It’s cold outside. On the Vespa I would have several layers under my cold weather riding jacket, electric gloves, and overpants. At 70mph on a 40 degree morning a person would get pretty cold without protection from the wind. But here I am with a sweater and t-shirt under my mesh summer riding jacket, summer gloves, jeans and boots. The power windshield and cowling keeps me out of the windblast. The heated grips keep my hands toasty and the heated seat, well, let’s just say it’s nice. By the time the thermometer reaches 55 I have shed the sweater. I could see riding this motorcycle until the snow flies.
Did I mention the R1200 RT has cruise control?
The BMW does a bit of deception when it comes to speed. The wind protection, power, and smooth ride give the impression that you aren’t traveling as fast as your actually are. On a stretch of US 15 I glanced at the speedometer and saw 80mph. I would have sworn to the State Police that I was going 60. No wonder I was passing everyone.
With the bike sitting in the driveway I imagined the kinds of rides I could make. Long day rides, weekend rides, or extended tours. The BMW R1200 RT would be ready for any of them.
The TED Conference is an invite-only affair that brings together the smartest minds from around the world to share their knowledge and wisdom with the attendees. Additionally all of the talks are made available online and as podcasts so that white people are able to watch or listen to them at work or during their commute.
These talks are like college lectures, except that they are free to listen, shorter, and white people aren’t hung over and pretending to listen.
Due to the broad audience watching the talks, TED speakers generally take very complex ideas and boil them down into a simple engaging presentation. So when a white person finds out that you have a PhD and visits and attempts to engage you in a conversation about String Theory, you should know that all of their understanding comes from a twenty-minute talk they listened to while running on a treadmill. You should also be aware that the average white person considers their knowledge on the subject to be on par or superior to yours.Sadly, TED Talks are not all roses and NPR approved comedians. For many white people, TED Conferences are actually a source of sadness and depression. This comes from their dreams to attend a future TED Conference in person. But with a price tag of $6000 and an invite-only policy, many white people are simply unable to attend. This is a new concept for white people as they have successfully been creating and joining expensive exclusive clubs for over one thousand years. Popular examples include: private schools, politics, and ice hockey.
Note: It is not advised to try to use sarcasm when trying to console a white person about their lack of an invitation to the TED conference.
“It must hard for you not being able to get into an expensive, invitation only club. As a non-white person, lets just say I have some experience in that field.”
“You didn’t get into MENSA either huh?”
This course provides an exciting, eye-opening, and thoroughly useful inquiry into what it takes to live an extraordinary life, on your own terms. The instructors address what it takes to succeed, to be proud of your life, and to be happy in it. Participants tackle career satisfaction, money, body, vices, and relationship to themselves. They learn how to confront issues in their lives, how to live life, and how to learn from it.
Total Cost of building PC: $1995.94
How many bitcoins can I buy with $2000? As of this writing it is about $0.066 per bitcoin. So I could buy 30,303 bitcoins if I had $2000 laying around.
Now, how long would it take for my newly designed 25,000 hashes-per-second machine to generate 30,303 bitcoins? Using the bitcoin generation calculator available athttp://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php, on average it will take 1 day, 19 hours, and 44 minutes to generate 50 bitcoins. After doing a little arithmetic that means it will take a little over two years to generate 30,303 bitcoins!!! Let's not forget to mention that the difficulty levels seems to be rising over time so it could take much longer than that. In addition, the electricity costs to run a server could add up.
something else to consider: the US Government considers the sale of gold as a "collectible," and the profit realized aka capital gain is levied at 28% instead of current long term cap gains for stock at 15%! Also realize this same higher rate applies to the GLD ETF! so don't think you can circumvent the high tax the government takes via the ETF, instead of selling gold coins. I don't know if the collectibles cap gains tax goes up next year with reversing the Bush tax cuts. However, if buying gold coins, there is sales tax collected from a dealer within your own state, on top of their margin over spot price. There is a lot of headwinds to the liquidity of gold, I think this has lead to greater popularity of the gold ETF, however most people don't realize their realized cap gains are taxed at the higher rate of 28% even for an ETF.
As I've said before, some people stop doing science and just do crazy and awkward things; other people try to prove that they were worth it, and overload with research so much that they go crazy in a different manner; and of course, some Nobel prizewinners are actually senile by the time they get the prize. I'll try to keep my sanity as long as possible.
In the years leading up to that mass panic, I was working as a feminist journalist, writing exposés of child sexual abuse, trying to convince the world that incest was more than a one-in-a-million occurrence. In the process, I convinced myself that my father had molested me. After five years of incest nightmares and incest workshops and incest therapy, I accused my father, estranging myself and my sons from him for the next eight years.
In the early 1990s the culture flipped, and so did I. Across the country, falsely accused fathers were suing their daughters' incest therapists. Falsely accused molesters were being freed from jail -- and I realized that my accusation was false. I was one of the lucky ones. My father was still alive, and he forgave me.
It's a little embarrassing for a person who's always been thought of as a critical thinker. There's a lot about writing this book and putting it out there that's embarrassing. It's not exactly the most flattering portrait. I think if it were a novel my editor would have rejected it, because the protagonist wasn't sympathetic enough. It really shocked me, I must say, to see how much influence the external had on the internal. That the most intimate emotions and relationships can be so affected by the dominant paradigm.
I can't follow you outside slashdot unless YOU make that possible. I don't know who you are. I can search your posts by your username because YOU choose to create an account and post under that account. I can't see what posts you made as an AC. Or what moderations you have done.
All your actions outside posts made under your account are unknown to me, unless YOU somehow share them AND link them to this account. You could be Obama for all I know, or be Lady Gaga. Now, I could google your nickname, but that only works if you used the same nick somewhere else.
It is possible to analyse all your posts and from them deduce a profile based on your style of writing. To be fair for the average slashdot poster that would put their location as "nearest kindergarden" but it might be possible to trace you to a specific location.
BUT that is because YOU choose to link all your posts together.
On the other hand, in the real world, I can't go invisible when I leave my house. So my neighbours know when I come and when I go. The supermarket can tell what I am doing by what I am buying. The bookshop knows my reading habbits (you sicko, is their personalized greeting) etc etc.
So, why do people worry about their online visibitlity where you can be a million different people, when everyone and their dog knows your offline person and what it is doing?
If you ever lived in a small community, you are used to it and you know, if the community is good, then it is a benefit. Neighbours actually stopped an attempted burglary because they knew I was away and saw movement so knew it couldn't be okay when I was younger and lived in a "village" that was about a dozen houses. In Amsterdam I had a neighbour discovered after the smell from the rotting corpse finally drifted into the hallway. All I knew was that the previous resident had moved and nobody ever noticed the new person moving in.
The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers.
Our fight, of [A] against [B] over [C], is but one battle in the ancient war over [F], along the great divide between [D] and [E]. Many do not realize how many of our apparently mundane conflicts are, in reality, battles in this ancient war. Today is a crucial day in this war, so we must not give up, and we must not lose hope, or someday [D] may lose [F] forever. Fight, fight!
Some classic great divides: tyrants vs. freedom-lovers, rich vs. poor, faithful vs. heathen, urban vs. rural folk, men vs. women, intellectuals vs. ignoramuses, artists vs. undiscerning, greens vs. greedy, civilized vs. uncivilized, east vs. west, farmers vs. herders, hill vs. valley folk, Aristotle vs. Plato followers, jocks vs. nerds, extroverts vs. introverts, neats vs. scruffies, makers vs. takers, communitarians vs. individualists, young vs. old, [can add more here].
Some questions, which I rarely see adequately answered:
- How is this division a key division, underlying many others?
- How do people acquire their sides in this conflict?
- How has this conflict lasted so long, without one side winning?
- How could one side finally win such an old conflict?
- Why is one side better than the other in an absolute sense?
- Why can’t those folks be persuaded that their side is bad?
- Why can’t peaceful compromise replace conflict?
"So, what kind of rock should I get? Granite? Sandstone? And which quarry should I get it from? I was thinking that granite would last longer but sandstone would ride nicer and would be easier to lob at a dinosaur in case of attack."
Wheels made from rocks are quite a demanding application. Most rocks are very strong under compression (e.g., in a building or wall), but many are relatively weak under tension [wikipedia.org] with low elastic [wikipedia.org] strength, and therefore they will break relatively easily when a wheel is sheared laterally, such as when rounding a turn (due to forces acting perpendicular to the direction of travel). A way to mitigate this is to make the wheel rather thick, but the disadvantages (weight) are obvious.
Granite [wikipedia.org] is probably a better choice than sandstone [wikipedia.org] because most sandstones have individual grains that are in contact only over a small part of their area, with the spaces in between cemented together by other minerals that are often quite soft (e.g., calcite). Worse, many sandstones don't have those spaces fully infilled (i.e. the sandstones are porous [wikipedia.org]), which does increase their elastic modulus [wikipedia.org], but makes the material more prone to surface wear (it's easier to rub the mineral grains off the surface -- and it's even worse if water freezes in your neighborhood). Cracks tend to propagate [wikipedia.org]easily in sandstones. By contrast granite and other intrusive igneous rocks [wikipedia.org] are comprised of mineral grains that grew together as the molten rock crystallized and therefore the grains interlock quite tightly with virtually no open spaces between them (i.e. they are holocrystalline [wikipedia.org] and often equigranular [about.com]). A downside, however, is that some of the more common minerals in many granites (e.g., feldspars [wikipedia.org] and micas [wikipedia.org]) have good mineral cleavage[wikipedia.org] (it's not what you think, it's planes of weakness in the crystal structure), and the more coarse-grained granites therefore tend to break more easily (because the cracks propagate along the relatively large, weaker cleavage planes in the large grains). One way around this is to look for a granite with less of the minerals that have cleavage (i.e. less feldspar and mica) and more of the minerals that don't (e.g., quartz [wikipedia.org]), and to choose a granite that is as fine-grained as possible (then the random orientation of the cleavage planes from grain to grain will mean the cracks can't propagate as far along them before bumping into a grain boundary). As a bonus, quartz has a greater hardness [wikipedia.org] than feldspar or mica, so frictional wear will be reduced too. Therefore, a nice, fine-grained quartz-rich granite (ideally a quartzolite, but they are quite rare) is probably your best granite option. A fine-grained, non-vesicular [wikipedia.org] mafic [wikipedia.org] igneous rock, such as a basalt [wikipedia.org] or diabase/dolerite [wikipedia.org], might work well too, although they have higher density and don't have significant quartz (but the very small grainsize partly offsets this).
But why limit yourself to granite or sandstone? You can get all the benefits of a quartz-rich rock by going for a lithology [wiktionary.org] that is even more quartz-rich than granites. For example, a metamorphosed [wikipedia.org] quartz-rich sandstone will have the sand grains much more tightly cemented together than a typical sedimentary rock. These rocks are known as quartzites [wikipedia.org] and are much, much stronger. So strong, in fact, that your biggest challenge will become carving the rock into a wheel shape with the tools you've got (even bronze tools would be a struggle). You might be best off doing it the old fashioned way, and using quartzite tools to carve your quartzite wheel.
To find a nice deposit of quartzite your best bet is probably to find a location where quartz-rich sandstones have been heated up adjacent to a major igneous intrusion, thus producing contact aureole [wikipedia.org] in the sandstones where the rocks are metamorphosed into hornfels [wikipedia.org]. Basically, if you already know what granite looks like and already know what sandstone looks like (and it sounds like you do), then look in the area near the contact between the two. That will probably be the best stuff for the application you have in mind.
You've suggested using rock for your wheel, but in the end, you're almost certainly better off making your wheel out of a modern, light, composite material such as wood. A lighter wheel such as this would also allow you to flee faster should your attempts to throw rocks at the attacking dinosaurs fail.
I hope that helps. Good luck with your project.
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