Displaying comments 1 to 48 of 48
MeFi post:
Next time around, I'm going to stay in bed!
I got a birthday card this week from my wife's grandmother. It was from a store. The note said, in part, "I wish I could make my own clever cards, like Bill used to."
The other night my two-year-old asked to see my almost-finished dissertation. She looked at the pages and pages of black-and-white text with black-and-white line drawings, and said, "Is it very boring?"
"Look at my titties!" A hundred-year joke.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 3:46 AM on July 24, 2008
MeFi post:
Knol goes live
[MOVPE] has become the dominant process for the manufacture of laser diodes, solar cells, LEDs, and also cocks.
It's everywhere!
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 11:44 PM on July 23, 2008
MeFi post:
Tunnel boring machines
jsonic, access to the Nevada test site is controlled the same way as access to reactors and accelerators. If you want to go, you have to have a reason (beyond "that'd be nifty"), get some credential and a dosimeter, don't walk past the DANGER RADIATION AREA ropes, and six months later get a report that says you weren't exposed to anything. I don't remember offhand whether access to the Nevada test site still requires a security... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 12:22 PM on July 21, 2008
MeFi post:
NASA's Deep Impact Films Earth as an Alien World
The alignment it took to get this series is pretty impressive.
At a scale where the Earth is half an inch across, the size of my thumbnail, the moon would be about the size of a pencil eraser and they would orbit each other separated by an arm's length. The distance to the Deep Impact probe is about 300 feet.
So your buddy is in one end zone of a football field, holding out a stiff thumbs-up, spinning, and moving his arm up and down. You are in... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 1:20 PM on July 19, 2008
MeFi post:
Francium Goes to Hollywood
Hassium has an isotope with a lifetime of an hour, and several with tens of minutes! That's astonishingly long for a superheavy element.
This paper claims that hassium's chemistry is "like osmium" from observing seven atoms.
I think it's safe to say that no one knows anything about hassium. So: very informative! These seem like fun guys.
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 7:20 PM on July 16, 2008
MeFi post:
Condensed: 'Care, constraint, concise, cut, character, clarity, and charity.'
So it goes.
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 8:11 PM on July 13, 2008
"em-dash" and "en-dash" are hyphenated. A nice example construction from A List Apart:Hyphens are Not Dashes
Stop! Go back and re-read the subhead above—at least 2–3 times—then let it sink in before continuing.
Also, onomatopoeia and palindromes aren't; semicolons, like transvestites, are not without their uses.
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 8:14 AM on July 14, 2008
languagehat, thanks' for the pointer's.
Careful, constrained, concise: that's us!
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 12:12 PM on July 14, 2008
MeFi post:
AP Diary
When I took the English AP test in high school,
there was a poem about
a frog, whose stanzas had
short lines in the middle
and long lines at the beginning and at the end.
I found this structure amusing, and used it as
a unifying theme in my
essay: the very shape of
each stanza was that
of a frog,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 8:32 PM on July 13, 2008
MeFi post:
Blue Collar Babies
From 4±2 (assuming counting statistics) to 17±4 with not other population changes is a spike at about the 3σ level. Certainly suggestive of something other than ordinary statistical fluctuations, as borne out by the existence of a "pact" to get pregnant.
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 4:03 PM on June 19, 2008
Interesting, grounded. If you assume the student body is predominantly white and use the rate 26.6/1000 from table 5 of your link, you expect 16±4 births.
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 4:57 PM on June 19, 2008
MeFi post:
Boring men?
Some years ago at a party my wife and I ran into a mutual old friend. We three talked for a few minutes, and the friend said, "Mrs. Timewaster, I hope you'll excuse me, but I'm about to say something really boring. Fantabulous, have you [complicated question about computers]"
"Oh!" I said. "I've been trying to get that to work, but [intriguing set of problems]"
My wife wandered off and found someone else to chatter with.
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 8:14 AM on June 19, 2008
MeFi post:
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Pointing to an absence of any well-designed systematic studies is a different ball of wax from pointing to a group of well-designed studies supporting or refuting some position. The Mind Hacks reply does the first thing.
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 5:41 PM on June 10, 2008
MeFi post:
HeroWorship Filter
The "obama is a messiah" was part of the opening schtick on this weekend's "wait wait don't tell me" on NPR: the host reported that after acknowledging the nomination Obama fed the assembled multitudes with five low-fat bagels and two bottles of Vitamin Water. Or whatever.
Propaganda can be met with two responses: you can ignore it and hope the propagandist gets tired, or you can point out that the message is ridiculous.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 1:18 PM on June 9, 2008
MeFi post:
“A most dread portent took place, the sun gave forth its light without brightness.”
An idle thought:
In the kinetic theory of gases, as part of the formalism surrounding the ideal gas law, there's a method for finding the mean free path between scatterings for a single particle in the gas. This is used e.g. in the design of vacuum systems. While the gas is dense enough that the distance between collisions is short, it acts like a fluid; when the mean free path starts to be larger than your vacuum chamber, individual gas molecules go from wall to wall... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 9:15 PM on May 30, 2008
MeFi post:
Metronomic syncage enjoyability
This is great! I expect to add this to my collection of physics demonstration toys, right up there with the magnet down the aluminum pipe.
Several people have mentioned Huygens' observation of this phenomenon. A couple years ago I read in some report on undergraduate physics research projects about an effort to quantify what sorts of couplings between two pendulum clocks allow this type of synchrony to develop. (Oh! I guess it's this paper, linked to above in this... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 9:21 AM on May 4, 2008
MeFi post:
Grand Theft Auto?
M-x grand-theft-auto
I am the carjacker. Please, describe your problems. Each time
you are finished talking, type RET twice.
I need more adventure in my life
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 8:13 AM on May 4, 2008
MeFi post:
Dohink!
I don't understand --- there is a flash ad in between levels, it doesn't exist since no one has shown it to a solipsist, and the torture stuff happens on level 15.
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 6:58 PM on May 2, 2008
MeFi post:
Pulp Shakespeare
Ten days ago, enraged at bad haiku
piled on an elsewise fruitless bug report,
I seized a chance at erudite retort
and answered with a sonnet. Now that you,
my tipsy friend, have posted here
another fine perversion of the form
and brought forth from the userbase this storm
of iambs, my sad heart is deeply cheered.
For just a moment, I held out the thought
that my short effort --- meager... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 8:08 AM on April 23, 2008
MeFi post:
No Intelligence Allowed, indeed.
Someone further up claimed that biology without evolution is like physics without math.
An interesting connection in light of Wigner's famous essay, "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics."
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 6:28 PM on April 20, 2008
MeFi post:
Lies I've told my three year old recently.
When I was about five, my dad and I went to visit one of his childhood friends. We were all puttering around outside and I caught a frog --- my first one! I showed my dad, who approved. I showed his friend, who asked to see the frog. I handed it to him; he popped it in his mouth, chewed a few times, and swallowed. I was awed, disgusted, and furious.
Ten years later, a teenage me telling this story suddenly realized that maybe the frog had been surreptitiously tossed... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 12:38 PM on April 9, 2008
Mr. Anthropomorphism: We tell our two-year-old wine is "grown-up juice." "Would you like a sip? You probably won't like it."
I expect this works because we more frequently make the same offer/warning for coffee. Don't know if it's actually true for mixed drinks, though.
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 9:17 PM on April 10, 2008
MeFi post:
But don't talk back to Darth Vader! He'll get ya!
Worst semi-kid movie experience ever: My wife (who may not have been my wife yet) and I were visiting my parents for a holiday. They didn't know each other terribly well yet, and everyone was a little anxious. Someone opens a package that arrives in the mail, and out falls an ad for Traffic. We were hunting for something to do that afternoon anyway, right? So flash forward: suddenly I am sitting in a darkened room between the woman I love and my mother, watching a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 7:07 PM on March 20, 2008
MeFi post:
“An Efficient Representation for Sparse Sets”
I've wondered for a while how this works, but haven't had a reason to look it up. Spiffy.
This trick only trades space for time if you expect to populate most of the data set. Imagine you have some giant 106x106 matrix where most rows have three or five or a dozen nonzero columns. With this trick you only need to allocate space for 107 or 108 data points, rather than 1012. That might make the difference between a tractable and an intractable problem.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by fantabulous timewaster
at 9:57 PM on March 15, 2008
