I can add an anecdotal confirmation of this study. 39 does seem to be the peak age for motor response.
I can move my fingers/hand much much faster while looking at a picture of Cheryl Ladd when she was 39 than I can for... well... be fair, most anything else.
When I was born, the estimated human population of this planet was 2.5 billion, give or take a hundred million. Today, the estimated human population of this planet is 6.7 billion, give or take a hundred million.
Yes, the number of humans on this planet has more than doubled in my lifetime! And we wonder why we are affecting the global climate??
The solutions are obvious. Up to now no one, including me, has had the balls to seriously consider implementing them. Eventually somebody is going to seriously consider implementing them and probably sooner than we expect. Interesting times, indeed.
The FA states that the last "serious attempt" at a flying car was the Aerocar in 1949 but I beg to differ.
'Bout 1975 (or so) I read an interesting little article in Car and Driver about some guy who had invented the Pinto Plane. This consisted of a big wing contraption with two aircraft engines attached. One would drive one's specially-modified Pinto underneath this thing and attach the car to it with cotter pins. The Pinto's car dashboard & pedals were then swung out of the way by a big lever revealing airplane controls and pedals. One then attached some cables and some electrical hookups and, presto!, the Pinto became an airplane!
The Car and Driver article ended by saying "we just wonder about those cotter pins that are supposed to hold it all together"
About a year after reading that, I opened my daily newspaper to find a short AP article about an inventor who was performing his flight worthiness demonstration for FAA officals out in Nevada with his car-airplane hybrid. It was an AP item because the car fell out of the bottom of the "plane" part from roughly 10,000 ft.
Guess the cotter pins didn't hold. Sounds pretty serious to me.
Maybe it's just me, but there's something odd about someone smiling so happily holding so many worms... I can't really put my finger on it...
Not to worry, this is a normal human reaction; one Richard Dawkins fittingly called "The Principle Of Least Horror". Your subconscious recognizes any grinning southern madman holding a huge ball of writhing tentacles as a devotee of The Old Ones and you run screaming from the eldritch terror, even if it means running to Slashdot where the angles and corners are somehow... wrong.
Re:Taking pictures of the sun?
on
The Quietest Sun
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Good luck, and don't take any chances with your eyes!
...and while contemplating the photography of the Sun let's all take a minute and think about what happens when we bring the Sun's light to a focus. Like, say, using a magnifying glass to focus the Sun's light on an ant.
Now think about what happens to the air/glass/coatings/electronics in your eyepiece/camera CCD/eyeball. Think real hard. Think, think, think.
Please, please, please use a real solar filter over your camera's lens - a real solar filter from Orion or another supplier - over the main aperture only!! There have been cases of misbegotten souls who didn't think, think, think about magnifying glasses and ants and who used an eyepiece filter on their telescopes to view the Sun. Their eyepieces exploded. Yes, exploded. Rapidly heating the air inside a closed container like an eyepiece will cause that effect. The lucky ones didn't have glass shoot into their eyes.
Not only do you have just one set of eyes but I'll bet you'd be one pissed puppy if your solar photography experiment resulted in a burned-out CCD or exploded viewfinder in that DSLR of yours.
The USA has had INVISIBLE Isreali-piloted submarine planes since the early 1980s. The BOLSHEVIKS in Washington were only stymied in their plans for world DOMINATION by the use of PSYCHO-KINETIC RANGE FINDING.
This was all revealed in detail by Dr. Peter Beter in his series of Audio Letters in 1981 - 1982.
So when NBC or ABC/ESPN/Disney or CBS/Viacom or Sony Pictures or Time Warner comes to me and says "Look at our really great new streaming movie/TV/video service! Pay only $29.95/mo and you can watch anything anyTIME ALL THE TIME!!!", I'll say "Sorry. Can't do streaming video. It puts me in the Comcast doghouse. I just play Nethack."?
Not only is it World Day Against Software Patents but it's National Punctuation Day (US); a day to remind us all that using a semicolon is not a surgical procedure.
Also; please do NOT forget that September 24 (US); AKA 24 September (EUR); AKA Whatevermate (AUS); is International Polar Day; a day for us all to...um...ah... think about...ah... people in the...um... polar regions...
I'm apparently missing something here. Seems pretty simple to me.
You take a reeely big weight into space, put it at the end of the rope, loop the rope over the pulley and push it off. Weight falls to Earth, cargo rises to orbit. No fuss, no muss. What could be simpler?
After we take that initial step, it's on to the moon. Move a weight, a rope and pulley up to the moon, push the weight off, and presto! The weight falls to Earth, we go to the moon.
Mars? Ganymede? Titan? Alpha Centauri? No problem. Just get a bigger weight and a longer rope! Push it off and up ya go!
I mean, WTH, they're all just "up", right? What's so hard?
A big flashy mostly useless clock made out of gold that only tells accurate time once every 5 minutes and the rest of the time just makes noise? You sure this thing is English? Sounds more French to me.
Trans-formers
More than meets the eye
Trans-formers
Robots in the sky
Ok, fess up. How many others heard "Robots in disguise" as "Robots in the sky" like I did? Show of hands.
No, not you guys who made up your own playground lyrics like "Robots with KY" or "Robots pissing high", you put your hands down. I want just the misheard-as-robots-in-the-sky people. Anyone? Don't be shy, I've confessed. Anyone at all?
Just perfect. Again science, devoid of morality, irresponsibly exposes us all to unknown and possibly fatal dangers in its maniac quest to unearth that which man is not meant to know.
Our planet is 75% water so the Davrosian madmen send water bears into space to freely mutate into hideous Lovecraftian nightmares! What next? Sewer gators? Cactus spiders? Sand panthers?? Where does it end?? How long before the entire ecosystem of our planet has its entire precious essence sucked dry???
We must stop these hellish experiments before it is too late for us all!!
And plenty of them died like flies from the Plague before it got to Europe. The Europeans just kept more accessible records - there aren't a lot of parish registers for India. It's probably a good rule of thumb that "1/3 of the world died" from SE China to Iceland.
The most dramatic result of the Plague was in central Asia where the heartland steppe, once teeming with nomadic peoples, became the home of Plague after AD 1330 or so. When the Russians began to expand into the steppe in the 1400s, they found a depopulated grass sea. This being the area of the world that had periodically sent waves of invading humans spilling out into the surrounding lands for 3000 years.
No, humanity wasn't going to be wiped out, but had a nice explosion of Yellowstone or a good asteroid strike happened at that time, it might well have been a real close call.
My wallpaper is a screenshot of the entrance to that giant space cigar Doomsday Machine from Star Trek and I like to sit in front of it, squirming in my chair making faces-of-horror and sweating while singing "da-da da-da DA-DA DA-DA".
But look at who I'm telling! Of course most of you reading this do the exact same thing! Ha ha ha.
Hello. This is Barak Obama and I have an important...
Look, you freaking r-tard, if you call me ONE MORE TIME, I'm voting for McCain!! You got that, SFB?
Hello. This is Barak Obama and I have an imp...
That's IT!!! I warned you!!! Tard! Tard! AAAA! AAAA!
Hello. This is John McCain and i have an important messag.. Alright! Screw *all* you guys! I'm voting Communist! You hear me, brain boy?? I'm now a registered Communist!!! Take THAT! AAAA! AAAA!
Hello. This is Angela Davis and I have an important message...
...and then, a member of the only species on the planet capable of designing hand-wavy theories, taxonomies and generalizations said
Setting aside the hand-wavy theories and taxonomies promoted by those in the social sciences, I'd say that such generalisations, while possibly interesting, are mostly meaningless. If a fairly accurate generalisation can be made, it's that our age-old insistence that we're somehow unique or different is repeatedly proven wrong, and the underlying hubris has interfered with our ability to understand not only ourselves, but the world around us.
causing much merriment among the assembled Slezhaks.
Slashdot Mirror
Two things. One, you neglected to call us "Slashdotian the genocide apologist" and two, you failed to mention our criminal Armenian grandparents.
You're obviously a little out of practice but it's still good to hear from you again Serdar!
I can add an anecdotal confirmation of this study. 39 does seem to be the peak age for motor response.
... well ... be fair, most anything else.
I can move my fingers/hand much much faster while looking at a picture of Cheryl Ladd when she was 39 than I can for
Just remember to fall forward and spring back. How hard is this?
When I was born, the estimated human population of this planet was 2.5 billion, give or take a hundred million. Today, the estimated human population of this planet is 6.7 billion, give or take a hundred million.
Yes, the number of humans on this planet has more than doubled in my lifetime! And we wonder why we are affecting the global climate??
The solutions are obvious. Up to now no one, including me, has had the balls to seriously consider implementing them. Eventually somebody is going to seriously consider implementing them and probably sooner than we expect. Interesting times, indeed.
The FA states that the last "serious attempt" at a flying car was the Aerocar in 1949 but I beg to differ.
'Bout 1975 (or so) I read an interesting little article in Car and Driver about some guy who had invented the Pinto Plane. This consisted of a big wing contraption with two aircraft engines attached. One would drive one's specially-modified Pinto underneath this thing and attach the car to it with cotter pins. The Pinto's car dashboard & pedals were then swung out of the way by a big lever revealing airplane controls and pedals. One then attached some cables and some electrical hookups and, presto!, the Pinto became an airplane!
The Car and Driver article ended by saying "we just wonder about those cotter pins that are supposed to hold it all together"
About a year after reading that, I opened my daily newspaper to find a short AP article about an inventor who was performing his flight worthiness demonstration for FAA officals out in Nevada with his car-airplane hybrid. It was an AP item because the car fell out of the bottom of the "plane" part from roughly 10,000 ft.
Guess the cotter pins didn't hold. Sounds pretty serious to me.
I want a robotic plant that's bright red, 600 feet high and smells terrible.
If it can dance, that's a bonus.
Maybe it's just me, but there's something odd about someone smiling so happily holding so many worms... I can't really put my finger on it...
... wrong.
Not to worry, this is a normal human reaction; one Richard Dawkins fittingly called "The Principle Of Least Horror". Your subconscious recognizes any grinning southern madman holding a huge ball of writhing tentacles as a devotee of The Old Ones and you run screaming from the eldritch terror, even if it means running to Slashdot where the angles and corners are somehow
Good luck, and don't take any chances with your eyes!
Now think about what happens to the air/glass/coatings/electronics in your eyepiece/camera CCD/eyeball. Think real hard. Think, think, think.
Please, please, please use a real solar filter over your camera's lens - a real solar filter from Orion or another supplier - over the main aperture only!! There have been cases of misbegotten souls who didn't think, think, think about magnifying glasses and ants and who used an eyepiece filter on their telescopes to view the Sun. Their eyepieces exploded. Yes, exploded. Rapidly heating the air inside a closed container like an eyepiece will cause that effect. The lucky ones didn't have glass shoot into their eyes.
Not only do you have just one set of eyes but I'll bet you'd be one pissed puppy if your solar photography experiment resulted in a burned-out CCD or exploded viewfinder in that DSLR of yours.
The choice is always between Verdun and Dachau. Always has been.
The USA has had INVISIBLE Isreali-piloted submarine planes since the early 1980s. The BOLSHEVIKS in Washington were only stymied in their plans for world DOMINATION by the use of PSYCHO-KINETIC RANGE FINDING.
This was all revealed in detail by Dr. Peter Beter in his series of Audio Letters in 1981 - 1982.
Oh yeah? Think I'm just trying to be funny, do ya? HA! Take this:
http://www.peterdavidbeter.com/
And THIS:
http://members.aol.com/rem547/
AKA Windows DVIAMEWBSOSTLDF
(Damn! Vista Is A Major Embarrassment We'd Better Slam Out Something That Looks Different FAST!)
So when NBC or ABC/ESPN/Disney or CBS/Viacom or Sony Pictures or Time Warner comes to me and says "Look at our really great new streaming movie/TV/video service! Pay only $29.95/mo and you can watch anything anyTIME ALL THE TIME!!!", I'll say "Sorry. Can't do streaming video. It puts me in the Comcast doghouse. I just play Nethack."?
Ok
Not only is it World Day Against Software Patents but it's National Punctuation Day (US); a day to remind us all that using a semicolon is not a surgical procedure.
Also; please do NOT forget that September 24 (US); AKA 24 September (EUR); AKA Whatevermate (AUS); is International Polar Day; a day for us all to ...um...ah... think about ...ah... people in the ...um... polar regions ...
I most highly recommend The Lollipop Guild. Dave Berry really dropped the ball on that one.
I'm apparently missing something here. Seems pretty simple to me.
You take a reeely big weight into space, put it at the end of the rope, loop the rope over the pulley and push it off. Weight falls to Earth, cargo rises to orbit. No fuss, no muss. What could be simpler?
After we take that initial step, it's on to the moon. Move a weight, a rope and pulley up to the moon, push the weight off, and presto! The weight falls to Earth, we go to the moon.
Mars? Ganymede? Titan? Alpha Centauri? No problem. Just get a bigger weight and a longer rope! Push it off and up ya go!
I mean, WTH, they're all just "up", right? What's so hard?
A big flashy mostly useless clock made out of gold that only tells accurate time once every 5 minutes and the rest of the time just makes noise? You sure this thing is English? Sounds more French to me.
Trans-formers
More than meets the eye
Trans-formers
Robots in the sky
Ok, fess up. How many others heard "Robots in disguise" as "Robots in the sky" like I did? Show of hands.
No, not you guys who made up your own playground lyrics like "Robots with KY" or "Robots pissing high", you put your hands down. I want just the misheard-as-robots-in-the-sky people. Anyone? Don't be shy, I've confessed. Anyone at all?
Gawd I'm such a geek.
Government Accountability Office? Really?
(SMACK)
tards
!tards, Relax .continuum spacetime the in disturbance horrible no been there's and up fired successfully been has LHC The
Just perfect. Again science, devoid of morality, irresponsibly exposes us all to unknown and possibly fatal dangers in its maniac quest to unearth that which man is not meant to know.
Our planet is 75% water so the Davrosian madmen send water bears into space to freely mutate into hideous Lovecraftian nightmares! What next? Sewer gators? Cactus spiders? Sand panthers?? Where does it end?? How long before the entire ecosystem of our planet has its entire precious essence sucked dry???
We must stop these hellish experiments before it is too late for us all!!
There are plenty of humans outside of Europe.
And plenty of them died like flies from the Plague before it got to Europe. The Europeans just kept more accessible records - there aren't a lot of parish registers for India. It's probably a good rule of thumb that "1/3 of the world died" from SE China to Iceland.
The most dramatic result of the Plague was in central Asia where the heartland steppe, once teeming with nomadic peoples, became the home of Plague after AD 1330 or so. When the Russians began to expand into the steppe in the 1400s, they found a depopulated grass sea. This being the area of the world that had periodically sent waves of invading humans spilling out into the surrounding lands for 3000 years.
No, humanity wasn't going to be wiped out, but had a nice explosion of Yellowstone or a good asteroid strike happened at that time, it might well have been a real close call.
My wallpaper is a screenshot of the entrance to that giant space cigar Doomsday Machine from Star Trek and I like to sit in front of it, squirming in my chair making faces-of-horror and sweating while singing "da-da da-da DA-DA DA-DA".
But look at who I'm telling! Of course most of you reading this do the exact same thing! Ha ha ha.
What?
Hello. This is Barak Obama and I have an important ...
Look, you freaking r-tard, if you call me ONE MORE TIME, I'm voting for McCain!! You got that, SFB?
Hello. This is Barak Obama and I have an imp...
That's IT!!! I warned you!!! Tard! Tard! AAAA! AAAA!
Hello. This is John McCain and i have an important messag..
Alright! Screw *all* you guys! I'm voting Communist! You hear me, brain boy?? I'm now a registered Communist!!! Take THAT! AAAA! AAAA!
Hello. This is Angela Davis and I have an important message ...
...and then, a member of the only species on the planet capable of designing hand-wavy theories, taxonomies and generalizations said
Setting aside the hand-wavy theories and taxonomies promoted by those in the social sciences, I'd say that such generalisations, while possibly interesting, are mostly meaningless. If a fairly accurate generalisation can be made, it's that our age-old insistence that we're somehow unique or different is repeatedly proven wrong, and the underlying hubris has interfered with our ability to understand not only ourselves, but the world around us.
causing much merriment among the assembled Slezhaks.
Thank you. That made my day. If I had mod points I would drop them on you like pipe bombs.