Comment Re:Le sigh.... (Score 1) 167
And, yah, I should be careful about responding to a coffee thread with a comment about mushrooms.
Just leave it at: There may or may not be any toxic relatives of the coffee plant in nature.
Comment Re:Agreed (Score 2) 167
Um, evolution in most plants is "trying to make them taste BAD", otherwise, they... get eaten.
You got any idea how / why there is yummy fruit surrounding a seed?
Comment Re:Le sigh.... (Score 1) 167
So all things being equal, you're asking me who I trust with my best interests more, Nature or Monsanto?
Look, I dislike most of what Monsanto does as much as the rest of ya, but if I had to randomly select a bunch of mushrooms from nature vs. randomly selecting a bunch of GMO mushrooms from Monsanto, I think I know which group is less likely to kill me.
Comment a slightly simpler option (Score 1) 14
Much as I'd like to build up a self-navigating boat, that's above my skill level. But let me put in a plug here for Tippecanoe Boats . Will's kits are pretty easy to build, quite customizable, and a blast to sail.
Comment Re:TI calculators are not outdated, just overprice (Score 1) 359
I have engineering students in college who use the "10^x" button for scientific notation instead of "EE" (or whatever it's called on your calculator), and so when asked to calculate 4/(2e3) will end up with 2000 instead of 0.002 (because they type 4 / 2 x 10^3).
Which demonstrates their lack of understanding of that particular computer(calculator)'s syntax, and has nothing whatsoever to do with their understanding of engineering principles, engineering math, or engineering methodologies.
You're testing the wrong thing.
Researchers Harness E. Coli To Produce Propane 82
Rambo Tribble writes A team of British and Finnish scientists have used the common bacteria Escherichia coli to produce the environmentally-friendly fuel propane. By introducing enzymes to modify the bacteria's process for producing cell membranes, they were able directly produce fuel-grade propane. While commercial application is some years off, the process is being hailed as a cheap, sustainable alternative to deriving the gas from fossil fuel production. As researcher Patrik Jones is quoted as saying, "Fossil fuels are a finite resource and...we are going to have to come up with new ways to meet increasing energy demands."
Comment Re:No more fiction writing in the US (Score 1) 441
when i was in high school i wrote a short story about a girlfriends parents not liking me, so i killed them, and hid their bodies in snowmen so no one found them until spring.
this was in 1999 after 4/20/1999
I got an A
So..... home-schooled, eh?
Comment Re:XKCD (Score 1) 169
What does XKCD stand for actually? I always wondered.
The Xavier Kenneally College of Dentistry, natch!
(disclaimer: GLR wrote that somewhere, not me)
And if yr not an OTTer, you probably don't care anyway.
Comment Re:It's OK to attack mythology and superstition... (Score 1) 266
Dowsing is an objectively testable claim.
Yes, but as was sensibly pointed out by J. Randi, most "tests" to date are invalid. Man goes out in field, picks spot, digs, behold water. Dowsing works!
Except that's not how a valid test goes. Challenge a dowser to find a spot which does NOT have water below. Dig there. Guess what'll happen.
Comment Bad turbulence ahead (Score 1) 76
If I read TFA correctly, this only stays submerged because the quad fans (ok, screws) are madly driving water vertically. Somehow I don't see this as enhancing the view, especially if one gets near the ocean floor and significant sand/sediment is stirred up.
Comment Re:And this is how we get to the more concrete har (Score 1) 528
civilization existed prior to the rule of law. It was just less pleasant for the non-elites.
You're defining "law" too narrowly. Think of it more in Judge Dredd terms.
Comment Re:Hmmm ... (Score 1) 194
If only there were some sort of software that would backup your Ipod and it's data including the music. We could call it I touch music or maybe Itunes or something.
Oh, please. You really never heard of software (hey, Microsoft Office, your ears burning?) which locks itself to the serial number of the CPU or equivalent hardware?
Comment Dead is dead; Why do we care about this one (Score 1) 300
Murder is a bad thing (let's at least agree on that). So why is the beheading of one person so drastically more awful than the deliberate killing (usually with a gun) of thousands of people whose only crime was not practising the exact same brand of Islam as ISIS? Does nobody here, or at YouFaceTubeBook, care that ISIS is deliberately killing whole villages?
Would it have been OK to kill a kidnapped journalist with a Kevorkian cocktail?
Comment Re:Inch? (Score 1) 90
And who's inch? The Danish classic inch and the British aren't even the same.
Oblig: lose the damn apos'trophe there.
Anyway, it was Hedwig's .
Comment or they could just NOT do it (Score 4, Interesting) 155
Instead of having software automatically remove every alleged infracting page, how about having the software automatically send a notice back informing the complainant of a lack of credible evidence, and dropping all the takedown notices into some summer intern's Inbox?
I mean, jeez...
