“Too much time on my hands” – Styx
Estimating the Airspeed
Velocity of an Unladen Swallow
Hashing out the classic question with Strouhal numbers and simplified flight waveforms.
by Jonathan Corum
“After spending some time last month trying to develop alternate graphic presentations
for kinematic ratios in winged flight, I decided to try to answer one of the timeless
questions of science: just what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?”
If I stopped watching cartoons, would I get nasty withdrawal symptoms? 😉
Cartoons
act like cocaine
By Roger Highfield
“A search for the mind’s ‘funny bone’ has shed new light on the mysteries
of merriment, revealing that the reason humour is addictive is that it activates
‘reward centres’ in the brain.”
“From theories of pedestrian movement and traffic flow to voting processes, economic
markets and war, researchers are striving towards a physics of society”“‘It may be’, said US sociologist George Lundberg in 1939, ‘that
the next great developments in the social sciences will come not from professed
social scientists, but from people trained in other fields.’ Take a look at
any issue of a physical-sciences journal in the past five years and you will see
one such field staking its claim vigorously. Physics is muscling its way into social
science. Not content with explaining the behaviour of atoms and electrons, semiconductors,
sand and space-time, physicists are now setting out to understand the behaviour
of people.”
It seems to me that the surest way to invite dystopia is to seek utopia. Witness
communism, eugenics, and other vain efforts to make the world perfect through logic
and reason.
I hate Southern drawls and, it would seem, so do speech recognition and natural language
processing programs.
“SHREVEPORT, La. – Southern drawls have thwarted voice recognition equipment
used by the Shreveport Police Department to route non-emergency calls.”
I’m generally not a sue-happy kind of guy, but this is sue-worthy if anything is.
“Total Disbelief”
Penis Removal Just Latest In Series of Surgical Mistakes, But Patients Can Protect Themselves
“Aug. 11 – After 67-year-old Hurshell Ralls went into surgery for bladder cancer, he came out of surgery missing more than he ever expected. His penis and testicles were gone.”
Texas Man Wakes Up After Operation, Penis Missing
“DALLAS (Reuters) – An out-of-court settlement has been reached in the case of a North Texas man who woke up from bladder surgery only to find that doctors had amputated his penis without permission, lawyers said on Thursday. “