Complete agreement on all points: I come from the same general side of the political spectrum as you and I was like WTF? I'd love it if he won the Nobel in 7 years for all the amazing things he'd done over those 7 years, because I think the world could be a much better place. But now? no. It could even be a disincentive: why try hard, when you've already won the freakin' Nobel?
I don't work in this field but it was my understanding from reading about it that mitochondrial aging and increasing lack of efficiency in supporting oxidative phosphorylation, as a result of oxidative damage, was a major cause of cellular aging. I've never read about anyone suggesting a mechanism for replacing mitochondria (numbering between dozes and tens of thousands per cell) although I've read about people saying it'd be an enormous help in reversing at least some organism-level age-related malfunction. Problem being that since there appear to be several different processes that drive aging, which all tend to come up at a similar point in an organism's life, just fixing telomeres or just fixing damaged mitochondria won't do very much for life extension.
And what's particularly sad about that is that a 2x4" is nowhere *nearly* actually 2" by 4" because of the kerf of the saws, so it's a completely lame legacy constraint. I wish they'd tell you in mm what the lumber measurements are. My old house had a few *actual* 2 inch by 4 inch logs in it, and nothing new fit well.
Around here they sell 2x4"'s in a strange length, calibrated to match so that a set of them with another on the top and another on the bottom, is exactly eight feet high, so the studs themselves are like 92 5/8" long or thereabouts. Weeeird.
This is exactly what's mentioned in one of the articles: "Ardi has many traits that do not appear in modern-day African apes, leading to the conclusion that the apes evolved extensively since we shared that last common ancestor."
It makes sense, if we evolved from the common ancestor in six million years, it's only reasonable to assume monkeys and apes also evolved. Think of the common ancestor not as an ape, but something that's as different from modern apes as it's different from humans.
My useful (I think) analogy: I did not descend from my cousin. We both descended from my grandmother, who is different than either of us.
That has happened on Earth too. We call it Fallout.
I am not kidding. A surface nuclear burst in the megaton range will vaporize millions of tons of rock and soil. This material will cool, condense, and and fall as
little pebbles or hail. In this case, it's radioactive, but otherwise the physics is the same.
Really? *Millions* of tons? I would be surprised if it even vaporized hundreds of tons. I don't know, I'm not a nuclear physicist, but the craters I've seen in Nevada look like they're in the dozens of tons range, from high kiloton explosions. If anyone has more specific numbers I'd love to know about it.
...and maybe running red lights. But you'll never see existing driving-while-distracted laws enforced. So all this hullabaloo about a Federal Summit ignores the fundamental flaw in roadway policing. The cops pretty much ONLY care about the speed you're going. They never pull anyone over for violating basic rules like failing to use a turn signal, zig-zaggers who change lanes endlessly to get 3 car lengths ahead, etc. And to make it even more inane, the speed limits are arbitrary and political, rarely having a correlation to the road they are posted on.
Boy, I dunno where you live, but I've been pulled over in the Denver area for not signalling a lane change, even though, in the officer's words, I'd signalled five out of six of the lane changes he'd seen me do. (I was merging from an on-ramp across an interstate to a left-side off-ramp.) I have friends who have been pulled over for following too closely, for driving below the speed limit in the left lane, for not wearing a seat belt. I've been pulled over for "driving erratically" because I was driving right on the white line to the right side of the road for several blocks. You must have much different police guidelines than out here in Colorado.
I almost got killed this way. The guy behind me was fiddling around with his radio and rear-ended my car. Which wouldn't've been so bad except traffic had come to a complete stop, he was still doing 65mph, and he was driving a semi. Since that time (once I was able to drive again) I've learned to work the radio without looking at it for fear of doing the same thing to someone else. My gf's car has the radio control buttons on the steering wheel and I'm envious.
I understand how hard it was for him to write his books. After all, it's not every author who decides to chuck the whole language and invent his own (I'm looking at you, Tolkien).
Anyway, here's some background for anyone unfamiliar with Joyce's works.
Wikipedia
First off, Tolkien didn't chuck the language and invent his own. He invented at least six.
Secondly, I didn't find his linguistic games to intrude on the story. They made it feel more realistic, if anything, because they gave you a sense of the difference. I've read plenty of scifi where the invented languages hurt the story's flow, or sometimes nearly halted it entirely. (There was an early CJ Cherryh novel where she'd sometimes manage to include two nouns and one verb in a made-up language in a single sentence, and it was nearly unreadable. I seem to remember Robert Jordan going down a similar path, but I might be wrong since I'm trying hard to forget I ever read him.)
I think that invented languages, like writing in dialect, can give a story a lot more depth. "Trainspotting", as a book, wouldn't be half the book if it were written in the same language that The New Yorker uses. It's more difficult for me to be in favor of Joyce's unusual use of English. But, hey, Shakespeare invented words in nearly every play he wrote, sometimes dozens of them, and many of them have become mainstream words. Hard to argue with that kind of success.
While I'd like to believe that, Saparmurat Niyazov tends to make me think that it's a lot more complicated and sometimes complete and utter whackjobs do get a chance to seize complete control over fairly large countries.
If you're interested in weight-reduced (helium-filled) lifting bodies, you should read about the Aereon 26, as chronicled in John McPhee's excellent book The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed. A fair amount of research and money has gone into this general area of design, with mixed results. And, as you say, a lot of people who research UFO's say it's possible that these are what the US Government is using for very high altitude, long-time-on-station rec. I've heard people claim that these are being used at 100,000 feet or thereabouts on US borders, although I'm marking these stories as only slightly more reliable than alien contact stories.
The scan works by looking for the OH bond, as I recall, which resonates on a particular frequency. I may be talking nonsense now, because it's a few years since I looked at this tech, but it basically works on the same principle as your microwave oven. That emits microwaves that cause the OH bonds to resonate, exciting the molecules and generating heat. This works by causing the OH bonds to resonate (in exactly the same way) and then picking up the IR that they emit as they return to their non-excited state. All that it can conclusively say is that there are molecules containing OH bonds present, but the simplest molecule containing this bond is water and so it's very probable that they've found water. Even if they haven't, they've found something that can be turned into water relatively easily, given sufficient power (e.g. a lunar solar array).
You're pretty much right on. Every molecular bond has several resonant energies for different types of vibrational modes, and a primary way of finding what you have in a sample is irradiating it and measuring at which frequencies it's absorbing energy. The MMM is specifically designed to detect in the range where hydroxy absorption would be detected, unlike previous moon mappers. (Why? I wonder. It seems like that'd be a basic thing they'd want to detect, and my memory of IR spectrometers and spectrophotometers is that it's a massive peak across a wide range of wavelengths.) Anyway, they're detecting sunlight reflected from the surface and measuring the areas in which there has been a lot of absorption to detect what's down there, if I read their description correctly.
As a side-note, it is (on paper) possible to tell something about what's adjacent to a molecular bond, to distinguish between (in this case) water and sugar, both of which have -OH bonds, because the stuff adjacent will change the frequency at which the bond you're looking at vibrates by adding or removing a bit of electron density from it. However, in the particular case of the -OH bond, as I recall, it's such a broad peak that it's not very informative.
If you build a dirigible, with some structural solidity, there's no reason you can't stick jets on it and drive it very considerably faster than a blimp. You can design it very nearly aerodynamically perfect, after all: no wings, less commercial constraints to build a long cylinder. Instead it can be a teardrop 5x as long as wide, and have something very close to ideal, so you're just fighting (very considerable) skin friction, but don't have any induced drag or nearly any interference drag.
I'm not saying it's economically feasible, but I think it's technically feasible.
The thing that scares me the most from the Cold War is we were raised to fear the specter of a Soviet attack but our own leaders were every bit as batshit crazy as they were accusing the Soviets of. Fucking Nixon and his brinksmanship, fucking LeMay and trying to start WWIII during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and fucking Reagan as mentioned in TFA. Those fucking monsters did their level best to end modern civilization.
Understatement. If you want to read something depressing, read Richard Rhodes' book "Dark Sun". The US did everything in its power to provoke a war, and the USSR was incredibly careful and nearly unbelievably tolerant. Rhodes claims (and nobody that I've read discussing his claims has rebutted) that we had aircraft flying over USSR territory, in their airspace, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from roughly 1951 until Frances Powers got shot down in 1960, and that the USAF ran several mock bombing runs of dozens of bombers and fighters over western Soviet cities in broad daylight. The Cuban Missile Crisis looks like the Soviet attempt to do something 1/100 as offensive, and even that made the US completely freak out. I suspect if the USSR had had a free press and the general public had been aware of what the US was doing, the way we were of what the USSR was doing, we would have ended up having a war.
The electrolytic production of aluminum is Hall-Heroult, I believe. There exists a titanium electrolysis system or two, but they're still patent-encumbered. (I've also heard people argue that it's the difficulty in working with titanium rather than the production costs that make it so expensive.)
>I remember several discussions among writers of the early MUDs (about 1990 or so... on USENET?) that involved aggregation of character data between multiple servers and allowing players to move from one "world" to the next. Some of this was simply copying character data, but it also involved direct links between servers... where players moving from one "room" to the next could switch to a different server and have it appear seamless to somebody playing within the MUD.
LambdaMOO and JaysHouseMOO (at least, maybe other lambda-core-based MOOs as well) allowed people to do real-time communication between different MOOs hosted on different servers, and implemented telnet within the MOO allowing you to log into the the other MOO (or, to break your brain, into the MOO you were currently using) in, at the latest, 1996.
We still call them bulbs at work, but honestly I don't have a good way to distinguish between them. You'd have to pull it so far apart that it'd be useless. (The last bulb I repaired, I chucked up in my lathe and used a jeweler's saw to slice the translucent diffuser off, then pried the board with all the LED's mounted out of the body, then desoldered the leads that drove the LED's, before I could get to the failed electrolytic that caused the bulb to die.) I'm also reluctant to recommend specific manufacturers because, well, much as I hate to say this, I don't think there are any bulbs on the market right now that are really super. In a year, there will be. (Or I'll be out of a job.) Right now, ugh; it's like trying to choose an ISP in another country in 1999. My company is building evaluation boards for LED drivers that run straight off AC, and have only ceramic caps on the board, so the eval boards should last for decades, but there's no guarantee people who are making the actual consumer products based on our design are going to use our reference design, unfortunately.
If I were to write that Sean Connery kicks cats, that'd be libel. But if Sean Connery were to write a book about how kicking cats cures baldness, and I were to write that kicking cats *doesn't* cure baldness and anyone who says it does is a swindler, that can't be libel, can it? I can see how writing that Sean Connery is a swindler for making the claim, would be libel. But I wonder if it takes defaming a specific person to get a libel charge to stick, or if merely defaming an idea that a person is identified with is sufficient cause for a libel suit to be likely successful.
I just spent a week driving through rural Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, with two friends. When we weren't on the Interstate, we had, during the entire week, a grand total of less than an hour when any one of the cellphones could pick up enough signal to talk. When we *were* on the Interstates, we had cellphone coverage less than half the time. In any of the towns of under 2000 people, I never saw any wireless access using kismet and the standard laptop pcmcia card antenna. In larger towns, like Bozeman or Billings, there was great cellphone coverage and even some open access points, especially near big hotels. But once we were out of sight of towns that size (and there are only about 12 of them in the whole area) there was absolutely nothing.
>The Chinese don't regard plagiarism the same way we do
One of the things I think about when I'm reading about this subject is t-shirts. In the community in which I hang out, if you're wearing a t-shirt that you've designed and silkscreened/airbrushed, that's cool. If you're wearing a shirt that has a Nike swoosh symbol on it, it's considered something like plagiarism, certainly a lack of originality. Yet I see other Americans wearing DKNY shirts all the time. My mini-culture considers that to be copying, but most people don't even think about it, or if they do, think of it as a sort of status thing -- they can afford a designer t-shirt.
It's quite possible something similar is going on here. By taking material from a very good source, the person is forming an association with the very good source. If you aren't raised with a sense of what Americans consider the line between research (copying from several sources) and plagiarism (copying from one source) you might be acting in a way you think is not only ethical but praiseworthy, while other people think you're plagiarizing.
For the record, today my t-shirt is covered with monochrome images of old cassette tapes of various brands. It certainly doesn't say Nike on it.
That sounds appalling. I'll bet that faceplate got warm.
My worst electrical experience was rewiring a knob-and-tube house from the 1900's, that had been rewired using very old Romex in flexible conduit in the 1950's. The knob-and-tube main distribution was fine, but everywhere they'd added in outlets or switches they'd done drops using the conduit/romex, and the old fabric-covered romex had degraded over time so it was mostly just bare wires packed in debris from the broken-off and fallen-apart insulation. Every time I'd touch anything, it'd disturb what was left of the insulation and there'd be a big audible 'pop!' and that circuit would go dead, and the only fix was to pull out the wiring and run up new vinyl-covered romex. It made me appreciate circuit breakers, and the longevity/reliability of knob-and-tube. One learns the old one-hand rule rather quickly on stuff like that (or on stuff where parental units are switching breakers back on while you're working on the wiring...)
Wow. Do you have any idea how old it was? Was it basically just a huge potentiometer, rated for 100W or so? I've wired up a couple pots with AC in my time and it can be an exciting solution: a little bit dirty and the sparks start *flying*. Even better if you've got 220V wiring everywhere like in Europe. I bet those caused a lot of fires.
I guess I also have my doubts that merely SMELLING peanuts is actually dangerous for certain people, and not merely a purely psychological reaction brought on by nutty parents.
For what it's worth, one of my good friends is allergic to potatoes. We recently got to take her to the hospital, after she'd injected herself with her little syringe full of I-don't-know-what that only slowed down her throat swelling shut so she couldn't breathe. The reason was because she'd walked into a house where someone was boiling potatoes in water. I knew she was allergic to potatoes, but I had no idea how severe an allergy could be until I actually saw it in action. She went from fine to breathing like Darth Vader in under two minutes.
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Complete agreement on all points: I come from the same general side of the political spectrum as you and I was like WTF? I'd love it if he won the Nobel in 7 years for all the amazing things he'd done over those 7 years, because I think the world could be a much better place. But now? no. It could even be a disincentive: why try hard, when you've already won the freakin' Nobel?
I don't work in this field but it was my understanding from reading about it that mitochondrial aging and increasing lack of efficiency in supporting oxidative phosphorylation, as a result of oxidative damage, was a major cause of cellular aging. I've never read about anyone suggesting a mechanism for replacing mitochondria (numbering between dozes and tens of thousands per cell) although I've read about people saying it'd be an enormous help in reversing at least some organism-level age-related malfunction. Problem being that since there appear to be several different processes that drive aging, which all tend to come up at a similar point in an organism's life, just fixing telomeres or just fixing damaged mitochondria won't do very much for life extension.
Around here they sell 2x4"'s in a strange length, calibrated to match so that a set of them with another on the top and another on the bottom, is exactly eight feet high, so the studs themselves are like 92 5/8" long or thereabouts. Weeeird.
But if they can't improve on 50cm, I'm just getting a 2ft extension cord for fixed items. (sorry for mixing units)
You joke, but my bicycle has an Italian bottom bracket that is officially defined as 36mm x 24 threads per inch. *ack*.
This is exactly what's mentioned in one of the articles: "Ardi has many traits that do not appear in modern-day African apes, leading to the conclusion that the apes evolved extensively since we shared that last common ancestor."
It makes sense, if we evolved from the common ancestor in six million years, it's only reasonable to assume monkeys and apes also evolved. Think of the common ancestor not as an ape, but something that's as different from modern apes as it's different from humans.
My useful (I think) analogy: I did not descend from my cousin. We both descended from my grandmother, who is different than either of us.
It's also possible that I'm a terrible judge of large weights and volumes.
That has happened on Earth too. We call it Fallout.
I am not kidding. A surface nuclear burst in the megaton range will vaporize millions of tons of rock and soil. This material will cool, condense, and and fall as little pebbles or hail. In this case, it's radioactive, but otherwise the physics is the same.
Really? *Millions* of tons? I would be surprised if it even vaporized hundreds of tons. I don't know, I'm not a nuclear physicist, but the craters I've seen in Nevada look like they're in the dozens of tons range, from high kiloton explosions. If anyone has more specific numbers I'd love to know about it.
...and maybe running red lights. But you'll never see existing driving-while-distracted laws enforced. So all this hullabaloo about a Federal Summit ignores the fundamental flaw in roadway policing. The cops pretty much ONLY care about the speed you're going. They never pull anyone over for violating basic rules like failing to use a turn signal, zig-zaggers who change lanes endlessly to get 3 car lengths ahead, etc. And to make it even more inane, the speed limits are arbitrary and political, rarely having a correlation to the road they are posted on.
Boy, I dunno where you live, but I've been pulled over in the Denver area for not signalling a lane change, even though, in the officer's words, I'd signalled five out of six of the lane changes he'd seen me do. (I was merging from an on-ramp across an interstate to a left-side off-ramp.) I have friends who have been pulled over for following too closely, for driving below the speed limit in the left lane, for not wearing a seat belt. I've been pulled over for "driving erratically" because I was driving right on the white line to the right side of the road for several blocks. You must have much different police guidelines than out here in Colorado.
I almost got killed this way. The guy behind me was fiddling around with his radio and rear-ended my car. Which wouldn't've been so bad except traffic had come to a complete stop, he was still doing 65mph, and he was driving a semi. Since that time (once I was able to drive again) I've learned to work the radio without looking at it for fear of doing the same thing to someone else. My gf's car has the radio control buttons on the steering wheel and I'm envious.
I understand how hard it was for him to write his books. After all, it's not every author who decides to chuck the whole language and invent his own (I'm looking at you, Tolkien).
Anyway, here's some background for anyone unfamiliar with Joyce's works. Wikipedia
First off, Tolkien didn't chuck the language and invent his own. He invented at least six.
Secondly, I didn't find his linguistic games to intrude on the story. They made it feel more realistic, if anything, because they gave you a sense of the difference. I've read plenty of scifi where the invented languages hurt the story's flow, or sometimes nearly halted it entirely. (There was an early CJ Cherryh novel where she'd sometimes manage to include two nouns and one verb in a made-up language in a single sentence, and it was nearly unreadable. I seem to remember Robert Jordan going down a similar path, but I might be wrong since I'm trying hard to forget I ever read him.)
I think that invented languages, like writing in dialect, can give a story a lot more depth. "Trainspotting", as a book, wouldn't be half the book if it were written in the same language that The New Yorker uses. It's more difficult for me to be in favor of Joyce's unusual use of English. But, hey, Shakespeare invented words in nearly every play he wrote, sometimes dozens of them, and many of them have become mainstream words. Hard to argue with that kind of success.
A cited fact on Wikipedia would disagree with you. The good old days were never that good.
And while we're on the subject nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
HEY NOW.
Suicidal wackos don't end up running countries.
While I'd like to believe that, Saparmurat Niyazov tends to make me think that it's a lot more complicated and sometimes complete and utter whackjobs do get a chance to seize complete control over fairly large countries.
If you're interested in weight-reduced (helium-filled) lifting bodies, you should read about the Aereon 26, as chronicled in John McPhee's excellent book The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed. A fair amount of research and money has gone into this general area of design, with mixed results. And, as you say, a lot of people who research UFO's say it's possible that these are what the US Government is using for very high altitude, long-time-on-station rec. I've heard people claim that these are being used at 100,000 feet or thereabouts on US borders, although I'm marking these stories as only slightly more reliable than alien contact stories.
The scan works by looking for the OH bond, as I recall, which resonates on a particular frequency. I may be talking nonsense now, because it's a few years since I looked at this tech, but it basically works on the same principle as your microwave oven. That emits microwaves that cause the OH bonds to resonate, exciting the molecules and generating heat. This works by causing the OH bonds to resonate (in exactly the same way) and then picking up the IR that they emit as they return to their non-excited state. All that it can conclusively say is that there are molecules containing OH bonds present, but the simplest molecule containing this bond is water and so it's very probable that they've found water. Even if they haven't, they've found something that can be turned into water relatively easily, given sufficient power (e.g. a lunar solar array).
You're pretty much right on. Every molecular bond has several resonant energies for different types of vibrational modes, and a primary way of finding what you have in a sample is irradiating it and measuring at which frequencies it's absorbing energy. The MMM is specifically designed to detect in the range where hydroxy absorption would be detected, unlike previous moon mappers. (Why? I wonder. It seems like that'd be a basic thing they'd want to detect, and my memory of IR spectrometers and spectrophotometers is that it's a massive peak across a wide range of wavelengths.) Anyway, they're detecting sunlight reflected from the surface and measuring the areas in which there has been a lot of absorption to detect what's down there, if I read their description correctly.
As a side-note, it is (on paper) possible to tell something about what's adjacent to a molecular bond, to distinguish between (in this case) water and sugar, both of which have -OH bonds, because the stuff adjacent will change the frequency at which the bond you're looking at vibrates by adding or removing a bit of electron density from it. However, in the particular case of the -OH bond, as I recall, it's such a broad peak that it's not very informative.
I'm not saying it's economically feasible, but I think it's technically feasible.
The thing that scares me the most from the Cold War is we were raised to fear the specter of a Soviet attack but our own leaders were every bit as batshit crazy as they were accusing the Soviets of. Fucking Nixon and his brinksmanship, fucking LeMay and trying to start WWIII during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and fucking Reagan as mentioned in TFA. Those fucking monsters did their level best to end modern civilization.
Understatement. If you want to read something depressing, read Richard Rhodes' book "Dark Sun". The US did everything in its power to provoke a war, and the USSR was incredibly careful and nearly unbelievably tolerant. Rhodes claims (and nobody that I've read discussing his claims has rebutted) that we had aircraft flying over USSR territory, in their airspace, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from roughly 1951 until Frances Powers got shot down in 1960, and that the USAF ran several mock bombing runs of dozens of bombers and fighters over western Soviet cities in broad daylight. The Cuban Missile Crisis looks like the Soviet attempt to do something 1/100 as offensive, and even that made the US completely freak out. I suspect if the USSR had had a free press and the general public had been aware of what the US was doing, the way we were of what the USSR was doing, we would have ended up having a war.
The electrolytic production of aluminum is Hall-Heroult, I believe. There exists a titanium electrolysis system or two, but they're still patent-encumbered. (I've also heard people argue that it's the difficulty in working with titanium rather than the production costs that make it so expensive.)
LambdaMOO and JaysHouseMOO (at least, maybe other lambda-core-based MOOs as well) allowed people to do real-time communication between different MOOs hosted on different servers, and implemented telnet within the MOO allowing you to log into the the other MOO (or, to break your brain, into the MOO you were currently using) in, at the latest, 1996.
We still call them bulbs at work, but honestly I don't have a good way to distinguish between them. You'd have to pull it so far apart that it'd be useless. (The last bulb I repaired, I chucked up in my lathe and used a jeweler's saw to slice the translucent diffuser off, then pried the board with all the LED's mounted out of the body, then desoldered the leads that drove the LED's, before I could get to the failed electrolytic that caused the bulb to die.) I'm also reluctant to recommend specific manufacturers because, well, much as I hate to say this, I don't think there are any bulbs on the market right now that are really super. In a year, there will be. (Or I'll be out of a job.) Right now, ugh; it's like trying to choose an ISP in another country in 1999. My company is building evaluation boards for LED drivers that run straight off AC, and have only ceramic caps on the board, so the eval boards should last for decades, but there's no guarantee people who are making the actual consumer products based on our design are going to use our reference design, unfortunately.
If I were to write that Sean Connery kicks cats, that'd be libel. But if Sean Connery were to write a book about how kicking cats cures baldness, and I were to write that kicking cats *doesn't* cure baldness and anyone who says it does is a swindler, that can't be libel, can it? I can see how writing that Sean Connery is a swindler for making the claim, would be libel. But I wonder if it takes defaming a specific person to get a libel charge to stick, or if merely defaming an idea that a person is identified with is sufficient cause for a libel suit to be likely successful.
I just spent a week driving through rural Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, with two friends. When we weren't on the Interstate, we had, during the entire week, a grand total of less than an hour when any one of the cellphones could pick up enough signal to talk. When we *were* on the Interstates, we had cellphone coverage less than half the time. In any of the towns of under 2000 people, I never saw any wireless access using kismet and the standard laptop pcmcia card antenna. In larger towns, like Bozeman or Billings, there was great cellphone coverage and even some open access points, especially near big hotels. But once we were out of sight of towns that size (and there are only about 12 of them in the whole area) there was absolutely nothing.
One of the things I think about when I'm reading about this subject is t-shirts. In the community in which I hang out, if you're wearing a t-shirt that you've designed and silkscreened/airbrushed, that's cool. If you're wearing a shirt that has a Nike swoosh symbol on it, it's considered something like plagiarism, certainly a lack of originality. Yet I see other Americans wearing DKNY shirts all the time. My mini-culture considers that to be copying, but most people don't even think about it, or if they do, think of it as a sort of status thing -- they can afford a designer t-shirt.
It's quite possible something similar is going on here. By taking material from a very good source, the person is forming an association with the very good source. If you aren't raised with a sense of what Americans consider the line between research (copying from several sources) and plagiarism (copying from one source) you might be acting in a way you think is not only ethical but praiseworthy, while other people think you're plagiarizing.
For the record, today my t-shirt is covered with monochrome images of old cassette tapes of various brands. It certainly doesn't say Nike on it.
My worst electrical experience was rewiring a knob-and-tube house from the 1900's, that had been rewired using very old Romex in flexible conduit in the 1950's. The knob-and-tube main distribution was fine, but everywhere they'd added in outlets or switches they'd done drops using the conduit/romex, and the old fabric-covered romex had degraded over time so it was mostly just bare wires packed in debris from the broken-off and fallen-apart insulation. Every time I'd touch anything, it'd disturb what was left of the insulation and there'd be a big audible 'pop!' and that circuit would go dead, and the only fix was to pull out the wiring and run up new vinyl-covered romex. It made me appreciate circuit breakers, and the longevity/reliability of knob-and-tube. One learns the old one-hand rule rather quickly on stuff like that (or on stuff where parental units are switching breakers back on while you're working on the wiring...)
Wow. Do you have any idea how old it was? Was it basically just a huge potentiometer, rated for 100W or so? I've wired up a couple pots with AC in my time and it can be an exciting solution: a little bit dirty and the sparks start *flying*. Even better if you've got 220V wiring everywhere like in Europe. I bet those caused a lot of fires.
I guess I also have my doubts that merely SMELLING peanuts is actually dangerous for certain people, and not merely a purely psychological reaction brought on by nutty parents.
For what it's worth, one of my good friends is allergic to potatoes. We recently got to take her to the hospital, after she'd injected herself with her little syringe full of I-don't-know-what that only slowed down her throat swelling shut so she couldn't breathe. The reason was because she'd walked into a house where someone was boiling potatoes in water. I knew she was allergic to potatoes, but I had no idea how severe an allergy could be until I actually saw it in action. She went from fine to breathing like Darth Vader in under two minutes.