planetguy

McDonald's is in a fortunate/unfortunate position in that they can afford to have an ad campaign based upon honesty, because the unvarnished truth is still a lot better than the stuff that an awful lot of people already believe about them. I've heard many of these urban myths repeated in the wild by otherwise intelligent people:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonalds_urban_legends

My favourite fact about most of these is that they allege that McDonald's is using a disgusting ingredient which would almost certainly wind up more expensive than the real thing. Hamburger-grade beef sells for, what, four dollars a pound? Probably a lot less if you have McDonalds' buying power. What do you think worm meat costs?

I have difficulty believing these poll numbers. How can 46% of Americans be full-on young-Earth creationists, when I've never met one? I think there must be some flaw in the way they're asking the question, apart from the fact that the phrasing of the question seems to presuppose the existence of a guy called "God" (I would replace with "a god or gods").

What about missing poll options? Surely there must be some young-Earth creationists out there who nonetheless believe the human race is over ten thousand years old. In fact, there's a whole term for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Earth_creationism

I am fond of pointing out (as it annoys many people) that not only is intelligent design not incompatible with evolution, but also that "intelligent design" is pretty much implied by the tenets of most monotheisms. If you have an omnipotent god who sets the initial conditions of the big bang, then he can hardly fail to know perfectly well that the initial particle trajectories he programs in will lead, inevitably, to the formation of Earth and intelligent life thereon. Assuming that said deity had a choice in initial conditions, the fact that he chose the initial conditions that he did must mean that he designed everything in the universe, since from an omnipotent being's point of view setting the initial conditions is perfectly equivalent to setting everything up from scratch at T=1.37e10 years. (The alternative is that you have a deity who can't predict the outcome of quantum events, but what kind of crappy omniscience is that?)

Academic papers also make terrible pornography. That's not what they're designed for either.

The thing about part-time citizen scientists is that they could exist, but don't. Or rather, they do exist, but nearly one hundred percent of them are crackpots. I don't think this kind of project can change that, because I don't think lack of funding is what's holding these people back.

What's the problem? Well, doing real scientific research is hard and time-consuming. Just trying to catch up with what's already known in your field of choice takes a lot of time and effort, especially if you're unplugged from the community, and then taking it to the next level by actually discovering something new is far harder. The average PhD student works for several years, full time, before they do their first piece of truly worthwhile work, and in 99 percent of cases we're still not talking about anything significant enough to satisfy your average hobbyist with dreams of scientific glory. Also the average PhD student has access to a zillion things which a hobbyist doesn't, most importantly an advisor who understands the field and knows what approaches are likely to be worthwhile. So for a hobbyist-scientist, we're talking four to five years of all your spare time spent trying to produce one or two papers that probably won't make a big impact. Doesn't sound enticing.

Crackpots, of course, get to take a short cut. Crackpots get the thrill of being a Great Scientist Who Discovered Something Important without the tedious mess involved with actually learning the field and doing science. Crackpots occur when you take the desire for scientific glory and subtract scientific understanding and self-awareness. They're inevitably extremely satisfied with their work, even if they're angry that nobody will take them seriously.

In short, though, anyone with the brains, the commitment and the love of science that you'd need to be a legitimate part-time citizen-scientist in this day and age has probably already found a way to be a full-time scientist instead.

There isn't any difference, except often when people microwave water they don't get it all the way to boiling. With a kettle it's pretty obvious when your water is at boiling.

Some let you just press the "add minute" button and it immediately starts cooking on a one-minute timer. Want to cook for more than a minute? Keep pressing that add-minute button while it's cooking.

I don't want it. I want a cordless one with a dock and a zillion-watt element that can boil a litre of water in forty seconds.

Even that needs a lot of work.

Okay, so I can create "connections" on an "if this then that" basis. I need more examples of the sorts of thises and thats that I can use as input and output, though. Like, apparently I can control my home appliances? And... what else?

And by "frequently" you mean "almost never, cuz I've been trying to get it to happen for years and it damn well doesn't"

Also, Douglas Adams on a very similar subject:

http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2002/12/a_proper_cup_o...

So the best advice I can give to an American arriving in England is this: Go to Marks and Spencer and buy a packet of Earl Grey tea. Go back to where you’re staying and boil a kettle of water. While it is coming to the boil, open the sealed packet and sniff. Careful---you may feel a bit dizzy, but this is in fact perfectly legal. When the kettle has boiled, pour a little of it into a teapot, swirl it around, and tip it out again. Put a couple (or three, depending on the size of the pot) of tea bags into the pot. (If I was really trying to lead you into the paths of righteousness, I would tell you to use free leaves rather than bags, but let’s just take this in easy stages.) Bring the kettle back up to the boil, and then pour the boiling water as quickly as you can into the pot. Let is stand for two or three minutes, and then pour it into a cup.

I don't trust the idea of microwaving water for tea, because microwaved water will probably be sub boiling temperature.

I've tried to superheat water in my microwave and never managed it.

The problem is that electric kettles in America are slow as fuck, which I assume is due to the 110V power supply.

Go somewhere with 240V and two things happen: (a) you're far more likely to die of electrocution in your own house and (b) you can get a decent tea kettle.

Interesting observation on the random direction, I'd always wondered why that was.

The other thing to remember is that in the 1990s a microwave oven cost several hundred dollars at least. Now you can pick one up for fifty bucks, possibly forty. Losing extraneous features like "boomerang turntable" is presumably part of how the manufacturers managed to respond to the downwards price pressure.

One of the most visually offensive things about a lot of communist architecture is top-heaviness. It's not just a grey block of filthy concrete, it's a grey block of filthy concrete that looks like it's about to crush you.

It felt like Borges wrote the first half and Neal Stephenson wrote the second.

I liked the first half better -- the mystery of the situation was so fabulous that any possible resolution would be a letdown.

Because fame and ego. Assange is a weird-looking socially awkward epsilon-male, but make him the figurehead of anti-Americanism and apparently a bunch of Swedish leftist chicks want to bang him. At least once. As long as he puts on a condom.

In all seriousness, if you find yourself asking "Why did this man choose fame, glory and groupies over the good of the cause he claims to espouse" then you don't know much about human psychology.

> The US would be happy to volunteer a few if it's a question of manpower

How many times? This is nothing to do with the US. This is a UK-Sweden extradition of an Australian citizen. If the US DoJ ever gets off its ass and decides to press charges against Julian Assange (they've been sitting on their hands for a couple of years now) it's not gonna do it via some subtle cloak-and-dagger six-country shuffle, it'll just show up with a letter that says "o hai extradition plz".

I'm confused by the embassy's statement.

Is an embassy really obliged to shelter any foreign national who might show up on the run from the law for a fairly prosaic [ahem alleged] crime? If I knock over a gas station can I show up at the Tanzanian embassy, say "Hi, I'm a political refugee" and hang around for long enough for them to process this claim?

Not disagreeing with you, but I wonder how much the Burj expands and contracts every day.

If this were fark someone would reply with some kind of comment about the threat typically posed to skyscrapers by persons of middle-eastern origin.

But yeah, I wouldn't wanna be on a high floor of this thing.

To make the entrants feel smarter. The whole thing is, of course, completely isomorphic to a guess-an-integer competition, but the rather minimal effort you need to go to to figure out the Nth prime makes it all worthwhile.

Perhaps it also indicates something about which primes sound primest, though. 29 is an outlying underachiever, suggesting that "29" doesn't spring to mind when you ask someone to name a prime... certainly I had to think for a moment to make sure it really was a prime. 23, 17, 37 are overachievers -- these are really prime-sounding primes, no doubt about it.

I would assume that the right strategy here varies depending on how many other people are going to enter the competition.

Actually, a "guess how many people will enter this competition" competition would be fun.

What would be interesting now is to repeat the competition after publishing these results; in fact, make sure these results are given on the entry page for the new competition. What would happen this time? Well, a bunch of people would start picking numbers around 109 this time. Except everybody expects everybody to do that, so maybe they'll start picking lower. Meanwhile smartasses will still be picking "2", and smartasses who think they can outsmart those smartasses will be picking "3".

It wasn't the engineers, it was the architects.

Communist architecture followed the principles of communist architecture. Diversion from what the state thought was a good idea was highly un-recommended. The principles of communist architecture started off from a lot of high-minded platitudes about equality and national purpose, but in practice always translated to a monstrous block of filthy grey concrete with tiny windows that looks awful from a distance and only gets worse as you get closer.

It wasn't confined to the eastern bloc either, you can find plenty of horrible examples of a similar style dreamed up by western architects infected by similar principles; pretty much anything ugly, grey, concrete, and mid-century. They continue to blight our cities and (especially) our university campuses. But reconstruct a whole city in the same milieu, and you'll have Warsaw.

Once again, in action, the unnamed law that decrees that any article about anything happening in any country in the world inevitably turns into a thread about much worse things are in the US.

Actually I think words are sufficient. As in "Oh man, those three and a half seconds of actual video of the reconstruction were awesome, it'd be nice if there were more of that"

edit: I found the full video! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrlE99I_Q9A

I watched it and it did tell me one thing: it's a bit like an iPad but it comes with a cover that's also a keyboard.

And that's probably going to be the big selling point. "It's a bit like an iPad, but it comes with a cover that's also a keyboard".

Cargo-cultism. Apple was doing both those things back in 1998 when they were going broke, and they could have just as easily gone broke doing 'em.

There are many ways to run a successful company. Some of 'em involve in-house engineering and a focus on quality, while others involve outsourcing all your engineering and focusing on cheap crap (see also: Wal-Mart, nearly as profitable as Apple).

Nobody is mentioned except Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Madrid, Milan, Moscow, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Stockholm and Tel Aviv. And a few of those aren't even in Europe.

I rarely buy stuff online, but I do worry about what happens to retail areas as shopping continues to move online. There's nothing more depressing than one of those run-down unrenovated malls that nobody bothers to visit any more, half empty and half filled with shops selling china statues of dogs. Now imagine a world where even the nice malls look like that.

I'm probably over-extrapolating, of course. The reason I hardly ever buy online is that if I've already decided I want something then I'm willing to throw in a few extra dollars to get it now rather than later. I can't be the only one who feels that way. There are some things which will continue to be much easier to buy instore than online.

Lascaux.