Ya know... I thought the same thing you do, as I was drawing. Then I noticed that my friend Hugh, who was modelling nude for some of my college's art classes, was almost always dating one of the women in one of the classes for which he was modelling. I asked him about it and he said he ended up sleeping with one of the students from the class about every third modelling session. And he's not a great-looking guy, tho' he does have a reasonably nice build. He didn't brag about it, either, which is why I tend to believe him: he just answered my question when I asked him about why he was always having coffee/lunch/study sessions with women in the art department when he was a math major.
Probably not: mitochondria have their own genetic material, and I'm pretty sure this doesn't work with them. (Their internals are odd and moderately different than the nuclear DNA proteins.) Mitochondria are inherited from the mother cell whole, and slowly divide on their own to repopulate a new daughter cell.
If you wanted to build a super muscle you'd probably mess about with its ability to produce actin and myosin and with its nutrient bandwidth -- getting it to be able to hold more glycogen in the first place and absorb glucose from the bloodstream and dump lactate into the bloodstream more quickly. But then you need a faster circulatory system and a faster liver lactate/malate shuttle. And stuff. Better to just buy an exoskeletal robot.
One question I haven't heard answered is where they're hitting the missiles. It's possible that they're above (for reasonable approximations) the atmosphere when this is going on. That's supposed to be the case for the impact-based ABM stuff.
Something that's not discussed at all in this article, and most people don't think about, is that it's probably harder to see the incomings with enough resolution to accurately hit them. You have a small window of time to notice them in the first place and then accurately locate them and their vector. A big problem that complicates this is: you can't rely solely on satellites, because you might not have them anymore. That's more of a Cold War worry, but if one missile gets through, its effects might sufficiently disrupt your communications that you can't get good data on the subsequent ones. The ABM missiles rely on stars for locating their targets because they don't think satellites and ground-based detection-and-ranging are going to be available. (Sobering thought: if enough has been destroyed that they can't get data from any ground-based sources, what, exactly, are they protecting?)
Huge flying lasers were originally proposed as Star-Wars-Era weapons, to stop many big intercontinental missiles (and shoot down the other side's satellites, by the way) but since the DoD's mission has changed, now they're being thrown at that problem instead. (where it makes more sense...)
I'm babbling about stuff that would be better as a root-level comment rather than a reply-to-reply-to-reply. You're entirely right: trying to protect against a laser is probably pointless. What happens then is someone trying to get a missile through just makes more cheaper ones and relies on quantity. In this circumstance, that's in the defender's favor, though, because the amount of support equipment is huge compared to the amount of offensive material, and engineering a small-but-still-effective payload is *much* harder than a big dirty payload.
Which is why it'll be transported by truck rather than rocket.
Obviously we have no idea what aliens might put on the outsides of their UFO's. (I've heard about confederate flags being seen painted on them, but that's not relevant.) With that said, the problem with trying to make a reflective surface that'll stop a laser of this power is that we simply don't know of anything that is 100% reflective at UV wavelengths and at those wavelengths absorbed photons have sufficient energy to instantly break molecular bonds. This isn't melting, where you have to heat atoms up enough that their kinetic energy enables them to break their bonds -- this is ablation, where the photons actually affect the bonding electrons and the bonds just go away. If you pulse the laser at a high repetition rate the debris from each ablation blast clear out pretty well, increasing your material removal efficiency at the cost of time.
It is possible that incoming UFO's or whatever might have external armor screens and return fire if those screens get hit, while they soak up (briefly) the laser power, analogous reactive armor on modern tanks. But just polishing them up so they're good and shiny, probably isn't going to work.
While I don't disagree with you from a natural perspective, I'm guessing that humans even 200 years from now will be almost unrecognizeable to us (and vice-versa) because of the biotech explosion. Already, plastic surgery is so common as to escape notice. If you went back in time 100 years you'd be startled and appalled at the number of people with disfiguring features: hare-lips, birthmarks, horrible teeth, blindness-from-birth. We'd recognize them as human, and being very much like us, but a walk through New York City in 1890 would give you a significantly different idea than a walk through Beverly Hills today. I think that's going to be vastly exaggerated in the frighteningly near future and we're going to routinely see people who look like pro body builders, seven feet tall, with perfect teeth, on every street, and people living into their 120's on a regular basis. In the next 40 years I think that'll be mostly from childhood drugs and treatments, but in the next 40 a lot of it will be genetic -- people will be designing their children to only vaguely reflect their own genes, and in large part reflect genes of whatever they consider successful.
I know a lot of people are saying stuff like this, and a lot of people are scoffing, but consider coyotes and wolves, that have remained the same for tens of thousands of years. Now look at a chihuahua and a st. bernard and a dalmation. That's what people will do if they get a chance to mess with something's genetics even in a limited way. Imagine what they'll do when A: they can put in any genes they want, and B: it's their children, whose future success might hinge on their appearance or height or basketball-throwing ability.
On the surface, I think tax cuts tend to exaggerate societal stratification insofar as they shift the responsibility of funding the government onto the poor.
However, I think there is something else going on here: I think that tax cuts do serve a political purpose, coz almost everyone appreciates (and votes for) more money in their pocket, and I think that overseas wars serve a political purpose, but as an overall strategy I think both those are being pushed to financially destabilize the US government enough to justify ending Social Security on the grounds that we're in a financial state that demands emergency action. There isn't any way to get rid of SS through normal channels without committing political suicide, so manufacturing an economic catastrophe is the best way to do it, and that's exactly where I see the country heading. That would, in the 20-years-down-the-line point of view, be appalling. It'll be no skin off my nose, since I already have enough for retirement right now and am just making it more comfortable and assured, but for many many people it's going to be an enormous problem.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe this isn't going to happen, but I'm betting it will.
I'm not good at sarcasm... and yeah, I'm in an income bracket in which his cuts have been good for me, personally, but I know a lot of people for whom they have been not quite so good, and I suspect the long-term effects are going to be just appalling, for all of us.
A lot of Manhattan probably already does. Usually urban centers and places where social services are in high demand are strongly Democratic -- since they stand to gain from those social services (like police availability and homeless shelters.) Those people who have the money to live in gated communities and commute into work, however, tend to vote strongly Republican since they've essentially paid for their own services already and resent paying for someone else's. It's very much like the American health care system... The problem is that somehow, politics has become dependent on stupid issues that don't actually have any effect whatsoever on most people's lives -- evolution/creation, gay marriage, being the two big ones, and to a lesser extent, abortion and gun control. (And, behind all those, civil liberties, freedom-of-speech, and the like, but both major parties pay lip service to those while curtailing them whenever they can.) Many people are voting for people based on intangible, perceived moral and ethical issues, and getting politicians who are making decisions that have direct, tangible effects on their lives, without ever making that cause/effect connection. Or maybe they do, and they'd just rather vote for someone who makes their lives tangibly worse but espouses family values. That tactic certainly worked out for the leaders of the evangelical mega-churches in the '80's.
I'd like one too, and for that price I'd probably get one...
Okay, more seriously, I came to a huge realization one day when I was talking to a friend who is a medical translator at a hospital. A family brought in their daughter, who was really sick from an infection that was easy to treat, but she had a bunch of other medical problems that came from living in a rathole. My friend asked the family (who were from Mexico) about their living conditions -- trailer, no running water, no power, coz they'd not paid their bills -- and got a pretty good idea of why the kid, and the rest of the family, kept getting worms and horrible infections and all this stuff. Then she went out to the parking lot with the father of the family so he could get something from his car and saw that he was driving an almost-brand-new, enormous Ford pickup, with almost every option. He had $45,000 of car and his family was living in the dark without toilets. She asked him why he didn't put more money into his housing situation and he replied, basically, that they were only living there for another couple of months, at which point he'd have enough money to move the family back home to Mexico. She asked how long they'd been in the US and he said ten years. The point being: he thought, every day, that he was only a couple of months away from his goal (going home) and it made sense to buy a nice car for when he went home but it didn't make sense to spend money on a house if he was going home in a couple of months. The fact that he *wasn't* going home in a couple of months, that he wasn't ever going to get that big financial break he was expecting, never occurred to him. Or at least he couldn't admit it. So having an expensive car despite being dirt poor was, for him, a reasonable decision.
Your downmarket yuppies might be in a wholly different situation, and might very well be welfare cheats -- but there are people who do things that to an observer look really stupid, like getting a car they can't afford -- who are dirt poor. Indeed, that's very likely WHY they are dirt poor. One time I went to a car dealership, intending to buy a car, and because of poor timing and poor planning, got to hear a manager rip one of the salesmen a new one because the salesman had advised a kid to buy a used car that would fit in the kid's budget rather than telling the kid to buy a new pickup that cost 3x as much, because, as the manager said, the dealership would get way more money *and* they'd get to foreclose on the car when the kid couldn't make the payments and sell the car again. The salesman promised he'd never try to talk someone into getting a car that matched their budget again, that he'd try and get them into the most expensive thing they'd accept. When you're dealing with people who make poor decisions -- part of why they have no money -- you can talk them into a lot of stupid stuff.
It IS, though: it's your lens hardening because it's a protein and it cross-links over time. They're now making replacement lenses that are soft, that they attach to the existing muscles in an intraocular lens replacement surgery, and they restore your ability to focus up close -- they erase presbyopia. I didn't get to see the surgery but this 80 year old guy had this done recently and his vision's like he's 15 again, focus from infinity down to a near point of like a foot away from his eye.
I think I've exceeded this theoretical limit for the simple reason that while the diagonal on my vehicle is, of course, longer than the length, I'm not scooting my car in with the diagonal parallel to the curb, but at a significantly lower angle. (Long skinny car.) Tho' I haven't ever actually measured, so maybe I'm wrong.
My brother-in-law owns a Mercedes Benz. It's a 1968 diesel that he runs on homebrew fuel, and its blue book value is $480. Yes, four hundred eighty dollars. The sunroof doesn't work. Only one window works. The air conditioning compressor is shot, the heater blower doesn't work, and the CV joints on the rear wheel drive (Mercedes had independent suspension on the rear of the car in '68, can you believe that?) are shot and he can't find a replacement. He's offered to trade his Mercedes for anything made since 1988, has offered it for sale, and now it looks like he's just going to have to sell it to a junkyard for scrap.
People still tell him "you must be rich: you drive a Benz."
Have you ever considered safety wiring for those bolts you really, really don't want to work loose? On a helicopter there's a nut called the Jesus nut. I bet you can tell, just from that name, what its function is. It's safety-wired. So are the bolts that hold an airplane's propellor on (and, actually, just about every other nut, bolt, or threaded fastener/adjuster on the vehicle except for sheet metal screws.) It's easy to learn and it works quite well. It costs less than smart fasteners. I use safety wiring on my mountain bike so I don't lose pieces in races.
Ya KNOW, now that you bring it up... if you talk to relationship counselors, one of the things many of them will tell you is that, to a first approximation, the reason men get into relationships is for sex and the reason women get into relationships is for emotional and financial security, which has a lot to do with the sorts of arguments that are typical of relationships.
Personally, I think cars suck, but it was a facile analogy so I went with it even though it glosses over a lot of material.
Yeah, so, I participated in this general conversation on, essentially, a BBS, where my brother was also a member. Talking about premarital sex with one's brother: eugh. Anyway, he's quicker-witted and funnier than I am, so I posted my "would you buy a car without test-driving it?" analogy and almost immediately afterwards, he posted "that's a great analogy! I'll keep it in mind! Now, please tell me where you buy your toothbrushes so I can never, ever shop there again?"
If I were *half* as funny as he is I'd be +5 funny every single day...
1. Virgins are awful. The last three women I've dated have two or three digit histories and boy howdy there's just no comparison.
2. Recent (last fifteen years) trend: a sizeable proportion of young women who have been told they need to remain virgins until marriage are engaging in other practices, some of which have led (through carelessness and, shall we say, adjacent activities) to pregnancy. Also the entire range of STD's.
3. It's interesting to hear that you wouldn't sleep with a woman until you've married her. May I take it you don't test-drive cars until after you've purchased them?
>While I know that you're trying to be all biting and sarcastic, you're more or less right regarding Christians. Part of scripture states that if a brother commits sin and we know of it, but we do not speak to help him mend his ways, we too are liable for his sin. I can't speak as to other religions though.
Matt. 7:1 "Do not judge, or you too will be judged."
And yes, I am aware of the context from which that verse is (often unfairly) extracted: I think it applies quite well, here.
I had a friend who'd shoehorned a blown RX-7 rotary into a Miata. That thing was one seriously terrifying car. I was glad he'd had the good sense to weld in a four-point rollbar. Some day it'd be fun to get an older Miata. They seem like really good starters for something loud, expensive, unsafe, and fun. And now you've gotten me curious: I'll have to talk to some engine importer friends and see what's up with it.
Now *that* is a funny answer. That's exactly the sort of inappropriate response that typifies the type of geek where you know something's wrong when you talk to them, but you just don't know quite what.
Much of an autistic person's challenge is recognizing emotions, or (apparently) more to the point, knowing what parts of a person's face to look at to recognize what the person is feeling. So, if you can tell a person "the person you're talking to is feeling very nervous" the person can do a memorized response to that situation, like running a macro. It's like an intelligent person who is blind, having a seeing eye dog that indicates when the walk light has turned on. Autistic people are not generally stupid people, they just physically cannot recognize the meaning of (or maybe even the existence of) emotional and nonliteral communication. And of course there's a broad continuum, from people that apparently don't recognize anything -- people, horses, chairs -- and essentially have no trustable input, to people who just talk a little too loudly and stand a little too close. ("He who laughs last, may be mildly autistic.") Oliver Sachs and particularly Tempel Grandin have written extensively about this. Tempel has said she thinks she hallucinates both sounds and visuals and even when she's pretty sure that what she sees is real, it's not useful. Someone else wrote about micro-tracking the eyes of people watching movies. During intense emotional scenes, most people would have their eyes jumping from one character's face (more particularly eyes and mouth) to the other, while an autistic person would look equally at the chair, the lightswitch, a character's knee.
It could just be the dollar/yen trading rate?
Yeah, I knew kids who were sticking nitrous on a stock Corolla and turning 12-second quarter miles... once. Then they'd take in the trashed Corolla and get another engine.
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Ya know... I thought the same thing you do, as I was drawing. Then I noticed that my friend Hugh, who was modelling nude for some of my college's art classes, was almost always dating one of the women in one of the classes for which he was modelling. I asked him about it and he said he ended up sleeping with one of the students from the class about every third modelling session. And he's not a great-looking guy, tho' he does have a reasonably nice build. He didn't brag about it, either, which is why I tend to believe him: he just answered my question when I asked him about why he was always having coffee/lunch/study sessions with women in the art department when he was a math major.
Probably not: mitochondria have their own genetic material, and I'm pretty sure this doesn't work with them. (Their internals are odd and moderately different than the nuclear DNA proteins.) Mitochondria are inherited from the mother cell whole, and slowly divide on their own to repopulate a new daughter cell.
If you wanted to build a super muscle you'd probably mess about with its ability to produce actin and myosin and with its nutrient bandwidth -- getting it to be able to hold more glycogen in the first place and absorb glucose from the bloodstream and dump lactate into the bloodstream more quickly. But then you need a faster circulatory system and a faster liver lactate/malate shuttle. And stuff. Better to just buy an exoskeletal robot.
One question I haven't heard answered is where they're hitting the missiles. It's possible that they're above (for reasonable approximations) the atmosphere when this is going on. That's supposed to be the case for the impact-based ABM stuff.
Something that's not discussed at all in this article, and most people don't think about, is that it's probably harder to see the incomings with enough resolution to accurately hit them. You have a small window of time to notice them in the first place and then accurately locate them and their vector. A big problem that complicates this is: you can't rely solely on satellites, because you might not have them anymore. That's more of a Cold War worry, but if one missile gets through, its effects might sufficiently disrupt your communications that you can't get good data on the subsequent ones. The ABM missiles rely on stars for locating their targets because they don't think satellites and ground-based detection-and-ranging are going to be available. (Sobering thought: if enough has been destroyed that they can't get data from any ground-based sources, what, exactly, are they protecting?)
Huge flying lasers were originally proposed as Star-Wars-Era weapons, to stop many big intercontinental missiles (and shoot down the other side's satellites, by the way) but since the DoD's mission has changed, now they're being thrown at that problem instead. (where it makes more sense...)
I'm babbling about stuff that would be better as a root-level comment rather than a reply-to-reply-to-reply. You're entirely right: trying to protect against a laser is probably pointless. What happens then is someone trying to get a missile through just makes more cheaper ones and relies on quantity. In this circumstance, that's in the defender's favor, though, because the amount of support equipment is huge compared to the amount of offensive material, and engineering a small-but-still-effective payload is *much* harder than a big dirty payload.
Which is why it'll be transported by truck rather than rocket.
Obviously we have no idea what aliens might put on the outsides of their UFO's. (I've heard about confederate flags being seen painted on them, but that's not relevant.)
With that said, the problem with trying to make a reflective surface that'll stop a laser of this power is that we simply don't know of anything that is 100% reflective at UV wavelengths and at those wavelengths absorbed photons have sufficient energy to instantly break molecular bonds. This isn't melting, where you have to heat atoms up enough that their kinetic energy enables them to break their bonds -- this is ablation, where the photons actually affect the bonding electrons and the bonds just go away. If you pulse the laser at a high repetition rate the debris from each ablation blast clear out pretty well, increasing your material removal efficiency at the cost of time.
It is possible that incoming UFO's or whatever might have external armor screens and return fire if those screens get hit, while they soak up (briefly) the laser power, analogous reactive armor on modern tanks. But just polishing them up so they're good and shiny, probably isn't going to work.
"Being stuck opposite Brigitte Nielson in a packed lift -- now THAT'S silicone heaven!" -- Lister, Red Dwarf.
While I don't disagree with you from a natural perspective, I'm guessing that humans even 200 years from now will be almost unrecognizeable to us (and vice-versa) because of the biotech explosion. Already, plastic surgery is so common as to escape notice. If you went back in time 100 years you'd be startled and appalled at the number of people with disfiguring features: hare-lips, birthmarks, horrible teeth, blindness-from-birth. We'd recognize them as human, and being very much like us, but a walk through New York City in 1890 would give you a significantly different idea than a walk through Beverly Hills today. I think that's going to be vastly exaggerated in the frighteningly near future and we're going to routinely see people who look like pro body builders, seven feet tall, with perfect teeth, on every street, and people living into their 120's on a regular basis. In the next 40 years I think that'll be mostly from childhood drugs and treatments, but in the next 40 a lot of it will be genetic -- people will be designing their children to only vaguely reflect their own genes, and in large part reflect genes of whatever they consider successful.
I know a lot of people are saying stuff like this, and a lot of people are scoffing, but consider coyotes and wolves, that have remained the same for tens of thousands of years. Now look at a chihuahua and a st. bernard and a dalmation. That's what people will do if they get a chance to mess with something's genetics even in a limited way. Imagine what they'll do when A: they can put in any genes they want, and B: it's their children, whose future success might hinge on their appearance or height or basketball-throwing ability.
On the surface, I think tax cuts tend to exaggerate societal stratification insofar as they shift the responsibility of funding the government onto the poor.
However, I think there is something else going on here: I think that tax cuts do serve a political purpose, coz almost everyone appreciates (and votes for) more money in their pocket, and I think that overseas wars serve a political purpose, but as an overall strategy I think both those are being pushed to financially destabilize the US government enough to justify ending Social Security on the grounds that we're in a financial state that demands emergency action. There isn't any way to get rid of SS through normal channels without committing political suicide, so manufacturing an economic catastrophe is the best way to do it, and that's exactly where I see the country heading. That would, in the 20-years-down-the-line point of view, be appalling. It'll be no skin off my nose, since I already have enough for retirement right now and am just making it more comfortable and assured, but for many many people it's going to be an enormous problem.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe this isn't going to happen, but I'm betting it will.
I'm not good at sarcasm... and yeah, I'm in an income bracket in which his cuts have been good for me, personally, but I know a lot of people for whom they have been not quite so good, and I suspect the long-term effects are going to be just appalling, for all of us.
A lot of Manhattan probably already does. Usually urban centers and places where social services are in high demand are strongly Democratic -- since they stand to gain from those social services (like police availability and homeless shelters.) Those people who have the money to live in gated communities and commute into work, however, tend to vote strongly Republican since they've essentially paid for their own services already and resent paying for someone else's. It's very much like the American health care system... The problem is that somehow, politics has become dependent on stupid issues that don't actually have any effect whatsoever on most people's lives -- evolution/creation, gay marriage, being the two big ones, and to a lesser extent, abortion and gun control. (And, behind all those, civil liberties, freedom-of-speech, and the like, but both major parties pay lip service to those while curtailing them whenever they can.) Many people are voting for people based on intangible, perceived moral and ethical issues, and getting politicians who are making decisions that have direct, tangible effects on their lives, without ever making that cause/effect connection. Or maybe they do, and they'd just rather vote for someone who makes their lives tangibly worse but espouses family values. That tactic certainly worked out for the leaders of the evangelical mega-churches in the '80's.
NO was mostly poor people who don't donate money to the people in power. When Manhattan goes under the waves, expect to see changes.
I'd like one too, and for that price I'd probably get one...
Okay, more seriously, I came to a huge realization one day when I was talking to a friend who is a medical translator at a hospital. A family brought in their daughter, who was really sick from an infection that was easy to treat, but she had a bunch of other medical problems that came from living in a rathole. My friend asked the family (who were from Mexico) about their living conditions -- trailer, no running water, no power, coz they'd not paid their bills -- and got a pretty good idea of why the kid, and the rest of the family, kept getting worms and horrible infections and all this stuff. Then she went out to the parking lot with the father of the family so he could get something from his car and saw that he was driving an almost-brand-new, enormous Ford pickup, with almost every option. He had $45,000 of car and his family was living in the dark without toilets. She asked him why he didn't put more money into his housing situation and he replied, basically, that they were only living there for another couple of months, at which point he'd have enough money to move the family back home to Mexico. She asked how long they'd been in the US and he said ten years. The point being: he thought, every day, that he was only a couple of months away from his goal (going home) and it made sense to buy a nice car for when he went home but it didn't make sense to spend money on a house if he was going home in a couple of months. The fact that he *wasn't* going home in a couple of months, that he wasn't ever going to get that big financial break he was expecting, never occurred to him. Or at least he couldn't admit it. So having an expensive car despite being dirt poor was, for him, a reasonable decision.
Your downmarket yuppies might be in a wholly different situation, and might very well be welfare cheats -- but there are people who do things that to an observer look really stupid, like getting a car they can't afford -- who are dirt poor. Indeed, that's very likely WHY they are dirt poor. One time I went to a car dealership, intending to buy a car, and because of poor timing and poor planning, got to hear a manager rip one of the salesmen a new one because the salesman had advised a kid to buy a used car that would fit in the kid's budget rather than telling the kid to buy a new pickup that cost 3x as much, because, as the manager said, the dealership would get way more money *and* they'd get to foreclose on the car when the kid couldn't make the payments and sell the car again. The salesman promised he'd never try to talk someone into getting a car that matched their budget again, that he'd try and get them into the most expensive thing they'd accept. When you're dealing with people who make poor decisions -- part of why they have no money -- you can talk them into a lot of stupid stuff.
It IS, though: it's your lens hardening because it's a protein and it cross-links over time. They're now making replacement lenses that are soft, that they attach to the existing muscles in an intraocular lens replacement surgery, and they restore your ability to focus up close -- they erase presbyopia. I didn't get to see the surgery but this 80 year old guy had this done recently and his vision's like he's 15 again, focus from infinity down to a near point of like a foot away from his eye.
I think I've exceeded this theoretical limit for the simple reason that while the diagonal on my vehicle is, of course, longer than the length, I'm not scooting my car in with the diagonal parallel to the curb, but at a significantly lower angle. (Long skinny car.) Tho' I haven't ever actually measured, so maybe I'm wrong.
My brother-in-law owns a Mercedes Benz. It's a 1968 diesel that he runs on homebrew fuel, and its blue book value is $480. Yes, four hundred eighty dollars. The sunroof doesn't work. Only one window works. The air conditioning compressor is shot, the heater blower doesn't work, and the CV joints on the rear wheel drive (Mercedes had independent suspension on the rear of the car in '68, can you believe that?) are shot and he can't find a replacement. He's offered to trade his Mercedes for anything made since 1988, has offered it for sale, and now it looks like he's just going to have to sell it to a junkyard for scrap.
People still tell him "you must be rich: you drive a Benz."
Have you ever considered safety wiring for those bolts you really, really don't want to work loose? On a helicopter there's a nut called the Jesus nut. I bet you can tell, just from that name, what its function is. It's safety-wired. So are the bolts that hold an airplane's propellor on (and, actually, just about every other nut, bolt, or threaded fastener/adjuster on the vehicle except for sheet metal screws.) It's easy to learn and it works quite well. It costs less than smart fasteners. I use safety wiring on my mountain bike so I don't lose pieces in races.
Ya KNOW, now that you bring it up... if you talk to relationship counselors, one of the things many of them will tell you is that, to a first approximation, the reason men get into relationships is for sex and the reason women get into relationships is for emotional and financial security, which has a lot to do with the sorts of arguments that are typical of relationships.
Personally, I think cars suck, but it was a facile analogy so I went with it even though it glosses over a lot of material.
This IS /. you know.
Yeah, so, I participated in this general conversation on, essentially, a BBS, where my brother was also a member. Talking about premarital sex with one's brother: eugh. Anyway, he's quicker-witted and funnier than I am, so I posted my "would you buy a car without test-driving it?" analogy and almost immediately afterwards, he posted "that's a great analogy! I'll keep it in mind! Now, please tell me where you buy your toothbrushes so I can never, ever shop there again?"
If I were *half* as funny as he is I'd be +5 funny every single day...
1. Virgins are awful. The last three women I've dated have two or three digit histories and boy howdy there's just no comparison.
2. Recent (last fifteen years) trend: a sizeable proportion of young women who have been told they need to remain virgins until marriage are engaging in other practices, some of which have led (through carelessness and, shall we say, adjacent activities) to pregnancy. Also the entire range of STD's.
3. It's interesting to hear that you wouldn't sleep with a woman until you've married her. May I take it you don't test-drive cars until after you've purchased them?
>While I know that you're trying to be all biting and sarcastic, you're more or less right regarding Christians. Part of scripture states that if a brother commits sin and we know of it, but we do not speak to help him mend his ways, we too are liable for his sin. I can't speak as to other religions though.
Matt. 7:1 "Do not judge, or you too will be judged."
And yes, I am aware of the context from which that verse is (often unfairly) extracted: I think it applies quite well, here.
I envy you. What flavor of plane?
I had a friend who'd shoehorned a blown RX-7 rotary into a Miata. That thing was one seriously terrifying car. I was glad he'd had the good sense to weld in a four-point rollbar. Some day it'd be fun to get an older Miata. They seem like really good starters for something loud, expensive, unsafe, and fun. And now you've gotten me curious: I'll have to talk to some engine importer friends and see what's up with it.
Now *that* is a funny answer. That's exactly the sort of inappropriate response that typifies the type of geek where you know something's wrong when you talk to them, but you just don't know quite what.
Much of an autistic person's challenge is recognizing emotions, or (apparently) more to the point, knowing what parts of a person's face to look at to recognize what the person is feeling. So, if you can tell a person "the person you're talking to is feeling very nervous" the person can do a memorized response to that situation, like running a macro. It's like an intelligent person who is blind, having a seeing eye dog that indicates when the walk light has turned on. Autistic people are not generally stupid people, they just physically cannot recognize the meaning of (or maybe even the existence of) emotional and nonliteral communication. And of course there's a broad continuum, from people that apparently don't recognize anything -- people, horses, chairs -- and essentially have no trustable input, to people who just talk a little too loudly and stand a little too close. ("He who laughs last, may be mildly autistic.") Oliver Sachs and particularly Tempel Grandin have written extensively about this. Tempel has said she thinks she hallucinates both sounds and visuals and even when she's pretty sure that what she sees is real, it's not useful. Someone else wrote about micro-tracking the eyes of people watching movies. During intense emotional scenes, most people would have their eyes jumping from one character's face (more particularly eyes and mouth) to the other, while an autistic person would look equally at the chair, the lightswitch, a character's knee.
I didn't realize there was a "The Sims: Paris Hilton Edition" out already. Does it include blurry sex scenes, too?
It could just be the dollar/yen trading rate? Yeah, I knew kids who were sticking nitrous on a stock Corolla and turning 12-second quarter miles... once. Then they'd take in the trashed Corolla and get another engine.