Daily Archives: September 30, 2010

The Case Against Pennies

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aka the disgusting bacteria-ridden disks of suck that fail to facilitate commerce

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You only have to get rid of the penny for cash transactions — you could still track it for electronic ones. You’d just round up or down on the whole transaction.

UPDATE: Those statistics are out of date. In 2009, it cost 1.6 cents to make a penny and 6.1 cents to make a nickel; the US Mint lost 22 million on penny and nickel production, not the 70 million they lost in 2008. (This is because the recession has made zinc and nickel cheaper.)

Not Related to the "No-Hair" Theorem

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The Virtuosi: Beards and Pulsars

The Hulse-Taylor binary is almost exactly what it sounds like: it’s a pulsar binary where one of the pulsars is pointed towards earth. It was the first binary of it’s kind discovered and offers a unique look into a very high gravity environment. It also provided a very nice test for General Relativity. General Relativity predicts that two orbiting massive bodies should emit gravitational waves. This emission of gravitational waves will then cause the orbit to decay and the two bodies to move closer together.
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So doing a quick division, we find that the rate at which the Hulse-Taylor binary’s orbit is shrinking is roughly 14 times beard [growth] speed

Evil Genius Physics

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French Thieves Use Vacuums to Suck Thousands from Safes

The key to the thieves’ nearly uninterrupted streak of success, per French reports, is the way that Monoprix delivers money from the checkouts to its safes: Envelopes of cash are funneled in via pneumatic suction tubes. Whereas breaching the safe itself might be considerably difficult, requiring explosives or safecracking, the thieves realized that if they just drilled into the delivery tubes near the safebox and hooked up a powerful vacuum, they could suck the money out and get at it much more easily.

I don’t know the specifics, so there may be a good reason that they haven’t fixed this problem during the four years the thieving has been going on, but it would seem a check valve would be useful here.

It's All by Design

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Are we raising a generation of nincompoops?

Are we raising a generation of nincompoops? And do we have only ourselves to blame? Or are some of these things simply the result of kids growing up with push-button technology in an era when mechanical devices are gradually being replaced by electronics?

Susan Maushart, a mother of three, says her teenage daughter “literally does not know how to use a can opener. Most cans come with pull-tops these days. I see her reaching for a can that requires a can opener, and her shoulders slump and she goes for something else.”

All the more for me after the impending apocalypse. The cell-phone-savvy will wither and die, and I will know how to open the cans.