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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.'"
'Things to do before you die' is a very apt term for this, I think.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
About the second past tense - now I know what does "C" in SCO stand for!
Homo Anonymi?
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
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.'" - I think /. moderators already speak in Choctaw, too bad most of them only learned the second past tence.
You can't handle the truth.
"Threesome with Japanese twins"
Amen.
Free XBox, PS2
Looks like I can't die yet.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Where's "get laid by 2 hot chicks at the same time"? Hello?
The common saying goes "Plant a tree, have a child, write a book" before you die. I think reading the lists is ok. Taking it seriously..Is seriously wrong ;)
Looks like Minerva isn't going to be the first to compile a list of experiences, afterall. :)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
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)
When I came back from seeing this during the summer, noone believed me. Now I have somewhere to point them to...
take a sauna to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, then run naked to the pole in minus 100 F
Introduce the Celsius system to the US
I don't need a signature.
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)
Wrong list... I think that's from "100 Things To Do When You've Lost Your Sanity."
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Here's there website
From the site:
What is a LifeGem?
A LifeGem is a certified, high quality diamond created from the carbon of your loved one as a memorial to their unique and wonderful life.
The LifeGem provides a way to embrace your loved one's memory day by day. The LifeGem is the most unique and timeless memorial available for creating a testimony to their unique life.
We hope and believe that your LifeGem memorial will offer comfort and support when and where you need it, and provide a lasting memory that endures just as a diamond does. Forever.
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The hardest part might be convincing the NSF to let you go to the South Pole research station just so you can run around naked.
I wonder if they go barefoot too?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
and solve the mathematical mystery of the number 137
To join that 'elite' group you need to insert another 3 in the middle.
;-)
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Good luck learning to speak Choctaw. If you look *real* hard, you might find someone who speaks Choctaw -- but chances are, they are too busy running the casino to teach you anything useful.
Pick of the list
Extract your own DNA by spitting gargled salt water into diluted washing-up liquid and slowly dribbling ice-cold gin down the side of the glass. Spindly white clumps which form in the mixture are, basically, you
You know, there are easier, and much more fun, ways to create clumps of white goo that contains your DNA.
The list is a pretty good one, especially the one about turning yourself into a diamond after you die. I can't help but wish they had included a link to the list, or told us if it was going to be published.
I saw this article in The Mysterious Future, so I googled up this brief page with Choctaw examples.
Personally, I'd like to see some of that grammar come into common usage. At least, on Slashdot.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
... I plan to discover the Secret to Immortality.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
"then run naked to the pole in minus 100 F"
Why the *FUCK* would I want to do that??
Use your excreta to enter the amazing world of the dung beetle. Much more basic but just as fascinating for some. If you are ever caught short in the open, says New Scientist, turn the accident into an opportunity by lingering nearby and watching what happens. "It won't take long for the beetles to appear, scuttle boldly up to your deposit and begin rolling balls of it away, head-butting it and pushing it with their forelegs." Reassuringly, it gets used as food and a beetle breeding nest
I tried this in the food court at my local mall, but security showed up before I saw any beetles.
The method to extract DNA seems pretty neat. Can anybody explain what the gin is doing?
Watching insects tinker with my poo just doesn't make my list of things to do somehow.
I'll do all that after I die.
while (!asleep()) sheep++
Morbid question: Can you make a diamond from someone from Sierra Leone's ashes without it being considered a conflict diamone? There sure is a lot of corpse talk in that article for things to do BEFORE you die. Do they know something we don't?
[insert sig file here]
Hmm, and I was considering learning Haskell, a language with monadic I/O...
Actually, though, the difference described in the summary, between the past tenses, isn't actually a distinction of tenses, but rather of modality (or mood, in some writer's terminology). From the description, it seems Choctaw would have a distinction between past and non-past, at least, and a distinction between believed-to-be-true and hearsay (a distinction of evidentiality). Sort of like English distinguishes past and present and two aspects. That is, two one-bit distinctions, making for four different combinations: I eat, I have eaten , I ate, had eaten. Not to mention all the other aspects of verbal systems...
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
are you not?
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Anyone else imagined trying to get it up while balancing on a 300 foot pole in -50C ? No.. ok ill be going back to work then.
28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds... that is when the world will end.
Some of those things should be called:
:-D
Things you do right before you die.
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.
Ok, so its a joke.. laugh...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm sure many /. readers achieve multiple orgasms... 2, maybe 3 before they die - yeah, they're mostly rather young so I think it's statistically possible.
then it would only be the 166.66666666666666666666 club. Doesn't sound as cool.
I guess I'm one of the weird types who would be quite content to die after getting the opportunity to go into space and see our world from an elevated perspective...
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.
'...assisting at the birth of an animal. "This is one of life's most surprising and moving experiences..."'
I grew up in a rural area where my uncle raised cattle. Consequently, I've "pulled" calves on numerous occations. My first experience, the cow projectile-shat all over me. Surprising? yes; moving? I'm not so sure.
Proverbs 21:19
(Yes, it's gecko, but I just had to leave my typo in.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Two bottles of "Hello Kitty" hand lotion doesn't count.
The imperfect tenses in Spanish (and other latin-derived languages such as Italian and French, I think) describe uncertainty about the current state of the "thing" mentioned, not of its truth value. As you stated, the past imperfect is used when you do not know if the event you speak of has finished happening. It has absolutely no relationship with the truth of the statement.
As a quick example, I cannot think now of a big difference between the past imperfect "Yo comía" and the English "I was eating". As far as I know, they are equivalent.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
I didn't count 100 things to do? Anyone have the full list?
Mark
Two chicks at the same time.
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.
Is "700 club" a clue as to where they hold their meetings?
...yeah right
Making cheese.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
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.'"
:Adam yurumus
:-)
I think Turkish has a similar concept. (I only know a few phrases so I might mess this up, but I'm pretty certain you can say
"the man walked" : Adam yurudu
or you can say
"the man walked (allegedly)"
Must save a lot of time in avoiding libel actions
(Their storage area is already full of bare-ass frozen tourists-onna-stick with a very stupid expression on their faces.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Running from 200 degrees to -100 degrees would kill many people. And I'm pretty sure being creamated and turned into a diamond would kill you.
God spoke to me.
English has two future tenses for certainty.
What do you mean, "to tell you the truth", all that other stuff you've been telling me is crap?
pet peeve
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
...you see, I'm going to live forever, or die trying!
In Ireland: Frolick in the Heather
In Australia: Get in the Bush
In the Galapagos: Play 'Hide the dragon'
In Brazil: Spank a spider monkey
In Canada: Pet a beaver
Drink a stupid "US Irish Bar" DRY........
"NIPPLES!! I HAVE NO NIPPLES!!!" -Happy Noodle Boy
has this on the current issue as a free book. Very nice...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
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.
You'll find that most turkic languages out there, including Uzbek have these two distinct preterite tenses. One is used for an event to which you were an eye-witness, and the other is used to report events that you did not witness, hence, less believable events.
This feature of the language actually served to insulate the people during the years of Soviet occupation. The news (i.e. propaganda) would be reported in the "I saw it first-hand" tense, thus nobody would believe it.
It's a shame that these languages, or at least the advanced features of such languages are dying out. Everybody should try to take at least two quarters of say Uzbek or Kazak in university (prior to death) to keep the awareness alive - see Professor Cirtautus.
From the article:
Above sea level? Since the Earth's oceans form part of that 20-kilometer bulge, "sea level" isn't a constant distance from the center of the Earth either, and Mount Everest is still the highest mountain above sea level (while there is no actual sea right below either Mount Everest or Chimborazo, the shape of its hypothetical and non-spherical extension around the globe, called the geoid, can be determined mathematically).
What they mean is that Chimborazo is the place on the surface that is most distant from the Earth's center.
Prove the Euler-Mascheroni Constant to be irrational... or not. Either will work.
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
Star in your own Murder mystery:
Your demise is inevitable, why not make good fun of it:
- Pick a handful of suspects to frame for your "murder"
- Plant, and contrive evidence to implicate the "suspects" in your death
- Secretly make silent calls from suspect's phones, nearing the night of your demise. When questioned they will deny any knowledge of such phone calls further raising the suspicion
- Intentionally accuse potential suspects of plotting your death, say things like "I know what you're doing, you won't get away with it!," just load enough to be overheard
- Change your will to benefit the suspects, but don't make them aware, they'll deny any knowledge of the change the in the will. But it gives them a motive
Watch the hilarity ensue
"Children should be taught to consider engineering and science as cool - not the preserve of boffins"
Boffins.. yeah.
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.
That one-carat rock of eternity will cost your estate $14,000. Plus tax. Sign here.
I wonder if my wife would wear me in a ring, or keep me on a nice pedestal in the foyer?
sigs, as if you care.
I wouldn't wanna clean your shorts.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
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.
It's supposed to be "100 things to do before you die. And a few to do after." or something like that.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
of 100 nerdly things to do before you die.
... /.
...
43. Get a FP on
44. Modify a computer to look like something else
45. Contribute some code to an open source project
46. "Daydream" about two chicks at the same time
47. Reference the movie Office Space 400 times in a single day
For about $100/month in dues and insurance payments, you can sign up for cryonics. It's a longterm experiment to determine whether a person vitrified today using state-of-the-art cryopreservative/vitrifications techniques (which eliminate or greatly reduce ice crystal formation) will be able to be revived at some indeterminate date in the future.
Although such revival is impossible today, at some day N days in the future, it may be possible to revive the experimental subjects. A happy consequence of such revival would likely be awakening into a society where humans are virtually immortal (or extremely lomglived) and machines and other technologies make it possible for humans to not have to work.
Nice payoff for that experiment!
As for the odds of success, there are too many confounding variables to make an estimation. However, the probability of success would be the product of several independent variables, such as (odds of a future society coming up with revival technology) times (odds of remaining safe in the dewar until such a time arrives) times..... etc etc.
Link? Yeah, what the heck....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Yeah, this is one of the problems with the centigrade scale. Fahrenheit is basically scaled such that most weather temperatures fall between 0 and 100. Centigrade is calibrated 0 to 100 on the liquid state of water at sea level. As common as water is, measuring its temperature on that scale just isn't something most people need to do very often. It may be more logical, but it's not actually more useful.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The car crash cadaver and the "murderer"-type cadavers both came straight out of that book.
It's a good read. Glad my wife gave it to me to read.
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."
Choctaw has taint()! Just goes to show how failing to rely on the "-T" flag can allow your entire nation to be conquered by European invaders, overflowing your treaty buffers with cannon.
--
make install -not war
I dunno, but it certainly makes it hard to get that phylacetry for lichdom done in time if they have to use your remains to do it.. now if only you can make one out of someone else and dump your soul essence into it... immortality could be yours!
If I should die before I wake
All my bone and sinew take
Put me in the compost pile
To decompose me for a while
Worms, water, sun will have their way,
Returning me to common clay
All that I am will feed the trees
The plants, the fishes in the seas
When radishes and corn you munch
You'll be having me for lunch
And then excrete me with a grin
Chortling "There goes Lee again!"
--Lee Hayes
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
See my URL of course. :)
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
From the article...
There is also, inevitably, some crossover with the more banal lists of things to do before you die, even if the scientists' equivalent of visiting Everest is much more interesting. The Earth's rotation causes a 20-kilometre bulge at the equator, making Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador the highest mountain above sea level.
Wouldn't the sea bulge as well (if not more)? Perhaps they should say the point on Earth furthest from the center of mass.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
a language with two past tenses - one for giving information which is definitely true
That's not tense, that's aspect.
Learn everybody to use English proper
Link your home computer to the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico
/.ers have done that, surely?
Plenty of
They use idle CPU cycles to analyze radio telescope observations for extraterrestrial signals.
SETI@home main page
Spread Firefox team .
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Well maybe when I was a kid. I've settled on a PhD and some patents since then.
The deeper into space, the better. Too bad the stuff in movie 2001 did not materialize on that schedule. I was also charmed by the adventure in Have Space Suit, Will Travel by Heinlein.
Anyway, he said that one of the motivators was that after a few months in camp, there was a fair amount built up sexual frustration, and the 300 club is co-ed. I don't know if there are attractive researchers at the Pole, but the implication was that after a few months of freezing your butt off, any thrill is a welcome diversion.
then going from 200 degrees farenheit to -100 degrees will probably kill you.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
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.'
..well so does Spanish, one for saying when something happened and one for saying how something happened .. then there is a few past tenses to order different occurences of events in the past as well ..
;-)
.. But I am only guessing :-)
another fine thing about Spanish is, that you can actually use it for something
I asume that girls will be more impressed about Spanish than Choctaw
As a member of the Choctaw Nation (my great-grandfather was an original enrollee), I'm proud that the language has been recognized as worth learning.
If you are interested, here is a link to Chahta Anumpa (Choctaw Language) classes via the Internet.
You can click here for more information about the Choctaw Nation.
Menage a Trois.
Before I die I need to make a Kano sandwich with two hot chicks as bread!
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Oh well, I guess marketing didn't approve of it...
I'm sure learning Choctaw is a worthy endeavour, but there are other languages where verb form indicates whether you trusted the speaker or not. It's called the subjunctive, and the language is German.
Since this is /. and everything should be taken seriously...
the mean you refer will only get you an aleatory *half* portion of you.
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.
Fee! Fo! Fi! Fum!
I smell the stink of a Slashdot bum!
Be he 'live, or be he thing,
I'll compress his bones, to make my bling!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Choctaw - the official language of Microsoft and George W. Bush.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It is actually the case in Turkish and all Turkic languages. There are two past tenses the one is for the things you experienced yourself and the other for the ones you heared from someone.
The number would be a lot less mysterious if they spelled it correctly: 1337
So does English, but I don't want to get into that.
In Korean, one of the past tenses roughly translates to "I saw that such-and-such happened" where "saw" can also mean "recall", "observed", "definitely concluded", or some other version of absolute proof. It is used pretty much only for testifying of fact. It really isn't that common in daily speech. Mostly they say, "such-and-such happened" without trying to claim a source or witness to it. Or they'll also come out and say literally, "I saw that such-and-such happened."
In English, we just say, "I saw that such-and-such", and by admitting to the method of observation we are admitting to its validity. I like the English way better, frankly, because in order to testify of fact, you have to admit to the method of the obtainment of that fact. (And also because it's my native language!)
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Did anyone else think this was a list made for future Darwin Awards winners?
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.
Man... What country are you living in?
Temp range here this year so far...
-60 deg. F to 105 Deg. F
and that's in Maine... go to Florida, and the high temp increases drastically
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
...get laid by someone else, as opposed to by yourself!
That's easy - disbelieve them both.
Scientists are sometimes wrong, and sometimes right.
Marketing types always lie.
Ergo, the only solution that satifies both axioms is that the statement is false, and that the scientist is wrong.
www.eFax.com are spammers
100 degrees Fahrenheit used to be the body temperature of humans. They calibrated their instruments wrong, and so it actually ended up being 98.1 or whatever it is. 0 degrees Fahrenheit was the temperature of salt water freezing. This is water that was completely saturated with salt at 1 atm of pressure (sea level). The British figured it's easier to measure the temperature of salt water than pure water because getting pure water is very hard.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Not very amusing, perhaps, but high-tech all the same. Keep them in a safety-deposit box and make sure someone trustworthy (e.g., spouse) knows how to get them and use them.
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.
play Duke Nukem Forever! :-)
Marry Britney Spears, make the most of it, and dump her before she manages to say anything.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
I've seen Galileo's midddle finger. What I want to do before I die is help the fellow have one last posthumous laugh, and orient the finger so it faces towards the Vatican. :)
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Well here it's pretty safe to say that when you get down below 0C you can expect snow as opposed to rain.
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."
Would someone please provide a link to the original source of the report, if it exists on-line? I searched briefly but the Guardian report gives no link to the New Scientist magazine article. I would like to see all the suggestions from the scientists.
Sincerely,
Kevin
Believe it or not, it is fine for up to a minute or so and then you haul yourself out and run back into the sauna as fast as possible, pausing only to grab another beer.
In Finnish, there is no equivalent, but there are two similar constructs, the "obviousness clitic" -han/-hän, and "it's obviously false" equivalent of "allegedly", muka. They're highly useful for abusing purposes in political discussions. For example:
/muka/ muovaa syntyperäisen choktawin puhujan ajattelua? ("I wonder how /the hell/ do you think this would shape the thinking of a native Choktaw speaker?") The thing is, that people will evaluate the trustability of a person, no matter what he says.
Microsofthan on laiton monopoli. "Obviously Microsoft is an illegal monopoly."
Microsoft aikoo muka korjata sen bugin. "Microsoft is going to - no way in hell - fix that bug."
If I'd shape your message into the latter form: Kuinkahan tämä
In Finnish, marketing types don't use these constructs I mentioned, because that'd make them sound arrogant. On the other hand, I suspect in Choktaw they use whatever is the default, "I think this is true", as the marketeer doesn't want to sound like "I just heard this from some guy". OTOH, IANALinguist.
Rowan: Gareth, quick trust exercise, ultimate fantasy?
Gareth Keenan: Hmm?
David Brent: We're just doing the ultimate fantasy, we're all doing it.
Gareth Keenan: Two lesbians probably, sisters. I'm just watching.
Rowan: OK. Erm. Tim? Do you have one?
Tim Canterbury: I'd never thought I'd say this, but can I hear more from Gareth please?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
However, there are two other reasonable ways to measure the height of a mountain. You can measure the radial distance from the center of the Earth to the summit. This is the one that makes Chimborazo a winner, since the equatorial bulge counts for this measurement.
You can also measure from the height of the surrounding terrain. This is obviously trickier, since the surrounding terrain is seldom entirely flat. But it happens that there is an unambiguous winner in this category, too: Mauna Kea, the tallest peak on the big island of Hawaii. All of that island is in fact a large volcano rising from the depths of the Pacific Ocean; the overall height from base to peak (including the submerged part) is over 33,000 feet.
This site provides a nice summary of the data, with references.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
It seems that LifeGem (turn your ashes into a diamond) is now Slashdotted, prehaps they could turn their server's melted remains into diamonds.
Slashdot could have quite the collection of "diamond servers"....
Human cadavers are used for two purposes: calibrating test instruments and assessing traumatic effects of measured forces.
There's, hem, a... third thing... they're used for...
You can't take the sky from me...
Erm, leave the airplane out of it. This is Slashdot, remember ?
Humidity also plays a role, the more humid it is the more energy is required to heat a given volume of air to a specific temperature. The heat index is generally as high or even higher in parts of Florida than it is in Arizona...
Bah, you people and your silly degrees. It's 275K outside here. Toasty!
Crash Test Cadaver Cleanup Technician.
Eeeewwwww.
The story gives a sampling of a few of the items on the list, but completely neglects to give a link to the actual complete list, or any mention whatsoever of how or where to see it.
Scientists' equivalent of visiting Everest is much more interesting. The Earth's rotation causes a 20-kilometre bulge at the equator, making Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador the highest mountain above sea level
I have always believed that Everest's height was measured wrt the sea level.Do these people mean that if the sea level at ecuador was adjusted to the sea level at Everest ?
Wanted : A Signature.
Apparently there was a program in Germany where, if you were convicted of a DUI and were facing some heavy jail time, you could volunteer to be a crash-test dummy and reduce your sentence. Not semi vs. volkswagen tests, but still without a seatbelt. A teacher friend of mine would show these films to his physics class.
a reference to GERMAN CRASH FILM - Impactive film using real people to portray the effectiveness of safety belt protection in actual crash situations - 12 minutes
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Yes on the distinction between tense and mood, but the active/passive distinction is called "voice," not "tongue." In the strictest sense, English only has two tenses, present and past. The "future" is not a true tense in English but an example of a conditional mood. 'Will' is a present-tense verb. The progressive system (e.g., "I am going") is also sometimes, inaccurately, called a tense, but it's more properly an aspect. The perfective (e.g., "I have gone") is also usually considered an aspect by linguists, although again, it's frequently lumped in with the basic tenses.
>...the British
A clue for you:
From the first Google hit on "Fahrenheit biography".
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)
That sure was interresting, but it ain't informative at all.
What's the 3rd tense? "I dunno: I was drunk"?
You can't take the sky from me...
I can't see why anyone'd want to do any of the things in the article, except perhaps multiple orgasm, which sounds like it might be fun. Clone a cat?? Run naked to the south pole??? Feed dung beetles??? What the fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuckity-doodah?????
Let's compose a list of 100 things for scientists to do instead of fannying around with this sort of nonsense. I'll start...
1: design a zip that doesn't snag on the surrounding material.
According to this Fahrenheit chose 96 degrees as the human body temperature. The article gives a brief explanation.
"There must - probably - be a reason why the number describes the strength of electromagnetism through calculations involving the charge of the electron, Planck's constant - the fundamental constant of nature arising in quantum mechanical problems - and the speed of light" What is the author trying to say? Thanks.
You are correct about the zero. I was taught in thermodynamics that Mr. Fahrenheit set zero to be the coldest temperature he could reach with the technology of the day, ice mixed with salt water. 100 was (no kidding) the temperature he measured from the back end of a horse.
My rights don't need management.
000. Find out where the list is
:)
001. Go swimming in cold fricken waters (where sharks with laser beams don't even go)
002. Get yourself turned into a diamond.
SO back to item 000... Where is the list
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
A friend of mine did that many years ago (just for the hell of it) and said it was a life-changing experience.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
... before one dies was given in the movie My Life Without Me. You should watch it some day.
Not only is a 1-C change noticeable, but a 0.5-C change is as well, which is why the F scale is more natural. This is why A/C units let you set by the 0.5 C increment. I'm not sure if 10 to 11 in particular is noticeable, but 27, 27.5, 28, and 28.5 are distinctly different temperatures to set your A/C at.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
In America: Supersize it
In England: Find a mate
In Denmark: Make bacon
In Scotland: Toss your caber
In Hawaii: Get into a grass skirt
In Switzerland: Ski down the pink run
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
"F puts 0 and 100 at the edges of the extreme temperature ranges experienced in my country"
In Celsius it is about -20 to 40. In any system you can get your subjective calibration. Mine is:
-20 C ultra cold
-10 C very cold
0 C freezing
5 C cold
10 C coldish
15 C cool
20 C warmish/coolish
25 C warm
30 C hot
35 C very hot
40 C ultra hot
There is no need to have it calibrated from 0 to 100. Celsius scale is definitely arbitrary but it is based on properies of water. And water is, well, important for us.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
FINALLY get a story accepted on /.
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
Pretty much everything is derived from water in SI, the meter, the gram, the liter.
IIRC 1 liter == 1 kg water.
I heard something like this once. I heard that the 0 and 100 deg. marks were set by Fahrenheit as he mesured temperature extremes around the Amsterdam area over a (several?) years. I heard this from a guy who was INSISTANT that that was the original definition of the scale, yet I have found no other mention of that basis other than from that man. Has anyone else heard this and can corroberated it with a source?
I have read over and over that it is based on the freezing of equal of a salt & water mixture. But this post (which I am inclied to beleive because it sounds more scientific with it's specification of pressure etc.) says it's just as much salt as can be saturated in water. I think this is interesting how hard it has been to find a standard explination of how the scale is setup.
On another note, it is only this year (in my thermodynamics course) that I found out that 0 deg. C is not just the freezing point of water but the TRIPLE POINT of water (the temperature at which ice, liquid water, and water vapor can exist). I wonder why I had never heard that in the past.
Also, on other unit scales, why is it that the definition of the kilogram has moved from being defined as 1000cc (1L) of water at maximum density (4 deg. C) and gone to being defined by this chunck of platinum in the NIST valut. These standards are supposed to be easy to reproduce, where as I cannot easily reproduce the weight of the platinum chunk if I don't have it to compare to.
I understand (from a first-hand account) that there's one big drawback to joining the 300 degree club: because of the cold, one might experience... ahem... "significant shrinkage".
Now it makes sense.
-FL
Turkish has two past tenses too, for exactly the same purpose.
Turkish has a similiar system of tenses.
Konustu -- he talked
Konusmus -- supposedly, he talked (or, apparently, etc)
Is it anywhere online/public?
"Build a house."
"And you?"
(still my #1 favorite movie of all time
Nathan's blog
If you're here in this life to do something, then the chances are you already either know what that thing is, or you have a strong inkling. Get the heck on with it. Courage is needed, we're on a serious clock and every contribution is vital. Climbing mountains while reciting scigeek-lore is no better than spinning in circles.
-FL
Use your excreta to enter the amazing world of the dung beetle.
This may not be obvious to those of us who are presently working on their monitor tan: do not attempt this indoors.
Thank you.
Everytime I read about delays or funding problems with the NASA Pluto probe under preperation, I keep thinking, "Hurry up guys, I want to see Pluto snapshots before I croak". If they do it soon enough, they can use Jupiter's gravity to shorten the trip to about 12 years after launch. If they wait too long, Jupiter will not be in position and it could be something like 30 years. The men in my family history tend not to live long lives, so I hope that probe is not delayed again.
And, I want to live long enough to see real AI become a reality. Based on computation power figures and extrapolation of Moores Law, it will be about 2030 when low-budget research computers reach the computing ability of the human brain. One AI author (can't find link) suggests that it takes low-budget research machines to allow enough researchers the opportunity to make/find nearly full AI use of the computer based on past AI project patterns.
Table-ized A.I.
For things which may be true.
'One time in band camp'....
-tfa- "With a little practice - carefully explained - you may also be able to achieve multiple orgasm, or, for £35,000, clone your pet cat." -/tfa-
The multiple orgasm one was the only one that appealed to me.. So long as the precticing mentioned doesn't involve said cat.
best.. volunteer medical research opportunity.. ever
(null)
Do they need an entire sorpse worth of remains? Or could you just send a leg you just lost to have it made into a 0.5 or 2/3 carat diamond.
Or maybe have the carbon turned into graphite?
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
I can see trading in diamonds made from famous people. How much do you think a diamond made from Einstein, Gallileo, Shakespeare, Da Vinci would go for? It could be interesting to have a diamond made from Cy Young put on the trophy that bears his name.
Of course there could be a certain amount of abuse - like Ted Williams' kid paying to keep his head frozen by selling off parts of his body as diamonds.
I know if I get turned into a diamond, I'll be treated like a ring on "The Lucy Show", you know get flushed down a sink, pass through a dog, get baked into a meatloaf.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
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...
In a programmer's life
Three things must be done:
Write two lines of APL
And make the buggers run.
How about joining the mile high club instead? It's alot more fun than running naked in -100F Temps, plus you get to watch a movie when when your done.
Researchers in Manchester have almost succeeded in developing Velcro-like pads to fix to the feet of volunteers who will then be able to scuttle over the town hall or the Guardian's northern headquarters like lizards, with no risk of falling.
Well, then I'll "almost" be able to complete this task.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
English, too, has a grammatical construction for hypothetical, uncertain, desired, or rhetorical actions, too: it's called the subjunctive mood -- but few people can be bothered to use it these days, and, were they to do so, it probably wouldn't be recognised anyway...
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Bulgarian has something like that too -- all tenses (not just past tense) have witness and non-witness forms. Bulgarian also has implied pronouns on verb conjugations (i.e. you can 'hear' the conjugation for every verb, so you are allowed to leave out the I, he, she, they, etc.). And yes, there is a first-person singular non-witness conjugation. I have heard some Bulgarians call this "drunk tense," generally while giggling hysterically.
:-).
As an example, you can say "Bil sum se napil", which means I got completely drunk, and is in non-witness form. Basically, you got so drunk that you don't actually remember having done it, and heard about it afterward.
One Bulgarian grammar book pointed out that this is also a handy tense for politicians. "My opponent said that I have defrauded the voters." By placing 'I have defrauded the voters' into non-witness form, you've already denied it
Acius the unfamous
Coming Soon:
A list of Things to do in Denver When You're Dead.
I would like to eat at The Restaurant at the End of the Universe before I die. I would probably have the steak, as I hear it's quite good, and then watch the destruction and rebirth of it all. Would anyone like to join me?
http://www.accelerateglobalwarming.com
Just have to do it twice then...
Google News doesn't show any article with a link to the original.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
No, it should be: Learn everybody to use England properly.
It makes the summit of Chimborazo the farthest from the center of the earth see here: http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/im g_chimbarozo.html/
log out, go kiting.
aah shit who put that slash on my link http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/im g_chimbarozo.html
log out, go kiting.
I cannot even get one thing done, let alone a cool 100, some of which certainly won't get you to grow old. But I must have mistaken the title :)
Highest above the center of the earth, yes.
Highest above sea level, no.
Live
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
Most of the time, the (at least Spanish) imperfect tense is used to indicate things that used to happen, as opposed to the preterit tense, which is used to indicate things which happened. The difference is simple:
Yo comía (imperfect) would be I used to eat
Yo comí (preterit) would be I ate
in most cases.
(assuming you mean to "watch the hilarity ensue" whilst being alive)
You must remember that only Elvis has successfully faked his own death.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
...at the same time.
Dialectician. Archology.
yeah the article is wrong, I agree with you entirely, guess I shoulda said so
log out, go kiting.
1. See attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. 2. Watch C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. 3. Look manly while crying in the rain. Bruce
The simple past tense is the "definitely true" tense.
The "unchecked" tense, which is generally referred to as the narrative tense, is very commonly used by the news media.
The simplest way to tranlate that idea conveyed by that tense is by prefixing the word "reportedly" or "apparently" to the verb in a normal English sentence.
Example
--
Factual: Merkeziye gitti.
(He went to the store.)
Narrative: Merkeziye gitmis.
(He [apparently] went to the store.)
In the first case, I either saw him enter the store, or at least subconsciously assumed he did in fact go because he left the house with a shopping list, or he always goes to the store on Saturday afternoons.
In the second case, I'm either relating something someone told me, or I saw him leave with no obvious indication that he's going to the store, but that's what I think he did.
I wonder if that means we'll decide all the mountains are twenty feet shorter after the Greenland Ice Sheet melts in the next couple of decades?
Fundamentalism is a crime against humanity