[I]f someone tells you that they “don’t believe in” thermal conduction, it’s likely that they’re not so much saying they deny its existence as that they don’t understand what you mean when you say “thermal conduction.” For all their supposed disbelief, after all, they still avoid sitting on metal park benches in the winter.
Use of “belief” is a standard equivocation tactic. Any poll that asks about belief in a theory is fatally flawed, but then, I think most polls are a sham, anyway.
Cloudy with a Chance of Satellite
Falling satellite warning from the National Weather Service
The Secret of Successful Kissing
Scientific evidence suggests that wet, sloppy smooches pack a bigger biochemical punch than dry kisses and thus may be more likely to lead to sex and reproduction
Just reporting what others have researched, my own anecdotal data to the contrary.
Regenerative brakes recapture energy that conventional brakes dissipate as heat. What’s next? Shock absorbers.
New Shock Absorber Harvests Energy From Bumps In The Road, Increases Fuel Economy
Their prototype shock absorbers use a hydraulic system that forces fluid through a turbine attached to a generator. The system is controlled by an active electronic system that optimizes the damping, providing a smoother ride than conventional shocks while generating electricity to recharge the batteries or operate electrical equipment.
In their testing so far, the students found that in a 6-shock heavy truck, each shock absorber could generate up to an average of 1 kW on a standard road — enough power to completely displace the large alternator load in heavy trucks and military vehicles, and in some cases even run accessory devices such as hybrid trailer refrigeration units.
Statistics, and the quest for meaningful statistics, in basketball. Baseball may have the most dubious statistics, but because of the dynamic of the game, in basketball you can amass impressive personal statistics in a way that hurts the team, e.g. the box score shows you scored 20, but that doesn’t indicate if it was on 10-of-20 shooting or 10-of-30, and doesn’t say whether a missed shot was at the expense of a teammate who had a much better opportunity.
[T]he big challenge on any basketball court is to measure the right things. The five players on any basketball team are far more than the sum of their parts; the Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling subtle interactions among the team’s elements. To get at this they need something that basketball hasn’t historically supplied: meaningful statistics. For most of its history basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is easy to measure — points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots — and these measurements have warped perceptions of the game. (“Someone created the box score,” Morey says, “and he should be shot.”) How many points a player scores, for example, is no true indication of how much he has helped his team. Another example: if you want to know a player’s value as a rebounder, you need to know not whether he got a rebound but the likelihood of the team getting the rebound when a missed shot enters that player’s zone.
There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group. On the baseball field, it would be hard for a player to sacrifice his team’s interest for his own. Baseball is an individual sport masquerading as a team one: by doing what’s best for himself, the player nearly always also does what is best for his team. “There is no way to selfishly get across home plate,” as Morey puts it. “If instead of there being a lineup, I could muscle my way to the plate and hit every single time and damage the efficiency of the team — that would be the analogy. Manny Ramirez can’t take at-bats away from David Ortiz. We had a point guard in Boston who refused to pass the ball to a certain guy.” In football the coach has so much control over who gets the ball that selfishness winds up being self-defeating.