Comment facebook, not Facebook (Score 4, Interesting) 113
They're using the pre-2004, non-proper-noun sense of "facebook".
They're using the pre-2004, non-proper-noun sense of "facebook".
The EPA regulations in question are more than 20 years old. This is just a pile of nonsense that's been going around a certain set of blogs for a while.
This gives a good summary of the actual situation:
I've tried to recently start throwing out "Causation doesn't always mean correlation" whenever I can find situations that it makes sense.
E.g. a recent Wired article talked about statistical analysis "proving" that the idea of a football team gaining "momentum" after an interception is a myth.
I think it's a fair assumption that sometimes a team gets momentum from an interception... but other times the team who lost the ball gets fired up in response. And lots of other times there is no clear advantage one way or the other. But the overall statistics being a wash doesn't mean there aren't specific affects going on at a finer scale that have been missed by big picture statistics.
Pascals, not Newtons, of course.
The "slug" is a unit of mass, but I don't know of anywhere that it's used.
I each of the examples ("tons of displacement, "tons of explosive energy"), the unit of force (pounds or tons) is being used as a stand in for mass with the implicit assumption that we're talking about the mass that relates to a given force in earth gravity.
A ton is 2000 pounds.
Pound is a unit of force. Weight is a force. It translates exactly to a unit of mass as long as gravity stays the same (i.e. we're on Earth).
The metric system uses grams as a unit of mass, and pascals as a unit of force. If I go from Earth to Mars, my weight changes, but my mass stays the same.
When talking about tons of displacement for ships, that's saying that the ship displaces X tons of water (muddling weight vs. mass in there too).
When talking about explosives, tons is referring to the amount of energy equivalent to an explosion of X tons of TNT (again muddling weight vs. mass).
e.g. when I went from a 4 mega pixel camera to an 8 mega pixel camera my file sizes became 4 times larger.
This is normal. When you double the resolution, you double it in 2 dimensions. (Height and Width) This results in a four-fold increase in data size.
But 4 megapixels to 8 megapixels isn't doubling the image size, it's doubling the number of pixels. So it is reasonable to expect the file size to double, not quadruple.
In America maybe, but not in Europe.
Fair point, especially considering TFA's topic. All my observations come with the "in the US" caveat.
In Spain the only person I know who had an iPhone was a coworker, who complained it was a fancy looking piece of junk.
Are iPods common but not iPhones? Or are iPods a rarity also?
Where have you seen an iPod dock connector on a device that doesn't plug into an Apple product?
Never. I'm just saying that iPods are *everywhere*, whether they're perfect or not.
My Nokia phone unfortunately does have its own weird charging connector, but standarization should take care of that in a few years.
Standardization on mini-B? Or micro-B? Or the thing that's on most LG's right now? Or the thing that's on most Motorola's right now? I'm just saying that, if I wanted to bet on availability of a given cable in any random place, I'd bet on being able to find the thing that plugs into the ubiquitous iPod.
I have no clue by what you mean "check backpacks" either. My backpack has a USB mini-B cable in it and a short length of Cat5e.
I think a survey of backpacks, shoulder bags, etc., in just about any demographic in the United States is likely to turn up more dock connectors than mini-B. Doesn't mean that's the best choice, just that saying the iPhone uses a non-standard connector is misleading.
Things are not as simple as they seems at first. - Edward Thorp