Looking at least one case of "1 inch" closure county on the East coast near where I used to live, I'm pretty sure they don't close for just 1 inch, or even a couple inches of snow. They did have a couple days where they closed when there was only an inch of snow, but it was an inch of snow on top of a quarter inch or more of ice. If they did close every time they got an inch of snow, they would have been closed a extra week or two every year.
I think these were students that already owed money for past lunches, but they only have a till set up after the lunch line where they are served. They already provided credit previously, and this was a poorly thought out way to deal with those that did pay for previous meals the kids did get.
Some of this might be skewed by the price per ounce, as it is in dollars, although I think the prices of ketchup, mayo, and soy sauce are all about the same at a regular store. Although when cooking, as opposed to just using as a condiment, I would say a lot more mayo gets used in things like potato salad compared to how much ketchup or mustard would get used in something like a coating a meatloaf or roast, etc. I probably spend the most on soy sauce even when buying bulk containers, as it gets used a lot in cooking, while a small container of mustard lasts a couple months, and I end up leaving ketchup in the fridge enough years it goes bad.
I agree with this, that there is a more general issue here than the art being too expensive to play with. While not messing with other people's stuff shouldn't be done on principle, there is also the potential for material damage, as who knows how well constructed a sculpture is if it wasn't intended to be touched or climbed. Even if only would sell for $10, it is probably worth hours of the artist's time to make or repair. Although some exception can probably be made for things too trivial that we shouldn't fret about kids having accidents with, it can be risky to assume something is trivial to deal with.
Of course kids will act like kids and show varying degrees of controls, but the slightest bit of attention from the parents should make it obvious what type of kid they have at a given age, and what environments might be best to avoid until the kid grows a little more. I can't tell if some parents don't notice though, or don't want to admit their kid has a "problem." I wouldn't even call it a problem, just requires some thought, like whenever a particular neighbor's kid comes over I make sure to put away any tools or glass items as she has to pick up and look at everything. But when giving tours/open house things at my job, I've seen some parents get rather indignant when I won't let their kid in a room with expensive, easy to damage tools after watching their kid get touchy-gabby with things they were already warned to not touch. Not to mention things that could hurt the child if they get too out of control, as I've certainly seen way too many kids standing on top of guard rails at tall, busy places before.
I've seen very few art museums that cordon things off. You'll occasionally see things in the news about something being damaged, but it seems museums tend to not want a few bad people ruin it for everyone, allowing people to get a close look at the art. There might be employees or volunteers to keep an eye on the art, but even at some of the bigger places I've noticed that there is often fewer than one per room, and fewer such people at modern art places compared to ones displaying centuries old famous works.
In my opinion, it is kind of nice to see places that assume most people can act reasonable and respectful, instead of designing things things to be idiot-proof, even if that comes with a risk.
It looks like the phobia curing industry is on a down turn. While I found a site that offers cures for fears of garlic, poetry, and long words, the closest they have to deal with staring ducks is fear of being stared at with some ornithophobia. But if that duck happens to bring an otter friend, they have you covered. Even if he brings his great mole rat acquaintance, that is covered too.
There seems to be a lot of overlap between the list on the site you linked and the ones put into the templates there, so that might actually be the source they used. I can't find one of the other sites that used to exist like the one I was linking to that used the fear of ducks joke (only a bunch that look like broken English).
As much as some of these are real fears, I think too many of the names are not actually used in psychology, and are either the result of poetic wording in other situations, making up words to sound smart (like some of the names for groups of animals), or just padding for weird lists that predate the, "You'll never guess these 10 phobias people are actually scared of," type sites. Or some are repurposed from actual words, like ombrophobia from plants that don't like rain.
What I found amusing, was as of a couple years ago, there were some websites advertising various services to help people with phobias, but they obviously used some sort of template/form letter system to have a separate page for each phobia:
"Are you finding yourself constantly afraid of X? Does your fear of X negatively impact your life? You may have a clinical case of chi-phobia, and our service can help you overcome your fear of X"
But the template must have been near completely unsupervised using whatever was the largest list they could find, as it included all sorts of joke phobias with the same dead serious pitch. "Does your fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth interfere with your performance at work?" "Does the fear somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you impact your romantic relationship?" "Did your fear of palindromes leave you traumatized as a child?"
You can measure the half-life of C14 in a lab on non-historic timescales. Using that and the assumption that C14 levels haven't changed, you can get a basic dating without any use of historic material. C14 levels have not been constant though, and a correct can be made by dating known objects. A common method uses tree rings to date pieces of wood, you can find that there is ~10% correction in the last several years and maybe at worst a 20% correction going further back, without using any human history. Other methods test other materials, many of which are geological or biological in nature, and not connected to past human calendars, and some of which can cross check things with other kinds of radiometric dating. Rather detailed work shows very small changes in chemistry between C14 and C12 that can cause slight differences depending on what organism or mineral absorbed the C14, but from what I've seen, a lot of those corrections are smaller than typical error bars on the measurement of items of interest.
Losing ~236 years about 1000 years ago is large enough you would probably notice without even the corrections. I think the bigger question would not be how to could carbon dating screw up that badly, but how could you get that many countries to agree to change at the same time and to make up history to fill in the gap, considering what a mess it was to get countries to change to the Gregorian calendar (took Russia ~400 years to switch) and the Arabic calendar already started by that point, etc..
Even without models, just by knowing it is 170 ft tall you can work out the fastest you can go, assuming no friction and no initial push, is about ~71 mph (even a 10 mph start only bumps that up to about 72 mph).
Looks like fun, but for those trying to save money: always remember there is a jig you could build to do what ever you need. The only problem, is before you know it, it will be 2015, and you'll still be making a jig to help you to make a jig to make the cabinet. On a more serious note though, some people have made their own bandsaws out of scrap wood to save money (although might be cheaper to fix a second hand used one), and using this as an inspiration, it would be well within reach to make something that performs at least some of its functions if one wanted to put time into making their own tools.
The drawing makes it look like the gyroscope has a vertical rotation axis, so it shouldn't have any trouble turning. If the turn had a slight bank to it, the turn might feel awkward with the car remaining vertical, but it wouldn't be a problem until the banking was strong enough to cause the side of the car to bottom out. A more likely problem would be going up or down a steep incline, as even though there seems to be a pivot to allow some incline, some people's driveways might exceed that.
I would beg to differ, having small but quite painful burns from a couple different caustics before, including sodium hydroxide. Weaker mixtures of sodium hydroxide make your skin feel slippery, but if it is strong enough to through the outer layers of the skin, or you have the dry form and moist skin, it certainly feels like it is burning...
Other kinds of metal casting can be done with rather cheap equipment, especially if you get most of it used or free from the curb. There are plans and examples around of using propane and various types of re-purposed blowers with a little hardware to make a heat source for melting aluminum, although some can get it hot enough for iron. You just need a little specialty cement and insulator from a typical hardware store to make the furnace. The expensive part ends up being the fuel, although I once saw someone made their furnace to run off of discarded oil. Like other things, comes down to needing time and space for it if you want to do it on the cheap though.
Of course kids will act like kids and show varying degrees of controls, but the slightest bit of attention from the parents should make it obvious what type of kid they have at a given age, and what environments might be best to avoid until the kid grows a little more. I can't tell if some parents don't notice though, or don't want to admit their kid has a "problem." I wouldn't even call it a problem, just requires some thought, like whenever a particular neighbor's kid comes over I make sure to put away any tools or glass items as she has to pick up and look at everything. But when giving tours/open house things at my job, I've seen some parents get rather indignant when I won't let their kid in a room with expensive, easy to damage tools after watching their kid get touchy-gabby with things they were already warned to not touch. Not to mention things that could hurt the child if they get too out of control, as I've certainly seen way too many kids standing on top of guard rails at tall, busy places before.
In my opinion, it is kind of nice to see places that assume most people can act reasonable and respectful, instead of designing things things to be idiot-proof, even if that comes with a risk.
There seems to be a lot of overlap between the list on the site you linked and the ones put into the templates there, so that might actually be the source they used. I can't find one of the other sites that used to exist like the one I was linking to that used the fear of ducks joke (only a bunch that look like broken English).
As much as some of these are real fears, I think too many of the names are not actually used in psychology, and are either the result of poetic wording in other situations, making up words to sound smart (like some of the names for groups of animals), or just padding for weird lists that predate the, "You'll never guess these 10 phobias people are actually scared of," type sites. Or some are repurposed from actual words, like ombrophobia from plants that don't like rain.
"Are you finding yourself constantly afraid of X? Does your fear of X negatively impact your life? You may have a clinical case of chi-phobia, and our service can help you overcome your fear of X"
But the template must have been near completely unsupervised using whatever was the largest list they could find, as it included all sorts of joke phobias with the same dead serious pitch. "Does your fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth interfere with your performance at work?" "Does the fear somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you impact your romantic relationship?" "Did your fear of palindromes leave you traumatized as a child?"
Losing ~236 years about 1000 years ago is large enough you would probably notice without even the corrections. I think the bigger question would not be how to could carbon dating screw up that badly, but how could you get that many countries to agree to change at the same time and to make up history to fill in the gap, considering what a mess it was to get countries to change to the Gregorian calendar (took Russia ~400 years to switch) and the Arabic calendar already started by that point, etc..