xkcd

DanD

The Potomac river is the border of Maryland and Virginia, with the curious property that the entire river is part of Maryland. As far as I know, the only real difference is that you could have a building on the Virginia shore that sold VA lottery tickets, and also have a cash register on a floating...

DanD

If what you're not getting is the title text: In our timeline, there was no Terminator 3 by James Cameron. There was a Terminator 3, but it was directed by Jonathan Mastow. The title text is insinuating that in the original timeline, James Cameron did direct Terminator 3, but it was so prophetic (a...

DanD

64% of occupied dwellings are occupied by an owner. That's not the same thing. If you have a better estimate, then I'd be happy to hear it and will start to use that number instead. If you don't have a better estimate then I'd be very interested to hear how you feel this fact contributes in any way...

DanD

Mikeski wrote:This is why I had to go into electrical engineering. Y'all mechanical engineers just can't keep yourselves from breaking the rules. Like Newton's Third.

As opposed to electrical, where the first thing you learn is that everything is backwards, and it gets more confusing from there.

DanD

"If stocks go up, should I leave more money in my mailbox or less?" Depend. Do you own any stocks? Fun fact: the economic term 'stocks' comes from the biological term 'stocks'. People would take a stock of wood and cut markings around it to represent a debt. The more cuts, the more money ...

DanD

There's a highway that runs through my hometown from the ocean to the mountains, and also over the mountains. I once long got lost on a foggy moonless night on the other side of the mountains on that highway, and figured one of two things would soon happen if I continued driving along it: I would e...

DanD

When someone asks me for directions the first thing I assess is whether I should use "turn left" or "turn north" (or whatever direction). [...] Compass directions are less ambiguous, so that's how I prefer to give directions. As long as you start with a travel direction, i.e. &q...

DanD

Considering that roads around here usually don't go in the direction they say they do (ie "west" on a certain highway might in fact be more north or south), and that I don't have a compass unless I wanted to rely on my cell phone (in which case I would be using GPS anyway), compass direct...

DanD

]...and this information is not very interesting. I have no problems with AI doing this, and even sharing it to make them drive better. But they also pick up the other patterns around them... which car tends to be in front of which house at what times... who is crossing the road (and later, down th...

DanD

What gets me is... ...None of these 'what ifs' do humans handle safely. Handwritten signs? Most should stop. Do Humans? An AI would. Bad lane markings. You probably should stop. An AI would. Do humans? Bad direction in a construction zone. You're supposed to stop. An AI would. So why do we care if ...

DanD

I'd say this is a logical conseuquence of the relative weighting of irrelevant factors. With a car or a computer, most people go in with a decent idea of the make and model they want. Or at least have a couple of major factors that will sharply limit their choices (carrying capacity, fuel economy, c...

DanD

Proof that if all children were called Logan, chickenpox would be eliminated from the globe. I wonder if we can do the same for Malaria, and what the optimum name would be? More funding for research! Malaria is more difficult, because it has a fairly widespread environmental reservoir, and isn't de...

DanD

speising wrote:but vampires still have teeth, even rather prominent ones.

But they aren't required to grind food. And could be replaced by claw or proboscis.

DanD

Evolution had to find a way to grind up food. The choices were teeth, bony plates (similar to teeth), or gizzards. I think it would be weirder if we had gizzards. External digestion, as in starfish or spiders. Slow digestion of intact food, as in snakes. External grinding, as in flour (yeah, I don'...

DanD

pkcommando wrote:Only a quitter stops when the election is over. Are you a quitter? .

In a lot of cases, campaigns actually end up in debt. And it's easier to say "we'll continue to fight" than to say "Welp, we lost, help us pay for it anyway".

DanD

Reka wrote:I don't get where MSPaint enters into this: surely anyone who's using Powerpoint would have Excel available to them, and would use Excel to generate the charts?

You're assuming A)competence. And B) actual data.

DanD

TIL there is actual gold inside the sun. Until now I assumed it was all just hydrogen and helium. But I guess if it's hot enough for fusion to happen, there's probably every element in there, including ones with super-high atomic numbers that we still haven't synthesized yet. It's not due to the Su...

DanD

Or a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a pyramid with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you. You beat me to it. Ironically, because I was actually asleep (dreaming about I know not what) when you posted it. I came here to post this one i...

DanD

This does help answer the "but more states voted for" argument in a fairly visible way. At least to me, it manages it on a more visceral level than the ones that have the county sizes weighted by population or the like.

DanD

qvxb wrote:What cabinet post will BHG hold in the Trump administration?

None. BHG is competently evil.

DanD

"Ok, Google-"
Sound of gunshot and body hitting the floor.
In voice of Alexa or Siri: "What can she do for you that I can't?"

Yes, my mind took that somewhere dark.

DanD

And, on top of that, the federal government owns about half of the land in the western half of the country . It's easier to farm and ranch when Washington D.C. isn't telling you exactly how to do it... or when to stop doing it. Not exactly. Federal grazing leases are cheaper and less volatile than ...

DanD

It's easier to install panels off the road than on them. That's not the critical question though. The critical question is: "Is it easier to build the road AND install panels off the road than it is to build the road with the panels on them?" While the answer is likely no, spending a litt...

DanD

I don't really see the purpose of the "When running, is it hot to the touch?" query. Do solar panels have some inherent problem when heated? I assumed that was an energy requirements versus energy provided filter. If something runs cool to the touch, it's energy demand is probably somewha...

DanD

Lake Nasser is visible from the moon (in an earthrise photo taken by the LRO). I would presume multiple other man made lakes are, as well. Cities, as a unit, are visible on the night side.

DanD

"Hell Escape" sounds like sounds like escape rooms as done by the organizers of Spartan races. Or vice-versa.

DanD

Title text: Where I live, one of the most common categories of sky object without a weird obsessive spotting community is "lost birthday party balloons," so that might be a good choice—although you risk angering the marine wildlife people, and they have sharks. You could try disguising th...

DanD

This is definitely something that Librarians and Archivists are deeply aware of, and deeply concerned about.

DanD

Taking this to it's extreme, you could reduce emissions in all directions but a tight beam along one direction, making you undetectable except in that direction (though the beam could be scattered by the interstellar medium so maybe this isn't perfect). EDIT: or you could just drop the heat straigh...

DanD

With all the cast iron back-and-forth, no one's getting upset about the equinox comment? That seems like such a simple non-Randall oversight... What oversight? If you're at the North pole a few days after the spring equinox, you get 24 hour sun. And the same if you go a few days before the fall equ...

DanD

You can just re-season cast iron. It's really not that hard. It really isn't. I got a couple of used pans that I didn't trust the seasoning on, so I burned it off (in the oven during a self clean cycle). A light layer of food grade flax seed oil (the low smoke point makes it easy to burn on, and it...

DanD

I assume that cast iron pans are some kind of fresh hipster hell that had passed me by. Is high-maintenance medieval cookware the new thing, in the same way that not having gears on a bike is the new having gears on a bike? More of a foodie thing, which doesn't completely overlap with hipster. Well...

DanD

I personally think New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts should all be unified into a single state. You know what, Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland should be merged with Pennsylvania or Virginia (speaking of which, either rename it to "East Virginia" or unif...

DanD

I personally think New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts should all be unified into a single state. You know what, Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland should be merged with Pennsylvania or Virginia (speaking of which, either rename it to "East Virginia" or unif...

DanD

The original stories are pretty much fantasy with some rational extrapolation - the science fiction background was no more than a framing device for a couple of decades until Dragonsdawn told the story of the initial colonisation (though it became a significant part of later events - and novels). F...

DanD

Isn't the main issue (apart from all the other issues already mentioned) that there's a minimum size for a nuclear explosion? As I understand it, Fat Man and Little Boy, which devastated one Japanese city each, contained just a little over the critical mass for Pt and U respectively. To make a fire...

DanD

I doubt many unarmed specialists are quite ready for the second option. I think that was "fourth degree black belt level" according to largely fading memory of my karate teacher (who was 4th degree after 20 some years of practice, although I don't know how long he had held the rank). I us...

DanD

Agreed, I had this one pot lid in college that I always thought would serve well as a buckler. Alas, my fencing coach viewed such improvised fighting implements as more of a liability than anything else, legally, if not practically in a bout. Join the SCA. We have rigid parry options, and a pot lid...

DanD

Fourth eclipse comic in a row, how much more will we get? . You know the answer: you'll have to.... Wait For It. Signed, Mr. Ten * 7 * Seventeen I died a little. Blood Cauldron could also be an Skyrim refrence, possibly I'd read it as a Chronicles of Prydain reference, honestly. But evil cauldrons ...

DanD

My parents live in (barely) Suburban Washington DC, as in MD within walking distance of the DC line. Their house is in a post WWII development, decent but not huge yards. They routinely have deer migrating through, or even living in for periods in their back yard. In addition, Rock Creek Park, whic...

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