The Onion: Nadir Of Western Civilization To Be Reached This Friday At 3:32 P.M.
Experts predict that the penultimate catastrophe will occur at approximately 7:15 p.m. Thursday night, when the social networking tool Twitter will be used to communicate a series of ideas so banal they will instantaneously negate the three centuries of the Renaissance.
As I hurtled down the highway, a pair of golden arches crept over the horizon, and the proverbial lightbulb smacked me in the forehead. To gauge the creep of cookie-cutter commercialism, there’s no better barometer than McDonald’s – ubiquitous fast food chain and inaugural megacorporate colonizer of small towns nationwide.
If you want to be more than 100 miles from a Mickey-D’s, you have to be in South Dakota
The baked bean index and other economic indicators
Many more in the included links.
This does not include* any mention of the vendor gift index; Tuesday’s Lab Snacks included mini Lorna Dunes. They were tasty. (He who opens the package gets first choice). And it was a partial order, so possibly more to come.
*UPDATE: Now it does. I’ve been linked to by Kottke!
What causes the colors of metals like gold?
If an energy level (like the 3d band) holds many more electrons (than other energy levels) then the excitation of electrons from this highly occupied level to above the Fermi level will become quite important. Gold fulfills all the requirements for an intense absorption of light with energy of 2.3 eV (from the 3d band to above the Fermi level). The color we see is yellow, as the corresponding wavelengths are re-emitted. Copper has a strong absorption at a slightly lower energy, with orange being most strongly absorbed and re-emitted. In silver, the absorption peak lies in the ultraviolet region, at about 4 eV. As a result, silver maintains high reflectivity evenly across the visible spectrum, and we see it as a pure white. The lower energies (which in this case contain energies corresponding to the entire visible spectrum of color) are equally absorbed and re-emitted.
To give it its full mathematical description, a Gömböc is a three-dimensional, convex and homogeneous object with exactly one stable point of equilibrium and one unstable point of equilibrium. Requiring it to be homogeneous amounts to saying that you’re not allowed to cheat: the material from which the Gömböc is made has to be uniform throughout, so you’re not allowed to use weights, as those found in roly-poly toys, or other irregularities to get the Gömböc to self-right. Convexity means that the Gömböc is not allowed to bulge inwards, in other words, the straight line connecting any two points on the Gömböc has to lie entirely within the Gömböc. It’s easy to create a non-convex shape with one stable and one unstable equilibrium point, hence the restriction to convexity.
I have this mental image of Dieter describing the Gömböc. I don’t know why.
Your three-dimensional, convex homogeneity has grown tiresome. Now is the time on Sprockets vhen ve dance!
175 Times. And Then the Catastrophe.
The laws of thermodynamics, unfortunately, have no regard for human life at all. They cannot be brushed off or bargained with, and if you do not pay attention to them they can cut you down.
Stone Age satnav: Did ancient man use 5,000-year-old travel chart to navigate across Britain
When did a chart become satellite navigation?
It’s considered to be one of the more recent innovations to help the hapless traveller.
But the satnav system may not be as modern as we think.
On the contrary. I think the satnav system is precisely as old as we think.
He analysed 1,500 prehistoric sites in England and Wales and was able to connect all of them to at least two other sites using isosceles triangles – these are triangles with two sides the same length.
This, he says, is proof that the landmarks were deliberately created as navigational aides. Many were built within sight of each other and provided a simple way to get from A to B.
Or, settlements were quasi-equally spaced, as the terrain allowed, because most people making a new settlement probably wouldn’t choose a site too close to an existing settlement, for fear of conflict.
Mr Brooks added: ‘The sides of some of the triangles are over 100 miles across, yet the distances are accurate to within 100 metres. You cannot do that by chance.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you could. Given the kind of packing restrictions present, I’d bet a semi-random distribution of sites would yield many such triangles.
(The comment about ET helping out is icing on the cake; I wonder if it the information was offered or solicited)
Very Important Poll: Dot Physics Census
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find as many different computers as I can to vote.
(I see there was a “not Tom” listed as one of the “other” submissions. That’s OK. If there’s an antiTom, though, I’m going to be worried.)
Uncertain Principles: Using Analogies on the Internet Is Like Doing a Really Futile Thing
No matter how carefully you set up your analogy, somebody will come along and interpret it in the most stupidly literal way possible, find some tiny point where it fails to correspond perfectly with the actual topic of discussion, and decide that this disagreement is an utterly devastating counter-argument to whatever point you were trying to make.
…
This is incredibly frustrating, because argument by analogy is a tool with a long and distinguished history among intelligent people debating topics in good faith.
Arguing in good faith on the internet has disappeared like a rabbit down its hole.
Aw, crap.