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User: Mindcontrolled

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Comments · 2,781

  1. Re:LOL...let's re-do the headline on Why Are Indian Kids So Good At Spelling? · · Score: 3, Funny

    I absolutely, positively LOVE the smell of burning strawmen in the morning. Smells like... trolling!

  2. Re:This will never fly on EU To Monitor All Internet Searches · · Score: 1

    The weird thing is that actually the EU did not force this specific treaty violation down the member's throats - the members offered it themselves, willingly. In particular, our dear German band of polit-clowns. With the even more weird result that Greece does not profit in the first place, but rather the French banks, which hold a shitload of Greek debt. Ah, well... we are fucked anyway.

  3. Re:The truth about caffeine on Caffeine Addicts Get No Additional Perk, Only a Return To Baseline · · Score: 4, Funny

    Given that I live in Germany, this might not be the problem.

  4. Re:The truth about caffeine on Caffeine Addicts Get No Additional Perk, Only a Return To Baseline · · Score: 1

    Dehydration is definitely consistent with the symptoms described. That does not make it "withdrawal", though. That is a basic physiological effect that has nothing whatsover to do with "addiction".

  5. Re:The truth about caffeine on Caffeine Addicts Get No Additional Perk, Only a Return To Baseline · · Score: -1, Troll

    Yep. I hate your freedoms!!!! Pro Tip - find a better way to define yourself.

  6. Re:The truth about caffeine on Caffeine Addicts Get No Additional Perk, Only a Return To Baseline · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That might very well be. I just find it weird personally, as I go between phases where I feel like coffee and drink it like water, and phases where I don't drink any at all. I never felt any negative effects after stopping the coffee, even for weeks. Neither have my friends. Perhaps our alcohol addiction masks the effects, though ;) I do not doubt your experience, and I do not want to troll here - I am surrounded by some heavy coffee drinkers and I am on and off myself, but I just did not see that effect nor did I hear of it, as I said, before I got into contact with Americans. I gotta do some reading on the topic when I next hit the library - perhaps there is some serious biochemistry to be found to clear this up.

  7. Re:The truth about caffeine on Caffeine Addicts Get No Additional Perk, Only a Return To Baseline · · Score: 1

    Actually, I live outside the US - I heard about the whole topic of caffeine "addiction" and "withdrawal" first when I spent a year in California. I am not trying to do some US bashing here - I seriously never heard anyone talking about the notion of "caffeine withdrawal" before getting there, and nowadays, I only hear about it on American forums. It is simply weird, and it interests me why this is so.

  8. Re:You can have my coffee... on Caffeine Addicts Get No Additional Perk, Only a Return To Baseline · · Score: 5, Funny

    Cold, dead and still shaking hands, you mean? ;)

  9. Re:The truth about caffeine on Caffeine Addicts Get No Additional Perk, Only a Return To Baseline · · Score: 2, Interesting

    For some weird reason, I have never met someone outside of the US that even had the slightest conception of "caffeine withdrawal". All the usually described effects - headaches, sleepiness - on caffeine withdrawal, just don't seem to happen for people outside of the US. Now that would be a topic for some serious psych dissertation...

  10. Re:The romans build concrete buildings on Sticky Rice Is the Key To Super Strong Mortar · · Score: 1

    Yes, of course there is rebar - the point I was trying to make is that concrete as such is not the common factor, it is how you treat the concrete, it is what you add to it. On the current topic - the rice might actually be an interesting factor. I was just trying to load off some snark on the "ohh, it is the concrete, stupid scientists"-crap posted above.

  11. Re:The romans build concrete buildings on Sticky Rice Is the Key To Super Strong Mortar · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Tell that to the idiots who build the building I am working in in the 70s - concrete, and nothing but concrete. It is crumbling now. Yay for engineering efforts...

  12. Re:As a brewer on The Race To Beer With 50% Alcohol By Volume · · Score: 1

    I am Bavarian, consider myself a lover of fine beers AND have been born basically at the birthplace of the Eisbock - you understand why I have to defend my position here ;)

  13. Lego Lab on The Genius of the Lego Printer · · Score: 2, Funny

    During my PhD work, we built some lab gear, for example an overhead shaker, from Lego Mindstorm gear. Pure nerd fun. Had to hide the stuff when the prof showed the lab to guests, though...

  14. Re:As a brewer on The Race To Beer With 50% Alcohol By Volume · · Score: 1
    Guess we are basically on the same side here - I have no interest in 40% beers either. For me, however, ice bock is completely legitimate and can be used to create some great beers - one of my favourites is the wheat ice bock Aventinus by Schneider, Munich. I guess my "it is still beer" comment was more aimed at the crowd above, somehow you got into the crosshairs there. ;)

    Regarding the Reinheitsgebot - your point about the wheat supply is certainly true. There is, in my opinion, more to that, though. First of all, it was originally a means of price regulation, too. And it might be viewed as an early "drug" law, as the use of psychoactive and more or less toxic components was common back then.

  15. Re:As a brewer on The Race To Beer With 50% Alcohol By Volume · · Score: 1

    As a brewer you are surely aware of ice bock? It's always a question how far you want to take the method. Ice bock is definitely to be classified as beer, albeit having undergone one freezing step. If it is beer under the Bavarian "Reinheitsgebot" - it IS beer!

  16. Re:But what about taste? on The Race To Beer With 50% Alcohol By Volume · · Score: 1

    Brewdog know their stuff - I haven't tried their strong ones, but judging from the Punk IPA and the Paradox, you can't go wrong with them. Damn shame I have to import the stuff from Scotland for horrible shipping costs.

  17. Re:I Hate to Be the One to Point This Out on 'Peak Wood' Offers Parallels For Our Time · · Score: 1
    Mostly by manufacturing in high-tech segments, where local know-how is more important than manufacturing costs. Germany lost just about all of its low-tech industries in the last two decades - the region where I was born used to be big in porcelain and textile industries, now it is a post-industrial wasteland. It's the high-end engineering, especially in the field of production tools, robotics and the like that are driving the German exports. And, naturally, cars.

    I completely agree that our tough ecological standards didn't hurt the local economy significantly. In many fields, they actually led to a streamlining and optimization of production, which, after the initial investment, actually lowered production cost. Additionally, it gave growth to a whole new field of "green technology", which is a sizable part of the economy by now, and which is getting heavily exported.

  18. Re:"Faith Science Basis?" on Australian Schools To Teach Intelligent Design · · Score: 1

    Well, I for one am an atheist, just mentioning Teilhard, because he is quite far out in that spectrum. However, the most interesting thing about Teilhards philosophy is that it is totally congruent with the transhumanist/singularity crowd, who are not even aware that they basically hold the same beliefs that a Jesuit wrote down in the 30s. Teilhard's "Omega Point" is the Singularity - with a deeper humanistic undercurrent and a deeper philosophic fundament. I am holding neither of these beliefs, I am just amused...

  19. Re:This... on Snails On Methamphetamine · · Score: 2, Funny

    Oh man, how did you have my lab bugged during my PhD work? Seriously, dude, I though that stuff was long buried and forgotten...

  20. Re:I.D. is not a theory, it is dogma on Australian Schools To Teach Intelligent Design · · Score: 1

    That's not even the point. ID does not state that it is possible to create designed life, like Venter is trying to do. It states that all life is a result of design. Building a bacterium in the lab, on the other hand, is not the slightest bit in conflict with evolution. The theory of evolution nowhere states that it is *impossible* to design life - just that it is not a necessary mechanism to explain biodiversity.

  21. Re:"Faith Science Basis?" on Australian Schools To Teach Intelligent Design · · Score: 1

    Actually, you don't have the full spectrum there yet. Maybe you even need another axis to accommodate people like Pierre Theilhard de Chardin, who is neither a creationist nor a fundamentalist of any kind. He is basically a catholic, though many of his works are shunned by official doctrine. For de Chardin, creation is not an act but a still ongoing process, evolution being part of it. What clashes hardest with catholic doctrine is his thinking that man is not remotely the "crown of creation", but a passing stage to something better, and that man has to work himself to further that development. Definitely a Theistic Evolutionist, but a quite unique and interesting flavour.

  22. Re:Roomba accessory on iRobot Demonstrates New Weaponized Robot · · Score: 1

    This would probably be the only robot on the market being able to clean my room... Come to think of it, it might just be time to burn the place down and rebuild...

  23. Re:I'm almost afraid to ask... on BP Says "Top Kill" Operation Has Failed · · Score: 1

    From what I have heard, Macondo is pretty consistently estimated at 50 mbl producible, perhaps up to 100 mbl in total, which would not be recoverable and definitely not leaking out by itself without exhaustive enhancement measures. So at 10-20 kbl/d, this can go on for a while before we are down to Arizona leak amounts.

  24. Re:wow on BP Says "Top Kill" Operation Has Failed · · Score: 1

    To elaborate a bit - water based muds like used there usually contain clay minerals, mostly bentonite, to adjust their rheological properties, and barite, which has a high density, to reach the desired mud weight. Apart from that, there's basically nothing which has not been included in various drilling muds.

  25. Re:long history of cutting corners on BP Says "Top Kill" Operation Has Failed · · Score: 2, Informative

    If people would have a look at the geology in the Gulf, they perhaps would finally shut up about the nuke nonsense. You can't just drop a nuke on top of it and hope it closes the wellbore. The seafloor in the Gulf is a huge layer of sediment, hundreds, if not thousands of feet strong. If you nuke that, you just blow away the silt and sand - now you have an underground blowout spilling the oil into the sediment layer, from where it will find its way up. So, if you want to collapse the bore, you gotta drill down to solid rock and explode your nuke there. At that point, you can as well drill a relief well. Besides, do we have a nuke that works under the pressure of 6000+ feet of water? This is a completely different situation than it was back when the Russians used nukes.