Links for 2010-04-23

"And it suddenly occurred to me that Tea Partiers really should read this pamphlet, because it would teach them something about what "tyranny" is actually like. It would teach them something about what "communism" was really like. It would make them ashamed of themselves for whining about a health care bill turning America into a tyranny, for slandering liberals as communists who want to impose tyranny on them. It might snap them out of the intoxicated hysteria they whip themselves into. "

"In honor of Earth day, I thought I would take a look at what it would mean to do physics in 'Earth' units. What do I mean by that? Well lets be anti-Copernican here, in fact lets assume the opposite of the
Copernican principle, and state that the Earth is privileged in the universe and define all of our units around the Earth. "

"[A] couple of months ago I picked up the 1945 edition of Etiquette, by Emily Post (yes, that is Mrs. Post in the photo). This book was published during WW II; women were working jobs vacated by men who went off to war; the world had gone through sixteen kinds of sea change since the end of the last world war (voting women! talking pictures! radio! sulfa drugs and penicillin just on the verge of being mass-produced!) and we think we know what it was like, how people behaved, what they thought and aspired to.

Then you read Etiquette and have to revise your thinking. Mrs. Post's books may have harkened back to a more formal time, but she was still the arbiter of social usage. "

"On one side of the machine, which is two-thirds the length of a football field and encircled by a conveyor belt, staff members place each book face-down on a separate panel of the belt. The book passes under a laser scanner, which reads the bar code on the back cover, and the sorter communicates with the library's central computer system to determine where the book should be headed. Then, as the conveyor belt moves along, it drops the book into one of 132 bins, each associated with a branch library. It's sort of like a baggage carousel that knows which bag is yours and deposits it at your feet. "

"So I was intrigued to see [S.E. Cupp's forthcoming Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media's Attack on Christianity]. I assumed it'd be funny, smart, and charming. I expected it to be honest and open to the concerns of non-theists even as she bizarrely defends Christianity from them.

No."

"So, which of these claims are ok and which are crazy? The 11 mph seems like it would be easy to verify - even though the problem is not really defined. I guess they meant that his feet are moving 11 mph? They should have instead talked about his angular speed. Also, I could do the force exerted on the body during the "spring" part of the handspring. It could easily be over 800 lbs. But you know what I am going to talk about, don't you?

Why do they make this stuff up? Oh, if you push with 800 lbs for 23 times - that is THE SAME AS LIFTING ALL THE NEW ORLEANS SAINTS! "