Only thing is that 96000km is a third of the way, not a quarter.
From wikipedia:
The distance between the Moon and the Earth varies from around 356,400 km to 406,700 km at the extreme perigees (closest) and apogees (farthest)
If I were you, I'd be angry at my primary school teacher; either she didn't explain orbits, or didn't teach fractions. Either way.
I'm pretty sure they were trying (and failing) to say the following:
It will take a week at 200 km/h for your party of 30 to reach the 36,000-km-high terminal station. Also, the elevator will need a counterweight at a height of 96,000 km, a quarter of the way to the Moon
...that can keep me at the Ballmer peak? Now THAT would be useful.
... or even attempted to be proven, for that matter. From the article:
The Fraunhofer Institute's press statement doesn't give any actual concrete figures on improved worker productivity
According to the "study", if you can call it that with only ten volunteers, they merely chose that type of lighting with the other choices being "that, but less so", and "normal office lighting". No conclusive evidence of improved productivity (yet) as far as I can see, but it is pretty nifty - I'd like one of these installed in my office. Now if I could just convince my superiors of docking up that €1,000 per square meter...
The Google icon is probably there because the poster mentioned that Google's webserver, among others, lost share the past month.
[1] China leads world in green energy investment
[2] Top Countries For Renewable Energy Capacity
[3] Actually, China accounts for 70% of green energy investment
My furniture came with the apartment I'm renting - it doesn't belong to me.
From TFA:
If a sense of humor is part of our basic, human thinking machinery, then why can’t we agree about what’s funny?
What’s universal about humor is the process, not the content. Everybody faces every situation with different beliefs, knowledge, and understandings about the world. And different understandings lead to different assumptions and therefore different false assumptions.
So there's not necessarily a conflict - you'd expect different cultures to have different assumptions about the world (for geographical and linguistic reasons, perhaps), and therefore have a different sense of humor.
Step 1: Find a method to determine skill (in whatever desired area) from DNA.
Step 2: Find a method to artificially combine two DNA strands that doesn't take more than a day or so.
Step 3: Be able to grow a fully-functional human from the DNA generated in Step 2.
Step 4: Start with the DNA of a few hundred people (preferably top athletes), and apply a evolutionary algorithm to combine, test, combine test, etc.
Result: Within weeks, not centuries, you'll have the DNA for super-athletes, super-nerds or super-soldiers. We're almost there!
Once, I would have written it off to deja vu and went on with my life. But the same article, 3 times? I might be human, but my memory is not that terrible, Slashdot!
All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin
