Ok, I'll admit, my first thought on seeing the picture was Oh. My. Gawd. That's a picture of something we put on another *planet*, a little red dot in the sky. Then I started rummaging through the stock phrases about the future of Man and stuff like that.
But one actual question that comes to mind -- now that the Opportunity team has high-resolution pictures of their baby's room, will they change where they send him to play? For example, could they see that rock just south of the dark "Cape Verde" formation? And looking back, if they'd had pictures like these to work with, would they have approached the crater from a different angle?
There is a real concern about the growing use of automated and electronic intelligence gathering in lieu of human intelligence, but ultimately, both are valuable. Unfortunately, electronic and signals intelligence is often much more costly, and sometimes gets more attention in some parts of the intelligence community while human intelligence needs languish.
Indeed. It's clear to me that the current administration has pretty much forgotten the importance of human intelligence, instead relying on high-tech gadgetry (and, of course, fear) to protect the nation.
For yet another example of an utter failure of human intelligence, check this out: Report: Terrorists' mail not well monitored in US prisons. We can't even monitor the mail being sent to and from *convicted terrorists* because we don't have enough people who speak Arabic and other middle-eastern languages. Better to build a no-fly list so that Cat Stevens can't spread dissent, and depend on magical computers to keep us safe.
Oops, seemingly-minor correction, but in the 2nd paragraph I should have said : "A mode will oscillate at a specific frequency, however. If you write the 'equations of motion' for all atoms in the crystal in 'matrix' form, the modes would correspond to the 'eigenvectors' of that matrix."
Dude... I was so out of my depth, you could have said "the modes would correspond to the 'Keanuvectors' of the Matrix" and I would have been like, "Woah".
Seriously, though -- like the other non-troll respondents to your message, I want to thank you for making Slashdot a smarter place.
Really, it's pretty pitiful. It looks like all the "research" entailed was to substitute the word "internet" for "alcohol". Here are just a few of their "symptoms":
* Internet engagement used as a way of escaping problems or relieving feelings of guilt, helplessness, anxiety, or depression. * Concealing from or lying to family members about the extent of internet use. * Internet user driven to financial difficulty due to incurring unaffordable internet fees.
Isn't that last one just teh stupid? It's cribbed word-for-word from a typical symptom of alcholism, as are the rest.
Even if there are still ISPs in the world that charge by the MB, it just doesn't fly. Now, if they were talking about "unexpected" credit card charges, maybe... but pr0n addiction.NE. internet "addiction".
All too frequently, stupid newsies and others confuse the Chinese with the Japanese...
What I tell my kids is this: calling someone from Japan "Chinese" or someone from China "Japanese" would make about as much sense as calling everyone from North America "Mexican". (Though here in Texas, the lines do get a bit blurry...)
So, China wants a large population of smart people, trained and able to ask fundamental questions, who won't question Party Orthodoxy... One of two things will happen: Another cultural revolution, or the overthrow of the regime.
In 1984, there was another suggestion. When English was replaced with Newspeak, scientists, engineers, doctors, and other professionals would continue to speak in their usual jargon. "Capacitor", "hypotenuse", and "spleen" have no political connotation, after all.
I never figured out what they would do about "Resistor", though...
While we in the US were watching Atlantis take off on what turned out to be a successful ISS construction mission, the Chinese were launching a quarter-ton of seeds into space:
Shijian-8 carries at least 2,000 types of seed samples from a variety of species including those grown in normal crops on Earth, as well as fungi. In all, about 474 pounds of seeds are stowed away aboard the satellite, according to the state-owned Xinhua news agency.
Heralded as China's first satellite primarily designed for space breeding, Shijian-8's seed payload will be returned to Earth after about two weeks of flight, the China Daily newspaper reported in July.
Sounds great, for them at least, doesn't it? Do some basic research. Get ahead of the Americans. So you can imagine the mental double-take at this tidbit from the same article:
After being recovered, the seeds will be used by researchers attempting to improve the quality and yield of terrestrial crops. Chinese officials contend that seeds exposed to space radiation and microgravity contain more vitamins and other crucial minerals.
WHAT? China's greatest minds put together a launch and re-entry vehicle, and "officials" load it with almost 500 pounds of seeds so that they will magically become superplants? WTF? Did someone in China not get the memo that their former occupiers are not *really* developing giant robots, and that Little Shop of Horrors is a work of fiction, not a battle plan?
The article claims that China will be a country that "produces its own scientific and technological breakthroughs". Sending a truckload of seeds to come back as food for the Fantastic Four sounds more like a continuation of the tradition that brought us tiger penis, rhinoceros horn, and bear bile therapies. And here I was, worried we were losing our edge.
I recently did IT for the largest casino company on the planet. I was dual-property and responsible for two casinos. The master code that would open the keyboxes and get you keys to anywhere in the casino was 654321. And people told each other all their passwords and such all the time.
In that environment, they probably could have kept the lids to the keyboxes open and illuminated with flashing neon signs. Anyone foolish enough to try to pull off some sort of heist, with all those cameras and undercover security types, would end up meeting the same fate as the bozo who tries to swipe the dealer's chips -- jail if he's lucky, a trip to swim with the Nevada fishes if he's not.
Maybe they haven't really cracked the code, they're just putting out false information to try to get the Israelis to switch to a different code. This would cause some confusion, thereby giving Hezbollah an edge.
If that's not the case, then someone in Hezbollah should feel really, really dumb now.
If you have access to your enemy's communications, the absolute last thing you would ever want to do is tell your enemy that you know what they're saying.
Of course, now the Israelis have to figure out whether the statement is an unwise boast, or an elaborate deception designed to look like an unwise boast. Such a deception would be even more wily if the folks leaking the news actually think it's true.
Thank goodness our country would never fall for such a scheme. Oh, never mind.
Considering the massive force of a black hole explosion (implosion, whatever), tinfoil is *not* going to be strong enough (sorry, saskboy). I'll stock up on the following items, courtesy of the Periodic Table Table entry for "Silver":
Silver Boxer Shorts -- while all you smartie-pants rationalists are protecting your *brains*, I'll be protecting Man's truest contribution to the future of humanity.
When your Windows locale is for a right-to-left language, the scroll bars, menus and everything is reversed and on the opposite side too. This works in pretty much all applications.
So, Windows does support it. The question is, how do you enable it in an English left-to-right OS?
!elpmiS.did I ekil,egaugnal ruoy rof "hsilgnE desreveR" tceles dna lenaP lortnoC ot og tsuJ
From TFA: "To update the credit card information details for your order, please select this link," the message instructed, directing people to a "spoof site" with an illegitimate sbcdslstore.org (not.com) Web address.
A personal website is one thing -- you might grab the.com and leave the.net and.org to whoever wants it. But wouldn't you think that a major company would think to grab sbcdslstore.org before setting up a nationally-advertised site at the corresponding.com? sbcdslstore.org was created on August 26, for crying out loud -- even if it only just dropped, surely AT&T should have been ready to scoop it up. And the.net variant was only registered this past May. Geez, if I can snag a previously lost domain name, surely Ma Bell can do the same?
Well, at least they've learned their lesson and scooped up the other major extensions... as, ofyesterday. What was that story about a cat, a bag, and a barn door?
Foo: To ensure that no one computer got lucky, each side was given the opportunity to play its opponent's hand after each deal. Bar: Thereby eliminating one important premise of poker -- you don't know what hand an opponent was playing unless someone called the last bet. In terms of an algorhithm for the program to 'learn' based upon others' behavior, this means the program has a lot more information than a regular player would.
Actually, I learned a lot about poker from my opponent's hand... when I was a kid. It's actually somewhat appropriate that this baby-level AI would be learning the essentials of the game the same way a human kid would, by playing one way, and then having Mommy/Daddy go back and say, "Now here's what I did with this hand..."
To be honest, though, I didn't play nearly enough games as a kid. In high school, playing nickel-ante poker with my friends, I lost consistently. We played with Pente pieces, with each of us having a different color, but in about 30 minutes everyone was playing with my pieces. At the end of the year, most everyone had sold my debts to them to the class card shark, so I owed him $25 bucks.
(looks closer) Oh. Its a roland piquapallawhatever submitted story. I use Slashdot's new Keyword system to mark all Roland P. stories as "pigpile". I'm hoping it will catch on.
Friers set up for french fries are set at about 350 degress Fahrenheit. Ice is presumably 32 degrees Fahrenheit or lower.
That's not the biggest part of the "problem" (or "solution", according to your story!).
If the ice simply floated on the grease, it would erupt in a burst of steam and that would be it. But water is denser than oil, so your ice cubes sink to the bottom. There, they erupt into superheated steam, which is far less dense and comes exploding out of the fryer, carrying that 350-degree grease along for the ride.
I enjoyed "breaking in" the new grease -- while it was still clear enough to see through -- by dropping a small piece of ice into it. A small enough piece will fall to the bottom, but will just melt and stay there a bit. Eventually, it comes floating up to the surface (at which point you'll want to step back). I guess some combination of pressure, thermal inertia, and surface tension kept it from exploding immediately. I didn't think about it much at the time -- I had burgers to flip.
By the way, if someone offers to take you for a swim in the grease tank, DON'T DO IT! (Hint: you are about as dense as an equivalent volume of water)
But good luck getting a bunch of minimum wage high school emplyees to take directions from a computer. Managers have a hard enough time keeping them in line.
When I worked at a Sonic Drive In in 1985-6, we teens weren't any less lazy than the ones today (despite what we tell our teens now). While flipping burgers and dropping fries, I thought about my TRS-80 Model I and my new Model 100, and had a brainstorm. What if the girl at the microphone had a computer terminal, and hit a key for each food item, and then -- get this -- the order would display on a screen in the kitchen! I think I got a pretty good reception for the idea, since I'd just wowed my co-workers and the 20-something manager with the voice synthesizer I'd built for the Model 100.
But nobody thought it would work:
* The heat and grease would kill the electronics. * Where do you mount a big ol' TV monitor? * You'll never be able to train the cooks -- they can barely figure out the french fry timer. * You'll never be able to train the order-takers -- they can barely figure out the bank of speaker switches. * Special orders would be impossible. * What's wrong with the slips of paper with orders written on them (#1 HB +O -P)?
I've often wondered two things. One, shouldn't I be a freakin' gazillionaire by now? Two, what's going to be the Next Big Thing in the minimum-wage kitchen. This may -- or may not -- be it.
The great and mighty Anonymous wrote: Launch...? Python....? Snakes on a Plane!!!
Yep, it's another Product Placement deal. Pretty shameless -- all the searches shown in the movie start at yahoo.com, and yahoo.com plugs the movie right down to the programmer level. Pitiful.
I have a friend who's a sound engineer and he says he always hears library sounds on news reports. e.g. A report from Iraq may have some standard AK47 shots dubbed on to make it sound more interesting.
We Americans have probably been completely desensitized to this. Every "reality" show (except for COPS, bless their heart) seems to take great pleasure in dubbing police sirens, truck air horns, squealing tires, and the like over the videos of car chases. Never mind that the chase was filmed from a helicopter, where the only sound would be the aircraft's rotors.
Seems like a lot of work for something that isn't that novel. I sense that a DDR with additional EyeToy functionality would be just as good, and I already *have* most everything for that.
Indeed. Both DDR Extreme (and its sequel, DDR Extreme 2) have EyeToy support and include a "Hands and Feet" mode. You're supposed to supplement the foot movement with left and right hand movement. It doesn't give the whole-body positioning that the article discusses, which is a *good* thing.
Konami's simplified method of adding upper-body "dancing" gives you more flexibility to come up with a "routine" of your own. The article's suggestion of a system that requires you to put your body in a precise position is pretty goofy by comparison. It would be like a version of DDR that requires you to use a particular foot to hit a pad -- sacrificing gameplay flexibility for an "enhanced workout".
Plus, the manual for DDR Extreme 2 (which I just bought for my teenage daughters and my long-past-teenage self) suggests only that the background be contrasting, without a lot of motion. No requirement that it be white and illuminated. I guess Konami figured out how to do motion detection in the real world after all.
You know, there's a good argument here that university research types ought to spend more time in the freshman dorms before they announce their "new" discoveries, especially if they're based on a popular video game.
Imagine having your radioactive waste flow into a multi-wall nanotube, which has many layers like an onion.
SHREK: For your information, there's a lot more to nanotubes than people think. DONKEY: Example? SHREK: Example? Okay, um, nanotubes are like onions. DONKEY: [Sniffs] They stink? SHREK: Yes. No! DONKEY: They make you cry? SHREK: No! DONKEY: You leave them out in the sun, they get all brown, start sprouting' little white hairs. SHREK: No! Layers! Onions have layers! Nanotubes have layers! Onions have layers. You get it? They both have layers. [Sighs] DONKEY: Oh, they both have layers. Oh. [Sniffs] You know, not everybody likes onions. Cake! Everybody loves cakes! Cakes have layers. SHREK: I don't care what everyone likes. Nanotubes are not like cakes... Nanotubes are like onions! End of story. Bye-bye. See ya later.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I'll admit, my first thought on seeing the picture was Oh. My. Gawd. That's a picture of something we put on another *planet*, a little red dot in the sky. Then I started rummaging through the stock phrases about the future of Man and stuff like that.
But one actual question that comes to mind -- now that the Opportunity team has high-resolution pictures of their baby's room, will they change where they send him to play? For example, could they see that rock just south of the dark "Cape Verde" formation? And looking back, if they'd had pictures like these to work with, would they have approached the crater from a different angle?
There is a real concern about the growing use of automated and electronic intelligence gathering in lieu of human intelligence, but ultimately, both are valuable. Unfortunately, electronic and signals intelligence is often much more costly, and sometimes gets more attention in some parts of the intelligence community while human intelligence needs languish.
Indeed. It's clear to me that the current administration has pretty much forgotten the importance of human intelligence, instead relying on high-tech gadgetry (and, of course, fear) to protect the nation.
For yet another example of an utter failure of human intelligence, check this out: Report: Terrorists' mail not well monitored in US prisons. We can't even monitor the mail being sent to and from *convicted terrorists* because we don't have enough people who speak Arabic and other middle-eastern languages. Better to build a no-fly list so that Cat Stevens can't spread dissent, and depend on magical computers to keep us safe.
Oops, seemingly-minor correction, but in the 2nd paragraph I should have said : "A mode will oscillate at a specific frequency, however. If you write the 'equations of motion' for all atoms in the crystal in 'matrix' form, the modes would correspond to the 'eigenvectors' of that matrix."
Dude... I was so out of my depth, you could have said "the modes would correspond to the 'Keanuvectors' of the Matrix" and I would have been like, "Woah".
Seriously, though -- like the other non-troll respondents to your message, I want to thank you for making Slashdot a smarter place.
Isn't that last one just teh stupid? It's cribbed word-for-word from a typical symptom of alcholism, as are the rest.
Even if there are still ISPs in the world that charge by the MB, it just doesn't fly. Now, if they were talking about "unexpected" credit card charges, maybe... but pr0n addiction
All too frequently, stupid newsies and others confuse the Chinese with the Japanese...
What I tell my kids is this: calling someone from Japan "Chinese" or someone from China "Japanese" would make about as much sense as calling everyone from North America "Mexican". (Though here in Texas, the lines do get a bit blurry...)
No No No if you have watched any CSI its a long walk in the desert not sleep with the fishes
Sorry, I'm a Law and Order (dun dun!) fan, myself. I've even been linked to the show by the media, so I'm kinda obligated.
So, China wants a large population of smart people, trained and able to ask fundamental questions, who won't question Party Orthodoxy... One of two things will happen: Another cultural revolution, or the overthrow of the regime.
In 1984, there was another suggestion. When English was replaced with Newspeak, scientists, engineers, doctors, and other professionals would continue to speak in their usual jargon. "Capacitor", "hypotenuse", and "spleen" have no political connotation, after all.
I never figured out what they would do about "Resistor", though...
Sounds great, for them at least, doesn't it? Do some basic research. Get ahead of the Americans. So you can imagine the mental double-take at this tidbit from the same article:
WHAT? China's greatest minds put together a launch and re-entry vehicle, and "officials" load it with almost 500 pounds of seeds so that they will magically become superplants? WTF? Did someone in China not get the memo that their former occupiers are not *really* developing giant robots, and that Little Shop of Horrors is a work of fiction, not a battle plan?
The article claims that China will be a country that "produces its own scientific and technological breakthroughs". Sending a truckload of seeds to come back as food for the Fantastic Four sounds more like a continuation of the tradition that brought us tiger penis, rhinoceros horn, and bear bile therapies. And here I was, worried we were losing our edge.
I recently did IT for the largest casino company on the planet. I was dual-property and responsible for two casinos. The master code that would open the keyboxes and get you keys to anywhere in the casino was 654321. And people told each other all their passwords and such all the time.
In that environment, they probably could have kept the lids to the keyboxes open and illuminated with flashing neon signs. Anyone foolish enough to try to pull off some sort of heist, with all those cameras and undercover security types, would end up meeting the same fate as the bozo who tries to swipe the dealer's chips -- jail if he's lucky, a trip to swim with the Nevada fishes if he's not.
Maybe they haven't really cracked the code, they're just putting out false information to try to get the Israelis to switch to a different code. This would cause some confusion, thereby giving Hezbollah an edge.
If that's not the case, then someone in Hezbollah should feel really, really dumb now.
If you have access to your enemy's communications, the absolute last thing you would ever want to do is tell your enemy that you know what they're saying.
Of course, now the Israelis have to figure out whether the statement is an unwise boast, or an elaborate deception designed to look like an unwise boast. Such a deception would be even more wily if the folks leaking the news actually think it's true.
Thank goodness our country would never fall for such a scheme. Oh, never mind.
There is an approximately equal chance that Pat Buchanan will be nominated as the Democrat candidate for president in 2008.
I guess that makes this experiment the physics equivalent of the Florida elections? (I'd rather take my chances with the black hole, thanks.)
Considering the massive force of a black hole explosion (implosion, whatever), tinfoil is *not* going to be strong enough (sorry, saskboy). I'll stock up on the following items, courtesy of the Periodic Table Table entry for "Silver":
Silver-lined tinfoil hat, cleverly disguised as a normal trucker's hat.
Silver Boxer Shorts -- while all you smartie-pants rationalists are protecting your *brains*, I'll be protecting Man's truest contribution to the future of humanity.
When your Windows locale is for a right-to-left language, the scroll bars, menus and everything is reversed and on the opposite side too. This works in pretty much all applications.
.did I ekil ,egaugnal ruoy rof "hsilgnE desreveR" tceles dna lenaP lortnoC ot og tsuJ
So, Windows does support it. The question is, how do you enable it in an English left-to-right OS?
!elpmiS
At least tag this Roland so people with a brain won't waste their time commenting...
Actually, I've been tagging them "pigpile". But I'll add "roland" as well. Thanks!
From TFA: .com) Web address.
.com and leave the .net and .org to whoever wants it. But wouldn't you think that a major company would think to grab sbcdslstore.org before setting up a nationally-advertised site at the corresponding .com? sbcdslstore.org was created on August 26, for crying out loud -- even if it only just dropped, surely AT&T should have been ready to scoop it up. And the .net variant was only registered this past May. Geez, if I can snag a previously lost domain name, surely Ma Bell can do the same?
"To update the credit card information details for your order, please select this link," the message instructed, directing people to a "spoof site" with an illegitimate sbcdslstore.org (not
A personal website is one thing -- you might grab the
Well, at least they've learned their lesson and scooped up the other major extensions... as, of yesterday. What was that story about a cat, a bag, and a barn door?
Geez, everyone's telling the same lame "ISS" = "International Space Station" joke.
It's just a typo! Haven't you figured that out yet? IBM simply bought IIS from Microsoft. I wonder if they'll make IIS run on Linux?
Foo: To ensure that no one computer got lucky, each side was given the opportunity to play its opponent's hand after each deal.
Bar: Thereby eliminating one important premise of poker -- you don't know what hand an opponent was playing unless someone called the last bet. In terms of an algorhithm for the program to 'learn' based upon others' behavior, this means the program has a lot more information than a regular player would.
Actually, I learned a lot about poker from my opponent's hand... when I was a kid. It's actually somewhat appropriate that this baby-level AI would be learning the essentials of the game the same way a human kid would, by playing one way, and then having Mommy/Daddy go back and say, "Now here's what I did with this hand..."
To be honest, though, I didn't play nearly enough games as a kid. In high school, playing nickel-ante poker with my friends, I lost consistently. We played with Pente pieces, with each of us having a different color, but in about 30 minutes everyone was playing with my pieces. At the end of the year, most everyone had sold my debts to them to the class card shark, so I owed him $25 bucks.
(looks closer) Oh. Its a roland piquapallawhatever submitted story.
I use Slashdot's new Keyword system to mark all Roland P. stories as "pigpile". I'm hoping it will catch on.
Friers set up for french fries are set at about 350 degress Fahrenheit. Ice is presumably 32 degrees Fahrenheit or lower.
That's not the biggest part of the "problem" (or "solution", according to your story!).
If the ice simply floated on the grease, it would erupt in a burst of steam and that would be it. But water is denser than oil, so your ice cubes sink to the bottom. There, they erupt into superheated steam, which is far less dense and comes exploding out of the fryer, carrying that 350-degree grease along for the ride.
I enjoyed "breaking in" the new grease -- while it was still clear enough to see through -- by dropping a small piece of ice into it. A small enough piece will fall to the bottom, but will just melt and stay there a bit. Eventually, it comes floating up to the surface (at which point you'll want to step back). I guess some combination of pressure, thermal inertia, and surface tension kept it from exploding immediately. I didn't think about it much at the time -- I had burgers to flip.
By the way, if someone offers to take you for a swim in the grease tank, DON'T DO IT! (Hint: you are about as dense as an equivalent volume of water)
But good luck getting a bunch of minimum wage high school emplyees to take directions from a computer. Managers have a hard enough time keeping them in line.
When I worked at a Sonic Drive In in 1985-6, we teens weren't any less lazy than the ones today (despite what we tell our teens now). While flipping burgers and dropping fries, I thought about my TRS-80 Model I and my new Model 100, and had a brainstorm. What if the girl at the microphone had a computer terminal, and hit a key for each food item, and then -- get this -- the order would display on a screen in the kitchen! I think I got a pretty good reception for the idea, since I'd just wowed my co-workers and the 20-something manager with the voice synthesizer I'd built for the Model 100.
But nobody thought it would work:
* The heat and grease would kill the electronics.
* Where do you mount a big ol' TV monitor?
* You'll never be able to train the cooks -- they can barely figure out the french fry timer.
* You'll never be able to train the order-takers -- they can barely figure out the bank of speaker switches.
* Special orders would be impossible.
* What's wrong with the slips of paper with orders written on them (#1 HB +O -P)?
I've often wondered two things. One, shouldn't I be a freakin' gazillionaire by now? Two, what's going to be the Next Big Thing in the minimum-wage kitchen. This may -- or may not -- be it.
The great and mighty Anonymous wrote:
Launch...?
Python....?
Snakes on a Plane!!!
Yep, it's another Product Placement deal. Pretty shameless -- all the searches shown in the movie start at yahoo.com, and yahoo.com plugs the movie right down to the programmer level. Pitiful.
I have a friend who's a sound engineer and he says he always hears library sounds on news reports. e.g. A report from Iraq may have some standard AK47 shots dubbed on to make it sound more interesting.
We Americans have probably been completely desensitized to this. Every "reality" show (except for COPS, bless their heart) seems to take great pleasure in dubbing police sirens, truck air horns, squealing tires, and the like over the videos of car chases. Never mind that the chase was filmed from a helicopter, where the only sound would be the aircraft's rotors.
Seems like a lot of work for something that isn't that novel. I sense that a DDR with additional EyeToy functionality would be just as good, and I already *have* most everything for that.
Indeed. Both DDR Extreme (and its sequel, DDR Extreme 2) have EyeToy support and include a "Hands and Feet" mode. You're supposed to supplement the foot movement with left and right hand movement. It doesn't give the whole-body positioning that the article discusses, which is a *good* thing.
Konami's simplified method of adding upper-body "dancing" gives you more flexibility to come up with a "routine" of your own. The article's suggestion of a system that requires you to put your body in a precise position is pretty goofy by comparison. It would be like a version of DDR that requires you to use a particular foot to hit a pad -- sacrificing gameplay flexibility for an "enhanced workout".
Plus, the manual for DDR Extreme 2 (which I just bought for my teenage daughters and my long-past-teenage self) suggests only that the background be contrasting, without a lot of motion. No requirement that it be white and illuminated. I guess Konami figured out how to do motion detection in the real world after all.
You know, there's a good argument here that university research types ought to spend more time in the freshman dorms before they announce their "new" discoveries, especially if they're based on a popular video game.
Imagine having your radioactive waste flow into a multi-wall nanotube, which has many layers like an onion.
SHREK: For your information, there's a lot more to nanotubes than people think.
DONKEY: Example?
SHREK: Example? Okay, um, nanotubes are like onions.
DONKEY: [Sniffs] They stink?
SHREK: Yes. No!
DONKEY: They make you cry?
SHREK: No!
DONKEY: You leave them out in the sun, they get all brown, start sprouting' little white hairs.
SHREK: No! Layers! Onions have layers! Nanotubes have layers! Onions have layers. You get it? They both have layers. [Sighs]
DONKEY: Oh, they both have layers. Oh. [Sniffs] You know, not everybody likes onions. Cake! Everybody loves cakes! Cakes have layers.
SHREK: I don't care what everyone likes. Nanotubes are not like cakes... Nanotubes are like onions! End of story. Bye-bye. See ya later.
(wham bam thank you m'am)
My father is especially proud to be a member of the Class of 1961. His class ring reads the same right-side-up or upside-down!
The usual suspects note that the condition won't happen again until the Year of our Lord 6009 (that is, if man is still alive, if woman can survive...).