Still quite a few of those in Paris, and they're still more or less standard in some countries. American servicemen usually refer to that design as the Turkish Bombsight.
There was a professor at Georgia Tech when I was there (1958-62) who had no use for either one. He had been a highly-regarded EE prof in the Thirties, then cracked up under the stress of pumping out engineers in World War II and spent some time in a mental hospital.
In the course of his confinement he was frightened by a bat, and decided that his condition was caused by a deadly brain-rotting radiation emitted by bats.
He was never able to teach EE again, but the school took him back in the Industrial Management department. He always wore a derby hat lined with foil -- but no crummy tin or aluminum for him. He insisted on using lead foil, the only quality material for such a purpose. But it didn't stop there: the bat rays tended to build up potentially lethal static charges on the foil, so it had to be grounded. His hat was connected by an alligator clip to wires sewn into his clothing and ultimately to a nail in his shoe.
He was known, naturally, as Batman and we treated him with the kind of casual cruelty you'd expect of undergraduates...we all thought he was unique and it wasn't until the Internet came along that I learned how common the foil-hat thing is. Apparently it's a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia -- a particularly sad condition in which the victim knows perfectly well he's screwed up and is powerless to do anything about it.
That's a different issue, and I'm not comfortable with punitive damages going to the plaintiff either...except that if the state had a financial interest in the outcome, it would find endless ways to bias judges.
The purpose of punitive damages is, well, to punish. The difference between $100,000 and, say, $1000 is the difference between punishment and an operating expense.
Remember that the taxpayers in that school district are getting the bill. The school board is going to get holy hell from them, and it's a safe bet there won't be any more of that crap.
Oh, and the educational benefit to the students? Priceless.
...under the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia. It's open to tourists now.
In the plains east of Denver there are a number of abandoned Titan missile silos. They were built under land leased from farmers and ranchers, and when the missiles and classified equipment were removed the government returned the structures to the landowners. For many years, teenagers snuck into them at night to toke up and hook up, and the owners had little success trying to block the entrances.
Occasionally a developer would announce a plan to turn them into energy-saving underground homes, but none of those schemes got very far...by now, I understand most of the owners have sprung for a load of Ready-Mix to close the entrances for good.
I imagine it certainly could be possible to actually, permanently BLIND the people on the boats,
Yul Brynner did that trick in Solomon and Sheba (1959), having his troops polish their shields before an expected sunrise attack. The enemy weren't blinded, just dazzled, but he had positioned his men behind a convenient chasm...
Hey, we've already done a large-scale social experiment where we recruited healthy young men, gave them a job, and told them to go a lifetime without sex when other people around them were having it, and it turned out OK, didn't it?
OK, gimme $500,000 and I'll make you a personal starship. If I don't deliver it by 12/31/08, you can have your $500,000 back. Excuse me...my broker's on the other line.
A coworker of mine claims he once held the Southern California record for Slurpee sales back when he was a 7-11 manager. His store was close to a business park and he kept a bottle of Wild Turkey under the counter...
Puts me in mind of my late mother-in-law's stories of nursing in China in the 1920s and 30s. She was working for the Rockefeller Foundation which was spending loads of money, but it was a drop in the bucket for a third-world population that size. One day she was working frantically to fight an epidemic, rationing her scarce supply of medication out to the patients with the best shot at survival and letting the hopeless cases die, when what should arrive but a big, shiny new truck.
Slashdot Mirror
And he does this by going to 70,000 feet in the aeronautical equivalent of a bullock cart?
rj
Still quite a few of those in Paris, and they're still more or less standard in some countries. American servicemen usually refer to that design as the Turkish Bombsight.
rj
In the course of his confinement he was frightened by a bat, and decided that his condition was caused by a deadly brain-rotting radiation emitted by bats.
He was never able to teach EE again, but the school took him back in the Industrial Management department. He always wore a derby hat lined with foil -- but no crummy tin or aluminum for him. He insisted on using lead foil, the only quality material for such a purpose. But it didn't stop there: the bat rays tended to build up potentially lethal static charges on the foil, so it had to be grounded. His hat was connected by an alligator clip to wires sewn into his clothing and ultimately to a nail in his shoe.
He was known, naturally, as Batman and we treated him with the kind of casual cruelty you'd expect of undergraduates...we all thought he was unique and it wasn't until the Internet came along that I learned how common the foil-hat thing is. Apparently it's a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia -- a particularly sad condition in which the victim knows perfectly well he's screwed up and is powerless to do anything about it.
rj
That's a different issue, and I'm not comfortable with punitive damages going to the plaintiff either...except that if the state had a financial interest in the outcome, it would find endless ways to bias judges.
rj
Remember that the taxpayers in that school district are getting the bill. The school board is going to get holy hell from them, and it's a safe bet there won't be any more of that crap.
Oh, and the educational benefit to the students? Priceless.
rj
Could be more like fining somebody for driving drunk and not hitting anybody.
rj
In the plains east of Denver there are a number of abandoned Titan missile silos. They were built under land leased from farmers and ranchers, and when the missiles and classified equipment were removed the government returned the structures to the landowners. For many years, teenagers snuck into them at night to toke up and hook up, and the owners had little success trying to block the entrances.
Occasionally a developer would announce a plan to turn them into energy-saving underground homes, but none of those schemes got very far...by now, I understand most of the owners have sprung for a load of Ready-Mix to close the entrances for good.
rj
Yul Brynner did that trick in Solomon and Sheba (1959), having his troops polish their shields before an expected sunrise attack. The enemy weren't blinded, just dazzled, but he had positioned his men behind a convenient chasm...
rj
Hey, we've already done a large-scale social experiment where we recruited healthy young men, gave them a job, and told them to go a lifetime without sex when other people around them were having it, and it turned out OK, didn't it?
Oh, wait...
Here's a hard way/easy way problem:
A machinist makes a solid metal sphere. Then he drills a hole in it, dead center, all the way through.
The hole is six inches long. How much metal remains in the ball?
rj
Yeah, and Ludovico Sforza had enough money to pay Leonardo to draw pictures for him, and nobody cared. So what? We still get to look at the pictures.
rj
Hut-Sut Rawlson on the rillerah and a brawla, brawla sooit...
Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey...
I'm a cranky old Yank in a clanky old tank...
Ah yes, those were the creative days.
rj
Ever fire an employee or have an ugly divorce?
rj
Either that, or I was saying the gubmint won't pay the bill for doing space exploration the right way. Your call.
rj
Think how many bombs you could deliver with $3.5 mil worth of Ryder Trucks.
rj
OK, gimme $500,000 and I'll make you a personal starship. If I don't deliver it by 12/31/08, you can have your $500,000 back. Excuse me...my broker's on the other line.
rj
That might be tricky, but you could have a shot at your own comet if you work at it.
rj
There isn't. We can begin doing it properly as soon as your check clears.
rj
Oh, I dunno...sometime in the last four hundred years, I suppose. Maybe around the time they were adding the "e" to Shakespear.
rj
http://www.aache.com/quijote/
rj
A coworker of mine claims he once held the Southern California record for Slurpee sales back when he was a 7-11 manager. His store was close to a business park and he kept a bottle of Wild Turkey under the counter...
rj
...or plug in a German keyboard without changing the driver.
rj
rj
Puts me in mind of my late mother-in-law's stories of nursing in China in the 1920s and 30s. She was working for the Rockefeller Foundation which was spending loads of money, but it was a drop in the bucket for a third-world population that size. One day she was working frantically to fight an epidemic, rationing her scarce supply of medication out to the patients with the best shot at survival and letting the hopeless cases die, when what should arrive but a big, shiny new truck.
Driven by smiling missionaries.
And loaded with bibles.
rj
Of course not. They should move to the San Andreas Fault like everybody else.
rj