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Thank you, the solution is now obvious (assuming it wasn't obvious 40 years ago or even 400).

You're welcome. Good luck eating your gold in a deflationary spiral. (Good news: it's actually edible.)

One of the things I've so often been troubled by with our current administration was that in uncountable examples, they look like a small child playing chess who can see no more beyond a couple of moves. The incompetence at all levels has been staggering. The disdain for facts and science over "gut" and pet policies (and blatant corruption) has been deplorable.

I sort of agree and disagree. Things like James Hansen of NASA and Global Warming fame, his Facts were tainted by his beliefs which amounts to the same justifications as god willed it. He has been shown wrong on many things and actually publicly stated that he believes it was ok to exaggerate claims on global warming just to get attention drawn to it. This administration had to deal with these contradictory facts that were little more then some zealot's twisting of words in order to push their opinion. To this day, people still believe that the Mann hockey stick graph is accurate when it isn't, they still believe that the 90's and 2000's were the hottest years on record, just a few weeks ago, he attempted to claim that October or November was the warmest month on record until someone pointed out that they used the previous months data, and we have had this type of crap poison all attempts to get to the bottom of things. The work that the IPCC has done didn't include any original research of their own, they simply studied other people's research, including the crap Hansen has been bastardizing and attempted to create a sane conclusion or interpretation over it. Of course the problem there is garbage in garbage out so we can't even trust their reports 100%.

So while there was disregard for facts, a lot of facts needed to be disregarded to the extent of the claims being made of them. If the warmest year on record over the last century and a half is actually 1934 (in that area) and not some point in the late 90's and Co2 is the main problem, then they need to explain why the mid 1930's was so hot with so little Co2 and how that doesn't effect the current explanation of the problem answer. to date, Hansen has only said that the differences are insignificant and doesn't change his position and he totally ignores that some natural or man made force that he himself claims wasn't Co2 was having an effect in the mid 30's.

In other words, a lot of the Facts are little more then political agendas in the same ways I already mentioned which you are also considering ""gut" and pet policies (and blatant corruption) has been deplorable."

An accomplished scientist need not champion the "CORRECT" solution. They would do far better than recent folk simply by doing a good job weeding out the bad solutions.

Well, no. Not when they cherry pick the data to prove their positions. I could take any data set and form it to support my theories and show that other solutions are bad. The ability to see this bullshit and act on it is more important then assuming that somehow a person with a science background is magically immune. When you politicize anything, there is no expectation that politics won't be a part of it. We are in no better or worse of a situation until such time that they prove themselves which would be true of anyone in the positions. Being a scientist makes little difference because politics isn't science, it is a philosophy more like religion and the two don't speak of each other. One may have control over the other but they aren't intertwined in a way that you can ensure good science in the other. Remember when politicians attempted to legislate the value of pi? It turns out that it was on the basis of facts as presented by a doctor seemingly qualified.

The credit crisis is a great example. Parent's understanding seems weak. The slew of people going into foreclosure was just the match struck in the shed full of

Don't you mean assisted suicide? Because you cannot charge a dead body with crime of committing suicide....

Or can you?

Shouldn't something along the line of "we don't know whether they taste nice" be in there?

There have been some reports of Russians eating frozen Mammoth, but I'm not sure how true that is (I read it somewhere, but I can't remember where).

Here are some quick links I found on the topic:
link 1
link 2

The modern canonical torah was finalized sometime between 1700 and 1900 years ago, as can be seen in differences from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Just one of several textual analyses of the torah showing revisions is Friedman's breakdown into several component parts, written at different times.

There's even more details about history of "bible" authorship that explains how most of the source texts that christians used around 1700 years ago were left out of the canonization of the New Testament, mostly gnostic rivals to the people who decided on the canon.

As a matter of fact, fingerprints are different between identical twins. Source. Source. Source. Source.

IIRC, older TV's actually did damage your eyes if you were too close to them. Ah, here's an article that mentions the risks with older TV's.
And as for old wives' tales, you'd be surprised how many have been proven. For the longest time, researchers were saying that being out in the cold wouldn't increase your risk of catching cold, because the reduced temperature would reduce the amount of the virus present. Within the last year or so, the latest research indicated that the cold temperature also suppressed your immune system, enough to give the cold virus an edge compared to if you kept properly warm.
A surprising number of superstitions are based on fact, too. For instance, of course it's bad luck to walk under a ladder - it increases the chance of things falling on your head!

high, squeaky voices

Actually, helium doesn't affect pitch. The squeaky effect is due to a formant shift.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1803/why-does-helium-make-your-voice-squeaky

It might still be a story intended to convey basic ideas or concepts to an unsophisticated people of long ago ... but clearly it simply is not the literal truth.

We agree there. I see the Old Testament as more of a story: "Hey, this is what happened before." As much as it may be the word of God, it's been translated by man... and I don't believe in the infallibility of man, divinely inspired or not. To take the Old Testament literally, word for word... well, that's probably where the crazy Christians come from. :oD

Since we can't trust the Bible as a source of knowledge about even basic organic chemistry, then we can't take it as literal truth about anything.

Sorry... I have to disagree with you there. I've got an textbook from my highschool days that references Bernoulli's Principle as the primary reason aircraft fly, that the air moving over the top of the wing speeds up so it "meet up" with the air below it. We now know that to be false. It may be a simplified answer, and it might partially explain lift, but it doesn't do the whole job.

See a pattern here?

Now, just because the textbook can be considered incorrect (at the very least incomplete) in that one location, does it mean I'm going to toss the rest of the book out, since obviously the author has no idea what he's talking about? Nope. There's still a lot of good stuff in that textbook that applies.

Same goes for the Bible. Even if the creation of man (and the rest of the universe) was glossed over, there's still a lot of good stuff in the Bible.

Just to add on to your comments about Reagan's "landslide" victory, The Straight Dope had an interesting discussion on that subject. From that article:

Ron got 50.7 percent of the popular vote, which is nothing compared to the landslide champs: LBJ in 1964 (61.0 percent), FDR in 1936 (60.8 percent), and Nixon in 1972 (60.7 percent).

Since only 53.9 percent of the voting-age population actually voted in 1980 (the lowest percentage since 1948), Ron got a scant 27.3 percent of the eligible vote, which is pretty terrible. Of the 40 elections held since 1824 (popular vote totals prior to that time are unavailable), Ron comes in 34th in percentage of eligible vote received, beating out only Carter, Nixon (in 1968), Truman, Coolidge, Wilson, and John Quincy Adams (who had an unbelievably crappy 8.2 percent in 1824

You mean like in Indiana when they tried to define pi as 4.0, 3.2 or some other 7 other possible numbers?

You know, I was ready to go down the road of questioning your speculation about Rolling Stone's & Blender's mission. Then I was reminded about a friend who was fired from his job as a computer game reviewer a long time ago because a game sucked and his review stated so. The editor wanted him to be kinder with the review since they were buying ad space. He refused. Thus I can't refute this statement.

"The use or non-use of meaningless marketing is irrelevant" That statement is not entirely true. A brilliant work would mean nothing if it's creator destroys it and tells nobody. The creator has to do minimal marketing. i.e. tell somebody. But that holds true for a work where improvement & innovation can be quantified (patent) and where improvement & innovation is subjective (copyright).

Back on topic

The reason why I started showing reviews, and top X lists was to demonstrate that "All things artistic are subjective. That's just the nature of the beast." and that it's a completely different beast then the one's governed by patent law.

So completely different in fact that the laws that govern something like:

"Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu announced in February 2005 an attack which could find collisions in the SHA-0 hash function in 2^39 operations."

or it's ilk could not be used to govern:

"Did Disney's The Lion King rip off an old Japanese TV series?"

Remember, you're going to have four women who are all menstruating at the same time - I think that would have some negative effect ;-)

McClintock effect

The McClintock effect, also known as menstrual synchrony or the dormitory effect, is a theory that proposes that the menstrual cycles of women who live together (such as in prisons, convents, bordellos, or dormitories) tend to become synchronized over time.

There isn't much evidence to support that theory:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/021220.html

And this article argues that the destruction was gradual, and may have been as much due to physical deterioration of the scrolls over time as any act of violence.

After posting, I wanted to find some sort of source which validates what I've said. I found a link about law and jurisdiction in international waters:

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

It really seems like the most logical way to deal with Jurisdiction in space would be to simply extend existing maritime law principles, which basically say that the Jurisdiction of a Nation is 'carried' by vessels that fly its flag. Of course, that just means that all the space tourism will launch from the Bahamas, and fly the Bahamian (is that the right form for the adjective?) flag.

I'd say the problem is that he's thinking of evolution in too concrete of terms. Evolution doesn't have an endpoint, it doesn't have a goal. It is simply a mechanism. Birds and bats both fly... similar outcomes, completely different evolutionary pathways. "Pure" chance is only involved in the mutation part. The rest is due to selection.

And don't forget that it's not only genes, but the proteins and activation results of those genes. Identical twins have the same genes, but they're activated differently and in different ways, even though they're similar.

Who doesn't have a clue? As far as I know nobody has tried it, but barrel rolls don't put a lot of additional stress on the plane. Apparently Boeing's engineers think it could be done in a 747: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_262.html. It was done in a 707 50 years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ546BEps-M but Boeing executives forbade any similar demonstrations by their pilots.

The Straight Dope had a discussion on this topic. Their answer as to why humans aren't comfortable at temperatures that are close to your body temperature:

"Your body is a little fuel-burning engine, and like all engines generates waste heat. That heat has to go somewhere, lest you pop a gasket. The easiest place to put it is someplace cooler, such as the air around you. However, if the ambient air temperature is the same as your body temperature, you have to go to great lengths to shove the waste heat out into it, e.g., sweating like a pig or going out to K mart to buy an air conditioner." (link)

While I'm linking to the Straight Dope, I might as well include this one as well:

Why do we have so many temperature scales?

The Straight Dope had a discussion on this topic. Their answer as to why humans aren't comfortable at temperatures that are close to your body temperature:

"Your body is a little fuel-burning engine, and like all engines generates waste heat. That heat has to go somewhere, lest you pop a gasket. The easiest place to put it is someplace cooler, such as the air around you. However, if the ambient air temperature is the same as your body temperature, you have to go to great lengths to shove the waste heat out into it, e.g., sweating like a pig or going out to K mart to buy an air conditioner." (link)

While I'm linking to the Straight Dope, I might as well include this one as well:

Why do we have so many temperature scales?

"Hear, hear" actually

That could never work. The Tower has to be infinitely high. Although I hear in some flat states they've tried to built it one story tall:

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

More likely they paid Christianity lip service when it was politically convenient - just like American politicians. But what did their actions say?

...over 180 million people have been killed by their own secular humanist governments in the 20th Century....Joseph Stalin closed down over 48 000 churches, and attempted the liquidation of the entire Christian Church.

Whatever Stalin claimed, he oppressed and killed Christians.

Hitler's "Christianity" is highly debatable.

Historian Paul Johnson wrote that Hitler hated Christianity with a passion, adding that shortly after assuming power in 1933, Hitler told Hermann Rauschnig that he intended "to stamp out Christianity root and branch."

I have a very poor knowledge of history, so I don't presume to have authority on this question, but it seems to me that dictatorships always oppose religion. They do not wish any citizen to have any higher allegiance than their allegiance to the state. If you want to see oppressive group mentalities, look to these people's governments sooner than to religion.

There's no delicate way to say this, but in cases of "apparent suicide" of young men, it's worth considering the possibility of autoerotic asphyxiation. It causes not insignificant numbers of young men to hang themselves to death each year unintentionally.

Should everyone think less of JFK if he was a furry porn freak?

Should everyone think less of JFK if he was a furry porn freak?

I think I'm going to have to agree with Cecil Adams on this one.

Cecil is happy to say he has heard from the originator of the Monty Hall question, Steve Selvin, a UCal-Berkeley prof (cf American Statistician, February 1975). Cecil is happy because he can now track Steve down and have him assassinated, as he richly deserves for all the grief he has caused.

Which is also not what the original writers of the laws intended. Sorry.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030919.html

I'd wondered that until a few minutes ago, too. After a quick google search, the answer turns out to be that they'd be far too heavy. Also of note is that they DON'T just survive any crash, even with all the precautions, they can STILL get destroyed. http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_001.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_data_recorder have more info

Urban Legends comments
Straight Dope comments
MSNBC comments.

All three sources say the same thing: 3 of the 4 air packs were activated which can only be done manually.

No explosions, according to Cecil: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_147.html

You'd even have a few seconds of useful consciousness to take a whiff and stick your head back in!

Waterboarding is most definitely torture.

And in general, we do surgery under anasthetic nowadays.

Hitler was not a professed/practicing atheist, but also demonstrated no application of religious belief in his political theories or actions.

Hitler was not just Catholic but claimed he was doing the Lord's work:

"My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.

"In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison.

Or this (link is to a good "Straight Dope" on the whole question):

"National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity . . . For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of today, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life"

He was certainly able to apply religious belief - in the manipulation of others. How much of what he said about religion he actually believed, and how much was manipulation, is hard to say.

Some of his statements flat-out contradict each other, but is that surprising? This was not a sane human being. Whatever he believed, his actions were clearly not consistent with the teachings of Jeshua ben Joseph, nor with teaching of secular humanists such as the Huxleyian tradition.

Just as the actions of Al Qaeda and the like are clearly not consistent with the teachings of Muhammad, and Zen masters raising money for fighter planes is clearly not consistent with the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, and the idiot who told me "Jesus would bomb Saddam Hussein!" in response to my "Who Would Jesus Bomb?" sign clearly makes Baby Jesus cry.

Saying that the Bible is two-thousand year old fiction produced by goat herders is a statement of fact.

I'm not sure the word 'fact' means what you think it means.

1. There are 66 books in the bible, the oldest of which were written around 1500 BCE (and even those were based on earlier writings). The newest ones were written around 100 CE. Most of the Old Testament is over three thousand years old.
2. There are many references to real places and people in the Bible. The Bible isn't one coherent story. Some books are biographical in nature, about real people. Some are fiction. You can't really discount the entire thing as a work of fiction.
3. The books of the bible were written by many different people. Some of them were goat herders maybe. Most were not.

I get the feeling you don't know much about the history of the Bible. You should read up on it someday to avoid sounding like you don't know what you're talking about. Here's a good link with some relatively impartial information:

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mbible1.html

Whilst I have no particular opinion on the issue of Intel's guilt or otherwise, I have to laugh at:

the only court I am interested in is the court of public opinion. In that court Intel is Guilty PERIOD.

In that court, half the US public subscribe to creationism. 73% believe in miracles, 61% in the devil, and 34% believe that the Earth is being visited by alien spaceships. According to Time, 36% of Americans think that the government were complicit or actively involved in 9/11. Almost a third of Americans believe that electronic devices like cell phones cause cancer, and the vast majority believe that the risk of dying of cancer is increasing.

So what? Only this: the court of popular opinion and reality (or justice) have very little in common. That does not negate the importance of said institution. The mere fact that we are in the words of Douglas Adams a lot of useless bloody loonies doesn't negate the fact that these are the nation's voters and consumers. But it does mean that pointing at 'the court of popular opinion' to justify your language is scraping the bottom of the barrel. OLPC are publicly held to be darling happy fluffy bunny types who can do no wrong... and?

You were probably exaggerating for example, but the issue with Tylenol (acetaminophen) is that even taking the normal dose over the course of a few days, usually if combined with some alcohol (which, I know, sounds stupid, but apparently it happens more than one would think) can bork your liver.

From Does Tylenol + alcohol = liver failure? (and other articles):

• Acetaminophen overdose is the leading cause of acute liver failure, even if we leave alcohol out of the picture. According to one study, it accounts for 20 percent of cases (Schiodt et al, Liver Transplantation and Surgery, January 1999) An as-yet-unpublished follow-up puts the number even higher--30 percent. Acute liver failure isn't that common. Still, 70,000 cases of acetaminophen toxicity are reported each year.
• 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.
• You can make the margin even thinner by drinking too much and eating too little. I'll spare you the biochemistry, but basically acetaminophen and alcohol in combination overwhelm the liver's ability to remove toxins from your bloodstream. At the same time, starving yourself reduces the liver's output of glutathione, a natural detoxicant produced in response to food.
• The upshot is that heavy drinkers (two or more drinks per day) who don't eat can suffer worse liver damage from Tylenol than people who OD on purpose. Of 71 patients treated at a Dallas medical center for acetaminophen overdose, 50 were attempted suicides and 21 were victims of an accidental overdose (Schiodt et al, New England Journal of Medicine, October 1997). The would-be suicides on average took twice as much of the drug as the accidental victims. Yet far more of the latter went into a coma (seven versus three) and died (four versus one). Why? Because most of the accidental victims were alcoholics. Five people--three accidental victims, two attempted suicides--overdosed on less than four grams, the claimed safe dosage for 24 hours.
• Let's not forget kidney damage. A December 1994 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that a daily tablet of acetaminophen for a year or 1,000 pills over a lifetime doubled the odds of kidney failure.

Fair abrigement seems to be about the right to quote small sections copyrighted work for the purposes of criticism or parody. Fair use, at least when people mention it here seems to be about Sony v Universal Studios where the US Supreme Court decided that time shifting was fair use or the Audio Home Recording Act

The Straight Dope summarised these rights as

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mcopyright2.htm

* It's OK to copy music onto an analog cassette, but not for commercial purposes.
* It's also OK to copy music onto special audio CD-Rs, mini-discs, and digital tapes (because royalties have been paid on them) but again, not for commercial purposes.
* Beyond that, there's no legal "right" to copy the copyrighted music on a CD onto a CD-R. However, burning a copy of a CD onto a CD-R, or transferring a copy onto your computer hard drive or your portable music player, won't usually raise concerns so long as:
* The copy is made from an authorized original CD that you legitimately own.
* The copy is just for your personal use. It's not a personal use in fact, it's illegal to give away the copy or lend it to others for copying.
* The owners of copyrighted music have the right to use protection technology to allow or prevent copying.
* Remember, it's never OK to sell or make commercial use of a copy that you make


Which are still quite a bit less than what people here view as an absolute right to backup media and then do what you want with the backups.

The Straight Dope has it as the above poster has said: between about one and four per cent. The 10% stat seems to be an urban legend based on old, slapdash research.

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_011.html

Why do hot dogs come 10 to a pack, but the buns come 8 to a pack?

I always end up with leftover buns or dogs, forcing my to buy more, over and over!

It's a conspiracy!

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_350.html

Yeah, me too. Cecil knows your pain.
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_201.html

See http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mwar1812.htm

> "Do you realise that everything you save would be more than offset by the additional energy required to fight off gravity?"

Congress already has an answer to that - they'll repeal the law of gravity, just like Indiana tried to make pi equal to 3.2 in 1897.

ENGROSSED HOUSE BILL

No. 246

A Bill for an act introducing a new mathematical truth and offered

as a contribution to education to be used only by the State of Indiana free of cost by paying any royalties whatever on the same, provided it is accepted and adopted by the official action of the Legislature of 1897.

Section -1- Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Indiana: It has been found that a circular area is to the square on a line equal to the quadrant of the circumference, as the area of an equilateral rectangle is to the square on one side. The diameter employed as the linear unit according to the present rule in computing the circle's area is entirely wrong, as it represents the circle's area one and one-fifth times the area of a square whose perimeter is equal to the circumference of the circle. This is because onefifth of the diameter fails to be represented four times in the circle's circumference. For example: if we multiply the perimeter of a square by one-fourth of any line one-fifth greater than one side, we can in like manner make the square's area to appear one-fifth greater than the fact, as is done by taking the diameter for the linear unit instead of the quadrant of the circle's circumference.

Section -2- It is impossible to compute the area of a circle on the diameter as the linear unit without trespassing upon the area outside of the circle to the extent of including one-fifth more area than is contained within the circle's circumference, because the square on the diameter produces the side of a square which equals nine when the arc of ninety degrees equals eight. By taking the quadrant of the circle's circumference for the linear unit, we fulfill the requirements of both quadrature and rectification of the circle's circumference. Furthermore, it has revealed the ratio of the chord and arc of ninety degrees, which is as seven to eight, and also the ratio of the diagonal and one side of a square which is as ten to seven, disclosing the fourth important fact, that the ratio of the diameter and circumference is as five-fourths to four; and because of these facts and the further fact that the rule in present use fails to work both ways mathematically, it should be discarded as wholly wanting and misleading in its practical applications.

Section -3- In further proof of the value of the author's proposed contribution to education and offered as a gift to the State of Indiana, is the fact of his solutions of the trisection of the angle, duplication of the cube and quadrature of the circle having been already accepted as contributions to science by the American Mathematical Monthly, the leading exponent of mathematical thought in this country. And be it remembered that these noted problems had been long since given up by scientific bodies as insolvable mysteries and above man's ability to comprehend.

ENGROSSED HOUSE BILL

No. 246

Read first time Jany. 18th, 1897

Referred to Committee on
Canals - rep. and referred to Com.
on Education Jany. 19th, 1897
Reported back Feby. 2d, 1897
Read second time Feby. 5th, 1897
Ordered engrossed Feby. 5th, 1897
Read third time Feby. 5th, 1897
Passed February 5th, 1897
Ayes - 67 - Noes -0-

Introduced by Record

IN THE SENATE.

Read first time and referred to
com. on Temperence, 2/11/97
Reported favorable 2/12/97
Read second time and indefinitely
postponed 2/12/97

Question appears to be answered: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_147.html

Its a little more complex than lack of oxygen - the oxygen in your system actually expands as it turns to a vapour (boiling point drops as pressure drops, remember?) and whilst its recoverable if caught quickly enough , it doesn't sound very pleasant...

Beer has been proven to prolong your life (yes, beer specifically) when drunk in moderation--2-3 per day (for males) reduces your lifelong chance of having a heart attack by around 30%-35% .

No amount of smoking is proven to have any positive effects that I'm aware of.

It's also kinda hard to unintentionally drink beer--again, as with cellphones, there is no secondhand effect.

Seriously, I can understand arguing that secondhand smoke hasn't been proven to cause harm, but I fail to comprehend people who acknowledge (or assume for the sake of argument) that it is harmful, but take the uber-libertarian view that smokers should have to right to poison non-smoker's air supply.

Walking into a restaurant, privately owned or not, doesn't give anyone the right to harm me, and "my lungs" are definitely a part of "me".

I'm still allergic to seafood, actually. If any cross-contamination occurs between my meal and someone else's who's ordered lobster, I could die. Should restaurants not be allowed to serve lobster?

Would you argue that "roughhouse" restaurants should exist where, by walking in, your forfeit your right to NOT be assaulted or (since lung cancer is indeed fatal) even murdered?

Protection from bodily harm isn't something that can magically evaporate when you step foot on private property.