I must say that since I started flossing regularly, I have not had any more big fillings done on my teeth. If you get cavities between your teeth the dentist can't drill a small hole into it from the side and is obliged to make a big filling from the tooth's top surface. I normally only floss every second day, or when I have eaten sugary foods. I think a lot of it could be genetic - people with widely-spaced teeth probably won't get much tooth decay between their teeth.
Given my experiences, I assume that it's a lot more common than people think. I have never seen anybody who looks exactly like me, but years ago when I was at university, I thought I saw my sister walking past me wearing brightly-coloured clothing that she would never wear. I realised that it was not her, and other people thought my sister had gone to another school that she had never attended. I have discovered that the family of a girl that I went to school with seems to have an amazing amount of coincidences relating to birth and death dates that correlate either closely or symbolically with our family's. Her daughter, a first-born like me, has a birth date very similar to mine and her first and middle names are exactly the same length as mine. Even more strangely, her husband has a birth date very similar to my father's and her parents died on similar dates to my grandparents in New Zealand. In a world of over 7 billion people I guess that there are lots of Doppelgangers, it's just that they are very spread out and it's rare to encounter them.
I wonder whether it could be due to the decline in serious diseases such as measles. Both my sister and I had the measles before we were five years-old. She blames the partial deafness in one of her ears as being due to the measles. Measles can cause brain damage, maybe a lot of us in the past were unknowingly losing some of our IQ due to it and other similar diseases.
I've had a Philips LED light bulb in my bedroom for nearly 3 years now, I use it for many hours at night and it's on at the moment as I write. We have had an all-LED house now for nearly a year after we moved back in after earthquake damage repairs. The only LED light bulb that has been replaced is the very first one that I bought about 4 years ago as an experiment, and that was only because we broke off both the side pins used in the bayonet fitting from swapping it around. We only used well-known brands like Philips, GE, and Panasonic.
In New Zealand we do nothing of the sort. My sister recently bought a new pre-paid cellphone because the battery in her old feature phone was needing to be recharged nearly every day. She was a bit pissed-off with the Vodafone shop because they asked for her name and the cellphone's phone number "for the warranty" in front of customers who were queued up behind her. It came with its own SIM card, but she did not have to show any ID at all. If it was not for the fact that it was a Vodafone shop, no-one would have bothered to ask for her details - nobody asked me for ID or details when I recently bought a new cellphone with a SIM card at Warehouse Stationery. I didn't realise how lucky we are to be able to buy prepaid cellphones with no rigmarole apart from keeping the receipt.
One thing that I would like to see is a counter showing how many people have clicked on a particular post of mine. I often take the time to compose a good reply to a post, I post it, and nothing seems to happen. Sometimes, I go back to a particular post after a few days and find a few replies and/or mods. Would be nice to get some feedback on whether people actually bothered to click on my posts to read them, even if they did not reply or modded them.
Something like this has already been done in New Zealand. I don't see what the big problem is. As previously suggested, just have a low-resolution scan of the original text displayed next to a plain-text version.
Here's an example of the original text when I searched for a street address near to me:
We had a similar problem with one of the lights in our dining room. Incandescent bulbs in one fitting would all blow after a few days, one bulb after a few hours! Got an electrician to look at it, he cleaned between the contacts of the bayonet fitting. Still had bulbs blowing, but seemed to be a bit better, resorted to only having two out of three bulbs on our chandelier. Had the whole house rewired after it had been repaired after a big earthquake hit our city. Tried putting in all the bulbs again - no bulbs blew prematurely. Put in LED bulbs about 6 months ago and so far, so good.
My guess is that the old wiring in the ceiling was leaking power into the fitting that itself had a minor power leakage. Once the wiring in the ceiling was replaced and the chandelier was properly earthed, the problem went away.
One of the most famous of the late Monsignor Ronald Knox's witticisms was a verse built on the Berkleyan idea that things exist only when they have an observer:
There once was a man who said: "God Must think it exceedingly odd If he finds that this tree Continues to be When there's no one about in the Quad."
This promptly drew the anonymous reply:
"Dear Sir, Your astonishment's quite odd; I am always about in the Quad; And that's why the tree Will continue to be Since observed by Yours Faithfully, God."
Millikan's experiment as an example of psychological effects in scientific methodology
In a commencement address given at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1974 (and reprinted in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! in 1985 as well as in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out in 1999), physicist Richard Feynman noted:
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that...
As of 2014, the accepted value for the elementary charge is 1.602176565(35)×1019 C, where the (35) indicates the uncertainty of the last two decimal places. In his Nobel lecture, Millikan gave his measurement as 4.774(5)×1010 statC, which equals 1.5924(17)×1019 C. The difference is less than one percent, but it is more than five times greater than Millikan's standard error, so the disagreement is significant.
Ah yippie yi yu Ah yippie yi yeah Ah yippie yi yu ah
I was asked by one of my young cousins to translate this music video https://www.youtube.com/watch?... into Italian when I was over there nearly 20 years ago. I had to explain that some of it was just meaningless sounds. Can imagine that it would make an interesting question in a linguistics exam to write it down phonetically. I am curious to know if it is a known feature in singing, or if it was just invented.
Further to my post, a message balloon popped up about an hour ago saying that the update was available. I tried the same thing with the same result as before. Then, I thought that maybe it was something to do with me running as a Limited User, so I right-clicked the Firefox icon and chose the "Run as administrator" option. I logged in, Firefox promptly started up and I successfully updated from there.
I haven't seen any mention of Rocket Lab co-founder, Mark Stevens (who legally changed his name to Mark Rocket), is he still involved? Many years ago he was a neighbour of ours in Christchurch.
Slashdot Mirror
"Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active." - Leonardo da Vinci
I must say that since I started flossing regularly, I have not had any more big fillings done on my teeth. If you get cavities between your teeth the dentist can't drill a small hole into it from the side and is obliged to make a big filling from the tooth's top surface. I normally only floss every second day, or when I have eaten sugary foods. I think a lot of it could be genetic - people with widely-spaced teeth probably won't get much tooth decay between their teeth.
Given my experiences, I assume that it's a lot more common than people think. I have never seen anybody who looks exactly like me, but years ago when I was at university, I thought I saw my sister walking past me wearing brightly-coloured clothing that she would never wear. I realised that it was not her, and other people thought my sister had gone to another school that she had never attended. I have discovered that the family of a girl that I went to school with seems to have an amazing amount of coincidences relating to birth and death dates that correlate either closely or symbolically with our family's. Her daughter, a first-born like me, has a birth date very similar to mine and her first and middle names are exactly the same length as mine. Even more strangely, her husband has a birth date very similar to my father's and her parents died on similar dates to my grandparents in New Zealand. In a world of over 7 billion people I guess that there are lots of Doppelgangers, it's just that they are very spread out and it's rare to encounter them.
There was an episode of the "Tales of the Unexpected" TV series in 1981 that had a similar premise https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Tales Of The Unexpected: Hijack (Series 4 Episode 17)
I wonder whether it could be due to the decline in serious diseases such as measles. Both my sister and I had the measles before we were five years-old. She blames the partial deafness in one of her ears as being due to the measles. Measles can cause brain damage, maybe a lot of us in the past were unknowingly losing some of our IQ due to it and other similar diseases.
I've had a Philips LED light bulb in my bedroom for nearly 3 years now, I use it for many hours at night and it's on at the moment as I write. We have had an all-LED house now for nearly a year after we moved back in after earthquake damage repairs. The only LED light bulb that has been replaced is the very first one that I bought about 4 years ago as an experiment, and that was only because we broke off both the side pins used in the bayonet fitting from swapping it around. We only used well-known brands like Philips, GE, and Panasonic.
OK, but what about words like plutonium and uranium then?
In New Zealand we do nothing of the sort. My sister recently bought a new pre-paid cellphone because the battery in her old feature phone was needing to be recharged nearly every day. She was a bit pissed-off with the Vodafone shop because they asked for her name and the cellphone's phone number "for the warranty" in front of customers who were queued up behind her. It came with its own SIM card, but she did not have to show any ID at all. If it was not for the fact that it was a Vodafone shop, no-one would have bothered to ask for her details - nobody asked me for ID or details when I recently bought a new cellphone with a SIM card at Warehouse Stationery. I didn't realise how lucky we are to be able to buy prepaid cellphones with no rigmarole apart from keeping the receipt.
One thing that I would like to see is a counter showing how many people have clicked on a particular post of mine. I often take the time to compose a good reply to a post, I post it, and nothing seems to happen. Sometimes, I go back to a particular post after a few days and find a few replies and/or mods. Would be nice to get some feedback on whether people actually bothered to click on my posts to read them, even if they did not reply or modded them.
Something like this has already been done in New Zealand. I don't see what the big problem is. As previously suggested, just have a low-resolution scan of the original text displayed next to a plain-text version.
Here's an example of the original text when I searched for a street address near to me:
http://paperspast.natlib.govt....
And here's the plain-text version, complete with OCR errors:
http://paperspast.natlib.govt....
As a bonus, they both have the searched-for text highlighted as well.
We had a similar problem with one of the lights in our dining room. Incandescent bulbs in one fitting would all blow after a few days, one bulb after a few hours! Got an electrician to look at it, he cleaned between the contacts of the bayonet fitting. Still had bulbs blowing, but seemed to be a bit better, resorted to only having two out of three bulbs on our chandelier. Had the whole house rewired after it had been repaired after a big earthquake hit our city. Tried putting in all the bulbs again - no bulbs blew prematurely. Put in LED bulbs about 6 months ago and so far, so good.
My guess is that the old wiring in the ceiling was leaking power into the fitting that itself had a minor power leakage. Once the wiring in the ceiling was replaced and the chandelier was properly earthed, the problem went away.
Reminds me of this Youtube video with the same title https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In 1987, the PXL-2000, a toy black-and-white camcorder was produced that used standard audio cassettes. I remember being amazed when I saw advertisements on TV for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
“A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there. A theologian is the man who finds it.” ~ H. L. Mencken
"Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active." - Leonardo da Vinci
One of the most famous of the late Monsignor Ronald Knox's witticisms was a verse built on the Berkleyan idea that things exist only when they have an observer:
There once was a man who said: "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."
This promptly drew the anonymous reply:
"Dear Sir, Your astonishment's quite odd;
I am always about in the Quad;
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by Yours Faithfully, God."
Paraphrasing part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Millikan's experiment as an example of psychological effects in scientific methodology
In a commencement address given at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1974 (and reprinted in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! in 1985 as well as in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out in 1999), physicist Richard Feynman noted:
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that...
As of 2014, the accepted value for the elementary charge is 1.602176565(35)×1019 C, where the (35) indicates the uncertainty of the last two decimal places. In his Nobel lecture, Millikan gave his measurement as 4.774(5)×1010 statC, which equals 1.5924(17)×1019 C. The difference is less than one percent, but it is more than five times greater than Millikan's standard error, so the disagreement is significant.
Ah yippie yi yu
Ah yippie yi yeah
Ah yippie yi yu ah
I was asked by one of my young cousins to translate this music video https://www.youtube.com/watch?... into Italian when I was over there nearly 20 years ago. I had to explain that some of it was just meaningless sounds. Can imagine that it would make an interesting question in a linguistics exam to write it down phonetically. I am curious to know if it is a known feature in singing, or if it was just invented.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Further to my post, a message balloon popped up about an hour ago saying that the update was available. I tried the same thing with the same result as before. Then, I thought that maybe it was something to do with me running as a Limited User, so I right-clicked the Firefox icon and chose the "Run as administrator" option. I logged in, Firefox promptly started up and I successfully updated from there.
Just did the same, with the same result.
“A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there. A theologian is the man who finds it.” - H. L. Mencken
A bit of Googling reveals that he left in 2011: http://www.stuff.co.nz/nationa...
Oh, and it's Rocket Lab, not Rocket Labs.
I haven't seen any mention of Rocket Lab co-founder, Mark Stevens (who legally changed his name to Mark Rocket), is he still involved? Many years ago he was a neighbour of ours in Christchurch.
That was John Key, the Prime Minister of New Zealand. Australia is over 3 hours away by commercial jet plane.