Posts by GrimJack

HiHe: agreed - I wonder sometimes about all those different 'stink' producers available on the market - up to and including one that allows you to set moods. The most I want to do is to is, maybe, light a joss stick. The one most effective trick I learned (I am a cat person) is to bag and seal everything that I scoop out of the cat box; it seems that 'cat smell' is usually not from the cat box but from the garbage where the scoopable is stored until disposal.

HiHe: agreed - the only true solution is to not have a smoker nearby. What I am offering is a way to remove 99.97% of particles that are .3 micrometers or larger. The outer filter is charcoal activated and removes the (relatively) huge chunks from the air before the 'interception, impaction, diffusion' takes place in finer detail.

Once you start talking about chemicals in the air, cigarette pollution becomes buried in all the other crap a typical apartment dweller has to breath. From carpet outgassing to neighbors outgassing (fart joke).

I recommend that you research HEPA air purifiers. I think that you can get better air cleaning at a lower cost. I know that Honeywell air cleaners do a good job and have reuseable filters (you can rinse them in the sink - once you have a cleaner, the filter cost becomes significant. Most HEPA cleaners will be rated by how large a room that they can clean and how many times per hour they will they will clean all the air in the room.

Good luck. Most 'big box' stores and large discounters like Fred Meyers and Target will have them and will allow you to turn one on to hear what they sound like

Important caveate - make sure it says 'true HEPA' as that is a standard that can not be wishy-washied away. I have seen phrases similar to 'HEPA-like' that implies more than it means. The range in costs is from $80 and up; most of the cost difference is the volume of air it can clean in a set amount of time.

Well, if we don't count my just cooking some lamb in the kitchen I will have to say Buenos Aires AR. My first and only visit to that continent. (other continents include Europe and Australia).

The only real use I have for laptops is to attach external monitors and keyboards to them. I hate HP products because of the the excess shite that they load on it.

could you please produce several other examples of such language "distortion"?

How about the entire English language is a distortion of Middle English which was a distortion of - well, you get the idea the distortion goes back Sumerian/Hindi. Even East Coast (USAIAN)language distortions (dialects) can be traced to the century that those areas were colonized by the British; from New England to Florida.

It is amazing how much of your thought processes are built right into your question and scare quotes - OMG, what were you thinking when you wrote "distortion"

@kplcjl: no it didn't - the story started from the point of view of the stranded traveler and followed that point of view for a number of years and landed to rescue the stranded traveler - consider it Worm Ourobores eating its way through the earth until it finds another like itself and asks it to marry him but the answer was "I can't silly, I am your other end".

ddanbe:

Time travel? What if you go back in time and killed your father or mother or both, when they were 10 years old?

Read All You Zombies Every single person in the short story is the same person - she started out as a teen who was seduced by an older man, became pregnant, her child was stolen, she had a sex change and became a writer using the pseudonym of "unwed mother". The bartender at his local hangout sent him into a time machine back into the past where he seduced himself (and so on - probably the single best time travel story ever told).

vmanes: 4th dimension, time travel....they give me headaches!

I read a time travel novel years ago that started with the point of view of someone being rescued and ended with that same point of view being the rescuer - my head hurt for weeks. Then I read "All You Zombies" and nearly had a migraine.

EP: of course I did, sigh. Look here.

Here is a referral to 77 'interesting' kybrds, including the wrist one - I liked #1, #11, maybe 14&15, #42, #46?, #57 could be interesting, #77 is just too vegan.

There is an interesting twist on the Flatland named "the Planiverse" - Flatland was a 2d world seen from above; Planiverse is 2d world seen from the side (ie a computer screen).

Time is not a dimension it is a coordinate; there is a 4th dimension and it is the space occupied by a hypercube,hypersphere, and so on. The mathematics of lower dimension space has some interesting 'tiling' properties - I especially like Kellor's Conjecture that state that tiling an N-dimensional space with N-dimensional hypercubes of equal sides yield an arangement in which at least 2 hypercubes have an entire (N-1)-dimensional "side" in common.

It has been proven true in dimensions 6 or less and false in dimensions 8, 10, and 12.

How useful you find the laser keyboard might depend on how you learned to type. I learned on a manual typewriter where there was almost an inch of play while the key lifted the impact hammer to strike the page - the feedback is important to me. I worked with a guy who learned on a computer keyboard and he would be perfect for the laser kybrd. Hmmm, as I type this I realize how important alignment is - I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that you would waste a lot of time making sure you are hitting the correct keys. I would say if you are a touch typist, it won't work but if you normally monitor your fingers then it would be worth a shot.

I have always been interested int this Keyboard

The book "Stank On Zanzibar" starts with (among other very VERY weird shit) the human race, standing shoulder to should, could fit on Zanzibar and ends with ... a list of deaths then "Despite the foregoing, the human race by tens of thousands would be knee deep in the water around Zanzibar"

Stages:
* up to 21 - I am immortal
* 22 to 31 - I might die
* 32 to 41 - I will die someday
* 42 to 51 - damn it, I don't want to think about it
* 52 to 61 - Okay, okay I will die soon enough
* 62 and up - okay, I will get around to making out a will and EOL plans and DNR
* (everybody sort of still believes that they are different and just might, maybe can still live forever)

Married people might have different time frams.

There is a quote by a French author that states that the average person does not know what to do with their life yet wants another one which will last forever

No there isn't. If you don't know what you are talking about, why do you open your mouth? Mexican proverb If you don't open your mouth, the flies won't get in

Hah, I just remembered the fish species that never dies of old age - the sturgeon. They are bottom feeders that have no known age limit or size limit. A dead sturgeon floated to the surface in Lake Washington (near Seattle), it weighed 300+ pounds and was though to be 200+ years old.

WRT blue animals - the blue crab is blue using a cyanine of the anthocyanidins which is similar to what plants use. It is a complex carotenoprotein. I thought that the blue was from copper but that is a different crab - the horseshoe crab which has copper-based blood (possibly the only such species on earth).

Suggesting that once an organism is no longer able to reproduce it no longer affects the evolutionary process is ignoring the importance of family. Colony species like ants, hive species like bees immediately come to mind - reproduction is limited to a single entity and yet they survive. In the same manner uncles, aunts, grandparents all contribute to the survival of the species by helping keep the offspring alive. The longer a grandparent lives productively, the more likely the offspring will survive. Unmated, relatives contribute to keeping offspring alive.

Actually, they are chipping people who are quadroplegics - I remember back in the 90s an electrode was placed in a quadroplegic's brain and he was albe to move the cursor. It is taking off in the assistive tech world; brain controled wheel chairs. Essentially there is a whole spectrum of people who have disabilities that can be assisted by 'chipping'.

Hmmm, I find the structoral blue of bird feathers interesting; the pattern of keratin proteins is such that red and yellow wavelengths are cancel each other out leaving blue reinforced and amplified. The shades of blue is made by air pockets in the keratin structures.

The lack of blue in mammals (actually, in most vertibrates) with the exception of mandrils and velvet monkeys (and some marsupials) has driven some scientists to delve a little more deeply into looking at the sturctoral reasons. I really like this quote for both what it says and how it says it
Prum’s observations provided the first phylogenetically documented instance of macroevolution between classes of coherently scattering nanostructures. For such periodic arrays, the 2D Fourier power spectrum could distinguish between laminar, crystal-like, and quasi-ordered nanostructures since laminar and crystal-like typically produce iridescence while quasi-ordered arrays do not.

Some blues and greens of glass are produced by oxides of copper so when working with these colors it is possible to use a reduction flame to rip the Oxigen out of the color leaving you with ribbons of copper metal in the object you are working.

Anyway, I brought up blue not for its own sake but to try to point out that some of the attributes produce by genetics are a side affect of some other attribute. Red hair in caucasians is linked to the balance of melanins produced by a particular gene whereas red hair in Africans is a form of albinism - a particular …

AD - thank you for that video - always eat a durian out in the open, near a bucket and never,never inhale anywhere near one.

Everyone kind of views the human body as balanced on a peak of health and anything that disrupts that the body falls to illness - the truth is that it is more like the body is down in a valley and it takes something pretty extreme to overcome its normal homeostasis. (sorry, that might be a confusing analogy sigh).

There are RNA (transcriptase?) molecules whose job it is to go over the DNA and correct transcription errors. We contain all the DNA from our origins with all the DNA that makes us different from pond scum or primates. It is just that certain genes are 'turned on' (crap I miss my ex - she was a plant phys. whis and could get me closer) or 'expressed'.

People sometimes wonder why no one has blue hair and why no mammals have blue fur - the reason might be that the combination of genes that would express blue hair cause other issues that are deadly to mammals. Attributes that we consider beneficial (surviving malaria) in a different environment proves to be detrimental (cycle cell).

But I digress

There have been interesting speculative fiction on living long: AE VAn Voght's Weaponsmaster, Heinlein's Methusela's children, and so on. The current research seems to aimed more at why do we age rather than how do we extend our lives. IIRC, DNA replication snips the ends off of certain chromosomes (???); pieces that are snipped start out being junk DNA but once the junk is all snipped off, actual important information is snipped and this is what they consider the aging process. Sorry, I don't have all the research to hand (and it is too late for me to start googling right now).

Durian - this is my love/hate fruit. It is not explainable what it is like; eating it from the shell is like eating pudding as long as you do not breath through your nose. Seriously, when eating durian plug your nose. It is banned in most cities and towns in Asia so you will see crowds of people (mostly men) at the city limits waiting for the durian truck. The durian fruit comes from a tree very much like palm trees but even taller; in order for the seeds to be spread it needs an animal that can carry a 4-10 pound seed so it evolved to attract tigers (the only animal big and strong enough to carry it) but how does it attract the tiger - it smells like rotting flesh! This is why you can't breath through your nose when you eat it and why most cities and towns ban it. It stinks - we wrapped one in 5 plastic bags (one inside the then next) and it sill stank. We buried it and it still stank so we took it about 20 miles north and dumped it in the woods. We were on the porch eating it (very carefully) when my boss showed up for the party, he tried a bite got a whiff and I swear he spit that about 40 yards across the road and onto a neighbor's yard. The party was themed with one of the themes was the strangest fruit - guess what …

Well, scientists recently found a clam that was over 500 years old (too bad they had to kill it to find out how old it was). There are some species of lizard that do not die of old age and a fish; not a coeleocanth but another of the cartilegenous fish that live over 300 years. Koi fish live over 200 years.

I bring these up because for such species to live a long time, they have to compete for food during the entire time; I just wanted to make sure that having a long life span does not necessarily means spending most of your life in senecense. In order for someone to live for hundreds of years, it would probably have to be by reversing the normal entropy at the cellular level.

I played high school football and college soccer/karate.

@AA=

Why do people need WIC anyway? GET A JOB
WIC is for children/babies - we have laws against child labor. "Get a Job" Is a pointless remark as there have to be jobs to get. I first thought you were making a joke, then I read your other rants.

I have a Fitbit and walk to the gym and back for about 7-8k steps, stretch, swim, do some isolated machines and some core including 'the wheel' but mostly I wander around the apt. wondering why I came into this room and what it is I was going to do.

Why would you need to physically move it around?

Because the point of having gold as a standard is the paper currency can at any time be redemed for gold (even if only theoretically) - the people would have to beleive that their country has the gold to back the currency - for each currency in use so the Nation's Bank would at least looked like it could cover its currency

The Gold standard for currency worked well,

The Gold standard only worked because it was illegal for citizens to own gold and the value of gold was artificially frozen at $28 per troy ounce here in the US

Potential investors are taxed to the point they have no money to invest, potential entrepreneurs think twice about starting a business on a loan

This is one of your craziest statements - there is no one in the US who is taxed to that extent. Taxes in the US are at an all time low and the countries infrastructure is failing to show that.

Mike 2k said that very well; a slightly different way to look a fiat currency is that it is the value of 'work' produced or a convenient way to keep track of barter. Carrying around bushels of wheat to trade for pounds of fish is just plain awkward. So we all agree that a certain number of pounds of fish are worth a certain number of bushels of wheat - since it is a relationship that is in constant flux we try to assign a value to the relationship and all agree to accept that valuation. Currently, the most stable currency in the world is the US$ so the world agrees to use the US$ for keeping track. There are a lot of people who somehow think that backing currency with gold is a good idea - but it isn't for a couple reasons; there isn't enough gold in the world to back the world's economy and the cost of shipping gold around the world would suck all the value out of the gold. If the world were to agree to use gold as the standard, it is essentially the same thing as the world agreeing to use the US$ as a standard - both are arbritrary.

As a sort of joke, the Big Mac has also been used to compare world's productivity - The Economist first did this back in 1986 - the current comparison tool is here.

VS: a little googling seems to imply that the shelf life of the current model of cruise missile is 10 years. After that time the probability of some part of the system to fail approaches 50%. I was not able to discern if each part of the system had a 50% probability of failure or the entire system had a 50% chance of failure. If the past is any predicter, we will create a new generation of cruise missiles and sell the 'stale' ones to our allies. Though since the old AS-15s are out there, I am sure that one nation or another can use one of them as a model from which to work.

The rebels are allied with Al Qaeda and very anti-US. They are probably worse than Assad. They are being strongly supported by Saudi Arabia who would like to get the US involved as well. This is no-win for the US (except maybe the arms companies who like to have the US at war with someone).

I agree that it is a no-win for the US but this quote show a complete lack of understanding of the politics of the Mid-East. I understand that sometimes nuance is difficult but you really should try it. A quick overview: Saudi Arabia is Wahabi Sunni (the Wahabi sect of the Sunni is one of the strictest), Iran is Shi'a and Syria is Sunni(74%) but the leadership is Alawite Shi'a(11%), the Druze are monotheistic ethnoreligious - they accept a little of this, a little of that, call them the Unitarians of the Mid-east(3%), 3 Shi'a subgroups of Twelver, Ismali, and Zadis comprise 2%. Don't forget the Kurds are 10%. There are also Christian and Jewish populations so totaling up all the non-Sunni we get about 16% of the population. This is only a breakdown by religion; we could breakdown the population by ethnicity, the non-Arabs such as Kurds, Turkmen, Circassians, Chechens, Bosnians and Albanians with a plethora of smaller ethnic groups. And there are the

Saying the rebels are allied with Al Qaeda is just wrong. Yes there are Al Qaeda in the fighting but that is what Al Qaeda does. The issues …

If a war was started it would be a little nuclear bomb here and there...

But we are not talking about starting a 'war' this is just little 'piss-ant' nations releasing WMDs. Japan has a cult that released sarin gas in their subway system. Biologic developement of weapons is fast becoming a DIY affair - or they could just break into one of the 2 labs in the world that still have smallpox samples. Nuclear war seems so 'last century' that I doubt that is a true WMD threat any more. If people can be convinced to don explosive vests, it is not a stretch to think they can be convinced to be infected with a MRSA, or TB or Pneumonic plague and have them fly around the world or just hang out in an airport and infect all the travelers.

I think that with the use of gas on his own people was crossing a Rubicon. What is done in response are the issues that arise. Chemical weapons are the first WMD; weapons that are indiscriminant - killing large swathes of people with no controls. The ban covers

asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases and of bacteriological methods of warfare <

This is a Pandora's Box that is being opened; allowing a rogue nation to use a banned weapon gives any nation carte blanc to follow suit. A little gas attack here, maybe some poison there, then just a little bit of anthrax or smallpox and suddenly there are pandemics across the world.

There is no posssible 'win' in a war with Syria/Egypt/Iran/Iraq/Afghanistan - there was a possible, incredibly tiny window of opportunity in Afghanistan back when Osama was trapped in the mountains, but so far we have lost every shot we took at interfering in other countries' affairs (at least since WWII) - we took a lot of shots. Hell, we are responsible for most of current shit going on over there.

valiant inability keeping in new game

harpoon

Ketchup eating tofu sauteing unabashed epicurian, killed in a mealtime explosion.

furrfu

coffee snort - the comments were much more informative than the article. It seems very much like the article was written across a 'Chinese Wall' - oh, I guess the new way to say that is google re-translate. In the process I discovered:

tranlate from German to German - listen "pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpkzvpvzk kkkkkk bsch"

it becomes a beat-box

Wanton or oddious liberal winnowing of real time heresies

heretical

in order to restore the tranquility Tibetans are incidentally presently enjoying.

I am not sure what you mean with this particular phrase. The Chinese government just completed a rail line to Tibet and are now giving land to Han Chinese to lure them to Tibet. Rather than 'conquering' the Tibetans the plan is to overwhelm them with numbers. At the end of the current phase, the Han Chinese will outnumber the Tibetans and there will no longer be a 'Tibetan' culture; there will be another Chinese province. In 1953 there were about 100k Han in Tibet. Since that time it has been Chinese policy to settle retired military in Tibet allowing a more pro-Chinese civilian population. It is pretty hard to get 'solid' information from the area so population figures are not particularly trustworthy since each 'side(?)' releases data supporting thier particular agenda.

War profiteering sort of falls under 'the Broken Window' fallacy - whereas something like the government works projects not only get money to the people who spend it immediately for necessities but there is the long term result that can be seen to this day; dams, bridges, park trails, art, et cetera. Ninety per cent of this type of economic support is trickle up - families get fed, local businesses are supported, goods and services are transported to where they are needed on roads produced by the work of the people. Larger businesses are supported by the increased demand for trucks, resources, and so on.
On the other hand, giving the same amount of money (either in tax breaks or whatever) does not get down to the local, human level except as 'keeping a job you already have'. Notice that the current market forces are not producing more jobs, they are producing more effecient use of jobs already in existence. There are job ads that specifically request applicants already have a job; they are not for people who are unemployed.

CanadaFred: and that was part of the horror behind 1984 - the constant state of war which engendered the need for control of history and people.

Sorry JW - I should not have yanked your chain. - I knew you could not help yourself.

Yeah, POTUS is essentially a slightly right of center politician but is played up by both sides as a far left activist (though the right seems to see/push him to the extreme left hence the 'socialist' label). He is just a politician who happens to fit a 'frame' for both the left and the right. Among other things, he is black and this reaches deep into the fears of the right and reaches deep into story that the left wants to believe of itself.

My desttop does not get shut down; on this machine my BOINC is Quake-Watcher and quakes don't rest. But I monitor the graphics/screensaver to make sure that it is using my sensor (I once watched the screensaver for a couple minutes [it shows the plate edges and the most recent quake activity] and noticed that it was not using my sensor so I rebooted). I also use this computer for my old games, I am back with Morrowind - reliving old conquests. My laptop I usually shut down when I am not using it especially since I use YOURKARMA as my link since I moved and have not bothered to find a provider. I was going to stay with Speakeasy which was boght by MegaPath (yeah - they might as well have named themselves 'Deathstar' as far as I am concerned, they were going to raise my rates for fewer services + it took them minutes (entire minutes) to find my account.

YourKarma charges a flat rate of $15.00 per gig and is the tiny 3X3 device that uses 4GL. I can put it in my pocket and connect anywhere in the world that has 4GL. It is an open device that alows anyone to use but they have to set up an account with YourKarma (and they start with a free 100m + I get 100m for hosting them - though I don't do anything).

If you can keep your head while all about you lose theirs - you might be a headhunter

The problem with checklists is that they are checklists. No one is one thing and not another; most people are a seething mass of contradictions that continually 'vote' on what is going on leading to how you feel on the conscious level. Some days your psycopath wins, sometimes it is the angel; heck sometimes it is the sociopath. There was an interesting TED Talk about on NPR (generic name for public radio) last night about mental issues - one was a reporter who worked to help get a psychopath out of prison. The pp (for short) had claimed psych. issues to get out of a 9 month jail sentence and ended up in the psych ward for 12 years(an approx. - I did not listen too closely). Every time he went up for his release hearings, they decided he was a pp based on the checklist. He kept changing his behavior to convince them he was okay but that behavior was on the checklist. Take the test honestly every couple years (or months) and see if things change for you.

Brevity is the heart of wit - let me add 'and wisdom' to that quote.

There are a lot of words that are not in the English language so we steal them for out own use - that is how languages grow. Like a famous president said "the French don't have a word for entrepeneur".

Someone asked a really interesting question: "how do you say 'voilà' in your language" - almost every language had imported the word because it was so useful.

On the other hand, no matter what language the locals speak "no problem" said with a smile will get you out of almost any difficulty.

Check out EULAlyzer at brightfort.com I am not sure if it will help you but the program will search any EULA for 'interesting' wording.