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Things To Do Before You Die
Lu Xun writes "A group of British scientists has brought some meaning to our lives by providing a list of 100 scientifically-oriented things to do before you die. The suggestions include 'joining the 300 Club at the South Pole (they take a sauna to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, then run naked to the pole in minus 100 F) or learning Choctaw, a language with two past tenses - one for giving information which is definitely true, the other for passing on material taken without checking from someone else.'"
on the whole donating your car to crash tests thing? (It was listed as one of the things that you can decide to have done to your corpse after you leave this realm) What kind of research do they do with actual corpses as opposed to crash test dummies? Are the corpses that much more useful? Who has to mop up after the test is done?
Monstar L
Operation Mayhem Drone1: "BUILD A HOUSE!"
OPMD2: "PAINT A PICTURE!"
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
IIRC, Korean has "two present tenses" for certainty - one for events that the speaker knows to be true, and on that they are not 100% certain of. IANAKS (I am not a Korean speaker)
Maybe someone can clarify why this Chocktaw(sp?) is so cool....but Spanish has two past tenses, preterite and imperfect. One for an event that happened once, at one time, and one that could continually be happening, or the start/end point is not certain. (My explanation is a bit hazy im not a native speaker).
;)
Plus for every tense you have... past present, future, conditional,etc. there is the subjuntive that expresses desires and doubts. It seems to me that the argument for learning this language is rather weak as I can get a handful of confusion from Spanish, not to mention im sure there are alot more languages like this
The method to extract DNA seems pretty neat. Can anybody explain what the gin is doing?
I wonder how this shapes the thinking of a native Choktaw speaker - for example, if George tells Fred something using the "definitely true" tense, will Fred be more likely to swallow it without thinking than if the "uncheck third-party" tense were used?
And if so, would that mean that an unscrupulous person would be more likely to use the "definitely true" tense?
Would marketing types use it exclusively?
www.eFax.com are spammers
If you sit over the wing of most jets, you may get to see the shockwave that forms during high-speed flight (above about Mach .8 or so). It is visible in one of two ways. First, if the sun angle is just right, the shockwave will cast a shadow on the wing that is a faint span-wise line of darkness and brightness. Second, if you are sitting in just the right location (about in the middle of the wing) you can see the shockwave by looking for visual disturbances (like a fault line in your vision). Sighting along a line of rivets or the edge of the wing or the wingtips, you can sometimes see a cleft that wavers. (For extra credit, one can also find a smaller shockwave on the engine nacelle about 6" to 12" back form the leading edge by sitting in line with the front of the engine and watching for a visual fault line in the ground scenery passing just above the engine.)
As the plane goes faster, the shockwave is pushed back toward the trailing edge. As the plane slows, it moves toward the leading edge. And during turbulence, the wave will flutter.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
or learning Choctaw, a language with two past tenses - one for giving information which is definitely true, the other for passing on material taken without checking from someone else.
:)
For what its worth, my native language, Macedonian, has two past tenses almost exactly like the above: one for things you personally witnessed, and the other for things you don't know first hand but think are true.
I find this quite natural. Imagine like having a separate past tense form for "she was there" as opposed to "she supposedly was there".
99 things left to go.
I've dreamed of standing on the moon, looking at the Earthrise. I've wished to stand inside a dome on the bottom of the ocean, watching sharks swim above. I've longed for a time machine so that I could watch dinosaurs; then finished with that, I'd journey as close to the Big Bang as I could. I want to chat with an Artificial Intelligence before I die. I want to stand in a world powered by the sun or the wind or clean fusion. In 2470, I want to walk within the ruins of a 20th century city, near the aforementioned solar powered, glittering metropolis, and tell the people around me about Times Square Stores and Broadway. I want a flying car, the sporty model, that I can fly along the New Miami skyline. Tired of that, I want a submarine to visit old Miami; zipping along South Ocean watching the sharks swim by.
Drink a stupid "US Irish Bar" DRY........
"NIPPLES!! I HAVE NO NIPPLES!!!" -Happy Noodle Boy
too bad the list is LAME!
For one thing there are only like a dozen things on the list. For another there are no instructions about how to actually accomplish any of those things.
Hey! I'd like to suggest that everyone should cure cancer before they die! Well that's nice, dipshit, but how would you suggest everyone accomplish that?
I looked for the link to the real list that was full of 100 things to do and had contact information on how you could actually do them, but didn't find it. What a great idea this article was. Some scientific publication should actually write such an article.
I'm bitter that this article wasn't as cool as it should have been.
- Imagine a people who found it so important
to know the reliability of information given to them, that they created two
past tenses to be able to tell the difference
- Thinking hypothetically, what if English
had adopted a similar structure. What would the politicians and media
do? Sound like? Say?
Yes, I know, completely pointless, but I thought it was an interesting mental hot foot.Reminds me of Fallout2 and the guy with grampy bone in his nose... How is this different?
"If you could only see what I've seen with your eyes..." - Roy Batty
If you KNOW you're going to die, have fun with some ecstasy. Since you don't have to worry about the long term damaging effects of MDMA, you can have all the fun without any of the guilt.
There probably is no greater emotion, or feeling one could possibly feel than under the influence of E. It's something I think everyone should have the privilege of experiencing before they die.
I think people on their death-beds (cancer, pneumonia, etc) should be able to legally sign-up for it.
I've been outside in a pair of shorts and a tee shirt in -40F. At that time, I was going to take the garbage out to the road. I had only a 60 yards to go, and could only go about 20 yards before I had to turn back. I suspect that few will do the 300 club for more than 10 secs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
C puts 0 and 100 at the freezing and boiling points of water. Might be useful for cooking.
F puts 0 and 100 at the edges of the extreme temperature ranges experienced in my country. In January, it can get to around 0 (some years not quiet, others a bit below), and summer heat tops out at 100. So, it seems to be a better fit for describing the weather.
There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to -0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!
The real mystery to this number, which the article hints at, is that it can be defined in a variety of interesting ways, including as (charge of an electron)^2 over (4 pi epsilon-naught h-bar c)- a formula that involves quantum mechanical (Planck's constant), relativistic (c) and mathematical (pi) constants produces a dimensionless number in the neighborhood of 1/137. The number itself is not so important (except to a bunch of people who have applied numerological methods to its study, most notably Arthur Eddington); rather, the issue figuring out the relationship between the fundamental constants that pop up everywhere in calculations (like h, c, and pi) and the universe that these calculations describe.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
The team is located in Colorado. I have know about 8 ppl who have gone as support ppl. It is not that hard, but you have to have good skill sets, and be able to handle no sun for months. Finally, you do have to be comfortable with the idea of cold weather.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
1 -- The distinction between direct and reported speech is not one of tense
2 -- Choctaw has _three_ past tenses
This pedantry brought to you by Pedant's Revolt (tm)
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Fun fact, -40 degrees F is equal to -40 degrees C. At these temperatures, the radio weather reports from the little town in northern Alberta where I lived use to include how many minutes it would be before exposed flesh froze (if there was a wind, the time dropped significantly, to under a minute in severe cases). Working outside at these temps is not fun. I'm just glad I didn't have to do survival training at -60C like some of my friends where were in the Military had to do.
That's just pathetic -- so-called scientists passing on the rubbish about Choctaw. That's about on par with the Eskimo words for snow thingy (besides, as other posters have suggested, they didn't even get the Choctaw part right).
Every language I've seen so far has some way to indicate doubt or lack of authority about what you're saying. For example, many Indo-European languages use the subjunctive mood (also called "conjunctive") rather than a separate tense for that purpose, and even English still uses the past subjunctive to indicate a condition that is contrary to fact: "if I *were* god" (but I'm not). We also use the subjunctive for something that someone else wants to happen: "I insist that he *go*" (the indicative would be "goes").
Perhaps those scientists could find something more useful to do with their time, such as encouraging people to send postcards to a dying boy.
Actually, it really doesn't--Arizona, yes, Florida, no. I live in Orlando, and this year our high was only up to 101F. Why? Winds from the Gulf and Atlantic tend to keep it under 100F most of the year...and when the winds aren't blowing, there's usually a good enough cloud cover to keep temps in the 90s during the summer months.
Q: "Why do sound techs say 'check 1, 2'?"
A: "Cause if they could count any higher they'd be lighting techs."
Ah, but just think of how easy it would be to filter out people as they talk.
A nice simple "this man has no idea what he's talking about" test to determine that salesman has no concept of what any of the features actually do.
Oh, the possibilities
=)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Turkish has two past tenses too, for exactly the same purpose.
Maybe digitalhermit dreams of someone giving a spin to the moon? Sure, it's a lot of energy and angular momentum, but are time machines which can visit the Big Bang any less possible?
Besides, who knows what boondoggle projects the Solar Congress of 2470 will be involved with? Properly terraforming Venus might involve speeding up the planet's rotation. If you consider changing the rotation of a planet to be impossible, calculate the relative magnitudes of the angular momentum of its spin, and of its orbit around the sun. Moving some of the anglular momentum from the orbit to the spin can change a planet's orbit slightly while changing its spin drastically. This process can either release energy or require it, depending upon the direction of change. If the process releases energy, it might be used as a power source in 2470...