A report from the CERN laboratory near Geneva has restated the conclusion that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the biggest experiment in particle physics — poses “no danger” to humankind. CERN hopes the report will dispel public fears that the accelerator will produce black holes or hypothetical particles known as strangelets that could destroy the Earth.
...
Recently Walter Wagner, a trained nuclear physicist, and colleague Luis Sancho filed a lawsuit in Hawaii to prevent the LHC from starting up based on these worries.
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The LSAG report draws attention to the fact that cosmic rays collide continually with the Earth and other astronomical bodies at much higher energies than the LHC, yet do not appear to create either large black holes or strangelets.
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I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote "I am that I am," for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside.
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One occasion on which the island was truly galvanised into action was in 1991, when an unemployed French nuclear scientist called André Gardes arrived with a semi-automatic weapon.
"He was such an odd chap," Beaumont says. "He turned up one night with a little posse and started putting up signs saying he was going to take over the island next day at noon. They read very like German wartime notices. Most people thought it was a joke, but he was serious.
"The next day, the voluntary constable approached him as he was sitting on a bench, waiting for 12 o'clock to come round. He said, 'That's a nice gun you've got there,' and jumped on Gardes when he was changing the magazine.
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Although we think of truthfulness as a young child's paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn't require. "It's a developmental milestone," Talwar has concluded.
( related to recursive thinking... )
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... Such was their enthusiasm for comparative anatomy that Beddoe and his companions turned into grave-robbers. 'The acquisition of skulls also had its difficulties,' he wrote. 'These relics lay about in old and deserted burial grounds, apparently quite uncared for, but their open abstraction would have aroused bitter feeling, and perhaps active opposition'.
To conceal what he was doing on these occasions, Beddoe wore a shooting jacket and, while his companions diverted the attention of any onlookers, he stuffed the skulls into large pockets sewn into the lining. ...
A professor from Galway developed an even more extravagant method for anatomical larceny. He always went hunting for skulls accompanied by his wife, who, in the fashion of the times, wore a wide crinoline skirt. When they spotted a skull, she stood nearby while the professor knelt down and quickly transferred the contraband to specially constructed pockets beneath the folds of his wife's voluminous skirt.
see also
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Built for freight, and yet for speed,
A beautiful and gallant craft;
Broad in the beam, that the stress of the blast,
Pressing down upon sail and mast,
Might not the sharp bows overwhelm;
Broad in the beam, but sloping aft
With graceful curve and slow degrees,
That she might be docile to the helm,
And that the currents of parted seas,
Closing behind, with mighty force,
Might aid and not impede her course.
Because his poem was also a comment on the ship of state and the storms it faced, Longfellow gave the
ship in his poem the symbolic name of Union. But, as we know from the owner of the ship McKay
was building at the time, Longfellow was celebrating the construction of a particular clipper. [...]
She was to be the Flying Cloud.
*
In the early days of the California Gold Rush, it took more than 200 days
for a ship to travel from New York to San Francisco, a voyage of more than
16,000 miles. The Flying Cloud's more-than-halving that time (only 89 days)
was a headline-grabbing world record that the ship itself beat three years
later, setting a record that lasted for 136 years.
The Flying Cloud's achievement was remarkable under any terms. But, writes
David W. Shaw,[1] it was all the more unusual because its navigator was a
woman, Eleanor Creesy, who had been studying oceanic currents, weather
phenomena, and astronomy since her girlhood in Marblehead, Massachusetts.
Kingsport. Fictitious city in Massachusetts invented by HPL. Kingsport
first appeared in "The Terrible Old Man" (1920) but was not then based upon any
specific site; only in "The Festival" (1923) was it identified with Marblehead,
a living museum of colonialism, which HPL visited in December 1922. It is
cited briefly in "The Silver Key" (1926), used extensively in "The Strange High
House in the Mist" (1926), and mentioned glancingly in The Dream-Quest of
Unknown Kadath (1926-27), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927),
"The Shadow over Innsmouth" (1931), "Through the Gates of the Silver Key"
(1932-33), and "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1933).
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MythBusters places a strong emphasis on viewer safety due to the nature of the myths tested, often dealing with purported household scenarios. All episodes begin with Adam and Jamie giving a disclaimer against attempting the experiments seen on the show; most episodes also feature a second warning halfway through the running time. This disclaimer is not aired with the broadcast on Australian channel SBS...
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My name is Victoria Winters. The tension seems endless. So much has happened since I first set foot in Collinwood and faced the woman who hadn't left the grounds in 18 years, a woman who has been shocked by an attempted murder, a woman who is torn with concern for the one person she loves most in this world....
Alexandra Moltke or Alexandra M. Isles (February 11, 1945), is best known for her role as the original Victoria Winters from 1966–68 on the cult TV serial Dark Shadows which aired on American Broadcasting Company TV from 1966-1971.
In the late 1970s Alexandra was the mistress of Claus von Bülow, and alleged to be a motive for two attempts by him to murder his wife. As depicted in Reversal of Fortune (1990), Claus was eventually acquitted of the charges, though the truth remains unclear.
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Shelley Winters: How do we get up Christmas Mountain? I'm no climber!
Shelby Winner: Have you ever heard of a "helicopter"?
Shelley Winters: Lawks! Those things are against nature! They fly using
a mixture of witchcraft and soundwaves!
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Book Passage, 2005
Clerk: Has anyone ever told you that you look like Neil Gaiman?
Me: Yes.
The Other Change of Hobbit, 2006
Co-owner: Has anyone ever told you that you look like Neil Gaiman?
Me: Yes.
Borders Books, 2007
Clerk: Has anyone ever told you that you look like Neil Gaiman?
Me: Yes, they have.
Clerk: You don't sound like him, though. He's British.
( note... )
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We are, technically speaking, a nation of constant infringers.
A. Infringement Nation
To illustrate the unwitting infringement that has become quotidian for the average American, take an ordinary day in the life of a hypothetical law professor named John. ...
In the morning, John checks his email, and, in so doing, begins to tally up the liability. Following common practice, he has set his mail browser to automatically reproduce the text to which he is responding in any email he drafts. Each unauthorized reproduction of someone else's copyrighted text -- their email -- represents a separate act of brazen infringement, as does each instance of email forwarding. Within an hour, the twenty reply and forward emails sent by John have exposed him to $3 million in statutory damages.
"Letters are the property of the recipient -- as physical entities -- but the copyright remains with the sender."
( a question of accepting the hypothetical )
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Or is this perhaps a product of the over-excited brain of a middle-aged and somewhat disparaged poet, when he finds that his ignored, his arcane, his deviously perspicuous meanings, which he thought not meanings, since no one appeared able to understand them, had after all one clear-eyed and amused reader and judge?
( deviously perspicuous? )
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When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The former -- while as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart -- has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation.... The point of view in which this tale comes under the Romantic definition lies in the attemtp to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us.
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne
Preface to The House of Seven Gables
Superstition brings bad luck. -- Raymond Smullyan, 5000 B.C., I.3.8
I also knew that a magnetic device centered in the floor beneath issued its command to a cylinder hidden in the floor beneath issued its command to a cylinder hidden in the heart of the sphere, thus assuring continual motion. This device, far from interfering with the law of the Pendulum, in fact permitted its manifestation, for in a vacuum any object hanging from a weightless and unstretchable wire free of air resistance and friction will oscillate for eternity.
The initial launch of the pendulum is critical; the traditional way to do this is to use a flame to burn through a thread which temporarily holds the bob in its starting position....
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"I don't stay after I set out dinner," Mrs. Dudley went on. "Not after it begins to get dark. I leave before dark comes."
"I know," Eleanor said.
"We live over in the town, six miles away."
"Yes," Eleanor said, remembering Hillsdale.
"So there won't be anyone around if you need help."
"I understand."
"We couldn't even hear you, in the night."
"I don't suppose--"
"No one could. No one lives any nearer than the town. No one else will come any nearer than that."
"I know," Eleanor said tiredly.
"In the night," Mrs. Dudley said, and smiled outright. "In the dark," she said, and closed the door behind her.
Eleanor almost giggled, thinking of herself calling, "Oh, Mrs. Dudley, I need your help in the dark," and then she shivered.
( Jackson vs. King )
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The solitary, steep hill called Corona Heights was black as pitch, and very silent, like the heart of the unknown. It looked steadily downward and northeast away at the nervous, bright lights of downtown San Francisco as if it were a great predatory beast of night surveying its territory in search of prey.
... We were standing in a little spot of greenery called Corona Heights Park, between Haight-Ashbury and Twin Peaks. Across the grass, I could see a little museum, austere and white. Across the street (which fell in dizzying straight steps toward the sea), I could see another park, shining with green trees, surrounded by houses and buildings with sharply peaked roofs of black slate, the ones nearer us carved with ornate gables and fluted columns. ...Quentin raised his hand and waved at some joggers bouncing by, little electronic gizmos in their ears. One of the girls waved back. Apparently his sweeping black robes and five-foot warlock wand did not seem odd or out of place here. Did I mention we were not far away from Haight-Ashbury?
Think, Amelia, think. You read all those books. What would Odysseus do? Dress up like a begger , and then shoot everyone. No help there. What would Achillles do? Go sulk in his tent. Nope. Aeneas? Sacrifice a cow or something. Boy, these old heroes are really not useful as role models. ...
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"... What other evidence do they have it was us? I mean, it sounds like they're pretty skeptical. They'll think the talking dog was lying."
"Say that again."
"Say what again?"
"They're skeptical. They'll think the talking dog was lying."
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