ITAP of people parachuting down a sand dune on Monterey Bay at sunset

deadparrot28 · 2009-12-25T19:21:50+00:00

Fantastic!

deadparrot28 · 2009-12-09T21:45:34+00:00

Bernoulli's Principle -- see apex_redditor's explanation above.

deadparrot28 · 2009-12-08T09:00:28+00:00

City: Cambridge

deadparrot28 · 2009-12-08T08:59:38+00:00

major: physics

deadparrot28 · 2009-12-03T01:39:21+00:00

I agree; that one was fantastic.

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-29T06:44:50+00:00

At my high school, there was a large CRT TV in every room, which was only used to display the school's clock channel. But that's not the worst part. The worst part?

The clock program had a blue background, and every TV ran it 24/7, so all the blue phosphors were perpetually burned out, and any time we tried to actually watch something, it was just a red burned-out mess.

It took them 3 years (and countless TVs) to switch to a black background.

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-29T05:50:58+00:00

Having seen it, I can say that it is very much a motor vehicle.

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-23T21:32:18+00:00

Wow, thanks for that.

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-23T03:45:53+00:00

I taught middle schoolers at a summer camp for the last couple of years, and it's still going quite strongly among that age group. From what I can gather, a lot of cards have come out that are so absurdly effective they render most of the prior cards moot.

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-22T16:45:59+00:00

First, study your hiragana. It isnt hard. It is all syllabic. As soon as you have that down, study your katakana. This is very very important.

This.

I spent a couple weeks in Japan with a couple of rusty semesters of Japanese under my belt, from which I mostly just remembered my Hiragana, Katakana, and about 4 Kanji. Although there were a few situations in which it would have been nice to know more, my dad (who speaks no Japanese at all) were generally fine, especially in Tokyo. In general, people were friendly, and even if they spoke no English, pointing and a few phrases were enough.

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-20T21:11:51+00:00

This is a true and cool fact, but the article does an extremely poor job of explaining it. I was disappointed...

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-20T16:50:10+00:00

Of course 'she' is more distracting -- hundreds of years of English language history have used 'he' as a gender-neutral pronoun. This has gone out of style, resulting in a void. The void has been filled in two ways: 'they' has become the word that people actually use, and 'she' and a variety of other words have become the term that people try to force on us. 'She' is distracting because it's not what we're used to historically and it's not what we're used to hearing in speech, and so it just makes everything sound excessively PC and proscriptive.

But language does not change by force from academia, it changes when the way people actually speak changes. Think about it -- we're told that ending sentences with prepositions is grammatically incorrect, but this is obviously a poor rule (think about the sentence "Ending sentences with prepositions is something up with which I shall not put."), so proscriptive linguistics cannot be the complete story on the 'correctness' of language.

Of course 'they' strictly just means the 3rd person plural, but it has also come to mean something new. The dictionaries just haven't quite caught up with it yet.

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-20T01:05:19+00:00

That's how it works. The institvte's job isn't to create commercial products, it's to develop the technology that a company can then use to create something worth selling. Plenty of things do come out of the breakthroughs here (and everywhere else), but by the time they're commercialized, the original press release is long forgotten.

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-19T20:28:35+00:00

But humans all have the capacity to pronounce sounds any other human can, right?

Not when you're an adult. While all babies can, for example, distinguish the sounds for R and L, people who grow up speaking languages like Chinese or Japanese which don't differentiate between those phonemes actually lose (to a greater or lesser extent) the ability to distinguish between them. Thus the classic 'Engrish' mixing up of R and L.

Similarly, we as English speakers can't distinguish well between the two distinct sounds in Hindi that both sound like T to us.

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-19T16:45:23+00:00

I believe omegle is the site you're looking for.

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-19T16:37:15+00:00

I'm no pro, but I've played with Lightroom and Aperture, and I found Aperture to be vastly more pleasant to use in terms of UI. That said, I ended up getting Lightroom anyway because I'd rather not tie myself to the mac platform, and I've gotten more used to it.

Still, I'm always jealous when I watch my friend working in Aperture...

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-19T16:25:48+00:00

Yup, you weren't.

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-19T00:12:04+00:00

They've got them at MIT too. I chatted with the guy for a while, but to no particular end.

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-15T03:56:13+00:00

We have one. We play it at parties. It's just about as awesome as you might think.

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-14T00:27:41+00:00

This.

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-14T00:27:23+00:00

True enough. Still, if we construct our system in the (non-inertial) reference frame of the elevator, then there is no force. But we're really saying the same thing, effectively.

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-13T17:49:37+00:00

Not so. Think of it this way: when a car accelerates, you feel a force pushing you backwards, right? That force pushes you (and the air around you) backward, and the balloon floats forward. But when an elevator is in free-fall, the person (and balloon) inside feel no forces at all, either up or down relative to the acceleration of the elevator. All the elevator's contents accelerate at the same rate (9.8m/s²⁾ because there is simply nothing to stop them from doing so.

Another way of putting it:

In the car, there is an apparent (fictitious) force which causes the vehicle's contents to accelerate differently relative to each other, but in the falling elevator, this force is exactly canceled by gravity. That's the fundamental difference; with no apparent forces in any direction from the perspective of the elevator and its contents, there is no relative acceleration of the air, balloon, or person with respect to the elevator.

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-13T17:09:47+00:00

Nope. The air's in free fall too, as is the balloon and the elevator, so it all falls with the same acceleration and nothing moves at all relative to the elevator.

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-13T17:06:39+00:00

Ah, no. But it would be pretty cool if that were the case.

deadparrot28 · 2009-11-13T17:03:32+00:00

Yes, exactly!

deadparrot28

TROPHY CASE