).

So if you plan on setting up your own little kingdom on some old oil rig just off the U.S. coast (or coast of any country) and doing whatever you want, you had better damn sure be ready to defend yourself when the Navy shows up in a big, heavily armed ship looking to introduce you to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the concept of Universal Jurisdiction. And if it's the U.S. Navy, you're probably going to need a *lot* of firepower on your little oil rig, Your Majesty.

Wait, what? So we need to have a nice high tally before we can stop being stupid?

How about any tally? or is it OK to be so risk adverse to anything? Around 150 people die a year from Coconuts, more than shark attacks, should we ban those?

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2405/are-150-people-killed-each-year-by-falling-coconuts

Stupid seems to be the word of the day.

+1 Insightful

That's an interesting point. IANAL, but if I understand what Blizzard is doing (you buy a copy of the game, find something randomly which has a real cash value), reading on The Straight Dope, there is a similar issue with Pinball back in the day:

To qualify as a gambling device, a machine had to offer a "thing of value"--money, merchandise, or tokens--as a reward

Interestingly, there's another analogy: I assume that the value of the item is related to its usefulness (a powerful two-handed, with four empty sockets will be worth more on the market than an etherial dagger that can't be repaired), which when outfitted to your character will make it easier for you to fight more powerful creatures and earn better, more valuable drops. That means in other words, you can pay more money to increase the odds that you find even more valuable items. That makes it similar to the "payoff gimmicks" in the linked example where you pay more money to increase your chances of winning.

I suspect that Blizzard's lawyers are taking this into account and will impose the appropriate limitations to avoid having Diablo III (hmm... that name should draw the ire of anti-gambling religious advocates) banned under Internet gambling prohibitions. Maybe you'll be limited to buy and sell strictly ornamental items with no material effect on the game play as opposed to the set pieces introduced in the LOD expansion pack.

This guy nails it - http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-601887.html

"It's not about acting on market information. It is purely arbitrage. A mis pricing allows one to buy and sell simultaneously and lock in the difference minus trading costs.

In the old days, traders used to do this in the trading pit. Now it's computers closest to the exchange feed.

Tied in with this is the automatic trading. In the case of that big intra day fall, a wrong trade was entered. I forget the details but it was big enough to push down the market xx amount, which triggered automatic sell programs from non-arbitrage automated computer selling, which triggered a market sell off, which in turn triggered more selling until the market circuit breakers kicked in.

During the mandatory no trading period, the original bad trade was discovered and reversed. This IIRC also triggered automated buy programs and the whole thing went in reverse. The bad thing is that the market whipsaw really hammered some real end investor trades as collateral damage.

I remember watching the Hang Seng Index the day that Soc Gen announced Jerome Kerviel's fraud and liquidated the positions. It was a full trading day of massive market swings for big losses to big gains several times throughout the day. It was almost all computer generated programmatic trading."

What is at issue is that, yes, it is illegal to promote the killing of the president, but saying 'shoot the president', is not necessarily a call to shoot the president.

I recall a rather silly animated reality show called "Drawn Together" which AFAIK never received a visit from the SS after their death threat, circa 2002:

Blue ball, giving an interview: "You know, normally Princess takes advice from us, but this time she listened to Foxy Love. Oh well, its okay, because if she asked me for advice, I would have told her to KILL THE PRESIDENT!" *screen tints red and music plays menacingly*

Actually, from an article on energy production I read a while back, the current projection is for the population to stabilize at 9 billion by midcentury.

(Source) It's mostly about energy sources, but it cites population projection figures in the third paragraph.

The reason given is rising standard of living. People living in abject poverty (and I don't mean first world slums, I mean abject poverty which is something most slashdotters have never seen firsthand) have lots of kids. Raise them out of poverty to a standard of living that includes such luxuries as medicine, clean water, adequate food and shelter and they have fewer kids. This is human nature, and it's as true for the western world as it is elsewhere. Our population growth didn't slow until our conditions improved, so why should we expect otherwise elsewhere?

Further to this, it is not necessary for the first world to elevate the developing world in order to accomplish this. They're doing that by themselves. We tend to have a very nineteenth century attitude to the rest of the planet, believing that it is only through our guidance that they can rise above savagery, but the reality is that with the exception of countries held in poverty by war, corruption or constant disaster, most of the developing world is quite capable of elevating themselves, and are doing exactly that. Note the qualifier about "war, corruption or disaster" preventing this; the Congo remains a bloody mess as do many of it's neighbours, but they aren't the only type of developing nation.

So we will eventually hit population stability. Now the catch is that the global demand for energy will more than double in the process. Given that many of our energy sources are either environmentally disastrous or finite, this is going to become a problem, as is competition for other natural resources. So we're not out of the woods, but Malthusian predictions about population growth are as wrong now as they were when they were new.

Read this and weep. NOBODY has the ability to just move off of nuclear power. Or any other power source for that matter. There is no such thing as "alternative energy". Global power demand is constantly increasing, even faster than population growth (in fact, as energy use increases, population tends to grow more slowly or even decline). We're going to need every watt of power we can get in the not too distant future, from nuclear sources or otherwise. This is a very foolish act on the part of Germany, that will only end up screwing them down the line as energy costs increase dramatically within 50 years, and their economy struggles to keep up. But by then, it will be too late. If Germany started building nuclear plants NOW, and continued building them at a rate that is practically impossible to manage, there's a CHANCE their economy might not end up collapsing completely within half a century.

Mark my words. People will look back on this as the beginning of the end for Germany.

The Straight Dope says that's wrong. I'd trust the Straight Dope, which uses quotations from the original letter from Columbus, over some random guy posting on a random website.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1966/does-indian-derive-from-columbuss-description-of-native-americans-as-una-gente-in-dios

No he was not:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1966/does-indian-derive-from-columbuss-description-of-native-americans-as-una-gente-in-dios

couple of possabilities.

* Harold
* Holy
* Haploid
* H in IHS
* H in INRH (Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Hebrei)

The world could aim for 80% wind power if wind towers produced baseload power

Are you sure about that?

According to this (scroll down to the list of power sources), building wind turbines in all the locations where they generate sufficient power would produce a grand total of 2.1 terawatts, globally. Which is a lot of power - don't get me wrong, it's totally worth building them to get that energy. But it's nowhere near the 13.5 terawatts needed circa 2002 (the article cites a 2006 paper), or the projected 28-35 terawatts needed by the midcentury (all figures from the same article, feel free to provide counter citations if my source is incorrect or biased).

I don't think we can aim for 80% wind power even if we had the ability to combat intermittency.

I've been reading The Mobs and the Mafia: the Illustrated History of Organized Crime by Hank Messic and Burt Goldblatt (1972, ISBN 0-88365-211-0) and was struck by a passage:

... in the three years after the [stock market] crash... those businessmen who didn't kill themselves turned by the thousands to the only men with money and credit -- the gangsters.

Sounds like an interesting book, and a believable premise, however I thought the mass suicides following the Crash of '29 turned out to be mythical.

Like the most-recent crash, not a lot of stories of Wall Streeters committing suicide. More common among lower-on-the-economic-scale folks that tend to do that.

Your quote from the book makes it sound very common, but I don't think it really was.

Ah, here's a link explaining more:

during October and November of 1929 the number of suicides was disappointingly low

Found it :)

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-153774.html

2nd post from the bottom. The gun is offset slightly so that the actual firing barrel is on the center line; because it's a gatlin gun, the firing point isn't the center of the 'gun' like a single barreled gun would be. That makes sense. This wasn't a slowing issue but one of attitude control. With the gun centered and thus the firing barrel offset it would exert a force off to the side of the barrel offset (yaw maybe?)

It does talk about initial stalling due to the engine ingesting gun gas which was fixed by closing the intakes during gun firing.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3000/followup-why-dont-we-ditch-nukes-em-and-em-coal

Also, some back of envelope calculations.

A typical nuclear power plant generates a gigawatt of *CONSTANT* power.

A 1.5 megawatt turbine (and keep in mind these things are gigantic) typically produces at around 20% of capacity, highly variable, but let's pretend we could store the power somehow or get enough of 'em to magically balance out.

That means you'd need like 3333 turbines to replace a consistent nuclear output with an inconsistent power source. Turbines that would need constant maintenance. And this is for a traditional 1 gig nuclear power plant, not one of the new designs, or larger ones.

How much land would that cover? About 77,000 acres, or 312 square kilometres. That's a square 18 kilometres on a side filled with them. Of course, wind power is not exactly environmentally neutral if you consider constructional, maintenance, and impact on bats, birds and weather patterns.

And keep in mind, we need a lot more than just 1 or 2.

This makes me wonder about insurance claims since I believe that most insurance companies won't pay if an incident is classified as an act of war. A quick Google search turned up this, and this.

Not International Poetry Day, but instead a contnuing acknowledgement of the debt that most modern physicists owe to Dr Seuss, whose patterns, once imposed on a young mind, continue to resonate for decades for reasons that are beyond scientific ken.

As testimony to this absurdity, there is Cecil Adams' provision of the Straight Dope on Erwin's and Al's argument about dice.

Or something like that. I am not a Quantum Mechanic, and in fact I admit to having occasional random thoughts that I cannot connect to anything in the Newtonian Universe with any of the screwdrivers or spanners in my rather meager toolkit. This posting may in fact be one of those random thoughts, especially as on inspection it would seem to have a nearly zero probability of conveying anything meaningful to any reader.

For a fairly thorough treatment on the subject of a falsifiable AGW hypothesis: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=521245

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1088/did-whites-ever-give-native-americans-blankets-infected-with-smallpox

According to historian Francis Parkman, Amherst first raised the possibility of giving the Indians infected blankets in a letter to Colonel Henry Bouquet, who would lead reinforcements to Fort Pitt. No copy of this letter has come to light, but we do know that Bouquet discussed the matter in a postscript to a letter to Amherst on July 13, 1763:

P.S. I will try to inocculate the Indians by means of Blankets that may fall in their hands, taking care however not to get the disease myself. As it is pity to oppose good men against them, I wish we could make use of the Spaniard's Method, and hunt them with English Dogs. Supported by Rangers, and some Light Horse, who would I think effectively extirpate or remove that Vermine.

On July 16 Amherst replied, also in a postscript:

P.S. You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race. I should be very glad your Scheme for Hunting them Down by Dogs could take Effect, but England is at too great a Distance to think of that at present.

On July 26 Bouquet wrote back:

I received yesterday your Excellency's letters of 16th with their Inclosures. The signal for Indian Messengers, and all your directions will be observed.

We don't know if Bouquet actually put the plan into effect, or if so with what result. We do know that a supply of smallpox-infected blankets was available, since the disease had broken out at Fort Pitt some weeks previously. We also know that the following spring smallpox was reported to be raging among the Indians in the vicinity.

To modern ears, this talk about infecting the natives with smallpox, hunting them down with dogs, etc., sounds over the top. But it's easy to believe Amherst and company were serious. D'Errico provides other quotes from Amherst's correspondence that suggest he considered Native Americans subhumans who ought to be exterminated. Check out his research for yourself at www.nativeweb.org/pages/l egal/amherst/lord_jeff.html. He not only includes transcriptions but also reproduces the relevant parts of the incriminating letters.

Exactly. Here's some people talking about it on answers.com: link
They list four of them, all of them from the 1800s from what I can tell.

Here's another discussion: link
Some people here claim that various 20th century Presidents came somewhat close to losing their renominations.
In addition, Lyndon Johnson never stuck around long enough to see if he'd win his nomination in 1968. He was so unpopular because of Vietnam, and had a very poor showing in the New Hampshire primaries, so he withdrew from the race.

Hopefully, the voters of today will be like the voters of 1968, and send Obama packing next year. However, I seriously doubt it. Today's Democrat voters seem to mostly be a bunch of morons who'll make any excuse they can for Obama so they don't have to face the fact that they were duped and made a terrible choice. (Don't get me started on how moronic Republican voters are...)

Nice try, but the only irony is that all of those are indeed aptly named:

French Fries
For also in the 1840s, pomme frites ("fried potatoes") first appeared in Paris. Sadly, we don't know the name of the ingenious chef who first sliced the potato into long slender pieces and fried them. But they were immediately popular, and were sold on the streets of Paris by push-cart vendors.

Frites spread to America where they were called French fried potatoes. You asked how they got their name--pretty obvious, I'd say: they came from France, and they were fried potatoes, so they were called "French fried potatoes." The name was shortened to "french fries" in the 1930s. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2033/whats-the-origin-of-french-fries

Salisbury Steak

In the late 19th century, Dr. James Henry Salisbury came up with chopped beef patties to cure Civil War soldiers sufferering from "camp diarrhea." http://homecooking.about.com/od/foodhistory/a/groundbeefhist.htm

Pizza
Pizza is a type of bread and dish that has existed since time immemorial in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_pizza

And for good measure:
Belgian Waffles
Vermersch started making waffles from a recipe of his wife's when living in Belgium before the outbreak of World War II. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_history_behind_the_belgian_waffle

Even the name Hamburger has its origin in Hamburg, Germany:
Hamburgers
In the late 18th century, the largest ports in Europe were in Germany. Sailors who had visited the ports of Hamburg, Germany and New York, brought this food and term "Hamburg steak" into popular usage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburger#18th_and_19th_centuries

No, that kind of reasoning does not apply to nuke plant failures. There are not millions of nuke plants running each day. There are only 442 nuke plants. If we cannot secure 442 plants from having disasters, then we need to do something else that does not cause disasters.

If you look up the history of certain organizations you'll find many interesting connections.
Why did Facebook grow so fast? What and who originally funded Facebook? You can find the connection to the CIA via http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMWz3G_gPhU In-Q-Tel. What about Disney? Walt Disney was an FBI informant and you can find that here http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1623/was-walt-disney-a-fascist

It's very likely that Apple receives government contracts. If Apple receives government contracts, typically when the government gives out contracts they own you. So yes if you do your research and find Apple has received government contract of any kind for any reason then it's a very high probability that they'd track us for the government. Only in this instance they finally got caught, they probably have been doing it all along.

Maybe (1) http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/716/what-is-the-true-source-of-the-kennedy-familys-wealth and maybe not (2) http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-04-26/the-kennedy-bootlegging-myth or as Candace Bergen once put it "twelve arrests, no convictions" [T.R. Baskin] (not that old Joe was ever arrested, mind).

...and if you believe that, you'll buy this watch!

The odds of a nuclear accident are small. The consequences of a nuclear accident are large. It's the classic risk problem everyone's been talking about since Katrina. The Soviets/Ukrainians dealt with the consequences of their nuclear accident by creating a large exclusion zone, but the Japanese have a lot less land to "exclude." The lesson is we (humanity) should learn, it that we have only this one nest. We can't afford to foul it up (that is, any more than we have already.)

p.s. Straight Dope is usually on the mark. Not today.

Also, see this.

Here here.

Wrong homophone in your idiom; it's "hear, hear".

Pi day always reminds me of one of my favorite examples of legislative lunacy, the almost-successful attempt by the Indiana state legislature to set the value(s) of Pi by statute. The story, from Cecil Adams's "The Straight Dope" I particularly liked Prof. Waldo's response, when he was invited to meet the originator of this bill.

My understanding is that the lights overheat. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/966/can-some-people-extinguish-streetlamps-by-means-of-their-bodily-emanations

The problem isn't the expectation of being future-proof, the problem is the very small value of "future" (now a moving target per the manufacturer).

So here's my question: since the black boxes nearly always survive plane crashes, why don't they just build the whole plane out of that same material?

The Straight Dope was asked this at one point. I quote from the response they got:

'They must get this question all the time at the National Transportation Safety Board. The guy I talked to didn't miss a beat with the answer: because the interstates aren't wide enough.'

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/909/if-aircraft-black-boxes-are-indestructible-why-cant-the-whole-plane-be-made-from-the-same-material

George Washington was the richest man on the continent at the time of the revolution.

I call bullshit on that. I don't know how much he was worth, but there's several things to note. First, he didn't have that much property (aside from his farmland in Virginia) or particularly notable business sense. Second, he spent most of the Revolutionary War fighting, not managing his wealth. Glancing around, this canard seems to have cropped up before. In that thread, they seem to think that John Hancock and Governor Morris were more wealthy. Supposedly a biography by Harlow Giles Unger on Hancock makes the case that Hancock was "arguably" the wealthiest person in the colonies.

My view is that the true rich lived in England. Being a significant share holder in the East India company or owning a lot of land both in England and the various colonies, would have made certain English extremely wealthy. And the King of England would have been at the top.

Ahh, reading the Wired article after all. It also refers to This article in The Straight Dope. The GM connection is there, but backwards.

Phillips applied for his own patents in 1934 and '36. After years of rejection, he got the American Screw Company to spend $500,000 ($5.7 million in today's money) to develop a manufacturing process. Then they convinced General Motors to try the new-fangled fasteners on the 1936 Cadillac.

Oddly enough, the completely-unrelated Phillips Screw Company was never involved in the Phillips screw (though they do make them now, I think.)

A case can be made for either. Not everybody agrees with you. Get over it.

If we define "case" as "saying things that are not true", then yes.

Defining "case" as "a lot of people say it so it's right" then it's also true.

But for anything like grammatical correctness there's no case at all - it's simply a common misunderstanding caused by people dabbling with latin without any actual knowledge of it.

For how an actual case is made, see: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2139/what-is-the-plural-of-penis

Some specimens were preserved well enough for people to try to take a bite. Most accounts of this are dubious at best but a few more credible accounts of having eaten mammoth flesh described it as being quite nasty. This is to be expected of a carcass that has been sitting frozen and half rotten in the Arctic since the last ice age. Now supposing that we found a few cell nuclei that looked good, the most likely outcome would be several hundred failed attempts if prior cloning experience is any indication. Genetic damage could in principle be corrected to a degree by hybridizing the broken strands with a very closely related species (in the case of dinosaurs it would be bird DNA; Ostriches to be specific, not frogs as was suggested in the Jurassic Park movies)

As long as cops are not accountable for their actions and prosecutors have immunity we need guns.

I agree. I was surprised a few years ago (a relative of mine was subjected to false arrest due to an error made by another State's DMV, and was rather badly treated by the officers involved) to find that the police in my State were immunized from any consequences of their actions. Yes, I spoke to my attorney about it, I was going to take them to court. What he told me was this: they cannot be sued by a private citizen, even for false arrest. So we have to depend upon the police policing themselves, which is an untenable situation. We obviously cannot depend upon our lawmakers to hold incompetent or criminal police accountable either.

Too many people in this thread have an unreasonable and unreasoning trust of government. Heinlein said it best, "Never trust another man's better nature. He may not have one." Now, having said that, I don't currently own a firearm, for the same reasons you stated. That doesn't mean that I'm willing to just give up the legal right to ever acquire one, just because some people have an irrational fear of a particular class of machine. Yes, guns are dangerous but so are many, many other aspects of our society.

Honestly, I'm under far greater threat of sudden death from the sociopaths I must contend with on the expressway every morning. Stupid bastards: get the cigarettes out of your mouths and the cellphones out of your ears and watch where you're going. It's amazing to me how many people can, on the one hand, rant about the need for gun control (so that they will (ahem) "feel" safer) and on the other hand risk their lives, and the lives of those around them, while they erratically pilot tons of metal and plastic at unsafe speeds, day in day out. Ignorance must truly be bliss, I guess.

Hitler and Stalin fist required a gun registry then they used the registry to confiscate the guns then well you know the rest.

Contrary to popular belief, Hitler actually didn't require a gun registry because he didn't need to do so. If you look at the post-World-War-I period, it was the Weimar Republic that passed a rather modern (by our standards) gun control law, that Hitler's regime simply extended to serve their own agenda. More info here. Here is the lesson that we should take away from that: social controls implemented during times of relative peace can be used against the population during periods of conflict. It's already happening to us now, if we only had the wit to see it. Put it this way: according to our government officials, we are now at "war" on multiple fronts ... and the Patriot act is about to be renewed again.

Regardless, I look at the focus on gun control (which I perceive as being all out of proportion to the actual importance of such things) as having roots in two different areas: fear, and social control. Unfortunately, the two are working hand-in-hand to take something away from us that we still need.

I hate to break it to all you gun-control fruitbats out there, but we have not, as a race, changed all that much from Colonial times. We really haven't, and the presumption that the Founder's wisdom no longer applies to us is misguided at best. Use your heads people: if we were so much more civilized now, the supposed "need" for gun control wouldn't even be on the radar. Keep in mind, also, that that need isn't yours: it's that of fearful, uninformed people led by a government who is twisting those fears to its own end.

While I grant you that is an interesting correlation there is no evidence to suggest that it is actual causation. Other species that menstruate do no have the same 28.5 day cycle. There has been evidence that daylight (or the simulation thereof) can influence the cycle. Either way we have well understood means of regulating a woman's cycle and is a component of most if not all birth control pills. Now that we have the ISS we also have a means of proving there's no connection and indeed have.

• What issues are there for women in space?
• How do female astronauts menstruate in space?

Is it in Indiana?

I call bullshit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_de_seigneur
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1139/did-medieval-lords-have-right-of-the-first-night-with-the-local-brides

Actual (most) US homes do have 240 volt service. They just use it only for the water heater and clothes dryer.

You could probably have an electrician hook up a 240 volt outlet for your car, too.

Many people already do. Donate your body to medicine or science and/or sign the organ donor release on the back of your license:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2654/how-do-you-donate-your-body-to-science

Censor the Internet? Unpossible.

The bill, if enacted, might have given the US government authorization to try. Once upon a time A bill was introduced in Indiana attempting to alter the value of pi.

Naturally any such censorship law would run afoul of the first amendment anyway, so a constitutional amendment would be required to make a credible attempt. And of course if enacted it would be as successful as attempting to control the distribution of alcohol or other harmful substances. It would do no more than breed contempt for law.

Can the judge override the jury’s decision? Sometimes. If the jury’s decision is to convict in spite of insufficient evidence, the judge may direct a verdict of acquittal and override the jury. But the reverse is not: if the jury acquits, the judge cannot reverse the acquittal.

Except that there's no actual article confirming that. A quick search only shows Slashdot making the claim and references to Slashdot making the claim. The WSJ doesn't have any such article. The New Yorker has an article making the claim, but with no factual explanation of how they know, other than urban myth. We do have The Straight Dope saying they asked Otis directly and got a response that it wasn't the case. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/595/do-close-door-buttons-on-elevators-ever-actually-work A quick search of the WSJ archives shows no articles about Otis Elevators admitting any such thing. It does turn up a lot of articles and forum discussions with people summing up the reasons listed on the Straight Dope article....i.e. that many of them are pre-timed, unhooked by the building operators or in need of repair.

the word "cake" did not refer to the familiar dessert item that the modern-day French call le gateau. The operative term was brioche, a flour-and-water paste that was "caked" onto the interiors of the ovens and baking pans of the professional boulangers of the era. (The modern equivalent is the oil-and-flour mixture applied to non-Teflon cake pans.) At the end of the day, the baker would scrape the leavings from his pans and ovens and set them outside the door for the benefit of beggars and scavengers. Thus, the lady in question was simply giving practical, if somewhat flippant, advice to her poor subjects: If one cannot afford the bourgeois bread, he can avail himself of the poor man's "cake."

Can a wind cart travel faster than the wind?

If boats can go faster than the wind, why not a wind cart?

So it should have been made much more clear that this is about down wind. OK. mentioned later, but who reads that far in a summery.