xkcd

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...

DanD

The next roundabout along the dual carriageway was briefly home to a deer or two, but I don't think it is any more. how big are your roundabouts that they have enough vegetation to house a deer or two? good grief. I've lived in some areas where deer were quite densely populated and practically live...

DanD

We do have a good answer for the hair/balloon/lightning thing ... it's called the tribolectric effect. What's wrong with that? Too empirical? Beware ontic dumping; If you answer "Why does static charge build up when rubbing a ballon on hair?" with "because of the tribolectric effect&...

DanD

So the market doesn't correct bad assumptions? Not a very conservative idea there. Did I ever claim to be a conservative? But I do think "the market" will probably correct such mistakes in time, it just might take a few failures before the suits figure it out. This still has the fundament...

DanD

As others in the thread, I am at least incidentally aware of Insane Clown Posse, but they are not the first thing that comes to mind when viewing an XKCD comic. (Despite this being the 3rd such reference).

DanD

My brain does the same whenever I heard the word "economics." Let me try my hand some economics magic... If demand (price) goes up when supply goes down, why are wages low in certain sectors and people are saying there's high demand for labor in those sectors? Because there are multiple i...

DanD

Industry tends to be biased towards what works and produces profits. So apparently liberal ideals work and produce profits. Possibly, but people can make mistakes, industry leaders would only need to think that's true. Entertainment is probably where this is most relevant. If say movie execs think ...

DanD

Copper Bezel wrote:I still want to know what a liberal bias across industry would even mean.

Industry tends to be biased towards what works and produces profits. So apparently liberal ideals work and produce profits.

DanD

You're both making the mistake of assuming that because one group is smaller, the other must be legitimate. The fact is that mainstream everything tends to have a rather extreme liberal bias that more or less runs on the same principle; "Your evidence is good as long as it confirms our core be...

DanD

What infuriates me is professional-looking studies from the journals of professional-sounding organizations actually staffed by real people of the profession in question... who all have a particular ideological bent (these particular professionals at this journal, not all people of that profession)...

DanD

This comic got me lost on Wikipedia reading about voting systems again, and I find myself wondering if anyone has ever come up with and named an idea I've rolled around in my head for a while now. The idea is that every individual gets a vote on each decision made by an office , like in a direct de...

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