 | Last login: 23 hours agoJoseph is a single guy from Chicago, Illinois, USA. Politically Moderate, Underemployed Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer tutoring all knowing freshmen in Mathematics. This profile, like most of the Web, is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, and probably best viewed in Firefox. A more complete listing of posts, including archived ones, can be found on the introduction page for this site, and is backed up on this page at Googlegroups, with occasional commentary found on Stumbling into the Void on Tribe.
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- Home | The American Prospect
- Dec 14, 2008 8:53am
 (12 reviews) politics http://www.prospect.org/
 I've only skimmed it, so I'll refrain from giving this one a thumbs up or a thumbs down at this point, but having skimmed it, I didn't find myself positively impressed. This is the sort of site that will talk about America's need for an industrial strategy - OK, fine - but when the time comes to say what that strategy might be, one finds a call to have the government build a lot of factories in which more of us can get to work on the assembly line, regardless of whether or not we prepared for any other line of work, and to make sure that the factory workers get payed megabucks, because while apparently one isn't supposed to question the proposition that the Market knows best when it comes to where professional jobs are to end up, it apparently doesn't know a thing when the time comes to decide what a factory worker's pay should be. Pure pic 'n mix, with the reader called on to overlook the inconsistencies.
I'll come back later to see if I missed something, but so far, this is reading like standard New Left ideology from the 60s, much rhetoric with little substance, with one important difference. The New Left of that era was open about the fact that it believed in "levelling" - dragging everybody down into a world in which everybody would work hard even though hard work wouldn't matter, because no matter how hard and how well one worked, one wouldn't be able to change one's station in life. Now, one must read between the lines a little, but that same bad idea is there, as if the failures of communism hadn't taught everybody a few lessons about the dangers of removing the idea of incentive from an economic system, lessons that now seem to be lost on liberals and conservatives alike, neither seeming to see anything odd in the belief that people will put decades of real sweat into training for and/or working at careers that might evaporate at a moment's notice with the slightest fluctuation in the currency exchange rates, and never ask themselves what good all of that "dues paying" will do them, should that happen. This is why so many of us tune out on politics - neither of these factions really listens to anybody, not even to themselves.
- Dec 14, 2008 8:52am
Older (unrelated) Posts: 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50
- futurama point . futurama news
 Dec 14, 2008 8:52am (3 reviews) tv http://www.slurmed.com/- Hmmmmm ... well ... continued
- Dec 14, 2008 8:51am
Re: Futurama Point. I thought about this one, and decided to give it a thumbs up - with a disclaimer. While it's not the sort of site I'd personally spend a lot of time browsing, for what it tries to be, it's almost perfect. I think. If you're into that sort of thing. If the owner cleaned up a few dead links, it would be perfect in its own, probably hygiene challenged kind of way.
This is a fan site for a cartoon series by Matt Groening (Simpsons, Life in Hell) about a clueless pizza delivery boy ("Fry") from the 20th century who is accidentally frozen, awakening a thousand years later in a world where ... and that's about where I'd leave you, with only a little more comment, because I wouldn't want to ruin the pleasantly odd surprise. Losing that would take one right out of the show, which would sort of have us viewing this odd and unknowable universe Fry finds himself in from his point of view, if we didn't almost all seem to have a minimum of fifty IQ points on the guy, even when drunk. A little bit of an acquired taste, it's certainly not the average cartoon. How many shows do you know of that have jokes about wave function collapses? (looking forward to that episode). One quickly sees why Fry is a little lost in this future he has stumbled into.
This may be a reason to hold off a little on visiting the site if one was planning to view the show, especially the "graphic guide", where there are a lot of plot spoilers (entire plot descriptions, in fact) - but very nicely layed out and written in a way that captures the feel of the show - which is one reason I gave a thumbs up: this was nicely done work.
The site has an unusually extensive collection of fan art, maybe taking the fandom a bit further than I would, but it seems to have been done with love, so I guess if somebody enjoyed collecting comic books, maybe he would enjoy this? If you look at some of the ascii pieces, like this picture of Gunther (a character from one of the episodes), there is a kind of modern folk art thing happening, which became a second reason why, however grudgingly, I had to give this site a thumbs up - not my favorite subject matter, but done with love and skill, and I couldn't pretend that I didn't respect that. Having written this, I wonder if I'll ever have a date, again?
- YOUNG GALLERY
- Dec 14, 2008 8:51am
 (2614 reviews) photography http://www.younggalleryphoto.com/photogr...
Slightly unreal looking but interesting black and white photography of wildlife in Africa.
- Tesla_coil_intro
 Dec 14, 2008 8:51am (1 review) electrical-eng http://tesladownunder.com/Tesla_coils_in...- Looking at one of the man's pages, I find that I have some grave reservations about the safety of something I see him doing ... continued
- Dec 14, 2008 8:50am
 "Kids, don't try this at home" ... or anywhere else, either. I'm skimming a promising looking fun with science site when I see this: Liquid Nitrogen. Yes, the man stuck his hand into it - and why not?
"Where did I get the name 'Lefty' from? That's a long story ... if at first you don't succeed and all that ... where are you going?"
Oh, yes - that's why not. The author writes, following the appropriate (?) photo, which you're seeing a thumbnail of above, if you're reading this on my blog:
"I'm not sure I should show this photo but here is me (carefully) throwing all the safety precautions to the wind and putting my hand in liquid N2 (for about 0.5 secs).
When you're sticking your hand into a liquid that is just barely warmer than the surface of one of the moons of Neptune, I'm not sure that "carefully" is an adverb that you get to use. Just a thought.
The gas generation keeps a gas layer between you and the liquid and reduces the rate of freezing.
Yes, the concept is simple enough - your flesh is so much hotter than the boiling point of liquid nitrogen that the liquid will explosively evaporate on contact, briefly blowing much of the liquid away. Drop a bead of water onto a hot dry skillet and as you watch it dance, you'll see the same physical principle at work. Without having done the calculations, though, would I know offhand if the liquid N2 would be blown off one's hand quickly enough to prevent tissue damage? No. Would I care to risk my fingers on a guess, or more to the point, on the claims I just saw on the website of somebody I had never heard of before? Definitely not.
An even more enjoyable thought is this: the boiling point of liquid nitrogen is lower than the boiling point of liquid oxygen. Any container of liquid nitrogen will begin to accumulate a layer of liquid oxygen on its surface from condensation, just as moisture will collect on a glass containing a cold beverage. Owing to the greatly increased density of oxygen, post-liquification, even with the reduction in the rate of chemical activity induced by the great cold, liquid oxygen is a very potent oxidant, potent enough to have served for the burning of rocket fuel in the apollo program.
[ continue ]
- Dec 14, 2008 8:50am
[ continuing my Tesla_coil_intro review ]
Liquid oxygen is dangerously reactive stuff, so much so that in Thermodynamics class in undergrad a standard warning was given about the explosive consequences of dropping anything made out of plastic into the stuff, producing a rapid, highly exothermic reaction in anything that can be set on fire. Great stuff to stick your skin into, right? Care to take your chances with a trip to the burn ward if you've poured out a little too much N2 and let it sit a little too long? The author continues:
Sensation is like a cold breeze and no discomfort but I am not pushing the boundaries here. Of course touching a solid,
Like, say, the walls of the container - but of course, that would never happen, because nobody ever accidentally bumps into anything, especially if he should be startled by somebody yelling "what do you think you are doing" or something like that
particularly metal, at liquid N2 temperature will give rapid severe frostbite and it might stick to you.
Or if, maybe, you were sweating a little more than you thought you were, and the sides of that container weren't as smooth as you expected them to be. Fun fact: anywhere outside of the orbit of Saturn in this system, water ice is hard enough to qualify as a rock - at temperatures that will, in places, be well above that of liquid nitrogen. Picture yourself bonded to something, your fingers immersed in that lovely fluid, maybe panicking a little as you find yourself needing to either yank yourself off and rip some flesh away in the process ... or, wait ... maybe you could wait for help that you know is coming soon. I mean, what could that do to you?
To treat warts and other skin lesions it is applied with a cotton bud and will rapidly kill tissue.
Oh, right. The skin lesions, on brief exposure, turn into something that crumbles away. The would be daredevil might very well, in a moment of panic induced misjudgment, lose his fingers.
Advice from the 'experts' for this somewhat risky stunt say not to get the liquid N2 in any crevices in your fingers or clothes as the liquid N2 gets forced in contact and freezing occurs."
Look at your own hands. What do you see a lot of, and even more of with age? Crevices. I'm not convinced, at least not on a brief reading, that the author did what he claimed with as little damage done to his person as he says, but I am convinced that this would be a fantastically stupid thing for anybody to do. This isn't "somewhat risky", this is absolutely insane, even as a half second dare, and the author gives us no sign of getting that.
I'll take a look at more as time and resources allow, but on any such page, one does have the question of how good the author will be at alerting the visitor to the possible dangers of what he is about to do. On this occasion, he has fallen distressingly short of doing just that. We would be most unwise to forget that as we read the rest of his site.
- Dec 14, 2008 8:49am
- possibly needed expansion space for liquid nitrogen post
- Dec 14, 2008 8:49am
Re: my review of ImgPlace
Since experience tells me that somebody, in the Internet's usual "blaming the victim" mode, will ask what scandalous, scandalous material I had posted on that account which "Kyle Kapper" from ImgPlace failed to restore my access to, probably while I'm away from the computer with a group of his would-be friends eager to insinuate there was so legitimate disciplinary reason for Kyle to lock me out of my account, I'll preempt that effort by saying exactly what I had posted.
Chrysanthemum pictures and street shots of a few homes in Chicago.
That's about it, as far as I recall. Everything I had posted was G-rated; one would not have hesitated to post any of what I had present on the wall of a Kindergarten classroom. Now, since I no longer have any control over my own account, I have no idea of what somebody else may have posted to it by now, but as I did get in touch with Imgplace immediately upon discovery of the fact that my password wasn't working, I'm not sure of what else I was supposed to do. Hack my way into my account and steal it back?
An amusing idea, but I think I'll pass on implementing it. Sigh. I must now go shopping for a new image hosting service, as if I had nothing better to do with my time.
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