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Comment: Re:Some Questions (Score 1) 410

by DotDotSlashDot (#34544728) Attached to: EPA Knowingly Allowed Pesticide That Kills Bees
How much may some of our "safe" foods degrade our environment? An almost empty coffee cup with a cigarette butt in it may be an attractive and deadly nuisance to a bee. WOW, what a sweet buzz! Where was I? The odor might get them rejected at the entrance to the hive. Multiply that by the daily output of all the little corner stores and gas stations. Some may develop a tolerance for nicotine and be real grouchy until their first cup every day.

Comment: There's one slight flaw with this plan. no shit (Score 1) 495

by DotDotSlashDot (#32173500) Attached to: A Peace Plan To End the Flash-On-iPhone Fight
It should be quite easy to fart rainbows if the positions of the light source, observer and Steve's sphincter are in proper alignment. Have a bag of burritos handy in case there is a need for re-takes. This could be modeled with any reasonable ray-tracing program or the like. I want to see the first free iDevice app with this graphic. To be fair, an Adobe representative should be present to indicate the relative position of the observer. YouTube will gladly convert the display format to Flash for the X.264 impaired.

Comment: one form of ball lightning may be damn small (Score 1) 3

by DotDotSlashDot (#32171602) Attached to: Ball Lightning Caused By Magnetic Hallucinations
When I get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I frequently see strange flashes. This happens even when my eyes are closed and I've taken several steps from the bed. My unsubstantiated theory is that this is from a re-equalization of the electrostatic fields around me. The mattress is foam rubber covered with various fabrics and there are coil springs below that. Has anyone ever modeled this electrical environment. Acoustically, the springs are apparently tuned to be resonant at the mean frequency of farts. Can plasmons form and decay within the eye or visual cortex? If this can happen on the surface of rods or cones in the eye, it would be about as brilliant as the things I see.

Comment: use C-Kermit on serial port (Score 1) 5

by DotDotSlashDot (#31557418) Attached to: Need help salvaging data from an old Xenix system
It's only a 10MB disk and everything would fit on a few floppys. If a floppy drive is flaky or absent, use C-Kermit or G-Kermit on a serial port. Here are some instructions. http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/case16.html To get all the bits with the least amount of directory lookup thrashing on the old source drive, copy the entire filesystem partition as a single file. Use the Xenix dfspace or mount command to find the device name for the root and /u and any other filesystems. Then, in Linux, use mount with -t xenix option on copies of the image files of the filesystems you transferred.

Comment: Re:An improved silica gel (Score 1) 93

by DotDotSlashDot (#30731556) Attached to: Sponge-Like "Swelling Glass" Absorbs Toxins in Water
I've been thinking a lot about several varieties of aerogel products lately. Aerogel is 95% air and is hydrophobic, yet will absorb light oils. To the extent that it can de-homogenize oil and water suspensions, it would be useful as a separating agent. Oil-saturated aerogel should be lighter than water and rise to the top. This would also facilitate centrifugal separation of oil-laden mud. The oils can then be removed from the aerogel with moderate heat. Then you get to recycle both the aerogel and the oil. I'd be surprised if there are no patents covering this.

"And they told us, what they wanted... Was a sound that could kill some-one, from a distance." -- Kate Bush

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