I was just trying to set the scene. There was this asian guy poll worker who took my ballot. If it had been an old lady I would have said: "a white-haired old lady." If it had been a hot young filippino chick I would have said: "a hot, young filippino chick." You have to get details to make it more readable. No harm intended.
I wrote in "Cthulhu" for Governor and the optical scan machine was jammed so the poll worker--some asian dude--told me to put the ballot in the lockbox slot. I had trouble getting it in because one of the pages was bent so the guy grabbed the ballot and moved them. On top was my write-in: CTHULHU in big black letters. He paused. Looked at it, looked at me. Swallowed. And I said "Thank you" and left.
"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
I was at a San Francisco restaurant at lunchtime waiting for a friend to arrive near the Metreon off of Market St. I needed a cigarette so I stood in the alley off of 4th St. I was just kind of lazily pacing back and forth puffing on my delicious cigarette and I turned around. Adam Savage walked by on 4th street and happened to look down the alley at me. I just said "Hey Mythbuster!" and stared at him like a stunned monkey. (It was just an odd place to see someone I had seen on TV the night before.)
He replied "How's it goin'?" And I didn't say anything. I just stood there.
I think he was referring to me in that article. People who say "Hey" and nothing else.
Actually, these are not my ideas. They are 'borrowed' from the authors of "The Smartest Guys in the Room."
If you had read the book or even watched the movie you will see they same the same things. (My knowledge of power grids and deregulation being poor, I have to rely on experts.)
They say at one point that the Governor could have taken charge and sent the National Guard into a single power-plant and they would have found where the problems were coming from and where the energy was going. He didn't. He got recalled.
This is why I love democracies. Even moronic Anonymous Cowards can call others 'idiots' on the internets.
At the end of the dotcom bubble I was working in downtown San Francisco. We used to have rolling blackouts and everybody would leave the building for a couple hours and enjoy themselves. Anyways, the servers weren't running and nobody was making money (except for the CEOs, they always make money.)
I asked my brother, an electrician at a Bay Area biotech, what the hell was going on and he didn't know.
It turns out that this fucking company Enron was turning off power-plants willy-nilly so they could profit off the spike in energy consumption somehow. So, while hospitals and grandma Millie are sitting in the dark these jackasses in Texas are laughing their asses off all the way to the bank.
It also turns out that our pussy governor could have sent the National Guard to ONE fucking powerplant and took it over. When the assholes from Enron call to take it offline they would pick up the phone: "could you turn the power off so we can spike the grid and make a lot of money?" "Uhhhh, this is Col. Soandso of the California National Guard. Who's this?" "Nevermind..." hangup. (Enron stops shenanigans.)
Oh well, Ken Lay, may you rot in the eighth circle of Dante's Hell: reserved for those guilty of deliberate fraudulent evil.
That's why "BugmeNot" is one of the greatest extensions ever created. I click on a link, get confronted by a reg page, right click, down to BugmeNot, and I'm in.
"googlenews Iraqi Army you'll see a slew of reports indicating progress."
I recently saw the Iraqi "army" on CNN take off their uniforms in protest over getting assigned to a place other than their hometowns. As far as I know, they have 1 battalion ready, when this administration said they would have 100 by now. Many of the soldiers and policemen are deserting once they are issued weapons. (Wonder where their next stop is?)
Iraqis are getting sick and tired of "democracy" and are probably ready for another tyrant or a civil war if promised running water and electricity. Many Middle-Eastern people I know say this.
How much longer is the public going to put up with news of another soldier killed by an IED? One year? Two? Five? How many of our fine soldiers will get killed before the public says 'enough'? 3000? 5000? 10000?
Many journalists and opinionistas are saying this whole war has been a fiasco, been run poorly, and probably headed for civil war. I don't know where your optimism comes from, probably Fox News.
In high school, a group of us went to an acquaintace's house--his parents were away and he had weed. We went around the back and looked in through the sliding glass door: he was naked, watching a porno, stroking it with a cat on his lap. (He was stroking himself while petting the cat like a bond villain. It was weird.)
We banged on the window and he jumped up (the cat went flying) and ran out of the living room.
Every time we saw him at school, we said "........meeeooooow."
The story got around and wherever he went, it sounded like a packed spay-and-neuter clinic. Needless to say, he transferred schools. His life was ruined. I felt bad about it after I got a conscience. I guess he could have sued us.
First of all, I do not proclaim to be an expert on these subjects. That's why I prefaced the post with "as an amateur."
You say "The funny thing is that beyond our universe something had to have existed". Really? I was summing up the Big Bang as I interpret it through books written for the layman. Science, as far as I know, does not speculate that our universe is an atom of a greater universe. (A stoned kid in "Animal House" posited this theory, as well as The Simpsons, but science doesn't.) Scientists have pretty well mapped out what happened after the Big Bang-- microseconds after. The moment before the Big Bang, as I understand it, is unknowable. One of the great questions of life. No time, no space, no inside, no outside. Blows your mind just to think about it. If you want to get poetic, you could say "... And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."
As for the second answer about evolution: "They were compelled by nature to seek land: to lay eggs, to find food, to mate safely." Trying to sum up an evolutionary milestone in a sentence is hard. You try it.
My third answer regarding the evolution of the eye is for all the creationists who point to the eye's "irreducible complexity." Creationists say there are no intermediate eyes. But there are. They are documented. They say "What good is half-an-eye?" Well, half-an-eye is a whole lot better than no eye when competing for mates, food, and space--when everybody else is blind.
"Thus you get these rather woolly analogies, translating the clear and precise equations into ambiguous and inaccurate English."
Exactly.
He was positing these questions as if they are unanswerable, whereas I, an amateur, can attempt an answer in one sentence. Of course I know that people much smarter than I have devoted their whole lives to these subjects: I was being pithy and flip.
And when I said "close enough for slashdot" I meant "close enough for government work."
Well, I'm just an amateur who's done a bit of reading on this so I'll give it a try:
1. What caused the big bang? or What external force was there that caused the big bang?
Time was created during the Big Bang so "before" is meaningless. There is no "before" or "after" or "cause" and "effect" if there is no Time.
Same goes with "external." The whole universe was contained in this ball of energy so there is no "internal" or "external." So the whole question is absurd and moot.
2. Why did the sea creatures decide to go on land?
They didn't "decide" to do anything. They were compelled by nature to seek land: to lay eggs, to find food, to mate safely.
3. Get them to explain the evolutionary path that lead to creatures having sight.
Here goes: an eye spot that detects light and dark develops into a pit eye, which enables the creature to detect direction. This develops into a Pinhole Eye. This develops a protective layer. The layer develops fluid. Fluid turns into a protein lens. Cornea and Iris separate. Organism is perfected into what we have now. Totally simplified of course but good enough for slashdot!
"So these sons-of-bitches send me crap all day. 'My car's broken down. My baby's been eaten by a dingo.' Boo fucking hoo.
I go to the bar at lunch. Have a bottle of the Dago Red and read this drivel. I would smack them if I knew them. A woman approaches. A fan. I take her back to the room and throw a fuck into her while the email inexorably builds up. It's driving me out of my fucking mind.
After I'm finished with her I look at the thing: a thousand messages from the doomed to the lost. I throw it out the window on the way to the track."
Reminds me of the "Life in Hell" cartoon where a guy dies, gets cryofreezed, then reanimated. His head is attached to a tractor and the future doctor says, "now you have to work off my $100 million bill."
You've hit the nail on the head with the major problem with this pill. More rapists would be walking around free. Rapists might even come to see it as their right to rape, and the victim just takes a pill to forget all about it.
In the episode where they address the stairs issue, it got me thinking that a single Dalek could rid the planet of human beings.
I'm not an expert, but their exterior is made of adamantium or some such, so it couldn't be destroyed by bombs, missiles, nuclear weapons, etc....The only obstacles are time--it would take quite a while to zap everybdoy--and, of course, The Doctor!
N.B.
I know it's only a TV show. It just happens to be the best scifi on TV right now.
Slashdot Mirror
The No-Fly List is a joke anyways.
I read that they don't put REAL wanted terrorists on it because the list is too widely circulated and might tip off the suspect.
copier next.
Just imagine: "Let me see your ID."
Tech: "But I'm putting in the toner. Both hands full."
Junior Exec.: "Somebody call security."
Like that for an HOUR.
That, my good man, was fucking funny. And probably true.
We should do that with everything! Moby Dick becomes "White whale kills crazy bastard."
I was just trying to set the scene. There was this asian guy poll worker who took my ballot. If it had been an old lady I would have said: "a white-haired old lady." If it had been a hot young filippino chick I would have said: "a hot, young filippino chick." You have to get details to make it more readable. No harm intended.
I wrote in "Cthulhu" for Governor and the optical scan machine was jammed so
the poll worker--some asian dude--told me to put the ballot in the lockbox
slot. I had trouble getting it in because one of the pages was bent so the
guy grabbed the ballot and moved them. On top was my write-in: CTHULHU
in big black letters. He paused. Looked at it, looked at me. Swallowed. And
I said "Thank you" and left.
"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
(Been a temp at a dot-com. It sucks.)
I was at a San Francisco restaurant at lunchtime waiting for a friend to arrive near the Metreon off of Market St. I needed a cigarette so I stood in the alley off of 4th St. I was just kind of lazily pacing back and forth puffing on my delicious cigarette and I turned around. Adam Savage walked by on 4th street and happened to look down the alley at me. I just said "Hey Mythbuster!" and stared at him like a stunned monkey. (It was just an odd place to see someone I had seen on TV the night before.)
He replied "How's it goin'?" And I didn't say anything. I just stood there.
I think he was referring to me in that article. People who say "Hey" and nothing else.
Not an exciting story but what the hell...
Oh man. I never even thought of that. If it ever comes up, I'm never, ever going to use an outhouse. I'll go behind it if I have to.
I'll even take the ribbing that comes with it: "that city slicker didn't even know how to use an outhouse!"
"Moods are for cattle and love-play Potatoface! Defend yourself!"
Actually, these are not my ideas. They are 'borrowed' from the authors of "The Smartest Guys in the Room."
If you had read the book or even watched the movie you will see they same the same things. (My knowledge of power grids and deregulation being poor, I have to rely on experts.)
They say at one point that the Governor could have taken charge and sent the National Guard into a single power-plant and they would have found where the problems were coming from and where the energy was going. He didn't. He got recalled.
This is why I love democracies. Even moronic Anonymous Cowards can call others 'idiots' on the internets.
At the end of the dotcom bubble I was working in downtown San Francisco. We used to have rolling blackouts and everybody would leave the building for a couple hours and enjoy themselves. Anyways, the servers weren't running and nobody was making money (except for the CEOs, they always make money.)
I asked my brother, an electrician at a Bay Area biotech, what the hell was going on and he didn't know.
It turns out that this fucking company Enron was turning off power-plants willy-nilly so they could profit off the spike in energy consumption somehow. So, while hospitals and grandma Millie are sitting in the dark these jackasses in Texas are laughing their asses off all the way to the bank.
It also turns out that our pussy governor could have sent the National Guard to ONE fucking powerplant and took it over. When the assholes from Enron call to take it offline they would pick up the phone: "could you turn the power off so we can spike the grid and make a lot of money?" "Uhhhh, this is Col. Soandso of the California National Guard. Who's this?" "Nevermind..." hangup. (Enron stops shenanigans.)
Oh well, Ken Lay, may you rot in the eighth circle of Dante's Hell: reserved for those guilty of deliberate fraudulent evil.
That's why "BugmeNot" is one of the greatest extensions ever created. I click on a link, get confronted by a reg page, right click, down to BugmeNot, and I'm in.
3 seconds.
As in, I stopped paying my bill, and now all my music is "purged" from my computer.
I recently saw the Iraqi "army" on CNN take off their uniforms in protest over getting assigned to a place other than their hometowns. As far as I know, they have 1 battalion ready, when this administration said they would have 100 by now. Many of the soldiers and policemen are deserting once they are issued weapons. (Wonder where their next stop is?)
Iraqis are getting sick and tired of "democracy" and are probably ready for another tyrant or a civil war if promised running water and electricity. Many Middle-Eastern people I know say this.
How much longer is the public going to put up with news of another soldier killed by an IED? One year? Two? Five? How many of our fine soldiers will get killed before the public says 'enough'? 3000? 5000? 10000?
Many journalists and opinionistas are saying this whole war has been a fiasco, been run poorly, and probably headed for civil war. I don't know where your optimism comes from, probably Fox News.
In high school, a group of us went to an acquaintace's house--his parents were away and he had weed. We went around the back and looked in through the sliding glass door: he was naked, watching a porno, stroking it with a cat on his lap. (He was stroking himself while petting the cat like a bond villain. It was weird.)
We banged on the window and he jumped up (the cat went flying) and ran out of the living room.
Every time we saw him at school, we said "........meeeooooow."
The story got around and wherever he went, it sounded like a packed spay-and-neuter clinic. Needless to say, he transferred schools. His life was ruined. I felt bad about it after I got a conscience. I guess he could have sued us.
First of all, I do not proclaim to be an expert on these subjects. That's why I prefaced the post with "as an amateur."
You say "The funny thing is that beyond our universe something had to have existed". Really? I was summing up the Big Bang as I interpret it through books written for the layman. Science, as far as I know, does not speculate that our universe is an atom of a greater universe. (A stoned kid in "Animal House" posited this theory, as well as The Simpsons, but science doesn't.) Scientists have pretty well mapped out what happened after the Big Bang-- microseconds after. The moment before the Big Bang, as I understand it, is unknowable. One of the great questions of life. No time, no space, no inside, no outside. Blows your mind just to think about it. If you want to get poetic, you could say "... And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."
As for the second answer about evolution: "They were compelled by nature to seek land: to lay eggs, to find food, to mate safely." Trying to sum up an evolutionary milestone in a sentence is hard. You try it.
My third answer regarding the evolution of the eye is for all the creationists who point to the eye's "irreducible complexity." Creationists say there are no intermediate eyes. But there are. They are documented. They say "What good is half-an-eye?" Well, half-an-eye is a whole lot better than no eye when competing for mates, food, and space--when everybody else is blind.
"Thus you get these rather woolly analogies, translating the clear and precise equations into ambiguous and inaccurate English."
Exactly.
He was positing these questions as if they are unanswerable, whereas I, an amateur, can attempt an answer in one sentence. Of course I know that people much smarter than I have devoted their whole lives to these subjects: I was being pithy and flip.
And when I said "close enough for slashdot" I meant "close enough for government work."
1. What caused the big bang? or What external force was there that caused the big bang?
Time was created during the Big Bang so "before" is meaningless. There is no "before" or "after" or "cause" and "effect" if there is no Time.
Same goes with "external." The whole universe was contained in this ball of energy so there is no "internal" or "external." So the whole question is absurd and moot.
2. Why did the sea creatures decide to go on land?
They didn't "decide" to do anything. They were compelled by nature to seek land: to lay eggs, to find food, to mate safely.
3. Get them to explain the evolutionary path that lead to creatures having sight.
Here goes: an eye spot that detects light and dark develops into a pit eye, which enables the creature to detect direction. This develops into a Pinhole Eye. This develops a protective layer. The layer develops fluid. Fluid turns into a protein lens. Cornea and Iris separate. Organism is perfected into what we have now. Totally simplified of course but good enough for slashdot!
They were Bi Shepherds!
Jeez.
"So these sons-of-bitches send me crap all day. 'My car's broken down. My baby's been eaten by a dingo.' Boo fucking hoo.
I go to the bar at lunch. Have a bottle of the Dago Red and read this drivel. I would smack them if I knew them. A woman approaches. A fan. I take her back to the room and throw a fuck into her while the email inexorably builds up. It's driving me out of my fucking mind.
After I'm finished with her I look at the thing: a thousand messages from the doomed to the lost. I throw it out the window on the way to the track."
Reminds me of the "Life in Hell" cartoon where a guy dies, gets cryofreezed, then reanimated. His head is attached to a tractor and the future doctor says, "now you have to work off my $100 million bill."
You've hit the nail on the head with the major problem with this pill. More rapists would be walking around free. Rapists might even come to see it as their right to rape, and the victim just takes a pill to forget all about it.
I'm not an expert, but their exterior is made of adamantium or some such, so it couldn't be destroyed by bombs, missiles, nuclear weapons, etc....The only obstacles are time--it would take quite a while to zap everybdoy--and, of course, The Doctor!
N.B.
I know it's only a TV show. It just happens to be the best scifi on TV right now.
"Civil disobedience is still disobedience"