PlasmaGryphon's Comments
143,999,999,999.540.3 °F... holy significant figures Batman!
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I'm not a fan of calling that creme brulee. It is not so much that I am a purist about food, just more a fan of calling things by what they are. I.e. you can like whatever you like, and something might taste good, just don't label it as something it is not.
That said, vanilla pudding does make a reasonable substitute for creme brulee, especially if you are going to be serving it with something else. Quite a few restaurants use vanilla pudding instead, although maybe a step up from pudding cups. It gets the job done, and in some cases customers have remarked they like that version better (you never know how many noticed it wasn't normal and didn't say anything...). Although you can learn a lot by making the actual custard by one of several methods, and the science behind custards is at least slightly interesting...
And don't go buying one of those $40+ creme brulee torches from a kitchen store, get a $10-15 propane torch at a hardware store. Unless you are going to try to draw detailed images with the burned sugar, the larger, cheaper propane torch is faster and seems to do a better job anyway.
That said, vanilla pudding does make a reasonable substitute for creme brulee, especially if you are going to be serving it with something else. Quite a few restaurants use vanilla pudding instead, although maybe a step up from pudding cups. It gets the job done, and in some cases customers have remarked they like that version better (you never know how many noticed it wasn't normal and didn't say anything...). Although you can learn a lot by making the actual custard by one of several methods, and the science behind custards is at least slightly interesting...
And don't go buying one of those $40+ creme brulee torches from a kitchen store, get a $10-15 propane torch at a hardware store. Unless you are going to try to draw detailed images with the burned sugar, the larger, cheaper propane torch is faster and seems to do a better job anyway.
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Although if you are in Florida and see a large mosquito, it might not necessarily be one of these kinds. If I remember correctly from when I was growing up, I talked to a guy once who's job was to survey local mosquito populations in SW FL. He showed a collection of different species, and there was a giant one that stood out, but he mentioned they didn't go after humans and were harmless other than clogging up his net sometimes.
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Pitcairn Islands are pretty safe with a highest elevation of 350 m, but the British Indian Ocean Territory on the other hand is only about 15 m.
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Ah, but something sort of along those lines seems so simple when expressed as a function f:
f(0,X) = X
f(n,X) = f(n-1, "Which came first, the chicken or the X")
Instead, spice it up with function A:
A(0, 0, X) = X
A(0, n, X) = A(0,n-1, "Which came first, the chicken or the X")
A(m, 0, X) = A(m - 1, 1, X)
A(m, n, X) = A(m - 1, A(m, n-1,X), X)
The exercise for the "casual" reader would be to find how many times the word chicken comes up in A(4,3,"or the egg") before you decide you hate math.
f(0,X) = X
f(n,X) = f(n-1, "Which came first, the chicken or the X")
Instead, spice it up with function A:
A(0, 0, X) = X
A(0, n, X) = A(0,n-1, "Which came first, the chicken or the X")
A(m, 0, X) = A(m - 1, 1, X)
A(m, n, X) = A(m - 1, A(m, n-1,X), X)
The exercise for the "casual" reader would be to find how many times the word chicken comes up in A(4,3,"or the egg") before you decide you hate math.
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That solution only works if Mr. White talks to himself, as the reply to Mr. White came from "man in the red suit."
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This depends a lot on who you ask though. Unfortunately a lot of the controversy seems to be coming from people who would not fall under such a label, while there are still individuals and organizations from the Arctic areas that use Eskimo self-referentially. It doesn't help that some of is an issue over where the Yupik people fit into things, which would maybe be part of the reason Greenland and Canada seem to have a different view of the term than Alaska and Russia.
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Depends on how much this stuff costs when production swings up. You can already buy clothes that last much longer than most things, it just costs you more.
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I don't usually reply to the "What is it?" posts as I am usually too late and in the past people got the answer pretty quickly, but I check to see what it actually is in these weekly posts.
If you are still looking for ideas, I thought that thing looked like a woodworking tool called a scratch beader or quirk beader. Such a tool is used to cut ornamental groves into wood for things like frames, molding, and fronts of furniture. Searching for images, you get a lot of tools like this: http://www.woodworkingtalk.com/f11/hand-made-beading-tool-scratch-stock-35881/ or another simpler one with some images of it being used: http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?97319-Scratch-Stock-Simple-Easy-Effective-%28Photo-Tutorial%29
There is a plate on the side so that it slides a constant distance from one edge, for making nice straight grooves. But I've seen simpler ones that were for doing more freehand beading that would not have that. I have not seen one like in the picture, but it looks pretty similar, with the large round part for sliding along the work, and keeping the toothed scrapped at a constant angle, while not having as much stuff in the way around the scrapper as a beading plane would.
If you are still looking for ideas, I thought that thing looked like a woodworking tool called a scratch beader or quirk beader. Such a tool is used to cut ornamental groves into wood for things like frames, molding, and fronts of furniture. Searching for images, you get a lot of tools like this: http://www.woodworkingtalk.com/f11/hand-made-beading-tool-scratch-stock-35881/ or another simpler one with some images of it being used: http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?97319-Scratch-Stock-Simple-Easy-Effective-%28Photo-Tutorial%29
There is a plate on the side so that it slides a constant distance from one edge, for making nice straight grooves. But I've seen simpler ones that were for doing more freehand beading that would not have that. I have not seen one like in the picture, but it looks pretty similar, with the large round part for sliding along the work, and keeping the toothed scrapped at a constant angle, while not having as much stuff in the way around the scrapper as a beading plane would.
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I've been around high voltage long enough to have seen a few accidents and talked to a few people that survived previous accidents, and doctors have always made a big deal about them needing to go in to have their heart checked after the accident, even in cases where the current didn't look like it went through the chest. It mostly amounts to sitting next to an EKG machine for an hour, while reading or otherwise trying not too be bored. They just wanted to check that the heart rhythm was ok, which it seems to be in most cases, but I guess it can highlight heart problems you may have not known you had or in rare cases cause issues that are difficult to see at first.
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The only issue is in every previous case of extracting power from footsteps I've seen, and I'm not sure if this one is different, the power comes at the expense of effort used to walk. This isn't a big deal for the people who want to get more exercise out of walking, or using a very small amount of power extract efficiently. But last I heard, the military ran into a lot of trouble using such a technique to try and power a soldier's electronics, because the soldiers testing the boots complained how tiring it was, like trying to run in soft sand.
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Oddly, they left out the incident in Goiânia, Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident , which involved a lot more health impact, especially for people not working a nuclear plant, than others on the list.
And the incident at SL-1 in Idaho has some weird issues, and no one is sure why the operator removed a control rod from the reactor as far as he did, when he would have know that was quite dangerous. Considering how hard it seems to do what he did by accident, people have speculated the incident was done purposely as a form of suicide
And the incident at SL-1 in Idaho has some weird issues, and no one is sure why the operator removed a control rod from the reactor as far as he did, when he would have know that was quite dangerous. Considering how hard it seems to do what he did by accident, people have speculated the incident was done purposely as a form of suicide
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A university is (or at least was) not a place just for developing careers, but a place to learn. As people got more eager to jump start careers and costs have driven people to be more utilitarian, people have made their time at a university more targeted at developing careers. But that is not the only thing one can do at a university. Even with a career centric curriculum, there are still opportunities to develop other interests and skills. Opinions on whether physical abilities and strategies fit into being an acceptable thing to learn at a university or not is going to vary a lot and probably be pretty set in most people's mind anyway though.
And for a few it is a career development. Although the rate at which a college sports player ends up going pro is 1-2% (although apparently 10% for baseball), that is not much less than chances in some other fields getting to what the training leads to. Physics graduate school is heavily biased toward teaching academia practices, but a rule of thumb gives about 5-15% actually ending up with a career in academia.
And for a few it is a career development. Although the rate at which a college sports player ends up going pro is 1-2% (although apparently 10% for baseball), that is not much less than chances in some other fields getting to what the training leads to. Physics graduate school is heavily biased toward teaching academia practices, but a rule of thumb gives about 5-15% actually ending up with a career in academia.
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If it is anything like how professors and some other university employees are paid, their state salary will include the money that comes from grants and other outsides, etc. So just because it is listed as such doesn't mean it is all money from taxes. My salary shows up as being paid by the state at my current and previous jobs, even though 0% of it was state money, all of it came from federal grants that are paid to the project (and a slice off the top of which goes to the university to pay for buildings and operations). There is a bunch of annoying paperwork that tracks what percentage of your work is related to what project, so that the money paying that salary comes out of the right grant. You would need to ask someone how that money that comes in from merchandise, tickets, donations, etc., gets handled, as there is a chance it gets counted in many of those things you are looking at that on first appearances look like it is coming from tax payers.
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If only I could use dowsing to find a citation... might be an interesting read.
"One of the first things we learned was that it should be impossible for a bumblebee to fly because its wing span can’t generate enough aerodynamics to lift its body weight. "
This one is always rather annoying. A bumble bee was said to not generate enough lift, if you applied principles that made a bunch of assumptions. It could be a useful lesson in checking your assumptions, but has become instead a false lesson in the hubris of science (maybe more appropriately of hubris of taking things out of context, or not remembering the details...).
"Scientists can’t accept it because they don’t understand how it works."
Scientists find and publish phenomenological results that lack explanation all the time. Although, being open to new effects without explanation is not the same thing as being motivated to invest time into something. That is where the word salad explanations can factor into things, that they make a scientists question how observant and attentive the person making the claims are, and likely figure there are better uses of time.
Still a well written article I think. It is just unfortunate that dowsing has moved on from a curiosity that at worst could lose a lot of money, to something that could now cost people's live.