True, but those are the only places I know of where it can literally be "95 degrees with 95 percent humidity", i.e. *dewpoints* over 90F. It has to do with the high temperature of the surrounding seawater.

True story: When taking a summer class in Alabama, on a particularly hot sticky day, the Indian students were talking nostalgically about how it felt like home.

If you believe all that, you have a lot of growing up to do.

It does happen, but it's not common. They end up on opposite sides of the judgment about 5% of the time. If you exclude unanimous cases, it's about 16% of the time.

http://sblog.s3.amazonaws.com/...

Record albums are kind of the pop equivalent of a symphony. They last roughly the same time, the length of a CD. It's a myth that it was chosen to be the length of Beethoven's 9th, but the intuition seems to be about right: that's about how long people are willing to listen to music before they need a break.

Not all albums are constructed well, but a good album has some kind of structure and forms a complete unit of music, rather than just being a bunch of songs. It's about as unified as the movements of a symphony. Songs don't quite correspond to movements (a movement is likely to be 15 minutes, a song 3), though as you say there is yet more structure within a movement.

These attention spans are probably not absolutely fundamental to human nature, but they're at least deeply culturally embedded.

It is too bad that things seem to have settled in a place that have eliminated long-form songs like Bohemian Rhapsody and Stairway to Heaven (about the length of a symphonic movement, and each definitely composed of sections that are very different musically). I would be very happy to see those return, though songs like those are rare epics, requiring tremendous skill and insight to construct. I don't know if Pandora will want to play them to you, since it means they get paid just once for feeding out bits that they could have been paid 3 or 4 times for, but I suspect that if somebody writes a great song like Stairway there will be demand for it. The streaming services will want to serve that demand, and since they have control over how often it comes up, it may cut only a tiny bit into their profits.

Can we have a discussion on here EVER, without some partisan inundating us with irrelevant linkspam nonsense?

Considering that her claim of being docked for damage would indicate a violation of federal law-- and she's a friggin' federal government employee-- either she's a rube, or you are. The only disciplinary deductions allowed are for safety violations.

Besides, a malfunctioning switch is not "damage", it's failure from normal wear and tear. They don't last forever. If the doors don't open or the wheels on the train have to be replaced, is that taken out of their paychecks, too?

Nerd fail, invalid use of significant digits ;). Though I was thinking the same thing, one in a million doesn't seem very significant. It's like 5 people dying in my country of 5 million, that's one bad car crash not exactly dropping like flies.

I'm not really anti-union (except for white-collar government employees), but the Amtrak union has really proved themselves to be total asshats during this issue. They opposed the automatic speed controls, because they preferred that another dues-paying engineer be in the cab. I'm sure that doubling the engineer payroll won't have any impact on the budget at all. Now they oppose the cameras, saying they won't improve safety because they only increase accountability, and mumble mumble. Yeah, and cameras in banks and stores don't keep employees from stealing, either. Accountability is what keeps people from failing at their job. Barring a medical emergency, a camera will cover every scenario of human failure. Obviously, the speed controls are what we need and if the GOVERNMENT WHO MANDATED THEM made sure the GOVERNMENT AGENCY INSTALLED THEM we wouldn't be talking about this.

That's not how Mad Libs looked when I was a kid. We usually came up with something like:

The system has been shut down while BUTTS investigate and FART, and they're notifying BOOGERS whose information was accessed.

Make a new law, if you get hacked, you have to pay the person whos data you lost $100,000.

Yeah, that will work really well with the government. Hey, we got hacked 100 times last year. In totally unrelated news, income taxes are going up and we just hired 1,000 new IRS employees because, obviously, those people need more help.

Everyone sue the IRS! That'll teach them! Oh wait, you can't. Tough luck, buddy. Just keep trusting your government though-- because you really have no choice.

Great post.

mars likely geologically stablized hundreds of millions of years before Earth. Life may have evolved there first, then "infected" Earth by meteors.