I mean, if neutrinos can cycle into a fourth variety (the "sterile neutrino") that goes faster than light for some reason ("taking a shortcut through the bulk?"), then why did the neutrinos from the supernova arrive at about the same time as the photons? This question can be adapted for any other explanation that I've thought of for neutrinos actually moving faster than light.

What if they oscillate into some form that is slightly faster than light? They'd be traveling slightly slower than light part of the time, faster than light part of the time, and their average speed might be exactly the speed of light. The amount of time spent on the other side of the lightspeed barrier would never be enough to be exploited to violate causality. But, the oscillations would cause some curious results that might sometimes show some neutrinos exceeding the speed of light.

The universe would give us hints of tachyons while at the same time not vanishing in a puff of logic, and would also demonstrate a means by which something that has mass could travel at light speed.

Not that I'm saying this is what's going on. I don't have the background; I follow what I can of these things as a hobby. It's just fun to think about.

I get by rather well on a stupid phone with pay as you go

I imagine that for many, contract voice and data plans are very good. I, however, got sick of them after having a PocketPC for two years and then an iPhone for two years. I finally realized that 90% of my already small amount of data usage was just twiddling my thumbs, and that 90% of my actual phone usage was in a place where I was in front of a computer.

So I got a pay-as-you-go phone for under $100. It has a touchscreen, camera, mp3 player, etc. along with a Web browser that just uses pay-as-you-go minutes instead of counting bytes. It uses AT&T's network, so it has the same coverage as my iPhone did. When I'm gonna be on a long call, I just put the cellphone down, put on a headset, and talk through my computer on Google Voice for free.

Now I'm paying $70/month less and wondering why I ever allowed myself to get roped in to those contracts in the first place.

One interesting oddity is that I can now see ultraviolet light

What color is it?

aren't newspapers rarer than oil now?

Eh, I've been hearing about potential "miracle bacteria" for decades now. To me this is just another load of over-hyped bullshit that we we won't hear about ever again, much like the crazy Thorium Car guy last month.

But, might as well: TFA did indicate it could potentially convert any plant-based material, newspaper being but one example.

Hey, why don't we turn this into a fantasy thread about how this could be good for marijuana legalization, 'cause you could harvest the sweet sweet buds and throw the rest into the vat to make fuel?

Initial reports said that the driver, David Secker, was apparently using his knees to steer the car, an accusation he tried to refute in court.

Back in the late eighties, before all these fancy gadgets came into being, I had (to my eternal amazement) the luck to witness a woman driving 75 mph on 285 west of Atlanta in bumper-to-bumper traffic reading a book. We're talking five lanes full of writhing idiots jockeying for position in a rush-hour race to get there first. That road was (and definitely still is) a horror story in progress. It was only a couple months before that I saw a car wrecked on the median, propped sideways on the concrete median divider, its engine block a good 150 feet down the road. Seriously, they just flat could not stop rush hour traffic to clean up the car, and I suppose an ambulance had taken the corpse(s) away previously. They'd have to wait for a break in the traffic at about 2 AM to get the car and its engine out of there.

A book, for you youngins, is a stack of paper bound together with static text on each piece; when reading one, you are confronted with one to two thousand words at a time, and the words are all longhand. So, for the guy dealing with a couple hundred or so characters of text messages while yakking on the phone -- heh.

There truly is nothing new under the sun.

My bullshit detector is beeping silently in the background...

As is mine. Looking at both articles, and googling a bit, I keep running across a statement to the effect that when the Thorium is heated, its molecules become so dense that it produces heat surges. Then they go on to talk about the amount of energy that could be extracted from Thorium in a fission reaction.

These articles also mention that it is believed that the internal heat of the Earth is due largely in part to the presence of uranium and thorium in the mantle. I can buy that; if you have a lot of diffuse radioactive stuff in an immense mass, practically all of the energy from its slow natural radioactive decay would be captured, warming the material. Small quantities of things that are dangerously radioactive also tend to give off heat from the decay.

It's my understanding that when you heat things, they expand, and become less dense. If they can't expand, they undergo a lot of pressure. So is it plausible that if you confined some Thorium so it couldn't expand when heated, the pressures generated inside the material during extreme heating could somehow cause a fission reaction, or accelerate radioactive decay?

Which is very bad, since the USA is so dependent on imports, it would fall apart without them.

Or maybe we would revive our manufacturing infrastructure, so we could make our electronics and toys and cheap you-assemble furniture ourselves, which would create jobs and keep more money circulating within our own borders. Maybe the value of the dollar would fall, making it more expensive for offshore labor, which would bring jobs back home. Maybe oil would become so expensive as a result that we have no choice but to invest in renewable energy and public transportation. Maybe goods would become more expensive, so maybe we'd stop buying disposable things and make better use of what we do have. We wouldn't like it one bit, but those are all things we have to do anyway, sooner or later.

Now, if we can just get the traffic engineers to implement this neato structure called a cloverleaf...

You're kidding, right?

When I first moved to Texas, it took me about a week to get used to the frontage roads, and then quickly realized their genius. Even the rural ones, where oncoming traffic has to yield. Scary as it seems, it really does make sense.

Now that I've left Texas, I want to punch whoever invented the cloverleaf in the face.

Real artists are driven by a primal urge to create. Throughout history and even now, most of them never make much money off of it, but they do it anyway. For them, creating is not work. It's their life's love.

People in general are driven by a primal urge to accumulate wealth. Throughout history and even now, those with a talent for making much more money than average people will continue to make money long after they have made more than they will ever need for themselves or their families. Stacking up money is not a means to an end, but an end unto itself.

So there you go. If you've got the art inside and it wants to get out, you're gonna let it out even if you're not getting paid. If you get paid for it, then you'll never be happy with your accumulated wealth. Either way, you're still motivated.

Back in their early days they used to run something called "Dial-A-Song". It was basically just an answering machine with one of their songs recorded as the greeting. They would switch out the song often.

One time the machine recorded part of a two-way conversation when a woman named Gloria called the machine to listen to it with someone else on the line. TMBG released that recording as an unnamed track on their "Miscellaneous T" b-side compilation album. There is a transcript here.

Here's a short clip of Linnell with accordion and singing Museum of Idiots. Love the horn section. Youtube also has videos with the studio version of this song.

They built this whole neighborhood out of wood, out of wood
I guess I'll still be around when they burn, burn it down
I will be standing around when they burn it down
Here in the Museum of Idiots

Honey I'm there when you need me, please believe me, please believe me
I'll still be right where you left me, if you manage to forget me
Where we met is where you may forget
Here in the Museum of Idiots

If you and I had any brains, we wouldn't be in this place

Chop me up into pieces, if it pleases, if it pleases
And when the chopping is through, every piece will say I love you
Every piece of me will say I love you
Here in the Museum of Idiots

Every piece of me will say I love you, you, you
Here in the Museum of Idiots

If you are right, then you have nothing to hide.

I've never quite understood this type of "single issue" consumer.

I have this "single issue" mentality, and I think it makes both logical and emotional sense. Basically, consumers are individuals and have very little power in a marketplace dominated by huge corporations. We don't get to haggle over prices much; it's pretty much take-it-or-leave-it. We can theoretically vote with our wallets by going to a competitor.

However, the big businesses just end up colluding. It's usually not overt. They're not having meetings to decide these things, but they follow each other when their "competitors" show some success. So eventually, all the competition is overcharging and under-providing while claiming that the value they provide is fair. They collectively have the upper hand, because a consumer can't say "no" to ALL of them. If you gotta make a phone call or get on the Internet or travel somewhere fast, then you have to agree to be taken advantage of by these implicitly colluding corporate monsters.

So over time, things get worse and worse for the consumer. ISPs cap bandwidth. Phone companies get away with making their users pay for minutes they never use, or charge them ten times as much when they use too much. Airlines begin to nickel-and-dime you to for everything -- any bet on how long it will take them to start installing pay toilets on the planes?

We poor consumers basically just keep taking the worst of it, until we finally just refuse to take it any more. Sometimes when it gets really bad, we file class-action lawsuits. Those make lawyers rich and make us feel better, and sometimes the defendant backs down and plays nice for a while. But if banding together and suing is not an option, then we have to use whatever other weapons we have to fight back. One good way is to bad-mouth an offending business at every opportunity.

As screwed-over consumers, the value we get from latching on to such a "single issue" is not that we are refusing our patronage to an entity who offended us, but that it gives us something specific to focus on when we share our tales of woe in hopes of costing them more business than just our own.

I haven't bought a Sony product since the PS2 -- back then my single issue was proprietary formats. Then it was the rootkit. Then Blu-Ray, then removing Linux from the PS3, and now their inability to keep from being rooted like a clogged toilet.

A few weeks back, I ordered a steak from the Chilis across the way. It was a to-go order, and the place is walking distance from my house. I'm not expecting much -- it is Chilis after all, but I do expect that the food be edible. I ordered it cooked medium. Now, I knew I was taking a bit of a risk. The quality of that place has steadily gone down over the last year -- food badly seasoned, or brought to the table cold when dining in, or long waits both before and after ordering, what have you. So, I go get my steak, and don't check it before I leave. I get home, open it, and find a thin piece of shoe leather. The cook had sliced it open down the middle, must have clearly seen that it was beyond well-done, and boxed it up for me anyway. Not wanting to bother going back for a new one, I decided to have a bite anyway, and discovered that it was old meat on the verge of being rancid (which must be why they overcooked it.) That was over the top. So I took the food back and pointed out every horrid thing about that box of food to the manager. When he offered me a replacement, and coupons for next time, I told him I'm never setting foot in there again. And I haven't. Not just his Chilis, but every other one, and I've even diverted group lunches at work to other places by telling that story.

It's not that they fucked up one steak. It's that their quality has been declining over the last couple years while their prices have been going up. The steak was just the final straw, and it's a good solid example of why not to give them my custom. Maybe they'll learn their lesson; if I ever become convinced of that then I'll give 'em another try.

Check out the wikipedia entry on House of the Rising Sun for more examples of this kind of musical cross-pollenation.