Calvin and Hobbes was my number one inspiration to explore, growing up. Seeing Calvin philosophize while riding a red wagon led directly to me pondering the world while climbing a river gorge... Reading Spaceman Spiff turned Nelson's Ledges into a hasty retreat through a hostile alien environment.
Part of the comic strip's allure to me in particular, though I didn't recognize it until years later, was that Bill Watterson wrote the strip in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, about ten miles from where I grew up. Cleveland weather patters are fairly unique, so no other comic strip--or really any fiction I read--I read captured the effect of the rain, snow, and winds of the Cleveland area on an inquisitive kid the way that Calvin and Hobbes did... because Bill Watterson (and Calvin) looked out the window and saw the same little portion of sky that I did.
Not long ago, as I paged through my old Calvin and Hobbes collection, I noticed a fairly familiar sight on the back cover of "The Essential Calvin and Hobbes". There, in fully Bill Watterson cartoony glory, was an image of a Godzilla-sized Calvin trampling my favorite high school date spot: the Chagrin Falls Triangle.
How do you want people to remember that 6-year-old and his tiger?
I vote for "Calvin and Hobbes, Eighth Wonder of the World."
Don't forget about dropping nuclear weapons in the center of heavily populated civilian centers with no military targets whatsoever. [emphasis added]
Morality of the atomic bombing aside, that is not a factual statement. Japan had a policy of merging the civilian and military throughout the war, to the point of surrounding potential bombing targets with captured British and American POW's lined up for slaughter.
The city of Nagasaki had been one of the largest sea ports in southern Japan and was of great wartime importance because of its wide-ranging industrial activity, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials.
Hiroshima:
A number of military camps were located nearby, including the headquarters of the Fifth Division and Field Marshal Shunroku Hata's 2nd General Army Headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. Hiroshima was a minor supply and logistics base for the Japanese military. The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops.
Debate is good, just be sure to get your facts straight.
It's thermodynamics, you can't make capital out of thin air.
Yes, you can. That's the whole basis of economics.
If I purchase a block of stone for $100 from a quarry and tools for $100 from a smith, and then proceed to carve a statue that is valued at and purchased for $1000, I have just added $800 to the economy. It doesn't matter the number of green bills or gold coins that are floating around, value is *created* in an economy just like that.
That is how the stock market works. It is a network of investment that allows for increased economic growth and better returns for all parties, rather than each business standing alone. Why do you think the Great Depression hurt the average American so badly? If what you said is true, then the Great Depression should have been a boon to the common worker as the "capital" would have flowed out of the hands of the big companies in the stock market and to "Main street". But that is not what happened. For the same reason, a non-bubble surge in the stock market indicates a real increase in wealth throughout the economy.
The American people chose to go to war by supporting Bush.
Except for the part where Bush originally ran on a platform of non-intervention, diplomatic involvement, and "we are not the world's police force".
Not that I enjoyed a single thing the guy did while crash landing my country over eight years, but you should see John Stewart's Bush vs. Bush debate, comparing the things he said on the campaign trail to the rhetoric he took in office. I know that politician campaign promises have a snowball's chance of making it into reality during their term, but I have never--not even with Obama and government openness--seen such a turnaround as Bush made on foreign policy... Bush didn't just fail to keep his promises, he made totally new ones. It's like some sort of presidential mental breakdown followed shortly after 9/11.
Now, 2004? Well, there was no excuse for that except Kerry rolling a 1 on his Diplomacy check.
You should have seen their "detailed" psuedoscientific claims referring to their revolutionary lead-acid batteries... I offer a few quotes:
the proper use of the overpotentials in these double surfaces can produce current that moves against the voltage.
in addition to the external charges of molecules and atoms that they normally consider, there are also ongoing a huge variety of nuclear currents and charging that presently do not appear in any book on batteries
Again, we leave further analysis along that line to the experts, only appealing to them that time-reversal effects must also be considered.
People can believe whatever they want. But face it, few freely choose their religion. Most just go about beliveing whatever their parents foisted on them.[...]Young people are given the choice: have faith in some crazy shit, or give up your whole support system.
I know this goes differently in different places, but where and when I grew up (northern Ohio in the 90's), plenty of my friends took a second (and third, and fourth) look at the religion they inherited at birth when we were high school / college age. Some recognized it as a tradition from their parents, some gave it up altogether, some rediscovered it on their own terms, and some (like me) converted to a new religion altogether.... but in none of these cases were the kids rejected/disowned/kicked out because they questioned their beliefs.
Now if there were only a way to encourage parents to love their kids more than they love what their kids believe... wait a minute, don't most religions already teach that very lesson?
So either, (a) everyone will rush out to watch their online TV on Comcast XFinity, so that their viewing counts in the ratings (unlikely), or (b) Hulu and everyone else starts to put more advertisements on their shows (more likely, but would also probably mean the death of Hulu)."
Or (c), Nielsen Ratings begin to lose their importance, clout, and influence over the next few years.
the best camera is the one you have on you at the time.
Indeed. I take spur of the moment pictures of friends and family, random things my 1-year-old does, or hillarious engrish on my Blackberry's half-decent quality camera. When I take a trip, I bring along my far superior-yet-bulky digital camera to capture landscapes, cities, buildings, and flora -- the kind that I'll probably be printing and framing at some point in the future.
The spots won't be moving faster than light, they will actually be a blur or line spread across the surfaces they hit.
You're confusing perception with reality, and they are two very different things.
I think the GP was right, any you may have it backwards. The human eye will perceive a blur or line, due to the limited "frame refresh" and averaging of our optical system. In reality, though, the "spot", as defined by the location where the photons are hitting/reflecting from the surface, will be traveling faster than light. No information can be conveyed, however, as no point on this surface can directly use this phenomenon to actually communicate anything faster than light.
remember that over the course of the previous few hundred years the Catholics were both the oppressed AND the oppressors at various times all across Europe, and they certainly gave as good as they got.
Which fact didn't make life one whit better for a Catholic living in 17th Century England.
My HP tx2530ea (dual Turion64 X2 Ultra @ 2.1) with ATI Radeon HD 3200 rocks Oblivion at 20-60fps, Fallout 3 at just a little less, X3 Reunion, and Far Cry 2 all without burning my lap, whilst charging. I have it with me and on, 24/7.
The issue with the Acer laptops is not melting plastic due to overloading the system, but rather a potential electric short involving the microphone that pumps unprotected current through the device, potentially melting the casing and burning the user.
It is certainly a serious issue and a dumb design flaw, but it has nothing to do with the heating/cooling of the CPU or its performance at load or while charging.
Which sucks for those of us with Celiac disease (i.e. the "wheat sort-of-allergy"). Last time I was on a Southwest flight, the flight attendants came by with a copious selection of snacks, multiple times during the flight. They allowed me to select from cookies, shortbread crackers, graham crackers, some other cookies, or pretzels.
Boo. (Though I have noticed that, recently, more and more airlines serve peanuts that somehow still manage to contain the ingredient "wheat"....What?)
Many people with allergies to fur can react to particles in the air as well, or find the smell absolutely revolting. Should we ban dogs and cats from traveling in planes?
Having flown once with a pet when moving across the country, I can say that there are plenty of hoops to jump through to fly with a pet. You have to let the airlines know way ahead of time that you plan to fly with a pet, we were put in the farthest back corner of the airplane despite purchasing tickets far ahead of time, and the small print sounded like my wife and I could get bumped if someone with a severe pet allergy signed up for the flight.
...Which actually makes sense to me. I'd prefer to suffer some inconveniences in order to avoid my wife's cat preventing another passenger from breathing for a few hours.
True, though I was kind of hoping for a warning that would let me at least stay off the roads or something on Earthquake Day. I know people talk about giving enough advance warning to stop driving and pull over, but can you imagine a CA highway packed full of cars traveling at 55 MPH at somewhat-less-than-safe-distance all trying to "stop driving and safely pull over" at once? Eeeeew.
You're a few hours late, but yes, we did have a magnitude 4.2 earthquake here in the Bay Area this morning. Of course, I'm from Cleveland, so I just assumed it was another big truck passing by the building, until I realized that I was nowhere near a major road.
I was impressed, though, at how quickly the USGS did send us all an e-mail detailing the quake, epicenter, magnitude, etc. They are certainly on the ball when it comes to the San Andreas fault, at least.
Now if we could only find a way to get advance warnings... unfortunately a time machine may be the most physically feasible method of doing that.
If a defect of lacking one whole chromosome is non-lethal (Down's syndrome), a minor damage to your genome has a really good chance of not affecting your offspring at all.
Lacking a single chromosome (or even a part of one) is pretty darn lethal. Down's Syndrome is a trisomy--i.e. an extra copy of a chromosome--which causes systems in the body to go out of balance. Down's Syndrome is one of the most "mild" trisomies, as most other duplicated chromosomes are also outright fatal.
Aside from that, tiny changes in other important parts of the genetic code can cause serious problems in the body, even given the duplication of genes between two chromosomes. For example, a great many of the connective tissue disorders (Marfan Syndrome, Loeys-Dietz Syndrome, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, etc.) are autosomal dominant and are caused by a single genetic bit (well, "quint" as there are four possible values) flipping in just one of the chromosomes. The body has natural protections against this, from simple error-checking of the genome to redundancy in which genetic byte codes for which protein (imagine if similar bytes meant the same opcode) to redundancy in the chromosomes. However, a single base (bit) error can cause a "stop codon" (think string terminator) to appear in the middle of a gene, ruining half of the body's supply of a particular enzyme. Sometimes this is not noticeable at all due to the other chromosome picking up the slack, sometimes it causes notable changes in the body, and other times it is completely fatal.
Perhaps this viral DNA is some of the un-parsed junk DNA, so our body really doesn't care what happens to it, or perhaps, as you mentioned, it has somehow provided beneficial adaptations... But small changes to the genome can cause big changes in offspring, and often not beneficial ones.
Also, anybody who knows how cell phones work knows better than to expect uninterrupted calls while driving. You're playing tarzan between towers. There isn't always a long vine in reach. Unless you're doing 120.
Unless, y'know, you are on CDMA2000. Voice or EV-DO, I've played tower Tarzan in the middle of nowhere without seeing interruptions.
I lost all data-related connections as of about 3:00 PM, yesterday, on my Verizon BB Storm. As of this morning, the internet is back, but e-mail is still down.
I called Verizon's tech support yesterday and the rep said that they were flooded with calls from Blackberry users all asking the same questions, so I am pretty certain that this was, in the words of Ron Burgundy, "kind of a big deal". The worst part is that this is the second such outage in a week! It is starting to look as though Gmail has better uptime than BIS.
And no, before you ask, Bing has not mysteriously appeared on my phone. The default search provider is and always has been Google.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a trope for that.
It's called Nintendo Hard.
Part of the comic strip's allure to me in particular, though I didn't recognize it until years later, was that Bill Watterson wrote the strip in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, about ten miles from where I grew up. Cleveland weather patters are fairly unique, so no other comic strip--or really any fiction I read--I read captured the effect of the rain, snow, and winds of the Cleveland area on an inquisitive kid the way that Calvin and Hobbes did... because Bill Watterson (and Calvin) looked out the window and saw the same little portion of sky that I did.
Not long ago, as I paged through my old Calvin and Hobbes collection, I noticed a fairly familiar sight on the back cover of "The Essential Calvin and Hobbes". There, in fully Bill Watterson cartoony glory, was an image of a Godzilla-sized Calvin trampling my favorite high school date spot: the Chagrin Falls Triangle.
How do you want people to remember that 6-year-old and his tiger?
I vote for "Calvin and Hobbes, Eighth Wonder of the World."
Indeed.
Don't forget about dropping nuclear weapons in the center of heavily populated civilian centers with no military targets whatsoever. [emphasis added]
Morality of the atomic bombing aside, that is not a factual statement. Japan had a policy of merging the civilian and military throughout the war, to the point of surrounding potential bombing targets with captured British and American POW's lined up for slaughter.
From Wikipedia:
Nagasaki:
The city of Nagasaki had been one of the largest sea ports in southern Japan and was of great wartime importance because of its wide-ranging industrial activity, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials.
Hiroshima:
A number of military camps were located nearby, including the headquarters of the Fifth Division and Field Marshal Shunroku Hata's 2nd General Army Headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. Hiroshima was a minor supply and logistics base for the Japanese military. The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops.
Debate is good, just be sure to get your facts straight.
It's thermodynamics, you can't make capital out of thin air.
Yes, you can. That's the whole basis of economics.
If I purchase a block of stone for $100 from a quarry and tools for $100 from a smith, and then proceed to carve a statue that is valued at and purchased for $1000, I have just added $800 to the economy. It doesn't matter the number of green bills or gold coins that are floating around, value is *created* in an economy just like that.
That is how the stock market works. It is a network of investment that allows for increased economic growth and better returns for all parties, rather than each business standing alone. Why do you think the Great Depression hurt the average American so badly? If what you said is true, then the Great Depression should have been a boon to the common worker as the "capital" would have flowed out of the hands of the big companies in the stock market and to "Main street". But that is not what happened. For the same reason, a non-bubble surge in the stock market indicates a real increase in wealth throughout the economy.
The American people chose to go to war by supporting Bush.
Except for the part where Bush originally ran on a platform of non-intervention, diplomatic involvement, and "we are not the world's police force".
Not that I enjoyed a single thing the guy did while crash landing my country over eight years, but you should see John Stewart's Bush vs. Bush debate, comparing the things he said on the campaign trail to the rhetoric he took in office. I know that politician campaign promises have a snowball's chance of making it into reality during their term, but I have never--not even with Obama and government openness--seen such a turnaround as Bush made on foreign policy... Bush didn't just fail to keep his promises, he made totally new ones. It's like some sort of presidential mental breakdown followed shortly after 9/11.
Now, 2004? Well, there was no excuse for that except Kerry rolling a 1 on his Diplomacy check.
the proper use of the overpotentials in these double surfaces can produce current that moves against the voltage.
in addition to the external charges of molecules and atoms that they normally consider, there are also ongoing a huge variety of nuclear currents and charging that presently do not appear in any book on batteries
Again, we leave further analysis along that line to the experts, only appealing to them that time-reversal effects must also be considered.
[Emphasis mine]
... that is, before the author gets into the whole "Big Energy is going to buy us and silence us or kill us!"
And that is just scratching the surface, here: http://www.greaterthings.com/News/Tilley/how/bob_colvin_bearden.htm
People can believe whatever they want. But face it, few freely choose their religion. Most just go about beliveing whatever their parents foisted on them.[...]Young people are given the choice: have faith in some crazy shit, or give up your whole support system.
I know this goes differently in different places, but where and when I grew up (northern Ohio in the 90's), plenty of my friends took a second (and third, and fourth) look at the religion they inherited at birth when we were high school / college age. Some recognized it as a tradition from their parents, some gave it up altogether, some rediscovered it on their own terms, and some (like me) converted to a new religion altogether. ... but in none of these cases were the kids rejected/disowned/kicked out because they questioned their beliefs.
Now if there were only a way to encourage parents to love their kids more than they love what their kids believe... wait a minute, don't most religions already teach that very lesson?
...Huh.
So either, (a) everyone will rush out to watch their online TV on Comcast XFinity, so that their viewing counts in the ratings (unlikely), or (b) Hulu and everyone else starts to put more advertisements on their shows (more likely, but would also probably mean the death of Hulu)."
Or (c), Nielsen Ratings begin to lose their importance, clout, and influence over the next few years.
the best camera is the one you have on you at the time.
Indeed. I take spur of the moment pictures of friends and family, random things my 1-year-old does, or hillarious engrish on my Blackberry's half-decent quality camera. When I take a trip, I bring along my far superior-yet-bulky digital camera to capture landscapes, cities, buildings, and flora -- the kind that I'll probably be printing and framing at some point in the future.
The best tool for the job...
I'm only 16 bits, you insensitive clod!
The spots won't be moving faster than light, they will actually be a blur or line spread across the surfaces they hit.
You're confusing perception with reality, and they are two very different things.
I think the GP was right, any you may have it backwards. The human eye will perceive a blur or line, due to the limited "frame refresh" and averaging of our optical system. In reality, though, the "spot", as defined by the location where the photons are hitting/reflecting from the surface, will be traveling faster than light. No information can be conveyed, however, as no point on this surface can directly use this phenomenon to actually communicate anything faster than light.
Nah... I read it in Elrond's voice.
remember that over the course of the previous few hundred years the Catholics were both the oppressed AND the oppressors at various times all across Europe, and they certainly gave as good as they got.
Which fact didn't make life one whit better for a Catholic living in 17th Century England.
open source pizzas.
I'll take mine with anchovies and extra xargs.
My HP tx2530ea (dual Turion64 X2 Ultra @ 2.1) with ATI Radeon HD 3200 rocks Oblivion at 20-60fps, Fallout 3 at just a little less, X3 Reunion, and Far Cry 2 all without burning my lap, whilst charging. I have it with me and on, 24/7.
The issue with the Acer laptops is not melting plastic due to overloading the system, but rather a potential electric short involving the microphone that pumps unprotected current through the device, potentially melting the casing and burning the user.
It is certainly a serious issue and a dumb design flaw, but it has nothing to do with the heating/cooling of the CPU or its performance at load or while charging.
Stop serving nuts
Which sucks for those of us with Celiac disease (i.e. the "wheat sort-of-allergy"). Last time I was on a Southwest flight, the flight attendants came by with a copious selection of snacks, multiple times during the flight. They allowed me to select from cookies, shortbread crackers, graham crackers, some other cookies, or pretzels.
...What?)
Boo. (Though I have noticed that, recently, more and more airlines serve peanuts that somehow still manage to contain the ingredient "wheat".
Many people with allergies to fur can react to particles in the air as well, or find the smell absolutely revolting. Should we ban dogs and cats from traveling in planes?
Having flown once with a pet when moving across the country, I can say that there are plenty of hoops to jump through to fly with a pet. You have to let the airlines know way ahead of time that you plan to fly with a pet, we were put in the farthest back corner of the airplane despite purchasing tickets far ahead of time, and the small print sounded like my wife and I could get bumped if someone with a severe pet allergy signed up for the flight.
...Which actually makes sense to me. I'd prefer to suffer some inconveniences in order to avoid my wife's cat preventing another passenger from breathing for a few hours.
True, though I was kind of hoping for a warning that would let me at least stay off the roads or something on Earthquake Day. I know people talk about giving enough advance warning to stop driving and pull over, but can you imagine a CA highway packed full of cars traveling at 55 MPH at somewhat-less-than-safe-distance all trying to "stop driving and safely pull over" at once? Eeeeew.
Twitter users can be repurposed as sensors for vibration, voltage and even temperature!
And Walmart sales.
You're a few hours late, but yes, we did have a magnitude 4.2 earthquake here in the Bay Area this morning. Of course, I'm from Cleveland, so I just assumed it was another big truck passing by the building, until I realized that I was nowhere near a major road.
I was impressed, though, at how quickly the USGS did send us all an e-mail detailing the quake, epicenter, magnitude, etc. They are certainly on the ball when it comes to the San Andreas fault, at least.
Now if we could only find a way to get advance warnings... unfortunately a time machine may be the most physically feasible method of doing that.
If a defect of lacking one whole chromosome is non-lethal (Down's syndrome), a minor damage to your genome has a really good chance of not affecting your offspring at all.
Lacking a single chromosome (or even a part of one) is pretty darn lethal. Down's Syndrome is a trisomy--i.e. an extra copy of a chromosome--which causes systems in the body to go out of balance. Down's Syndrome is one of the most "mild" trisomies, as most other duplicated chromosomes are also outright fatal.
Aside from that, tiny changes in other important parts of the genetic code can cause serious problems in the body, even given the duplication of genes between two chromosomes. For example, a great many of the connective tissue disorders (Marfan Syndrome, Loeys-Dietz Syndrome, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, etc.) are autosomal dominant and are caused by a single genetic bit (well, "quint" as there are four possible values) flipping in just one of the chromosomes. The body has natural protections against this, from simple error-checking of the genome to redundancy in which genetic byte codes for which protein (imagine if similar bytes meant the same opcode) to redundancy in the chromosomes. However, a single base (bit) error can cause a "stop codon" (think string terminator) to appear in the middle of a gene, ruining half of the body's supply of a particular enzyme. Sometimes this is not noticeable at all due to the other chromosome picking up the slack, sometimes it causes notable changes in the body, and other times it is completely fatal.
Perhaps this viral DNA is some of the un-parsed junk DNA, so our body really doesn't care what happens to it, or perhaps, as you mentioned, it has somehow provided beneficial adaptations... But small changes to the genome can cause big changes in offspring, and often not beneficial ones.
Hmm. Between the beaming lights and the background music, it appeared to be either an Animusic production or a Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert.
Also, anybody who knows how cell phones work knows better than to expect uninterrupted calls while driving. You're playing tarzan between towers. There isn't always a long vine in reach. Unless you're doing 120.
Unless, y'know, you are on CDMA2000. Voice or EV-DO, I've played tower Tarzan in the middle of nowhere without seeing interruptions.
My '98 Saturn, casual street wear, and BlackBerry Storm reject your hypothesis, but still sorely miss our Wikipedias.
:-p
And besides, I'm type B+, according to my donor card.
I lost all data-related connections as of about 3:00 PM, yesterday, on my Verizon BB Storm. As of this morning, the internet is back, but e-mail is still down.
I called Verizon's tech support yesterday and the rep said that they were flooded with calls from Blackberry users all asking the same questions, so I am pretty certain that this was, in the words of Ron Burgundy, "kind of a big deal". The worst part is that this is the second such outage in a week! It is starting to look as though Gmail has better uptime than BIS.
And no, before you ask, Bing has not mysteriously appeared on my phone. The default search provider is and always has been Google.