My dad was born without a sense of smell.
He has 3 smoke detectors and turns on a series of lights when he is cooking (so that he doesn't forget and burn the house down).
One interesting thing is that the sense of smell is closely associated with taste(notice how bland things taste when your nose is stuffed up) so Dad likes to douse things in hot sauce or lemon juice so he can get some flavor. Over the years he has chugged a few containers of spoiled milk that would gag a crocodile.
There are real dangers though. Someone carelessly tossed an empty container of a chemical into a trashcan next to his workstation. Without a sense of smell he simply breathed it in for hours whereas anyone else would have detected it in seconds. He ended up with chemical pneumonia.
Other symptoms include being paranoid about BO and wearing too much cologne that was recommended to him by the pretty girl behind the perfume counter at the mall.
Take a couple of those old thumb drives or flash memory cards you never use anymore, fill them with as many pictures as they can hold and then drop them in the mail when you come into port.
I actually did a paper about red light cameras a few years back. They do decrease the incidence of "T-Bone" crashes at intersections but they increase the rate of rear-end collisions even more.
Imagine that there are 3 zones as you approach an intersection. A "Must Stop" zone, a zone of decision and a "Must Go" zone. If the light turns yellow while you are in the "Must stop" zone then you have to stop, if it turns yellow while you are in the "Must Go" zone then you must keep going and if the light turns yellow in the zone of decision the driver must make a judgement call. What these damn cameras do is shrink the "Must Go" zone and expand the zone of decision toward the intersection. The result is more people slamming on brakes and getting rear-ended because they are more worried about getting a ticket than whether or not they can stop safely.
I also found instances of the yellow light time at red light camera intersections being mysteriously shortened as if to catch more people running red. And looking at accident statistics in my local area showed that they weren't putting the cameras at the most dangerous intersections which one would suspect if the point were really to decrease accidents.
For months after my mom died I used to "see" her out of the corner of my eye in public places. Then I would turn to look and it would just be someone that resembled her (same body type, or hair or shape of the face). I just assumed that it was due to the fact that she was on my mind. Later I started to think about the brain's pattern recognition system. The one that lets us see faces in electrical outlets and the grills of cars. It allows us to get a pretty good sense of something without complete information. And for all of my life whenever I saw someone from a distance, or in poor light or out of the corner of my eye that vaguely resembled my mother it probably was my mother. That shortcut to recognition usually serves us well. Its just that it doesn't turn off instantly when someone dies. Its that flash of pain you get when you remember "oh yeah she's gone" that makes these misidentifications memorable.
That being said, when you start having conversations with dead loved ones outside of a dream its time to call in a professional.
To anyone who may have misunderstood my point...
Duke is fighting vigorously to protect people from charges of downloading but when the Duke Lacrosse team was falsely charged with gang rape they were completely thrown under the bus.
The more serious the accusation, the more important the presumption of innocence.
I had one of these. Got it free from Radio Shack like everybody else. You took it home, plugged it in, installed the software and then you could scan a can of peas for instance and it would take you to delmonte.com... And then you started to think why do I need this?
The encryption on it was really lame. You could get around it with a soldering iron or a few lines of code(freely available on the web). They came in two flavors, PS2 and USB. They made great little barcode scanners for home cooked inventory systems.
Summary says "world's oldest Bible" Actually its the oldest extant New Testament
Summary says "makes no mention of the resurrection" Actually the New Testament is rife with references to the resurrection. This particular book contains a shortened version of Mark that ends when the disciples discover the empty tomb. Any biblical scholar is familiar with this shorter version of Mark.
In other words the summary is not merely bad but suggests an agenda.
Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They'll intersperse their code-those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs-with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it.
In other words, yak yak yak, am I right fellas?:-)
But seriously does anyone else get annoyed by "*gasp* men and women are different" stories?
When I upgraded my cell phone recently the clerk gave me the option of donating my old phone to a charity that passes the phones along to battered women so they can dial 911 in an emergency.
Seems like something similar could be done with memory sticks. I have a couple of memory sticks I don't use anymore because I've gotten a new one with more capacity. I imagine that a lot of people have older, smaller capacity memory sticks sitting in a drawer somewhere. Wouldn't it be great if there was a trusted third party that we could give our old memory sticks to which could then smuggle them into countries living under repressive regimes? Thus encouraging a robust sneakernet that is below the state's radar.
...This is infuriating and a little frightening. Not only are they junking up my webpage and possibly offending my readership(with the content of the ads) but they are leaving my readers with the impression that I'm behind it all! If I was the owner of a Christian chat site and they inserted a "Wanna hook up?" style dating ad I would be mortified.
But what really worries me is what else are they doing with this technology? Could they programmatically swap out my Adsense Publisher ID with theirs? Could they change the links on my homepage to point to their spam sites? Could they put words in my mouth e.g. my readers suddenly find me favorably reviewing "Male Enhancement" products on my homepage?
What is the rationale given in the USA for not using metric?
Its the same reason we don't all speak Esperanto.
Think about it. Esperanto was supposed to be for language what the metric system was for measurement; international, easier to learn and just all around better.
Like Esperanto the metric system may actually be a marginal improvement over what it was designed to replace BUT it isn't a big enough improvement to justify the effort for the average person to forget everything they know and start tabula rasa with a new system.
[Begin new train of thought]
The best metric(pun intended) of how much a populace has accepted a system of measure is how accurately the average person can extemporaneously estimate. For example the average American could tell you that a kilometer is about 2/3 of a mile but ask them to estimate how far away some distant landmark on the horizon is and they would immediately resort to English measures. Thats because (going back to my language analogy); I don't merely speak English, my thoughts are in English: I don't merely measure in English Units, I think in English Units.
Imagine for instance if we imposed a metric-like system on time measurements. After all 24 hours in a day is a horribly unround number. Maybe we should divide a day into 100 metric hours. Then we could mystify people by saying cool things like "I'll be back in 2 deca-hours" or "Hang on, I'll be there in a centi-hour!". It may sound absurd but you better believe if someone did invent such a system you would have people out there touting it as easier, more efficient and (*groan*) more "scientific".
[Begin new train of thought]
That being said; the biggest popularizer of the metric system in the US is probably Coca-Cola. The average person doesn't have a clue how heavy a kilogram feels but they know exactly what 2 liters looks like. Its a bottle of Coke. If the metric system ever catches on here amongst the rabble it will be via the Coca-Cola model not by State fiat as it has in some other places.
Everyone knows about BB guns but when I was a kid Daisy sold this strange cast iron thing that you were supposed to attach paper bullseye targets to. In other words it was a big, flat piece of metal that kids were supposed to shoot at. The purpose? It produced a truly awesome *ding* sound when you hit it. "You'll shoot your eye out!"
Crossbows and Catapults was a game where two players build little castles and then try to destroy each others castles with the aforementioned medieval weapons. Made of hard plastic, powered by rubber bands and firing solid plastic discs that weighed about an ounce it was a lot of fun. But being boys my brother and I were unsatisfied with the catapults destructive power so we augmented it with about a dozen extra rubber bands, increasing the catapults force so much that its plastic frame actually warped when we pulled it back to full strength. We had turned a child's game into a pair of homemade honest-to-god slingshots. We soon found that shooting them at each other was much more fun than knocking over little castles. Getting hit by one meant a bloody silver dollar size welt. My brother actually sent one through a single layer of sheetrock.
I own MemoryHole.com(which is currently defunct). Perhaps you may have heard of TheMemoryHole.org(I had not heard of it until after I bought my domain name, honest).
Not only did I get mistyped URL traffic from them but I also got the occasional misaddressed email. You can imagine that the email they get is rather interesting! When I realized I was getting email intended for someone else I would politely inform the sender. But sometimes they would argue with me! "No my friend said it was Memory Hole!"
I think we should impose a metric-like system on time measurements. After all 24 hours in a day is a horribly unround number. We should divide a day into 100 metric hours. Then we could mystify people by saying cool things like "I'll be back in 2 deca-hours" or "Hang on, I'll be there in a centi-hour!". It may sound absurd but you better believe if someone did invent such a system you would have people out there touting it as easier, more efficient and (*groan*) more "scientific".
Who really cares if someone forged, misrepresented or just misunderstood the nature of this document? The point is that Bush dropped the ball when he was supposed to be defending the country in the 1970's
Untrue. Bush drew a very high draft number and never would have been drafted but joined the National Guard anyway. Then once in the National Guard he volunteered for Operation Palace Alert which would have put him in Vietnam. He was not picked for that duty but the point is he volunteered.
I want to make it clear that I'm a libertarian and I'm not voting for either of these guys but this National Guard crap is just scurrilous.
Nobody is required to accept the US Dollar. Unlike taxes, you will not be shot for refusing to particpate.:)
This is actually a common misunderstanding arising from the phrase legal tender.
There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise.
The quote above refers to the acceptance of CASH not US Dollars. It simply says that businesses have the option not to accept cash in payment (they could for example demand that you pay with a check or credit card) but you would still be paying in dollars.
Legal Tender laws(in the US) state that creditors must accept dollars in payment of debts if offered. They cannot, for example, legally compel a debtor to pay in beaver pelts or Euros.
What is the rationale given in the USA for not using metric?
Its the same reason we don't all speak Esperanto.
Think about it. Esperanto was supposed to be for language what the metric system was for measurement; international, easier to learn and just all around better.
Like Esperanto the metric system may actually be a marginal improvement over what it was designed to replace BUT it isn't a big enough improvement to justify the effort for the average person to forget everything they know and start tabula rasa with a new system.
[Begin new train of thought]
The best metric(pun intended) of how much a populace has accepted a system of measure is how accurately the average person can extemporaneously estimate. For example the average American could tell you that a kilometer is about 2/3 of a mile but ask them to estimate how far away some distant landmark on the horizon is and they would immediately resort to English measures. Thats because (going back to my language analogy); I don't merely speak English, my thoughts are in English: I don't merely measure in English Units, I think in English Units.
Imagine for instance if we imposed a metric-like system on time measurements. After all 24 hours in a day is a horribly unround number. Maybe we should divide a day into 100 metric hours. Then we could mystify people by saying cool things like "I'll be back in 2 deca-hours" or "Hang on, I'll be there in a centi-hour!". It may sound absurd but you better believe if someone did invent such a system you would have people out there touting it as easier, more efficient and (*groan*) more "scientific".
[Begin new train of thought]
That being said; the biggest popularizer of the metric system in the US is probably Coca-Cola. The average person doesn't have a clue how heavy a kilogram feels but they know exactly what 2 liters looks like. Its a bottle of Coke. If the metric system ever catches on here amongst the rabble it will be via the Coca-Cola model not by State fiat as it has in some other places.
[Begin new train of thought]
Regarding the US as the lone industrialized holdout: Any mother can tell you that "Because everybody else is doing it" is not a valid argument.
Cyno01: "Games like roulette and craps are close to pure chance and the only real skill involved is strategic betting."
Actually the single best way to improve your odds at Roulette(other than not playing) is simply to avoid Double Zero wheels like the plague. You see the older Single Zero, or European wheel, has a house advantage of 2.7%. But the Double Zero, or American wheel, has a house advantage of 5.26%.
Often casinos will have both Double and Single Zero wheels and you will see suckers at the Double Zero wheel blissfully unaware that they could walk 20 feet to the next table and get much better odds.
Slashdot Mirror
My dad was born without a sense of smell. He has 3 smoke detectors and turns on a series of lights when he is cooking (so that he doesn't forget and burn the house down). One interesting thing is that the sense of smell is closely associated with taste(notice how bland things taste when your nose is stuffed up) so Dad likes to douse things in hot sauce or lemon juice so he can get some flavor. Over the years he has chugged a few containers of spoiled milk that would gag a crocodile. There are real dangers though. Someone carelessly tossed an empty container of a chemical into a trashcan next to his workstation. Without a sense of smell he simply breathed it in for hours whereas anyone else would have detected it in seconds. He ended up with chemical pneumonia. Other symptoms include being paranoid about BO and wearing too much cologne that was recommended to him by the pretty girl behind the perfume counter at the mall.
Take a couple of those old thumb drives or flash memory cards you never use anymore, fill them with as many pictures as they can hold and then drop them in the mail when you come into port.
I actually did a paper about red light cameras a few years back. They do decrease the incidence of "T-Bone" crashes at intersections but they increase the rate of rear-end collisions even more.
Imagine that there are 3 zones as you approach an intersection. A "Must Stop" zone, a zone of decision and a "Must Go" zone. If the light turns yellow while you are in the "Must stop" zone then you have to stop, if it turns yellow while you are in the "Must Go" zone then you must keep going and if the light turns yellow in the zone of decision the driver must make a judgement call. What these damn cameras do is shrink the "Must Go" zone and expand the zone of decision toward the intersection. The result is more people slamming on brakes and getting rear-ended because they are more worried about getting a ticket than whether or not they can stop safely.
I also found instances of the yellow light time at red light camera intersections being mysteriously shortened as if to catch more people running red. And looking at accident statistics in my local area showed that they weren't putting the cameras at the most dangerous intersections which one would suspect if the point were really to decrease accidents.
For months after my mom died I used to "see" her out of the corner of my eye in public places. Then I would turn to look and it would just be someone that resembled her (same body type, or hair or shape of the face). I just assumed that it was due to the fact that she was on my mind. Later I started to think about the brain's pattern recognition system. The one that lets us see faces in electrical outlets and the grills of cars. It allows us to get a pretty good sense of something without complete information. And for all of my life whenever I saw someone from a distance, or in poor light or out of the corner of my eye that vaguely resembled my mother it probably was my mother. That shortcut to recognition usually serves us well. Its just that it doesn't turn off instantly when someone dies. Its that flash of pain you get when you remember "oh yeah she's gone" that makes these misidentifications memorable. That being said, when you start having conversations with dead loved ones outside of a dream its time to call in a professional.
To anyone who may have misunderstood my point...
Duke is fighting vigorously to protect people from charges of downloading but when the Duke Lacrosse team was falsely charged with gang rape they were completely thrown under the bus.
The more serious the accusation, the more important the presumption of innocence.
So the Duke administration demands proof of downloading but accepts rape accusations at face value? Nice priorities.
I had one of these. Got it free from Radio Shack like everybody else. You took it home, plugged it in, installed the software and then you could scan a can of peas for instance and it would take you to delmonte.com ... And then you started to think why do I need this?
The encryption on it was really lame. You could get around it with a soldering iron or a few lines of code(freely available on the web). They came in two flavors, PS2 and USB. They made great little barcode scanners for home cooked inventory systems.
Summary says "world's oldest Bible"
Actually its the oldest extant New Testament
Summary says "makes no mention of the resurrection"
Actually the New Testament is rife with references to the resurrection. This particular book contains a shortened version of Mark that ends when the disciples discover the empty tomb. Any biblical scholar is familiar with this shorter version of Mark.
In other words the summary is not merely bad but suggests an agenda.
In other words, yak yak yak, am I right fellas? :-)
But seriously does anyone else get annoyed by "*gasp* men and women are different" stories?
When I upgraded my cell phone recently the clerk gave me the option of donating my old phone to a charity that passes the phones along to battered women so they can dial 911 in an emergency. Seems like something similar could be done with memory sticks. I have a couple of memory sticks I don't use anymore because I've gotten a new one with more capacity. I imagine that a lot of people have older, smaller capacity memory sticks sitting in a drawer somewhere. Wouldn't it be great if there was a trusted third party that we could give our old memory sticks to which could then smuggle them into countries living under repressive regimes? Thus encouraging a robust sneakernet that is below the state's radar.
...This is infuriating and a little frightening. Not only are they junking up my webpage and possibly offending my readership(with the content of the ads) but they are leaving my readers with the impression that I'm behind it all! If I was the owner of a Christian chat site and they inserted a "Wanna hook up?" style dating ad I would be mortified.
But what really worries me is what else are they doing with this technology? Could they programmatically swap out my Adsense Publisher ID with theirs? Could they change the links on my homepage to point to their spam sites? Could they put words in my mouth e.g. my readers suddenly find me favorably reviewing "Male Enhancement" products on my homepage?
What is the rationale given in the USA for not using metric?
Its the same reason we don't all speak Esperanto.
Think about it. Esperanto was supposed to be for language what the metric system was for measurement; international, easier to learn and just all around better.
Like Esperanto the metric system may actually be a marginal improvement over what it was designed to replace BUT it isn't a big enough improvement to justify the effort for the average person to forget everything they know and start tabula rasa with a new system.
[Begin new train of thought]
The best metric(pun intended) of how much a populace has accepted a system of measure is how accurately the average person can extemporaneously estimate. For example the average American could tell you that a kilometer is about 2/3 of a mile but ask them to estimate how far away some distant landmark on the horizon is and they would immediately resort to English measures. Thats because (going back to my language analogy); I don't merely speak English, my thoughts are in English: I don't merely measure in English Units, I think in English Units.
Imagine for instance if we imposed a metric-like system on time measurements. After all 24 hours in a day is a horribly unround number. Maybe we should divide a day into 100 metric hours. Then we could mystify people by saying cool things like "I'll be back in 2 deca-hours" or "Hang on, I'll be there in a centi-hour!". It may sound absurd but you better believe if someone did invent such a system you would have people out there touting it as easier, more efficient and (*groan*) more "scientific".
[Begin new train of thought]
That being said; the biggest popularizer of the metric system in the US is probably Coca-Cola. The average person doesn't have a clue how heavy a kilogram feels but they know exactly what 2 liters looks like. Its a bottle of Coke. If the metric system ever catches on here amongst the rabble it will be via the Coca-Cola model not by State fiat as it has in some other places.
Everyone knows about BB guns but when I was a kid Daisy sold this strange cast iron thing that you were supposed to attach paper bullseye targets to. In other words it was a big, flat piece of metal that kids were supposed to shoot at. The purpose? It produced a truly awesome *ding* sound when you hit it. "You'll shoot your eye out!"
Crossbows and Catapults was a game where two players build little castles and then try to destroy each others castles with the aforementioned medieval weapons. Made of hard plastic, powered by rubber bands and firing solid plastic discs that weighed about an ounce it was a lot of fun. But being boys my brother and I were unsatisfied with the catapults destructive power so we augmented it with about a dozen extra rubber bands, increasing the catapults force so much that its plastic frame actually warped when we pulled it back to full strength. We had turned a child's game into a pair of homemade honest-to-god slingshots. We soon found that shooting them at each other was much more fun than knocking over little castles. Getting hit by one meant a bloody silver dollar size welt. My brother actually sent one through a single layer of sheetrock.
Perfect for stalkers and suspicious spouses, now all they need is 30 seconds with your cell phone to enable this option and they own you.
The US was founded on anonymous and pseudonymous speech.
Brutus
Publius
The Federal Farmer
A Pennsylvanian
etc...
Anonymous and pseudonymous pamphlets and letters to newspapers were a favorite mode of expression for the Founding Fathers.*
*(Not that I would compare normal forum twaddle to The Federalist Papers but the point holds regardless; this is unamerican)
My floors have never been cleaner but my daughter keeps coughing up dust bunnies.
I own MemoryHole.com(which is currently defunct). Perhaps you may have heard of TheMemoryHole.org(I had not heard of it until after I bought my domain name, honest).
Not only did I get mistyped URL traffic from them but I also got the occasional misaddressed email. You can imagine that the email they get is rather interesting! When I realized I was getting email intended for someone else I would politely inform the sender. But sometimes they would argue with me! "No my friend said it was Memory Hole!"
I think we should impose a metric-like system on time measurements. After all 24 hours in a day is a horribly unround number. We should divide a day into 100 metric hours. Then we could mystify people by saying cool things like "I'll be back in 2 deca-hours" or "Hang on, I'll be there in a centi-hour!". It may sound absurd but you better believe if someone did invent such a system you would have people out there touting it as easier, more efficient and (*groan*) more "scientific".
Untrue. Bush drew a very high draft number and never would have been drafted but joined the National Guard anyway. Then once in the National Guard he volunteered for Operation Palace Alert which would have put him in Vietnam. He was not picked for that duty but the point is he volunteered.
I want to make it clear that I'm a libertarian and I'm not voting for either of these guys but this National Guard crap is just scurrilous.
...it would be funnier if it were a prequel and not a sequel.
Its the same reason we don't all speak Esperanto.
Think about it. Esperanto was supposed to be for language what the metric system was for measurement; international, easier to learn and just all around better.
Like Esperanto the metric system may actually be a marginal improvement over what it was designed to replace BUT it isn't a big enough improvement to justify the effort for the average person to forget everything they know and start tabula rasa with a new system.
[Begin new train of thought]
The best metric(pun intended) of how much a populace has accepted a system of measure is how accurately the average person can extemporaneously estimate. For example the average American could tell you that a kilometer is about 2/3 of a mile but ask them to estimate how far away some distant landmark on the horizon is and they would immediately resort to English measures. Thats because (going back to my language analogy); I don't merely speak English, my thoughts are in English: I don't merely measure in English Units, I think in English Units.
Imagine for instance if we imposed a metric-like system on time measurements. After all 24 hours in a day is a horribly unround number. Maybe we should divide a day into 100 metric hours. Then we could mystify people by saying cool things like "I'll be back in 2 deca-hours" or "Hang on, I'll be there in a centi-hour!". It may sound absurd but you better believe if someone did invent such a system you would have people out there touting it as easier, more efficient and (*groan*) more "scientific".
[Begin new train of thought]
That being said; the biggest popularizer of the metric system in the US is probably Coca-Cola. The average person doesn't have a clue how heavy a kilogram feels but they know exactly what 2 liters looks like. Its a bottle of Coke. If the metric system ever catches on here amongst the rabble it will be via the Coca-Cola model not by State fiat as it has in some other places.
[Begin new train of thought]
Regarding the US as the lone industrialized holdout: Any mother can tell you that "Because everybody else is doing it" is not a valid argument.
Probably something vaguely like this:
:-)
if (sin > 0 && !salvation)
hell(soul);
else
heaven(soul);
void hell(aSoul& u)
{
int x = 0;
while(x < x + 1)
{
torment(u);
x++;
}
}
etc.... you get the idea
Cyno01: "Games like roulette and craps are close to pure chance and the only real skill involved is strategic betting."
Actually the single best way to improve your odds at Roulette(other than not playing) is simply to avoid Double Zero wheels like the plague. You see the older Single Zero, or European wheel, has a house advantage of 2.7%. But the Double Zero, or American wheel, has a house advantage of 5.26%.
Often casinos will have both Double and Single Zero wheels and you will see suckers at the Double Zero wheel blissfully unaware that they could walk 20 feet to the next table and get much better odds.