...it's even a poor metaphor for what they're trying to express: in clock form, there isn't any analogy that maps to backwards movement that makes any sense.
Daylight Saving Time comes to mind. But the real metaphor here is closer to the other reason to move a clock backwards: You screwed up setting it in the first place. Backward movement on the Doomsday Clock represents its keepers' having been incorrect in their entire belief system.
I always read WHO headlines as referring to the band. The swine flu fear-demic was much more bearable when all the inane warnings were delivered to the tune of Won't Get Fooled Again.
If they can find a market where energy efficiency is more important than thickness and durability (another issue that I would be concerned about in anything with moving parts, mirrors, etc.), then they should be able to do alright with their product. I am just not sure I can think of a market where durability is less important than energy efficiency.
I don't miss that point. I was pointing out a different one that the parent had missed. Your point is valid, of course. But wind and other non-fossil-fuel energy sources are already highly subsidized. They likely won't develop much faster than the current pace, so this will just artificially increase the price of electricity for Minnesotans in the meantime. If the slight increase in development pace is worth that burden on consumers, then that's fine - I am not able to decide that one.
Making coal power artificially more expensive in dollars to accommodate for the non-fiscal costs to the environment, etc., is a goal that this tax does properly address. It doesn't, however, answer whether that's a good idea. What are the environmental costs of wind power? That question has not fully been answered, but at least we can be honest and say that wind power is not free to the environment, as it uses more acres of land than other sources and requires manufacturing processes that are probably less harmful than for solar panels, but how much less? I wonder how many gallons of diesel are burned by the trucks hauling the components of a wind tower to a farm, how long the wind tower has to be in operation to make up for that particular carbon footprint, and how that duration compares to the usable life of the tower.
Except that Minnesota's tax is on electricity generated by coal plants anywhere, which is the source of the whole North Dakota thing. North Dakota has a huge electrical generating capacity, most of it from North Dakota coal with increasing portions from wind farms in various parts of the state, and exports a lot of that electrical power to Minnesota. Minnesota is doing nothing but increasing the price of electricity for its people.
Interestingly enough, North Dakota is one of the few state governments that has a surplus right now. A huge one. With the lowest unemployment rate (4.1%, low in any economy). Guess which industry can rightly take a lot of the credit for making that possible.
Is the one class actually called Discreet structures with graph theory as you put in quotes? If so, then it's got my vote as having the best name.
Seriously, I only clicked on this story to make the joke that you should take "the discreet math classes" because that way the ladies won't have to know, but then I read the rest of the summary and you did most of the heavy lifting on the joke for me. Thanks!
This is one of those times I'm glad that removing the Flash player plugin was the only way to make my Mac browsers not crash when loading Gmail (no clue why), and therefore can only hope I forget to check the video out tomorrow at work.
It isn't pleasant when you jump on the windward side and get blown into the side of the building.
Do you know this from personal experience? How many times did you repeat the experiment to ensure it was not an anomaly? Do we trust the advice of someone who jumped off the windward side of a building more than once? =)
Thank you for the historical note, which I can add to the store of things I throw at people who try to tell me that a preposition is the wrong thing to end a sentence with. Another famous retort is the classic example of a Harvard student who lacked the standard prep school upbringing:
Q: Excuse me, where is the library at?
A: At Harvard, we do not end sentences with prepositions.
Q: I'm so sorry. Where is the library at, asshole?
My favorite, though, is Fowler, who thought of that rule as a "superstition." While he's not the only authority on prescriptive English usage, I have yet to be told by someone more of an authority than he that it's not okay to end a sentence with a preposition.
I'm very familiar with Schlumberger - I even know how to pronounce it. =) And good point - losing the hole was even more of a problem at the time than now because horizontal drilling makes hole placement a lot more arbitrary, but it's still a big deal now since it's not cheap to drill, and even the time waiting for the fishing crew to get there is a huge opportunity cost when that drilling rig should be sitting a few miles away working on the next well.
Right now we seem to be in the "lease and drill every acre" mode (most of the new wells here are on 2-section spacing), then hold the leases by production to go back in and drill the other formations, although there have been a few wells completed in multiple horizontal formations from what I've heard. It's kind of fun to watch even if it's slowed down slightly over the past year or so, since I was too young to really see the fun part of the last boom - I grew up in its bust era!
Oilfield tools have always been fascinating to me. The technology is all really simple on one level, but incredibly complex when you take into account what it has to go through in a typical day. From mud motors to the exhaust plume from the diesels when you trip out 4 miles of drilling pipe, it's just cool stuff. Then there's the guy I know who made his millions doing nothing but fishing tools out of holes, which tells me that even your basic "how straight is the hole?" gizmo wasn't cheap, if it was on the list of things worth paying a guy to fish out when it gets dropped.
I'm thinking it will stand tall for a long time. I just try not to account for remote possibilities in wishing people luck. That's the particular breed of American capitalist pig I am!
You raise a valid point. I'm from oil country myself, and hadn't considered well casing - made of the same two main materials as the Burj Dubai, at that, good old steel and concrete. Most of our current drilling is to around 10,000 ft. as I understand it, with another 2 miles of horizontal drilling once you get there, but I don't know that the horizontal legs are cased. At any rate, straight-bore holes have been drilled well beyond a mile for a long time, so if you count basements they win hands-down.
This is the tallest manmade structure in the world, freestanding or otherwise. The previous record was held by a TV mast in eastern North Dakota, which took the lead when a mast in Poland fell down if I am not much mistaken about the history. This building has occupied floors higher than the world's tallest TV mast. The only thing possibly taller would be offshore oil rigs, but I can't remember how those stack up against it. A very impressive accomplishment, so long as it stays standing through Monday.
Or wants to make a self-deprecating joke about belonging to the last group of people. Similar to "There are three kinds of people in the world: Those who can count, and those who can't."
See, I was quoting the ad, so I had no choice but to say PC in that context. If I had any advice for you, it would be to learn how to spell before you write too critically of other people's use of an abbreviation. We'll leave to the side any arguments that Macs are workstation-class computers and not really part of the personal computer market, of course. But in your short comment there are the following errors. I'm not normally a spelling or grammar Nazi, but feel compelled to point out a mistake or two when someone is being an abbreviation Nazi.
Capitalize Windows
Use a question mark to terminate a question
Separate your sentences and capitalize the first word in the second one
Capitalize the initialism PC
Separate the third sentence by a period and more capitalization
"Legit" is probably the abbreviation you're looking for
Abbreviation, by the way, has two B's and an E in it
I don't know what four periods in a row mean - why not just one period here?
B.S. is the proper way to abbreviation bullshit - at least capitalize it
I'm has a capital I in it
It also has an apostrophe
Capitalize Mac
I'm again - capitalize
And apostrophe
Capitalize PC
Apple the company gets a capital A
Don't has an apostrophe
Windows is also a proper noun
Capitalize the first word in the sentence
Linux, too, is a proper noun
Specifically is a bit longer than you seem to want it to be
Have you stopped for, say, one second to consider how obnoxious television would be if every ad were just one second long? Some ad breaks are pushing 10 minutes now. That's 600 ads. And it would be an arms race to see who can make their ad annoying enough in that one second for you to remember it from among the other 599. It's a good idea for one advertiser to do, but a terrible idea for more than that.
Also, advertising by its nature is going to be about what makes your product either unique or better than competing products. You can't tell people what makes your product unique or better unless you contrast it with other products. Even if you don't mention the other product, the contrast is implicit. For instance, "Macs hardly ever crash and require virtually no configuration by the user" doesn't have any meaning without context, and the assumed context is that the listener has used Windows and had a blue screen or two and got lost in configuration screens. I'm sure you'd complain about implicit comparison ads like that, just as you do about the explicit comparisons.
It's not about bashing the other guy. It's about communicating to your audience what it is that makes your product their best choice in a way that they will remember. The "I'm a Mac / and I'm a PC" ads are effective at that. The Gates/Seinfeld ads are good for the latter but I don't think they communicated anything about the product. Microsoft could have learned from the dot-com era Superbowl ads to have avoided that mistake.
It's possible to find an ad that is effective without making any explicit or implicit comparisons to other products. The "Make 7-Up Yours" ads did that just fine, as do many food ads because the market is swamped with different products and you can't say yours is better than each of the others and state reasons for that conclusion, but you can remind people of your product enough to make their mouth water for a taste. But, for products where there is a limited number of competitors and you have objective reasons to say why yours is better than any of theirs, a comparison comes up in every effective ad.
Here's hoping that at least one moderator gets the joke and mods it Funny to offer guidance for future reply authors who take it seriously. I had thought the facetiousness of my suggestion would have been apparent from comparison with SciFi Channel B movies and experimental bikinis-in-space missions. Am I supposed to call you an [expletive deleted] moron now? I don't know the protocol for this.;)
The only problem with Schipol's security arrangement is that unticketed pickpockets can roam the commercial area of the airport. Other than that nuisance, I leave it to the bean counters to decide which is the more efficient arrangement.
Slashdot Mirror
...it's even a poor metaphor for what they're trying to express: in clock form, there isn't any analogy that maps to backwards movement that makes any sense.
Daylight Saving Time comes to mind. But the real metaphor here is closer to the other reason to move a clock backwards: You screwed up setting it in the first place. Backward movement on the Doomsday Clock represents its keepers' having been incorrect in their entire belief system.
I always read WHO headlines as referring to the band. The swine flu fear-demic was much more bearable when all the inane warnings were delivered to the tune of Won't Get Fooled Again.
For your kids: Don't download this song!
If they can find a market where energy efficiency is more important than thickness and durability (another issue that I would be concerned about in anything with moving parts, mirrors, etc.), then they should be able to do alright with their product. I am just not sure I can think of a market where durability is less important than energy efficiency.
I don't miss that point. I was pointing out a different one that the parent had missed. Your point is valid, of course. But wind and other non-fossil-fuel energy sources are already highly subsidized. They likely won't develop much faster than the current pace, so this will just artificially increase the price of electricity for Minnesotans in the meantime. If the slight increase in development pace is worth that burden on consumers, then that's fine - I am not able to decide that one.
Making coal power artificially more expensive in dollars to accommodate for the non-fiscal costs to the environment, etc., is a goal that this tax does properly address. It doesn't, however, answer whether that's a good idea. What are the environmental costs of wind power? That question has not fully been answered, but at least we can be honest and say that wind power is not free to the environment, as it uses more acres of land than other sources and requires manufacturing processes that are probably less harmful than for solar panels, but how much less? I wonder how many gallons of diesel are burned by the trucks hauling the components of a wind tower to a farm, how long the wind tower has to be in operation to make up for that particular carbon footprint, and how that duration compares to the usable life of the tower.
Except that Minnesota's tax is on electricity generated by coal plants anywhere, which is the source of the whole North Dakota thing. North Dakota has a huge electrical generating capacity, most of it from North Dakota coal with increasing portions from wind farms in various parts of the state, and exports a lot of that electrical power to Minnesota. Minnesota is doing nothing but increasing the price of electricity for its people.
Interestingly enough, North Dakota is one of the few state governments that has a surplus right now. A huge one. With the lowest unemployment rate (4.1%, low in any economy). Guess which industry can rightly take a lot of the credit for making that possible.
Taking advantage of others' unethical behavior for your own benefit - ethical or not? Discuss.
Is the one class actually called Discreet structures with graph theory as you put in quotes? If so, then it's got my vote as having the best name.
Seriously, I only clicked on this story to make the joke that you should take "the discreet math classes" because that way the ladies won't have to know, but then I read the rest of the summary and you did most of the heavy lifting on the joke for me. Thanks!
I find your discrimination to be both unkind and irrational. What kind of a Japanese party would it be without robots?
Plus, it's a dupe. I read this on the mirror universe Slashdot yesterday.
This is one of those times I'm glad that removing the Flash player plugin was the only way to make my Mac browsers not crash when loading Gmail (no clue why), and therefore can only hope I forget to check the video out tomorrow at work.
It isn't pleasant when you jump on the windward side and get blown into the side of the building.
Do you know this from personal experience? How many times did you repeat the experiment to ensure it was not an anomaly? Do we trust the advice of someone who jumped off the windward side of a building more than once? =)
Thank you for the historical note, which I can add to the store of things I throw at people who try to tell me that a preposition is the wrong thing to end a sentence with. Another famous retort is the classic example of a Harvard student who lacked the standard prep school upbringing:
Q: Excuse me, where is the library at?
A: At Harvard, we do not end sentences with prepositions.
Q: I'm so sorry. Where is the library at, asshole?
My favorite, though, is Fowler, who thought of that rule as a "superstition." While he's not the only authority on prescriptive English usage, I have yet to be told by someone more of an authority than he that it's not okay to end a sentence with a preposition.
I'm very familiar with Schlumberger - I even know how to pronounce it. =) And good point - losing the hole was even more of a problem at the time than now because horizontal drilling makes hole placement a lot more arbitrary, but it's still a big deal now since it's not cheap to drill, and even the time waiting for the fishing crew to get there is a huge opportunity cost when that drilling rig should be sitting a few miles away working on the next well.
Right now we seem to be in the "lease and drill every acre" mode (most of the new wells here are on 2-section spacing), then hold the leases by production to go back in and drill the other formations, although there have been a few wells completed in multiple horizontal formations from what I've heard. It's kind of fun to watch even if it's slowed down slightly over the past year or so, since I was too young to really see the fun part of the last boom - I grew up in its bust era!
Oilfield tools have always been fascinating to me. The technology is all really simple on one level, but incredibly complex when you take into account what it has to go through in a typical day. From mud motors to the exhaust plume from the diesels when you trip out 4 miles of drilling pipe, it's just cool stuff. Then there's the guy I know who made his millions doing nothing but fishing tools out of holes, which tells me that even your basic "how straight is the hole?" gizmo wasn't cheap, if it was on the list of things worth paying a guy to fish out when it gets dropped.
I'm thinking it will stand tall for a long time. I just try not to account for remote possibilities in wishing people luck. That's the particular breed of American capitalist pig I am!
You raise a valid point. I'm from oil country myself, and hadn't considered well casing - made of the same two main materials as the Burj Dubai, at that, good old steel and concrete. Most of our current drilling is to around 10,000 ft. as I understand it, with another 2 miles of horizontal drilling once you get there, but I don't know that the horizontal legs are cased. At any rate, straight-bore holes have been drilled well beyond a mile for a long time, so if you count basements they win hands-down.
This is the tallest manmade structure in the world, freestanding or otherwise. The previous record was held by a TV mast in eastern North Dakota, which took the lead when a mast in Poland fell down if I am not much mistaken about the history. This building has occupied floors higher than the world's tallest TV mast. The only thing possibly taller would be offshore oil rigs, but I can't remember how those stack up against it. A very impressive accomplishment, so long as it stays standing through Monday.
Or wants to make a self-deprecating joke about belonging to the last group of people. Similar to "There are three kinds of people in the world: Those who can count, and those who can't."
New Years Resolution: Think your way to a thinner 2010!
Have you stopped for, say, one second to consider how obnoxious television would be if every ad were just one second long? Some ad breaks are pushing 10 minutes now. That's 600 ads. And it would be an arms race to see who can make their ad annoying enough in that one second for you to remember it from among the other 599. It's a good idea for one advertiser to do, but a terrible idea for more than that.
Also, advertising by its nature is going to be about what makes your product either unique or better than competing products. You can't tell people what makes your product unique or better unless you contrast it with other products. Even if you don't mention the other product, the contrast is implicit. For instance, "Macs hardly ever crash and require virtually no configuration by the user" doesn't have any meaning without context, and the assumed context is that the listener has used Windows and had a blue screen or two and got lost in configuration screens. I'm sure you'd complain about implicit comparison ads like that, just as you do about the explicit comparisons.
It's not about bashing the other guy. It's about communicating to your audience what it is that makes your product their best choice in a way that they will remember. The "I'm a Mac / and I'm a PC" ads are effective at that. The Gates/Seinfeld ads are good for the latter but I don't think they communicated anything about the product. Microsoft could have learned from the dot-com era Superbowl ads to have avoided that mistake.
It's possible to find an ad that is effective without making any explicit or implicit comparisons to other products. The "Make 7-Up Yours" ads did that just fine, as do many food ads because the market is swamped with different products and you can't say yours is better than each of the others and state reasons for that conclusion, but you can remind people of your product enough to make their mouth water for a taste. But, for products where there is a limited number of competitors and you have objective reasons to say why yours is better than any of theirs, a comparison comes up in every effective ad.
Here's hoping that at least one moderator gets the joke and mods it Funny to offer guidance for future reply authors who take it seriously. I had thought the facetiousness of my suggestion would have been apparent from comparison with SciFi Channel B movies and experimental bikinis-in-space missions. Am I supposed to call you an [expletive deleted] moron now? I don't know the protocol for this. ;)
The only problem with Schipol's security arrangement is that unticketed pickpockets can roam the commercial area of the airport. Other than that nuisance, I leave it to the bean counters to decide which is the more efficient arrangement.