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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
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
Where's "get laid by 2 hot chicks at the same time"? Hello?
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)
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.
Here's there website
From the site:
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Nothing to see here
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.
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.
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.
"then run naked to the pole in minus 100 F"
/.er who runs naked in their direction....
Why the *FUCK* would I want to do that??
I really *shouldn't* be telling you this but....
There are rumors that, at the Pole, there are nubile virgin maidens ready to pleasure any
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
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.
> The common saying goes "Plant a tree, have a child, write a book" before you die.
I'm impotent, allergic to trees, and have lost the use of my right hand. Thanks for making me feel good.
'...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
Two bottles of "Hello Kitty" hand lotion doesn't count.
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.
(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.
Because of the high alcohol content, the gin can be brought down to below zero celsius - put it in your freezer and it'll be a liquid at -18. The salt, I imagine, is there for the same reason - it allows the solution containing the DNA to be brought down to sub-zero temperatures without freezing.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
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.
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
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.
I'm impotent, allergic to trees, and have lost the use of my right hand. Thanks for making me feel good.
See kids.. that's what happens when you spend too much time looking at things you shouldn't.
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
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."
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.
I'd rather plant a tree, which has a child, which gets turned into a book.
Learn everybody to use English proper
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.
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.
Choctaw does have two past tenses, but they are not differentiated in the way claimed. The regular past tense, written -tok (or -tuk in older orthogrophies) is used for completed events ranging back about a year. The other suffix -ttook is for events that were completed more than a year ago. Furthermore, events that happened within the past few minutes and are still relevent for the current situation are often marked as "present" (-h).
Choctaw, and a huge number of other languages in the world, also have what are called evidentials. These are suffixes that indicate how you know the statement is true. In Choctaw, there is a first-hand knowledge suffix -hlih, used when you have direct evidence of the claim (you saw it, heard it, smelled it, etc). There is also the suffix -ashah which indicates that you are guessing that it is true -- you have some indirect evidence, such as hearsay, or very circumstantial evidence.
Tense and evidentiality are definitely distinct, as you can find tense and evidentiality marked at the same time on the verb.
Checkout the papers by a Choctaw expert: Aaron Broadwell.
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.
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.
Please tell me you haven't actually attempted this? :-)
People are telling me to attempt this all the time.