Andrew Dalke's Comments

Probably safer than sleeping on the .. I don't have a word for it. The shelf behind the rear seat, between the rear window and above the most forward part of the trunk. As a small kid I remember sleeping on that shelf in our 1973 Ford Galaxie sedan.

When we got bigger, my sister and I would stuff the footwells and and nap laying flat. W/o seat belts, of course.
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I remember back in the early 1980s when all the planets were on the same side of the Sun - within an arc 95 degrees wide, says Wikipedia. Some were worried about "The Jupiter Effect", wherein it was predicted the alignment would cause catastrophes on Earth. March 10, 1982 came and when without a problem.
I only just now realized I confused it with "The Late Great Planet Earth", a book arguing the Biblical end-times were coming by the 1980s.
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There is a lot of pseudoscience about magnets. Take a look at all devices with embedded magnets which purport to cure a range of medical issues, like arthritis, but whose efficacy has never been demonstrated. There's also a lot of research which got public notice, but which could not replicated.
It's very easy to fool oneself by accident. You knew the magnets were there, for example, so it wasn't even single-blinded. The magnets you can get from a hardware store have a field through your body which is far smaller than in an MRI, which can pull metal objects out of someone's grasp.
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The strongest field I've had my hand in was 1 Tesla, and I felt nothing.

Some people manage to sleep while having an MRI scan, which is 3 T or higher.

From what I gather, there was a 2015 paper claiming the worm C. elegans is magnetosensitive, but it has not been replicated. ("We find that under these conditions the worms moved randomly on horizontal plates placed either on top of a strong neodymium magnet or within a homogenous Earth-strength horizontal magnetic field.")
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Following along the lines of Captain Womble's "prescriptive and descriptive", I was hoping for something like: "I am no longer the simple prescriptivist you once knew. Now I am a descriptivist, and wield the deeper grammar."

Then for every false grammar rule, like the prohibition on splitting an infinitive, reply with something like "the rules am meaningful" or "wood red small house" to make even the Errorist cringe in pain.
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My wife's Dad took us to the gun range where I got to fire his Mosin–Nagant, which is similar to the rifle Häyhä used, and also with iron sights. It made me appreciate more the skill, patience, stamina, and, well, sisu that Häyhä must have had.
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My wife uses an app to count steps. We live in Sweden, within walking distance of stores and schools, or we take mass transit. About 15 months ago she went back to the US for her mother's 60th birthday. Her step counts for that week were a small fraction of normal, as even when she wanted to walk, it just wasn't possible.
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Hah! I've been in that spot, back in the 1980s. There's a scout camp nearby. My Mom's troop camped there and I got to go along. Her sister was also there on a visit, so one evening my aunt took me on a road trip to that bat tower. She parked right underneath it, and we looked up through the open moon roof.
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Profile for Andrew Dalke

  • Member Since 2012/08/04


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